E-Pluribus | April 15, 2024
The right thing in the wrong way; the dystopian Great White North; and friends, Americans, countrymen: how about Caesar?
A round-up of the latest and best musings on the rise of illiberalism in the public discourse:
Andrew Gillen: The Right’s Old Strategy for Higher Education Isn’t Working. This One Would.
That many institutions of higher learning lean (unless there’s a stronger word for “lean”) left is hardly news. At Discourse Magazine, Andrew Gillen recounts how the right’s efforts to reverse or at least hold at bay this tendency have gone so far, but also suggest there are better ways to go about it.
Historically, the mission of higher education was to preserve, discover and disseminate the truth. While many professors still strive to do so, too many colleges have abandoned this mission, instead seeking to promote social justice narratives. The folly and contradictions inherent in this new mission for higher education have reached absurd heights. Some of these, like the campus celebrations of Hamas’ recent massacre and mutilation of Israelis, are well publicized. But others receive far less attention.
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In the past, given that colleges were drifting leftward but still tolerated a conservative presence, the right pursued a beachhead strategy, seeking to establish and maintain right-leaning outposts and colleges within academia.
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The limited success of this beachhead strategy was based on tolerance from institutions dominated by the left, but now that they’ve forsaken the pursuit of truth as their mission, this tolerance has all but vanished from many campuses. While tolerance for a right-leaning presence on campus was essential for a college pursuing the truth, such a presence is actively counterproductive for a college whose mission is now promoting leftist views of the world.
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How then can coexistence be brought into institutions where faculty and administrators will be actively opposed? To overcome this resistance, the right’s new strategy needs to focus on ICEHE: independence, competition for required courses, equitable funding, hiring freedom and an even playing field.
Independence: Many years ago, University of Chicago President Robert Hutchins said a college is “a series of separate schools and departments held together by a central heating system.” This collage of largely independent islands has been lost to a political monoculture, but it can be brought back by establishing new independent centers with a goal of ensuring that currently marginalized viewpoints are represented.
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Competition for required courses: One of the main problems with the old beachhead strategy was that the beachhead was easily quarantined. Its courses weren’t required for graduation. Establishing new majors or minors takes years (and requires the approval of ideologically hostile faculty, administrators and accreditors), and such specialties appeal only to a small subset of students. Thus, even when present on campus, a beachhead had little effect on the rest of the campus.
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Equitable funding: There is little point in having an independent school if it doesn’t have enough funding to hire faculty to research and teach. To ensure sufficient funding, the new independent school should be funded in the same manner and to the same extent as the rest of the university.
Hiring freedom: One of the toughest obstacles to reversing higher education’s ideological monoculture is faculty hiring. . . To circumvent this predicament, the new independent school needs to be able to hire faculty without interference from existing faculty, relying on faculty from other campuses aligned with the mission to assist on hiring committees as needed. As politics professor Eric Kaufmann writes, “It is vital that these centres control tenure lines ... with full independence from the rest of the university.”
Even playing field: There are countless ways that a hostile university leadership or faculty could try to sabotage an independent center... The goal is to ensure a level playing field between the new center and the rest of the university and then let student interest determine the size of the new center.
Read the whole thing.
Mark Milke: Canada Goes All In for 1984
George Orwell’s classic 1984 featured Oceania, Eurasia, and Eastasia. Based on this Mark Milke article at National Review, perhaps “Canadia” would have worked as well. Milke says Canada’s current trajectory is worrisome and provides several examples to bolster his case.
Americans may wish to look up north to see how the latest attacks on free thought and expression are proceeding. In Canada, governments, universities, and self-regulating organizations regularly attack the core civil rights that have long allowed individuals in English-speaking democracies to flourish and innovate: the right to think and to speak.
One recent famous example is the College of Psychologists of Ontario, which harassed former Harvard and University of Toronto psychology professor Jordan Peterson because they didn’t like his tweets. They demanded that he undergo remedial social-media training. He refused, went to court, lost, and may lose his license to practice in Ontario.
There are many other instances in which free speech is being similarly suppressed in Canada. British Columbia nurse Amy Hamm, for instance, was persecuted by her own nurses’ association for her off-work sponsorship of a local billboard that endorsed the view of famed British author J. K. Rowling on gender-transition issues. Hamm’s disciplinary hearing ended this month. She might soon face the same choice as Peterson: Submit to Orwellian reeducation or give up her profession as a nurse.
In Calgary, in 2021, another professional lost her tenured job and career because she stood up for Enlightenment-inspired empiricism. Mount Royal University fired Professor Francis Widdowson — a Marxist with a long history of involvement with, sympathy to, and publications on Canada’s native population. Widdowson’s thoughtcrime? She pointed out that there was no such thing as “indigenous” knowledge but that facts and data, science, and the scientific method are available to all.
