Heartfelt and earnest, and many of us are behind you in this great struggle to reintroduce civic discourse into our society. However, the task is harder than you might think, and is made even more difficult by the biases we professors have brought (and are still bringing) into the classroom for decades.
I have been in higher education as a grad instructor, as adjunct faculty, and now as a tenured professor, for over thirty years. I also happen to be a historian of modern European history. In those years, I have borne (silent, I’m ashamed to admit) witness to to the steady and concerted effort to denigrate and downplay the achievements of what used to be called Western civilization by my fellow colleagues in the service of privileging and “foregrounding” the subaltern. I am not here to debate the wisdom of that approach to teaching history, just report on its (rather predictable, even thirty years ago to be honest) results.
For better or for worse, the civic mechanisms we have in place to ward off societal violence and respect the freedom of the individual are all rooted in the Western experience almost exclusively. Once the value of that cultural inheritance was questioned and its base assumptions demolished, it was inevitable that other “civic” (scare quotes because I think citizenship is a uniquely Western construct, at least in the way we commonly use the term) models would take its place. Recently, with the goings on in Tehran and other Iranian cities, we got to see how one of those models functions up close.
But reintroducing an existential respect for the civic achievements of the West is also complicated by our own biases. For example, I presume, from what you wrote above, that your sympathies lie with the demonstrators in Minnesota. You might not support the violence as your students do, but you do support the spirit behind the protests (forgive my presumption if I am incorrect, but the point can still be made regardless). But earlier in your article you cited that more young conservatives seek violent outcomes to political debates than young liberals/progressives. Furthermore, given that you stipulated that the overwhelming majority of your civics class is in favor of violently supporting the demonstrators, that raises a real issue. What happened to the conservatives in your classroom? Are they speaking up? If not, why not? If they are, are they in support of the demonstrators or the police you think? If they are in support of ICE, do they think that ICE is applying the right amount of force or excessive force? (As a side note, there are many more ICE operations in Florida and those are proceeding peacefully. Does that mean ICE is different in Florida or that Florida, Texas, etc. are now full blown authoritarian states?) If there are no conservatives in your classroom, that would mean they exist outside of it which should give those inside of it room for pause since those conservatives currently see the violence of ICE as lawful and justified and any response to it as unlawful and incendiary.
That is where the conversation must start for both sides. Rather than assuming one side is right and one is wrong, why don’t we role play as the other side? Force your class to put forward points as to why they might be wrong. If they cannot come up with any, then they should disobey but with the awareness that an authoritarian state (it must be if it has no civic defense for its policies) will kill every last one of them in order to defend itself. If they want to start a Revolution, they should know the stakes.
If there's one thing the American people hate, it's chaos. Right now, many are turning against the administration because they blame it for causing chaos. However, should protests turn to widespread riots, it is very possible, likely even, that support will swing back towards the administration. It has happened before. Hopefully your students will consider that.
They may blame it for causing chaos but is it actually causing chaos? Or are activists who fundamentally disagree with every aspect of the administration’s call to enforce immigration law and protect the border the ones causing the chaos? We can all agree that the administration (or at least a small yet very visible portion of it) have not gone about that law enforcement in a very effective manner to give the perception that they aren’t thugs. But the beginning premise of the protests isn’t the seemingly violent or thuggish manner in which the agents are apprehending undocumented migrants. It’s that they’re apprehending them at all. Of course the goalposts have been shifted to being about “the violence” but that’s the Mott-Bailey tactic being deployed. I think the protesters and organizing activists need to be viewed in a proper lens. They aren’t simply pushing back and/or rioting against an administration bent on chaos. They are the ones sowing chaos by doing more than simply recording ICE operations. So I think it’d be disingenuous to say Americans hate chaos, which I do agree with, but there are obviously Americans causing the chaos and pointing the finger at the administration. Its almost a sort of gaslight to suggest that the administration is causing chaos. Enforcing immigration law, at least as far as the administration was voted in to do, would be the opposite of causing chaos seeing as the wide open border and now documented welfare state corruption and fraud by many undocumented migrants IS the chaos that administration is attempting to bring back into order.
Well written and thank you for arguing for persuasion over violence. I've been seeking resources and am interested to hear from others on how to handle mob mentality. We have that in abundance on both "sides". Politicians and media stoke the flames for votes and clicks, and we _all_ happily oblige their manipulations. Each "side" talks in hyperbole and very broad generalization, and gets more and more extreme, which pushes the other "side" to get more extreme in response, all while nobody is considering the actual nuance or details.
An example of exactly that is in the article, "They look at Minneapolis and see federal agents firing on crowds. They see a system that, in their view, responds to speech with silence and to silence with violence. Their question is reasonable: Why should only one side play by the rules?"
