The Brooklyn Rail

“The mob is the mother of tyrants.”
–Diogenes

“Kings will be tyrants from policy when subjects are rebels from principle.”
–Edmund Burke

“The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants.”
–Thomas Jefferson

 

In his 2016 best-selling memoir Hillbilly Elegy, JD Vance proudly shared how he went from being a Marine to attending college on the GI Bill at Ohio State University, then went on to Yale Law School, and asserted how it was education that lifted him out of poverty. By 2021, however, during a speech titled “The Universities are the Enemy” at the National Conservatism Conference, Vance said, “We have to honestly and aggressively attack the universities in this country.” Most recently, in an interview with the European Conservative last February, Vance praised Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán’s most aggressive railing against what he called the “left-wing domination of universities,” which Vance said should be a model for the conservatives in the US.

This profound challenge to the legitimacy of our liberal democracy has been in part due to the gradual disappearance of our various local communities, or what we think of as our social capital: networks of civic engagement and community involvement. This visible decline in civic engagement is undoubtedly a mirror of our social and political affairs, at least in the last three decades, during which time the US evolved from a reluctant empire to finally claiming the unilateral triumph of its liberal democracy—hence reversing the once essential policies of containment and deterrence against its archenemy, the Communism of the Soviet Union. Now it has become very clear that all dictators are collaborating against the democratic West—be it Vladimir Putin, Xi Jinping, Kim Jong-un, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, Narendra Modi, Viktor Orbán—on the basis of a collective attempt to undermine and destroy our concept of a free and open society. In response, we must look back and see whether the mistakes that past administrations have made can be corrected as has been done in the past. As we look back, it’s hard to imagine how a number of significant events were allowed: how Bill Clinton gambled in favor of the global economy by welcoming China to the World Trade Organization in 2000; how George W. Bush invaded Afghanistan and Iraq; how Barack Obama assassinated Osama bin Laden only for ISIS to emerge; how Joe Biden undertook a chaotic evacuation of US troops from Afghanistan without thinking back to the Fall of Saigon in 1975; and how Donald Trump’s instigation of the January 6 attack on the US Capitol in defiance of the 2020 presidential election results challenged both the rule of law and the commitment to a peaceful transfer of power. I should add that both left and right alike, since the end of the Cold War, have shown similar tendencies in their deployments of foreign policy—which is to say bumptious at times, and at other times simply arrogant.

The global political left has been associated with the working class ever since the emergence of labor movements during the Industrial Revolution, proclaiming workers’ rights, demanding safe working conditions, advocating for fair wages, and engaging in other collective bargaining. By the mid-twentieth century, this productive synergy between the left and the working class reached its peak throughout the West, including the social democratic parties in Europe, the Labour party in the UK, and most especially the Democratic Party’s New Deal coalition in the US with its impressive expansion of federal prerogatives. That enduring bond between the left and blue-collar workers remained solidified and coherent for decades, until the arrival of the structural transformation of the global economy, which led to outsourcing to lower-wage countries, especially China, India, and elsewhere in Asia. This caused a profound sense of cultural displacement among the traditional working class, along with their looming anxieties on issues such as job security, stagnating wages, and, above all, self-worth. And right-wing populist movements have never failed to exploit such disquiets by offering the classic nationalist remedies, which include anti-free trade agreements and tightening immigration controls. Again and again, as the once “progressive left” has turned into the “cultural left,” moving from “class-based politics” to “identity politics,” there has been a growing perception that the left has become affiliated with educated elites, inevitably deepening the working class’s resentment. We might now ask, considering the psychology of “trading places” that has led us to this unintended consequence: how are we to mediate the Trump administration’s unrelenting process of destabilizing the world order? The US at this critical moment treats its adversaries abroad like allies and its allies abroad like adversaries. While at home Trump’s unpredictability has proven to be his most effective weapon against the left’s bureaucratic rigidity, it is now causing a good deal of economic commotion, which may in turn threaten his popularity.

There are a few things we should be mindful of as common attributes shared among dictators, autocrats, authoritarians, and tyrants—namely, their capacity for extreme violence; their ability to exploit their cult of personality; their ability to adopt religion for selfish ends; and especially their appetite for delusions of self-aggrandizement, even for world domination. If they can suppress what they deem as the alternatives—which include our creative friends and colleagues—and make artists, writers, poets, and members of the press “enemies of the state,” they can prolong and expand their rule before their inevitable fall from grace. Under Benito Mussolini, whatever was thought of as “anti-fascist”—in newspapers, in what was considered “degenerate” art and literature, or in other forms of cultural production—was to be banned. Under Joseph Stalin’s despotism, his persecution of poets and writers was known as the Great Purge: Osip Mandelstam, Anna Akhmatova, Boris Pasternak, and countless others were among the victims of house arrest, imprisonment, or execution. The same can be said of the infamous Nazi book burnings under Adolf Hitler. And in China, Mao Zedong is said to have asserted during the Great Cultural Revolution: “What’s so unusual about Emperor Shih Huang of the Chin Dynasty? He had buried alive 460 scholars only, but we have buried alive 46,000 scholars.”

Since April is a month we celebrate poetry, I thought of sharing the below poem entitled “Yarkhoto.” Written in 1980 by the great poet Ai Qing, father of our friend Ai Weiwei, it testifies to poetry’s powerful counter-friction against any form of tyrannical attempt to control people’s memory, and as a means to erase history:

 

It’s almost as if a caravan is wending its way through town
A clamor of voices mingling with the tinkle of camel bells
The markets bustling as before
An incessant flow of carts and horses

But no—the splendid palace
Has lapsed into ruin
Of a thousand years of joys and sorrows
Not a trace can be found

You who are living, live the best life you can
Don’t count on the earth to preserve memory

 

In solidarity with love, courage, and cosmic optimism as ever,

Phong H. Bui

P.S. This issue is dedicated to our friends and mentors, Fred Eversley (1941–2025), Pierre Joris (1946–2025), and Ricardo Scofidio (1935–2025), all of whom have profoundly contributed to how inventions of form and matter, unrestrained deployments of material, translations of thought in art, poetry, and architecture, can be fearlessly mobilized for greater autonomy and freedom. We’d like to send our deep condolences to their beloved members of their families, as well as close colleagues, admirers here and across the world.