In 1919, William Butler Yeats wrote a poem with two lines that came to seem more timely as the century wore on:

The best lack all conviction, while

The worst are full of passionate intensity.

Within little more than a decade, fascism would be on the rise in Spain, Italy, Austria and Germany. And the fit of the two lines with our own time still seems disconcertingly tight.

On the Left, we find the woke-sters. Though they profess to maintain a united front in defense of The Oppressed, along with steadfast opposition to all Oppressors – it seems disconcertingly easy to find oneself expelled from the ranks of the Oppressed and demoted to the despised precincts of Oppressor. The wrong word, a telltale slowness to denounce the latest Enemy of the People (especially if our newest enemy used to be your personal friend) – and poof! You’re out! Down in the muck below! Forgotten! We don’t know you any more!

All the Oppressed who’ve been authenticated have their names on the Approved List. Don’t even think about siding with some perceived victim or sufferer who isn’t posted on the List.

The best way to maintain your standing with the Oppressed is to keep your head down. Once you get noticed, for any reason, good or bad, the dance gets trickier. You could easily get denounced in your turn. Btw, this syndrome hasn’t changed since the French Revolution’s Reign of Terror (ca. 1789-1799), the classic account of which is in G.W.F. Hegel’s Phenomenology of Mind. Nothing of importance has changed since Hegel first described it in his chapter titled, “Absolute Freedom and Terror.”

Now what does the “passionate intensity” look like on the Right? Those who are found ineligible for membership in the class of the Oppressed, often find themselves choking back anger. They may feel oppressed, but they don’t qualify for that social rank. They don’t want to be socially downranked, shunned, or fired, but whatever they say can be suddenly found out as racist, sexist, transphobic, binary, heteronormative, etcetera etcetera. Even if what they said was meant as a joke, they can still be unmasked. So they can’t be confident of being able to let off steam harmlessly. Further, they may be concerned that their children are being taught values or given verbal signals in school different from those approved at home. Additionally, they can’t be sure that experimental interventions concerning sex identity aren’t being advocated during school hours – those too without parental knowledge or consent.

On the American body politic, what do both the far Left and the far Right have in common? Both of these contending blocs appear to have – in one degree or another – given up on the democratic process. Each is showing a new-found tolerance for authoritarian shortcuts. In these respects, the Left and the Right are starting to look like mirror images of each other.

Back when the Constitution of the United States had just been ratified, Ben Franklin stepped outside the closed doors of the Convention and was asked what had been approved in that assembly. We all know his reply:

A Republic, if you can keep it.

Since those who still want to keep it are surely more than those who want authoritarian shortcuts, why can’t we just assume that our inherited, rights-bearing citizenship is the norm, always has been since the Constitution was first ratified, and leave it at that, without further concern?

In 1945, French philosopher Merleau-Ponty wrote an article on this topic titled, “The War Has Taken Place.” Before World War II, he and his elite classmates had simply assumed that the right of each human being to be treated with dignity and respect for that person’s moral and intellectual freedom was self-evident. But when the Nazis occupied Paris, they erased these rights. To get them back, the rights would need to be fought for. Rights were neither immune from assault nor self-perpetuating.

The lesson that the War taught Merleau-Ponty remains true in our time. The democratic norms don’t defend themselves. They don’t impose themselves. If we want them, we must defend them.

Years ago, when I was a Professor of Philosophy at Brooklyn College of The City University of New York, a new college president decided to sideline the college’s award-winning liberal arts curriculum, and put a new set of required courses in its place – all centering round the borough of … uh, Brooklyn! We had students whose parents came from all over the world. And they didn’t come there for their children to study the borough of Brooklyn!

I and a like-minded Professor in the History Department decided to fight this degrading of the courses that would in future be offered to our students. One of our first moves was to call a meeting of concerned faculty for the purpose of assessing the situation and planning effective strategies. 

Between us, we divided the calls to be made to colleagues.

We called one colleague after another. Many of those we called told us that they had given up on the college and were planning to take early retirement. Since I’m not a natural politician, I had to reach for any counter-argument I could think of. To one colleague, in desperation, I tried recounting a dream I’d dreamed the night before. Here’s how my dream went:

I was standing in the entrance lobby

of New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art

with its magnificent, high-domed ceiling overhead.

But the entrance lobby was cluttered

with moveable stalls marketing trinkets and junk items,

each stall bracketed by tall wooden spires

that interfered with the view of the high-domed ceiling.

In my dream, I exclaimed in distress:

Where will we go, in New York,

to see a noble prospect?

After a moment’s silence, my colleague from another Department (was it English? Art History?) said to me, “Okay, I’ll go to your meeting.”

As things turned out, we actually did win the fight. In the course of it, I met Jerry, who was an ally and advisor, and we fell in love. The story of our victory ran in most of the New York papers as well as the nationally read Chronicle of Higher Education.

What’s the moral? You don’t win ‘em all, but you don’t lose ‘em all either.

But you for sure lose the ones

you fail to fight.

Related Content: Press Coverage of Victory at Brooklyn College