President Donald Trump’s erratic rhetoric has veered into new territory with his recent assessments of Puerto Rico, Las Vegas and the sinister cabal of ‘fake news media’ that supposedly wishes to undermine his believed heroic efforts at presidency. Trump’s worldview, as evident from his Twitter feed, is one in which things occur passively rather than by causation.
I don’t believe there is anything anti-intellectual about Twitter, but Trump deploys a reductionist language that is as easily swallowed as segments of cable news. Phenomena such as “gun violence,” “global warming” and “racism” are either ignored, dismissed as fake news or left unnamed.
Instead, Americans live in a world and a nation that is subject to the whims of God and the subjectivity of destiny. Trump’s speech divides experience into a world of brute dichotomies of good and bad, “nice” (the citizens of Puerto Rico) versus “traitorous” (the NFL), fake news and truth.
Although I have always felt a sense of danger from his style of speech, it is most worrying to see it seep into our own discourse at Binghamton University. The administration’s response to the recent racist drawings in Endicott Hall of Newing College was wholly inadequate. The incident was “characterized as hateful and bigoted” and “inconsistent with the values of inclusion and engagement.” The word “racist” is never explicitly stated. It was only when racist drawings were found a second time in Onondaga Hall of College-in-the-Woods that University President Harvey Stenger used more specific terminology when denouncing the finding.
Now, in the United States, it seems as though evidence is up for debate and ultimately subjective. The pros and cons of a neo-Nazi being punched in the face are left to the niceties of salon debate. Counterprotesters assaulted and murdered by white supremacists are somehow responsible for the violence inflicted on them. All sides are equal in blame. Our president and the “alt-right” employ erasure to propagandistic effect. A similarly meek response from the administration, despite my belief that they are very much opposed to racism, is a feckless response to this new discourse and will do little to counter what is becoming the new status quo.
In “Anti-Semite and Jew,” philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre argues that anti-Semitism — and any form of bigotry — is a passion, not an opinion. He argues to try to debate an anti-Semite and you will find that “they know their remarks are frivolous … but they are amusing themselves … if you press them too closely they abruptly fall silent.”
The rhetoric or diction of a society exists in a hierarchy. Adaptation of specific styles at a higher level is then sifted through the pyramid of power into popular discourse, affecting consciousness and ideology as it is funneled down to the masses. This style of thought-negating speech must be countered at the highest level and through channels of power — independent of the executive branch of our country — if we are to resist sliding down the national funnel of racism and creeping authoritarianism.
Alec Weinstein is a senior majoring in English.