There's an arc to campus protests

A glance at Derf Backderf's meticulously researched graphic novel Kent State: Four Dead in Ohio seems right on time today.

This artist really did the work, in archives and interviews, to reconstruct the events of the Ohio college massacre on May 4, 1970. A barrage of gun fire from National Guard troops killed four students and maimed more in response to student protests. He tries to portray accurately what students, politicians, cops, and Guardsmen were thinking as the movement against the ongoing Vietnam war both intensified and shifted focus under ham-handed state repression. Overall theme: nobody really knew what they were doing!

Here are a few panels (click to enlarge):

Spring had come and students enjoyed the campus's grassy open lawn.

"Out of the bars and into the streets." During a boisterous evening in town on Friday night, some students interrupted a night of drinking and cruising to take common chants into the streets. The town police department had no idea what to do and bashed heads while intoxicated student rioters smashed store fronts.

The town called in the National Guard. No one seemed to know quite how to act in the aftermath.

Non-campus actors believed all sorts of myths about the mysterious campus activities. What had got into these kids?

For the students, their occupied campus was novel and insulting.

On Monday on campus, a small fraction of students reverted what they had been doing for weeks -- marching in protest. Students had a new target - the occupation of their turf by tired, frustrated, and uncomprehending troops. Many of the Guardsmen despised students they saw as privileged snots.

And so tragedy. A random crew of students were dead; all sides told their own stories. No one was punished. At the time, 58 percent of Americans thought the protesters had it coming to them.

I can highly recommended Backderf's reconstruction of Kent State events, much more detailed and nuanced than what I've offered here.

The book is not a great graphic novel because, for all the artist's efforts, all these characters seem to blend into each other, classic hippies in one stereotype and malevolent pols in another. He could probably have created a clearer visual experience with a lot of editing, but he's determined to report all the available historical strands and the result is not pictures which are easily understood. But this is a terrific effort to tell a complex story.

I got the book from the public library; I hope it is readily available in this moment.

• • •

A few observations from having lived similar events at UC Berkeley during attendance there from 1965-1969 and watching student protests over Gaza today:

• As at Kent State, most students can and do navigate around the edges of passionate protests, going about their lives. They may sympathize, but they are not there. The passionate activists are usually a small minority.

• Repression of campus protests draws a far larger fraction of students (and profs and staff) into the protests, for good and ill. College students, at least back then and likely still, come to think of campus as their place and broadly resent being invaded.

• This can create incentives among a small fraction of protesters to try to create a situation in which cops or others beat protesters' heads. I'm not saying that is all that goes on, but there are always provocateurs, some honest and some not.

• When under attack on campus, it becomes hard for protest leaders to keep the focus on the initial animating issue -- today the call for a Gaza ceasefire and for an end to US complicity in Israel's oppression of Palestinians. If the issue becomes mean cops, the movement is losing.

• Protest leadership demands teaching serious protest discipline. This is hard because the aim is to grow fast. And also, the power of campus protest is attractive moral creativity; apparent rigid automatons chanting only approved messages do not attract.

And we'd be a far worse country if students could never be moved by atrocity. So far, we seem to be that kind of country.

Friday cat blogging

 The war in Ukraine keeps providing amazing photos of cats.

You wouldn't think they'd take to war. But they do seem willing to adopt human friends.

Via The Counteroffensive.

Is Hakeem Jeffries the real Speaker of the House of Representatives?

No, he's not. Jeffries remains the Democratic House Minority Leader. 

Republican Mike Johnson is the Speaker, leading a one vote majority with Marjorie Taylor Greene and other far right lunatics nipping at this heels. It's a precarious perch. But Jeffries has managed to win a commanding position in the current Congress by means of cross party legislative legerdemain.

Russell Berman describes the arrangement with Jeffries that is keeping Johnson in his current job:

... in an unusual statement, the leaders of the Democratic opposition emerged from a party meeting to declare that they would rescue Johnson if the speaker’s main Republican enemy at the moment, Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, forced a vote to oust him. ... by thwarting Greene’s motion to vacate, Democrats hope they can ensure that Johnson will keep turning to them for the next seven months of his term rather than seek votes from conservative hard-liners who will push legislation ever further to the right.