There are several presumptions in those three, short sentences that will sow outrage. In order:
- Firing on crowds: There's a huge difference between federal agents indiscriminately firing into a crowd and the Minneapolis killings of two individuals. That distinction is vital. (We do NOT want to re-learn what living through the former is like.)
- Respond with silence: Neither side is responding with silence. This is being heavily debated across the entire country -- as it should be. (I saw a high school protest with a huge, fancy "ICE are terrorists" banner (hyperbole), AND the POTUS administration has a tweet-first, think later approach to the shooting investigation (hyperbole)).
- Only one side play by the rules: Power switches sides continually and constantly -- POTUS every four-to-eight years and congress every two-to-four -- the 2026 midterm campaigning is starting now! Neither side plays by the rules when in power and BOTH sides try to railroad as much partisan stuff through as they can in each limited window -- which makes the other side even crazier for their turn. ICE is operating under very extreme dictates, which are also broadly popular, AND the protesters are surprisingly well organized and well funded. (If you can't identify the partisan stuff your "side" last rammed through, then you're probably accidentally contributing to our polarization. Please broaden your media diet.)
We don't get out of this without getting out in front of the mob mentality that is taking hold of everyone. We don't get out of this without dialog and specifics and nuance. We don't get out of this without holding our own "side" to account when they fly to extremes or break the rules.
Having lived through the riots and domestic terrorism of the 60s and 70s, I know how seductive a violent call of action can be. As pointed out, the real work is in longterm community building, which involves coalition-building by finding points of commonality, dealing with root causes, feeding the babies, etc. Takes years - decades - of unglamorous, unheralded, often boring and frustrating work. And lots of failures. I was just writing someone about some community projects my father was involved with. One of his successes took twelve years to see to completion.
When confronted with the "violence is necessary" argument, my response is "And then what happens? How do you live when the war is over?" Usually, the person has no idea, because they don't have a path to peace or concrete goals to inspire people in a positive way. Thus, they attract followers who find meaning and justification for hating their enemies in the battle.
I have helped out in various local elections. One of my rules is that the activists I work with conduct themselves so they can walk down the streets of their community and smile at everyone, with good will, after the votes are counted. I encourage people to play the Long Game, as if we are all going to have to figure out how to live on the same planet after the war is over.
This is a mature, responsible approach, and the only way to secure stable peace and prosperity. The alternative is that one side or the other wins through violence (and nobody can be sure their side will be the ultimate victor). And too often the end of a war does not mean the end of violence. Winning sides have slaughtered, imprisoned and oppressed millions in order to maintain their victories and stay in power (e.g., communists, Nazis). The path of violence is often the path to becoming monsters.
"The path to becoming monsters." I saw a version of this happen more than once when I was a consultant regarding workplace conflicts. An individual or small group within a workplace were the problem, using emotional intimidation aka bullying to get their way. Opposing them would be another individual, often another employee, often the person who brought me in, the one got the boss to hire me.
The situation would be resolved, which usually meant that the bully quit or was fired, followed by their minions. And then...usually a couple of years later, I would get a call, but this time from the boss.
"We have another bully situation," the boss would tell me. "A different person. Can you come back?"
And guess what? The person who was most opposed to the first bully had taken on that role themselves. I learned to shift my attention from just the one problem person to the environment that allowed bullies to flourish. Also, I realized that some people thrived on conflict, and once they had helped banish the bully, they create new conflict, and the characteristics that served them in the war now helped them dominate the workplace in an unhealthy way.
I got so that I got pretty good at predicting the leader of the next band of bullies, too often the most fired up of the reformers. Of course, it happens on a big scale in government when the "fixer" comes into power, replacing the old bad with the new.
It all boils down to an anti-democratic propensity not to respect other people and their opinions and a willingness to force your desires on others. Workplace bullying is the same attitude on a micro level. At least it is not (typically) violent.
I think there needs to be some foundational understandings when approaching a room of Gen Z (and whoever else) about this topic. Free speech advocates instinctually point to and try to reason with the First Amendment and Constitutional law and precedent. But the students and activists aren’t entertaining those arguments because they aren’t approaching this issue from a rational standpoint.
If we break it down to simple terms, ICE is in charge of enforcing federal immigration law. Border Patrol is in charge of enforcing the border. To a rational thinker those two agencies seem to make perfect sense when looking at the law and understanding that a sovereign nation cannot properly exist without a defined border or legal citizenship. But the issue is being twisted to be viewed on emotional terms rather than rational ones. And we do need to have some emotion in our politics, but its currently being skewed heavily to that over reason by both sides.
