Buried in these materials is a road map for a career that will never be and projects that will never be completed. They were so incipient, I’ll admit there is room for healthy debate about whether they would have been completed even if I had somehow gotten the job. So let’s not mistake this for a sob story. But I do want to introduce one of these seeds, not only because I find it interesting, but because this peculiar medium of Substack affords me the kind of freedom that academic publishing can’t: a chance to introduce an idea in the hopes that some place, somewhere, someone might be interested in taking it on and developing it. If you’re out there, run with it.

Timeless Enemies

For almost fifteen years, culminating with the publication of my first book in 2019, my scholarly life was centered on Armenians from the Ottoman Empire who, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, migrated between their homes in what is today eastern Turkey and the United States and Canada. I say migrated between because many eventually returned—either temporarily or permanently—from their long sojourns abroad. They migrated despite Ottoman state policy that forbade most Armenians from both migrating to and returning from North America. For the sake of brevity, I will recommend you check out the book if you would like to learn more about the background here.

Migration bans and border control regimes have the perverse effect of driving migration underground. Migrant smuggling economies in Mexico and along the Mediterranean are direct outgrowths of US and European immigration policies. Likewise, the Ottoman Empire’s migration ban helped to create a booming migration smuggling economy that connected migrants’ hometowns to smugglers on the Ottoman coast, hoteliers in European transit ports, and compatriots embedded in Armenian migrant colonies throughout the United States who made sure recent arrivals paid their smuggling debts. These were amazingly sophisticated networks coordinated across continents and oceans that allowed—often at a steep price—tens-of-thousands of mostly young Armenian men to leave for the US and Canada in the face of the migration ban between the late 1880s and the second decade of the twentieth century.

Migrant smuggling was good business in many of the Armenian-populated provinces of the Ottoman Empire at the turn of the twentieth century. And perhaps the most successful migrant smuggler of them all was Artin Harputlian. Artin was a wealthy banker based out of the dual cities of Harput-Mezre (modern day Elazığ, Turkey). By 1905, he was also suspected by the Ottoman government of being at the head of a vast smuggling operation that enabled prospective migrants to travel between the US and the Ottoman Empire in the face of the ban.

He charged a pretty penny for his services, with at least one brother based in Massachusetts who collected on migrant smuggling debts. His banking operation had a branch in Istanbul and operations in Marseille, a major European transit hub. I suspect, but was never able to prove, that remittances were the primary way he ensured he was paid for his smuggling services: Want to send money back home? Got to do it through me. And if you don’t pay up? Guess mom and dad won’t be getting their money. Those remittances, in turn, are likely what capitalized his banking operations.

Artin Harputlian features prominently in my book. Perhaps one of my most precious archival finds was a set of documents from 1907 detailing Artin’s arrest and imprisonment for smuggling. In short, he was arrested after he switched out a group of ten Armenians who were being expelled from the empire with a group of ten different Armenians who were looking to migrate. The first group was facing expulsion after officials discovered that they had returned to the empire illegally from unauthorized sojourns in the United States. If the plan had worked, the group would have received armed escort to the Black Sea coast and steamship tickets all at government expense. But the elaborate plan failed, the group’s cover was blown, and Artin ended up in the dock.

The case became part of a bigger effort by the recently appointed governor of the province to break the smuggling rings operating out of Harput-Mezre. It failed, Artin Harputlian was simply too powerful an economic and political actor. He called in some favors from well-placed people in the Ministry of Justice in Istanbul, and eventually was freed based on some legal technicalities. The humiliated governor, who had taken on Artin and lost, was eventually shipped off to another assignment.

But as part of the case, the governor had accumulated a substantial body of evidence implicating Artin in all sorts of wrongdoing. Artin had also made numerous enemies, as evidenced by the broad cross-section of provincial society who was willing to testify against him. Among the witness interrogation files was the testimony of one Minas Fabrikatorian. Minas’s presence in the files is especially interesting. If there was one family who could rival the Harputlians in terms of economic power it would be the Fabrikatorians.

Their surname, which incorporated the word for factory common across several languages including Western Armenian and Turkish, advertised their position as the region’s most prominent silk manufacturers. Minas and his four brothers—all of whom had spent time in the UK and US studying industrial production—had changed their surname from Ipekjian (meaning silk merchant) to reflect their family’s turn to large-scale industry. The Fabrikatorian brothers weren’t shy about announcing their family’s success in other ways, either. In the middle of town, they constructed five interconnected rowhouses, one for each brother, with a wide, landscaped boulevard in front reminiscent more of suburban America than the Ottoman interior.

One would be forgiven for imagining that the Harputlians and Fabrikatorians would have been natural allies as wealthy and prominent Armenian families in a time and a place where Armenian life was—to put it mildly—embattled. The Harputlian family had financial connections that reached across the Harput-Mezre region, the Ottoman Empire, stretching all the way to the United States. The Fabrikatorians were the area’s foremost industrialists, providing a vision of a prosperous and mass-produced future to a region often written off as backward. Weren’t these two families perfectly positioned to serve as symbols of Armenian power and influence, cutting against the stereotype held widely in the West of Ottoman Armenians as the archetypal persecuted victim group?

But the enmity between the Harputlians and Fabrikatorians ran deep. Minas’s testimony depicted Artin Harputlian as irredeemably corrupt, happy to pay off government officials in order to evade justice. Here he shared the opinions of others who gave testimony against Artin—most of whom were local Muslims—who essentially portrayed him as a scoundrel and a cheat. A couple of years later—after the 1908 Young Turk Revolution had ushered in a nominally more liberal Ottoman government—a bitter property dispute between the Harputlians and Fabrikatorians made it the way to Istanbul for mediation. Both families laid claim to plots of land, and a road, in the center of Mezre’s commercial thoroughfare. Although I could never discover how the case was resolved, it provided further evidence that the feud involved not just Artin Harputlian and Minas Fabrikatorian, but several members of both families.

By 1914, Artin’s banking operation had gone bankrupt. The ban on Armenian migration and return had been largely lifted in 1908 by the Young Turk government. No longer required to go through smuggling channels, perhaps would-be Armenian migrants were simply bypassing Artin altogether. A letter sent by an Armenian church representative to the Ottoman government, however, alleged that the collapse of the Harputlian banking empire had resulted in substantial losses for his Christian and Muslim clients. In his letter, the representative complained that Artin was managing to escape responsibility for compensating his clients for his losses. On the eve of World War I, Artin Harputlian remained a controversial and polarizing figure.

1915 is a decisive breaking point in the story. In the summer of that year, much of the male Armenian population of Harput-Mezre was marched out of town and murdered. The remaining Armenian residents were eventually deported south toward the Syrian desert. Some of the Fabrikatorian brothers and their families managed to survive the Armenian genocide, though their manufacturing business was wiped out and their magnificent row homes seized by the Ottoman government. As far as I can tell, the Harputlians fell victim to the genocide, surviving only in the documents that the Ottoman state and their local enemies produced about them.

*

The project I sketched out in my job letter was intended to answer a set of interlocking questions that remained about the Harputlians and Fabrikatorians. What turned the two families into implacable enemies? I liked to think part of the answer lay in the very different origins of their respective wealth. Artin Harputlian was a financier and a speculator. His family got rich off of helping people leave. And those who left usually didn’t come back. The Fabrikatorians, meanwhile, made their wealth homegrown labor and regional consumption. Perhaps they imagined a future where young Armenian men made and spent their fortunes at home, making Harput-Mezre into a more prosperous place. They wouldn’t have been alone in such a view. Many prominent Armenians actively opposed emigration, including the region’s most famous writer and intellectual, Hovhannes Harutiunian, who went by the demonym Tlgadintsi (he, too, would be murdered in the Armenian genocide). The Harputlian family’s operation was certainly a threat to such a view of the future.

And more broadly, I wondered how the story of this feud might challenge how we make sense of interethnic relations in a place that had already been shaped by anti-Armenian violence and ethnic tension. Even the provisional title of the project, Timeless Enemies—referring to the Harputlians and the Fabrikatorians—was toying with this idea of how we understand conflict.

I am almost certainly never going to finish this project. My new career path will never afford me the time or the resources. And there is a more philosophical question I might ask: Was I even the right person to tell this story to begin with? Descendents of the Fabrikatorian brothers have reached out to me in the past. Living descendents of the Harputlians may be out there, too. And these families were victims of genocide, one the Turkish government continues to deny. These are more than just subjects of historical curiosity.

But I am putting it out there anyway in the hopes that there might be someone out there, someone better positioned than I am—or maybe ever was—might someday be able to run with it. It won’t be easy. In addition to its human cost, genocide is tremendously destructive to the historical record. It erases stories that future generations should be able to tell. But a project such as this one could do so much to shed light on aspects of a region’s history that remain largely shrouded in tragedy.

If you’re out there, shoot me a message. Happy to share what I have.

David Gutman: Matt, how do you feel about one year of The Historicizer?

Matthew Ellis: I feel really great about it. It’s been a major catalyst for growth for me. I feel like it’s changed how I think about myself as a writer, first and foremost.

I’ve known for a long time that I was dissatisfied with the kind of writing that we have to do as academics a lot of the time. Increasingly, I don’t want to read academic monographs, and I certainly don’t have a lot of fire in my belly to write one.

But I’ve always wanted to grow as a writer, and I feel like having this Substack has really been the push that I needed to sit down and work on the craft of writing a lot more. I’ve noticed a real difference between the pieces I was doing when we started and the pieces I’ve been doing now. My last few pieces have even been more personal, more reflective.

I’ve really enjoyed the journey so far in terms of thinking about what I’m trying to do as a writer. The Substack has also given me a lot of freedom to explore different kinds of voices, different perspectives, and different ways of approaching my writing. I’m really grateful for the opportunity it’s given me to do that, and I look forward to experimenting even more.

What about you?

David: I feel very much the same, Matt. I feel much freer as a writer, much less self-conscious. I really enjoy being able to explore topics I would never have otherwise written on. The Omaha pieces, for example, I still don’t fully know what inspired me to write them, but I found it immensely rewarding.

In a sense, working on The Historicizer has liberated me from the scholarly conventions that were drilled into us in graduate school. What we are doing isn’t untethered from historical evidence, whether that evidence is our own personal experience or primary and secondary material that is available to us when we are crafting these pieces. Even if we aren’t credentialed experts on all of the topics we are writing about, we are still doing what good scholars do. At the same time, I feel free to write with a verve and a sense of imagination that scholarly writing doesn’t usually allow for.

Also, we have managed to avoid turning into a mill for hot takes. When we set out to do The Historicizer, we vowed not to churn out reactive hot takes and I think we have stayed true to that promise.

Matt: I feel that, too. It’s freeing not to have to worry about peer review, scholarly apparatus, and all of the hoops you have to jump through with academic writing. Instead of starting from a place of feeling that I have to craft this one overarching, airtight argument, with The Historicizer pieces it’s more about exploring ideas or asking questions, and then working through those questions.

That’s not to say that good historians don’t do that in their books. Probably my favorite works are a little more open, a little more exploratory or experimental. But by and large, to get something published, you have to follow these conventions.

So yes, I feel a lot freer. And I think it’s really great that we don’t try to publish something every day, and that we’re not just responding to the news. The world is saturated with hot takes on social media and 24-hour cable news networks, and we’ve been able to do something a lot richer than that.

I believe there’s an appetite for what we’re doing. Our readership has grown pretty steadily. I’ve gotten a lot of good feedback. It’s pitched at the right level: not too scholarly, but also not just another hot-take news article that someone dashes out in 400 or 500 words and that doesn’t really say anything we don’t already know.

David: I have also really appreciated the feedback I have received. It is good to know that people are engaging with the material even if sometimes it feels as if we are throwing these articles into the void.

It helps me to keep going when I hear someone say, “I learned a lot from that piece you wrote about Erdoğan” or “Is Matt really going to walk into the ocean at Coney Island if he loses his World Cup bet?” You winning that bet, Matt, was a real lost opportunity, I might add.

Knowing that there is an audience for this stuff does keep me going. And also the fact that the audience isn’t the same for each piece! Our material is eclectic enough that if the topic of one piece doesn’t much appeal to you, you only need to wait around a little bit for one that will. I think people are enjoying that variety.

Matt: I really value that, too. On one hand, if I feel like I have to write about what’s happening on my campus in terms of political engagement around Palestine, Israel, and Zionism, I can do that. But then if I want to write about my personal distaste for World Cup soccer, I can also do that.

Both are okay, and both probably have different audiences. I imagine some people who were really into the Zionism piece didn’t really care about the soccer piece, and vice versa. But that’s okay. If they subscribe, they can make their own choices about which pieces appeal to them. That’s the way it should be.

David: If we were just a Middle East history blog, I’m sure we would have a committed audience, but that audience would know what to expect every time we published something. That’s not the case here. I’ve really enjoyed that, and I think our audience has really enjoyed that. It certainly helps propel me forward.

Matt: So we can pledge to our readers: we’re going to keep you on your toes moving forward. This isn’t going to become Juan Cole’s Informed Comment or something like that.

David: No, definitely not. He does a valuable service, but we don’t need to replicate that.

Matt: He’s got that market cornered!

So: Where do you imagine the Substack will go moving forward after one year?

David: When we first started The Historicizer, I had a good idea of the pieces I wanted to write. Very few of those have actually been written, and I’m totally fine with that.

I certainly did not set out to write a three-piece, very long-form essay on Erdoğan’s consolidation of power in Turkey. Nor did I think I would write so much about Omaha. Those just came from inspiration on the spot.

As far as this year goes, I have a couple of ideas for pieces I might want to write, but at the same time I look forward to being surprised at what I end up choosing to write about. I’ve really enjoyed that aspect of the process: allowing random pieces of inspiration to suddenly become the germ for a piece.

Matt: I think, like you, it’s hard to say where I’ll go next. I don’t know what’s going to come up in the classroom. We certainly don’t know what’s going to come up in terms of the news and world affairs. But, again: we’re not trying to be super-reactive all the time to current events.

I want to continue balancing writing about history and politics with more personal essay writing. That’s something I’m very interested in.

I’d also like to continue experimenting with form and maybe write more humorous essays like the soccer one. There’s a part of me that’s always been drawn to humor writing—I used to do it a lot as a kid, actually!—but I guess that got beaten out of me throughout my years of academic training.

Ultimately I want to work on cultivating one authentic voice for all my writing—one that is funny when the material calls for it—instead of feeling like I have to have this separate academic voice that is totally removed from other parts of my personality or how I go about my day-to-day life.

At the same time, I want to find ways to start integrating more of my research project on propaganda and communications into my writing. I’ve already done a little bit of that here—with the piece about cynicism and mass communications, for example. But I’d like to do that more—get my feet wet with my research by doing some exploratory writing for The Historicizer.

David: That’s what’s great about this. We have this platform now, and we have readers who engage with it. I continue to be very glad we chose to do this.

One thing I hope for this year is that we can grow our readership. I don’t think we need thousands of readers to feel successful. At the same time, I encourage our readers, if they like what we’re doing, to spread the word about The Historicizer. If you like a piece, go ahead and share it! It means a lot to us when you do that!

I think we both agree that we’re first and foremost doing this for ourselves. There’s no reason to hide that fact. But it is immensely gratifying that people like what we’re doing and find it useful and interesting. And if that’s the case, we’d love to get more people on board.

We’re keeping our subscription free; it’s certainly not about the money.

Matt: We are very grateful, though, to those readers who have decided to give us a little something and who believe that the content is worth the investment. Thank you to our angel donors!

This might also be the year that we have to tackle social media a little bit. I know both of us are really reluctant to do that.

I swore off social media five or six years ago. I felt like it was a really destructive presence in my life—being on Facebook and getting embroiled in fights where I felt people were constantly showing up as their worst selves, including people I love and respect very much. I wasn’t a fan of how people were engaging with me, and with each other, about a lot of issues.

So I dropped all social media, and I’ve been much happier since doing that. I have a lot of qualms about getting involved in social media again and bringing that distraction economy back into my life. But we will certainly consider doing it if it’s going to help amplify what we’re doing.

David: Exactly. I’ve also cut down my social media diet quite a bit. I still have a presence on Facebook, but neither of us is on X or Bluesky or anything else that tends to drive virality.

I know there is no magic pill or button for driving engagement on social media. But we’re open to any tips our readers might have to drive interest and circulation.

Matt: We can also travel. We can do an in-person Historicizer!

David: That would be great!

Matt: I think most of our readers are just reading our pieces as a digest in their email, which means they’re not going to the website. So we would like to remind you that you can come directly to the website, even without a Substack account—you don’t even need to have the Substack app—and leave comments that way. Then we can have more of a conversation around the pieces we write.

We’d love to hear more from you.

Something I like to say a lot as an educator is that I’m not here to provide all the answers. I’m here to generate conversations by raising a lot of critical questions. If that’s what’s going on for you when you read our pieces, we’d love to hear from you and have you enter the conversation with us.

David: Another thing we’re open to—and we talked about this when we first set out to do this—is getting to a position where others would be willing to share material they’re writing on The Historicizer.

We’d love to get to a place, whether that happens this year or sometime in the near to medium future, where our readers see this as a big enough platform, or a high-quality enough platform, to share their own writing and their own thoughts.

We’d love to have a guest piece on The Historicizer.

Matt: Absolutely. And inviting guest authors to contribute is just one of the ways we can keep thinking about growing and diversifying our site. The future of The Historicizer is bright!

My grandfather—my mother’s father—was born in Omaha in 1898. The city of his birth was a railroad boomtown par excellence. In the ten years between 1880 and 1890, the city’s population grew from 30,000 to 140,000. His parents had contributed to that meteoric growth. His mother, an immigrant from Ireland, arrived in Omaha in the late-1880s, finding no shortage of domestic work in a city filled to the brim with frontier wealth. His father came to the city as a refugee from his family’s failed effort to cultivate the grasslands of the central Nebraska prairie, finding a position as a letter carrier.

But all was not well in Omaha as the 1890s drew to a close. The Panic of 1893, one of the many economic recessions that roiled the American economy in the nineteenth century, had brought Omaha’s torrid growth to a grinding halt. The speculative capital that had fueled the Great Plains’ railroad boom had all but dried up. People weren’t coming to settle in Omaha in nearly the same numbers. In fact, many were choosing to pack up and leave. The 1900 census would reveal that Omaha had been losing population over the course of the 1890s.

For Omaha’s civic boosters, the aftermath of the 1893 panic was both a challenge to be managed and an opportunity to be exploited. As far as they were concerned, the city’s future was as boundless as the Nebraska plains. After all, economic downturns eventually come to an end. And while railroad investments had always been volatile, the US was a nation of railroads, and its economy couldn’t thrive without them. Council Bluffs, Iowa, just across the river, was the eastern terminus of the first trans-continental railroad. Omaha was the headquarters of one of the largest railroads in the country, the Union Pacific. The West was the nation’s future, and Omaha was destined to be its gateway.

In hindsight, it seems unfathomable that Omaha’s leading men once imagined that their city would rival Chicago or even New York in size. But human history is littered with examples of people mistaking historical blips for inexorable laws of nature. Omaha’s population had already more than quadrupled in one decade. If its population tripled over the next decade and then doubled in the one after that, Omaha would rank among the nation’s five largest cities. The line would always go up. Omaha would always be essential.

For a city built on real-estate speculation, however, a prolonged bust risked denting Omaha’s future prospects. After all, a boomtown needs to stay booming. Rather than sitting pretty and waiting for the nation’s economy to right itself, one particularly intrepid Omaha financier named Gurdon Wattles had an idea for how to sell Omaha’s bright future to the nation and the world. Inspired by the success of the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago, he wanted to bring a world’s fair to Omaha. Pulling off a similar kind of event was the perfect way to prove Omaha’s big-city bona fides. In 1895, the Trans-Mississippi Commercial Congress—made up of representatives from each state west of the Mississippi River—agreed to hold their next major gathering in Omaha in 1898. So was born the Trans-Mississippi Exposition and Indian Congress, Omaha’s world’s fair.

Over the next couple of years, Wattles and the planning commission he headed laid the groundwork for what would be a six-month expo lasting from June 1 to November 1, 1898. The quest to find a suitable location for the event reflected the economic challenges Omaha was facing. After rejecting several sites, they selected a vacant tract of land in a suburban neighborhood, Kountze Place, named after its developer and financier, Herman Kountze. Kountze’s decision to donate the land was probably motivated by more than just civic pride. Demand for new housing had slackened in recent years, and the fair promised to jump-start real-estate interest in Omaha’s north side.

The exposition would spread out over 180 acres, featuring a magisterial grand court surrounding a half-mile-long lagoon. To the north of the grand court was a midway with restaurants, curiosities, and rides—including a towering motorized seesaw. The whole thing was built to be temporary. The buildings were little more than simple wooden structures clad in staff—essentially plaster and cement mixed with shredded burlap. Creamy white in color and easily moldable, it was perfect for making cheap timber structures look like grand Greco-Roman edifices. Omaha’s own White City was steadily taking shape.

It’s hard to convey just how incongruous the fair must have seemed when it opened on June 1, 1898. It was situated in a lightly developed part of the city on a shallow ridge overlooking the vast flood plain of the Missouri River, then still a wide, untamed and flood-prone waterway. Stretching to the west were vast prairie lands that only a couple of generations earlier were home to roving herds of bison—and the indigenous groups that hunted them—now largely extirpated by White settlers. The classical architecture that loomed over fairgoers gave an impression of permanence that belied the ersatz nature of the buildings’ staff facades. At night, the thousands of gleaming electric lights must have appeared like a blinding beacon on the otherwise empty plain. How uncanny it all must have seemed to Nebraskans whose pioneer parents and grandparents made their homes out of sod on the treeless expanse of the American steppe.

The exposition was inaugurated with a two-mile-long parade. William Jennings Bryan, a prominent backer of the expo, was in attendance. President McKinley officially opened the fair from Washington, DC, with a push of a button—he would make a personal appearance later that October (admittedly his visit has since been overshadowed by his trip to the Buffalo world’s fair three years later). Overall, the expo tallied more than 2.5 million visits—a small fraction of the Chicago fair a few years before, but respectable nonetheless. Ferried to the site by streetcar, by carriage, or arriving on foot, fairgoers were transported to another world replete with exhibition booths from several countries including China, Egypt, Mexico, and France. They were invited to imagine a world of permanent electrification, and to gawk at strange novelties such as the horseless carriage.

