Marc
Jongen, a right-wing anti-immigrant German politician, attended an
event at Bard College’s Hannah Arendt Center, sparking a bitter dispute.
The latest fight about campus speech is playing out among people who
normally agree on most things. The Hannah Arendt Center, at Bard College,
held its annual conference earlier this month, convened under the
heading “Crises of Democracy: Thinking in Dark Times.” The event
featured more than twenty speakers, ranging from the Occupy Wall Street
co-founder Micah White, on the left, to the German parliament member
Marc Jongen, on the right. (I was also a speaker.) Jongen’s appearance
at the conference has sparked a bitter dispute among Arendtians and some
other prominent academics—a dispute more interesting, if not necessarily
more nuanced, than other recent conflicts between far-right proponents
of “free speech” and those who oppose their presence at colleges and
universities.
Jongen, a former philosophy professor, is the intellectual face of
Alternative für Deutschland, the right-wing populist party that last
month surged from near-obscurity to claim the third-largest share of
seats in the Bundestag.
Explaining his decision to invite Jongen, the Arendt Center’s academic director,
Roger Berkowitz, wrote in an open letter last week that, with “majorities of people in Hungary,
Russia, Turkey, and Austria and . . . large pluralities of people in
France, Germany, and the United States (amongst other countries) . . . embracing ideas of democratic nationalism and democratic
authoritarianism,” he had felt compelled to invite a speaker to
represent the illiberal point of view.
Jongen obliged. During his talk at the conference, he began by
complaining that his party is unfairly smeared with the Nazi brush
because Germany is “haunted by the spectre of Hitler.” He lamented the
“new form of terrorism and the rise of crimes caused by immigrants,” and
called immigration “an act of violence” to which Germany has been
subjected. (He spent much of the rest of his allotted time attacking the
German Chancellor, Angela Merkel.) His speech would have seemed jarring
in almost any academic setting, but it was particularly jarring at the
Arendt conference—not only because Arendt herself was a refugee from the
Nazis, who had jailed her, but because she wrote extensively on the
impossibility of engaging with the present in the absence of a narrative
about the past. One suspects that Jongen’s framing demand, that his
views be considered without regard for Germany’s past, would not have
sat well with her.
Still, Berkowitz has made the case that Arendt would have wanted Jongen
at the conference. “Politics, for Arendt, is the exercise in expanding
our perspective and learning to see the world from as many different
viewpoints as possible,” he wrote in the open letter. “For
Arendt, hearing opposing opinions is the necessary condition for a
politics of plurality.” Leon Botstein, the president of Bard, who
studied with Arendt and has said that he owes his job to her (Arendt was
on the committee that hired Botstein more than forty years ago),
claimed that the great political theorist would have been disappointed with
academics who have raised objections to Jongen’s appearance. “The
invitation by an academic center on a college campus, even one named for
a distinguished individual, does not constitute either legitimation or
endorsement,” Botstein wrote. “Right-wing and neo-fascist parties are a
reality of modern political life. We cannot pretend they do not exist.
We need to hear what their representatives claim directly so that they
can be properly challenged.”
If the organizers’ intent was to facilitate a debate with a living
specimen of the new far right, it failed. What Jongen said had been
heard before, and could have been discussed in his absence. More to the
point, whatever the organizers’ intention, an invitation to talk at a
famous center at a prestigious college does lend legitimacy to the
speaker and his views. As an academic, Jongen will probably put this
invited talk on his résumé. As a politician, he has already posted a
recording of the talk on his Facebook page, with thanks to Berkowitz.
And the Center itself live-tweeted some of his more colorful statements
as he spoke—apparently shocking followers of the account who were not
present at the conference.
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“The center lent its institutional legitimacy and communicative power to
Jongen’s statements,” an open letter signed by more than fifty scholars,
and published in the Chronicle of Higher Education earlier this week,
said. Not only did the Arendt Center help amplify views aimed at
vulnerable groups that have less access to similar forums, these critics
said, but it also made no clear public effort to distance itself from
Jongen’s views. The signers of the letter included the political
theorist Andrew Arato and the philosopher Richard J. Bernstein, of the
New School, in New York; the philosopher Judith Butler and the political
scientist Wendy Brown, of the University of California, Berkeley; and
the preëminent German political theorist Rainer Forst.
In his own letter to the Chronicle of Higher Education, Botstein fired
back. “The self-righteous stance of the signatories and the moral
condemnation in the letter do, sadly, bear a family resemblance to the
public denouncements of the Soviet era by party committees in the arts
that put terror in the hearts of young musicians and writers, and
deterred them from speaking and acting against a group consensus,” he
wrote.
The Arendt scholar Peter Baehr went even further, in a
letter to the same publication, calling the critics’ group letter “Soviet style . . . academic mobbing.”
Arendt, who wrote the book on totalitarianism—much of it devoted to the
phenomenon of the mob—was probably spinning in her grave (which is on the Bard campus). She knew that actual Soviet collective efforts were
orchestrated from above; that the signatories to those letters never
engaged with the objects of their criticism, be they people or ideas;
and that the targets of Soviet mob efforts never had the kind of
personal and institutional support that Botstein has lent the Arendt
Center. If Berkowitz were the target of a “Soviet style” mob effort, as
Baehr put it, he’d have been purged from Bard by now, on his way to jail
or exile.
It took no longer than a few days for a debate among some of the Western
world’s best-known academics to devolve to a level of rhetorical
mud-slinging typical of so-called free-speech debates involving the
likes of the right-wing agitator Milo Yiannopoulos. More precisely, the
Arendt Center and its supporters have resorted to using the single stock
argument of self-proclaimed free-speech advocates: accusing the other
side of attempting censorship. To support his argument, Baehr has
pointed out that Jongen’s AfD is a legal political party supported by
six million Germans. But should everything that’s legal be represented
at a conference like this? Does the support of millions of Germans (or
Hungarians, or Americans) automatically entitle a politician (or
thinker, or writer) to be heard by hundreds, thousands, or millions
more?
As with all campus-speech debates, the free-speech argument obscures the
matter of resources: college budgets, Twitter accounts, and, yes, the
limited resource that is intellectual legitimacy. Although Arendt wrote
extensively about plurality, by which she meant the unique properties of
every human being who ever lived or will live, one would be hard-pressed
to find a place where she argued that every part of that plurality
should be represented at any given time. Nor did she ever advocate moral
or intellectual neutrality—on the contrary, she stressed the
responsibility to pass judgment and to recognize and call out evil. Most
famously, of course, she stressed the simplicity and the “preposterous”
nature of ideas that underlie evil: these were ideas to be called out,
not debated. She was also sensitive to the appearance of legitimacy that
an invitation can lend. In December, 1948, she signed a
letter to the Times about the visit to the United States of the Israeli
politician Menachen Begin, whose organization the letter likened to the
Nazi Party. The letter also warned that “irreparable damage” may be done by “public
manifestations in Begin’s behalf, and the creation in Palestine of the
impression that a large segment of America supports Fascist elements in
Israel.”
At the time, Begin seemed like a radical, marginal political figure. In
1977, two years after Arendt died, he became the Israeli Prime Minister.
In our time, we have a President of the United States who champions many
of the same ideas that Jongen does—though Donald Trump lacks Jongen’s
degree in philosophy and ability to form coherent sentences. It is
perhaps naïve, given Trump’s enormous platform, to think that a small
academic conference can significantly broaden the appeal of these ideas.
But this argument is not censorious. The conference matters, too.
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