Last fall, on the day after Donald Trump was elected President, scores of students at Evergreen State College walked out of class. They burned an American flag, and wrote chalk messages to protest Trump’s victory. “We need a revolution,” read one. “Not my president,” declared another.
But Trump is their president, of course. And instead of fomenting revolution, some Evergreen students are acting just like him.
Witness the Trump-like way they accosted biology professor Bret Weinstein last week, after he took issue with a proposed “Day of Absence” ritual in which white students and faculty were asked to leave the campus. Echoing our narcissistic President, they framed the professor’s claim as a personal affront against them. And they didn’t let facts or reason interfere with their outrage, another hallmark of Trump’s childish character.
The Evergreen imbroglio began after circulation of Weinstein’s email to a college official. In the past, Weinstein wrote, minority students had left school for the “Day of Absence” protest. But the new arrangement was something else altogether.
“There is a huge difference between a group or coalition deciding to voluntarily absent themselves from a shared space . . . and a group or coalition encouraging another group to go away,” Weinstein wrote. “The first is a forceful call to consciousness which is, of course, crippling to the logic of oppression. The second is a show of force, and an act of oppression in and of itself.”
You don’t have to agree with Weinstein’s argument here. But if you don’t, you need to offer a better one.
And that’s precisely what the Evergreen students didn’t do. In a confrontation with Weinstein, which was captured on video and went viral, the students rejected the idea of argument itself. He is a racist, they are his targets, and that’s the end of the story.
Watch for yourself. At one point, Weinstein tells the students he will listen to them if they listen to him. Nothing doing. “This is not about you,” one student replies. “This is not a discussion.”
At another point, students ask Weinstein a question and then shout him down as he tries to respond. “Would you like to hear the answer or not?” he asks. Several students yell their answer: no. Then the crowd starts chanting, “Hey-hey! Hey-ho! Bret Weinstein’s got to go!”
Never mind that Weinstein’s email acknowledged racial oppression, taking issue with the way the students had challenged it rather than with racism itself. Nor did it matter that Weinstein — a self-described progressive — supported the Occupy Wall Street movement in 2011 and Bernie Sanders for president last year. All that counted was the way the offended protesters felt.
Sound like anyone you know? Ever since he entered the White House, Donald Trump has played the injured victim. The Russian investigation is a witch hunt, unfairly targeting his family and allies. Media reporters are enemies of the people, spreading fake news to discredit him. They even underestimated the crowd at his inauguration. Sad!
And when you imagine yourself as wronged, it really doesn’t matter if your facts aren’t right. Indeed, you can say whatever you want. American Muslims danced in celebration after 9/11. The U.S. murder rate is at a five-decade high. And Donald Trump won by the biggest electoral-vote margin since Ronald Reagan.
False, false, and false. But who cares? Trump has heard people saying these things, or so he says. And he certainly feels them, very deeply. For Donald Trump, emotion trumps reason every time.
But you can’t have a democracy on those terms. Our entire system of government — indeed, our entire way of life — is premised the idea of an informed citizenry. People who are ignorant cannot govern themselves. And they are easy pickings for tyrants, who can prey on their feelings of injury and victimhood.
Racism itself is a feeling, of course, deeply held by millions of Americans across space and time. And it is founded upon lies. The idea that one race is superior to another isn’t simply hateful and offensive; it’s false, disproved many times over by biologists, geneticists, and psychologists.
But we can’t fight racism-or any other falsehood — if we reject the idea of truth itself. And that’s what the protesters at Evergreen were doing, by refusing to discuss what they felt with the fair-minded professor whom they maligned.
Revolutionaries? Please. At this tenuous moment in our history, a real revolution will require all of us to recommit to reason, inquiry, and fact. Anything less will mimic our deceitful president, all in the guise of defying him.
Jonathan Zimmerman teaches education and history at the University of Pennsylvania. He is the author (with Emily Robertson) of “The Case for Contention: Teaching Controversial Issues in American Schools,” which was published in April by University of Chicago Press.