Rep. Hakeem Jeffries, D-NY

For the sake of historical memory, it seems worth recalling that former California Assembly Speaker Willie Brown pulled off similar legislative wizardry in the mid-1990s. Brown served as Democratic Assembly leader for fifteen years, using his near absolute power over his caucus to advance civil rights and to raise the cash to elect Democrats. The push for legislative term limits in the state -- passed by voter initiative in 1990 -- was often described as the only way to pry Willie Brown out of the job.

In 1994, as the new term limits led to a bit of legislative turnover, for the first time in decades, Republicans seized a one vote majority in the state Assembly. But Brown wasn't about to let them take over "his" house. First he persuaded a dissident Republican, Paul Horcher, to turn independent and vote to keep him as Speaker. Horcher was quickly recalled by his Republican district. (Horcher stayed in Brown's orbit; when Brown was later mayor of San Francisco, Horcher worked in department of parking and traffic.)

After Horcher was deposed, Brown worked his magic to hang on yet longer. He persuaded another disgruntled Republican member, Doris Allen, to take the title of Speaker, for the next six months. But her power consisted of Brown's control of the Democratic Caucus. After this, Dems again won the Assembly majority and that was that.

The California legislature only saw the last of Willie Brown when term limits sent him off to be "da Mayor" in San Francisco.

If Democrats win the House in November -- a strong possibility if we do the work -- then Hakeem Jeffries will be elected the actual Speaker. But he's certainly proving a worthy successor to former Speaker Nancy Pelosi and her mentor Willie Brown in this interregnum. 

• • •

I have to add that Willie Brown's later influence was extremely malign on the city I love . His mayoral tenure was both corrupt and indifferent to majority who were too poor to offer much to him and his friends. He governed for the civic fat cats and left of a legacy of subsequent lesser imitators. But he sure was a phenomenal leader of the Assembly in his day.

An unexpected source of support for US aid to Ukraine

How about some elements of the religious right?

Most of us who don't live their world miss nuances and small fissures in evangelical support for Trumpism. These aren't our people and their information diet is not ours.

But informed observers think that Republican Congressional Speaker Mike Johnson's willingness to allow a majority vote for aid to Ukraine derived, in part, from rightwing Christians' awareness that Russian invaders are persecuting their kind. Russia wants to impose a Russian flavor of Orthodox Christianity under the Moscow Patriarch. 

Historian of Christian religion Diana Butler Bass has flagged the resulting conflict:

When Speaker of the House Mike Johnson pushed through aid to Ukraine ..., it did more than green-light funds to support the Ukrainians. In recent weeks, he changed from hard-core opposition to supporting Ukraine to championing its cause. His actions were, of course, political and personal, but they also signal a genuine conflict within American evangelicalism, one that could come to have ramifications for the upcoming presidential elections.

... While 77% of evangelicals supported Ukraine when Russia invaded, that enthusiasm eroded over the next two years. ... In general, American evangelical public opinion became clouded. It appears that in the last two years, the more evangelicals committed to Christian nationalism as a political movement, the more they began to back away from Ukraine and re-embrace Vladimir Putin. As a result, evangelical opposition to Ukraine and support for Russia essentially took over the issue. ... By November 2023, however, pro-Ukraine groups figured out the key to American aid in their war was swaying evangelicals. ...

The number of stories about Russian persecution of evangelicals appearing in the religion press increased. A good example of this can be found in The Baptist Press — their Ukraine coverage increased in its political content, urgency, and frequency beginning in the autumn of 2023 through this spring.

 Sarah Posner is a leading student of America's religious right. She sees Mike Johnson shoring up his base against purer nihilists like Marjorie Taylor Greene:

Greene and her fellow ideologues may want to tread carefully. There is a growing backlash on the Christian right against the move to oust Johnson. While Greene’s MAGA influencer antics garner significant media attention, people with longtime clout in the evangelical political trenches, including Johnson himself, have been waging a quiet but scathing war against her in Christian media. The GOP’s evangelical base — vital to Republican hopes in the fall — is hearing that Greene is groundlessly attacking a godly man and imperiling the party’s election chances, thus bringing (in Johnson’s words) the Democrats’ “crazy woke agenda” closer to fruition. 

