A few days ago, 216 employees of Simon and Schuster, along with several thousand people from outside the trade publishing house, sent a petition to top executives of the company demanding that they stop publishing anyone who had anything to do with the Trump administration. Their rationale for making such a demand was that Trump’s presidency was a dangerous historical aberration. According to the Wall Street Journal, the letter insists that Simon and Schuster not treat “the Trump administration as a ‘normal’ chapter in American history.”
Before I sat down to write this essay, I had to ask myself several questions. Will the opinions I express jeopardize my position at the liberal university where I teach? Will they endanger my relationship with my liberal publisher? Will they roil my relations with my neighbors in the ultraprogressive New Jersey suburb where I live?
That I had to ask is not “normal.”
For a long time, dictators, from the European tyrants of the 1930s to the military leaders of the Latin American juntas, skillfully used the violent excesses of dissenters to seize and preserve power. Now so-called liberal “resistance” to “fascism” justifies its attacks on freedom of speech by citing the threat posed by a former American president. Susan Sontag famously enraged the New Left by calling Communism “fascism with a human face.” The current woke movement has all the trappings of fascism with an anti-fascist face.
Growing up in a working-class suburb alongside others whose parents, like mine, had emigrated out of New York City’s working-class enclaves, I came to learn that there were two principal methods of conducting a street fight. You either kicked your opponent beneath the belt, if he was bigger, stronger, and older than you, or you punched him in the nose. Though genteel on the surface, liberal culture warriors avail themselves of the same tactics. They either strike below the belt, trying to bring down an adversary by staining him with an embarrassing episode from his private life, or they go straight for the head, calling to censor written or spoken language that they don’t like.
In the 1990s, some on the left called for the ejection of Homer and Shakespeare from school curriculums. Now, as university-based political correctness—remember that quaint old term?—has mutated into wokeness and jumped from the seminar room to everyday life, they’ve broadened their restrictions to include anyone who disagrees with them. It’s a disreputable desire, even by their own Peter Clemenza standards of free speech—leave the Dr. Seuss, take the violent porn—and one that they justify by invoking Donald Trump.
All-purpose strawman Trump makes desperate measures necessary, you see. It’s useless to express outrage at the Simon and Schuster petition, yet another woke attempt to stifle expression in the form of someone’s work; futile to point out, for the umpteenth time, the illiberal peril of trying to silence speech you don’t agree with. Perhaps scrutinizing the notion of the Trump administration as an all-purpose exception would be more useful than trying to construct a rational response to the Simon and Schuster petitioners’ Thermidorian demands. For if Trump was a normal phase in American democracy, then the abnormal response to him would lose its justification.
. . .
If woke progressives had been honest about the populist confusion and discontent sweeping the country, on both ends of the political spectrum, they would not have rung the bells of political apocalypse. They would have taken yet another incarnation of American energy in stride—as they do when it happens on their side. But to continue their cultural onslaught, they need to stigmatize as abnormal everything that stands in their way. No wonder the Simon and Schuster petitioners put the word “normal” in inverted commas. They have no idea what it is.
Forward!