According to the 1898 Omaha City Directory, my great-grandparents lived under a mile due west of the fair site. I like to imagine that they were regular visitors, strolling around the lagoon pushing my infant grandfather’s baby carriage. But what did the Trans-Mississippi Exposition mean for them? Certainly they would have been impressed by the awe-inspiring sights on display. This was perhaps their first glimpse of mass electrification and of the internal combustion engine. It was the closest they would ever get to Rome or Cairo or Beijing. But their stake in the city’s future was different from that of the fair’s organizers. They didn’t have development lots to sell nor did they own stock in the railroads. As a mail carrier, my great-grandfather’s salary was likely secure, but I imagine it was hard for them not to notice the effects of the recession on the city’s fortunes. Did the fair herald for them a great metropolitan future? Or was it just a fleeting curiosity, as ephemeral as the buildings themselves?

Life in Omaha returned to a more familiar pace when the expo closed at the end of October. Gone were the bright lights illuminating Omaha’s northern skies and the giant see-saw. But the lagoon and the buildings remained, at least for a time. The following summer, the organizers of the Trans-Mississippi Exposition mounted a sequel: The Greater America Exposition. But lightning didn’t strike twice. The second fair, a celebration of the country’s recent colonial conquests, was met with less fanfare and much smaller crowds. As the twentieth century dawned, the White City was no more. Omaha’s economy eventually recovered and its population resumed growing, but the city would never again experience anything like the explosive expansion of the 1880s. The Trans-Mississippi soon receded into civic memory: that strange summer when the world’s fair came to Omaha.

My great-grandparents eventually moved to a house only blocks from the old grand court and lagoon at 1816 Wirt Street. Rather than remaining an enclave for Omaha’s wealthy, Kountze Place eventually became the kind of place where a family making do on a letter carrier’s salary could own a home. By the 1910s Omaha was developing rapidly to the West. As White Omahans (and real-estate investment) moved westward, the neighborhoods of Omaha’s near north side became some of the few places Black Americans could put down roots in the city.

As Omaha’s Black population grew rapidly beginning in the first decades of the twentieth century, racial violence, redlining, restrictive covenants, and other forms of housing discrimination would increasingly confine African American residents to North Omaha, helping make the city one of the most segregated in the country. The site of the exposition eventually became a park named after Herman Kountze. In the late 1960s, Black activists in Omaha began referring to it as Malcolm X Memorial Park, named after one of Omaha’s most famous native sons, who was born not far from the park (and the house where my grandfather was born).

When my mother was born in 1946 in that house on Wirt Street, the automobile and the airplane were rapidly challenging the railroad for transportation supremacy. By 1955, Omaha’s streetcar system would soon be gone, a victim of automotive supremacy. Omaha’s exuberant visionaries of the late nineteenth century had largely given way to a more staid, careful, and conservative civic elite. Omaha had grown into a more mature version of itself, and the Trans-Mississippi Exposition a distant memory of its more unrestrained youth.

In the midst of the recent crushing heatwave here in the Northeast—and a semiquincentennial celebration that, in the Trump era, was only ever going to be polarizing—my family escaped to Vermont for a last-minute Fourth of July weekend. While not my first trip to our nation’s 49th most-populous state, it has been a while since I was last there—in an era before cannabis legalization turned cannabis consumption into a septuagenarian pastime.

Our impromptu trip provided me with an opportunity to reflect on Vermont and its place in the 250-year-old American experiment. So without further ado, below are some observations about Vermont on July 4.

1. Burlington put on what I can only describe as the loudest, longest, and most bombastic fireworks display I have ever seen. Just ask my three-year-old; he was traumatized by it. The Burlington fireworks brought out more than ten thousand people (no mean feat in a town of fewer than fifty thousand) of all backgrounds and walks of life.

2. State borders still mean something. It is striking just how different Vermont is from New York. Yes, New York state is comparatively massive both in size and population—it says little to point out that Brattleboro and Buffalo are culturally very different from one another. But New York’s North Country is far more culturally conservative than the communities on the other side of the border. Plattsburgh and Burlington are not far from one another, but they are very different places.

   In an age of internet-driven hyper-connectivity, it can be easy to ignore the reality that place-based and state-based cultures remain quite robust. Settlement patterns, traditions of local government, educational institutions, and local media culture continue to shape how Americans understand politics, community, and everyday life.

3. Vermont, perhaps more than anywhere else in the 21st-century United States, embodies the characteristics that Tocqueville believed made America great: a vibrant civic culture, strong traditions of local government, and an independent streak anchored in common sense and thrift. Layer in a revolutionary-era suspicion of distant authority and a live-and-let-live ethos, and it’s little wonder that Vermont is associated with a certain countercultural oddballism.

4. Vermont’s laid-back attitude and wariness about punitive uses of state power run into challenges in a world that mass produces homelessness and addiction. For a relatively small town, Burlington has a shockingly visible homelessness and drug addiction problem. City Hall Park, a lovely civic green space in the heart of downtown, hosts a significant encampment, and we encountered several people on the streets who had clearly been using.

   Governments often turn toward coercive measures to keep the unhoused and addicted out of public sight. For its part, Vermont is experimenting with some interesting policy solutions that center housing over prisons and other punitive measures. It claims the highest success rate of any state at providing temporary housing for the unhoused.

   But not everyone is on board with these efforts, and their success in reducing the twin scourges of homelessness and addiction has been debated. At the same time, it’s a lot to ask a state of 640,000 people to solve systemic problems that require policy interventions on a national scale.

5. Vermont has played an outsized role in shaping American politics over the past several decades. In 1999, the Vermont state government became the first in the US to recognize civil unions—a precursor to the legalization of gay marriage. And though it eventually failed, Vermont came close to implementing—or at least trying to implement—the country’s first single-payer health system.

   The left rightly bemoans the structure of the United States Senate and the disproportionate power it gives to rural, conservative states. At the same time, it’s hard to imagine how Bernie Sanders becomes one of the most influential politicians in recent American history without this quirk of American federalism.

   It would be a different world had the once-independent Vermont Republic been absorbed into New York or New Hampshire.

6. The American right often looks to Florida and Texas as models of successful right-wing governance. Is Vermont, then, the left’s answer? I’m not so sure. Is it possible to build a nationally viable political and economic alternative with an aging, largely rural population and an economy built around tourism and maple syrup? Single-payer ultimately failed in Vermont largely because the state couldn’t finance such an ambitious program on its own. And its failure is a major reason why Vermont’s current governor is a (very popular) moderate Republican.

7. Vermont may not be representative of America as a whole. But I think I can say that in its stubbornly eccentric, independent, and experimental way, it’s more maverick than Texas. Whether it can continue to thrive given the demographic and economic pressures it faces is an open question. But after spending a Fourth of July weekend there, I was reminded that America is still a nation of distinct political communities. And that’s something worth celebrating.

As exhilarating as it was to be part of that early morning pub party, a pint of lukewarm bitter in my hand, my experience of watching the World Cup unfold that year left me with some questions. Some of these were typical for soccer newbies and interesting enough to ponder (ie, why Scotland and Wales have their own national teams, though they don’t have separate nation-states). Other questions were more vexing: Why did the same teams seem to dominate the tournament every four years? Why are so many grueling, hard-fought matches determined by penalty kicks—essentially a roll of the dice onto the craps table?

And, most of all: what was it about this sport, of all sports, that so deeply captivated the world?

Soccer had never been my thing. It was always the weekly activity at my sports-oriented day camp that I dreaded the most. This was because I knew my time would be spent standing around deep in defensive territory, twiddling my thumbs and avoiding bees, while the more aggressive boys ran around chasing the ball somewhere yonder. When the other team inevitably came charging down towards the net I was supposed to be defending, I’d make a half-hearted attempt to put my body in the way. But I had my groin to worry about, first and foremost; and, truly, I didn’t care all that much if they scored.

But that year in England, World Cup fever swept through the Williams-Oxford house where I was living. Little groups formed to watch key matches at local pubs, and the Cup was almost always on our communal TV. My cohort mates got really into it, while I was just, well, mostly bored and frustrated. Ireland, who had never had much success in international soccer, played their heart out against a much stronger Spanish team. The result? A draw, and then a heartbreaking coda of penalty kicks where Spain eked out a victory despite having been outplayed for most of the match.

Meh.

And then who wins it all that year? Well, of course, Brazil—the perennial powerhouse, with its trio of first-name-only superstars I couldn’t be bothered to tell apart (I mean, their names were nearly identical—Rivaldo, Ronaldo, Ronaldinho—one could be forgiven, right?). No surprises there.

Meh.

Ever since, even though I have not particularly relished the coming of each new World Cup, the tournament has had a way of finding me. It is almost as if soccer were trying to seduce me, given the ideal, even romantic soccer-viewing contexts in which I found myself for many years.

In 2006, I was living in Egypt. This was the same year that Egypt won the Africa Cup of Nations. The night they took the championship, I found myself in the middle of utter pandemonium on the streets of Cairo; traffic came to a standstill as people honked their horns repeatedly, or got out of their cars to dance, cheer, wave flags, and set off sparklers and firecrackers. I eventually had to get out of my taxi and walk all the way home, over two hours.

It was impossible not to get swept up in the soccer mania on an unforgettable night like that, and so I resolved to make another valiant effort to enjoy soccer when the World Cup came around that Spring. I remember watching the Italy/France final from my hotel room in Alexandria; I can’t tell you much about the match, which seemed to me like one long defensive slog, except that Italy played dirty and whoever Zidane head-butted probably deserved it.

I was living abroad again for the 2010 Cup—in Italy, no less! I took in one match over spritzes at a small bar in the Umbrian hill town of Orvieto; for other matches, back in Rome, I joined large crowds in the lush Villa Borghese to watch on the big public screen they had installed. The vibes were lovely; hope for the Italians, the defending champs, sprung eternal.

In 2018, I was in Tunisia for the World Cup final, which I watched on a giant screen at a beach club on the Mediterranean. I seemed to be the only one rooting for Croatia, the heavy underdog; in a bizarre twist I still can’t purport to understand, the Tunisian crowd was overwhelmingly for Les Bleus, the formidable national team of their erstwhile colonial overlords.

And even this year, I was able to watch part of France’s first match of the tournament in Aix-en-Provence—how about that! It was intoxicating to be out on a night that everyone in the city was crowding into one cobblestone square or another for communal viewing, basking in the bon vivant atmosphere.

The World Cup is 100% more fun when you get to experience it as I have—watching it in countries where soccer is sacrosanct; where people care so very much and the streets are alive with passionate fandom. I have had every opportunity to fall in love with World Cup soccer over the last couple of decades.

But in spite of it all, I still don’t really get it; I still struggle to understand what all the fuss is about.

First, there’s the grotesque lack of parity. Consider this: since 1970, with the exception of Spain in 2010, every single World Cup has been won by one of five teams (provided you allow West Germany and Germany to be counted together). What’s more: since 1970, only eight teams in total have even qualified for a World Cup final (two of which—Spain and Croatia—were one-offs; the other team of these eight, the Netherlands, has played in three finals during this stretch but lost them all). That’s fourteen tournaments in all, dominated by the same five teams: France, Italy, Germany, Brazil, and Argentina.

From where I’m sitting, at least, I start to wonder: why do all the other teams even bother? The outcome seems to be a foregone conclusion. In fact, in 2014, when I was still on Facebook, I made a public declaration that if any team other than the big five managed to win, I would run into the ocean at Coney Island wearing that team’s jersey. Fortunately for me, Germany won again that year.**

I also confess that I find soccer to be excruciatingly boring to watch. Even though I can absolutely appreciate the amazing athleticism on display (the physical endurance, the precise ball control skills, the power and speed), I can’t help but sit impatiently while so little seems to happen for so much time. And if the World Cup is supposed to make things more exciting or dramatic, you wouldn’t necessarily know it during the group stage, where too many teams seem content to play for a draw. Even in the knockout rounds, where the (always British) color commentators on TV see endless artistry in goal-scoring, I see tedious repetition. To me, at least, it seems as if 75% of goals are scored on a header, following a cross or corner kick. (In yesterday’s Egypt/Argentina match, for example, two of Argentina’s and one of Egypt’s goals were scored this way). To be perfectly honest, a lot of the time goals seem to me to be sheer dumb luck: someone kicks the ball into a scrum of people in the box, and then someone manages to make some sort of contact that redirects the ball into the net while the goalie’s view is blocked (sometimes intentionally, sometimes not).

And don’t even get me started on all of the goals that are discounted because of offsides or some other (potentially dubious) penalty, like what happened to Egypt yesterday.

Meh.

Now here we are in 2026. Living in Queens, NY with the US co-hosting the World Cup, there is more soccer fever in my home country than I’ve ever experienced. It is genuinely delightful to walk around my neighborhood and take in the ambience as different immigrant communities go nuts for their national team. The other night, for instance, we witnessed dueling bars across the street from another, one supporting Mexico and the other Ecuador. Last night we saw some sad, drunk Brazil fans soaking up their misery after their loss to Norway with some late-night Bangladeshi cuisine.

I can appreciate the excitement and passion that so many others feel for this sport, and for this big international tournament every four years. Though I can’t muster much enthusiasm about “the beautiful game” itself, I bring to it the curiosity of the ethnographer, trying to comprehend a global cultural system that completely eludes me.

I also realize I’m the perpetual outsider here—the stick in the mundial mud—and I’ve learned to embrace it. It was years ago that an English friend—a soccer fanatic—said he was genuinely sad for me that I didn’t have this magic in my life. I’ve endured other similar expressions of pity from my jersey-wearing/flag-waving friends, and I’ll be the first to confess that I probably don’t understand enough about the strategy to make the game come alive for me. It’s fine; I’m done trying to understand. Sometimes in life you have to accept that there’s some magic out there that’s just not made for you.

* Never again, though. I might not know much about soccer, but I know enough to understand why the rest of the world always roots against England (and its fans).

** Let’s make the same wager this year, even though it’s already the quarterfinals. If any team other than one of the three remaining World Cup champions since 1970 (that is, France, Argentina, and Spain) wins the Cup, I will run into the ocean wearing their jersey. That gives you the better odds – 5 of 8, or 62.5% – or does it???

I.

Recently, a commission of academics in the humanities and social sciences released a short document titled, “Report on the State of Scholarship in the Humanities and the Humanistic Social Sciences.” The report was commissioned by the chancellors of Vanderbilt University and Washington University in St. Louis, both elite, research-intensive private institutions, and was motivated by a concern “about the dramatic erosion of support for the humanities and humanistic social sciences among students, parents, and government officials, as well as by the steady drumbeat of complaints about the deterioration of scholarly standards within those disciplines.”

The chancellors charged the commission “to examine the state of scholarly work in their respective fields and to evaluate” whether scholarship in various humanities and social sciences fields has indeed deteriorated in quality and become overly ideological. Such assessment is critical, the chancellors argue, because without it, “the well-documented erosion of support for the humanities will continue unabated.”

More revealing than the report itself—which I found to be underwhelming and largely banal in its conclusions—is the question the commission was asked to answer. The chancellors who commissioned it expressed concern about both declining public support for the humanities and complaints about deteriorating scholarly standards. Yet the charge conflates the two problems and operates from the assumption that an investigation of humanities scholarship will help explain—or perhaps even reverse—declining societal and political support for the humanities.

That assumption strikes me as far from self-evident. If the goal were truly to understand why students, parents, and policymakers have grown increasingly skeptical of the humanities, one might expect a commission that included experts in higher education policy, enrollment trends, curriculum design, or faculty working at the kinds of institutions—such as community colleges and regional public and private four-year institutions—where most college students actually encounter the humanities. Instead, the commission was composed almost entirely of senior scholars from elite research universities. We get, as a result, a report that views the crisis of the humanities as, in effect, an elite issue: a problem of scholarly production at the highest levels rather than one of institutions, curriculum, or the changing structure of higher education itself.

Indeed, none of the commission members appear especially well-positioned to explain why—as the charge itself asks—students, parents, and government officials have lost trust in the humanities and social sciences. From the perspective of a faculty member at an elite private research institution, it is impossible to separate scholarship from the health of higher education itself. For someone like myself, a faculty member/administrator at a small, tuition-dependent institution, however, the crisis in the humanities and social sciences has little to do with scholarship and everything to do with problems of cost, outcomes, and the design of the university curriculum itself.

II.

The first two issues, cost and outcomes, are real and cannot simply be waved away. Although the rate of increase has slowed in recent years, the cost of a four-year degree remains dramatically higher than it was a generation or two ago. Students and parents are therefore much more sensitive to questions of return on investment than they once were.

Those of us in the humanities and social sciences often respond by emphasizing critical thinking, communication, and other broadly transferable skills. I believe those benefits are real. But we should stop pretending that the labor market reads a degree in history or English in the same way that it reads a degree in marketing, nursing, accounting, or engineering. Whether fairly or unfairly, those degrees send different signals to employers. Any serious discussion of the humanities’ challenges must begin by acknowledging that reality rather than wishing it away.

But these are also difficult problems to solve. I became a history professor so that I could teach the discipline and produce scholarship, not to engage in a zero-sum competition with colleagues in nursing and business over a shrinking and price-sensitive pool of students. But there is another issue that we also can’t ignore and that we can’t dismiss as being in someone else’s purview: curriculum.

Unlike the cost of higher education or the structure of the labor market, curriculum is one area where faculty still retain considerable—albeit steadily decreasing—influence. If we want to begin to understand why students increasingly avoid the humanities and social sciences and parents question their value, the place to begin is not the keynote address of the American Anthropological Association—as the commission’s report would ask us to— but the way most universities organize learning itself.

I understand many might bristle at this: one can point to any number of institutions where the humanities don’t feel imperiled, or where major or enrollment numbers aren’t down. But I promise you, in those institutions that educate the majority of college students they absolutely are. And it is why diagnoses made by faculty entrenched in the headiest positions of the world’s most prestigious institutions probably are going to end up missing the heart of the problem.

III.

What do I mean when I say that the structure of learning is the problem? When I first arrived at my current institution, Manhattanville University (then Manhattanville College), I would often remark that its structure much more resembled my alma mater, the behemoth University of Minnesota, than it did what I imagined a small institution with fewer undergraduates than my large urban high school should.

Each department and each program they oversaw were run largely independently of one another. Faculty, resources, and disciplinary knowledge were siloed and jealously guarded. Students could pick from a wide range of programs of wide-ranging quality, meaning that two graduates earning a Manhattanville degree might have had vastly different educational experiences.

Like all institutions, we had a general education curriculum as is required by our accreditors. For many institutions, general education is the last vestige of a truly liberal arts education otherwise eclipsed by the rigid focus on the major. I came in during a general education restructuring that ended up taking the better part of five years to implement, and when it was implemented, it was a disaster—reflecting a focus on what faculty wanted rather than on what was best for students.

As long as there was relative parity among programs and sufficient student demand for what institutions like Manhattanville offered, this arrangement functioned reasonably well. In the History Department, we had six full-time faculty members, a healthy number of majors, and strong enrollments in our courses. Our curriculum resembled the one I had experienced at the University of Minnesota—broad, content-rich, and organized around disciplinary coverage.

And Manhattanville certainly wasn’t unusual in this way. Universities large and small were organized in much the same way. Departments operated as largely autonomous units, general education occupied a secondary role, and students moved through a curriculum assembled from relatively self-contained disciplinary experiences. Because the model was so ubiquitous, it was easy to mistake it for a natural feature of higher education rather than what it actually was: a historical product that emerged under a particular set of conditions.

This structure left the humanities particularly exposed when Manhattanville, in the midst of a major budget crisis made worse by the aftermath of the Covid pandemic, embarked on a series of deep personnel cuts culminating in the termination of several tenure and tenure-track faculty—cuts that included the termination of my tenured position. The disciplinary siloes and the obsessive focus on the sanctity of major programs became easy targets for administrators looking to terminate faculty in underenrolled programs. And it was the humanities that particularly suffered.

Faculty were let go based entirely on the sustainability of a small slice of the curriculum rather than on the contribution they made to the institution’s broader educational mission. Manhattanville is now attempting to rethink and revamp the meaning of a liberal arts education in the wake of these cuts without a critical mass of humanists and social scientists perhaps best positioned to rethink the curriculum along more interdisciplinary lines and with a remaining faculty still heavily tied to their individual programs (and who can blame them, they witnessed several colleagues be let go based on the “weakness” of their respective programs). Nevertheless, I think Manhattanville is generally moving in the right direction on both the curricular and academic structure fronts, and may someday soon be a blueprint for others looking to do the same, but it’s slow and tough going.

I focus here on Manhattanville not only because of my connection to it but because institutions throughout the country are making similar cuts, with the humanities usually the first to feel the pinch. And this reveals a central irony completely missed by the authors of the report: as long as institutions—particularly those outside the category of elite R1s—remain organized around disciplinary siloes and major enrollments, the less relevant scholarship becomes to the survival of those disciplines as budgets tighten and major numbers decline. A brilliant body of research in history or philosophy does little good if the institution evaluates those fields primarily through the number of majors they produce. The crisis facing many humanities departments is therefore not principally a crisis of scholarship. It is a crisis of curricular and institutional design.

IV.

We so often take it as a given that a place like Manhattanville, or a regional public university, or even a community college has a structure not all that different from a major research university. But there is nothing “natural” about organizing our institutions this way. In a world where tuition was relatively cheap, the college-age demographic growing, and the number of major programs relatively few, this model more or less worked. And by the turn of the twenty-first century, academics like myself, coming out of graduate programs in institutions that had been organized like this for generations, simply couldn’t imagine anything different.

The research university model of siloed departments and decentralized curricula was the outcome of a particular historical moment—the post-war expansion of higher education and its aftermath—that no longer pertains. We have seen institutions of various sizes and types respond by shuttering departments and laying off faculty. Such actions may help address acute budgetary challenges, but these moves are reactive and seldom accompanied by any clear blueprint for what comes next. Frequently what is left is a pared-back and deficient version of the same structure. In my view, the current moment calls for a much more radical form of restructuring that preserves the essence of disciplinary knowledge and skills building but in a much more interdisciplinary form.