Worship in a Baptist congregation in the village of Gat in Ukraine. (Photo: European Baptist Federation)

Meanwhile, divisions over Russian persecution of Ukrainian Baptists and others have come to the American home front. Catherine Wanner, a professor of History, Anthropology, and Religious Studies at Pennsylvania State University, explains:

I'm a professor at Penn State ... so I live in rural central Pennsylvania, where there happens to be a Baptist mega church. It used to be called the Russian Baptist Church – they changed their name after 2022. They are now the Salvation Baptist Church. The majority of members are either Ukrainians, Russians, or Russian speakers, and this community itself has fractured; it has divided in two. While there was universal agreement that the war should be condemned in no uncertain terms and that Russia is the aggressor in this case, the issue that prompted this community to split was over how one should pray for suffering co-religionists.

The Russians and the Russian speakers argued that the restrictive atmosphere in Russia was such that there was immense suffering among Russian Baptists in Russia, and so the suffering of Russian Baptist should be equated with Ukrainian Baptists, and the two should be prayed for on equal terms. The Ukrainians, those from Ukraine, said no. The suffering of Ukrainians is primarily at the hands of their Russian brethren, who are waging war and shelling Ukrainians every day and destroying Baptist communities throughout Ukraine.

And so, it was over the issue of how to recognize the suffering of both Baptists in Russia and Baptists in Ukraine that prompted this community to experience conflicts such that they split. This is my way of saying that these conflicts are not limited to the occupied territories in Ukraine where they are most acutely experienced, but they reverberate in communities in rural central Pennsylvania, which has a significant number of immigrants from the former Soviet Union, and specifically from Ukraine – as does our neighboring state, Ohio, and Michigan beyond it. 

The U.S. religious right is paying attention to such divisions, to the benefit of Ukrainian resistance to Russian aggression. Can the rest of us listen up as well?

The tiny dinosaurs we share a world with

Don't miss this current article from Erudite Partner in the LA Progressive:

... Many of us, myself included a few times a year, do eat birds, but an extraordinary number of people all over the world are also beguiled and delighted by them in their wild state. People deeper into bird culture than I am make a distinction between birdwatchers — anyone who pays a bit of attention to birds and can perhaps identify a few local species like the handsome rock dove, better known as a pigeon — and birders, people who devote time (and often money) to the practice, who may travel to see particular birds, and who most likely maintain a birding life list of every species they’ve spotted.

Mandy and Lara Sirdah of Gaza City are birders. Those twin sisters, now in their late forties, started photographing birds in their backyard almost a decade ago....

If it weren’t for the Israeli occupation — and now the full-scale war ... Gaza would be ideal for birding. ...

Who knew? -- don't you want to know more? I certainly did.

I don't see women putting up with this indefinitely

A cry from rural Missouri.

Tender feelings among phony "conservatives" underlie assault on democracy

The right wing Heritage Foundation has undertaken to mobilize a broad swath of conservative academics and a goodly number of cranks to write a blueprint for a prospective Trump administration. They call it Project 2025. The document has been widely reported on; if you are a real glutton for punishment, you can download it yourself, though I doubt anyone else is much up for 900 pages of this stuff. 

European political scientist Thomas Zimmer, who is a visiting prof at Georgetown University, is closely observing the U.S. scene. He provides this commentary on the plan:

There is a nervous energy on the Right. A volatile mix of desperation and enthusiasm, delusions of grandeur and a feeling of impending doom – all of it being channeled into a feverish effort to devise detailed plans and strategies, policy agendas, personnel databases, and emergency “playbooks” for a return to power.

... reactionaries are actually united by the desire to punish their enemies, “take back” the country, and restore the “natural order” of unquestioned white Christian patriarchal rule – a unity that is indicative of a broader realignment on the Right towards an aggressive embrace of state authoritarianism. ...

This tendency to embrace the coercive powers of the state as long as they were deployed in service of the rightwing agenda has escalated in the more recent past, as the sense of being under siege as a persecuted minority in their own country has radicalized on the Right. Conservative elites have always cultivated a sense of (self-)victimization, have displayed a remarkable persecution complex even while holding disproportionate power, at least politically and economically, often focused on the cultural sphere they didn’t manage to dominate.

