In the aftermath of George Floyd’s murder, more forcefully than after the scores of other highly publicized murders of black people by police in the recent past, Average Americans are stepping up and out to say “enough is enough.” Even a pandemic couldn’t stop thousands of able-minded Americans in all 50 states from registering their demands for change to a criminal justice system that tolerates the systematic harassment, brutalization, and murder of black and brown citizens. This apparent awakening has undoubtedly been fueled by the undisguised and unprecedented racism, corruption, and dishonesty of Donald Trump and the Republican Party he leads, a party that has now expelled or marginalized its honest intellectuals and activists, leaving only the morally, psychologically, and intellectually defective to shepherd the GOP into the future.
Unfortunately, the far right in America has a very strong foothold among America’s police officers. Many police unions, ironically enough, have embraced right-wing authoritarian notions of policing and politics. Far too many cops now see themselves as military and culture warriors, instead of public servants steeped in civil service professionalism. The day-to-day policing of America’s communities is the government function that has to be most faithful to the political neutrality of the civil servant because it most directly and clearly signals American society’s fidelity to the Rule of Law. Whether appearance or reality, if police officers are widely understood to be a loyal constituency of one political party over the other, then societal breakdown is a certainty, not merely a possibility. In 2020 America, the law enforcement profession has been politicized and militarized, neither of which would have been possible without the normalization, if not legitimization, of politically motivated dishonesty and corruption at the highest reaches of American society. Dealing with systematic racism in America will require significant changes to our political culture, not just police culture. We have to root out more than bad cops, politicians, and political profiteers. We have to root out the intellectual collaborators, the opinion shapers in positions of influence who have sold or surrendered their professionalism, expertise, and objectivity to those intent on repealing more than a century’s worth of social and economic progress in America.
For me this most recently came into stark relief when one of my politically conservative faculty colleagues at CCSU pushed back against the outrage over Floyd’s murder being expressed on the faculty listserv by first posting criticism of the University President’s public statement about the murder, claiming that she failed to properly condemn the violent protesters, and then by posting a piece from last summer, by conservative commentator Heather MacDonald, describing “a recent study [that] demolishes the Democratic narrative regarding race and police shootings.” (Emphasis Added). This wasn’t the comments section of a piece at FoxNews.com, it was a listserv of university professors, a group that includes experts and scholars on … well… pretty much everything. Pushing back against weak or deceptive arguments on university faculty listservs is useful and necessary, but the far more important pushback has to reach a much wider audience.
My colleague’s critique of our University president’s relative silence on the rioting and looting that has accompanied some of the mass protests sparked by George Floyd’s murder is just garden variety false equivalence spin that is as ubiquitous as it is unworthy of serious attention, but his insistence on carrying water for the far right from his perch as a respected history professor by endorsing right-wing propaganda is dangerous, and it is this legitimation of dangerous propaganda by credentialed experts that honest academics need to more forcefully and more publicly call out and refute. Right-wing billionaires have for more than half a century built up a parallel infrastructure for political conservatism in America, where “alternative facts” are peddled by alternative experts and opinion shapers. My CCSU colleague is a member of the National Association of Scholars, an organization that has regularly heaped support and effusive praise on conservative propagandists like Heather MacDonald since its creation in 1987 as a conservative outpost in the infrastructure of the American academy.
By the 1970’s, political conservatives had been all but routed in the battle for influence in most of America’s politically important intermediary institutions. Journalism, academia, and science had all become bastions of liberalism in part because those who choose these careers are committed to science, reason, and professionalism more than political power or financial gain. Ambitious conservatives, not surprisingly, have always dominated the business world and it has been from this redoubt that the financers, strategists and tacticians of modern Conservatism have built, and still oversee, their plutocratic schemes.
The MacDonald commentary, dutifully endorsed by my CCSU colleague, is based on a single study produced with data from a single year (2015) to claim that the epidemic of racist policing in America is a myth. The proper inferences from the study are far too narrow to honestly support MacDonald’s politically motivated generalizations. In fact, at least one scholarly review of the study concluded that the data didn’t even support the narrow inferences of the study’s authors. Nonetheless, MacDonald has used this study repeatedly to claim that racist police brutality is a myth. The version disseminated by my CCSU colleague isn’t even the most recent in this regard. MacDonald recycled that piece for a Wall Street Journal Op-Ed on June 2nd, just one week after George Floyd’s murder. In the WSJ piece MacDonald referred to this study as “the latest in a series of studies undercutting the claim of police bias.” Oddly, she didn’t mention this “series of studies” last time she used this study. Given that it remains “the latest,” I’d say Ms. MacDonald is embellishing just a bit, wouldn’t you?