I suspect that if you dug down even just a little bit, your students would give almost purely emotional responses when asked why ICE should be abolished or violently fought against. They’re viewing the issue almost exclusively through a moral lens where one side is enacting tyranny and the other is having their human rights trampled on, and they’re either naively or willfully ignoring any nuance to the situation. If they’re starting the debate under the premise anyone and everyone has an inherent right, no matter the circumstance, to be in the US as a full participating citizen, and shouldn’t need to go through a legal process to be here, and that any enforcement of immigration law is inherently racist, xenophobic, tyrannical, fascist, etc. then any argument they hear to the contrary will not suffice because they aren’t thinking in any terms other than the most nakedly emotional ones. And when the inherent goodness of the “victims” or “targets” of what is viewed as a morally corrupt and despised government is perceived to be under attack, violence will naturally follow. When we create a visible enemy, whether or not they are actually an enemy out of law enforcers, violence will follow actual physical enforcement of law or even just the rhetorical advocacy of law enforcement.
You have to find a way to cut through the propaganda that has brainwashed them into viewing the issue with such little nuance and acceptance of violence. Until they understand (if they even want to) that their perception is not based in reason they won’t ever think in reasonable or rational terms. And that’s the trick to it in trying to turn the temperature down and shift the advocacy back to Free Speech and nonviolence.
I think you’re right that in many cases, the emotional, irrational approach to issues is the result of propaganda and education designed to instill the teachers’ preferred political viewpoints. I saw that explicitly being done in Tucson’s Mexican-American La Raza studies program. It was marketed to the students and the general public as being grounded in humanism, love and righteousness. The program’s founders admitted they were socialists. They used cherry picked facts and emotional appeals with the stated goal of turning students into activists for the program’s specific points of view and political and economic goals.
I also teach civics and philosophy, but at the HS level.
Argument and evidence can only change minds if those minds have a shared moral language or sacred commitment of some kind -- a god for lack of a better term.
In Medieval times, our civilization's highest good was Jesus. The theological unity was fractured post-Reformation, but the sacred morphed into a shared moral order -- "we disagree about the details of God, but we agree on His commandments." Locke and the Enlightenment fractured that moral framework (esp Hume), and John Stuart Mill dethroned it completely, declaring the highest good of society to be personal freedom instead of virtue.
That's where we stand today. Oh sure, the postmodernists did their part to destroy the idea of sacred ("there is no truth!" -- ironically, a sacred statement by nature) but the roots lie in Mill and Nietzsche. Most know Nietzsche's line "God is dead" but incorrectly assume it's triumphant: "Let's have fun now that God's dead!" It's not. It's more like: "How will we live now that God is dead?" Nietzsche's answer gave us Hitler, not a promising start to a philosophy.
We're still trying to answer that question today. But Mill's "maximal individual autonomy" has done a century of work now, and our answers are too divergent to have a conversation. Our arguments talk past each other because we lack the shared moral framework (the sacred) necessary for discussion. Our society has more than one "good", and like rival gods, rival "goods" don't coexist well.
The term I use with way civics students is the "theologicalization of politics" -- we no longer argue about HOW to achieve the common good but about WHAT "good" is and whether it exists at all. Democracy is great at questions of "means" (how do we achieve X); it sucks for questions of "ends" (is X a good goal?).
I don't think there's a way out of this. At least not without massive suffering. My goal is merely to kick that can down the road long enough for my children to live a decent live in the ruins.
Campus administration is 100% responsible for this state of affairs. They have allowed and even encourage the heckler veto to be used for decades. Students who participate in this should be expelled and prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law but what we have is an administrative regime across academia which participates in struggle sessions in the aftermath of campus riots.
I don’t think it is students that need to be convinced. They are sponges for zeitgeist, that’s all.
Efforts to undermine and corrupt speech, to turn it into the weapon, come from rule-makers. The symmetry is not there; power definitely abuses speech rules because lies don’t stop.
You’re a good communicator. I believe folks like you should focus squarely on “here is how we will make speech arena clean again, so we can use speech for good”
What students are telling you, and all of us: get out of law and constitution thinking, get into destroyed political ethics and norms. That is where the problem is. Educating lay people that they should be reasonable is not enough.
Which suggests that your side has a bit of a lead in expecting to use violence for political ends, as the 30% vs 35% figure would indicate. I think the current gun sales numbers are reflecting the other side closing that gap.
He was speaking about a very specific time and place. We're not there (or close to there). Tyranny is a spectrum not a binary. It's a useful public discussion to ask how much tyranny requires how much violence, so that you know in advance when the line has been crossed and you're not relying on "gut feel" and mob reactionary-ism before plunging a country into (much more) chaos.
What you call tyranny many other Americans would call enforcing the law. You may not like that (I don't), but what is your proposed end-game when the violence starts and after the violence is over?
I don't advocate banding together with guns to try to overthrow the government: that's not helpful on many levels. I advocate individuals defending themselves from acts of tyranny, as the situation arises. How many people do you think would keep working for ICE if a few of them got popped off as they're acting in their murderous ways?
Are you talking about a system of federal tyranny or are you talking about individuals performing "acts of tyranny"? Those are very different things. If you fight law enforcement on the streets then you are breaking the law. What follows is that more law enforcement shows up. They have to -- it's literally their job description. If you are wrongfully arrested or if a law is unjust, then you fight it in the court and the ballot box.
