Mark Bauerlein, Protester Of Protests
More tough love for Snowflake America from Trump’s leading liberal arts academic
Judgment, So-called is an irregular series in which the law is laid down on political and cultural acts of “criminal” cravenness, hypocrisy, ineptitude, and general stupidity.
As previously established, English professor and cultural critic Mark Bauerlein is, despite his lofty proclamations about free speech and extensive knowledge of the canon, a boilerplate hack.
But he’s also so much more!
To be fair to Bauerlein, many people hold his views. And many of them are hypocrites. (And some even voted to end their own health care.) But few have the education and writerly talent to cloak that hypocrisy and bad faith in big, soaring pronouncements carrying the weight of supposed academic honesty and crotchety, professorial forthrightness.
Take his commentary on college protesters, hilariously titled “Their violence is free speech, but our speech is violence.” Bauerlein is horrified by the resistance some college students have shown to giving “conservative intellectuals” a platform to “cross the race taboos of the left.” These controversial speakers are apparently sweet, docile innocents at the mercy of rampaging, lefty hordes joining into one giant ratking of hooligans viciously enforcing higher-ed group-think.
The ringleader of these rampaging campus fascists? Toni Morrison! Bauerlein blows the dust off a 1993 quote from Morrison — “Oppressive language does more than represent violence; it is violence” — to serve his argument. In case anyone missed it, he connects the dots for us: “So free speech by conservatives is violence. On the other hand, the left’s real violence is free speech.”
Bauerlein’s rhetoric is triple-rainbow-level self-serving. But is it actually possible for words, immaterial as they are, to stroke their own egoistic tumescence? No? Okay. Let’s meet this finely calibrated bullshit on substance then: here is a list of conservatives exercising their free speech rights to protest the 2008 election. Funny, I didn’t realize that conservatives, only capable of violent speech, ever burned down churches or assaulted people as part of their protests.
It is hard to generalize, after all, riots are like snowflakes: each one is special in its own way. Similarly, there are many unique kinds of conservative speech non-violence: threats to family, death threats, and verbal harassment followed by murder.
But hey, those were all isolated incidents, right? They don’t represent what Republicans actually stand for. And that last one doesn’t count, because Bauerlein’s not talking about the times conservatives “cross the race taboos of the left” by murdering people. Conservatives never engage in violence in a collective, political manner, like say, a street fight or when they don’t like how people’s votes are being counted accurately, or like the original rioting students: white southerners rejecting integration.
Bauerlein is fond of admonishing contemporary violent “Protesters who intimidate attendees,” and “block entrances” — (the horror the horror!) — yet is apparently incapable of imagining that behavior being used by anyone but campus liberals “shouting down lecturers.”
I don’t feel especially threatened by the condescending speech of “provocative” conservatives like Charles Murray and Heather Mac Donald, but Bauerlein neglects that many people have good reason to fear his fellow crusaders. That’s the thing about hate speech: sometimes it’s just foreplay for hate crimes. Bauerlein might not consider Milo & Co. to be hate speech purveyors, but the radical elements of Bauerlein’s base continue to hate crime Muslims, Jews and non-whites in increasing numbers, and while making the same complaints.
Bauerlein likes to rile his readers up with lurid tales of “liberal fascism.” For someone who’s written about lynching in America’s past, it’s amazing that he expends so much concern about discussing race taboos, and so little concern about the KKK.
What do college students have to fear from benevolent fascists seeking to criminalize protest, anyway?
Take the University of Wisconsin. On the one hand, this is just comically inept: “Steve Nass, a state senator from Whitewater, has urged university leaders not to give way to ‘the political correctness crowd demanding safe spaces, safe words, universal apologies for hurt feelings, and speech/thought police.’ But last July, Senator Nass also sent a letter to university leaders to complain about an ‘offensive’ essay assignment on gay men’s sexual preferences.” At least he didn’t want a universal apology?
