The Collapse of Liberalism

I attended Rashid Khalidi’s course, History of the Modern Middle East, 20 years ago and still think about it. Amid Columbia’s sea of polished and top-of-their-game scholars, Khalidi stood out as brilliant, and every lecture was exceptionally lucid and compelling. But beyond his talent as a lecturer, what was striking was how measured and sober, and even at times seemingly cautious, Khalidi was. He and other members of Columbia’s MEALAC department simply bore no resemblance to the right’s caricature of them. Insofar as their teaching was classifiable as “controversial,” it was not due to any ideology or temperament, let alone the defamatory bad faith accusation of anti-Semitism, but only because they were accurately chronicling an historical reality shaped by mass and ongoing atrocities perpetrated by the powers that be.

This then makes all the more striking Khalidi’s recent denunciation of Columbia’s capitulation to the Trump Administration’s attack on its students, employees, and academic freedom and free speech in general. Columbia, Khalidi writes, is Vichy on the Hudson, a fatally compromised collaborator that is a university in name only. While it is obviously the Trump Administration that is at the forefront of this breakneck authoritarian regression, it’s useful to remember that the historic attacks on the department and critics of Israel in general have always been a bipartisan affair. And it is the mutual culpability of this bipartisanship, giving lie to the shrill but facile Resistance to Trump 1.0, that prevents liberal institutions from effectively challenging the Trump Administration today.

The nature of the Democrats’ pulled punches is currently on vivid display over the imbroglio of the Trump Administration’s mishandling of classified communications preceding its attack on Yemen. Democrats and their media outlets surely cannot challenge Trump regarding the heart of the matter: the bombing of a foreign country and the killing of innocents. After all, it was the Democrats, under Barack Obama, who facilitated the war on Yemen both directly and via its Saudi attack dog. Similarly, Democrats cannot convincingly complain that the attack did not go through the “proper channels” or obtain congressional approval, as it was Obama who made a laughingstock of the War Powers Resolution by defending his refusal to request congressional approval for his war on Libya, claiming that it wasn’t in fact a “war,” a far more contemptuous, and deadly, semantic sleight of hand than even Bill Clinton’s notorious pronouncement that “it depends on what the meaning of the word ‘is’ is.” And of course Biden, his characteristically bankrupt promises notwithstanding, helped continue the onslaught in Yemen. Accordingly, the Democrats can do little else but seize the opportunity to put Trump on the defensive via the charge that he is an unreliable wielder of empire, i.e., the old “Reporting for duty,” more patriotic than thou, John Kerry script, as preposterously sanctimonious as it is ineffective.

Liberals’ proclamations of horror and outrage are not entirely insincere – how can they be considering the sheer bizarreness and surreal hubris of the Trump Administration’s shitstorm of slothful stupidity? Nevertheless, there is an unmistakable note of thou-protest-too-much in their railings, evoking a husband who screams at his wife because she left the rice out, displacing his real anger over the fact that she is sleeping with her co-worker, which he cannot express since he is busy sleeping with her friend.

The Democrats, as well as Columbia and more broadly all liberal institutions, are in on it and, it goes without saying, will not be coming to save us. We are alone to face a determined authoritarian movement that, notwithstanding its own weaknesses, will go as far it can in destroying human security, freedom, and dignity.

This is hardly a call to keep our heads down. On the contrary, to do so would be political and psychological suicide, a point eloquently expressed in Bruno Bettelheim’s 1960 essay in Harper’s Magazine, “The Ignored Lesson of Anne Frank.” The essay was controversial, as Frank had become a symbol of wartime virtue, and the perceived criticism of her family’s choices seemed cruel if not sacrilegious. But, in taking aim at the “universal admiration of their way of coping, or rather of not coping,” Bettelheim identified a great irony: those, like the Frank family, who thought they were doing the safe thing by going into hiding to wait out the nightmare were in fact likelier to be caught. Of particular consequence to Bettelheim were the psychological consequences of survivors’ wartime choices. Describing the experiences of others paralyzed by the harrowing circumstances of the war, Bettelheim writes:

As their desperation mounted, they clung more determinedly to their old living arrangements and to each other, became less able to consider giving up the possessions they had accumulated through hard work over a lifetime. The more severely their freedom to act was reduced, and what little they were still permitted to do restricted by insensible and degrading regulations imposed by the Nazis, the more did they become unable to contemplate independent action. Their life energies drained out of them, sapped by their ever-greater anxiety. The less they found strength in themselves, the more they held on to the little that was left of what had given them security in the past – their old surroundings, their customary way of life, their possessions – all these seemed to give their lives some permanency, offer some symbols of security. Only what had once been symbols of security now endangered life, since they were excuses for avoiding change. On each successive visit the young man found his relatives more incapacitated, less willing or able to take his advice, more frozen into activity, and with it further along the way to the crematoria where, in fact, they all died.

That is, the lesson the world drew from Frank’s story, “glorifying the ability to retreat into an extremely private, gentle, sensitive world,” was both self-serving and mistaken, an embrace of denialism and a refusal to confront a system that, at the seeming drop of a hat, can become devastatingly oppressive. On the contrary, those who chose to fight on principle and stuck their necks out, or who endured the sacrifices of escape, choices which appeared far riskier at the time, were in fact likelier not only to maintain their psychological integrity but to survive.

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