Perhaps the authors of the report might respond that they aren’t concerned about what form the humanities and social sciences take outside of the research institution ecosystem. The chancellors at Vanderbilt and Washington University aren’t paid to worry about the health of the humanities at a Manhattanville or a Middle Tennessee State. But the truth is that these institutions train the humanists and social scientists that take jobs at those schools. Part of the work of reimagining these disciplines will necessarily have to take place at the level of the research university. It is an integrated ecosystem, whether we like it or not.

The humanities and social sciences don’t have the luxury to bury their heads in the sand. Students are voting with their feet and are unlikely to return to our programs in their old form. The research university model has conditioned students to think of disciplines and programs as discrete entities to which they assign value based on perceived return on investment. And given the exorbitant cost of education it is difficult to blame them. As universities become ever more market driven, they reinforce this logic through their marketing, their budgeting decisions, and the ways they respond to institutional crises. Needless to say, no return to “objective” and empirical scholarship is going to solve this problem.

As the authors of the report rightly observe, “the humanities and the humanistic social sciences are an essential strand in the life of the modern university.” I would go further: they are essential to every institution that claims to provide a genuine higher education. A university education without meaningful engagement with the humanities and the humanistic social sciences is an impoverished one. But preserving them will require more than defending individual disciplines or lamenting trends in scholarly production. The humanities and social sciences cannot survive simply as a collection of increasingly specialized departments competing over a shrinking and skeptical pool of potential majors. They must be reimagined as integral components of the education of all students.

We need to figure out where the humanities and social sciences fit and what purpose they serve in a rapidly transforming higher ed landscape that is no longer in sync with the major/gen ed model of the past century. Being bold might require admitting that humanities knowledge is too important to confine in disciplinary silos, and that the discrete disciplinary knowledge our disciplines impart are, in isolation, not as central to student success as they were in prior generations. It may require a willingness to teach outside of our comfort zones and institutional educational mission over that of our disciplines. We need curricular structures that weave the knowledge and habits of mind developed within those fields throughout the undergraduate experience. Only then can we imagine a universe where the legitimacy of the humanities is derived not from the number of majors they produce but their indispensable contribution to the education of every graduate.

As for the report writers’ fretting about the current state of humanities scholarship, I might advise that all they need to do is wait a while: if current trends persist unchanged, and the humanities and social sciences education becomes an increasingly elite commodity, then research in those fields will almost certainly narrow and shift to a focus on questions that reflect a largely elite habitus.

Oh, and most importantly: this is the late 1980s—long before someone could just take a screen shot of the homework and email or text it over to me. The internet was still a decade away from being a fixture in my life.

So, what do I do? I lean on my mother to rescue me.

My mom gets on the landline and calls up Bobby McGuinness’s mom, who then proceeds to dictate the entire homework text over the phone while I just sit there, hanging my head in shame. My mom, an excellent stenographer by training, is taking down Mrs. McGuinness’s recitation in shorthand; I remember seeing only a few specialized science words (cytoplasm? plankton?) written out among the scribbles. Then mom hangs up the phone, and we sit down together to translate her notes into the full text, so that I can answer the comprehension questions and pass the assignment.

*

Sometimes art imitates life; and sometimes you find yourself watching a period piece that you actually lived through.

At the TriBeCA Film Festival last weekend, I had the great pleasure of attending the NYC premier of “Last Minute,” a short film by writer-director Michael Cusumano, who also happens to be my earliest friend (we grew up next door to one another). After being out of touch for over two decades, Mike and I recently re-connected after our mothers—who bowl in the same league in our central New Jersey hometown—discovered that we were living a few blocks away from each other in Queens.

After setting the scene with some titles, rendered in fun 80s typeface—“The year is 1989. The internet is not in homes. ChatGPT is decades away…”—the 15-minute film launches straight into its main action. Twelve-year-old Jason (Espyn Doughty) has procrastinated mightily on his science project. As his hard-working single mom, Jackie (Charity Schubert), soon discovers to her great chagrin, he has done no work on it, it’s due the next day, and it constitutes a significant portion of his final grade. Whatever dreams for a relaxing evening of fast-food takeout, cheap wine and TV that Jackie might’ve had are now out the window. The bat signal has gone up, and it’s Mom to the rescue.

“Last Minute” is an utter delight—a charming and poignant story of the bond between a well-intentioned but lazy pre-teen boy and a mother who will do whatever it takes to help him succeed. But what I appreciated most about the film—and the reason I thought to write about it for this Substack—is its keen historical sensibility.

Nostalgic without becoming cloying, “Last Minute” uses its period setup as an occasion to interrogate what has been lost with the digital information revolution over the last three and a half decades. While Jackie and Jason might yearn for some “magic device” that would instantaneously give them the five original facts about plutonium that the assignment requires, what the film astutely offers up is a convincing portrait of how—in the pre-internet era—something as mundane as homework could mobilize one’s entire community. Over the course of one madcap evening—much of which Jackie spends sitting in her kitchen on the phone, just as my Mom had done when saving my ass with that call to Mrs. McGuinness—Jason and Jackie use every resource at their disposal to ascertain the needed information. It’s truly “all hands on deck,” as friends, neighbors, relatives, and even Jackie’s hapless occasional lover, Ken, all rally to the cause, contributing what they know. (Ken heroically comes through at the eleventh hour with the requisite visual aid).

As “Last Minute” reaches its triumphant denouement, Cusumano—like a seasoned cultural historian—has mounted a subtle argument about changing norms and the passage of time. The sequence of actions that Jackie and Jason take to solve their crisis are all shown to be perfectly natural given the constraints of the era. And while it’s certainly easier to have all the requisite information at one’s fingertips nowadays, the film suggests that perhaps there was something profoundly worthwhile about the collective problem-solving efforts that were often necessary in this bygone analog era. We might not yet have been connected to the information superhighway, with its infinitude and all its promise of speed and efficiency, but we were more connected to one another. As reviewer Peter Gray writes, “The inconvenience of the era becomes a catalyst for connection, forcing characters to rely on each other in ways that feel increasingly rare.”

It’s a theme I keep coming back to (including on this Substack): I wonder all the time about how we, like the frog in the slowly boiling pot, have unconsciously become inured to the ways our media and information environments have altered our patterns of communication—and, consequently, our capacity for human connection. Kudos to Mike and the team behind “Last Minute” for creating this fun, compelling, deeply humanistic slice of life, reminding us about the surprisingly ordinary ways that people used to show up for one another before our era of screen dominance, and how natural it once seemed to do so.

“This is the West, sir. When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.”

- from The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (dir. John Ford, 1962)

A legend died this past Monday: tenor saxophonist Sonny Rollins, one of the last remaining giants from jazz’s 1950s/60s golden age.

With Rollins’s passing, there is now no one left from Art Kane’s famous photograph “A Great Day in Harlem,” a black-and-white portrait of fifty-seven jazz musicians published in Esquire magazine in 1958 (and later featured as a key plot point in Steven Spielberg’s bittersweet film The Terminal).

Remembered by all who knew him as a strikingly reserved, unassuming man, Rollins nonetheless cut an imposing, larger-than-life figure in the jazz universe over the course of his long career, emerging in spite of himself as the stuff of lore. There was that time he kept playing a concert in upstate New York even after breaking his foot. Another Rollins quirk was related personally to me and a friend by renowned NYC sax repairman Perry Ritter: Rollins apparently asked him to leave his horn a bit leaky (ie, not fully resetting all of the dodgy keypads), in order to give his sound a rawer, brasher quality.

And then there’s the mythos of the bridge. In 1959, just as his career was taking off after the release of seminal albums like Saxophone Colossus (1957) and A Night at the Village Vanguard (1958), Rollins completely dropped out of the jazz scene, refusing to record or perform for over two-and-a-half years. Instead, Rollins would play to the wee hours most nights on the pedestrian level of the Williamsburg Bridge. Why? Rollins claimed that he had grown dissatisfied with his tone and disgruntled with the music business, and that playing on the bridge—an easy walk from his Brooklyn apartment—was a way for him to practice obsessively, for hours on end, without pissing off his neighbors. Rollins had not wanted to draw attention to himself—hence why he would play in the middle of the bridge in the dead of night. But soon the jig was up—Rollins was discovered one night by a music writer. Henceforth, as jazz critic Francis Davis writes, “The TV networks were sending camera crews to the bridge and portraying Rollins as a lofty and mystical idealist, a man who had turned his back on worldly riches to pursue self-knowledge.”

Even though Rollins hadn’t wished to become a media celebrity, he was nonetheless able to parlay the mystique of the bridge years into a lucrative record deal, which kicked off with his vaunted return album, fittingly called The Bridge (1962). Though it’s a beautiful, energetic album, marked by Rollins’s tremendous synergy with guitarist Jim Hall, I cannot say I hear any real difference in his tone from the pre-bridge era. Sonny still sounded like Sonny.

Which is saying a lot. Because no one has ever sounded quite like him, even though many, myself included, have tried. (Maybe we need to leave our horns a little leakier…). Rollins was notoriously self-critical, often dissatisfied with his live performances, ever in pursuit of an elusive ideal in his playing. But to my ear, at least, Sonny’s sound was perfection: robust, exuberant, husky yet somehow still delicate, loose but laser-focused, all with a strong hint of smoke.

For good reason, John Coltrane is usually held by jazz aficionados as the greatest saxophonist who ever lived. It is undeniable that Coltrane did more to shape the overall trajectory of jazz; it has often been said that trumpeter Miles Davis would open a new period, based on a new kind of style or sound, and that Coltrane would then take it to its pinnacle. Coltrane took hard bop and post-bop to places no one else could have taken them. Almost every contemporary tenor player in New York City has modeled their sound concept to some extent on Coltrane.

I love Coltrane’s playing, but Rollins will always be my favorite. When I was first getting more deeply into jazz as a freshman in college, it was Rollins’s albums that I played on repeat. Saxophone Colossus is my favorite jazz album of all time—I could not get enough of it then (and even chose to transcribe Rollins’s solo on the first track, the beloved calypso “St. Thomas,” for my jazz improv class), and I still cannot wrap my head around the level of sophistication of Rollins’s playing on that album. What Rollins did best (and I’m by no means the first to say this) was to tell a story through his playing. He was the master of thematic development—taking a simple musical idea, a short phrase or motif, and turning it into high art over the course of a long solo. Listen to his lines on “St. Thomas,” or “You Don’t Know What Love Is,” or “Moritat” (aka “Mack the Knife”) or “Blue 7,” and you will hear a prose poem unfolding in real time.

What also stands out to me throughout Rollins’s body of work was his unmatched joy. If, for Coltrane, jazz was a sober spiritual quest—a vehicle towards enlightenment—Rollins seemed to be motivated more by the sheer thrill of improvisation, of finding a total, all-encompassing spirit of liberation in the act of musical creation. Even when Rollins’s approach was more overtly political—such as the fiery title-track of his 1958 album Freedom Suite, which he composed after experiencing racial discrimination when trying to rent an apartment in New York—his playing is ebullient, filled with brilliant energy and light. It just sings.

I’ve always felt that Rollins sounded especially joyful on his recordings of the ostensibly cheesy, old-timey crooner and Hollywood tunes that he purportedly loved ever since he was a kid. Way Out West (1957), with jazz renditions of “I’m an Old Cowhand” and “Wagon Wheels,” is in fact a love letter to Western genre films. Another favorite recording of mine is Rollins’s adaptation of “The House I Live In,” the title track of a short “social issue” film from 1945, starring Frank Sinatra. This was not the sort of source material that most jazz musicians of the Civil Rights era wanted to touch. But in Rollins’s hands (or embouchure), these tunes were elevated to the heights of musical genius.

*

As a huge jazz fan, it’s difficult to process losing a legend of this magnitude. Living in New York, I go hear live jazz all the time, and I can attest that jazz is very much thriving; at least in this city, it is a living, breathing art form that is continuously evolving to meet the moment, pulling in and metabolizing so much from the contemporary musical ecosystem.

But losing Rollins is still a blow; it feels like the very end of an era. Even if it’s an era that has, in fact, already been gone for a very long time, I still can’t help but mourn its passing anew. I know enough about how jazz (and history) work to be skeptical of “lone genius” interpretations of how ideas and artistic movements take shape. Each and every jazz luminary was embedded in a rich and dynamic community, where ideas were shared and cross-pollinated with amazing frequency and rapidity. It’s certain that Rollins wouldn’t have been Rollins without having had the chance, as a young and up-and-coming musician in NYC, to absorb the greatness of Charlie Parker, Thelonious Monk, Coleman Hawkins (his personal hero), Bud Powell, Dizzy Gillespie, Miles Davis, and Max Roach, among others.

And yet, to my mind, Rollins stands apart. He was the colossus. And even as we’ve lost a number of other jazz legends in recent years, I had felt a weird sort of groundedness knowing that Rollins—though in his 90s, and having been retired from performing and recording for over a decade—was still here. Jazz will never be the same without him.

Hungary is not all of a sudden a healthy democracy, but Orban’s defeat shows that there are real limits to the so-called “competitive authoritarianism” model. Both he and Erdoğan managed to stay in power for so long because they have successfully sustained a critical mass of popular support—something approaching fifty percent of the electorate—despite their polarizing styles. That model of governance simply ran out of gas on Orban.

And Erdoğan’s sagging popularity suggests the same dynamic is playing out in Turkey. But instead of setting himself up for possible electoral failure, Erdoğan has decided to double down on authoritarianism.

This past Friday, May 23, Erdoğan released a two-sentence presidential decree ordering the closure of Bilgi University, one of Turkey’s most prestigious private institutions. The president provided no rationale or justification for revoking the university’s license to operate. It seems Bilgi was an annoying liberal thorn in Erdoğan’s side, and so he decided to take care of the problem once and for all.

Erdoğan’s decree was met with shock both at home and abroad. Blindsided and still processing what had happened, Bilgi students and faculty attempted to occupy the campus. After being violently removed, they protested outside of the campus gates. Barely two days after issuing the decree closing the school, Erdoğan issued another equally cryptic two-line decree allowing it to reopen.

Perhaps handling two major controversies was just too much for the aging president. On Saturday, one day after issuing the decree closing Bilgi, police raided the headquarters of the opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP) in Ankara. Before the raid, the Erdoğan-aligned Turkish judiciary issued a decision that invalidated CHP’s current leadership and returned to the head of the party its septuagenarian and chronically unpopular former leader, Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu.

As was the case with Bilgi University, party members attempted to occupy the building and, once forcefully evicted by the police, staged protests outside of it, with photos of the now-ousted CHP leader, Özgür Özel, leading them. Unlike in the Bilgi case, there is no indication that Erdoğan and his allies plan to back down.

CHP has its own mixed record when it comes to democratic governance. But if elections were to be held today, Özel would have a strong chance at winning the presidency. By removing Özel as leader—a decision made by the supposedly independent judiciary— Erdoğan can avoid the bad visuals that would come with shuttering the CHP outright or cancelling presidential elections. Instead, he can choose who he runs against: in this case, the ineffectual Kılıçdaroğlu.

Orban’s position was weakened by the fact that, as a member of the EU, Hungary is especially vulnerable to diplomatic, political, and economic pressure from more powerful member states. Any attempt by Orban to do what Erdoğan is doing now in Turkey would have been met with likely insurmountable political opposition both within Hungary and outside. EU membership remains popular in Hungary, and the EU had already frozen billions in development aid to Hungary in response to Orban’s rule-of-law violations. While the EU often appears politically and diplomatically feckless, it is hard to imagine it standing by idly had Orban resorted to extreme measures to meddle in the electoral process.

Erdoğan, meanwhile, benefits from Turkey’s geopolitical importance vis-à-vis both Russia and Iran. There is simply no appetite on the part of EU leaders to stoke political instability in Turkey. Erdoğan is operating with a veritable diplomatic blank check as he runs roughshod over the last remaining vestiges of Turkish democracy. Indeed, at the same time Erdoğan’s government was shutting down Bilgi University and occupying CHP headquarters, Spain’s foreign minister celebrated his country’s “robust partnership” with Turkey. Mark Rutte, secretary general of NATO, signaled his enthusiasm for the coming NATO summit to be held in Ankara, promising the hosts would put on a “good show.”1 It’s hard to come away with any other conclusion than the near-term picture in Turkey is truly a bleak one.

There is no question that we are living in an era of widespread democratic backsliding. It is also the case that the path taken in one country does not predict the path that will be taken in another. I think it is also worth considering what lessons we are to take from the fact that a supposed beacon of democratic vitality such as Spain and a self-proclaimed democratic bulwark such as NATO are willing to let diplomatic and political expedience trump support for the ideals of democracy in the case of Turkey.

We may once again live in a world where democracy feels like it is on the ascent, but the road ahead is a rocky one. And it is clear that democratic restoration in Hungary, Turkey, and elsewhere will be very challenging without robust institutional, political, and diplomatic support.

It’s easy to become inured to the subtle and not-so-subtle ways these responses reflect assumptions about a place like Nebraska as being a non-place, without culture, without history, without a story. But this isn’t a piece about why Nebraska matters, or at least not in a way that would appeal to a Nebraska booster. Instead, I want to leave you with a sense of why an Omaha kid ended up in a scholarly career that has tried to make sense of the forms of mass violence and genocide that have shaped our modern world.

Nebraska is a place shaped by immigration. I understand how obvious this must seem at first glance; even the many indigenous groups that populated Nebraska before European settlement were constantly on the move. But Nebraska’s immigration history is genuinely unique. As a frontier state in the late-nineteenth century, many of the immigrant groups that arrived in Nebraska established colonies: to this day, Wilber is known for its Czech identity; O’Neil for its Irish; Dannebrog for its Danish; and Stromsburg for its Swedish.

My great-grandfather arrived in Nebraska from Joliet, Illinois, along with his family in the 1880s (yes, I have an old family), encouraged by an effort among Catholic clergy in the US to settle Irish immigrant families in rural frontier areas far from the urban vices of drinking, gambling, and cavorting. Their efforts to make the desert of the Nebraska Sandhills bloom failed, and my great-grandfather and most of his siblings eventually ended up either in Omaha or scattered to the winds. The only remnant of the Irish colony of O’Connor, Nebraska, is a church and a cemetery where his parents are buried in unmarked graves.

The main character in the classic American novel My Antonia was modeled after a Czech immigrant named Anna Pavelka, who, along with her family, settled in Willa Cather’s hometown of Red Cloud (and whose family remains in Nebraska to this day). Black families arrived in large numbers to Omaha starting at the turn of the twentieth century. Included among them were Earl and Louise Little. Their son, Malcolm, was born in 1925—he later replaced his surname with an X.

Nebraska is a unique amalgam in this way, including a mix of immigrant communities and their descendants that is unlike elsewhere in the Great Plains and Mountain West. Growing up, I thought kids with bright blue eyes and hair so blond it was almost white were a majority population; so, too, people with names that started with odd consonant combinations like Hr and Vl or ended in some version of son, sen, sson, or ssen. It was only moving to New York that I realized that my phenotype—dark hair and dark eyes—is the default human setting.

Greeks were not a noticeable part of this mix. That isn’t to say they weren’t there at all. My father, an events organizer, helped put on a “Grecian Festival” in Omaha in the late-70s and 80s. Our favorite restaurant growing up was a Greek place—the Greek Islands, an apt name in our triple-landlocked state. My father still orders from there at least once a week. Cinephiles will no doubt recognize the name Alexander Payne, perhaps Nebraska’s most famous filmmaker, and son of a local Greek-American family.

Most Nebraskans would probably respond to this observation with a casual “so what.” There is really no Armenian community to speak of in Nebraska. Or Syrian (contrast that with the long-standing Arab communities of Iowa and the Dakotas!). Or Dutch. It’s easy to conclude from their relative absence in present-day Nebraska that Greeks just didn’t settle there in large numbers, certainly nothing like the Czechs, Poles, and Irish. But they did. And then something happened.

The arrival of tens of thousands of Greeks in the United States at the turn of the twentieth century is one of the lesser known chapters of that era of mass immigration. Greek immigration was a drop in the bucket compared to the eastern European Jews and Italians who came to the US in the same period. Further complicating matters, “Greek” wasn’t a stable identity: more Greeks lived under Ottoman rule than lived in the independent Greek Kingdom. Before World War I, Greece was only half as big as it is today. Many Ottoman Greeks, though members of the Eastern Orthodox church, spoke Turkish, not Greek. The Ottomans referred to their Greek subjects as “Romans” (Rum), distinguishing them from the Greeks living in Greece (Yunan). Confused yet?

The Greeks who arrived in Omaha at the beginning of the twentieth century came primarily from the Peloponnese, the heartland of the Greek Kingdom. Greece was a poor and indebted country. Greek immigrants were attracted to the promise of high wages and ample work opportunities on offer in the United States. Would-be immigrants often contracted with middlemen, padrones, who helped secure their clients’ passage to the US and employment when they got there. Railroad work in the West was a common source of work for these early Greek immigrants.

It was the railroads that first brought Greeks to Omaha. But they quickly found work in the burgeoning meat-packing industry centered on the then independent city of South Omaha. They worked alongside Irish, Polish, Czech, and Italian immigrants who vied for the same meatpacking jobs, settling in a neighborhood not far from what is today the epicenter of the Mexican community in Omaha. By 1909, they numbered in the several thousand, with their own stores, boarding houses, churches, and taverns, following much the same script as other immigrant groups settling in the city at the same time.

But Greeks were different. They were Orthodox, not Roman Catholic. In the emerging “scientific” racist hierarchy of the time they, like other questionably European ethnic groups, sat somewhere between black and white, Asian and European, Oriental and Occidental. This was the age of Chinese Exclusion; anti-immigrant fervor was growing in the United States, targeting those groups deemed to be unassimilable to republican American life. And one way an immigrant group could bolster their position in the eyes of nativist Americans was to turn on another group that appeared more different, more vulnerable, more threatening.

Such was the position Greek Omahans found themselves in as the first decade of the twentieth century came to a close. They were viewed as particularly suspicious by more established Omahans, and other immigrant groups found that they could harness anti-Greek sentiment to bolster their own position in the cut-throat economic hierarchy of the packing plants and the railroads.

