Days before the 2016 general election, Republican Rep. Jeff Fortenberry got some unwanted media attention. One of Fortenberry's large campaign yard signs was vandalized. The image of the congressman's face was enhanced with a pair of googly eyes and some text was altered. Unsurprisingly, an image of the altered sign was passed around social media, and everyone had a good chuckle. One political science professor at the University of Nebraska at Lincoln gave a post of the image a "like" on Facebook, and then things got weird.
Fortenberry's chief of staff discovered that Professor Ari Kohen had liked the post and realized that democratic norms were collapsing all around us. Having never heard of the Streisand Effect, the chief of staff promptly contacted the professor, his department chair, his dean, and the university chancellor demanding to know what the university's position regarding "vandalism or worse violence" might be. The story went viral. Kohen filed an ethics complaint. Fortenberry won reelection. And everyone moved on.
Well, not quite everyone. Fortenberry called for "serious investigative reporting" to discover "who is causing this type of divisiveness in our city." Perhaps not trusting that journalists would do the necessary digging, the police were also put on the case of the googly eye vandal. Remarkably, some crack CSI work led them to a suspect. Fingerprints from the googly eyes apparently matched fingerprints collected from earlier acts of political vandalism. "Betsy Riot" stickers, the mark of a local "neo-suffragist punk patriot resistance," had been left not only on the Fortenberry sign but also on the office doors of the two Republican senators for the state of Nebraska. Patricia Wonch Hill, a University of Nebraska sociology professor, is now alleged to be a serial political vandal.
A postmodernist sociology professor, Patricia Wonch-Hill, at the University of Nebraska, is indulging in political shennanigans. What should be done?
On the one hand this is tactically a trivial issue - defacement of campaign materials to further an opposing political agenda. Why waste scarce public money on so trivial a matter. That is basically the position Whittington takes and it is not an unreasonable one.
And yet, self-serving as it might be, Fortenberry's question is a legitimate one, "who is causing this type of divisiveness"?
Our nation is afflicted by jaundice and skepticism. No one trusts the press, no one trusts politicians, fewer and fewer trust religious institutions, etc. I am confident that when the radical postmodernists of the sixties and seventies unleashed their ideological warfare on us in the form of the epistemic brain bubo of postmodernism, they did not anticipate that the division and distrust would lead to the very opposite of their goals.
"Don't trust anyone over thirty" was the cry and "Down with the military-industrial complex."
And after all this hue and cry about social justice and inclusion and diversity but shouted from a platform of division, racism and hatred, how could they have known that it would lead to the military being our most trusted institution (74%). Trusted in terms of doing what is right. After the military, the next most trusted institutions are small businesses at at 67% and the police at 54%. Religion comes in at 38%. The Presidency at 37%.
In contrast, the champions of the vocal left are among the least trusted - Congress at 11%, Unions 26%, public schools 29%, newspapers 23%, TV news 20%. Banks (30%) and Big Business (25%) are trusted more than Congress and the media for goodness sake.
And the tragedy for us as a nation is that much of this has been a self-inflicted wound. Sure there are a few who truly believe in postmodernism and social justice but those few are highly concentrated in government bureaucracy, in the mainstream media, among NGOs, and most perniciously in academia. The rest of the 95% of the nation focus on making their lives better and the lives of their family and friends.
What is the common attribute among these groups who are trusted so little? They all depend solely or substantially on taxpayer money to fund this destructive ideology.
So Whittington is right - we don't want politicians interfering in academia to police their thoughts, thinking, and research.
But Fortenberry is right as well. Taxpayers should not be forced to subsidize political speech, especially political speech for an ideology that is so divisive and destructive.
This is a classic example of Saul Alinsky's Rules for Radicals, specifically, Rule 4 - Make the enemy live up to its own book of rules. It is a classic mechanism for bringing down the legitimate and well-intended through nefarious subversion.
All social systems rely on rules. The more complex system, the more rules and the more types of rules. One of the most effective mechanisms for undermining the legitimacy of democratic republics is to drive an excess of rules.
More specifically - Laws are good for the basic norms and down to a certain degree of commonality. But below that they become ineffective and even counter-productive. In most functioning societies, the law covers the big ticket items but below a certain level, you default to local social norms (as long as they are compliant with the law.)
Where you draw the line between Law and Social Norm is both difficult and dynamic. Postmodernist radicals have been hugely effective at using test cases on inconsequential issues to extend the law further and further into the domain of social norms.
Hate Speech is a classic example where radicals, in maliciously forcing the government to live by its own rules, it has also undermined those rules by either making them unacceptably pervasive or simply absurd.
One of the early examples of radicals using Rule 4 to great effect came in 1993 when the University of Pennsylvania ended up being forced by radicals in the administration to bring charges against an Israeli-born American student for using the term water buffalo when yelling at a group of black sorority sisters making noise near a dorm while others were studying. The infamous Water Buffalo Incident. There is a much better summary in the New York Times Book Review of the time.
In the real world the fifteen sorority sisters would have been punished for disturbing the peace and interfering with the studies of their fellow students for half an hour. In the world of Rules for Radicals, this was an opportunity to make the University look absurd. Thus started a two decade long push to restrict speech in universities, bringing universities into disrepute and into court. All through the clever use of Rule 4.
A university employee defacing other people's property shouldn't be a political issue or even much of a legal one. The University of Nebraska needs to police itself so that its employees are respectful of all the citizens who pay their salaries. Politicians and police should not be wasting their time and resources on this picayune stuff and intervening on university policy. They should be calling the the President of the University of Nebraska and telling him/her to get his house in order so that the police and politicians don't have to waste their time.
The President of University of Nebraska should call the Department Chair - "Wonch-Hill is breaking the law defacing other people's property. Tell her she's fired if she breaks the law again."
No one loses their job. No precednts are set. Individuals are counseled. Norms are enforced.
Instead, through the deployment of Rule 4 we have calls for Wonch-Hill to be fired, cries that politicians are censoring academics, etc. It is very effective at increasing distrust in the political system and in institutions of higher learning and very effective in undermining the free exchange of ideas. We should not be falling to the jesuitical cleverness of the postmodernists. Enforce the laws on everyone and if a professor is breaking the law, punish him/her as specified by the law. But also put them on notice that someone consuming taxpayer money cannot be bringing the brand of the university into disrepute.
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