The real problem is, and has always been, congress. They have passed a confusing and conflicting patchwork of federal laws, and then deferred the widely varying execution of those laws to whoever happens to be in the executive at the time.
Please consider your use of the word "popped off". If you replace that with the actual word then you're advocating murder, specifically the murder of federal officers who think they're enforcing the law. I hope we can agree that murder should never be trivialized. Even if you think it's justified murder that is a very extreme position to take. What is your end-game for murder justifying murder? Do you really think murder will lead to less murder?
You love to use the word "murder". Would you use it if someone employs lethal self-defense against a private criminal who is attempting to kill him? Hopefully not. Do you believe that things magically change when the would-be killer is wearing a government costume?
You're getting off-topic. Quick responses: I used that word for parity in direct response to your "they're acting in their murderous ways" line; and, yes, our legal system handles self defense very different when a law enforcement officer is involved (and different even still if that officer is federal or state)...but I suspect you know that already.
I am still interested to hear if you have a response to the actual substance of my questions above?
You're probably right. After 2020, many police departments saw a significant hollowing-out, for example. The two aren't mutually exclusive. I just think that if you're expecting ICE to be reduced to a skeleton crew in that scenario, that you'll be disappointed.
It's a very high-risk gambit. Even if it works and doesn't result in an even more brutal crackdown, it's likely to trigger civil war. One has to be absolutely certain that the present tyranny is worse than the horrors that a civil war would bring before walking down that path. In Solzhenitsyn's case, I believe that bar was met and that he was correct.
This logic only works if you think today's America actually bears any similarity to Stalinist Russia or Nazi Germany. And since the Left keeps explicitly making those comparisons, it's not surprising their foot soldiers are violent.
The road you're suggesting (private people engaging in violence against others aligned with the state) has a name: civil war. And that road ends at Yugoslavia.
I'd be interested in a comparison between the right calling the left communists and the left calling the right nazis. I suspect the duration/volume of the first is much larger.
The Right used to. I certainly used that insult on multiple occasions in the 90's. I haven't heard it much lately. It's kind of lost it's power since the Democrats (Bernie, AOC, Mamdani, etc) embrace the "socialist" label now.
I would not use commie or anything similar again today. The namecalling of NY's mayor is wrong, I think. The Left has demonstrated how easily that fascist/commie type of rhetoric bleeds into "my side must win by any means necessary".
Although I do have to admit that I pretty much think "my side must win by any means necessary" myself. I think the leadership of the Left truly hates America and American citizens. I'm honest enough to admit that the last 15 years has radicalized me in ways I don't like. The three things that did it most: Afghanistan, Kavanaugh hearings, and the lawfare against Donald Trump.
I suspect those on the Left probably have similar radicalization events. Which makes me less than optimistic at our chances of peaceful coexistence in the foreseeable future.
Is this an accountability issue? One part of the despair is that people don't see authorities as accountable, at least not through civil, rule-of-law means. And this lack of accountability involves all three authoritative parts of law--legislating the law into effect, executing (and enforcing) the law, and judging the law.
What ethical shortcuts did our leaders take (over time) to get us to this place?
To be a devil's advocate, the public at large isn't going to agree on everything, including which laws get onto the books and what is a reasonable use of force, among other things--and sometimes one side gets the short end of the stick. Of course, a constitutional republic is supposed to have checks and balances to ensure that even the "losing" side can't lose everything, and can have the questions revisited as needed--and an unethical law is still unethical even if supported by 99% of the public.
I think you nail it when you say your students are coming to this out of despair. Nonviolent protest has been defanged, and speech has been siloed off so the other side will never hear your attempts to persuade them.
To put it another way, the last nonviolent movement to accomplish any of it's goals was ActUP. And that's arguable- they had a half million deaths in the background.
Since then we've had a lot of non-violent movements: the anti WTO in 1999, the pro immigration reform in the early 2000s, the Occupy movement that got ignored until it was crushed, the BLM movement that was demonized and crushed, the women's march, the anti ICE protests. None of them accomplished any of their goals.
What non-violent movements in the last 30 years have mattered at all? And if none have, isn't nonviolence a useless principle if you want change?
Heartfelt and earnest, and many of us are behind you in this great struggle to reintroduce civic discourse into our society. However, the task is harder than you might think, and is made even more difficult by the biases we professors have brought (and are still bringing) into the classroom for decades.
I have been in higher education as a grad instructor, as adjunct faculty, and now as a tenured professor, for over thirty years. I also happen to be a historian of modern European history. In those years, I have borne (silent, I’m ashamed to admit) witness to to the steady and concerted effort to denigrate and downplay the achievements of what used to be called Western civilization by my fellow colleagues in the service of privileging and “foregrounding” the subaltern. I am not here to debate the wisdom of that approach to teaching history, just report on its (rather predictable, even thirty years ago to be honest) results.
