Privilege

The Shame We Feel in what our Nation has Become is the Road to Transformation

An old joke that my friend Emily taught me when I received tenure.

Q: What's the difference between a raging mother bear and a tenured professor?
A: You can intimidate the bear.

What I am finding is that, for me at least (because quite frankly many many tenured professors have been so cowed by the procedure of getting tenure that they don't live the meaning of this joke), being a retired tenured emerita full professor has made me even braver and bolder than I was as a brave and bold tenured professor. The times demand it.

Privilege is a resource, meant to be spent down, not hoarded. Use what you've got in terms of privilege right now, because many of the people on the front line of this hideous Republican Regime’s attack have no privilege, and are rightfully afraid. Immigrants (regardless of status, as is now clear), foreign exchange students, disabled people, transgender people (especially teens). We have a world to defend, and a world that could be much better than what it is trending towards now, and better than what it was in 2024, or 2012, or 1993, or 1948 or 1865 or 1776. It HAS TO BE BETTER. None of us who has privilege (whether of white skin, or wealth, or cis-gender, or citizenship, or English-as-first-language, or heterosexuality, or class, or access to education) got that privilege because we "deserved" it or "earned" it - and likewise no one who is marginalized and/or currently under attack "deserves" or "earned" that status.

Use your privilege to dismantle privilege.

Shame and Revolution

I am proud to be an American. After all, I am a scholar of American history and, as a traveler, I’ve visited (and have lively memories from) all fifty states. But right now, my feelings about the United States are Shame, Anger, and Fear. And SAF is the opposite of SAFE! As someone who was born and raised Catholic before becoming an out-and-proud apostate,¹ I can honestly say that guilt and shame are ever-present for me, and so it is a joy to reclaim them for the revolution!

In 1843, Karl Marx faced a similar moment. He describes it in a brief letter to his friend Arnold Ruge:

I am now traveling in Holland. From both the French papers and the local ones I see that Germany has ridden deeply into the mire and will sink into it even further. I assure you that even if one can feel no national pride one does feel national shame, even in Holland. In comparison with the greatest Germans even the least Dutchman is still a citizen. And the opinions of foreigners about the Prussian government! There is a frightening agreement, no one is deceived any longer about the system and its simple nature. So the new school has been of some use after all. The glorious robes of liberalism have fallen away and the most repulsive despotism stands revealed for all the world to see.

This, too, is a revelation, albeit a negative one. It is a truth which at the very least teaches us to see the hollowness of our patriotism, the perverted nature of our state and to hide our faces in shame. I can see you smile and say: what good will that do? Revolutions are not made by shame. And my answer is that shame is a revolution in itself; it really is the victory of the French Revolution over that German patriotism which defeated it in 1813. Shame is a kind of anger turned in on itself. And if a whole nation were to feel ashamed it would be like a lion recoiling in order to spring. I admit that even this shame is not yet to be found in Germany; on the contrary, the wretches are still patriots. But if the ridiculous system of our new knight [Frederick William IV of Prussia came to the throne in 1840] does not disabuse them of their patriotism, then what will? The comedy of despotism in which we are being forced to act is as dangerous for him as tragedy was once for the Stuarts and the Bourbons. And even if the comedy will not be seen in its true light for a long time, yet it will still be a revolution.

The state is too serious a business to be subjected to such buffoonery. A Ship of Fools can perhaps be allowed to drift before the wind for a good while; but it will still drift to its doom precisely because the fools refuse to believe it possible. This doom is the approaching revolution.

Re-reading this I was surprised by how accurately it describes our situation - and here was Marx describing the conditions that would lead to the suppressed European revolutions of 1848 (the same year that saw the Seneca Falls Convention here in the United States, another form of revolution). I’ve highlighted some passages that show that - in particular how “the glorious robes of liberalism have fallen away and the most repulsive despotism stands revealed for all the world to see.” This is why I am continuously cautioning against depending on the Democrats. I do not think their vision is large enough for what we need. Because remember, they were, when in power this century, holding things steady, but not effectively challenging the sprawling roots of what is now a home-grown fascism. They didn’t have a genuine vision for the future, and I don’t think they do now. They believe in “the glorious robes of liberalism” but wearing those same robes lulled them to sleep about the corrosion happening within the robe itself - Fox News, the Tea Party, Charlottesville. Somehow the Democrats thought that the “glorious robe of liberalism” - if they re-donned it after the first term of the Don - would miraculously save us. It didn’t. The rot was even deeper, leading to the re-election of a now full-slate across-all-three-branches-of-government, of the MAGA Republican Party. When the “robe of liberalism” fell, what are we left with? “The most repulsive despotism stands revealed".” And here we are, folks.