And so it was when on February 19, 1909, an Irish-American policeman named Edward Lowry happened upon a Greek immigrant, John Masourides, and his seventeen-year–old English tutor. Suspecting an illicit sexual affair was taking place between the two, and that Masourides was trafficking the girl, Officer Lowry decided to arrest them both. As they were approaching the police station, Masourides drew a gun he had been hiding and opened fire on Lowry, killing him.

Lowry’s murder touched off a firestorm of anger, particularly among Omaha’s Irish community. The killing of a police officer by a Greek man accused of conducting an illicit sexual relationship with a native-born teenager was a narrative tailor-made to fuel retributive violence. Lascivious rumors about the sexual proclivities and violent impulses of the alien Greek population spread among Omaha’s various communities, native and foreign-born. On February 21, a mob descended on the Greek neighborhood, led by Lowry’s many friends and relatives from Omaha’s Irish neighborhoods. The crowd smashed storefront windows, set boarding houses ablaze, and beat up anyone suspected of being Greek. The goal was to rid Omaha of the “vile filthy Greeks.”

And the mob largely succeeded. Almost overnight, much of the fledgling Greek colony in South Omaha fled the city, many going to Fort Worth, TX to seek employment in the meatpacking industry there. Some would eventually return to Omaha. The Greek Orthodox parish founded by the initial wave of Greek immigrants to Omaha, St. John the Baptist, still exists today, occupying a building that once housed the same Reform Jewish congregation where I was Bar Mitzvahed. But Omaha’s Greek population remains small, and Greek surnames—many of which have been anglicized (Papadopoulos to Payne, for example)—remain far outnumbered by Hruskas, Sedlaceks, Petersons, and McGills. If you visit what remains of the old Greek neighborhood today, be ready to dodge the cars flying past at highway speeds.

I’ve spent my career researching, writing, and teaching about places and people far away from Omaha. Maybe I, in my own way, also concluded that Nebraska was a place without history—or, at least without a history that mattered in a global sense. And yet when I think about the anti-Greek pogrom that wiped out Omaha’s Greek Town, I can’t help but think of another episode of mass urban violence that took place in the early spring of 1909 on the other side of the planet. In April of that year—mere months after the reinstating of the Ottoman constitution, an event that was welcomed by Ottomans of all ethnic and religious backgrounds—mobs of Muslim monarchists attacked, looted and largely destroyed the Armenian quarter of Adana, a cotton-boomtown in what is today southern Turkey. The violence resulted in the killing, injuring, or displacing of tens of thousands of people.

Closer to home, the anti-Greek riot also presaged what would become an all too-common feature of American politics in the later-1910s and 1920s: the so-called “race riot.” In the four years from 1917–1921, Black neighborhoods were attacked and terrorized throughout the United States. Lynchings reached levels unseen since the racial terror of the 1870s. Many of these events still resonate in the public consciousness: 1917 - East St. Louis, Illinois; 1919 - Elaine, Arkansas; 1921 - Tulsa, Oklahoma.

In the midst of the “Red Summer” of 1919, when this violence hit its crescendo, a white mob in Omaha lynched a Black man on the lawn of the Douglas County courthouse and proceeded to burn and dismember his body. They hanged the reformist mayor until he nearly died and tried to set fire to the courthouse. The Omaha World-Herald won a Pulitzer for an editorial written about the riot titled “Law and the Jungle.”

In the “Cyclops” chapter of James Joyce’s Ulysses, a character comes across a headline in the newspaper that reads Black Beast Burned in Omaha, GA. Despite locating Omaha in Georgia (what is Nebraska, after all?), this is almost certainly a reference to the Omaha lynching. “A lot of Deadwood Dicks,” Joyce continues, “in slouch hats and they firing at a Sambo string up in a tree with his tongue out and a bonfire under him. Gob, they out to drown him in the sea after and electrocute and crucify him to make sure of their job.”

I am fascinated by the mechanisms of violence that characterize such events. Why are there so many examples of urban violence targeting minority communities in the early twentieth century? What do well-known examples such as the pogroms of Kishiniev and Odessa, and the Adana and Tulsa massacres share in common? Where does a largely forgotten event like Omaha’s anti-Greek riot of 1909—its memory kept alive by a handful of descendants and local history hobbyists—fit into this global history?1

Nebraska is not a place without history. It is not a provincial backwater unchanged by the currents of global history. Rather, it is a constituent part of this past.

- Opening of Hari Kunzru’s novel Red Pill (2020)

With my 45^th birthday less than two weeks away, there’s no escaping the fact that I’ve now decidedly entered middle age. I have the usual questions, which shouldn’t feel as shocking as they somehow do: How did this happen to me? When did my body start falling apart? Though I’m not a father, I have a dad-bod paunch I can’t seem to shake, while nagging Achilles tendonitis and plantar fasciitis issues keep me from being as active as I once was and still wish to be. If body “maintenance” is my future, it also feels like a prison sentence. “This is what I have become,” yes, but also: what are all the things I must now do, forever, to stave off even more precipitous decline?

As time lurches ever onward, horizons do seem to be closing; Kunzru is absolutely right about that. I am finally beginning to understand that all those giant 19^th-century novels I once collected—“putting off for ‘later’”—will probably go unread. Meanwhile, I have less patience for bullshit, more desire to expedite plans for once-in-a-lifetime travel. My wife and I fantasize about retirement almost every week.

With so much I need or want to do—and read!—while time sleds me inexorably down that “slope into darkness,” it is a rare and unexpected treat to find a moment to re-read a favorite book. Yet this is exactly what I did last month with Hari Kunzru’s haunting and prescient novel, Red Pill. While the real impetus for re-reading was the opportunity to discuss it with my wife’s book group, I was also compelled to revisit it out of a sense of both personal and historical curiosity. I wanted to know: Why had this novel resonated with me so deeply when I first read it in the Fall of 2020, as the Trump/Biden election reached its boiling point? And now, re-reading it six years hence, what might it tell us about a particular moment in our recent past—a moment when so many of us felt to be on the precipice of collapse, our political and intellectual certainties apparently dissolving before our eyes?

I’m a historian, so I can’t help but read fiction with a historical eye. (As a student, I would have hated the “New Criticism” that dominated Anglo-American literary academia for so many decades). I teach novels and short stories in my Middle Eastern history courses all the time; they give students a unique feel, I think, not just for ordinary lived experience, but also for the texture of historical time. Historical monographs or textbooks, valuable though they may be, cannot adequately capture the psychological and emotional content of lived history—the anxieties and preoccupations of different kinds of people living through periods of momentous change. We need imaginative works about the past to supplement our more empirical and archival apprehension of it.

When I first read Red Pill, I was gaining insight into our present (even though a big reveal in the novel’s final act complicated that a bit). But now it reads to me somewhat like a historical novel, albeit one dealing with the very recent past—a past that most certainly continues to torment our present. In the rest of this post, I’ll explore how I feel Red Pill captures a distinct moment—a shift, as we historians like to say—in the collective psyche of American liberals.

NB: There are spoilers below. If you think you might want to read Red Pill, you may want to stop here.

*

Red Pill is told from the point of view of a New York intellectual who has spent his entire life and career trying to understand “the self.” This appeared to him as a higher calling—as a liberal, all that is good and worthy in the world stems from the sanctity of the individual and the rights that are understood to inhere in individual selfhood. When the unnamed narrator arrives in Berlin to begin a fellowship at a prestigious (fictionalized) research center, his entire intellectual project is to understand the “lyric I”—the role of the self in European romantic poetry.

In Berlin, things quickly unravel. Wanting to be left alone in study and contemplation, he runs afoul of the authorities at his host institute. He can’t connect to his research and instead spends hours each day on frigid long walks around the Wannsee, notorious for being the site of the conference where the Nazi leadership decided upon the Final Solution. Isolated from his peers and increasingly marooned inside his own skull, the narrator binge-watches a hyper-violent cop show called Blue Lives, which he believes is “red-pilling” its audience into accepting a brutal, nihilistic reality where “might makes right” and nothing else in the world much matters. Not the “lyric I,” not the sanctity of the individual, and certainly not any tired liberal notion of progress.

The story picks up momentum when he meets Anton, the creator of Blue Lives and an unapologetic racist and anti-immigrant xenophobe, who taunts the narrator for his sanctimonious liberal views—views which the narrator had not considered he might need to defend or explain. This sends the narrator spiraling: he grows obsessed with Anton, convinced that he alone must expose Blue Lives, and the monstrous reactionary mind behind it, before they wreak real havoc on the world. Mixed up in all of this is the narrator’s own precarious mental health, propelled in part by his fear that he will be wholly unprepared to protect his family in the Anton-esque hellscape to come. (That he now inhabits a middle-aged body only compounds his anxiety). As his (real or imaginary) standoff with Anton escalates, the plot careens forward towards a decisive mental break; then, in a deeply moving final chapter, the narrator is back in New York, left to pick up the pieces.

Red Pill is a contemporary masterpiece, and—like all great works of fiction—it can be appreciated on many levels. The prose is deeply thoughtful, elegant, elegiac; its imaginative leap into the head of a character teetering on the edge of psychosis is truly chilling. One could read the novel simply as one man’s descent into solipsism and madness and find a great deal to take away from it.

But I am equally drawn to the novel as an allegory for the violent rupture in the taken-for-granted order of things that so many liberals experienced in the 2010s, with the rise of Trumpism. What seems to disturb the narrator so profoundly about Anton, and Blue Lives, isn’t how wrong they are about the world, but rather the question of why liberals are always so sure they are right. If the mere existence of the Antons of the world comes as an affront to our narrator—in bourgeois Brooklyn, he never really had to deal with anyone like them—he is even more discomfited by the way Anton breezily dismisses his most cherished political beliefs (about individual rights, about immigrants, about diversity), exposing them as platitudes and pieties that many liberals are ill-prepared to defend in any meaningful way. I don’t think the narrator truly believes that Blue Lives is going to corrode the public mind, so much as he realizes (and here, being in Berlin, in Wannsee, is crucial) that history has always contained the capacity for tremendous violence—that an eternal darkness always threatens to upend the arc of the moral universe that so many of us want to believe bends towards justice, so much so that we’ll squint and squint so that we can pretend we still see it bending, even when events tell us otherwise.

Red Pill succeeds as a historical novel, then, because it perfectly captures that crushing experience I know I had somewhere in the 2010s, of realizing that my devotion to certain liberal precepts—comforting stories we like to tell ourselves about progress—was masking the hidden darkness underneath. That I had taken for granted a political and social reality that might have seemed stable and secure, but was as contingent and uncertain as any other phase of human history. All that is solid melts into air; all that we take for granted can slip away in just one year into a spiteful, vengeful president’s term.

And if I’m reading Kunzru correctly, then we also can’t complacently assume we can just return to the status quo ante. We’ve come too far; we know too much. There’s no going back; instead, we must figure out how, in light of the ever-present darkness, we can come together and build something better. Here, I believe the character arc of Kunzru’s narrator provides not just a cautionary tale, but rather a hopeful model of where to start.

By the end of the novel, the narrator realizes that his lifelong pursuit of a fully mastered selfhood was always a chimera—a total waste. “It’s not much, but I can say that the most precious part of me isn’t my individuality, my luxurious personhood, but the web of reciprocity in which I live my life.” We need each other, Kunzru is saying, to break out of the cocoons of selfish individualism that our taken-for-granted neoliberal order has woven around our lives. “Alone, we are food for the wolves. That’s how they want us. Isolated. Prey. So we must find each other. We must remember that we do not exist alone.”

Herein lies the novel’s ultimate irony: if, for most of the novel, we understand the “red-pilling” of the title to be the propagation of Anton’s nihilistic worldview through the mass medium of television, by the end I think it’s clear that Kunzru’s book itself serves as its own kind of “red pill” for its readers. But here, Kunzru is turning the red pill meme—so ubiquitous among the online right in the 2010s as an invitation to shun the “normie” world—on its head. It’s not that we have to abandon the precepts and values of liberalism—which I think are wholeheartedly worth defending, as I think Kunzru also does (and as a colleague of mine has so eloquently done in this essay). Instead, we must let go of the illusion that the world will continue to move inexorably in a progressive direction, without being prepared to defend it from the backlash that we should have always known was inevitable. It is naive and foolhardy to pretend that the fight isn’t coming, or that the barbarians at the gates of liberal democracy will stop on their own accord. Kunzru’s red-pill for us, then, is a dose of realism, a sober cautionary tale about our need to transcend our innocent illusions and live in the sordid and difficult world as it actually is: “Outside the wide world is howling and scratching at the window. Tomorrow morning we will have no choice but to let it in.”

Back in January, I published a post—“History on the Precipice”—that I suggested would be the first in a two-part essay on the experience of collapse in American society. Instead of one linear essay, I’ve decided instead to write a series of loosely related pieces on collapse. “Historicizing Hari Kunzru’s Red Pill” is the second in that series.

In recent years, American higher education has found itself caught between a crisis of political legitimacy and a renewed expectation that it serve as a bulwark of democratic life. Donald Trump’s reelection in November 2024 capped off what has been interpreted as a monumental political backlash against the “woke” turn of the 2010s and the early-2020s. Well before November 2024, the leading culture warriors of the “war on woke” were already laying much of the blame for the perceived leftward lurch of political discourse at the feet of higher education. The 2024 campus encampments protesting Israel’s war on Gaza only turbocharged this dynamic.

The entrenched belief on the right that higher education has been hijacked by the cultural left has powered the Trump Administration’s aggressive assault on federal funding of the sector. At the state level, Republican governors and legislatures have forced major curricular changes at state universities aimed at removing disfavored content—which they often characterize as leftwing propaganda—from general education and major programs.

Against this political backdrop, higher ed administrators have found themselves scrambling to redeem the sector’s legitimacy in the eyes of a skeptical public. For many university boards and presidents, the overarching question is: how do we depolarize perceptions of the university in a highly polarized political environment? Over the past couple of years, we have seen institutions from the University of Florida to Yale to the University of North Carolina open multi-million dollar centers intended to signal to higher ed’s rightwing critics that these universities, far from sitting at the vanguard of cultural revolution, are safe spaces for viewpoint diversity and open dialogue. Recently, Yale University published a self-study that, among other things, pointed the finger at itself and other elite institutions for losing the trust of the American people by having failed to encourage civil dialogue.

At the same time, Trump’s explicit flirtation with authoritarianism, coupled with broader, global democratic backsliding, has led to a growing debate within the higher ed sector, at least in the United States, about the role the university plays in safeguarding democratic society. For many, it has become increasingly imperative that universities prepare students to contribute actively as republican citizens, whether through the introduction of required courses on government and civics, or through enhanced curricular and co-curricular offerings that focus on volunteerism, community engagement, and off-campus experiential learning.

These two imperatives—one focused on restoring political legitimacy (usually in the face of bad faith attacks) and the other on centering higher education as an essentially democratic institution—have converged in recent years on the (often twinned) concepts of civics and dialogue. This development perhaps isn’t all that surprising. Both sound safe, non-partisan, and unthreatening. Additionally, a civically engaged population in open and respectful dialogue is essential for a functioning democracy. As a result, we are seeing a renaissance of a sort for concepts that not too long ago were portrayed as, at best, quaint and old-fashioned and, at worst, as repressive.

This focus on civics and dialogue raises an important question in my mind: What is the university for? It is hard to argue against centering civics and promoting democratic dialogue in higher education curricula. We should, however, be realistic about what we can expect from such an effort. We need to resist the effort to portray the university as a quintessential democratic institution or to position it at the vanguard of restoring civic good in American society. The reason for this is simple: the university of the early twenty-first century is an inherently undemocratic institution.

Such a claim may appear shocking or discomforting at first glance, but dig a little deeper into the history of the American university and it shouldn’t come as all too surprising. I want to clarify that by undemocratic, I do not mean anti-democratic. Rather, they are undemocratic in form, with vertical decision-making structures and various gatekeeping practices that serve to reinforce exclusion. The higher ed sector has changed a great deal over the past century-and-a-half. But far from always having been perceived as an essential bulwark of civic good, the idea that universities are engines of democratic change has more recent, historically contingent origins.

The Evolution of the American University

Higher education at the turn of the twentieth century was a fundamentally different kind of sector compared to what it is now. Broadly speaking, it was composed of three types of institutions: elite private schools, land-grant research universities, and so-called normal schools focused on teacher training.

The primary function of elite private institutions was to produce and reproduce the nation’s political and economic elite. Land grant institutions, which proliferated in the American South, Midwest, and West in the years after the Civil War, were similarly focused on elite production albeit focused more on the state and local levels. The land grant system brought world-class university education to the American hinterlands, becoming particularly powerful engines for economic and technological development—a truly amazing feat without parallel in global history to that point. But their goal wasn’t necessarily to democratize access; higher education remained out of reach for the vast majority. This isn’t to say that elite private and land-grant institutions didn’t serve a certain civic function, they certainly did, but it was an indirect one—manifested in the lawyers, doctors, engineers, and artists who could then serve models of civic virtue to the masses.

The normal school is perhaps the closest we have come in American history to creating a higher education institution truly on the civic vanguard. These schools, often located in smaller communities on the American frontier, focused almost entirely on teacher instruction and played critical roles in the expansion of mass public education in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. The teachers who came out of these institutions were anchors of civic life in the rapidly expanding American frontier of the fin-de-siecle.

The GI bill and the post-war baby boom transformed the higher ed sector in innumerable ways. Perhaps most notably, normal schools all but disappeared, evolving instead into regional comprehensive colleges and universities. States that hadn’t until that point developed robust networks of public colleges and universities, particularly in the Northeast, invested huge resources into building out that infrastructure.

By the 1960s, vastly higher numbers of young people were enrolled in colleges and universities around the country than had been the case twenty years before. It is at this time, too, that higher education had its first taste of being at the center of political, social, and cultural strife. The twin crises of the Civil Rights Movement and the Vietnam War opened up a space for college students to position themselves on the political and cultural vanguard. Campuses also became sites of violence, whether from government agents in the case of Jackson State and Kent State, or from student (or former student) activists in the case of the Weathermen. In response, many on the right began to see colleges and universities as places of indoctrination in desperate need of reform.

In subsequent decades, college students of the 1960s swelled the ranks of the professoriate, benefitting from the rapid expansion of instructional lines as the demand for higher education grew. For many, their experiences as student activists shaped how they understood the role of the university and its relationship to political change and democratic engagement. They helped to nurture and cultivate the intellectual and political outlooks of their undergraduate and graduate students.

Indeed, this was my own experience; my doctoral advisors, both heavily involved in the cultural and political ferment of the 1960s, were fervent believers in the politically transformative power of their teaching and scholarship.Their voices played an undeniable role in shaping the internal politics of their institutions and, by extension, their public face.

At the same time that the baby boomer generation—or at least those who weren’t part of the growing rightward shift that took place among many boomers in the 1970s and 80s that led many to shun the higher ed sector altogether—was coming to dominate the commanding heights of the higher education sector, another even greater structural force was transforming colleges and universities into institutions with missions much larger than simply educating students. The steady erosion of public financial support for public universities forced these institutions to seek new sources of revenue through tuition increases, corporate partnerships, and private and foundation philanthropy. In many small and medium-sized college towns throughout the United States, the process of deindustrialization meant that the local university became the largest and most important employer and economic anchor. Binghamton, NY, the location of my graduate alma mater, is a prototypical example of this dynamic.

As tuition increased, students also began to demand more entertainment options and better living conditions. Broadening of access to higher education also meant catering to the needs of students who lacked access to health care, both physical and mental. In a country defined by its threadbare social safety net, colleges and universities—big and small, well-resourced and impoverished alike—find themselves in the business of offering a whole suite of social services to their student bodies.

Finally, the demand that college degrees live up to the massive investment students make in them means that campuses across the country and of all varieties keep very well-staffed career, internship, and study abroad offices. And this litany doesn’t even touch on the corporate, community, and donor outreach offices and the burgeoning athletic departments that have become staples of larger and wealthier institutions.

The higher education institutions of the twenty-first century increasingly resemble complex, heavily centralized corporations with vast and diversified portfolios. This, among many other factors, helps to explain the steady decline of shared and faculty-led governance that were once hallmarks of the American university. Add this to the steady erosion of tenure, and faculty increasingly resemble corporate employees more than they do a co-equal branch within the university hierarchy.

The modern research university more resembles Rockefeller’s Standard Oil or Jeff Bezos’s Amazon than it does the horizontal and collaborative local organizations imagined by Tocqueville in his paean to American civic democracy. And while regional universities and community colleges strive to democratize access to higher education, forced by chronic budget constraints and hostile legislatures, they too have become deeply hierarchical institutions.

The Undemocratic University

Just like Amazon has a phalanx of personnel dedicated to enhancing the company’s image as a good corporate citizen, and any number of community outreach campaigns, so too do most colleges and universities. Anyone who spends significant time on a college campus will be very familiar with the manifold ways that they strive to embed community engagement, diverse curricular options, and global awareness into the four-year student experience. These efforts are aggressively foregrounded in internal and external communication.

If it is necessary to rebrand these strategies as being fundamentally civic in nature, then I certainly have no opposition; but it is, at least in part, a matter of branding. Not that this should immediately imply cynicism or disingenuousness on the part of those institutions that do so. In fact, such claims about the importance of a college education are rooted in something very real. Plenty of research suggests that college-educated people—particularly those exposed to the social sciences and liberal arts—are, on average, more politically engaged and more open to different and new experiences.

To the extent that this is true, however, it reinforces the longstanding role of universities as institutions that shape civic capacity. But that is a different claim than saying they can sustain civic culture. We should be clear-eyed about the distinction. Requiring a class on civics, encouraging more volunteerism, or ensuring that students engage in respectful dialogue are not going to save American democracy.

I don’t necessarily disagree with some elements of the rightwing critique of campus culture in the 2010s and early-2020s, despite the fact that a great many have been made in obvious bad faith, driven primarily by the desire to bring higher education to heel. Fueled by the social media hothouse, aspects of campus culture did appear rather hostile to differences in opinion, even when those differences were stated in a well-meaning register. I witnessed it myself on more than one occasion. For example, a faculty member at my institution was denounced as a fascist by a colleague after he gently criticized the institution’s effort to set up a bias-response team. Small-bore efforts to foster open dialogue and encourage rigorous examination of diverse viewpoints—in other words, to take them seriously—are thus laudable.

