We live in a time when the people who are in charge are scared
of the people who are not. Professors report being terrified of their students.
Publishing executives fear the wrath of junior employees. CEOs worry about
staff revolts. Museum curators watch what they say lest it lead to professional
annihilation. Politicians in senior positions are nervous about the newbies —
on their own side.
اضافة اعلان
Some of the fear is necessary and merited. Former
New York Reps. Joe Crowley and Eliot Engel lost their primaries to energetic
challengers because they were arrogant and too comfortable in their
incumbencies. Young employees at Goldman Sachs revolted early this year over
nearly 100-hour workweeks that have the color of abuse. Overseas, one can only
cheer the fact that Iran’s despots are finally living in fear of the
magnificent women taking off their hijabs and burning them in the streets.
But the fear is also doing a lot of damage: to the
people on whom the fear is inflicted, on those inflicting it, on the welfare of
the institutions to which they belong.
In healthy institutions, leaders are supposed to
teach, inspire and mold younger people so they can eventually inherit and
improve those institutions when they are ready to take charge. In many of
today’s institutions, repeated abdications of authority by cowardly leaders
have become invitations to arson by willful upstarts.
I have thought about this a lot in recent years as
one organization after another capitulated in the face of outrage mobs, hanging
good people out to dry to avoid having to stand on principle. I thought about
it again last week when Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, speaking at a New York
Young Republicans gala, said that if she and Steve Bannon had organized the
January 6 attack on Congress: “We would have won. Not to mention, it would’ve
been armed.”
They tell themselves that condemning Greene or Trump only gives them the attention they crave. But they ignore the fact that failing to condemn the pair gives them the legitimacy and power they crave much more.
The comment sparked indignation among Democrats, but
not a word from Kevin McCarthy, who has cozied up to Greene to win her support
in his bid for the House speakership. Greene later defended herself by saying
the White House could not take a joke — the old demagogic trick of riling the
mob while playing the fool.
Meanwhile, Republican leaders and conservative
pundits more or less keep mum, just as they kept mum for years over the verbal
hooliganism of Donald Trump before and (except for a fleeting spasm of
conscience) after January 6. They tell themselves that condemning Greene or
Trump only gives them the attention they crave. But they ignore the fact that
failing to condemn the pair gives them the legitimacy and power they crave much
more.
The problem with evil clowns is that it is the
clownishness, not the evil, they soon shed.
This is not a new problem. Communist dictatorships
came to power in Central Europe after World War II by pretending to play by
democratic rules, until they did not. The Nazis came to power in Germany the
same way. They joined the institutions they intended to destroy. And the people
who were supposed to be the keepers of those institutions, the guardians at the
gate, allowed — and sometimes even helped — them to do it.
Why?
A good explanation comes in Max Frisch’s 1958 play
“Biedermann and the Fire Raisers” (also translated from German as “The
Arsonists” or “The Firebugs”). It tells the story of a self-satisfied
businessperson named Gottlieb Biedermann who reads the news that arsonists have
been sweet-talking their way into people’s houses and then, after being allowed
to sleep in the attic, blowing them up.
“They should hang the lot of them,” says the
outraged Biedermann at the beginning of the play. But he is their next victim.
The arsonists wheedle their way into his house with
a combination of servile pleading, subtle bullying and appeals to Biedermann’s
moral vanity. And Biedermann, who nurses a hidden feeling of guilt and fears
open confrontation, is their ideal mark. By the end of the play, he is handing
the arsonists the matches with which they are going to blow up the house. He cannot
conceive that he is no longer in charge. He thinks he and the arsonists are in
on a big joke, never realizing that he has become the butt of the joke itself.
It is not hard to figure out who today’s arsonists
are. They are not just Trump, Greene and Vladimir Putin. They are also the
ideological entrepreneurs in universities, businesses, publishing houses and
news media working almost openly to undermine the missions of these
institutions — intellectual excellence, profitability, free expression, objectivity
— in the name of higher social goals like representation, sustainability,
sensitivity and “moral clarity”. Their aim is not to make their homes better.
It is to blow them up.
The harder challenge is to recognize our present-day
Biedermanns: the university president who claims to believe in academic
freedom, until he joins the arsonists in destroying the career of tenured
faculty members; the magazine editor who claims to believe in vigorous debate,
until he capitulates to those who do not; the Republican House member who says
enough is enough after January 6, until he finds it much more convenient to let
bygones be bygones.
These are some of the self-deluded weaklings who set the
tone of institutional life in much of America today. It is why so many others
live in fear.
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