DC, City of Despair
I am working on my French New Wave project and trying to come up with an approach to my first more detailed discussion of specific films. I have a lot of notes, but I’m still experimenting with putting things together. I promise to have something soon, but it may take another week.
I’ve also been quite distracted by the despair that has become something of an ambient environment in Washington, DC. I don’t know politicians and political staffers, but I know plenty of federal workers. This is a company town, and the company is the federal government. Friends and acquittances work at USAID, DOJ, Library of Congress, NIH, NEH, The Kennedy Center, Commerce, Transportation, and the Park Service. As the authors of Project 2025 have said, the goal has been to make federal bureaucrats feel under assault, traumatized, and villainized. And that is working, people are furious, they feel abandoned by Democrats, by their country. No one knows if they will still have a job on a day-to-day basis; they are watching outrageous and illegal takeovers of their databases and networks by Musk’s team. It is a demoralized city, and it’s palpable to any resident.
More or less what we are watching, in my opinion, is the final destruction of the welfare and regulatory state that was a hard-won victory of the movements for democracy in the 20th century—the creation of some buffer between the rapacious immorality of capitalism and people’s day-to-day life through a regulatory bureaucracy that could constrain the worst excesses, help provide safety nets, and fund social goods beyond war and prisons. Others can argue about budget issues and how small the expenditures of the regulatory and grant apparatus are in the federal budget compared to everything else. What I am certain of is that most Americans’ lives are about to get significantly worse, and the demoralization in DC is a prelude to a country cast into despair. Government function is being reduced to defense, deportation, prisons, and pay-to-play handouts to oligarchs. The consequences will be far-reaching, but the most sinister part of this is how obvious the lies were that convinced so many Americans to vote for this stripping away of democratic power.
And make no mistake, regulation and grant funding is democracy in action, not an unaccountable bureaucratic deep state. These are the institutions that ensure the things we fought for and voted for, like The Clean Water Act, the Labor Rights Act, Consumer Financial Protections, Voting Rights, Arts Funding, Health Research Funding, University Research Programs, Student Financial Aid, The National Parks continue to function at all. Don’t believe for a second Musk’s lie that he’s eliminating waste; he’s preventing the federal bureaucracy from functioning, overturning enacted legislation through fiat, with almost no constraints or consequence.
I can speak to the immediate destructive consequences of this. I can’t go into details, but we are currently in contract negotiations for my union, and they are not going well. But we have no recourse because, at the moment, federal labor law is not enforceable. The National Labor Review Board has been made non-functional. This is the body that reviews all Unfair Labor Practice filings (ULPs) against employers and adjudicates them, but because of the removal of members by Trump, it does not have a quorum and is not able to meet and process ULPs. If employers were to fire employees, vindictively, for practicing their organizing rights (such as a right to strike), there would be no recourse. We can talk about how our major unions simply need to get more militant and strike-ready (since you can’t fire everybody) to wage labor conflicts more aggressively, and I would agree. But right now, the law within which collective bargaining has functioned essentially does not exist, and knowing that employees are being intimidated into accepting bad contracts with little to no resistance. This is happening now, and those contracts will last for years because of the way democracy is being overturned by Musk and Trump. The National Labor Act was fought for and won democratically. It has not been repealed by Congress, but functionally, workers have to proceed as if it does not exist at the moment, under an atmosphere of fear, intimidation, and curtailed rights. And employers are capitalizing on it to force things unions would never accept under normal conditions.
We are also preparing in Higher Ed for a much more extreme crisis. We already had a moment of chaos with the temporary grant funding payout freeze, but talking to people outside of higher education, I’m not sure Americans recognize how much education and research for the public good was thrown into crisis even by two days of funding being stopped. I’m not in the sciences; I am not particularly dependent on grant funding, so it did not impact me directly. But any longer-term cuts would, because the university would have to make up the losses somehow, and they would have to start doing massive cuts across campus to meet the shortfalls.
Paul Musgrave does a much better job than I do explaining the crisis Higher Education is facing here, and I recommend everyone read this post to understand what we are facing. It is the end of Higher Education as we have known it in the United States, and it’s already triggering the flight of top researchers from jobs in this country. It is a disaster, and it may not be possible to stop at this point. And if you feel like this doesn’t matter, I wonder if you’ve thought about what it means for something like cancer research and treatment.