For better or for worse, the civic mechanisms we have in place to ward off societal violence and respect the freedom of the individual are all rooted in the Western experience almost exclusively. Once the value of that cultural inheritance was questioned and its base assumptions demolished, it was inevitable that other “civic” (scare quotes because I think citizenship is a uniquely Western construct, at least in the way we commonly use the term) models would take its place. Recently, with the goings on in Tehran and other Iranian cities, we got to see how one of those models functions up close.
But reintroducing an existential respect for the civic achievements of the West is also complicated by our own biases. For example, I presume, from what you wrote above, that your sympathies lie with the demonstrators in Minnesota. You might not support the violence as your students do, but you do support the spirit behind the protests (forgive my presumption if I am incorrect, but the point can still be made regardless). But earlier in your article you cited that more young conservatives seek violent outcomes to political debates than young liberals/progressives. Furthermore, given that you stipulated that the overwhelming majority of your civics class is in favor of violently supporting the demonstrators, that raises a real issue. What happened to the conservatives in your classroom? Are they speaking up? If not, why not? If they are, are they in support of the demonstrators or the police you think? If they are in support of ICE, do they think that ICE is applying the right amount of force or excessive force? (As a side note, there are many more ICE operations in Florida and those are proceeding peacefully. Does that mean ICE is different in Florida or that Florida, Texas, etc. are now full blown authoritarian states?) If there are no conservatives in your classroom, that would mean they exist outside of it which should give those inside of it room for pause since those conservatives currently see the violence of ICE as lawful and justified and any response to it as unlawful and incendiary.
That is where the conversation must start for both sides. Rather than assuming one side is right and one is wrong, why don’t we role play as the other side? Force your class to put forward points as to why they might be wrong. If they cannot come up with any, then they should disobey but with the awareness that an authoritarian state (it must be if it has no civic defense for its policies) will kill every last one of them in order to defend itself. If they want to start a Revolution, they should know the stakes.
If there's one thing the American people hate, it's chaos. Right now, many are turning against the administration because they blame it for causing chaos. However, should protests turn to widespread riots, it is very possible, likely even, that support will swing back towards the administration. It has happened before. Hopefully your students will consider that.
They may blame it for causing chaos but is it actually causing chaos? Or are activists who fundamentally disagree with every aspect of the administration’s call to enforce immigration law and protect the border the ones causing the chaos? We can all agree that the administration (or at least a small yet very visible portion of it) have not gone about that law enforcement in a very effective manner to give the perception that they aren’t thugs. But the beginning premise of the protests isn’t the seemingly violent or thuggish manner in which the agents are apprehending undocumented migrants. It’s that they’re apprehending them at all. Of course the goalposts have been shifted to being about “the violence” but that’s the Mott-Bailey tactic being deployed. I think the protesters and organizing activists need to be viewed in a proper lens. They aren’t simply pushing back and/or rioting against an administration bent on chaos. They are the ones sowing chaos by doing more than simply recording ICE operations. So I think it’d be disingenuous to say Americans hate chaos, which I do agree with, but there are obviously Americans causing the chaos and pointing the finger at the administration. Its almost a sort of gaslight to suggest that the administration is causing chaos. Enforcing immigration law, at least as far as the administration was voted in to do, would be the opposite of causing chaos seeing as the wide open border and now documented welfare state corruption and fraud by many undocumented migrants IS the chaos that administration is attempting to bring back into order.
Well written and thank you for arguing for persuasion over violence. I've been seeking resources and am interested to hear from others on how to handle mob mentality. We have that in abundance on both "sides". Politicians and media stoke the flames for votes and clicks, and we _all_ happily oblige their manipulations. Each "side" talks in hyperbole and very broad generalization, and gets more and more extreme, which pushes the other "side" to get more extreme in response, all while nobody is considering the actual nuance or details.
An example of exactly that is in the article, "They look at Minneapolis and see federal agents firing on crowds. They see a system that, in their view, responds to speech with silence and to silence with violence. Their question is reasonable: Why should only one side play by the rules?"
There are several presumptions in those three, short sentences that will sow outrage. In order:
- Firing on crowds: There's a huge difference between federal agents indiscriminately firing into a crowd and the Minneapolis killings of two individuals. That distinction is vital. (We do NOT want to re-learn what living through the former is like.)
- Respond with silence: Neither side is responding with silence. This is being heavily debated across the entire country -- as it should be. (I saw a high school protest with a huge, fancy "ICE are terrorists" banner (hyperbole), AND the POTUS administration has a tweet-first, think later approach to the shooting investigation (hyperbole)).
