The fascist wrecking ball is here

The historians all saw this coming. In a prophetic post from long long ago (2023), Ruth Ben-Ghiat explains the authoritarian playbook, and it all starts with stifling the universities.

As the GOP transforms into an autocratic entity allied with foreign far-right parties and governments, it’s worth understanding how Orbán and other illiberal leaders target universities. They don’t only shut down intellectual freedom and change the content of learning to reinforce their ideological agendas, but also seek to remake higher education institutions into places that reward intolerance, conformism, and other values and behaviors authoritarians require.

She then reviews the strategies used by tyrants like Viktor Orbán, Benito Mussolini, Augusto Pinochet, César Ruiz Danyau, and Ron DeSantis, who all cracked down hard on the universities. Their usual approach is to declare themselves the guardians of public morality, while deploring the licentiousness and depravity going on with young people in college (an idea that can only be fostered if you’re totally ignorant of what’s going on in college — most of my students are more worried about grades, social rank, and what they’re going to do after they graduate.) Of course LGBTQ students are great scapegoats, but only if your imagination is unfettered by reality.

Much of this repression has centered on LGBTQ populations. A 2018 ban on gender studies preceded the 2020 end of legal recognition of transgender and intersex people. In 2021, a law outlawed any depiction or discussion of LGBTQ identities and sexual orientation, and some universities came under the authority of “public trusts” run by Orbán cronies.

LGBTQ students are even more worried about the future than our cis-het students. The authoritarian impulse is always to find the most threatened minority and bully them as an example to everyone else. They must destroy anyone who deviates from the mandatory, uniform pattern of behavior that the dictator demands…which means they must accuse both variations from the required breeder lifestyle and those who think seriously about the cultural consequences of our actions of being agents of chaos.

Watch for higher education professionals to be increasingly targeted as agents of the destruction of family, decency, and nation as GOP politicians compete to seem more extremist and authoritarian —which will bring them even further into line with autocrats such as Orbán.

Far from being “ivory towers” closed off from society, higher education institutions are often front-line targets of those who seek to destroy democracy. What happens on campus reflects, and often anticipates, transformations of societies as authoritarianism takes hold.

This was all written before the presidential election, at a time when many of us were pretty confident that the electorate couldn’t possibly put a criminal grifter in charge. Ha ha ha, we were so innocent.