Pedagogy and Polarization: Restoring America’s Fractured Political Landscape

From the claims about Maus that it promotes an "unnecessary use of profanity and nudity and its depiction of violence and suicide" to arguments about "critical race theory" suggesting it endorses "discriminating against people based on their whiteness," teachers across the United States now find themselves accused of peddling immorality and bigotry.

This assault on educators as the purveyors of dangerous ideas is hardly unprecedented; David Horowitz’s The Professors: The 101 Most Dangerous Academics in America (in which I am featured) was published in 2006. There is a long history of anti-intellectual populism in the United States. To someone who has taught Middle Eastern politics in American universities for decades, the current uproar about critical race theory is painfully reminiscent of attacks on scholars of the Arab world after 9/11, accusing them of both anti-Semitism and sympathizing with terrorists. (For a description, see my 2003 presidential address to the Middle East Studies Association, most easily available, ironically, on the website of the still active, if less histrionic, "monitoring" group, Campus Watch.) 

But the range, popularity and danger of the new witch hunts seems to be greater. After all, the worst threats we Middle East scholars faced were professional. In a world before "doxing", we faced professional embarrassment and, perhaps job insecurity, but we rarely, if ever, confronted death threats or rallying protesters outside our homes. And that is a clue to the current moment.

Does that mean these are not serious issues? Not necessarily, but neither does it mean that the flash mobs that can be brought out by activists - from Cairo in 2011 to Hong Kong in 2019, to Black Lives Matter in 2020, to the January 6 2021 insurrection in Washington DC - are reflections of stable political alliances, much less carefully considered political positions. What it does suggest, however, is that the reflective, serious, thoughtful world of academia, so often accused of being an ivory tower, secluded from the practicalities of the real world and resistant to disruption, may well prove to be one of the sanctuaries, perhaps even antidotes, to the surfeit of pent-up emotion, anger, resentment, fatigue and bitterness, in which Americans - and many others - are awash today. Ultimately, today’s social problems - whether of social mores and violence, or race, or freedom - that the book banners, the critical race theory opponents, the anti-vaxxers are actually worried about, are probably better addressed in reasoned debate and concrete policy than in the theatrical performance of bullying and browbeating fellow citizens, however momentarily satisfying that may be. 

Since January 6, we have increasingly heard that the United States is heading towards a 'second civil war' caused by extreme political polarization. While these fears need to be qualified and the definition of 'civil war' itself can be challenged, have these concerns also spread to the academic world? If so, could they be considered as the cause or the symptom of this malaise?

As I have suggested, university faculty are more accustomed to feeling beleaguered than their counterparts teaching in elementary and secondary schools. That is, in part, because until relatively recently, disgruntled parents quietly defected from the public school system to send their children to private schools rather than attack the public schools directly. But over the last several decades, neglect of public education has slowly turned into contempt as the rhetoric of "charter schools"- public-funded independent schools - has undermined public confidence in, and funding for, conventional public school systems, once the backbone of American civic education. Neo-liberal hostility to anything associated with state or public purposes has now converged with popular anxiety about household economies - who will pay the school taxes? - and social, particularly racial, unease to fuel active resistance to public education, a resistance cast in terms of the dangers that curricula pose to parental control and childhood innocence.

Critics demand "balance" in faculty hiring. But the American university system - a model widely emulated by the rest of the world - has yet to be actually dismantled. And, indeed, a system so closely associated with what social mobility remains in the United States is probably fairly resilient. 

What are the implications of political polarization within American society for the US’ relations with the rest of the world, in particular with Europe?

If I were living outside the United States, I would be concerned about two questions: who speaks for this country and what does it stand for? The outsized influence of the US since the end of the Cold War has not been nearly as benign as its advocates have claimed, particularly after 9/11 and the launch of the "Global War on Terror". But it has been relatively unified, its proponents speaking with one voice. Since the election of Donald Trump in 2016, and especially since his refusal to acknowledge his defeat in 2020, the country has been both deeply preoccupied with its own discord and unable to present a united front to the rest of the world. 

This creates global uncertainty, on which both China and Russia have clearly capitalized. Perhaps more disconcerting, it has permitted a variety of voices to claim to represent the United States, from the new media and technology moguls with millions more Twitter followers than the American president, to the various networks of dark money that seem to know no boundaries. Every claim that George Soros is funding protest movements around the world is matched by counterclaims that the Koch Brothers are undermining climate change efforts and that American Christian conservatives are funding far-right politicians in Europe. Some of these claims are true, of course; globalization and technological change has made the movement of both money and ideas infinitely easier and faster. It has also made it more difficult to establish just exactly what or who the "United States" actually stands for or cares about. Trump’s back channel communication with Putin, Mohammed Bin Salman and other potential investors in his power reflected the erosion of American foreign policy as a singular, coherent strategy or program.

All of this means, of course, that it is hard, if not impossible, to discern how the United States understands its interests in the world, and what its still-outsized influence will turn into. Besides making routine international relations with the United States more complex, this also presents an even more frightening prospect: that America might be showing the rest of the world its future. In a globalized world, can the toxic mix of existential anxieties with which the United States is currently seized, and the fast and efficient dissemination of ideas and tactics afforded by social media, be confined to a single country? Or does the United States still represent a model that other countries will follow? 

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