While MacDonald’s dishonest accounting of scientific evidence can be debunked chapter and verse, doing so is largely a waste of time and effort because it won’t reach the audience most in need of it. MacDonald understands and relies on this, knowing that her real audience is NOT made up of experts, but rather conservative pols, activists, media shills, and potential voters, none of whom have either the interest or inclination to closely scrutinize her work. However, Mathematician Aubrey Clayton has done us all the service of debunking the repeated use of this single study by conservative commentators (including MacDonald) in a recent, and very enlightening, Boston Globe op-ed. Conservatives like MacDonald rely on this lonely study very much like they relied on the same example over and over to paint President Obama as a Liar. Remember, “if you like your healthcare plan, you can keep it”? With Trump approaching 20,000 documented lies in office, even right wingers rarely trot out this one anymore, but they have not (yet) been similarly chastened by reality from their habit of repeatedly touting debunked or irrelevant statistics about police brutality.
MacDonald could care less about the flaws in her favorite data point, or the fact that it isn’t actually supported by that “series of studies” she referenced. For her, this study and any other useful “data” she can find or fabricate is merely fodder for deflecting liberal critics and criticism. She just needs the appearance of data-based argument to give her credibility with her non-expert target audience. Racism is a highly emotional issue for everyone, but since there is so much valid data and evidence of systematic racism in America, right wing gaslighters like MacDonald need to cherry-pick or manufacture data to help shield their target audience from inconvenient truths. After all, her audience is already convinced. Her job is to give them something to use against liberals trying to change their minds. Weak, out of context, or fake data, along with a healthy dose of hyperbolic trolling talking points (mean libs calling Republicans racists are the real racist) usually does the trick.
Folks like MacDonald, and my history department colleague, defend their support of and participation in this right-wing network of academics and quasi-academics who provide the Republican Party and Movement Conservatism with credentialed support and assistance by saying that they are merely trying to balance scales already tipped in a liberal direction in the academy, but the fact that there are leftwing academics similarly behaving badly is neither here nor there because the work of leftwing versions of MacDonald & Company are not heavily subsidized and widely distributed by billionaire plutocrats using a carefully constructed and now massive right-wing alternative media infrastructure that reaches its politically potent target audience 24/7/365. In other words, right wing plutocrats are NOT merely balancing the scales, they are paying fake experts, journalists, and opinion shapers to discredit standard weights and measures entirely, and it’s working. Republican electoral success over the past 50-plus years has far outpaced voter support for conservative public policy, in large part, because the right gave up on rational political persuasion and policy analysis a long time ago and went all in on sophisticated and well-coordinated marketing strategy and tactics instead. The debate about whether policy or politics should be emphasized, which remains heated on the American left, ended decades ago on the right.
Because one of America’s two major political parties is committed to an unholy alliance between Madison Avenue and Wall Street, while the other tries to speak rationally for and to Main Street and University Drive, professional journalists, in particular, struggle to find ways to provide fair and objective reporting on American politics. The right-wing’s alternative-reality infrastructure, developed over many decades to discredit reality-based experts and journalists in the eyes of average voters, continues to make it very difficult for honest journalists to pursue both professionalism and financial survival in the present hyper-competitive media marketplace. With the Fourth Estate caught between a rock and a hard place, it is vital that qualified professionals help fill the breach by calling out dishonest “expertise,” like that peddled by Ms. MacDonald and my CCSU colleague, as often and as vigorously as possible. Unfortunately, because doing so requires real expertise, considerable time and effort that distracts from honest pursuits, and at least some insulation from professional and/or financial pressure, the incentives to do this work are not very powerful.
If the dishonesty and anti-intellectualism of Trump-style conservatism could be defeated by a reality-inspired version of the same it would be a bit easier, but the reality-based community doesn’t have the luxury of fighting fire with fire here because they have to convince people of things they do not already believe. This is a burden that is not born by today’s conservative political actors. [It’s worth noting that this burden is also under-appreciated by many progressive political activists who do bear it.] Like it or not, effective democratic politics requires constructive thinking and rational argument, which is very difficult to fake or dumb down for popular consumption. Nonetheless, honest experts and analysts need to redouble their efforts to educate the public, by pushing back much harder against the avalanche of disinformation from the right.
Tenure and other norms of conduct in the academy have long been prime targets of conservatives, but truth-seeking academics remain more insulated from Trump-style personal attacks than journalists and other experts who are more vulnerable to popular, professional, and/or commercial pressures. Coordinated attacks on me by right-wing operatives over the years have not been pleasant or without personal cost, but neither have they seriously damaged my reputation or endangered my career (as near as I can tell).
MassPoliticsProfs, and other academic blogs like it, were created in part to transmit qualified and objective analysis and commentary to mass audiences without the same level of personal and financial vulnerability that commercial journalists, commentators, and experts face. We need still more such efforts and outfits, and we need to do a better job of incentivizing, promoting, and distributing to the public honest expert analysis and commentary about American politics. Senior academics, in particular, need to do more to get meaningful, persuasive, and digestible expert analysis and commentary to average Americans. Restoring sanity and integrity to America’s national political conversation is far too urgent in 2020 for any able-minded American to stay above the fray.