Until quite recently, this overall feeling among conservatives of being victimized was accompanied by a sense of representing the majority will of the people – of having the infamous “silent majority” on their side. The “silent majority” idea was obviously based on a racialized conception of America’s true volk. It was the majority of only those who *really* counted the Right claimed or cared to represent – a group that was predominantly white, Christian, and espoused certain conservative values and sensibilities that were coded as authentically American. And yet, the “silent majority” chimera at least paid lip service to some notion of majoritarian government and therefore, at least rhetorically, recognized democratic principles. That’s completely gone, in theory and practice.

Conservatives have basically moved from criticizing “big government” and “activist judges” for going against the will of the “silent majority” to declaring the majority illegitimate and accusing it of assaulting the natural order as justification for their attempts to entrench minoritarian rule by whatever means.

... this would not be the same Right that came to power in 2017. That starts with Trump himself. The idea that he has always been the same, just Trump being Trump, is massively misleading and obscures the rather drastic radicalization of the Right’s undisputed leader. Beyond Trump, the Right more generally has significantly radicalized. The idea that more drastic action is urgently needed has been spreading fast into the center of conservative politics. The summer of 2020, specifically, escalated this perception of imminent threat: It has become a key element of rightwing political identity to view the protests that erupted after the murder of George Floyd as supposedly irrefutable proof that “the Left” has started its full-on assault, justifying calls for ever more extreme action in response. This radicalization has found its manifestation in the Republican Party.

... The best approach to understanding the Right has always been to take seriously and actually grapple with their vision for American society. In that sense, “Project 2025” is tremendously helpful. Rightwing leaders could not possibly be clearer about the reactionary vision they want to impose on the country. They are telling us that they do not accept this egalitarian, pluralistic idea of a society in which the individual’s status is no longer determined by race, gender, religion, and wealth. They feel justified in taking truly radical, extreme measures to prevent that society from ever becoming a reality because they believe they are defending “real America” in service of a higher purpose: To restore and entrench what they see as the natural order and divine will, as it manifests in strict, discriminatory hierarchies.

The reactionary mobilization against democratic multiracial pluralism won’t stop because the people behind it have some sort of epiphany that they shouldn’t go *that* far. It will either *be stopped* or succeed in entrenching white Christian patriarchal rule – and install a system in which only they and those who reflect their image back at them are entitled to rule and be recognized as equal.

Scary stuff. As is usual when previously unchallenged dominant men let themselves be governed by fear. Also, all too much like the BS that Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito was peddling the other day in the arguments over whether a president should enjoy absolute immunity from prosecution for illegal acts aiming to stay in power.

Demagogues, ideologues, racists, and grifters past

The dire prospect of yet another Trump campaign season brings out historical-political observers who remind us that destructive populist energy run amuck in the Republican Party is nothing new.

Trump is not a unique figure in American history. In each generation, anti-liberal forces have turned to the same breed of demagogue, the flouter of norms, the boorish trampler of liberal nostrums. William Buckley noted that the very “uncouthness” of George Wallace seemed to “account for his general popularity.” James Burnham marveled at how Joseph McCarthy’s “inept acts and ignorant words” had a “charismatic” quality that well expressed the fears and angers of his devoted followers.

What their critics saw as boorishness and malevolence, however, their followers saw as strength and defiance against a liberal system stacked against them. They were rebellious opponents of the system, “wreckers,” unabashedly anti-liberal in both thought and manner, and that is precisely what made them popular among a broad swath of White Americans who felt themselves losing ground in the culture and society... -- Robert Kagan 

• • •

The fact is that for a very long time—longer than I’ve been alive—the Republican Party has been motivated by the drive to tap into and mobilize populist energy bubbling up from the “grassroots” and then ride it to power. Populism in this sense is a revolutionary impulse—a drive to rise up in rage-filled rebellion against entrenched, established powers, allies against enemies, us against them. Barry Goldwater was the first to attempt it. -- Damon Linker

Looking back from our moment, Rick Perlstein's 2001 history, Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus, fills in the record of one episode in the GOP's long course of replacing most policy goals with rage-driven rebellion against modern American life.  