- Only one side play by the rules: Power switches sides continually and constantly -- POTUS every four-to-eight years and congress every two-to-four -- the 2026 midterm campaigning is starting now! Neither side plays by the rules when in power and BOTH sides try to railroad as much partisan stuff through as they can in each limited window -- which makes the other side even crazier for their turn. ICE is operating under very extreme dictates, which are also broadly popular, AND the protesters are surprisingly well organized and well funded. (If you can't identify the partisan stuff your "side" last rammed through, then you're probably accidentally contributing to our polarization. Please broaden your media diet.)
We don't get out of this without getting out in front of the mob mentality that is taking hold of everyone. We don't get out of this without dialog and specifics and nuance. We don't get out of this without holding our own "side" to account when they fly to extremes or break the rules.
Having lived through the riots and domestic terrorism of the 60s and 70s, I know how seductive a violent call of action can be. As pointed out, the real work is in longterm community building, which involves coalition-building by finding points of commonality, dealing with root causes, feeding the babies, etc. Takes years - decades - of unglamorous, unheralded, often boring and frustrating work. And lots of failures. I was just writing someone about some community projects my father was involved with. One of his successes took twelve years to see to completion.
When confronted with the "violence is necessary" argument, my response is "And then what happens? How do you live when the war is over?" Usually, the person has no idea, because they don't have a path to peace or concrete goals to inspire people in a positive way. Thus, they attract followers who find meaning and justification for hating their enemies in the battle.
I have helped out in various local elections. One of my rules is that the activists I work with conduct themselves so they can walk down the streets of their community and smile at everyone, with good will, after the votes are counted. I encourage people to play the Long Game, as if we are all going to have to figure out how to live on the same planet after the war is over.
This is a mature, responsible approach, and the only way to secure stable peace and prosperity. The alternative is that one side or the other wins through violence (and nobody can be sure their side will be the ultimate victor). And too often the end of a war does not mean the end of violence. Winning sides have slaughtered, imprisoned and oppressed millions in order to maintain their victories and stay in power (e.g., communists, Nazis). The path of violence is often the path to becoming monsters.
"The path to becoming monsters." I saw a version of this happen more than once when I was a consultant regarding workplace conflicts. An individual or small group within a workplace were the problem, using emotional intimidation aka bullying to get their way. Opposing them would be another individual, often another employee, often the person who brought me in, the one got the boss to hire me.
The situation would be resolved, which usually meant that the bully quit or was fired, followed by their minions. And then...usually a couple of years later, I would get a call, but this time from the boss.
"We have another bully situation," the boss would tell me. "A different person. Can you come back?"
And guess what? The person who was most opposed to the first bully had taken on that role themselves. I learned to shift my attention from just the one problem person to the environment that allowed bullies to flourish. Also, I realized that some people thrived on conflict, and once they had helped banish the bully, they create new conflict, and the characteristics that served them in the war now helped them dominate the workplace in an unhealthy way.
I got so that I got pretty good at predicting the leader of the next band of bullies, too often the most fired up of the reformers. Of course, it happens on a big scale in government when the "fixer" comes into power, replacing the old bad with the new.
It all boils down to an anti-democratic propensity not to respect other people and their opinions and a willingness to force your desires on others. Workplace bullying is the same attitude on a micro level. At least it is not (typically) violent.
Agree.
I think there needs to be some foundational understandings when approaching a room of Gen Z (and whoever else) about this topic. Free speech advocates instinctually point to and try to reason with the First Amendment and Constitutional law and precedent. But the students and activists aren’t entertaining those arguments because they aren’t approaching this issue from a rational standpoint.
If we break it down to simple terms, ICE is in charge of enforcing federal immigration law. Border Patrol is in charge of enforcing the border. To a rational thinker those two agencies seem to make perfect sense when looking at the law and understanding that a sovereign nation cannot properly exist without a defined border or legal citizenship. But the issue is being twisted to be viewed on emotional terms rather than rational ones. And we do need to have some emotion in our politics, but its currently being skewed heavily to that over reason by both sides.
I suspect that if you dug down even just a little bit, your students would give almost purely emotional responses when asked why ICE should be abolished or violently fought against. They’re viewing the issue almost exclusively through a moral lens where one side is enacting tyranny and the other is having their human rights trampled on, and they’re either naively or willfully ignoring any nuance to the situation. If they’re starting the debate under the premise anyone and everyone has an inherent right, no matter the circumstance, to be in the US as a full participating citizen, and shouldn’t need to go through a legal process to be here, and that any enforcement of immigration law is inherently racist, xenophobic, tyrannical, fascist, etc. then any argument they hear to the contrary will not suffice because they aren’t thinking in any terms other than the most nakedly emotional ones. And when the inherent goodness of the “victims” or “targets” of what is viewed as a morally corrupt and despised government is perceived to be under attack, violence will naturally follow. When we create a visible enemy, whether or not they are actually an enemy out of law enforcers, violence will follow actual physical enforcement of law or even just the rhetorical advocacy of law enforcement.
