strategist Roger Ailes, the threat to literary studies Mitchell cites is implicated in a decades-long pattern of practice, with obvious strategic value for anyone who might wish to manipulate definitions of the mainstream in US politics and culture. The damage done to Nixon’s agendas by student activism and investigative reporting has apparently not gone unanswered, as his party has sought to maintain its title to values and principles of democracy that are often contradicted by its deeds. By redefining his opponents as evil antagonists in an eternal struggle between ascension and decline, Reagan set the tone for the next 50 years of partisan struggle.
Of course, such observations about patterns of behavior, systemic consistencies and strategic incentives can be mistaken for conspiracy theory, as we will discuss in connection with Eve Sedgwick’s reflections on the AIDS epidemic in the United States. This ambiguity between conspiracy and what she calls “systemic oppressions” has often been used to the right’s advantage: Whether it be Zionist protocols, global communist plots, jihadist terror, or immigrant invasions, the right’s grand narratives inevitably define the outgroup against which aggression is permitted as an inexplicably powerful cabal drawn from the marginalized or disempowered side of an asymmetrical struggle. Like the self-aggrandizing, self-universalizing fantasy of a “silent majority” living in a “city on a hill,” melodramas of victimization in which powerful and wealthy white men are beset by demonized and demeaned minority subalterns completely ignores systemic inequities. So while this dimension of narrative, poetics and interpretation is incomparably important to the reproduction of power, it is an often underestimated and overlooked aspect of US politics and history. The period of US history in which minority rule, information bubbles and fake news have blossomed as primary drivers of public policy has been the same period in which the academic centers of expertise in narrative, poetics and interpretation have been systematically defunded and disempowered. This need not be misread as a conspiracy in order to be acknowledged as a systemic consistency that accords with the right’s strategic incentives.
As Mitchell observes of the eighties and Orwell of the forties, we still live in an age in which there is no escaping politics—and in politics, there is no escaping interpretation. Just now, in an interview with the New York Times Book Review, a Yale professor in his seventies is defending the “aristocratic spirit” of the university against the “egalitarian and democratic values” of US political culture.13 While he assures us he does not object to these values in our political life, Anthony Kronman speaks of the dangers of importing such values into academic life. As if the university were a walled sovereignty upon which students were imposing their foreign democratic culture, or else an apolitical realm in which questions of power were suspended, he accuses students of engaging in the “politicization of academic life.”14 Seemingly unaware that his aristocratic values are as political as democratic ones, Kronman’s argument illustrates the self-aggrandizing fantasies of victimization that are so often voiced by the most privileged wealthy white men, fantasies we will see recur throughout this book. Kronman calls the attempt to democratize higher education an “assault on American excellence,” and by defining his own values as universal, he remains etymologically true to the aristos of his preferred spirit. He warns against an invasion, already underway, of the demos into Yale’s rarified halls, bringing with them “Orwellian” attempts at “purification” and restriction of speech on campus.
It is easy to forget that the term “aristocracy”—even in the analogical sense of “spiritual aristocracy” that Kronman invokes here—is already partisan in its valorizing redefinition of oligarchy, or minority rule, as rule by the best. The distinction “best” presumes a universalized standard of value, a central referent which would guarantee that the excellence Kronman celebrates is not merely relative or contingent, but is universal and necessary, defined by those “distinguished not in this or that particular endeavor [...] but in the all-inclusive work of being human.” His use of a vocabulary of inclusion to define an exclusionary ethos is an echo of William Bennett and Walter Jackson Bate, whose rhetoric of crisis in the humanities was provoked by challenges to the aristocratic, white, heteronormative, masculinist canon that for so long centered humanistic study. Kronman’s reaction to this destabilization of an exclusionary standard of value is indicated by the anecdote that begins his book, concerning one residential unit adviser at Yale who decided to abandon the traditional title of “master,” because “he understood why black students in particular might be sensitive to the use of the term.”15
Immediately after recounting this facially reasonable decision, Kronman mocks it as a clear demonstration of the inferior intelligence of both the would-be “master” and the black students about whom he articulated concern:
I found it hard to believe he was serious. In an academic setting, the word “master” carries none of the connotations the complaining students found offensive. Instead of mindlessly deferring to their feelings, the master of Pierson should have told them what is obvious—that in this setting the word has an altogether different meaning.16
This is the implicit interpretive theory of privilege in action. Connotations, in Kronman’s view, should apparently be erased and reset at every institutional threshold, to be defined solely by those with the preponderance of institutional power. In that view, meanings are not carried over from a more familiar to a less familiar usage or rhetorical situation. Instead, words mean what those in power say they mean. Kronman treats as “obvious” the presumption that Yale tradition decides what words mean for all those who tread on its campus, and insists no other connotations are valid, no matter how the language or its population of users might change over time. The decision to alter one’s vocabulary in response to altered conditions or audiences is here depicted as ridiculous, unserious or “mindless,” as laughably irrelevant as a student’s “feelings.” But any thinking that disavows feelings thereby ignores key aspects of its own occasion, frame and motor, just as much as any inquiry that disavows its historical and social implication.
Kronman’s characterization of such incidents as posing “Orwellian” dangers to campus life at Yale illustrates that, just as Reagan and his eighties are too often reduced to stock characters of popular myth, so too are Orwell and his forties. It should not be surprising that even the briefest review of Orwell’s warnings against politicizing speech, in “Politics and the English Language,” reveals an argument that contradicts Kronman’s reference. But it would be a dire mistake to avoid discussing such simplistic instrumentalizations of historical and literary figures and events: first, because they are so often carried out by the privileged and powerful, like this former Dean of Yale Law School. Silence on the overly familiarized tropes of mythologization or hagiography actually helps to reproduce them, as their alternative and antidote is not demonization or dismissal, but careful attention. To become familiar, after all, is to recede from attention, and figures like Reagan or Orwell are misremembered because they are referenced but not recalled. The most certain way to humanize and contextualize mythological figures is to attend closely to their words and deeds, drawing conclusions from the patterns discerned there, rather than from reputation, expectations or received wisdom.
Writing just a few months after World War II ended, Orwell reminds us of the tenor of the time when he epitomizes its political speech in some “familiar phrases”: “bestial atrocities, iron heel, bloodstained tyranny, free peoples of the world.”17 Orwell mocks these as hackneyed figures, robotically repeated, in conformity with the general rule that “orthodoxy […] seems to demand a lifeless, imitative style.” But his point is not primarily stylistic. Nor is he proposing an aesthetic program—even though, like Williams’s insistence on “no ideas but in things,” Orwell’s advice emphasizes the importance in writing of “calling up mental pictures.” His primary concern is the political force of such images, which the political speech he cites is designed to neutralize. The familiar phrases are designed to repulse their readers’ attention, by means of “euphemism, question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness.” By drawing attention to them, Orwell’s “defense of the English language” presents an alternative to the “defense of the indefensible” accomplished through obfuscation and distraction. He reminds readers