But university administrators that accept multimillion dollar offers to open “viewpoint diversity” centers on their campuses should be more honest about what they are doing. These moves have been rightly criticized as clear efforts to mollify rightwing critics, many of whom now have broad power over federal and state higher ed policies. But viewpoints are not immutable identities, and no viewpoint is entitled to institutional privilege if it cannot withstand critical scrutiny, or if it rests on the denial of others’ equal standing in a democratic society.

Universities may be important to the functioning of a democratic society, but as heavily centralized and corporate entities, it is a category error to argue that they can sit at the vanguard of civic rejuvenation. I broadly agree with Tocqueville’s argument that it is organic, horizontal, and local organizations—think bowling leagues, knitting groups, book clubs, and, yes, student organizations—that lie at the center of a rich and thriving democratic society (and that democracy suffers in their absence).

At their best, modern universities democratize access and serve as important engines of social mobility. This fact seems to me the strongest antidote against the seemingly ever-deepening popular skepticism of the higher ed sector in this country. And it is the successors to the normal schools of the past—the regional public (and private) universities—along with community colleges (39 percent of US undergraduates are enrolled in community colleges!) that are the most successful in this regard.

I find it frustrating that while it is elite universities that most closely resemble the rightwing caricature of the modern higher ed institution, it is the less prominent regional schools and community colleges that tend to suffer the most from the recent spate of anti-college legislation. Rather than focusing on the civic-mindedness or openness to dialogue of students at Harvard or Berkeley, perhaps instead we can work to center these non-elite institutions, and the vitally important work they do, especially at the local and regional levels. If we do, we just might go a long way to restoring public faith in higher education.

The problem is not that universities have failed in their civic mission, but that we have come to expect them to perform a role they were never designed to play—and are no longer structurally capable of sustaining.

Among the colorful stories that Matt’s colleague, who grew up in Iran in the 1960s, loves to tell about his childhood, one has always stood out.

Imagine a well-heeled school in northern Tehran. At the end of each week, in the school’s leafy courtyard, the students would march in a boisterous flag parade, showcasing Iran’s solidarity with the world of nations. Matt’s colleague recalls that the boys would always fight for the honor of carrying the three favored flags. One was Iran, of course; what schoolboy wouldn’t want to show off his national pride. The other two? The United States, and Israel.

That the United States was closely allied with Iran during the reign of Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi is no great secret. Since the early decades of the Cold War, the U.S. had worked to cultivate strong diplomatic relations with both Turkey and Iran, as a bulwark against the radical Arab politics of that era. The United States was pre-Revolution Iran’s greatest sponsor; opponents of the regime pejoratively dismissed the Shah as America’s (or Jimmy Carter’s) puppet, and the CIA notoriously trained the Shah’s fearsome secret intelligence service, SAVAK, in torture methods.

But the deeper history of the Iran-Israel relationship is typically forgotten. As Israel continues its reckless war in Iran, supported by 78% of Jewish Israelis and marked by Netanyahu’s Michael Corleone-esque bid to murder as many rival leaders as possible in one go, we might pause to reflect on the fact that Iran was Israel’s most stalwart ally in the region a mere fifty years ago. Iran was the second Muslim-majority country to recognize the state of Israel. Trade was robust between the two nations for over two decades, and—after the 1967 War—Iran supplied Israel with most of its oil. El Al operated popular direct flights between Tel Aviv and Tehran. And if Matt’s colleague’s story bears any weight, then it seems plausible that this mutual diplomatic affection trickled down to the Iranian populace, as well. (This is to say nothing of the loyalty that many Iranian Jews had to their Persian homeland. As historian Lior Sternfeld brilliantly documents, tens of thousands of Iranian Jews played a key role in Iran’s own nation-building projects over the first three quarters of the twentieth century).

Especially given the Manichaean rhetoric that defines our own time of war, then, the historical relationship between Iran, Israel, and Jews thus bears closer scrutiny. In our last post on the Iran War, we included in our list of key takeaways the perhaps provocative notion that Israel and Iran are far more similar than either side would care to admit. We’d like to expand on that theme in this post.

Sectarian Political Cultures

Both Iran and Israel have deeply sectarian identities. Liberal Zionists tend to characterize Israel as a pluralist democracy. It is certainly true that Israel holds generally free and fair elections. And all Israeli citizens enjoy equal voting rights regardless of their religious or ethnic identity. But this glossy brochure narrative obscures the many ways that Israeli society, politics, and legal structures more closely resemble the Ottoman Empire than they do the United States.

For one, key elements of Israeli civil law echo the Ottoman millet system, in which government-recognized religious communities oversaw the civil matters of its members. The Israeli state recognizes multiple such communities, each of which exercises authority over personal status matters such as birth, marriage, divorce, and death. The state only recognizes Orthodox interpretation of Jewish law in matters of personal status. Non-Orthodox Jewish institutions do not enjoy similar state sanction.

Although political representation is not explicitly apportioned along communal lines, politics in practice is heavily sectarian. The Jewish community is, of course, dominant. Some non-Jewish communities, most notably the Druze, have allied themselves with the Israeli state and thus are well integrated into the political system. Palestinian Muslim and Christian citizens of Israel (to say nothing of the millions who live under Israeli occupation), by contrast, largely exist on the political and economic margins.

Iran’s system is similarly sectarian, although organized differently than Israel’s. In Iran, the Shi’a Ja‘fari school of Islamic law underpins the legal system, and clerical authority plays a central role in governance. Iranians elect a parliament and a president in competitive elections, but clerical leadership is embodied in the form of the Supreme Leader, and various clerical councils hold wide veto power over the civilian government. Religious minority groups such as Armenian and Assyrian Christians, Zoroastrians, and Jews enjoy some limited legal autonomy over the civil affairs of their respective communities, and each elects its own member of the Iranian parliament.

Post-War Modernization and Religious Revival

Israel and Iran had strikingly similar experiences of the paradigm of modernization that prevailed in the Middle East, as it did much of the developing and decolonizing world, in the decades after World War II. Both Ben Gurion and the Shah were staunch believers in brisk and robust top-down modernization schemes, ranging from industrial development to education policy (for the Shah, it was bringing literacy to the benighted ethnic minorities in the provinces; for Ben Gurion, it was acculturating the newly arrived Mizrahim away from their “Oriental” backwardness and towards an Israeli national identity that prided itself on its Europeanness).

And each leader believed in one fundamental tenet of modernization theory: that religion was bound for the dustbin of history. Ben Gurion compromised with the Orthodox religious establishment in laying down the civic foundation of the new state—one that moved forward without a constitution, which many Orthodox Jews felt would be blasphemy against God’s law—only because he believed the Orthodox would simply die out within a generation. Meanwhile, the political culture of the dominant Labour Party was avowedly secular in outlook. The Shah, too, did everything in his power to impose a version of Iranian national identity that ignored 1300 years of Islamic civilization and theological tradition, instead playing up the ancient pre-Islamic past. Hence the Shah’s $17 million investment in the so-called Persepolis celebrations of 1971, which lavishly commemorated the 2,500 year anniversary of the Persian empire and monarchy. (This extravagant display, given its excessive costs at a time when so many Iranians lived in poverty, was the subject of a scathing rebuke of the Shah by future Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini).

If top-down secularization and modernization agendas dominated both Israeli and Iranian lived experience in the 1950s and 60s, the backlash in each country was also remarkably similar. Israel and Iran alike witnessed a robust religious revival movement that sought to amass political power and reclaim national identity.

It was in the 1960s and 1970s that the clerical establishment ramped up its vocal opposition to the Shah (Khomeini was exiled by the Shah in 1964 due to his political activism against the ruling regime). In response to the Shah’s consistent dismissal of Shi’a Islam as a pillar of Iranian identity, many Iranians—including members of the urbanized and educated middle classes—embraced Islam as a cultural emblem of their opposition. Women donned the chador in public to protest the regime’s forced unveilings, dating back to the era of Reza Shah. Ali Shari’ati, a hugely popular intellectual and activist, argued that Iranianness was a beautiful synthesis of pre-Islamic customs and traditions (like the Nowruz celebration for New Year) and Shi’a Islam, and that fighting against the Shah’s forced secularization was thus a crucial aspect of the “return to ourselves” that he called for. Meanwhile, writer and social critic Jalal Al-e Ahmad—the son of a cleric—popularized the notion of gharbzadegi (alternately translated as “Westoxification” or “Occidentosis”) to denote what he saw as the ruling class’s shameful obsession with all things Western at the expense of authentic Iranian culture). As the revolutionary movement against the Shah ballooned in the last years of the 1970s, Islamic revival was always a key rallying cry. (This does not mean, of course, that the millions of Iranian demonstrators wanted a theocracy; far from it. It simply means that they rejected a top-down construction of Iranianness that ignored the country’s deep-rooted Islamic heritage).

The 1970s was also the key decade of religious revivalism in Israel. Many religious Jewish Israelis interpreted their miraculous victory in the 1967 war as a sign of divine approval of the Israeli national project—especially the country’s recent territorial expansion. (Israel quadrupled its size in that war, though it would cede its territorial acquisitions in the Sinai peninsula following the Camp David peace agreement with Egypt). It was in the immediate aftermath of the 1967 war that the precursor to Gush Emunim (“Bloc of the Faithful”), the Religious Nationalist group at the center of Israel’s settlement movement, sprang to life. After the 1973 war, inspired by the fundamentalist, messianic teachings of the Rabbi Zvi Yehuda Kook, Gush Emunim established itself as a mainstay of Israel’s religious right and eventually became central in the National Religious Party that would play a significant role in Israeli politics in the 1980s.

Religious nationalism has only grown as a major force in Israeli society. It was, of course, a religious nationalist who assassinated the Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin in 1995, and it is fanatical religious nationalists who carry out weekly pogroms against Palestinians in the West Bank, aiming to dispossess them from what little they have left by making their lives unlivable. What has been especially troublesome to those Israelis who still believe in the brand of secular, socialist Zionism they had once grown up with—a nostalgic mindset often associated with the legendary writer Amos Oz—is the degree to which religious nationalists have worked steadily to wrest control of the Zionist narrative away from the older generation. Religious nationalists readily claim that they are the true Zionists, that Israeli nationhood must be about redeeming every inch of God-given territory; and that the older, secular Zionists—who are not Jewish enough, in their view—are deluding themselves if they think otherwise.

Gender, Patriarchy, and Law

It is notoriously difficult for women to get a divorce in both Iran and Israel. This is due to the preponderance in both countries of traditional patriarchal norms that have been translated into modern civil law.

One of the first things Khomeini did upon declaring Iran an Islamic Republic was to roll back many of the progressive gender reforms put in place by the Shah, starting with the so-called “White Revolution” of the mid-60s. The Shah’s “Family Protection Laws,” passed in 1967 and 1975, ended the long-standing patriarchal practice of unilateral male divorce. With the Family Protection Laws in place, both men and women could ask for a divorce under specific circumstances, including any mistreatment on the part of the husband. (The Family Protection Laws also raised the legal marriage age for women, first from 9 to 15, and then in 1975 from 15 to 18).

But Khomeini obliterated the Family Protection Laws almost immediately upon seizing power. The legal marriage age for women again returned to 9 years old. And the new regime also re-imposed draconian patriarchal norms in terms of a personal status law that once again gave men the authority to divorce their wives at will, whereas women could now only seek divorce by appealing to an Islamic judge based on a circumscribed set of permissible criteria, based on her ability to prove “hardship” or “undesirable conditions”—terms that are often very subjective and thus difficult for women to establish to a judge’s satisfaction.

Meanwhile, in Israel—thanks to the “Law of Jurisdiction of the Rabbinic Courts” passed in 1953—divorce is strictly regulated by the Orthodox religious establishment, which enjoys full discretion to rule according to its interpretation of Halakhah (Jewish religious law). A woman cannot get a divorce without receiving her husband’s consent, which is represented by a halakhic divorce document known as a “gett.” What this means in practice is that a man in Israel cannot be coerced into consenting to a divorce against his will. Meanwhile, the judges who serve on the Rabbinic court adhere to a strict set of guidelines governing what is a permissible cause for divorce according to Jewish law. When a man refuses to issue a gett—as was the situation depicted in the powerful 2014 film, Gett: The Trial of Viviane Absalem—women are stuck in a precarious and difficult limbo position, legally tied on paper to their husbands even if the relationship is effectively over. This means that a woman cannot remarry (or, practically speaking, even consider the possibility of renewing a personal life).

This is one of the reasons why so many Israelis refuse to get married within Israel, instead electing to go abroad. There is no civil marriage in Israel, only religious marriage; so anyone who wants to circumvent the patriarchal norms of Jewish religious marriage and divorce laws simply has to go elsewhere to gain legal sanction for their union.

The laws governing marriage, divorce, and child custody in both Israel and Iran are extremely complex and arcane—far more intricate than we have time to explore here. But the upshot is the same: religious courts are firmly in control, and patriarchy reigns supreme.

A Deep History of U.S Aid

The seeds of Iran and Israel’s regional power—and this catastrophic war—were sown by the United States. It is well known that Israel is and has been for decades the world’s largest recipient of US military aid. As the second of the so-called “twin pillars” (along with Saudi Arabia) of US Cold War policy in the Middle East (Turkey being a close third), Iran under Mohammad Reza Shah was also a primary recipient of US military aid in the 1960s and 70s.

Iran had been invaded by Russia and Great Britain during World War I, the ruling Qajar Dynasty unable to muster anything more than token opposition to foreign occupation. After the war, the shah’s father managed to march on Tehran and declare himself king armed with little more than surplus rifles supplied to him by the British. Iran was once again occupied by the Soviets and Great Britain in World War II, once again with little opposition.

Iran’s military weakness led the shah to prioritize building a massive military armed with the latest weaponry as a central component of his political program. The US was more than willing to make the Shah’s vision come true in exchange for the Iranian government maintaining its anti-Soviet political orientation. The Shah’s appetite for the latest American military hardware became so lavish that by the mid-1970s, he was spending nearly three billion dollars each year on US weapons.

By the time of the Islamic Revolution, Iran’s military was among the largest in the world and a dominant force in the region. Even after the revolution and the subsequent hostage crisis did not entirely sever the strategic relationship between Iran and the US. During the Iran-Iraq war, elements of the US government engineered covert arms transfers to Iran in order to weaken an Iraq they viewed as an even bigger threat to American interests, the basis of the Iran-Contra affair.

The Shah also worked to build a domestic military industrial system, an effort that has continued in earnest under the Islamic Republic, as evidenced by the IRGC’s impressive missile and drone arsenal. Nonetheless, the military support the United States has historically provided to both countries is not incidental—it is central to the scale and intensity of the conflict we are now witnessing.

Matt: So, you’re flying high after finishing and defending your thesis, but then you immediately have to transition into a new role. What was it like starting your new job at Manhattanville, coming fresh out of grad school?

David: The transition from graduate school to academic job was profound for me on a number of levels. I interviewed at Manhattanville on Valentine’s Day 2012. I was offered the job in March. My oldest son was born in April, and I defended my dissertation in May. By July I had moved from Syracuse, NY—where I had been living—on to Manhattanville’s campus in suburban Westchester County.

When classes started that September—and I think I had three of them that first semester—the learning curve was even steeper than I expected. This was my first time fully controlling my own classroom. I was terribly anxious that first year about whether I had what it took to be an effective teacher. And I was navigating this transition while also adjusting to fatherhood.

One thing I noticed right away was that for many of my older colleagues, they had come of age at a time when there was a firm distinction between what we might call teaching-first and scholarship-first institutions. Many of them had been hired before they received the PhD and received tenure upon defending their dissertations. Just a very different world.

I had it drilled into me during graduate school that I was an aspiring scholar first. I think that was the message many in our generation were getting from our grad programs. And even at Manhattanville, the requirements for tenure had been adjusted over the years to require a great deal more scholarly production. Yes, I was at a teaching-heavy institution, but from the get-go I was concerned with carving out the space and the time to be able to do research and to publish.

David: Same question: How did you find your transition to Sarah Lawrence?

Matt: Well, similarly, it was both really exciting and really hectic. I defended my thesis in August 2012, just a couple of weeks before I had to teach my first class. So that summer was incredibly busy and stressful, but also very heady: not only was I putting the finishing touches on my thesis and developing new syllabi, I was also packing up and moving into my own apartment. That entry into adulthood you mentioned really resonates with me, because that was the first time I would live on my own. I felt like I had graduated from this endless purgatory of studenthood and was finally entering the real adult world.

But I really had to hit the ground running at Sarah Lawrence! The teaching load there is very intense, with this mandatory tutorial system where you’re meeting all your students one-on-one every other week, on top of your normal classes. The learning curve was steep for me, as well, and I just had to push myself to keep going and keep learning my way into this very quirky institution.

It helped that I loved teaching—something I had discovered in grad school, as we discussed last time. I threw myself into my classes completely. This was actually a welcome change, since at that point I was totally burned out from those intense last few months of writing my thesis, which had been brutal. So I just decided to let myself off the hook that first year in terms of expectations for scholarship or publication. And when the first year ended and I could catch my breath, I knew I needed a period of total rest; and so I made a deal with myself that I was not going to work on my book manuscript that first summer and instead would relax and have fun in New York City. I didn’t even look at my dissertation manuscript; instead, I played a lot of music [Matt plays saxophone] and immersed myself in the traditional Jazz scene in New York, which was blowing up at that time.

Matt: What was it like for you after you started to feel more settled at Manhattanville? Did anything change in terms of your goals or expectations?

David: That first year was all adrenaline, Matt. Coming into my second, I hit a wall. I taught four classes that fall semester, four separate course preps. I still think of it as the most difficult and least rewarding thing I have ever done. I also felt burned out because I was living on campus. I was just constantly there, maybe leaving once a week or so. I was always exhausted. I felt like I had no time for my scholarly work.

Going into my third year, I knew I needed to find a better balance. In the early fall of my third year—fall 2014—my wife and I find out we were having another baby. That was the impetus for moving off campus. We bought a house later that year. Creating that physical space between my personal and professional lives was very important to me.

Buying the house was also a sort of tacit recognition that I would be staying at Manhattanville for the medium to long term. I had gone on the job market a couple of times those first years with no success. So I started strategizing on how best to take advantage of my little perch and contribute to the broader field. I went to Turkey in the summer of 2014—incidentally my last time there—and collected a lot of great material for the book project. I managed to get a couple of articles published.

By the end of the spring 2015 semester—almost two years after I first arrived at Manhattanville—I was developing three distinct identities: I had my personal/family life, I had my teaching life, and I had my scholarly life. It was important for me to keep those realms separate and balanced, and I felt like I was starting to be able to manage that.

Matt: I’ve felt this each time we’ve sat down to have our conversation, but it’s uncanny how similar our experiences have been at every step!

It was my second year at Sarah Lawrence when I hit a brick wall and realized the honeymoon phase was over. That first year, everything had been so new and fresh; I loved teaching, I loved living on my own, I loved my quirky new intellectual home. But as soon as that second year started, everything just felt so much more laborious. For one, I was teaching a “First-year studies” course, which at Sarah Lawrence means you meet with your students in that course every week one-on-one, beyond the seminar time. Teaching that along with another brand new course, I just had no time to myself: each week felt like being on a hamster wheel. It was also a very lonely time in my life: I was single at the time, trying to squeeze in a personal life when I could, but I honestly felt I was drowning in work, struggling desperately to keep my head above water. Teaching was all-consuming. It wasn’t long before I started to think, ‘maybe maybe this isn’t the dream job I thought it was,’ and so I tested the waters on the job market starting that Fall. Nothing worked out, though, and somehow I made it through the year in one piece.

I was so burnt out again, but I also realized that I had to start working on my book manuscript—that, whatever came next, I was going to have to get that book out. I know I got some work done that summer, but I don’t think it was until the summer after my third year that I started to gain some traction again with my scholarship. A good friend of mine, Shana Minkin—who at the time was the Middle East editor of an online journal called History Compass—invited me to write a historiographical essay on borderlands in Middle East studies. I really have that piece (and Shana!) to thank for rekindling my interest in my research: it forced me to do a deeper dive into the history of borderlands and territoriality than what I had been able to do for my dissertation. Along the way, I finally started to see how to revamp the conceptual framework for my book. That assignment gave me new intellectual energy but also a lot of confidence; three years after I’d defended my dissertation, I finally had some fire back in my belly.

There were some other developments in my second and third years at Sarah Lawrence that proved to be formative. For one, I went through my reappointment process and found it very gratifying—it was clear that my teaching and service to the school were being recognized. I also started to do some public-facing gigs beyond the College—for instance, I gave a guest lecture at a synagogue in New Rochelle [Westchester County] on the history of Palestine/Israel, and I found that experience to be extremely rewarding. So much so that I decided to offer a class on Palestine/Israel for the first time at Sarah Lawrence. Finally, it was in my third year that I started to find more community at Sarah Lawrence and feel more at home there. I was part of a writing group, which proved helpful for developing my ideas for the book manuscript. I also served on a search committee for a new position in Latin American history, and that was actually one of the most joyful and energizing experience I had from that period in my career: not only did it get me excited about the historical profession again, but I was also invested in choosing someone who would be my colleague in the History Department for the foreseeable future. All of this left me feeling more optimistic about my future at Sarah Lawrence.

Matt: Let’s talk a little more about your experience working on your book. Was it a smooth process for you? How did it fit with the demands of your tenure-track job?

David: When I first arrived at Manhattanville, I wasn’t entirely sure whether I would be able to publish a book. There wasn’t much institutional support for it, and a book wasn’t required for tenure. In those first few years, I was asked to contribute an article to a special issue of a journal and a chapter to an edited book volume. I published a literature review on the Armenian genocide in 2015, coinciding with the centenary of that event. I felt productive and like I was doing enough to ensure my tenure file was strong.

Going back into the Ottoman archives in 2014, where I found some really rich material, helped a lot in convincing me to turn the dissertation into a book. Also, seeing people like you, Matt, and other friends starting to get to work on their own books served as a real motivation. I began spending my summers back in my hometown of Omaha where we had some family support with child care. It was there that I really began to work on it in earnest. It does feel like an accomplishment looking back on it, given all that was stacked against me finishing the book. At some point, it became something I wanted to check off my bucket list.