You have to find a way to cut through the propaganda that has brainwashed them into viewing the issue with such little nuance and acceptance of violence. Until they understand (if they even want to) that their perception is not based in reason they won’t ever think in reasonable or rational terms. And that’s the trick to it in trying to turn the temperature down and shift the advocacy back to Free Speech and nonviolence.
I think you’re right that in many cases, the emotional, irrational approach to issues is the result of propaganda and education designed to instill the teachers’ preferred political viewpoints. I saw that explicitly being done in Tucson’s Mexican-American La Raza studies program. It was marketed to the students and the general public as being grounded in humanism, love and righteousness. The program’s founders admitted they were socialists. They used cherry picked facts and emotional appeals with the stated goal of turning students into activists for the program’s specific points of view and political and economic goals.
I also teach civics and philosophy, but at the HS level.
Argument and evidence can only change minds if those minds have a shared moral language or sacred commitment of some kind -- a god for lack of a better term.
In Medieval times, our civilization's highest good was Jesus. The theological unity was fractured post-Reformation, but the sacred morphed into a shared moral order -- "we disagree about the details of God, but we agree on His commandments." Locke and the Enlightenment fractured that moral framework (esp Hume), and John Stuart Mill dethroned it completely, declaring the highest good of society to be personal freedom instead of virtue.
That's where we stand today. Oh sure, the postmodernists did their part to destroy the idea of sacred ("there is no truth!" -- ironically, a sacred statement by nature) but the roots lie in Mill and Nietzsche. Most know Nietzsche's line "God is dead" but incorrectly assume it's triumphant: "Let's have fun now that God's dead!" It's not. It's more like: "How will we live now that God is dead?" Nietzsche's answer gave us Hitler, not a promising start to a philosophy.
We're still trying to answer that question today. But Mill's "maximal individual autonomy" has done a century of work now, and our answers are too divergent to have a conversation. Our arguments talk past each other because we lack the shared moral framework (the sacred) necessary for discussion. Our society has more than one "good", and like rival gods, rival "goods" don't coexist well.
The term I use with way civics students is the "theologicalization of politics" -- we no longer argue about HOW to achieve the common good but about WHAT "good" is and whether it exists at all. Democracy is great at questions of "means" (how do we achieve X); it sucks for questions of "ends" (is X a good goal?).
I don't think there's a way out of this. At least not without massive suffering. My goal is merely to kick that can down the road long enough for my children to live a decent live in the ruins.
Campus administration is 100% responsible for this state of affairs. They have allowed and even encourage the heckler veto to be used for decades. Students who participate in this should be expelled and prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law but what we have is an administrative regime across academia which participates in struggle sessions in the aftermath of campus riots.
I don’t think it is students that need to be convinced. They are sponges for zeitgeist, that’s all.
Efforts to undermine and corrupt speech, to turn it into the weapon, come from rule-makers. The symmetry is not there; power definitely abuses speech rules because lies don’t stop.
You’re a good communicator. I believe folks like you should focus squarely on “here is how we will make speech arena clean again, so we can use speech for good”
What students are telling you, and all of us: get out of law and constitution thinking, get into destroyed political ethics and norms. That is where the problem is. Educating lay people that they should be reasonable is not enough.
You can tell the leftist college students that if they want to go in that direction that my side has more guns and more practice using them.
Which suggests that your side has a bit of a lead in expecting to use violence for political ends, as the 30% vs 35% figure would indicate. I think the current gun sales numbers are reflecting the other side closing that gap.
Gun ownership and training has no correlation to political violence.
Seems to contradict your first comment.
Solzhenitsyn expressed shame for NOT having resisted government tyranny with force: see his famous quote at https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/34738-and-how-we-burned-in-the-camps-later-thinking-what . Was he wrong?
He was speaking about a very specific time and place. We're not there (or close to there). Tyranny is a spectrum not a binary. It's a useful public discussion to ask how much tyranny requires how much violence, so that you know in advance when the line has been crossed and you're not relying on "gut feel" and mob reactionary-ism before plunging a country into (much more) chaos.
What you call tyranny many other Americans would call enforcing the law. You may not like that (I don't), but what is your proposed end-game when the violence starts and after the violence is over?
I don't advocate banding together with guns to try to overthrow the government: that's not helpful on many levels. I advocate individuals defending themselves from acts of tyranny, as the situation arises. How many people do you think would keep working for ICE if a few of them got popped off as they're acting in their murderous ways?
Are you talking about a system of federal tyranny or are you talking about individuals performing "acts of tyranny"? Those are very different things. If you fight law enforcement on the streets then you are breaking the law. What follows is that more law enforcement shows up. They have to -- it's literally their job description. If you are wrongfully arrested or if a law is unjust, then you fight it in the court and the ballot box.
