Resisting Trump: Are You Ready?

Today the sun glows behind a gray shroud, its shadows are anemic, shrinking, and more rain is forecast. With foreboding and growing fear, we watch our government take on an equally dismal expression, as its executive branch - with the exception of some of its bravest resisters - works to dismantle our constitutional principles.

How shall we respond to these gathering forces that are seemingly as bland and quotidian as the weather but equally able to wreck our foundations? What shall we do? Amidst a rising regime that seeks a shameless, naked, and determined acquisition of power, we are rightly reminded to reflect carefully before leaping into senseless action. But ultimately, we must act.

In his Over-Soul essay, Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote, “Man is a stream whose source is hidden. Always our being is descending into us from we know not whence.” In other words, despite our individual limitations, we are bound together into something greater than a single life.

Inspired by this Emersonian Transcendentalism, John Steinbeck filled Jim Casy, the fallen prophet and itinerate preacher of the Grapes of Wrath, with an ecumenical passion: “There ain’t no sin and there ain’t no virtue. There’s just stuff people do. It’s all part of the same thing… Maybe all men got one big soul ever’body’s a part of.”

This tolerance should not be confused with passivity. It is a call to involve ourselves in the world around us, to depart our cloisters and engage with the pains and pleasures of others. It is also a reminder that all laws, no matter how well-intended, are human creations, equally subject to human error and deserving of conscious oversight.

Henry David Thoreau helped shape this vision. A solitary idealist who would much rather tramp the quiet green spaces of nature than join the hurly-burly of city life, Thoreau called us to act when the pains of shared suffering demand it. To be sure, he emphasized that human machines eventually grind themselves to a halt if we’re willing to wait long enough. But, he added, “when oppression and robbery are organized… let your life be a counter friction to stop the machine.”

20th-century America saw a necessary rise of resistance against the oppressive machines of racial hatred, economic injustice, and gender inequality, a time that called for a nation’s citizens, woven from the same cloth that helped thwart aristocracy in one era and smash fascism in the next, to forgo its patience and muster on battlefields of land and soul.

Writing, marching, and ultimately dying for his beliefs, Martin Luther King understood this demand all too well. In his Letter from a Birmingham Jail, King called for us to become rebels with a cause, gadflies in the Socratic sense who would not only preach our values but practice them. The creative tension of that practice is not simply a matter of philosophy or rhetoric; it is a call to disobey.

We must be willing to break unjust laws - not for anarchistic pleasure but instead from a fundamental belief in American values. After all, as King wrote from his jail cell, “an individual who breaks a law that conscience tells him is unjust, and who willingly accepts the penalty of imprisonment in order to arouse the conscience of the community over its injustice, is in reality expressing the highest respect for law.”

We look upon King, Gandhi, Anthony, Stanton, Thoreau, Emerson, and further back to Jefferson and other resisters, and we say, “Well, of course.” History has taught us the rightness of their actions. We re-read their words as if they were somehow always hewn in stone. But those brave men and women were not monuments; they were frail and fallible human beings with all of the fears that we share.

They were dismissed as agitators. They were mocked as fools. They were marked as criminals against law, decorum, and common sense. The tyrannies they faced were overwhelming, and the prices they paid were high. They could not imagine that school children (and sometimes overwrought professors) would one day recite their words as the scripture of America’s civic religion. They acted without the sure promise of success. They saw no other choice but to resist.

As Americans facing the new clouds of a Trump administration hell-bent on transforming our country into something that would horrify its founders, we must do nothing less.

Images by Andrew Wood

Professing in the Age of Trump

How should a professor respond to the Age of Trump?

Many of us are understandably frustrated by the bad ideas coming out of Washington D.C. these days, in the form of unqualified cabinet selections, impulsive policy statements, and unhinged late-night tweets. We recognize the danger of our current national mood and feel duty-bound to respond with every tool at our disposal. And, no doubt, to be a professor, whether during these troubled times or in more halcyon days, one must first and foremost profess. It is an obligation woven into the title. Yet, now more than ever, we must attempt a difficult balance.

