More on Schapiro (and Morson)

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Commenters offered interesting links. One was to Heather MacDonald’s essay, which concludes

Schapiro’s condemnation of vandalism is welcome, even if, ideally, he would have spoken up against the national violence before he was himself subject to harassment. Time will tell whether his firm stand now will change the victim mentality on his own campus. For now, Schapiro is reaping what he has sown.

Another was an essay by Schapiro’s co-author, Gary Saul Morson. Called “suicide of the liberals,” if you combine it with MacDonald’s analysis it makes it seem as though Schapiro is a suicidal liberal. I also found my way to LeninThink, another Morson essay. Recommended.

[UPDATE: Another less-than-enthusiastic piece on Schapiro by John O. McGinnis, a law professor at Northwestern.]

15 thoughts on “More on Schapiro (and Morson)”

  1. When I see that the protest group’s acronym is NUCNC, I just can’t get the sound of the Three Stooges out of my head.

  3. From the Leninthink piece:

    “ When Leninism is significant, there will always be a spectrum going from those who really understand, to those who just practice the appropriate responses, to those who are entirely innocent. The real questions are: Is there such a spectrum now, and how do we locate people on it? And if there is such a spectrum, what do we do about it?

    There is no space to address such questions here. My point is that they need to be asked.”

    Now more than ever.

  4. I cannot help thinking that this situation (as summed up by Professor McGinnis) was well-described long ago.

    Israel hath cast off the thing that is good: the enemy shall pursue him….For they have sown the wind, and they shall reap the whirlwind.

  5. Leninists! I might agree with the diagnosis, but again I ask, is this man Morson actually being serious or is he just exaggerating for rhetorical purposes?

    If one diagnoses a patient with “stage 3 cancer”, but doesn’t prescribe throwing everything we have at the tumor before it metastatizes, then something is terribly wrong in that doctor’s chain of reasoning and his medical advice is worthless. I mean, if the patient wants to live.

    Does Schapiro even deserve one cheer, as a kind of participation trophy for showing up as an actual adult once in his life when the enemy is literally at his door, in the ultimate example of defining sanity down?

    What would Morty do if he discovered a herd of unicorns, oh, excuse me, a cell of white supremacists at his University? I think the response would have been three orders of magnitude more serious.

    I did a quick search for “Northwestern Expelled”. The algorithm was certain I must have mean Northeastern (in Boston), because a dozen students were dismissed for violating anti-covid protocols (mostly by having parties). Serious! More serious than throwing bricks, apparently.

    Ok, insist on Northwestern. Well, first dozen hits are one guy last year for drunken sexual assault in public in the library. Serious! National news!

    I see some stories about one student’s family being involved in the admissions cheating scandal, fraternities getting booted out almost 20 years ago for drinking and hazing. An article “Sorry Cops, You’re Expelled!” No, that’s not it.

    A story from three years ago about Brendan Amos who matched with some South Asian freshman girl at Dartmouth on Tinder, and trying hard to come off as a first class jerk, called her a “Sand-N-word”. Also very serious, also national news, not clear what if anything actually ended up happening to him.

    Oh, here’s an interesting one: Yuqi Zheng, who was expelled for buying one of those common fake documents online that says some psychologist determined you have a medical need to take your emotional support puppy to class with you.

    *Serious* stuff here.

    But what about these terrible neo-Bolsheviks then? Besides some stern “talk is cheap” words from Schapiro and right-wing commentary “they should be expelled!” (or arrested) well, I may have missed it, but I didn’t see any official warning from the university that anyone caught would suffer a fate as least as bad as Zheng got for dog fraud.

    As for actual Lenin, when he was 16, his brother Alexander tried to assassinate the Czar but was caught and hanged. When Lenin went to Kazan University, he joined a banned student society, and led a demonstration against the bad, for which he was not just expelled, but also exiled to his family’s estate.

    That probably seems pretty serious, but given what was going on at the time – NB: thirty years afterwards the Bolsheviks took power – it still wasn’t serious enough, because Lenin used the time to absorb all kinds of radical literature (like Chernyshevsky’s book with the original use of the title “What is To Be Done?” and which I think inspired Ibsen’s more famous “A Doll’s House”.)

    They relented on his mom’s appeal and let him back into the city, where he immediately got busy studying up on radical Marxism. A few years later, they let him take his exams externally at Univ. StP and he did great. A few years later at the age of 26 he was part of a big group arrested for sedition (with justice!) and eventually sentenced to three years of Siberian summer camp. (Seriously, look up what it was like. Back then it wasn’t even close to the hell the Bolsheviks made of it. It took nearly three months just to *get* there. The state doesn’t need prison bars if it sends you to the moon!) His lover was also arrested, told the authorities she was his fiance, and was allowed to join him in ‘exile’, where they were married!

    Then exile was over and it still wasn’t serious enough. Because Lenin *was* serious. The power couple got right back to work, and the rest is history. Catastrophically terrible history.

    Morson sees the light but through a pinhole.

    • But what to do about it?

      Given the many sensible state referenda decisions made this election (e.g. rejecting apartheid in California, rejecting corrupt and punitive taxation in Illinois) it seems to me that a constitutional amendment authorizing quarterly national initiatives and referenda would be a prudent and incremental, rather than radical, step forward in creating a sustainable future.