By fall 2017, I had a pretty full manuscript and was ready to start shopping it around to presses. I was pretty lost when it came to navigating that process. Thankfully, Kent Schull—who had been hired as the Ottomanist at Binghamton not long after I left—had just started an Ottoman history series with Edinburgh University Press. He encouraged me to submit a proposal there. I did, and by summer of 2018, I had a book contract in hand.

David: What was writing the book like for you?

Matt: To be honest, those years working on my book manuscript are pretty fuzzy to me. On one hand, I know I had some momentum coming out of my third year of teaching—I won a course release from the College and had some extra funding that I used for research, including hiring a developmental editor to help me break through some of the impasse I was feeling in terms of converting the dissertation into a book. But I also remember that it still felt like a total slog to work on the book when teaching consumed so much time during the academic year. I was also easily distracted by world events. Especially with the 2016 presidential election and then Trump’s inauguration, the Muslim ban—I remember I was trying hard to write some new material over that Winter Break, but I couldn’t take my eyes off the news. It made no sense to focus on what felt like an esoteric academic book about the Egyptian/Libyan borderland when my country was going to shit right before my eyes.

But somehow I kept muddling along in those years, even though I knew, like you, that I didn’t need to have my book out to go up for tenure (Sarah Lawrence is quite different from a lot of other places in that regard); I was just doing it for myself.

Again, the sequence of things is a bit blurry for me. At some point I sent a prospectus to Kate Wahl at Stanford University Press; then I finally got to researching and writing the new chapter I knew I needed to write, about territoriality and the politics of economic development. Writing that chapter was the first time in a long while that the manuscript work actually felt kind of fun. Then I methodically went back and radically revised dissertation chapters so that they were streamlined and read more like book chapters. Finally I researched and wrote a brand new conclusion, and then completely overhauled my Introduction. I honestly cannot remember if all of that work occurred before I sent my draft off to Stanford for approval or not; some of it might have been for the final draft, which I do remember was due in summer 2017. That was when I put the whole thing together, including annoying parts like the bibliography and the “Note on transliteration” and stuff like that. That final stretch reminded me a lot of the final months of my dissertation writing—I just kind of blocked out everything else and went into a long tunnel, working grueling hours every day towards the finish line. But then it was done, and I felt a tremendous sense of achievement when that manuscript was finally out of my hands.

David: Matt, how did you feel when the book finally did come out? Did it feel like a certain sort of culmination, or was there disappointment involved?

Matt: To be perfectly honest, when the book came out in March 2018, I immediately fell into a kind of postpartum depression. Don’t get me wrong, it was obviously nice to see the book in print; I loved holding the physical copy in my hands, and I loved how it looked, especially the cover—the design team at Stanford did a superb job with that. But I also fell into a huge funk. It didn’t help that, right after Desert Borderland came out, I gave a book talk at UC-Berkeley that was very poorly attended and just felt completely flat. At that point I was so over the book, so tired of the main ideas and arguments, and I was having a lot of existential doubt about this being the culmination of my scholarly career—that I had just spent nearly a decade of my life working on something that no one was going to read. But then, after a few weeks of feeling this way, I threw a book launch party in New York City, which was attended by a lot of my friends and family, and that completely transformed my mood about the whole thing. Hosting that party, finding the right register to talk about the book’s genesis and evolution and significance in front of a crowd of my favorite people: suddenly that original passion was somehow rekindled in me, and I was okay after that. I made my peace with the fact that this was my book—I had written it for a reason, I had followed to fruition a set of ideas and questions that had fascinated me once upon a time, and I could take pride in a job well done.

Matt: What was it like for you to finish the book? Did you experience anything similar? And then, what did you start to think about career-wise once the book was done?

David: After getting the contract from Edinburgh, actually finishing the book turned out to be a real slog. The peer reviewers gave very detailed and positive feedback. When I initially saw them I thought, “Great, it shouldn’t take me too long to turn this around.” What a mistake that was. I started reading the manuscript alongside the reader reports and was really dissatisfied with a lot of the prose and the argumentation. I felt like I still had so much to do before I felt comfortable with having it published.

Those last months before sending it off to the press were a furious blur of editing, rethinking and rewriting. I ended up stripping two or three chapters down to the studs and completely rewriting them. We were expecting our third son that summer, too. It’s a wonder I got any of it done. I remember being so sick of the book by July that I could barely look at it anymore.

The book finally came out in August 2019. I remember the excitement of finally holding it in my hands. The compulsive part of me could not hold back from looking through the pages to find typos and infelicities of language. I found a few of the former and far too many of the latter. But aside from that I was proud of what I had accomplished. Not least because in my mind, in our field, you aren’t really a full “citizen” of the discipline until you have a published monograph under your belt. And now I had that. I had arrived.

I was able to put together a pretty solid slate of book talks in fall of 2019 and 2020. NYU, Columbia, and Tufts on the east coast. And then a whirlwind tour of California in March 2020. I landed in LA the second week of March and gave a talk at an Armenian museum there. I then drove up to Fresno and gave a talk there. And then back down to Irvine for a talk there the next day. I was going to close it out with a talk at UCLA. That whole time, of course, a lot of apocalyptic reports were circulating about the rapid spread of COVID-19 in various parts of the United States. My UCLA talk was cancelled, and my children’s schools were preparing to go remote. I flew back into lockdown.

I certainly wasn’t thinking at the time how much my life—and my professional life in particular—was going to be upended by COVID. My career as an academic historian was just hitting full stride and it was about to be stopped dead in its tracks.

David: So, Matt, you have the sense of postpartum depression, as you call it, after the book was published. Then you have that book party—and I was there! It was a wonderful event! Now you feel more at peace with the book. But COVID hit not long thereafter. Did you have that same sense of needing to pivot or transform yourself?

Matt: I felt like my pivot started while the book was in its final phases, actually. Again, the Trump election was very galvanizing for me. Soon afterwards, I decided I wanted to develop a new class on the history of propaganda and mass communications, along the lines of an amazing seminar I had taken as a senior in college. I team-taught that course with my wonderful colleague in Sociology, Shahnaz Rouse; collaborating with her was a tremendous experience, and I learned a ton that semester.

From then on, I was kind of hooked on the topic of propaganda—I couldn’t read enough about it. So even as I was finishing up the book, and while I continued to spin off a few shorter publications from the book material and give some presentations on it, I knew that my heart was somewhere else. During my first sabbatical, in Spring 2019, I got invited to teach a graduate seminar on propaganda and mass persuasion at Baruch College (CUNY), which was another fantastic experience, and which only crystallized for me that I wanted to take my work in this radically new direction towards propaganda studies. I was excited to feel this kind of passion towards my scholarship again, but it was also daunting—and highly unconventional. I feel like most scholars’ second projects are pretty natural outgrowths or pivots from their first, but I felt I needed to move completely away from the Egypt/Libya and borderlands material.

I was also proactive about trying to find new ways to engage with a broader public, and so I was grateful to have the opportunity to teach for a program called the Faculty Resource Network, a professional development workshop run by NYU for faculty from around the country. They asked me to teach a weeklong intensive seminar on Propaganda, but then the pandemic hit. So we ended up having to do it via Zoom—four hours a day in front of the screen! But the participants were amazing, and it was so much fun.

The COVID pandemic was obviously challenging in a lot of ways, but I never had an issue with teaching over Zoom. I just ran my classes the same exact way as I had in person, and it seemed to work okay. In general, COVID wasn’t all that disruptive for my work, at least insofar as I had just started to get more deeply into the propaganda material and had a lot of stuff to read that didn’t require me traveling to archives; and I appreciated having the time and space to focus more on my work. Ironically, the pandemic was also great for my personal life! I was very grateful for those early months of COVID, because they gave me a lot more time with my girlfriend (who’s now my wife); I also got to spend a lot of time with my parents, while also getting to know her parents much better. (For a few months I was shuttling back and forth, every two weeks, between my parents in New Jersey and her parents’ house in Long Island). Overall, I appreciated how COVID slowed things down: it helped me focus and find some clarity and perspective that I found very useful.

Matt: I gather that you experienced this moment in your career quite differently—that there were some unforeseen developments that presented extreme challenges for you.

David: Yeah. I did experience some of that sense of time slowing down during those early months of the pandemic. At the same time, I experienced a lot of the same challenges that many parents had during the pandemic between managing on line schooling and online work.

Matt: It helps that I didn’t have kids!

David: I think because of that, I was more ready than many of my colleagues to go back to in-person teaching. At the same time, in those first couple of pandemic years, I was beginning to feel a deep sense of boredom with what I was doing. The book was done. While I had ideas floating in my head for a possible future book project, where would I find the resources to travel to archives abroad and the time to really dive into a new topic? I kept shuddering at the idea of spending the next several decades of my life growing stale teaching the same things over and over again.

And the situation at my institution was such that I might not even have the opportunity to do the same thing year in and year out until I retired. The Covid crisis revealed some pretty stark and deep-seated structural issues with the higher education business model, and this was especially the case at Manhattanville. Before the start of the fall semester of 2022, the college president made it pretty clear that the institution was going to lay off faculty, including those with tenure. That semester a review of academic programs was started that would result in the closing or reduction of smaller programs. As a result of that study, a decision was made to cut several positions in History. A couple of colleagues retired, but it wasn’t enough to save my position. At the end of that semester, I was called into the Provost’s office and told my position was going to be eliminated.

I mean, there is just no way to sugarcoat how traumatic it is to have your professional identity stripped from you, and to watch as the same thing happens to colleagues and friends. I mentioned before that it is important for me that I keep the various aspects of my life—my teaching career, my scholarly career, my family life—separate. Thank goodness I still had my family and the scholarly network in my field. At least I wasn’t being erased completely. But it was a tough break, to say the least, to lose the career and the job security that came with tenure.

There was a silver lining to an otherwise dreadful turn of events. I was offered a new position, a mixed administrative and teaching position that would involve developing and directing new interdisciplinary curricular initiatives. I had been awarded a sabbatical earlier that fall—my first—and the institution allowed me to take it. That sabbatical afforded me a little time to think about my future and how best to take advantage of my unusual situation. My fourth son was born in April 2023, so I also had a bit of time to adjust to an even busier and more hectic household. Let’s just say, I’ve been through the ringer and have mostly made it out to the other side.

David: I know, Matt, that your post-pandemic trajectory hasn’t been quite as bumpy as mine. But how do you see the evolution of your career over the past few years?

Matt: Well, first off, I’m so sorry that you had to endure that. I can’t imagine how terrifying and stressful that must have been. I think you’ve been remarkably resilient in the face of a professional crisis like that.

Things have been generally pretty positive for me since the pandemic. Obviously there have been real challenges. I would say a central one for me has been trying to navigate my role as the only Middle East studies professor at Sarah Lawrence in the aftermath of October 7, 2023—trying to figure out how to do my best as a thought leader on campus when it comes to Palestine, Israel, and Zionism. It hasn’t been easy.

But like I said before, the pandemic gave me some space to figure out who I wanted to be as a teacher and scholar. For one, I decided to seek out new professional experiences that would broaden my intellectual perspectives and push me in new directions. That’s how I ended up at the American Academy in Rome for five months in 2021—I decided to apply for the Rome Prize to pursue new research on North Africa and decolonization, focusing on Italian colonial Libya, and I was extremely fortunate to be selected. It was still the height of the pandemic, so my archival work in Rome was a bit limited. But there were some huge perks: beyond the amazing community I got to be part of, we also got to experience Rome without any tourists. And my partner was able to come with me, since she was working completely remote at that time.

More generally, I started to appreciate more and more that teaching was always going to be something I love and take extremely seriously, and that this made Sarah Lawrence a great fit for me. I don’t know that I’d be as happy or successful at a big research university. But I also realized that I wanted to continue to do research and writing, but that I needed to find another lane—another mode to work in beyond the strictly academic one. Increasingly I had less and less interest in producing academic journal articles, and it was hard to stomach the thought of toiling away for years on another academic monograph that would collect dust on university library bookshelves. Instead, I decided that I wanted to develop my voice as a writer and try my hand at more popular history.

It was a bit scary to be jumping into the unknown—I was jettisoning what I had been trained to do (by which I mean: churn out academic books and articles). But it just felt right, and so I sought out new opportunities and venues to connect with non-academic audiences and try to grow as a “public intellectual” (a term I don’t love, by the way). After the pandemic, I started teaching regularly for the senior program at the 92Y in New York City, which I’ve found to be really rewarding; they’re such an enthusiastic audience!

That more or less brings me up to where I am today. For the last several years now, I’ve just tried to step into a role where I think of myself foremost as a public-facing historian trying to reach wider audiences, while still being a very dedicated Sarah Lawrence teacher. I do have scholarly projects, and I’ve taken archival research trips to develop my work on the history of mass communications and propaganda. But now my first thought isn’t to produce strictly academic work. Instead, I think a lot more about finding venues for different kinds of writing—shorter pieces, personal essays, now Substack posts—that will be a lot more accessible for non-academic readers.

David: Yeah, I want to pick up on that sense of renewed purpose. As traumatic as being laid off from a tenured position was, I am far more excited about the work I am doing now than I was in those years immediately after the book came out. I find the curricular development work I am doing to be meaningful, especially as it allows me to give real thought to the question of how best to teach the humanities and social sciences in this moment of crisis in the higher education sector and beyond. At least within the context of my institution, I am content to no longer be known primarily as a historian—or as someone who primarily teaches history courses. I wish there had been a less traumatic way to make that transition, but I no longer have that deep sense of boredom.

That doesn’t mean, of course, that I no longer consider myself to be a historian. I still very much have the desire to contribute to the field. I just don’t necessarily have the patience or the desire to continue producing work that goes through the academic publishing process and is meant almost entirely for an academic audience. I think that we as scholars need to embrace different platforms for getting our ideas and our thinking out to wider audiences, not least because we just don’t know what the medium to long-term future of academic publishing really looks like.

These were the things going through my mind, Matt, when we met in Midtown for lunch eight or so months ago. It was, of course, during that lunch that we discovered we were both interested in starting a Substack and decided to join forces. And I’m so glad we did. I love this co-author format. But also, The Historicizer was absolutely your title and it saved me from having a Substack titled something like David Gutman’s Blog. I’m not great with titles.

When I started my PhD program nearly twenty years ago, I thought I was setting out on a path that would be intellectually stimulating, rewarding, and predictable. That world that I was trained to inhabit no longer exists, at least not for me. But having this platform has really helped to reinvigorate my sense of scholarly purpose. Who knows what the world has in store moving forward—but for now, what a joy to have a place where I can write about topics and themes that I might not otherwise have the opportunity to write about, and to have an audience that is willing to read and engage with those ideas. And it is a pleasure to have you as both an interlocutor and a co-collaborator in this process.

Matt: Well, amen to that! It’s been such a tremendous joy to work with you on this Substack since we got it going last summer, and I agree this is exactly the right approach for me. For years now, I’ve noticed that academic writing just wasn’t rewarding for me: it certainly wasn’t what I enjoyed writing, but it also wasn’t what I enjoyed reading! I still have to teach a lot of academic history, but I try to assign only good writers!

I don’t regret for a second having done a PhD in history. I still love history—I’m obsessed with it, truth be told. And I still believe very strongly in the power of historical knowledge to enrich our lives and empower us to make sense of our present.

Now, with The Historicizer, I’m able to experiment with forms of writing that I hope come a lot closer to how I teach—raising important questions, making broad connections, weighing in on big ideas without the whole rigamarole of peer review, and without having to respect the rigid rules of the discipline that can make academic history feel so marginal, so arcane, so picayune. Our Substack allows me to try out new ways of writing that I feel are much more accessible and, well, fun. It’s truly a gift, and I’m so proud of what we’ve achieved these last eight months.

Rather than a long post on Iran, we felt it might be useful to share our initial thoughts on the conflict, where it might be going, and what it might mean for the region and the world. These are presented in no particular order, and we may revisit and expand on some of these themes in future posts.

1. As if it weren’t already clear, after the second Iraq War, the Ukraine War, the coup in Venezuela, and now Iran, the post-WWII liberal international order is dead. Trump has made it clear that he will invade the sovereignty of any country he doesn’t like if he feels it serves his interests, and no one can stop him. To this end, Cuba seems likely to be next.

2. There has always been a certain emptiness to the idea of universal human rights that was nominally a cornerstone to the post-WWII order. But Gaza, Lebanon, and now Iran appear to be their death knell. Justifications for Western support of Israel’s ruination of Gaza—despite the massive and deliberate targeting of civilians and civilian infrastructure—have often rested, both implicitly and explicitly, on the conceit that Palestinians are not “civilizational” equals to Israelis and therefore do not share the same rights. We are seeing a similar script begin to play out in Iran. We appear to be entering an era of warfare where we can no longer expect combatant forces to even pretend to respect the dignity and rights of the other side.

3. This last point seems tied to Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben’s notion of the “state of exception.” Agamben foretold a world in which state violence would be forever normalized once wartime conditions—which should be the rare exception—become the permanent state of things. When you’re a hammer, everything looks like a nail; when you’re perpetually at war, everyone starts to look like an enemy.

4. If this war drags on and becomes increasingly unpopular in the United States, it may precipitate the final political break between the US and Israel. To a rapidly growing number of Americans, it is increasingly unclear how the US benefits from the relationship. Meanwhile, US support operates essentially as a blank check for Israel to engage in genocidal violence against Palestinians and perpetual warfare with many of its neighbors. A reset of the relationship is long overdue.

5. We are likely to see outright antisemitism become increasingly normalized in US society, particularly as Israel skepticism grows, especially on the right. Israel has long justified its existence by claiming that the presence of a Jewish state makes Jews around the world safer. But we feel quite strongly that the opposite is true: Israel, when it claims to represent global Jewry but then wantonly dehumanizes and murders innocent Palestinians, Lebanese, and Iranians, makes Jews much less safe.

6. About two weeks into this war, and it is all too easy to imagine a scenario where this ends as a catastrophe for all involved. The Islamic Revolutionary Guard (IRGC) appears to have the capacity to disrupt Persian Gulf shipping—and huge swaths of the global economy—indefinitely, even against the backdrop of domestic state and societal collapse in Iran. There is no reality where Iranian society benefits from state collapse or an empowered IRGC.

7. What makes this war especially terrifying is the combatants’ increasing reliance on automated systems–drones and AI. This portends a very bleak future, like something out of a Black Mirror episode.

8. Much like in the early days of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, it once again feels hard to rule out the use of nuclear weapons, especially if Iran’s closure of Hormuz drags on.

9. Back in 1971, Hannah Arendt argued—in the context of the Vietnam War, following the release of the Pentagon Papers—that the American public was witnessing a new kind of modern political lying. She felt it was especially dangerous given how it muddied our sense of shared reality, replacing it with image-driven manufactured narratives. Watch Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth give a briefing on the war, and it is clear that the political lying Arendt warned us about is still rampant.

10. This war feels like the natural culmination of the rise of the imperial presidency in the United States: a massive, global-scale conflict in very obvious violation of international law, but also without any effort at building democratic consent domestically. A king’s war.

11. It’s ironic that Israel has been so hell-bent on destroying Iran when the two countries actually look so much alike in so many ways. Both pride themselves on being modern republics in which the majority religion of the land provides the basic fabric of life and defines all the nation’s laws. They also share the honor of being the two worst regional aggressors in the Middle East

    .

12. We came into the field of Middle East studies in part because of George W. Bush’s illegal invasion of Iraq in 2003. It feels surreal talking to a new generation of students, who weren’t even born when that war started, about another pointless and destructive war in the Middle East.

This is Part III of a three part series on Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s path to dictatorship. Part I covered his early years in power until 2010. Part II covered Erdoğan’s years of crisis from 2011–2015.

It is hard to believe we are only a decade removed from 2015–16. Anymore, that time feels as if it belongs to a different era. And maybe it does. I doubt many commentators at the time would have argued that the rise of Donald Trump in the United States, the surprising victory of Brexit in the UK, and Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s comeback from electoral humiliation were symptoms of a broader global shift. It’s hard to know you are living in a turning point in the moment. That understanding comes later. I think we will look back at the years 2015 and 2016 as a major global turning point. And if we do, Erdoğan and Turkey should be part of that story.

The Ruination of Sur

The city of Diyarbakır in the southeast of Turkey is a sprawling metropolis populated primarily by Kurds. When first arriving in the city, it is hard not to be mesmerized by the beautifully preserved system of defensive walls that snakes through many of its neighborhoods. The walls date back to the Roman era and are celebrated as the world’s second longest behind the Great Wall of China. I still remember standing astride the walls when I visited Diyarbakır in April 2004, looking out onto the verdant, riverine plains surrounding either side of the Tigris River, which provides the rich soils for growing Diyarbakır’s famous watermelons.

Diyarbakır’s historic old city, known as the Sur district, takes its name from the walls. Walking through its narrow streets, it is not hard to find evidence of the city’s once bustling Armenian population, whose name for the city—Dikranagerd—recalled a great pre-Christian Armenian king. The genocidal fury that accompanied Ottoman involvement in World War I largely brought an end to Diyarbakır’s rich religious diversity that included Muslim and Jewish Kurds and Armenian and Assyrian Christians. But the war did not bring an end to the city’s importance as a political, intellectual, and economic hub. During the republican period, Diyarbakır emerged as the cultural capital of Turkey’s Kurdish population. And the city’s population jealously guarded their Kurdish identity in the face of often brutal repression by the Turkish state.

Diyarbakır was a major center of support for the Kurdish militant group PKK in the 1990s, an era shaped by Ankara’s brutal crackdown on what it deemed to be a Kurdish separatist movement bent on destroying the state itself. More than two decades later, during the 2015 parliamentary elections in Turkey, the city and the surrounding province played a critical role in pushing the Kurdish-led People’s Democratic Party (HDP) above the critical 10 percent threshold needed to receive seats in parliament. In doing so, they helped to bring about a stinging political defeat for Erdoğan and demonstrated the organized political power Kurdish votes could bring to bear in the Turkish political system.