So Marx says this can demonstrate to us the “hollowness of our patriotism, the perverted nature of our state and to hide our faces in shame.” This is the important moment. We can love our country, our native land, this place - but we have to recognize that our patriotism, if given to a perverted notion of government-morphing-to-tyranny, is a cause of SHAME. Because shame can be revolutionary. Marx suggests that “shame” is when our anger at the state turns inward, and with it we coil up like a lion waiting to strike. This Republican Regime is stealing our country, our dreams, our struggles, our history, for many of our fellow citizens our livelihood, likely soon our freedom - and all this while destroying the economy. The fact of our shame - our collective shame, as we could see at Saturday’s “Hands Off” demonstration - creates both self-examination of our previously held principles, and external anger at the open corruption of everything in inhuman and inhumane ways. Thus, to be a wonky wordy-nerdy Marxist-Hegelian dialectician, shame is both Subjective and Objective, and, in our situation, a tool for positive change.

As someone with knowledge of American history, this is not the first time I have felt shame about our country. Far from it! The country’s founding in imperialism and genocide of Native peoples; the enslavement of people stolen from their homes and lives in Africa; the horrors of segregation and lynching; the mistreatment of our genuinely human revolutionaries (from the marginalization of Thomas Paine to the abuse of Abolitionists to the water hoses turned on the Civil Rights movement to the mockery of Feminist and LGBTQ heroes, etc. etc.), the institution of our own forms of American global imperialism; the internment of Japanese-Americans - to name a few. But what makes this moment qualitatively different is the totality of the attack on what had been markers of actual progress.

Dr. King in his “I Have A Dream” speech, intoned

“When the architects of our republic wrote the magnificent words of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, they were signing a promissory note to which every American was to fall heir. This note was a promise that all men would be guaranteed the inalienable rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”

What I am saying is that the current Republican Regime is breaking the last treaty - they are tearing up the “promissory note.” Now, anyone who knows American history (especially Native history), knows there’s nothing new about America reneging on a treaty. But as long as the clear words of the Bill of Rights, of the Civil War Amendments, of the Declaration of Independence - as long as those had any functional value, and their functionality was shared by the people and those in power, incremental progress was possible. There were always cynics in politics who tried to work around them; there were always people who hated those sentiments (such as racists, sexists, white supremacists, and so on). But the words remained, and remained (as Dr. King points out) as a debt unpaid, a “promissory note” that the people of the country were the heirs to, and which freedoms they/we richly deserved. Unfulfilled but still an ever-present goal. And you can’t reach the target if you don’t have a target.

“Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” How’s that holding up in 2025? The liberty of people is being obviously, blatently, openly stolen by ICE (I am still astounded that their Gestapo’s actual name is inhuman). Nearly every way in which I, personally, pursue happiness is under attack - and that is true for many others as well.² They haven’t started killing yet in great numbers - either in their ICE detention facilities or in war - but they have commenced their murderous ways. Many of those they kill will be invisible - the elderly whose Medicaid is stolen from them by the wealthy, the kids not getting vaccinated, the immigrants returned to countries where they will face political persecution. Others will be more obvious, and ominous. Ominous enough that I don’t want to make them any more real by writing them here, but we all know what happens in authoritarian one-party states.

