Since we last posted, the Supreme Court has created a Supreme Leader out of what we once called the president. The damage done to our democracy by four years’ worth of the Trump administration appointing puppet judges dedicated to dismantling democracy to courts high and low across this country is now made dramatically clear by those appointees in our highest court.
This transformation of the judiciary is the necessary precursor to implementing Project 2025 in a second Trump presidency. You’ve likely heard a lot about this by now; an even-handed description at Snopes, a non-partisan news source and investigatory journalism outlet, details it without being exhausting…. as much as that’s possible, since Project 2025 is the roadmap to a police state and a dictator in the U.S. With the judiciary firmly packed with kangaroo court anti-democratic worker bees, carrying out Project 2025 will be very easy, as any challenges to it in court will be overruled or dismissed (like the Trump classified documents case was dismissed by U.S. District Court Judge Aileen Cannon earlier this month).
When this end goal is made as unapologetically clear as Republicans have made it, it’s astounding to us that many people still call on historians to remain “neutral”. We’ve addressed this in the past–the hesitation, the worried caution around drawing parallels between what’s happening now (with roots in the Reagan Administration) in the U.S. and what happened in Germany in the 1930s or any other democracy that was forced into authoritarianism. Somehow that’s irresponsible, and alarmist. “Just keep on doing what you’re supposed to do,” historians are told, which usually means “just talk about the past as past.”
People posing as historians, of course, do just the opposite, but we’ll get to that next time.
For now, we think of our March 2021 post “Neutrality isn’t justice, silence = death”, which was part of our posting on the efforts of the Iowa state legislature to incorporate the anti-justice language and intent of the Trump Executive Order 13950 of September 22, 2020 (Combating Race and Sex Stereotyping), which we wrote about in-depth in late 2020. All of the universities whose Republican presidents have initiated or are currently initiating these “anti-diversity” regulations provide helpful test-runs for Project 2025’s universal rollout.
As we said back in March 2021, one quote in particular from the story on Iowa by Inside Higher Ed sticks with us:
Representative Sandy Salmon, a Republican, argued that there still “needs to be a paragraph in there about requiring a public institution of higher education to attempt to remain neutral on current public policy controversies.”
Neutrality. We understand the disequilibrium our nation is going through as it attempts its boldest reckoning with racism since the 1950s and 60s. We know how painful it is to everyone to disturb the equilibrium of an entire nation, to call a halt to business as usual, including all the coping mechanisms people have relied on for centuries to deal with and survive racism and sexism. That coping state is identified as neutrality, and it can seem like neutrality, a grey area between violence and safety, but it isn’t neutral. It’s charged with fear and hate. It’s the medium in which cells of injustice grow and multiply.
So there is nothing noble or helpful about calling for neutrality on “controversies” that are tearing our nation apart, and that we are finally stopping all the machinery to address and redress. It doesn’t “calm things down”. It only perpetuates the medium for injustice by refusing to call it out and destroy it.
First they force universities to go along, then K-12 schools, then businesses, then everything else. Neutrality isn’t justice, in Iowa or anywhere else. All of us have to stick with the exhaustingly difficulty work of derailing what is corrupt in our society and nation, and then, when all injustice is indeed safely “in the past,” we can figure out how to keep it that way.
There was a slogan back in the 90s amongst gay Americans fighting the unwillingness of the U.S. government–and most of society–to do anything to stop the AIDS epidemic.
Silence=Death was a quick, efficient way to get the message across that not talking about AIDS, or “gays”, was a way to guarantee that the death rate just kept rising. Gay Americans who had adopted the coping mechanism of silence about their sexuality, concealing it in some way, to some extent, in order to survive had to be mobilized for public protest, public political action. It was not easy. But momentum grew with the death rate, and heroic gay Americans put their lives on the line to stand up and demand equal medical treatment and attention. It was dangerous, it was hard, it put all of American society into disequilibrium as “mainstream” America was forced to acknowledge gay people as human beings with equal rights (and as people–regular people who had jobs and pets and went on vacation and hated broccoli, etc.).
Neutrality in that situation was not the answer. It’s never the answer when justice is at stake. We all need to revive this slogan for today. Find a new shape to replace the pink triangle that represented homosexuality and get those t-shirts and buttons out there on every American who knows that “neutrality and silence for all” is not our national slogan.
This is even more true today in 2024, as pretend history is manufactured by Americans who don’t want liberty and justice for all and see their best chance since the Civil War to restrict those freedoms to themselves alone. All of us have a job to do speaking out against home-grown fascism, campaigning against candidates who want authoritarianism and for democratic candidates, running for office, protesting publicly, and of course voting democratically.
We’re in a hole now, as the Supreme Court rulings prove. Dictatorship in America is like climate change–no longer something possible, on the horizon, that we can avoid, but something already here. The Court has already made the president above the law. That’s done. We will be living with the unfolding and ever-increasing horrors of that decision well into the latter half of this century. If Trump becomes president again, the horrors will only come sooner and become more permanent.
In this situation it’s easy to feel helpless, and that’s a justifiable first reaction. But if “traditional” American history has told us anything over the past 200 years, it’s that Americans rise to any challenge and vanquish it. Let’s borrow a little of that spirit from the unhinged false histories that trumpet American exceptionalism in all the worst, most ahistorical ways to promote real history, the kind that draws parallels to fascism when necessary and obvious, refuses to go along, and offers later generations evidence they can use to carry on the fight.
The Historic Present 