The months of fruitless political wrangling that followed the June 2015 elections left Erdoğan with a stark choice: he could either ally himself with the Kurdish-led Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP), an outcome that would force him to take a more liberal and reformist approach to governance. Or he could choose to adopt a more right-wing nationalist stance in an effort to placate voters who had switched to the fascistic National Movement Party (MHP). For Erdoğan, this did not require much deliberation. He doubled down on right-wing nationalism. And in doing so, he had to show he could be tough on the Kurds.

In summer of 2015, Erdoğan let lapse a cease-fire agreement with the PKK that his government had negotiated in 2012 as part of his Democratic Opening initiative. In the early months after the collapse of the cease-fire, Turkey directed much of its military actions against Kurdish forces in the de facto independent region of Rojava (in doing so, Turkey also hindered Kurdish efforts to conduct the war against the Islamic State). But by the winter of 2015, following the AKP’s victory in the November re-run of parliamentary elections where, this time, Erdoğan’s party won the majority, the government turned its sights on Diyarbakır.

Between December 2015 and March 2016—with the stated goal of destroying PKK presence in the area—Turkish military forces destroyed many of the neighborhoods abutting the defensive walls in Diyarbakır’s Sur district. At minimum, dozens of people were killed and thousands of people displaced. Once the rubble had been cleared, entire swaths of Sur had been erased. Befitting Erdoğan’s penchant for big projects, speculation ran rampant that he planned to open up the destroyed districts to massive development schemes.

The destruction of Sur symbolized a noticeable change in Erdoğan’s style of governance. The years immediately preceding the operation had been one of almost constant crisis for the prime minister-turned-president. The electoral defeat he suffered in June 2015 reflected a population growing increasingly weary of his strongman style. He saw himself falling below that 50 percent threshold of support that he had long seen as critical to maintaining power. But rather than relent, he responded with force and with anger.

The November 2015 snap elections, which took place after Erdoğan’s AKP had failed to establish a parliamentary majority following their June defeat, were replete with irregularities. It seems Erdoğan used the power of the state to play around the electoral margins, ensuring that the June disaster was not repeated. Attacking Diyarbakır was intended, at least in part, as a post-election reward to the right-wing nationalists who helped swing the November election in his party’s favor.

In the wake of the destruction of Sur, an organization called Academics for Peace circulated a petition calling for an end to the state’s anti-Kurdish operations. Hundreds of academics in Turkey signed. The backlash to the petition was immediate and fierce. Erdoğan’s newly empowered right-wing allies called for the heads of the perfidious academics who signed the petition. In response, the president used the peace petition as an excuse to crack down on academics, students, and institutions of higher education throughout the country. Over the coming months and years, hundreds of academics and students would lose their jobs or be expelled from school. Many ended up in prison, others had to flee the country altogether.

Administrators handpicked by the government were put in charge of some of the country’s most prestigious universities to ensure that faculty and academic programs deemed hostile to the state were silenced or shut down altogether. Erdoğan, stung by defeat and emboldened by his nakedly authoritarian allies, was engaging in a form of institutional capture that would accelerate over the coming years. Nearly a decade later, his war on universities would serve as a blueprint for Trump’s own efforts to clamp down on institutions he saw as politically compromised and “woke.”

Barely a year had passed since the June 2015 elections. Sur was in ruins and some of Turkey’s brightest minds were on the run.

Erdowie, Erdowo, Erdoğan

In hindsight, it seems impossible that anyone sincerely thought of Erdoğan as a champion of democratic reform. But in the years before 2016, he was a coalition builder much more than a strongman. The destruction of Sur, the suppression of Kurdish politics that followed, and the persecution of Academics for Peace were critical turning points in Erdoğan’s authoritarian turn. However insincerely, he had once worked to cultivate a bloc of support among Turkey’s Kurds. Now he was sacrificing them to earn credibility with hard-right nationalists. By taming the military, he had taken on a distinctly anti-democratic institution. Now, in jailing academics and neutering the institutional independence of universities, he was undercutting what had been a relatively independent and progressive institution in Turkish society.

Erdoğan’s consolidation of power had generated some concern in Europe and North America. Many European leaders and societies found Erdoğan’s increasingly brash, strongman style to be especially offputting. In one almost comical example, in March 2016, the Turkish government pressured the German government to censor a satirical song, “Erdowo, Erdowie, Erdoğan,” criticizing Erdoğan’s increasing authoritarianism. Ten years earlier, such criticism coming from Europe might have pressured him to soften and to change course. Now Erdoğan felt empowered to quash dissent outside of Turkey’s borders, regardless of how his erstwhile liberal admirers might respond.

Whereas the championing of democracy had been the name of the Western diplomacy game in the 1990s and 2000s, the 2010s were a different world altogether. The song’s release and the Turkish government’s backlash to it were taking place against the backdrop of the migrant and refugee crisis that was threatening to upend politics throughout Europe. Governments from Serbia to Spain were adopting ever stricter—and often more violent—measures to stem the flow. The same month that the song was released, the European Union, with particular support from German Chancellor Angela Merkel, had come to an agreement with the Turkish government that would see the EU pay Turkey vast sums to ensure that refugees seeking asylum in EU countries could no longer cross into Europe from Turkey via land or sea.

It also gave Erdoğan tremendous power in his relationship with the EU. Moving forward, negotiations on economic and political matters involving the two sides always carried with them the implicit—and sometimes explicit—threat to remove the barriers keeping refugees from crossing into Europe. It was a tremendous trump card that Erdoğan could choose to pull out at any time. Cross him and he could simply turn the flow back on.

In a crisis-ridden region in an increasingly unstable world, stability and predictability were of the essence. The EU could no longer afford to risk angering an increasingly empowered Erdoğan by taking him too much to task over the increasing repressiveness of his regime. The president wasn’t only taming domestic institutions that could threaten his power but also those foreign powers that had once been best positioned to challenge him. For Erdoğan, the timing couldn’t have been any better. He was about to face the most spectacular crisis of political career in a very strong position.

Fethullah’s Coup

On the afternoon of 15 July 2016, I was sitting in a university library in my hometown of Omaha, Nebraska, working on the manuscript of what would become my first book. Flipping between my work and social media, I began noticing strange posts about something happening in Turkey, reports of gunfire, the sound of helicopters in the air, tanks rolling down the streets in various parts of Istanbul. It was evening already in Turkey, and it took a while for a clear picture to emerge. Eventually news sources began reporting that a military coup attempt directed against Erdoğan and his government was underway.

Any student of modern Turkish history knows well the long history of military interventions over the republic’s brief life: 1960, 1971, 1980, 1997. One could have been forgiven for thinking that by having brought the military firmly under the control of civilian government—as Erdoğan and his allies had managed to do through the Ergenokon trials—he had closed the book on Turkey’s troubled history of military interventions. And yet here we were, watching a coup attempt play out live in the era of Twitter and Facebook.

For people in Istanbul and Ankara, in particular, it felt like a sudden military invasion. Troops occupied Taksim Square, where a few years earlier state forces had clashed with Gezi Park protestors. In Ankara, helicopters opened fire on the national headquarters of the Turkish police forces and the parliament building. State broadcasters were forced to read statements declaring martial law and the establishment of a military government.

At first, Erdoğan was nowhere to be found, supposedly on holiday in a Mediterranean resort town. It seemed the coup leaders might succeed in their efforts to remove him from power. But then suddenly Erdoğan appeared on screen apparently alive and well. He encouraged his supporters to go out on the streets and confront coup forces themselves. They came out in droves, blocking streets and bridges, confronting soldiers and tanks, and at times engaging in open combat alongside police forces. Within 24 hours, it was clear the coup attempt was going to fail. Erdoğan was going to survive with a vast and energized support base ready to move heaven and earth for him.

It almost seemed too perfect. Some wondered whether the whole thing wasn’t an elaborate theatrical production—one great mizansen as some in Turkey started calling it, a modified (in spelling and meaning) version of the French term mise-en-scène—staged by Erdoğan himself to expand his own power. It’s hard to blame people for thinking this way: the coup and its aftermath did provide Erdoğan with an opportunity to fully consolidate authoritarian rule—the same way many Germans felt about the Reichstag fire in the aftermath of that event.

Blame for the coup quickly fell on the Gülenists, the same movement that had engineered the Ergenokon trials that had removed the military as a major institutional check on his power. The Gülenists had amassed tremendous power within the Turkish military and bureaucracy, a dynamic that Ergenokon had only accelerated. But as they grew increasingly powerful as a pseudo-governmental institution in their own right, the movement increasingly clashed with Erdoğan, who saw them as a growing threat to his power. The coup marked the conflict’s loud and violent crescendo.

With the coup defeated, Erdoğan set about eliminating Gülenist influence in the government and dismantling its presence in Turkish society. In trials that continued on for the next several years, hundreds of alleged Gülenists were found guilty of conspiring against the state and sentenced to long prison terms. Thousands more were hounded out of the military and bureaucracy in what quickly became a vast and totalizing purge. Many opponents of the government with no plausible connection to what the government began referring to as the “Gülenist Terror Organization” (Fethullahçı Terör Örgütü or FETÖ) found themselves caught up in the purge.

What began as a purge of suspected Gülenists quickly became something much broader. Judges, civil servants, journalists, teachers, and academics were swept up in the crackdown. Entire institutions were reshaped in the name of national security. The failed coup had given Erdoğan exactly what he needed: a justification for dismantling the remaining checks on his power. Heading into 2017, with the military, judiciary, and bureaucracy now almost entirely bent to his will, he finally felt empowered to codify into law the all-powerful executive presidency that would essentially complete his authoritarian consolidation.

Constitutional Consolidation

In December 2016, Erdoğan’s AKP and their parliamentary allies in the far-right MHP passed a resolution paving the way for a popular referendum on twenty-one constitutional amendments. If the referendum succeeded, it would give the president sweeping powers and curtail the power of parliament, particularly in situations where the majority party and the president’s party were one and the same.

The lead-up to the April 2017 constitutional referendum was shaped by frenzied purges and emergency rule by decree. Yet even in this environment of fear—or maybe because of it—public opinion polls reflected real popular hesitation about approving the measures. In many ways, the referendum played out just as so many other Erdoğan power gambits had. With the regime-allied media putting its fingers on the scale for the “yes” side, and many credible reports of intimidation of “no” voters reported all throughout the country, the referendum narrowly passed with 51.4 percent. Hardly a sweeping victory but enough to get the job done, in Erdoğan’s eyes.

To actually benefit from the constitutional changes, Erdoğan would need to win another presidential election. But with the full power of the state now at his disposal, it was hard to imagine anyone being able to mount a successful challenge. Erdoğan would go on to win the 2018 presidential election with 52 percent of the vote and once again in 2023 by the same amount. Speculation is rife that he will find a way to run again in 2028 despite being term-limited.

Since the failed coup and the constitutional referendum, it is hard to conclude anything other than Erdoğan rules over a fully consolidated authoritarian regime. He certainly behaves as if he does. The trademark policy discipline and patience that characterized his early years in power has been replaced by arrogance and impetuousness. He has surrounded himself with yes men, many of whom are family members or close friends. His obsession with maintaining low interest rates at all costs, and over the warnings and objections of economic experts, has resulted in years of high inflation and slow economic growth—a recent fixation of Donald Trump’s.

Erdoğan’s popularity has waned in recent years; in a fair election, he would likely be quite vulnerable. But with the judiciary under his control, he has managed to jail his political rivals. Selahettin Demirtaş, leader of the left-leaning HDP and one of the architects of Erdoğan’s humiliation in the June 2015 parliamentary elections has been in prison since 2016. More recently, in March 2025, Erdoğan’s judiciary ordered the jailing of Istanbul mayor and leading opposition candidate for the 2028 presidential elections, Ekrem İmamoğlu. İmamoğlu faces a long prison sentence if convicted on trumped-up charges of leading a vast criminal conspiracy. Erdoğan’s long-running concern with maintaining close to 50 percent support among Turkey’s electorate no longer matters as much when he can simply have the opposition jailed.

None of this was predetermined when Erdoğan first took office in 2003. There is no question that he has always been power hungry. He always desired to remake Turkey’s political system in his image. It is even possible that he always imagined that he would eventually be able to bend it entirely to his will. But Erdoğan’s metamorphosis from reformist prime minister to authoritarian strongman was the product of patience, discipline, the ability to weather crises, and a knack for making and remaking political alliances. Erdoğan isn’t an archetypal authoritarian—if such a thing can be said to exist—but the product of a set of historical circumstances that he managed to work to his favor.

Erdoğan, Trump, and the Lessons of Authoritarian Consolidation

I began this essay series arguing against drawing too many parallels between Donald Trump’s brand of authoritarianism and Erdoğan’s. Donald Trump has neither Erdoğan’s gift of time nor his patience and cunning. Instead, Trump wields power in a way that is spectacular and eye-catching but that, in the end, lacks any real durability. Trump, like Erdoğan, has attempted to destroy the federal bureaucracy as an independent institution, only to discover the importance of maintaining state capacity. His signature tariff policy has been struck down by a still-independent judiciary. His at times violent efforts to bring Democratic states and cities to heel have proven politically toxic. His strongman impulses keep running up against institutional and popular backlash in a system that was already much harder to control than Turkey’s.

The one realm where Trump can effectively exercise unilateral authority is foreign policy. But this isn’t the result of any particular cunning on his part. As far back as the 1820s, Alexis de Tocqueville recognized foreign policy as the one true area of the American political system where presidents could exercise almost unchecked authority. Since the middle of the twentieth century, the American presidency has rapidly transformed into an imperial presidency. As Commander-in Chief, US presidents can employ the awesome power of the US military with little to no oversight. Trump’s regime change operation in Venezuela and his war in Iran are hardly examples of a sinister and sudden authoritarian lurch: they are a natural outgrowth of a system put in place over decades and even centuries with ostensibly democratic mandates.

I don’t believe that the US is immune to the kinds of democratic backsliding that has shaped Turkish politics for the past two decades. It’s not too difficult to imagine a future scenario where a young and ambitious leader wins the presidency and, with significant popular support and large majorities in the House and Senate, radically transforms the US political system in ways that Donald Trump can only dream about. Such a scenario wouldn’t necessarily be unprecedented in American political history!

Turkey is a cautionary tale. Yes, it can happen here. But I am skeptical that looking at Turkey, or Hungary, or Putin’s Russia, or Hitler’s Germany, tells us all that much about our present moment and where it is likely to lead. Each is worth understanding on its own merits, to help us make sense of how political systems in certain contexts and at certain moments can give rise to authoritarian leaders. Doing so requires more work than simply relying on—often lazy—historical analogies, but that work is nonetheless necessary.

I’m sure I don’t need to remind many of our readers that the second Iraq War—President George W. Bush’s infamous war of choice—was a colossal mistake. What the neocon-laden Bush administration assumed would be a slam dunk victory for American-style democracy, turned into a messy and protracted conflict that saw Iraq plunge deep into political chaos for over a decade. As the American occupying forces struggled to fend off a scrappy and determined insurgency year after year, somewhere between 500,000 and 650,000 Iraqis ended up killed (with many more seriously injured). We now know that this war was pointless, based on an elaborate web of lies and fabrications, and that all those violent civilian deaths—to say nothing of ISIS’s rise and ensuing reign of terror throughout the region—were thus wholly avoidable. Though it is perhaps easy to forget, now that Bush and the recently departed Dick Cheney are routinely lionized in liberal media—somehow painted as the “good old Republicans of yesteryear” in comparison to the cabal of MAGA fanatics who run the country today—these men have serious blood on their hands.

But I’ve actually been thinking about the First Gulf War—the much shorter Iraq conflict that enjoyed universal support from the U.S.’s allies and was also genuinely popular at home. I was nine years old when this conflict erupted late in the summer of 1990; it is my first major political memory. I remember Wolf Blitzer’s impassioned reporting from Riyadh; like me, CNN came of political age with that war, too. I remember sitting with my family in our living room and watching on TV as the bombs fell over Baghdad—what seemed to me like a surreal laser light show, something you’d see at a Pink Floyd concert.

I also remember a surge of patriotism in the country. Tune into any radio station at the time and you were bound to hear “Tie A Yellow Ribbon Round the Ole Oak Tree,” an early-70s pop song about an ex-con freshly released from prison, wondering if his girlfriend would take him back, which had emerged as the unlikely anthem of national hope and solidarity during the Iran hostage crisis of 1979-81. (The 1981 Super Bowl, played a few days after the hostages were released, featured a giant yellow bow tied around the New Orleans Superdome). For whatever reason, this hokey tune was suddenly revived during the First Gulf War to inspire Americans to show their support for our brave troops selflessly toiling away in Operation Desert Storm. I remember bringing a yellow ribbon home from school and, lacking any oak trees in our yard, tying it around the basketball pole on our driveway.

Unlike the second Iraq War, which catalyzed vociferous protests around the country, even as the national Democratic Party and most liberal media caved to the Bush administration in the most craven way imaginable, there was scarcely any opposition to the First Gulf War. George H.W. Bush told us that this war was necessary to stop an evil dictator from swallowing up a vulnerable neighbor, and we bought it wholesale. “This aggression will not stand!” was the watchword, immortalized by the Dude in the Coen Brothers’ masterpiece, The Big Lebowski. The U.S. swiftly formed a coalition forty-two nations strong; that was proof enough for many of the righteousness of the cause. It seemed like a simple case of good v. evil; after all, the Cold War was on its last legs, and we were used to viewing the world in such Manichean terms.

Just last week, for my seminar “The Middle East and the Politics of Collective Memory,” I taught a section of Dina Rizk Khoury’s excellent monograph, Iraq in Wartime: Soldiering, Martyrdom, and Remembrance. I was particularly moved by Khoury’s account of the U.S. bombing of the al-‘Amiriyya shelter, an underground bunker in a crowded middle-class district of Baghdad, where over 400 Iraqi civilians were killed while seeking refuge from the Coalition Forces’ aerial assaults. At 4:30am on the morning of February 13, 1991, when most of the occupants (mostly women and children) were sleeping, two one-ton “smart bombs” were dropped on the shelter in quick succession. Those on the upper level of the complex were incinerated; those on the lower level were severely burned when the shelter’s water tank overheated and exploded.

As Khoury explains, the al-‘Amiriyya bombing became a national site of memory and mourning for an already traumatized Iraqi populace. In the words of a blogger from Baghdad who went by the moniker Riverbend:

“For weeks and weeks the whole area stank of charred flesh and the air was thick with grey ash. The beige stucco houses were suddenly covered with black pieces of cloth scrolled with the names of dead ones. Ali Jabbar mourns the loss of his wife, daughter, and two sons….,’ ‘Muna Rahim mourns the loss of her mother, sisters, brothers and son.’… Within days, the streets were shut with the black cloth of tents set up by grief stricken families to receive mourners from all over Iraq who came to weep and ease some of the shock and horror.”

Picking up on the genuine groundswell of grief and public mourning in response to the al-‘Amiriyya massacre, the Iraqi government seized upon the opportunity to turn it into a state-sanctioned site of commemoration—a national memorial and mausoleum. As Khoury writes,

“The al-‘Amiriyya shelter left on exhibit the remains of the victims’ bodies and the detritus of their lives. It provided a venue for an on-site reenactment of those deaths by survivors…Located in a nondescript area, its very ordinariness served to highlight the precariousness of life and the injustice of the war against Iraq. Visitors, both Iraqi and foreign, were ushered into a building with an open gaping hole in the roof where the bombs had hit, which exposed the meshed reinforced steel. The blackened walls of the shelter were preserved, as were the ashes of those incinerated by the bombs. In the early years, visitors often commented on the stench of burnt bodies and the persistence of a haze of smoke within the shelter. The dried blood of victims provided visceral treatment to their violent deaths. On the first level, the outline of a woman holding her child as she burned remained seared onto the wall, while the lower floor’s ceiling had the imprints of palms of men and women trying to escape.”

The bombing of al-‘Amiriyya shelter was widely condemned as a war crime at the time—a claim affirmed by Human Rights Watch. But the U.S. military has consistently maintained that the shelter was being used as an Iraqi military command center, and that the blame for the massacre lay with Saddam Hussein, who cynically used civilians as human shields. The George W. Bush administration later doubled down on this interpretation in a report entitled Apparatus of Lies: Crafting Tragedy, published during the second Iraq quagmire, ostensibly to solidify its line that no Iraqi narrative could be trusted since it was all merely Saddam’s propaganda.

But this claim has been widely disputed, including by the U.S. Department of Defense as well as other members of the U.S. armed forces. Moreover, the first journalist on the scene after the bombing—Jeremy Bowen of the BBC—reported that he saw no evidence of military use in the bunker. The U.S. Department of Defense later stated that it knew al-‘Amiriyya had been used as a civilian shelter ever since the Iran-Iraq war (1980-88). To know its uses for civilian protection and commence with the brutal bombing, anyway, clearly constitutes a war crime.

Remember al-‘Amiriyya. Remember its defenseless victims when you follow the news from Iran. No matter how vile you might find a political regime, remember the plight of the innocent civilians who scramble to survive as their home is under brutal assault. Almost every war, if not all war, is unnecessary—the product of “shitty men,” as “Mother Russia” playwright Lauren Yee puts it, steering their countries in shitty directions. There is always a devastating human toll. There is always an al-‘Amiriyya—usually many of them; it doesn’t matter how good or “professional” a given military purports to be. There is no excuse for needlessly destroying the lives of people who never chose to live under an anti-democratic regime—one that happens to have made some extremely powerful enemies who have the audacity to decide, against the norms of international law, that they can take unilateral action to make it gone.

There will come a time for more granular political analysis of this war and its fallout. But for now, I needed to convey my unvarnished reaction to waking up on Saturday morning to news of this latest and most heinous of Trump’s overseas gambits. This war is wrong: deeply immoral and unconstitutional. Many civilians will die needlessly; already, after two days of bombing, at least 500 Iranians have been killed and around 750 injured. As I write this, the internet is erupting with reports of 153 dead at a girls’ elementary school in southern Iran. There will be many others just like it. Meanwhile, dozens more civilians have been killed in Israel and elsewhere in the region.

If you ever catch yourself wondering why the U.S. always seems to make so many enemies around the world, or why our rivals like Russia or China seem so emboldened to pursue their agendas of wanton expansion and aggression, I urge you to remember that the U.S.—certainly since Vietnam—has showed the world not simply that it will flout international law to pursue unnecessary and short-sighted wars of choice, no matter the cost, but that it has no compunction about piling up one civilian massacre after another.