In 1964, right wing operatives -- John Birch Society and other fringe-ish cranks -- needed a standard bearer if they were going to break into the mainstream. Senator Goldwater was a far right libertarian out of phase with the eastern, capitalist, urban leadership of the Republican Party. He looked strong and was seriously ambitious, but also was determined to do things his own way. 

The election was always going to be tough for Republicans -- the incumbent Lyndon Johnson had inherited the presidency from the assassinated John Kennedy. People were still reeling from the shock. But the war in Vietnam was heating up and the non-violent movement for African American rights and dignity had escaped the South, leading to urban unrest. There might have been an opening for a less divisive Republican, Johnson was a master of turning social unease to his advantage (and in many respects was a pretty darn good president for most citizens).

According to Perlstein, the right wing outsiders organized highly competently to get Goldwater nominated at a populist GOP convention. But they never managed to entirely take over the campaign apparatus. So during the run up to the vote, it was often as if the populist grassroots were running in parallel to, rather than pushing from behind, their champion. There was plenty of venting of white rage and fear, but Johnson was able to use this energy against the Republican, defining Goldwater as a war-mongering menace.

The numbers were spectacular: 43,126,218 votes for Johnson to 27,174,898 for Goldwater, who won only six states -- one of them, Arizona, by half a percent.

Democrats cleaned up down ballot as well, winning overwhelming advantages in Congress. In consequence, in 1965, they passed Medicare and the Voting Rights Act which enabled Black suffrage (until the current Supreme Court killed it off).

Perlstein writes a very detailed narrative of these events, fascinating if the nuts and bolts of political campaigns interest the reader. In reading such history, I'm always reminded that though the technology of campaigning changes, its essence -- harnessing mass political energies into effective action -- remains the same. 

Where and how might you work to defeat Trump's current right wing threat this fall? (I'm still figuring it out.)

• • •

In 1964, when the radical right John Birch Society was near the peak of its influence, renowned journalist Martha Gellhorn, who had launched her career covering the Spanish civil war three decades earlier, wrote a friend: “Unless there’s a Johnson landslide, the country and world will know how many incipient and energetic home-grown Fascists we have. I never for a moment feared Communism in the US but have always feared Fascism; it’s a real American trait. -- via Karen Tumulty

A stroll through the Sculpture Garden

 

I had heard there was a sculpture garden somewhere up in the Chilmark woods. Yesterday I found myself walking through it.

The gate came with some admonitions:

 

And there I was, walking paths among dozens of improbable denizens, large and small:

I encountered no living dragons, or other humans for that matter. This, still barren, early spring makes for a splendid moment to walk among some artist's fantasies.

Friday cat blogging

I asked whether it would be okay to take a snap of the bookstore cat.

"Oh, yes. Visitors do that all the time," said the clerk.

The animal slept on, next to its stuffed friend, oblivious to an admirer.

Many Israelis are not European-origin white people.

And too much of American discourse about the present horrific phase of the long Israeli/Palestinian war tries to shove the conflict into a framework derived from U.S. racial history, a Black/White binary.

Insisting that this terrible conflict is different than U.S. experience and carries its own complications in no way justifies Israel's current brutal effort to simply eradicate or expel the people of Gaza and the West Bank. Nor does it justify hostage taking and vengeance raids. I'm tempted to say there aren't any good guys, though the work of the Jewish and Palestinian group Standing Together may point to better possibilities.

Standing Together on the Gaza border: marching for LIFE, PEACE, FREEDOM & SAFETY FOR ALL. "We need to end the war. We need to end the occupation. We need to end this cycle of violence and killing. We need a real, just peace that gives everyone a future here - Palestinians and Israelis." via Xitter

But it isn't adequate to think of the hell of the two clashing nations as indigenous dark Palestinians rising up against white Jewish intruders. Both justice and compassion require a more nuanced view.

John Ganz [@lionel_trolling], historian and Xitter pundit extraordinaire, has attempted to recomplicate the agony of Israel/Palestine in simplified form. I've excerpted some of this here, but urge those concerned to Read the Whole Thing.

... as many others have pointed out, the more than half of Israeli Jews—between 50% or 55%—are Mizrahim or Sephardim, rather than Ashkenazim.

