Many of us born post-1945 have wondered at some point how we might deal with an approaching fascist threat. Luckily, we have three preeminent American scholars of fascism to help advise us. And the answer from Professors Jason Stanley, Timothy Snyder, and Marcia Shore seems to be: run away.
Stanley, the philosopher-author of How Fascism Works, says he is leaving the States for Canada because of the oppressive political climate. Historian Shore, who writes about totalitarianism and is married to fellow historian Snyder of On Tyranny fame, pronounces herself “heartbroken at what has happened to my own country”. All three were at Yale, and soon will be at the University of Toronto; safely away from Trump’s targeting of DEI policies, and the recent slashing and burning of university funding. His rationale, insofar as anyone can discern it, is combatting antisemitism on campus, though what the exact connection is supposed to be is not entirely clear.
Stanley — mostly known on the internet for saying his former job title out loud — has been trying to get the word out in underground samizdat publications such as the Guardian and Vanity Fair. Interviewed in the latter, he likens the Trump regime to Nazi Germany four times. Vaguely reminiscent of Captain Von Trapp eyeing up the Alps and about to launch into Edelweiss, he declares: “Things are very bad in this country. It’s an authoritarian regime…we are leaving for our kids primarily so they can grow up under conditions of freedom. I would love to live in the United States, but I want to live in the United States because it’s a place that is free.” Still, readers must understand that what Stanley is absolutely not doing is “moralizing or lecturing”: “that’s not my thing. I’m an intellectual. What I do is I describe reality as I see it.”
“Our institutions already have their quota of barmy neurotics.”
In some ways, this is just true to modern liberal form, whether on Left or Right. If something displeases you about the culture that surrounds you, opt out; then dramatically overplay the horror of the thing you disliked, in some kind of psychological compensation for incipient shame. See also: moving to a nice suburb because London is “just so dangerous” these days, but without specifying where it is dangerous, exactly, or for whom; or self-consciously embracing a nonbinary identity in order to reject oppressive gender norms à la Judith Butler (“I am enjoying the world of “they”, she declares, like a Victorian surveying a new vista on a Grand Tour). But a problem for the Left here is that they are officially supposed to value solidarity with the oppressed. The more you talk up how horrific something is, the more you look like a coward for leaving other poor sods to it.
Weary as many of us are of self-aggrandising cosplay, still, the response to Trump’s bizarre university policies is truly something to behold. It is perhaps predictable that Stanley would react as he has done, not being previously well-known among colleagues for keeping a cool head. But at least he and his fellow would-be refugees are directly affected, or know people who are. What is even more over the top is the response of European onlookers, sympathetically channelling US histrionics at a distance.
Consider this overheated stuff from Ros Taylor at the New European, for whom the anticipated brain drain is redolent of desperate people scrabbling scant belongings into suitcases, rather than getting removal expenses for their massive TVs: “At what point have things got so bad that you no longer have a future in your home country? Should you leave now or hang on and hope things improve? … America was the place where people fled to escape oppression and build a new life … The door is shutting now. The lamp has gone out.” She is describing the fact that worried academics, conscious of research funds disappearing, are considering employment opportunities elsewhere. Nature magazine has polled 1,200 US scientists and found that that 75% of them are looking for jobs in other countries. There is a lot to criticise about Trump’s actions, not least the pointless self-sabotaging of US scientific prowess. But it’s not exactly a pogrom.
Meanwhile, a Guardian Europe columnist sums up the progressive consensus on Trump’s aims, making it sound as Stalinist as possible: he wants “to forcibly align science with state ideology; undermine academic independence and suppress dissent; and maintain geopolitical and economic goals.” Or, slightly less portentously, it’s just business as usual for the relationship between government and universities, except this time with overlords who don’t force you to list your pronouns but punish you for doing it instead. What a truly independent, politically diverse intelligentsia might look like is as much of an irrelevant mystery as it ever was; for what would the point be in funding that?
Superficially, the UK looks like a probable beneficiary of the exodus to come, but I can’t help thinking this will not be to our ultimate advantage. If Americans want jobs in Britain because they can’t get one at home, that’s one thing – though obviously raises questions about why we should employ them over similarly qualified British citizens, in a graduate job market currently being described as “nightmarish”. (Strangely, American immigration is one issue the British Right never seems to raise.) But if Yanks are coming here because they style themselves as “fleeing fascism”, that is quite another matter. Our institutions already have their quota of barmy neurotics fancying themselves as anti-fascist agitators; we don’t need any more of that sort of thing.
Appointment committees must try to stand firm against the delightful feelings of inherited glamour whenever an American wanders into a staff room and complains about the coffee. Back in the 2000s, there was a trend towards internationalisation, and I saw the contagion effects at first hand. Suddenly, our PhD students were talking with a curious rising inflection at the end of sentences, even if they were from Birmingham. Everything was either “super interesting” or “super boring”, enunciated slightly sarcastically, a bit like Chandler from Friends. Awkward young postdocs giving talks on the philosophy of language would use rabbit fingers to signal air quotes, sometimes so compulsively and hypnotically that bemused audience members could focus on nothing else.
Gently satirised by David Lodge in Small World, the fantasy object of a “global campus” producing “world-leading” “groundbreaking” research was just getting into its stride then, and a confident US naturally set the hubristic tone. Relatively many of the incomers went into elite research positions, appointed by starry-eyed managers overimpressed by novelty accents; though it also might have been the tendency for American testimonials to sound as if they were recommending someone for a Nobel prize. Candidates with laconic British referees — for whom “not undistinguished” is the highest compliment a man can pay a fellow human being — really didn’t stand a chance.
And so they flocked to our shores, waxing lyrical about the lack of guns; complaining about the terrible food, the small houses, and the taps. Some saw themselves as political refugees even then, though I’m not sure why; and even more so during the first Trump presidency. Few had a deep understanding of the country they were joining, let alone the particular region; and were highly unlikely to gain any, surrounded only or mostly by other academics.
They also tended to bring the puritanical tendencies of their forebears, displaced from the sexual realm into the political one. Manichean theories of the bad people (white straight males, conservatives, TERFs, people in the Global North) and the good ones (everybody else) were lapped up by impressionable/ lazy British colleagues, to whom it sounded a lot more fascinating/ simple than the history of collective bargaining or understanding Hegel’s influence on Marx. When the death of George Floyd hit the news, humanities subjects reacted like it had happened in Macclesfield not Minneapolis, having previously ignored the police shooting of Mark Duggan or the death in police custody of Sarah Reed. And when “TERFs” eventually found their voices on campus, insults hurled from colleagues often involved anachronistic references to draconian abortion laws, Marsha P. Johnson and Jim Crow.
There’s a meme that regularly does the rounds, depicting two heat maps, popularly understood as representing the “moral circles” of US progressives and conservatives respectively. The conservative map is most focused upon family, then friends, then strangers, in that order; while the progressive map seems to show more concern for foreigners, animals, aliens, and rocks than family or friends (though boringly, it actually doesn’t). If someone were to do a heatmap for UK progressives in universities, it would look even more embarrassing: their moral circle would just replicate whatever was in the US version, entirely derivatively.
Equally, though, there are now parts of the British Right who automatically back whatever the US Right is saying: whether muttering darkly about cultural Marxism, or sucking up to Musk. They, too, are in danger of developing a second-hand heatmap. Will the British university-educated classes ever stop secretly seeing themselves as starring in a film about good guys and bad guys, complete with American accents? Let this week’s imposition of tariffs by Trump act as spine-stiffener. There’s only one thing for it: we need to close the cinemas, shut the borders, and take back control.