On the one hand, the act of being a professor, hardly a passive privilege but rather an active responsibility, emerges from the Latin reference to working in the world: to “lay claim to, declare openly." It is a declaration of one’s expertise, measured against public standards; it is a statement that one knows. Yet there is another meaning, public, yes, but also much more personal: the “profession” that one believes.

Socrates, pious citizen and iconoclastic gadfly, understood the difficulties of straddling both positions when he was called before the Athenian assembly to answer charges that, among other crimes, he had confounded the youth of his city with his rhetorical wiles. To be fair, Socrates would retort that he was no sophist, that he was a philosopher, a lover of wisdom. Putting aside this argument for a moment, we may still yet recall that when he was threatened with fines, imprisonment, and ultimately death, Socrates knew that he could not rely on mere dialectic to save him. He knew that he could not be “saved” at all if he were to honor what he professed. He would speak, publicly and dangerously, to profess both what he knew and what he believed.

This ancient convergence of knowledge and belief calls to mind a contemporary conundrum facing the university professor. In our classrooms, we call upon our disciplinary knowledge to convey what is known in our fields. Of course, knowledge is fraught with debate. Fact-claims reside within and emerge from ongoing questions that remain to be settled, they are shaped by epistemological and paradigmatic filters, and, most importantly, they are subject to violent repudiation - though not by “alternative facts,” that absurdly flippant excuse offered by Trump Counselor Kellyanne Conway for administration hacks’ willingness to confuse fact with conjecture. No, facts are rightly repudiated by our merciless efforts to test them and reveal, not with passion but by method, that what is fact today may be falsehood tomorrow. Our willingness to submit our claims to peer review is a necessary standard that demonstrates the degree of our professionalism.

At the same time, abstract facts are used for concrete purposes, to build things, to formulate policy, to impact human lives. It is one thing, after all, to know the effect of carbon emissions on the planet; it is another thing entirely to advocate for their reduction because that kind of professing - that kind of advocacy - resides less in fact than in value (the comparative value of human life over corporate greed, for example). And values are not facts. Values emerge from that other manner of belief that called for Socrates to speak against the prevailing wisdom of the assembly, even at the risk of his life. And this is where the question becomes particularly thorny. Because values in a democracy (which is itself both a manner of government and an aspiration for human affairs) are not tested as facts; they are tested by our ability to persuade, to profess our beliefs not as facts but as ideal possibilities.

The professor’s dilemma, then, is the struggle between one’s identification of facts and one’s advocacy for beliefs. There are few other jobs where those terms blur so easily. Certainly, few of our students would confuse us with priests extolling holy writ from our lecterns. But our power to measure their educational outcomes through the act of grading makes for a grave responsibility. How we meet that responsibility - indeed, how we define it - can hardly be resolved to universal satisfaction. But we must try our best to define our terms and defend our stances, publicly, if only that we may benefit from hearing the perspectives of others.

Speaking therefore as one professor, I hold that the classroom, certainly one located in the humanities and social sciences, should as much as possible be treated as a microcosm of public life where each student is encouraged to craft meaningful articulations of the facts and beliefs as they understand them. As professors, we are called to introduce students to many of those facts, along with some of their more useful frameworks. But we should not abuse that power by encouraging students to confuse beliefs (neither ours nor theirs) with facts. No doubt we should share our beliefs, profess them without shame. But our students require first that we demonstrate a democratic tolerance for debate and an open-minded appreciation for contrasting opinion.

Some might say that this perspective demonstrates intellectual cowardice, that this day demands that we transform our classrooms into tools that may dismantle the creeping (and sometimes nakedly obvious) crisis of the Trump Age. I sympathize with that position. Indeed, I believe that Trump is not only ill-informed but that his occupation of the presidency is illegitimate. And I recognize that resistance to that which one both knows and believes to be wrong may take many forms. But for now I can imagine no better response to the anti-democratic impulses of his administration than a bravely democratic stance, to teach my students to listen to the opinions of others, to parse those opinions for the validity of stated facts and the utility of stated beliefs, and to debate them, publicly and with confidence. The story of our country, after all, is one of bad ideas holding sway for a while before ultimately being won over by good ones.

