Allan Appel Photo
Prof. Jason Stanley and Unitarian Society of New Haven's Rev. Stephen Kendrick
Keep demonstrating and boycotting. Keep doing your job without caving in — such as teaching Black history if you’re a teacher, doing the right thing if you’re a lawyer. And vote, of course, even though that may make no difference, as Trump wants to be president for life.
You may not prevail in any of this, but History is watching, and your grandchildren will ask.
Those were among the sobering take-aways Wednesday night from an hour of remarks and Q and A by Yale Prof. Jason Stanley that drew 200 people to the sun-filled sanctuary of the Unitarian Society of New Haven out on the Hartford Turnpike just over the Hamden border.
An expert on propaganda and the language and strategies of fascism, Stanley is also the author of Erasing History: How Fascists Rewrite the Past to Control the Future. Both he and the book have come into recent prominence since the election of Donald Trump and Stanley’s decision to leave Yale for a teaching post in Toronto.
“That book sets the stage for what I want to talk about today,” Stanley said Wednesday night.
That was a wide-ranging, largely extemporaneous, erudite, and sometimes black-humorish extended riff on how racism, antisemitism, and patriarchy are being “wielded as weapons against democracy.”
He took particular aim at what he termed “centrist liberals,” including sleepy college professors, many of his acquaintance, and The New York Times, and how they are being duped and manipulated by the right to be allies or unwitting participants in their own self-destruction.
Although Stanley’s tone was casual, his central point was anything but. “Concerned liberals and The New York Times don’t get it: When you’re in a war, appeasement is surrender.”
Stanley’s analysis zeroed in often on the university, which he knows well. “The Trump regime is drawing on historical memory” of antisemitic stereotypes as promulgated, for example, by Henry Ford in his screed The International Jew, “in the attack on universities.”
At Wednesday's meetup at the Unitarian Society.
“Why Columbia? There are lots of Jews there, the largest Jewish student population, 22 percent, highest in the Ivy League,” Stanley continued. “Tim Snyder said, ‘I know of no other university where free speech was attacked to preserve the Jews.’
“So why did the media erase that presence of Jewish students on campus [many of whom were among the protesters]? Because they’re saying left-wing Jews are not really Jews; only right-wing Jews are. When Christian nationalists tell you who the real Jews are, you know you’re facing antisemitism.”
Stanley said that the Trump administration’s targeting of institutions of learning is hardly to protect students and faculty because they are the ones “grievously harmed by the cuts and the atmosphere of fear in the faculty. And we’re deeply harmed that our non-American colleagues can never speak about politics again.”
He was at pains to analyze how the concept of a scapegoat works where its success depends on zeroing in on a target that the groups you want to assemble, disparate as they may be, can all agree to hate. Such as DEI or the “T” in LGBTQ.
“The ‘T’ is being targeted because it’s so small. The smaller your target is, the more effective your political coalition [of haters],” he said.
The cautionary note Stanley kept coming back to was the unwillingness of what he called “centrist and MLK liberals” to recognize the gravity of the moment and by so not-doing are “placing us in peril.”
“We have to recognize the situation we’re in,” he said. “It’s not a discussion. It’s a defense of our schools, universities, and children against this attack. And it’s not conservative, progressive, or liberal. We’ve never seen one political party vote 100 percent all the time for their leader. That’s communist China. That’s authoritarianism, that’s not democracy.”
Those remarks, which concluded the talk, elicited rousing applause, and a slew of questions as people lined up in the central aisle of the church to speak at the microphone.
Astute and lengthy in analysis, Stanley nevertheless did not have any secret knowledge to convey to his questioners, some of whom were looking for a brilliant strategy or specific action to take to address particular problems.
One questioner, for example, said she is the mother of a 33-year-old child with the intellectual capacity of an infant, who lives in a group home. “I’m really concerned that in Nazi Germany these people were experimented on. Medicaid is also supporting her. How do I save my daughter? What do we do?”
“I don’t have an answer,” Stanley replied, with the same muffled emotion many in the suddenly silent audience seemed to feel.
“We’ll need to lean on community when the state fails. Our community ties will need to be stronger, places like this [the Unitarian church], and mutual support not tied to ideology.”
Some listeners, such as this reporter, might be forgiven for coming away from the talk with not only new insights but also a touch of the hopelessness of the moment as limned by Stanley.
So while he was signing copies of his books for folks waiting on the long line, I whispered in Professor Stanley’s ear: Should we walk away from your remarks feeling optimistic or pessimistic?
“You know the old Jewish joke,” he whispered back: “The difference between an optimist Jew and a pessimist Jew? The pessimist says, ‘Things couldn’t be worse.’ The optimist replies, ‘Oh yes they can.’”