The Ship of Fools

Ah! The Ship of Fools. Beloved image of philosophers, because, well, philosophers have cultivated the ability to see what’s happening as it happens. Oftentimes, as Marx noted in his Theses on Feuerbach, “The philosophers have only interpreted the world….the point is to change it.” And so noting that there is a Ship of Fools governing our nation, while a sign of perspicacity, is insufficient to the moment. We have to understand what the Ship of Fools is doing, where it is going, and how to stop it, in order to embark on a better, healthier voyage.³

Of all things, the Wikipedia article on “the Ship of Fools” saved me the trouble of having to look up the Platonic source, from Plato’s Republic:

“Imagine then a fleet or a ship in which there is a captain who is taller and stronger than any of the crew, but he is a little deaf and has a similar infirmity in sight, and his knowledge of navigation is not much better. The sailors are quarrelling with one another about the steering -- every one is of opinion that he has a right to steer, though he has never learned the art of navigation and cannot tell who taught him or when he learned, and will further assert that it cannot be taught, and they are ready to cut in pieces any one who says the contrary. They throng about the captain, begging and praying him to commit the helm to them; and if at any time they do not prevail, but others are preferred to them, they kill the others or throw them overboard, and having first chained up the noble captain's senses with drink or some narcotic drug, they mutiny and take possession of the ship and make free with the stores; thus, eating and drinking, they proceed on their voyage in such a manner as might be expected of them. Him who is their partisan and cleverly aids them in their plot for getting the ship out of the captain's hands into their own whether by force or persuasion, they compliment with the name of sailor, pilot, able seaman, and abuse the other sort of man, whom they call a good-for-nothing; but that the true pilot must pay attention to the year and seasons and sky and stars and winds, and whatever else belongs to his art, if he intends to be really qualified for the command of a ship, and that he must and will be the steerer, whether other people like or not, the possibility of this union of authority with the steerer's art has never seriously entered into their thoughts or been made part of their calling. Now in vessels which are in a state of mutiny and by sailors who are mutineers, how will the true pilot be regarded? Will he not be called by them a prater, a star-gazer, a good-for-nothing?”

Like the earlier quote from Marx’s letter to Ruge, there is in this a shock of recognition - the blustering power-mad ignorance of the MAGA crew (consider Laura Loomer walking into the Oval Office to get National Security people fired), the internecine battles, and the castigation of anyone who knows anything as a “good-for-nothing” - all this describes our current dilemma.

John Alexander, Ship of Fools, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington DC

What Marx implies - and I think he is correct - is that the Ship of Fools can only be stopped by a counter-force of greater strength: a revolution of humanity against tyranny. But first he reminds us that human government is serious business. Given that we need some form of regularizing our projects, conflicts, and creativity with each other, we need to be serious about the gravity of that project. So the Ship of Fools will drift in its buffoonery, but the good sense of people will end up upending it. Because we have to.

The state is too serious a business to be subjected to such buffoonery. A Ship of Fools can perhaps be allowed to drift before the wind for a good while; but it will still drift to its doom precisely because the fools refuse to believe it possible. This doom is the approaching revolution.

Let us collectively be the doom of this Ship of Fools - but let’s not sink their ship without having a better vision of what to build and where to go. It is never enough to only know what one opposes. We must also know what we are for. It is not yet scripted (there is no equivalent of “Project 2025” for the revolution, and if anyone offers you a ready-made blueprint, howl with laughter and reject it out of hand).

This Ship of Fools won’t flatten us out, or tear up our Promissory Note, unless we let it. And last Saturday’s protests show that WE THE PEOPLE are ready to rise up and REFUSE THE FASCISTS!

We can do better. We will do better. We must do better.

We have a planet to save, a planet full of humanity, contradictions, nature, ideas, histories, and more, always more.

1. One of the most oft-repeated prayers, every catholic mass, includes the words “I am not worthy” - which remains absolutely imprinted on my brain!

2. A brief list of things that I do to pursue happiness. I think you can see how I would feel that many of these are under direct attack: reading, making research visits to archives, writing about intersectionality and the great American revolutionaries of the Abolitionist movement, bird-watching, appreciating National Forests/Parks/Wildlife Refuges, searching tree trunks for lichens, kissing my wife, voicing my political opinions, hoping/working to keep the planet alive, listening to music that has intellectual depth, enjoying cuisine from around the world, trying to bring happiness to my mother as she ages, etc. etc. etc. PLEASE ADD SOME OF WHAT YOU DO FOR PLEASURE THAT IS UNDER ATTACK (in the comments)

3. Note that Tucker Carlson wrote a book under the title Ship of Fools, pillorying the Democrats. The projection that the MAGAists practice is quite telling. Every accusation is a confession. Never forget that. It helps provide clarity nearly every day.