Dick Hubert’s Worldview: Liberal America vs. authoritarian America: the ultimate decision comes down to us

This column is for you,

IF:

*You have a son or daughter heading off to college;

*You have a son or daughter in college;

*You have grandchildren on their way or in college;

*You fear the public response to unrest on college campuses today;

*You have ties to a college or university that is in the midst of student protests;

*You see student protests upending the re-election chances of President Biden;

*You are worried about a repeat this summer of the street violence in 1968 in Chicago.

That was the summer when antiwar protesters on the left upended the Democratic convention in Chicago and dashed Hubert Humphrey’s chances of winning the Presidential election against Richard Nixon.

The prospect of anti-Israel, anti-Gaza war, and pro-Palestinian protesters turning Chicago’s streets into a 1968 rerun is giving me nightmares.

But what makes 2024 far different from 1968 can be summed up by the following major media Opinion analyses.

Together they have convinced me that we’re at a critical turning point in American history.

The Atlantic and the Washington Post

The cover story for the April issue of The Atlantic magazine is Franklin Foer’s thesis titled:

“THE GOLDEN AGE OF AMERICAN JEWS IS ENDING
Anti-Semitism on the right and the left threatens to bring to a close an unprecedented period of safety and prosperity for Jewish Americans—and demolish the liberal order they helped establish.”

This essay by the Washington Post’s Robert Kagan is even more unsettling:

“WE HAVE A RADICAL DEMOCRACY; WILL TRUMP VOTERS DESTROY IT”
The Post’s editors found it such a crucial article that they opened their paywall so anyone could read it here.

The Post excerpted Kagan’s essay from his 2024 Penguin/Random House book: “Rebellion: How Antiliberalism is Tearing America Apart — Again.”

Foer & Kagan’s arguments

I’m hoping Westmore News readers will take the time to read these landmark reports.

Word by word and step by step Foer tears apart the dream of American Jews that in the United States they have found a country where they would be accepted and flourish in all corners of society.

Foer centers his fears around not only the Trump MAGA movement, but also the American left.

“The anti-Zionism that has flourished on the left in recent years doesn’t stop with calls for an end to the occupation of the West Bank. It espouses a blithe desire to eliminate the world’s only Jewish-majority nation, valorizes the homicidal campaign against its existence, and seeks to hold members of the Jewish diaspora to account for the sins of a country they don’t live in and for a government they didn’t elect. In so doing, this faction of the left places itself in the terrible lineage of attempts to erase Jewry—and, in turn, stirs ancient and not-so-ancient existential fears.”

Foer goes on with this seminal thought:

“America’s ascendant political movements—MAGA on one side, the illiberal left on the other—would demolish the last pillars of the consensus that Jews helped establish. They regard concepts such as tolerance, fairness, meritocracy, and cosmopolitanism as pernicious shams. The Golden Age of American Jewry has given way to a golden age of conspiracy, reckless hyperbole, and political violence, all tendencies inimical to the democratic temperament. Extremist thought and mob behavior have never been good for Jews. And what’s bad for Jews, it can be argued, is bad for America.”

Kagan sees the current crisis (for everyone with any understanding of what makes our country unique) in brutal American historical terms:

“How to explain their willingness to support Trump despite the risk he poses to our system of government? The answer is not rapidly changing technology, widening inequality, unsuccessful foreign policies or unrest on university campuses but something much deeper and more fundamental.

It is what the Founders worried about and Abraham Lincoln warned about: a decline in what they called public virtue. They feared it would be hard to sustain popular support for the revolutionary liberal principles of the Declaration of Independence, and they worried that the virtuous love of liberty and equality would in time give way to narrow, selfish interest.

Although James Madison and his colleagues hoped to establish a government on the solid foundation of self-interest, even Madison acknowledged that no government by the people could be sustained if the people themselves did not have sufficient dedication to the liberal ideals of the Declaration. The people had to love liberty, not just for themselves but as an abstract ideal for all humans.”

Kagan continues:

“Americans are going down this route today because too many no longer care enough whether the system the Founders created survives and are ceding the ground to those, led by Trump, who actively seek to overthrow what so many of them call “the regime.”