      Although many have proposed such a measure in the past (Gravel, et al) the highly successful Swiss measure would serve as perhaps the best model. See: https://www.admin.ch/opc/en/classified-compilation/19995395/202001010000/101.pdf

      The USA constitution would be amended to include something like:

      Amendment _____. Initiative and Referendum
      Art. 1. Popular initiative requesting the total revision of the Federal Constitution

      1. A. Any 10,000,000 citizens of the United States of America duly registered with the Federal Roll of Eligible Citizen Voters may within 18 months of the official publication of their initiative in the Federal Register by the Federal Bureau of Citizen Initiatives and Referenda propose an amendment to the Constitution of the United States.
      B. This proposal must be submitted to a vote of the registered and eligible citizen voters. Two thirds of ballots cast by such voters shall be necessary for the amendment to take effect and no such duly enacted amendment may be made subject to judicial review without a separate two-thirds vote authorizing such review.
      C. A federal justice or judge, including one otherwise tenured for life may be dismissed from office by such a two-thirds vote for any or no reason.
      D. A federal law may be adopted, repealed or amended through a similar vote by a simple majority of such citizen voters.
      É. A federal regulation may be repealed similarly by a two fifths vote

      Article 2.

      A. There is established an independent Federal Roll of Eligible Citizen Voters within the Legislature Branch.
      B. This Roll shall be administered by a council of 4 administrators, one each appointed by the majority and opposition leaders of the House and Senate.
      C. The purpose of the Roll shall be to:
      1. maintain an accurate and timely roll of eligible citizen voters who request inclusion and who provide substantive and verifiable evidence of their citinship and eligibility;
      2. conduct national initiative and referenda votes on the 30th day of each January, March, June, and September.
      3. Maintain an inventory of proposed initiatives and referenda and provide a means by which eligible citizen voters may indicate their endorsement of an initiative or referenda for publication in the Federal Register;
      4. Prompt and timely publication in the Federal Register of all initiatives and referenda that attain endorsement by 10,000,000 registered citizen voters.
      Article 3
      1. The activities of the Roll shall be funded by reserving 1 percent of all monetary receipts of the United States Treasury.
      2. Interference with the lawful conduct of such referenda or submission of false statements shall be a federal crime punishable by not less than one year imprisonment.

      Such an institution would go a long way towards building a consensus democracy and reigning in tyranny.

      • “But what to do about it?”

        Sit back and enjoy the entertainment. If the lefties want to destroy their own cities and universities, then by all means let them do it.

        My cable television subscription has gotten a lot more interesting over the past few months. Please pass the popcorn.

        • I had an ESPN+ subscription to watch NCAA volleyball but even that was all fomenting race hate all the time, so I cancelled today. That was the last of my paid subscriptions for anything. Let SiriusXM lapse. It’s free e-books off of Project Gutenberg from here on out. Not one penny of mine that I can avoid is going to finance leftist cultural tyranny.

      • edgar, I consider myself an “expert” on constitutional law. In the past 70 years, I have spent a lot of time analyzing constitutional issues. From my elementary-school indoctrination into Perón’s new Constitution in the early 1950s to the ongoing process for a new Chilean constitution (at least in the next 2 years, I will spend a lot of time educating a few former students and my grandchildren), and through my formation in Law schools, my teaching in Econ Departments, and my participation in many instances of reform in several countries, I have learned how to feel good about proposing great solutions and to feel bad about failing to persuade clients to fight for my proposals. I can tell you about the many battles I lost with my clients. If you want to win, you will have to play yourself —a necessary but not sufficient condition to win. If you have been a successful adviser to business people, don’t think you will succeed as an adviser to politicians.

  6. Take a break, Arnold. Later you can continue thinking is Schapiro and others should deserve to be canceled. Now, it’s time to decide what to do with a stolen election. Yes, Arnold, I’d like to hear your suggestions.

    FYI, the thieves have not been able to finish their work. They are still counting how many more fake votes they need for Biden to win.

    I know you are not a Republican but one is tweeting this

    Old GOP: “Republicans should have the good manners to have elections stolen from them with dignity.”
    New GOP: “There is no dignity in accepting media rigging, polling deception, and voting irregularities, particularly without a fight.”

  7. The HEE’s are turning the US into Petrograd for sure.

    What did I hear an old woman say in Petersburg? “I was born in Petrograd, lived in Leningrad, and will die in Petersburg.”

    This is the first stage of the American Petrograd.

  8. Based on your previous post, HEEs are the ones who decide whether ideals like free speech and expert neutrality are maintained. If — as is happening — expertise and the definition of things like free speech or racism get to be defined by one political side that dominates HEE, there is little likelihood in the long run that traditional non-elites will grant legitimacy to elite opinions. Ultimately, this will lead to the breakdown of liberal institutions. As we can see the HEEs join in this destruction in the belief that they can establish a new status quo with messages that they fully control. But as the history of the USSR and other such catastrophic failures have shown, there is no way to put the genie back in the bottle. I fear we have passed that point.

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