... The fact that most of the Israeli population is of non-European descent—including a sizable population of Ethiopian Jews—somewhat complicates the picture given by some Western activists of Israel as a white supremacist settler-colonial state lording it over darker peoples. The Mizrahi population tends to be more religious, more conservative, less educated, less prosperous, and to vote for right-wing parties, like Likud, Shas and the Judeo-Fascist Otzma Yehudit, headed by the national security minister, Itamar Ben Gvir, himself of Mizrahi descent. ...

... Mizrahi and other non-European Jews are also more likely to be IDF combat troops involved in the most dangerous and violent missions in the occupied territories and Gaza: They do a lot of the grunt work of repression. ...

 ... “Living in Israel is for us, coming from Arab countries, the continuation of our Jewish identity. Whereas the programme presented by the left is cosmopolitan - in which nationalism is overcome - we, Mizrahi Jews, do not relate at all to this discourse, in which human and civil rights come before our Jewish identity,” as one Likud activist told Middle East Eye.

... To understand why the Mizrahim became so right wing and nationalist, we have to look to the process by which they became integrated into Israeli society and politics. In the wake of the U.N. Partition vote of 1947 and the 1948 Israeli-Arab war, some 900,000 Jews from the Middle East fled their homes. Around two thirds of these would end up in Israel. When they arrived, the Israeli state was dominated by the largely Ashkenazi founding generation, figures you will have heard of like David Ben-Gurion, Chaim Weizmann, and Golda Meir. The Ashkenazi elite had a paternalistic and prejudiced attitude towards their newly arrived cousins, who were often extremely poor and uneducated. ...

... It would be a mistake, however, to put too much weight on the Ashkenazi-Mizrahi distinction as the sole explanatory factor in Israeli politics. The ethnic issue is often a proxy for other things. A recent study shows that as educational attainment rises, voting behavior starts to look the same. Some argue that increasing rate of mixed marriages is reducing the saliency of ethnic politics. Not all class differences map easily onto these ethnic differences: for instance, Iraqi Jews are often part of the elite. One should also not map Mizrahi onto “Settler” or Religious Zionist: Israeli finance minister Bezalel Smotrich is the head of the more Ashkenazi National Religious Party. ...

Click to get a look at Smotrich

Would it matter if we learned a more nuanced view of the agony we watch and seek to impede from here? Perhaps not. But more truth still seems better to me  ...

It's beginning to feel a little 1968ish ...

Republican politicians are licking their chops. They hope beating up on protesting college students will distract their fellow citizens while their leader sits in a dingy New York court room defending a sordid con. Meanwhile the economy chugs along and majorities tell pollsters we're feeling pretty good about our individual lives. Gotta raise the temperature. Beat up on some students ...

Via the Austin American

This dodge has succeeded before. Last time we got Richard Nixon and it took every intact strand in the democratic fabric of the rule of law to evict him. This time they want to ride a stupid, sociopathic, toddler-strong man. 

They want to leverage genuine moral outrage over Gaza for their ugly purposes. Escalating violence on campuses is not the students' fault, even if some are unthinking and overwrought. 

Atlantic editor Adam Server cuts to the essence of the moment:

... As we approach the summer of 2024, the economy is growing, migration to the border has declined at least temporarily owing to what appears to be a new crackdown by Mexican authorities, and in many major cities, crime is returning to historic lows, leaving protests as the most suitable target for demagoguery. The Biden administration’s support for Israel divides Democrats and unites Republicans, so the longer the issue remains salient, the better it is for the GOP.

More broadly, the politics of “American carnage” do not work as well in the absence of carnage. Far-right politics operate best when there is a public perception of disorder and chaos, an atmosphere in which the only solution such politicians ever offer can sound appealing to desperate voters. Social-media bubbles can suffice to maintain this sense of siege among the extremely online, but cultivating this perception among most voters demands constant reinforcement.

This is why the Republican Party is constantly seeking to play up chaos at the border and an epidemic of crime in American cities, no matter what the reality of the situation might actually be. ... any escalation in chaos would redound to their political benefit. They don’t want to solve any problems; they want to make them worse so that the public will warm to “solutions” that will continue to make them worse. They don’t want order, or safety, or peace. What they want is carnage.

They want carnage and they'll make it where it doesn't yet exist. They want to use protesting students in their theater of carnage. And when your cause is just, it's hard not to play.