This “regime” they are referring to is the unique political system established by the Founders based on the principles of universal equality and natural rights. That, plain and simple, is what this election is about. ‘A republic if you can keep it,’ Benjamin Franklin allegedly said of the government created by the Constitutional Convention in 1787. This is the year we may choose not to keep it.”

“Trump not only acknowledges his goals, past and present; he promises to do it again if he loses this year. For the third straight election, he is claiming that if he loses, then the vote will have been fraudulent.”

“He has warned of uprisings, of ‘bedlam’ and a ‘bloodbath,’ and he has made clear that he will again be the promoter of this violence, just as he was on Jan. 6.”

“Trump explicitly warned in 2020 that he would not accept the election results if he lost, and he didn’t. This year he is saying it again. Were there no other charges against him, no other reason to be concerned about his return to the presidency, this alone would be sufficient to oppose him. He does not respect and has never pledged to abide by the democratic processes established by the Constitution.”

“On the contrary, he has explicitly promised to violate the Constitution when he deems it necessary. That by itself makes him a unique candidate in American history and should be disqualifying.”   

And on my college campus…

As a former Alumni Trustee of Amherst College, I follow developments on the campus through the pages of The Amherst Student, the student edited publication.

Neither Foer nor Kagan would be surprised by the sentiments in recent Opinion sections.

In its April 10 issue The Student published a letter signed by a horde of alumni/ae from Classes ’00 through ’24 and aimed at the College’s President and Chairman of the Board of Trustees.

They started off this way:

“We write to you as Amherst College alumni deeply disappointed by your failure to divest Amherst College’s endowment from companies perpetrating and enabling Israel’s ongoing genocide against the Palestinian people and occupation of Palestinian lands.”

They went on to make this pledge:

“*We commit to withholding all payments and donations to Amherst College, including payments to attend 2024 Reunion Weekend

*We commit to disrupting (in-person and virtually) Amherst College alumni engagement efforts

*We commit to coordinating phone and email blasts to clog the phone lines and email inboxes of Amherst College administrators and trustees

*We commit to clogging Amherst social media accounts with comments decrying the college’s support for genocide

*We commit to protecting and defending Amherst College students who face repression in response to their advocacy for Palestine, including by supporting student-led campaigns calling out Amherst admin responsible for repression

*We commit to publicizing and pursuing the severance of support for the state of Israel, Zionist organizations, and the war industry in the Amherst community beyond the endowment—for example, personal investments of Amherst trustees or administrators or the presence of Zionist propaganda in curricula.”

Amherst President Michael Elliott and Board Chairman Andrew Nussbaum responded in the April 24 issue with their own letter denying any repression of student opinion and making this salient point:

“The trustees are firmly of the view that the endowment is not an appropriate or effective tool for foreign policy debate and deliberation, and the symbolic act of divestment — were it even possible — would have no measurable impact on the crisis in Gaza.”

Franklin Foer would instantly recognize the attack from the left and the response from leaders of an institution who seem startled to find themselves reviled centrists.

Robert Kagan’s definition of the Trumpist right may be represented in the alumni body, but they have yet to be heard from in The Student’s pages.

Elliott and Nussbaum ended their defense of current Board and Administration policies with this wistful hope:

“We welcome alumni engagement in matters of national and international importance in ways that promote, rather than abandon, the values of the liberal arts education with its respect for civil discourse, difference of views, and a willingness to consider matters from multiple perspectives. Thank you for your continued engagement.”

One way or the other, this debate over what constitutes a “liberal” view of the United States at Amherst and everywhere else in the country will be decided in November at the polls.

As Kagan summed it up:

“If the American system of government fails this year, it will not be because the institutions established by the Founders failed. It will not be because of new technologies or flaws in the Constitution. No system of government can protect against a determined tyrant. Only the people can. This year we will learn if they will.”

Dick Hubert, a retired television news producer-writer-reporter living in Rye Brook, has been honored with the Peabody Award, the DuPont Columbia Award and the Robert F. Kennedy Memorial Journalism Award.

Editor’s Note: This column, written by Dick Hubert, represents his opinion and not that of this newspaper.