There are, though, more chilling Republican operatives, like State Representative Murphy, who “promised to direct his staff to screen courses in the humanities ‘to make sure there’s legitimate education going on.’”
Murphy’s bill requires neutrality on the “controversies of the day,” like how other Republican State Representatives believe the earth is 6,000 years old — “That’s a fact” — and “students who felt intimidated from expressing their opinions in class could bring their complaints to the Council on Free Expression, an oversight board created in the bill.
“The exchange illuminated critics’ concerns over a little-debated clause of the Campus Free Speech Act, a bill that has stirred controversy for its provisions compelling the UW to punish students who disrupt campus speeches.”
Conservatives will not settle for criminalizing dissent in the academy. Trump surrogate Newt Gingrich wants excuses to “close down the elite press.” Gingrich wants a subservient media, mindful to say please and thank you and ask for more. “First and foremost, he suggested that Acosta be banned from reporting on Trump events for 60 days ‘as a signal, frankly, to all the other reporters that there are going to be real limits’ for proper behavior.”
It’s not a safe space. It’s just good manners . . .
Bauerlein’s a pretty conventional “law-and-order” conservative. “When people break the law, you immobilize them, you handcuff them, and you take them away.” Sometimes he gets a little florid though:
“The solution is clear. The next time the protesters commandeer public grounds and threaten innocent citizens, they must be seized, immobilized, and carted away. Until that happens, the upheavals shall continue.” Bauerlein is fond of using words like “upheavals” to describe these nasty protestors who “commandeer public grounds.” By this view, fear of his terrifying students justifies an entirely rational and completely un-emotional response.
He must mean something like this, right? Whoops, that concerned conservative should have waited for the police. After all, “What we need here is a very strong state response to these activities,” Bauerlein says.
I’m not sure which is more terrifying, the combination of vigilante and police violence against random minorities (speaking of speech, “He let off more rounds than he let out words”), or the politicized, programmatic, state-sponsored suppression of speech with violence. It’s one thing when Trump says, “I can shoot someone and not lose voters,” another when he encourages his mob to “Knock the crap out of” protesters. Of course, when Bauerlein’s id personified takes Trump up on the idea, it’s the black man who’s just been punched the police first tackle and arrest.
Bauerlein is a civilized man, even if his dear leader isn’t. But the police aren’t taking their cues from tenured English Professors. After protesters and police clash, police are now arresting suspects “weeks later,” and, according to defense attorneys, “prosecuting people not based on evidence, but for who they know and who they associate with.”
Most recently, our Capitol saw the Republican tax-cut/assisted suicide that is their health care bill meet “Protesters with disabilities, including many in wheelchairs” who “jammed the hall outside of McConnell’s office until removed by police. At least 15 people were arrested in the die-in.”
Perhaps Bauerlein would prefer they die more civilly.
At heart, the conflict is this: conservatives like Bauerlein believe they are living in a foundering society, surrounded by disorder, where their courageous and darling opinions are met by organized violence. How Bauerlein can work and speak freely on a college campus and, despite this violent enforcement of campus groupthink, speak his mind to whatever media outlet will listen seems incomprehensible. We must save him from his oppression! Somehow he persists through the very real struggle.
The so-called verdict:
Bauerlein, possibly the best example of a conservative intellectual in the humanities in the academy, somehow ignores an entire and continued history of violence simply to score rhetorical points against Toni Morrison 24 later. I can’t think of a judgment worse for a literature professor than continuing to stew over something a novelist said in 1993. (Though, to be fair, people will be picking over Morrison’s words for years and years to come. No one will remember Bauerlein’s once Trump’s gone.)
Still, Bauerlein’s not done yet. Eventually those college students he fears graduate, then they become “liberal media elites,” and he’s got much worse to say about them. In our next installment: watch Mark Bauerlein take on The Privilege Police.
Joshua Gottlieb-Miller is based in Houston.
