The More Intelligent Path Forward
Do you know why more people who go to universities, like Harvard and other higher education institutions, support things like diversity and human rights? It is because it is the more intelligent path forward for human beings. It is not smart to hang onto old enmities related to skin colour and religious differences. The consensus among academics and the majority of students at these places of learning is that the progressive political camp has the better ideas for humanity. Nationalism and starting trade wars are not going to be better for the planet. In fact, historically, they increase the likelihood of actual war breaking out, as it did following the introduction of US tariffs in the 1930s. People take stuff being done to them around money personally. It grates on them a great deal. Tariffs are an insult to the nation they are imposed upon.
“In the decade after the end of the First World War, the United States continued to embrace the high tariffs that had characterized its trade policy since the Civil War. These were enacted, in part, to appease domestic constituencies, but ultimately they served to hinder international economic cooperation and trade in the late 1920s and early 1930s.”
Trump’s Culture Wars & Executive Actions
Trump and his authoritarian regime in America are taking the US backwards to a darker time in terms of human progressiveness. Attacking universities, like Harvard and Colombia, on the basis of student protests about the genocide occurring in Gaza by Israel and labelling it an antisemitism problem is a diversionary tactic. The list of demands being made by the Trump regime upon these universities is way beyond their remit under the Constitution. Presidents cannot, by executive decree, go around destroying century old institutions because they don’t agree with how they run things. The Trump culture wars against multiculturalism, diversity, equity and inclusion are not going to be won via executive actions. The courts in the US are having their say about this Trump 2.0 means of going about things. It is illegal and they don’t like it.
Change Takes Time, Not Trump Decrees
Changing things does not happen overnight. Cultural shifts take time and you cannot truly change societies by executive decree. The Trump executive actions are, already, proving expensive ways of going about things. Much of it is, and will prove to be, exercises in futility. The old white guy, in an increasingly kitsch looking White House oval office, with the big fat black markers, is not going to change the world by decree. No matter how pretty he gets his performative signature to appear. Hundreds of millions of Americans are not going to just sit back and take it. This is the reactionary epicentre of the world. Women are not going to take being redefined, as second class citizens in America. This minority government of white, Christian Nationalists is not going to get away with imposing draconian laws upon the greater population of the United States. Push is going to come to shove and the shit is going to hit the fan. We have only just passed the first 100 days of Trump 2.0.
The Unenlightened Donald
The more intelligent way forward has been via The Enlightenment, initially. Universities had a big role to play in that all over Europe and then, in the New World too. This progress has not been perfect by any means, especially if you were born as an Indigenous person in the non-European sense. America and Australia are built on invasion, theft, and massacres of the original populations. However, the one place that ownership of these truths have flourished is within universities, like Harvard, but there is still a long way to go. The Trump pushback on DEI in the US is a direct attack on the progress made in this area across America. This white supremacist backlash promotes revisionist history, as a way of denying and removing responsibility for the current imbalance of wealth so prevalent by race in the US today. They want to forget about the crimes against humanity, which directly produced the wealth of many families and institutions in America. It isn’t an even playing field and never has been. Every one knows this but the ugliest American, Trump, ugly on the inside too, his vision is a moral wasteland.
“The Trump 2.0 regime is attacking education in America, along with a host of other things which have made America great over decades and centuries. Right wing extremists have been marshalled into a force for disassembling stuff. Trump and the rise of righteous fools. Harvard University, an institution of higher education which is much older than the United States itself, is being threatened and attacked by the Trump regime. One of Donald Trump’s sons couldn’t get into Harvard. I mention this in passing because with Trump this sort of thing is usually personal.”
Robert Sudha Hamilton is the author of America Matters: Pre-apocalyptic Posts & Essays in the Shadow of Trump.
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