The real problem is, and has always been, congress. They have passed a confusing and conflicting patchwork of federal laws, and then deferred the widely varying execution of those laws to whoever happens to be in the executive at the time.
Please consider your use of the word "popped off". If you replace that with the actual word then you're advocating murder, specifically the murder of federal officers who think they're enforcing the law. I hope we can agree that murder should never be trivialized. Even if you think it's justified murder that is a very extreme position to take. What is your end-game for murder justifying murder? Do you really think murder will lead to less murder?
You love to use the word "murder". Would you use it if someone employs lethal self-defense against a private criminal who is attempting to kill him? Hopefully not. Do you believe that things magically change when the would-be killer is wearing a government costume?
You're getting off-topic. Quick responses: I used that word for parity in direct response to your "they're acting in their murderous ways" line; and, yes, our legal system handles self defense very different when a law enforcement officer is involved (and different even still if that officer is federal or state)...but I suspect you know that already.
I am still interested to hear if you have a response to the actual substance of my questions above?
Given how many people still work for the police despite the occasional murder of an officer, I'd say a lot.
I'd bet a dollar they'd start jumping ship in droves.
You're probably right. After 2020, many police departments saw a significant hollowing-out, for example. The two aren't mutually exclusive. I just think that if you're expecting ICE to be reduced to a skeleton crew in that scenario, that you'll be disappointed.
Hopefully things will de-escalate before we have to find out.
It's a very high-risk gambit. Even if it works and doesn't result in an even more brutal crackdown, it's likely to trigger civil war. One has to be absolutely certain that the present tyranny is worse than the horrors that a civil war would bring before walking down that path. In Solzhenitsyn's case, I believe that bar was met and that he was correct.
This logic only works if you think today's America actually bears any similarity to Stalinist Russia or Nazi Germany. And since the Left keeps explicitly making those comparisons, it's not surprising their foot soldiers are violent.
The road you're suggesting (private people engaging in violence against others aligned with the state) has a name: civil war. And that road ends at Yugoslavia.
I'd be interested in a comparison between the right calling the left communists and the left calling the right nazis. I suspect the duration/volume of the first is much larger.
The Right used to. I certainly used that insult on multiple occasions in the 90's. I haven't heard it much lately. It's kind of lost it's power since the Democrats (Bernie, AOC, Mamdani, etc) embrace the "socialist" label now.
I would not use commie or anything similar again today. The namecalling of NY's mayor is wrong, I think. The Left has demonstrated how easily that fascist/commie type of rhetoric bleeds into "my side must win by any means necessary".
Although I do have to admit that I pretty much think "my side must win by any means necessary" myself. I think the leadership of the Left truly hates America and American citizens. I'm honest enough to admit that the last 15 years has radicalized me in ways I don't like. The three things that did it most: Afghanistan, Kavanaugh hearings, and the lawfare against Donald Trump.
I suspect those on the Left probably have similar radicalization events. Which makes me less than optimistic at our chances of peaceful coexistence in the foreseeable future.
Where was public silence met with state violence?
Is this an accountability issue? One part of the despair is that people don't see authorities as accountable, at least not through civil, rule-of-law means. And this lack of accountability involves all three authoritative parts of law--legislating the law into effect, executing (and enforcing) the law, and judging the law.
What ethical shortcuts did our leaders take (over time) to get us to this place?
To be a devil's advocate, the public at large isn't going to agree on everything, including which laws get onto the books and what is a reasonable use of force, among other things--and sometimes one side gets the short end of the stick. Of course, a constitutional republic is supposed to have checks and balances to ensure that even the "losing" side can't lose everything, and can have the questions revisited as needed--and an unethical law is still unethical even if supported by 99% of the public.
I think you nail it when you say your students are coming to this out of despair. Nonviolent protest has been defanged, and speech has been siloed off so the other side will never hear your attempts to persuade them.
To put it another way, the last nonviolent movement to accomplish any of it's goals was ActUP. And that's arguable- they had a half million deaths in the background.
Since then we've had a lot of non-violent movements: the anti WTO in 1999, the pro immigration reform in the early 2000s, the Occupy movement that got ignored until it was crushed, the BLM movement that was demonized and crushed, the women's march, the anti ICE protests. None of them accomplished any of their goals.
What non-violent movements in the last 30 years have mattered at all? And if none have, isn't nonviolence a useless principle if you want change?
In some sense that's probably to be expected when we lose sight of exactly how bad things can get when things get violent.
Are people responding to campus FIRE surveys self-reporting their political orientation? How are these surveys conducted?
Just ignore the nutters on both sides. The scream in your face idiots. Don’t let those people influence policy.
Stop appeasing them.
Stop nodding along.
Stop pretending.
Stop with the quotas…
Stop with the lame conspiracies…. the cancellations….
The childish use of terms that actually had meaning when the perpetrators of actual Nazism and fascism were trying to give hate a good name.
Grow the fuck up.