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[I]f a hate-speech case arrives in court, as the Canadian Constitution Foundation notes, claims would be judged “on a mere ‘balance of probabilities’ standard rather than the criminal standard of proof beyond a reasonable doubt.” The bill would even “allow judges to put prior restraints on people who they believe on reasonable grounds may commit speech crimes in the future.” So future thoughtcrimes would be added to past thoughtcrimes as punishable Criminal Code offenses in Canada.
This would lead to a cornucopia of complaints, given that anyone would be able to file an anonymous complaint to the federal Human Rights Commission alleging that a “hate crime” has occurred. The commission in turn would be authorized to investigate, rule, and order “remedies,” including prosecution if the government-appointed body concludes that the accused is “motivated” by hate.
Read it all.
Jeffery Tyler Syck: The Americans Who Long for Caesar
While Marc Antony may have indeed come to bury Caesar and not praise him, Jeffery Syck at Persuasion writes that there are some Americans who are coming to do exactly that. Frustration with a divided political system that seems incapable of decisive action has led to a resurgence in those looking to a strong individual who can “get things done.”
Given the appalling circumstances in which it was born, it is shocking to imagine that anyone alive today could support a political philosophy that calls itself Caesarist. But within the intellectual ecosphere of the far right, several people do just that. The political theorist and prominent Trump advisor Michael Anton has suggested that an American Caesar might be inevitable. The far-right blogger Charles Haywood openly calls for Caesarist government. The influential Catholic journal First Things has provided an impassioned defense of the Emperor Augustus. As isolated statements they are not so frightening—but they are representative of a larger move away from free government on the right, one that shares disturbing ideological parallels to the fall of the Roman Republic. If we wish to preserve American democracy, it is important to understand contemporary Caesarism.
First some history. When the Roman Republic was established in the sixth century BC, the founders intended to create a regime that fostered harmony between the various economic and social classes that composed Ancient Roman society. In so doing, they hoped to build a nation whose chief aim would be to secure the liberty of the Roman people—something they had gradually lost during the earlier reign of kings. The republican regime was built around a number of annually elected magistrates whose political power was strictly limited by legal and social conventions. Though it was unlike modern-day liberal democracy in many respects, the Roman Republic shared our concern for both popular assent and restrained political power.
The phrase “Caesar” can refer to all Roman emperors, but as a personal name it usually refers to two people: Julius Caesar and his great-nephew Octavian (later Augustus) Caesar. These men remade Rome in the final decades of the republic. Despite their shared name and methods, the two Caesars stood for slightly different visions of the Roman state.
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Despite their differences, the two Caesars were united by a common theme: both centralized power in their own hands. Advocates of Caesarism today see such centralization as the cost of achieving great things. Like Julius and Augustus, they argue that deep transformation can only be accomplished through upending the entire political system.
The influential far-right blogger Curtis Yarvin was one of the first in American politics to start calling for a new “Caesar” in the 2000s. According to Yarvin, America’s problems lie in its subtle transformation from a democratic regime to a theocratic oligarchy, in which a number of left-wing “priests” determine the sort of social and economic viewpoints that remain acceptable. Yarvin does not seem to wish to topple the American republic. He rather aims to find an American Caesar who can restore the lost traditions of the nation. Strangely, he argues that the rise of a Caesar figure is nothing new in America: he claims that every 75 years or so a “Caesar” rises up in America to renew the nation—citing George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, and Franklin Roosevelt as prime examples.
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Meanwhile, Michael Anton, a former speechwriter for Donald Trump, has spent a great deal of time on recent podcasts and in his book explaining why the time may now be ripe for an American Caesar, a form of government that lies somewhere between monarchy and tyranny. Charles Haywood, reviewing Anton’s book, argues that a Caesar is the only way to truly save Western civilization. Kevin Slack, a colleague of Anton’s at Hillsdale College, argues in War on the American Republic that the United States has been seized by an out-of-touch cosmopolitan class that includes “entrenched bureaucracy, the military, the media, and the government-sponsored corporations.” One solution is a “Red Caesar” or a leader “whose post-Constitutional rule will restore the strength of his people.”
If such ruminations were simply the ramblings of a handful of cranky intellectuals there would be very little need to address them. But these ideas are gaining currency with Blake Masters, Peter Thiel, J.D. Vance, and other darlings of the so-called “new right.” Support for strongmen in the United States is also apparent in Donald Trump’s overt desire for vengeance and the fact that an increasing number of Republicans openly admire autocratic governments in China and Russia.
Read it all here.
Around Twitter (X)
Peter Moskos and Geoff Shullenberger comment on the disconnect between fighting crime and dealing with the mentally ill:
There’s a lot of lively discussion about the limits of academic freedom in the wake of Hobart and William Smith College dismissing professor Jodi Dean for an article arguably supporting Hamas. Selected tweets follow:
And finally, via Californian Steve Miller, a new euphemism has dropped: “culturally specific intervention.” (Click for video.)