In response to an illegitimate president who mocks our values and fears our democracy, this is one professor who will speak out and push back. I will support allies in all sorts of public action to resist Trump and return our country to a positive, humane course. At the same time, I will attempt to live that difficult balance in my classroom, to encourage students to practice the principles that Trump repudiates. We will listen to each other, learn from each other, and inspire each other to speak authentically and honestly about what we believe, even at the risk of encountering opinions that strike us as wrong. We will practice that virtuous profession that counters falsity with fact while respecting the fundamental humanity of our interlocutors. No matter how wrong our opponents may be, as we define that term, we will engage them in the marketplace of ideas, not with force but with persuasion, not with hate but with love. And then, not easily, not without pain, but eventually, we will win.

Lectern image from Amazon

Mr. Unelected President, I resist

Today marks the inauguration of our 45th president, Donald J. Trump. Where I live, northern California, the weather has been dark and rainy, a suitable pall for a dismal day.

I’ve admitted it before: I was stunned by the election result. Trump lost the popular vote by a wide margin, 2.8 million, and yet his ability to game the electoral college wrested victory from a vastly more qualified (though politically tone-deaf) opponent. And now Donald Trump, a man who has boasted about sexually assaulting women, a man who flirts with racists and tyrants, a man who has selected a cabinet composed of people hell-bent on trashing the departments they will lead, this man is now President of the United States.

On this dreary day, I think back to a conversation I had with a colleague who shares my shock and concern. Responding to her understandable horror at the election results, I attempted a conciliatory stance, saying, “Well, I didn’t vote for him, but I want him to succeed as my president.” She didn’t need to pause. “So you hope he succeeds in turning back LGBT rights? You hope he succeeds in pushing back on workers rights? You hope he succeeds in his plans?”

My tongue-twisted reply surely belied the confusion that many of us face. I was raised to associate the presidency with the hopes, wishes, and identity of our country, to support the office even if I could not praise the officer. Such a position always struck me as fundamentally democratic. My side plays fair, the other side plays fair, may the best person win.

But the best person did not win, not only because Donald Trump is so manifestly unfit for the office but more obviously because he didn’t win. He occupies the office but has not earned it. 2.8 million Americans prove that point. And while I admire the Constitution, have actually read, studied, and taught the document, I will not forget that its framers once marked slaves as being worth three-fifths of a person, that its framers enshrined an aristocracy with appointed senators, that its framers failed to ensure the voting rights of women. These mistakes, and other ones, needed to be rectified through the process of constitutional amendment. And the electoral college remains an error in need of remedy.

Until then, I find myself adrift, wondering how to respond to an election that is equal parts failure and farce. For all its faults, I still support the Constitution, and I continue to love my country. I remain a proud veteran, loyal citizen, and respectful participant in public life. But I will not again make the error of confusing Donald J. Trump with the office of the presidency. He is its occupier, not by popular vote, not by divine right, not by common sense.

Just this morning, before my bus began its climb over the hill from Scotts Valley to San Jose where I work, we visited a final stop. There in the rain stood two bedraggled protesters holding signs that read “Not my president” and “Save the ACA.” Under dark skies and stormy weather, they announced their positions, quietly and with dignity. They did not shout, and they may have wondered when our bus passed by, spraying rainwater from the tires, whether anyone noticed or cared. I noticed, and I took heart in their silent protest. I was reminded.

Donald J. Trump is a fraud and a failure. He is a liar and a con. He is undeserving of the office and unprepared for its obligations. He is not my president. Some folks voted for him, knowing his sins and somehow not caring. They will now watch what they have wrought, straining their eyes for some way to blame the opposition. They are hoping that we will be bullied, silenced, stunned into submission. Some will be, I suppose, fearful that they may lose their jobs, their privileges, their safety. But most of us who said no to Trumpism are ready to push back. Starting today.

“Mister Unelected President,” you are not my president, and I am proud to stand with those who will resist you from the beginning.

Image by Andrew Fyfe 

Shameless Media Plug: Twilight of the mom and pop motel

Based on “The twilight of the mom and pop motel,” an article I wrote last year that was featured in The Conversation, The New Republic, the Houston Chronicle, and the Associated Press, WAMC Northeast Public Radio’s Academic Minute asked me to produce a radio narrative of that piece, which aired on January 2, 2017.

Check it out!