One area where I have great fear is around student financial aid. The student body at my university is heavily dependent on federal financial aid. All signs and rumors are pointing to massive cuts to things like Pell Grants in the next budget. Federal student financial aid processing is already broken, and cutting staffing to the bare bones is only going to destroy processing capacity even more. Many universities are already facing larger enrollment drops; this will only escalate with the withdrawal of needed financial aid packages either through budget cuts or processing failures.
Very shortly, possibly by next fall, far fewer students will attend colleges, far fewer people will have jobs teaching at colleges, and research funding is going collapse. When I go teach my classes, I’m overcome with the immense despair of realizing up to half of us in the room (myself included) may not be able to return in the fall. I wonder if this level of loss and societal despair is really what Americans voted for, but then I think about the rhetorics of anger, revenge, and resentment that drove the Trump campaign, and I realize this is exactly what they wanted, all the people they hated as “elites” to suffer. It hardly needs to be said how absurd that is as a categorization for public employees and university workers, all of whom make far less than what they could make in the private sector and less than many Trump voters, especially when you factor in housing costs. And when it’s the richest man in the world and his cronies leading the attack.
There’s also a lot of anger at Democrats. Federal employees rightly feel like they are being abandoned by the party whose horizon of imagination seems to be limited to fundraising and the next election when the damage will already be irreversibly catastrophic. Patrick Nathan takes the decadence of Democratic politicians to task here, and I have nothing to add.
We Asked for Leaders, Not Influencers - by Patrick Nathan
It’s customary to end a post like this with a positive note or a call to action. But I can’t muster it. Things are very bad; the bottom is falling out for my neighbors, for myself, my students, and colleagues, and very soon, the rest of the country. If you voted for this, I have nothing but anger and hatred for what you’ve done to all of us. And this doesn’t even scratch the surface of the suffering you’ve inflicted on immigrants, USAID aid recipients, Palestinians, trans people, Ukrainians, Europeans (imagine being a German seeing the American vice president speak to AfD, the modern Nazis), and yourself and your children. It’s just the beginning.
But my anger only goes so far before it exhausts itself and starts turning inward into depression and pointless, aimless self-excoriation. Others seem to be acting like rats in a cage and furiously arguing with the very people they should be organizing with in solidarity to fight this, casting blame instead of coming together. So I’m trying to do something else, find and hold to my senses of loss, of what is being lost and how to conserve it in my heart, at least.
I recently watched Francois Truffaut’s 1966 adaptation of Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451. It was the famous French director’s only English language film, made at Pinewood Studios in London. It’s an infamous failure, and Truffaut never liked the outcome much, having had a very frustrating, troubled production. And it is flawed, but I was surprised by its dreamy pathos. It is less effective as a story about a totalitarian regime that burns books and more successful as a melancholy reflection on the profound loss of a world that has ceased to read. Its action sequences don’t work and the main characters are underwritten, but its closing moments stirred something in me.
The protagonist has fled into exile to join a community called “Book People.” These are people who have memorized entire books, changed their names to the book they memorized, and wander a woods encampment reciting them out loud as snow falls. There is this overwhelming sadness of the human books in exile, of desperately trying to maintain human access to that conversation that is culture, even as the whole world has refused it.
Being a university humanities teacher, what I do, in essence, is to introduce students to that ongoing conversation and try to give them the tools and confidence to join in. But humanities departments are collapsing, reading is replaced by Chatbot inquiries and physical books are almost completely disappearing from campuses. Faculty experience intense alienation on and off campus and barely have time for discussion with each other. As the pressures and stresses students face make reading seem an extravagant use of time they can’t afford, as they lose access to books themselves through flailing university bookstores poorly managed by Barnes and Noble, overwhelming expenses elsewhere, and cuts to library funding, I start to feel like a book person in exile, having lost any hope of being part of an ongoing conversation and carrying into the future. I fear soon that exile will be complete when all our jobs and students disappear, but I will hold onto what I know has value and meaning and pass it on to whoever will listen. I don’t know what else to do.