This is Part II of a three part series on Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s path to dictatorship. Part I covered his early years in power. Part III will cover Erdoğan’s authoritarian consolidation from 2016 until the present.

I remember walking down İstiklal Street to Taksim Square—probably the most heavily trafficked pedestrian zone in Istanbul—on New Year’s Day 2010. The world was a different place then. Barack Obama was president of the United States. It seemed like the Gordian knot of America’s failed healthcare system might finally be undone. The catastrophic aftermath of the invasion and occupation of Iraq seemed finally to be settling down.

That sense of optimism pervaded much of Turkish society, too. Inflation had been tamed—much to the dismay of this poor American graduate student living on a stipend amount set when the US dollar had much greater buying power. Erdoğan was popular at home and abroad. He had hit his stride.

But, unbeknownst to most, clouds were gathering on the horizon. Frustration with entrenched authoritarians was boiling just below the surface in much of the Middle East, a pressure cooker that would explode in protests later that year. Erdoğan was, perhaps, getting a bit too comfortable. A bit too confident in the durability of his popular support. The Prime Minister was about to enter the wilderness, four years that would test his leadership—and almost bring it to an end. We can think of this period as a turning point, one that would cement his status as a would-be authoritarian.

Tents in the Park

In his seminal 1935 essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” written as the Nazis consolidated power in Germany, Walter Benjamin described what he called the fascist aestheticization of politics. Political struggle, he argued, was replaced by spectacle. Grand visions of the future stood in for material transformation. The underlying structures of inequality—private property and obscene wealth—were left untouched as politics were replaced by the theatrical.

In Trump’s America, it feels as if politics has been entirely reduced to profane spectacle. We see echoes of Benjamin in Trump’s kitschy embrace of classical architecture, his performatively cruel deportation roundups, and in his flashy, made-for-TV military interventions.

Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has his own flair for spectacle, kitsch, and monumental displays of power. Over the course of his first decade in office, his government oversaw a series of megaprojects intended to put an unmistakable visual stamp on his efforts to transform the country. Nowhere was this penchant for grandiosity more visible (and more controversial) than in the nation’s largest city—his city—Istanbul.

One early example was the completion of the Marmaray rail tunnel. The idea of constructing a tunnel under the Bosporus strait that would connect Istanbul’s European and Asian sides had existed since the late-Ottoman period. Although preliminary work for the project had already been completed when he took office, Erdoğan committed himself to seeing it through to completion. The project was not without its detractors, not least because of Istanbul’s notorious reputation as a seismic hotspot, but Erdoğan celebrated its completion as a major victory.

In 2012, parliament approved funds to construct a bridge spanning the Bosporus not far from where the strait opens on to the Black Sea. Unlike the first two Bosporus spans, this one would be constructed in a rather sparsely populated, heavily wooded area of the Istanbul metro area. To critics, the proposed bridge looked like a gift to real estate speculators and a potential ecological catastrophe, requiring the removal of millions of trees to accommodate both the bridge and the highway connecting it to the rest of the city. Even worse for these critics, the bridge would help pave the way for the construction of a massive new airport that would require further destruction of the region’s forests.

Erdoğan bulldozed ahead—both literally and figuratively. By 2020, both the bridge and the new airport had been completed. The bridge was named after Sultan Selim I—best known in the Anglophone world as the father of Suleiman the Magnificent. Yavuz Sultan Selim, as he is known in Turkish, is beloved by orthodox Sunni Muslims as a stalwart defender of the faith. But among Turkey’s Alevi minority, he is reviled as genocidaire, responsible for the killing of tens of thousands of Shi’a converts during the Ottoman war with Safavid Iran at the beginning of the sixteenth century. To many Alevis, the government’s decision to name the bridge after Selim was a deliberate insult and provocation.

Whatever opposition these projects may have attracted, they all proceeded with an air of inevitability. So, in 2013, when the Istanbul municipal government, controlled by Erdoğan’s party, announced the proposed (re)construction of an Ottoman-era barracks that had been torn down in the mid-twentieth century for the development of an urban park, they would have been forgiven for thinking that this project would follow the same course as the Marmaray tunnel or the Yavuz Sultan Selim bridge. Instead, the proposal triggered the single greatest political crisis of Erdoğan’s premiership to that point.

The Gezi Park barracks idea was pure Ottoman nostalgia kitsch. Gezi Park, over which it was to be built, was a forlorn and neglected strip of green space located just off of Taksim Square, where I had strolled on that New Year’s Day a few years before. The building that would replace it, a giant Ottomanesque faux-alabaster concrete carbuncle jam-packed with designer stores catering to Erdoğan’s preferred conservative upper middle-class consumer. Not the demographic who traditionally frequented Taksim Square and its environs.

In May 2013, a series of protests broke out seeking to prevent the destruction of Gezi Park. Though the park was small and shabby, the protestors centered their complaints on the destruction of precious green space in a city where such places were in tight supply. Furthermore, the barracks proposal struck protestors and their allies as another giveaway to developers aligned with the Justice and Development Party. In other words, the frustrations being voiced in opposition to the project weren’t all that different from those that had been leveled against the Marmaray tunnel or the third bridge.

But this was the era of the Arab Spring and Occupy Wall Street. Social media still felt like a potential vehicle for positive change rather than the social and political carcinogen it has since become. The mostly college-aged young people who spearheaded the protests made masterful use of social media to make the struggle over Gezi Park into a national—and international—movement. Protesters set up tents in the park intending to occupy it until the development plans were rescinded. Their numbers swelled as others, excited by the buzz, joined them.

By early June, the size of the protest had ballooned, now numbering in the tens-of-thousands. And their frustrations went beyond the proposed destruction of Gezi Park to include a recent decision to limit alcohol consumption and plans to build a massive mosque complex in a forested area of Istanbul’s Asian side. Such plans were clearly intended to appeal to Erdoğan’s religious conservative base and to anger the growing opposition to his government among the young urbanites and secular middle-class liberals.

As the protests continued, they morphed into an all-out movement against Erdoğan’s government. Tayyip…İSTİFA! (Erdoğan, resign!) became its rallying cry. Sympathy for the protestors’ cause poured in from across the country and the world. It seemed that Erdoğan might be losing the PR battle. But public opinion was divided. Polling showed his support slipping but still north of 50 percent. He decided to lean into culture war. For Erdoğan, the protests became a battle between law and order and the agents of chaos. He called the protesters looters (çapulcu in Turkish). Many protestors proudly adopted the label for themselves as an act of defiance, but it is clear that Erdoğan’s supporters agreed with this characterization.

By the middle of June, Erdoğan was ordering police forces to crack down harshly on the protestors. Clashes between security forces and protestors began ratcheting up in intensity. Police tanks sprayed foul-smelling liquid at protestors who joined hands trying to keep riot police from entering the park and evicting those occupying it. Harrowing images emerged of police manhandling young college students and pepper-spraying them in the face at point-blank range.

But despite the imagery, support for Erdoğan did not collapse. The largest opposition party, the Republican People’s Party refused to ally itself with the protests. The Prime Minister had a consolidated block of support behind him. The protestors did not. By the end of June 2013, the protests had begun to dwindle. In a narrow sense, they had succeeded. Gezi Park remains a green space to this day. The Istanbul municipal government rescinded the redevelopment plans. But Erdoğan was still in office; hopes that he might soon resign quickly disappeared. And over the course of the next few months, much of Taksim Square was paved over with concrete, making it much harder to stage future demonstrations there.

Problems with Neighbors

On July 3, 2013, just as the Gezi protests were abating, Mohamed Morsi, the recently elected president of Egypt, was removed from office in a military coup. Egyptians—many of whom had joined protests that eventually led to the removal of long-time dictator Hosni Mubarak just a couple of short years before—poured onto the streets to celebrate his ouster.

For Erdoğan, this was a humiliating defeat. He had positioned himself as Morsi’s strongest international backer. The fact that the now-deposed leader, affiliated with the once-banned Muslim Brotherhood, had come to power in democratic elections had seemed to Erdoğan as clear an indication as any that his brand of electoral Islamism was on the ascendant. Now he was forced with the prospect of having to mend ties with the hostile military government of one of Turkey’s most important trading partners. And the Saudis, who detested Morsi and his government and openly supported the military coup, looked more like the preeminent power in the Middle East.

In his first years in office, Erdoğan had pursued a foreign policy later termed “Zero Problems with Neighbors” (in Turkish: Komşularla Sıfır Sorun). The policy was the brainchild of one of Erdoğan’s right hand men, Ahmet Davutoglu, who, in 2009, was named Turkey’s foreign minister. It was under the Zero Problems policy that Turkey mended its long-broken relationship with Assad’s Syria, and worked to broker rapprochements with Greece and Armenia.

In those early years, a peaceful foreign policy was important to maintaining political legitimacy at home and support abroad. But events largely out of Erdoğan’s control would bring an end to Zero Problems, triggering a more muscular approach to foreign policy, one that risked weakening his electoral standing at home.

In December 2010, a Tunisian fruit seller, Mohamed Bouazizi, set himself on fire in front of a government building, frustrated at government policies that stymied his business. His act galvanized protest movements throughout the Middle East. Within months, long-time dictatorial regimes fell in Tunisia and Egypt. Protests threatened to destabilize monarchies in Morocco and Jordan, long celebrated as bastions of regime stability. And demonstrations in Syria were met with brutal violence that quickly spiraled into an all-out civil war. Try as Erdoğan did to avoid them, the neighbors’ problems had found Turkey. And it was now time to pursue a muscular and assertive foreign policy.

Turkey quickly became a major force in the post-Arab Spring Middle East. Erdoğan embraced Morsi and the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, and turned on his erstwhile friend, Bashar al-Assad. Assad’s fall seemed inevitable, and Erdoğan wanted to ensure Turkey was in position to help fill the vacuum. Turkey, with US support, armed and trained the Free Syrian Army (FSA), a loose coalition of fighters that ran the political gamut from secular nationalists to ex al-Qaeda affiliates. The FSA brought together many strange bedfellows.

The Assad regime proved much more resilient than Turkey had initially hoped. Russia and Iran entered the fray to prop up the regime, swooping in like a deus ex-machina when Assad’s ouster appeared imminent. The rise of the Islamic State in 2014, furthermore, threatened to see entire swaths of Syria and Iraq fall under the permanent control of a wildly violent group of religious fanatics.

The rise of ISIS further pulled resources and attention away from weakening the Assad regime. What was worse for Erdoğan was that the fiercest opposition to ISIS’s depredations was coming from a left-wing, Kurdish-led organization, the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), and their armed wing, the People’s Defense Units (YPG). The SDF had managed to take control of territory in northern Syria along the border with Turkey, creating a small de facto statelet called Rojava.

As defeating ISIS became a central priority of US foreign policy, the Americans began providing financial support to the YPG to continue their resistance against further ISIS encroachment. For his part, Erdoğan was furiously opposed to the SDF, viewing Rojava’s existence as a potential cause of political unrest among Turkey’s Kurdish population. His policies were quickly running up against those of Turkey’s NATO ally, the United States.

Turkey was dealing with another growing problem as the Syrian Civil War raged on. What started as a trickle of refugees fleeing unrest in Syria quickly turned into an unstoppable flood. Many were simply transiting through on their way to Europe. But many thousands were also finding themselves stranded in Turkey, unable to arrange passage elsewhere. Their presence was unmistakable. Many were reduced to begging on the streets of Istanbul, often with children in tow.

At first, Erdoğan spoke of Syrian refugees as brothers, and emphasized welcoming them as a religious and national duty. But for many in Turkey, patience was quickly wearing thin. A growing question in Turkey in 2014 and 2015 was whether Erdoğan and his party would pay an electoral price for a foreign policy that saw the country taking on a more adventurous stance without clear benefit for the average voter. The parliamentary elections of 2015 would bear those concerns out.

Foreign policy miscalculation and domestic unrest were no longer separate spheres. They were beginning to feed each other.

Erdoğan the Loser?

In 2007, voters in Turkey approved a constitutional change that would allow the president of Turkey to be elected by popular vote. The president was largely a ceremonial role focused on protecting the secular nature of the Turkish state. Since 2007, that role had been filled by Abdullah Gül, a close associate of Erdoğan’s, whose election by parliament that year was not without controversy given his Islamist background.

In 2014, Turkey was gearing up to hold its first presidential vote since the constitutional change. Erdoğan decided to throw his hat into the ring. He had a vision in mind. He wanted to move Turkey away from a parliamentary system to one with a strong presidency, a la the United States. He wanted to make sure he was president when that change went through.

When election day rolled around in August 2014, there wasn’t much doubt that Erdoğan would secure the most votes. Despite the previous year’s Gezi protests and a mine disaster in May that killed more than three-hundred miners that elicited from Erdoğan what many thought was a callous response, he was still broadly popular. The real question was: would he secure an absolute majority of the votes, thus avoiding a runoff.

When counting was completed, Erdoğan secured 51.8 percent of the vote. Erdoğan had won a majority. Plenty of commentators looked askance at the result. The election was mostly free and fair, but state media clearly had its thumb on the scale for the president-elect. And was it so far-fetched to imagine that some voting shenanigans had ensured his final vote count was north of 50 percent?

Whether or not Erdoğan had won the presidency fair-and-square, the election was further evidence of the dynamic that had made Erdoğan an entrenched force in Turkish politics: he had the support of nearly half of the country, and the opposition was too divided to mount any kind of effective challenge. One could perhaps squint and see in the results of the election evidence of eroding popular support. But as long as this dynamic was at play, it was clear Erdoğan would be very difficult to dislodge.

As 2015 dawned, Erdoğan had his eyes on the constitutional change that would place extraordinary powers in his hands. But to get there, his party needed to do well in that year’s parliamentary elections. It was a bad time for a feeling of malaise to begin setting in over the country’s electorate. Inflation was creeping up and the economy was slowing down. Exhaustion was beginning to set in over the country’s many foreign policy entanglements.

Whatever support Erdoğan had enjoyed from middle class liberals in the early years of his premiership had evaporated in the years culminating in the Gezi Park protests. Another key pillar of his electoral coalition in the 2007 and 2011 parliamentary elections was also beginning to waver: Kurds. Kurdish voters who had reluctantly supported Erdoğan’s party in the past were growing sour with promises they viewed as being undelivered, and the clearly anti-Kurdish bent of his government’s foreign policy.

Kurdish voters were flocking to a left-leaning umbrella party, the People’s Democratic Party (HDP), anchored by Kurdish political organizations and led by a charismatic young politician named Selahettin Demirtaş. The far-right National Action Party (MHP) was also gaining support from disaffected AK Party voters frustrated with what they saw as the failures of Erdoğan’s foreign policy—especially vis-a-vis the Kurds in Syria—and his support for Syrian refugees.

The major question coming into the elections in June was whether the MHP and HDP would win more than 10 percent of the vote, giving the parties seats in parliament. The results of the election struck like a political earthquake. MHP won more than 16 percent of the vote. HDP more than 13 percent. Erdoğan’s Ak Party, led by his close associate Ahmet Davutoglu, received barely over 40 percent.

For the first time since 2003, Erdoğan looked vulnerable. For the next few months, the Ak Party struggled to assemble a parliamentary coalition. The centrist CHP refused, as did MHP. Erdoğan didn’t entertain negotiating with HDP. Of course, the three opposition parties also didn’t come close to forming a coalition.

By fall it was clear that snap elections would need to be held to break the impasse. The lead up to the snap elections was marred by violence, unrest, and a concerted effort by the government to ensure that this time didn’t result in a hung parliament. The November elections yielded an entirely different result. Large numbers of MHP voters, perhaps chastened by the hung parliament and the success of the HDP, switched back to the AK Party. Despite again passing 10 percent, HDP also bled support from the margins, perhaps a result of growing state violence in Turkey’s east.

Erdoğan had the parliamentary majority he desired. But if observers expected him to be chastened by his first taste with near electoral defeat, they would soon be disappointed. He came out of 2015 in a mood for vengeance. And he would turn his ire on the country’s Kurdish regions.

What Erdoğan took from 2015 was not a lesson in restraint, but a lesson in how dangerous pluralism could be when it threatened his hold on power.

The spring in his step was gone, and replaced with a snarl.

This is the second of a three-part essay.

This is Part I of a three part series on Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s path to dictatorship. Part II covers his early years in power. Part III will cover Erdoğan’s authoritarian consolidation from 2016 until the present.

If you’re anything like me, you have probably given some thought in the past year or two to the question of authoritarianism. Donald Trump has long barely hidden his strongman ambitions. Unlike in his first term, however, Trump has used his second term to make good on his authoritarian aspirations. As a result, a veritable cottage industry has emerged seeking to understand Trumpism in comparison to other authoritarian projects. We have probably all encountered breathless comparisons of Trumpism to twentieth century fascism. Portraying Trump as Hitler-adjacent probably has some political utility in galvanizing opposition to meet the direness of the moment. But I largely agree with critics of the Trump-as-fascist critique that fascism was a historical phenomenon unique to the mid-twentieth century with limited use as an analytical category.

Comparisons have also been drawn between Trump and more contemporary examples of democratic backsliding and authoritarian consolidation in Russia, Hungary, and Turkey. But how instructive are these examples in making sense of what we are currently witnessing in the United States? I don’t know much about the history of authoritarian consolidation in Russia and Hungary. But I do know a fair amount about Turkey. In this two-part piece, I examine the authoritarian rise of Turkey’s current president and erstwhile prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan.

I think Turkey is an especially instructive example for a number of reasons. Having spent a great deal of time in both Turkey and the United States, I have always felt that the two societies share certain affinities that are often overlooked. Both are, by the standards of Western-oriented democracies, relatively socially conservative. Both societies are capable of remarkable warmth and openness while also being prone to chauvinistic—and at times violent—expressions of national pride. And, at least until recently, Turkey’s democratic institutions—while brittle and imperfect—more closely resembled those of the United States than those of Russia, or even Hungary. Competitive elections mattered, claims to legitimacy were made using democratic language, and civil society was generally strong and independent.

At the same time, its political system is far more centralized than the US. Americans rightfully recoil at the idea of Washington controlling elections and running police forces everywhere from the biggest cities to the smallest villages. Both are the reality in Turkey. Plenty of obstacles existed to an authoritarian takeover in Turkey, but these were much weaker than those that exist in the United States.

Yet Erdoğan’s road to autocratic power was a winding one, requiring a great deal of patience, the ability to handle setbacks, and a disciplined approach to managing and maintaining popular support. If Erdoğan provides a roadmap to consolidating power, it is not one that Trump has bothered to follow, I think to the detriment of his ambitions. Turkey is an instructive reminder that there is no instant “dictator” button. Transforming a democracy—even an imperfect one—into a dictatorship requires coalition building, a willingness to tolerate strange bedfellows, and, most importantly, good poll numbers. The difficulties Erdoğan faced in transforming Turkey into a dictatorship are a major reason I am skeptical that Trump can succeed in doing the same in the United States.

In Part I, I explore the early years of Erdoğan’s rule, when Erdoğan was widely perceived, both at home and abroad, as a democratic Islamist. Part II will examine Erdoğan’s rule from 2011 to the present, an era marked by crisis and accelerated democratic backsliding.

I. Rise to Power

Erdoğan rose to power in a fractured and fractious political environment. He was elected mayor of Istanbul in 1994 as a member of the conservative Islamist Welfare Party. His political mentor, Necmettin Erbakan, became Prime Minister as part of a coalition government. Erdoğan’s rise to the Istanbul mayoralty and Erbakan’s premiership represented a major challenge to the entrenched secular elite that claimed to represent the legacy of the Republic of Turkey’s founder, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, and tied itself closely to the Turkish military. In 1997, Erbakan was forced to resign in a military-led “post-modern coup,” with no tanks rumbling through the streets. Erdoğan was forced to resign the mayoralty the following year and later would spend time in prison following his conviction for “inciting violence and religious hatred” after reciting a poem at a rally denouncing Erbakan’s removal.

Erdoğan’s hands, however, were firmly on the pulse of Turkish politics. The 1990s and early-2000s were defined by high inflation and a sputtering economy ruled over by a feckless political elite. The environment was perfectly suited for an outsider promising change. Erdoğan had rebranded himself following his brief imprisonment. He was no longer the second banana in a political party led by his mentor. Instead, in 2001, he and a couple of other castoffs from the Welfare Party started a new political organization, the Justice and Development Party (AKP). The AKP was less outwardly Islamist than Welfare and openly embraced the politics of Washington Consensus market liberalism.

To an American audience, AKP’s politics might have resembled that of the Texas Republican Party, whose most prominent figure, George W. Bush, had just assumed the presidency in the United States. And in the parliamentary elections of 2002, the AKP, with Erdoğan as its leader, found some of its greatest support in the so-called “Anatolian Tigers”, boom towns in the Turkish interior dominated by conservative businessmen who resented the Kemalist elite of Istanbul and Ankara. The AKP won a decisive majority in that year’s parliamentary election and, after some legal wrangling, Erdoğan assumed the premiership in the spring of the following year.

II. The Tightrope Walker

Turkey possesses a very different political structure than the United States. Power is highly centralized. Power over elections and policing are tightly controlled by Ankara. Turkey’s provinces and municipalities have nothing resembling the power that states and cities enjoy in the United States. The US’s byzantine federal structure is a well-recognized if underappreciated obstacle to authoritarian consolidation. No comparable formal obstacle exists in Turkey.

Nevertheless, even in such conditions, Erdoğan came to power in a system riddled with landmines on the path to dictatorial rule, especially that of an outsider populist and Islamist. This was a fact Erdoğan knew all too well. He had witnessed the fall of his mentor, Necmettin Erbakan, not long after he had assumed the premiership. And, perhaps more concerningly, his political touchstone, a conservative populist named Adnan Menderes, had come to power in 1950 in the fledgling republic’s first free elections. Menderes used his popularity to try to sideline Turkey’s secularist elite, only to be removed by the army in a coup and ending up on the wrong side of a hangman’s noose. For Erdoğan, at least in the early days, survival meant balancing the demands of competing interest groups, and taking care not to anger too many.

In his early years as prime minister, Erdoğan was a master tightrope walker. His domestic policy was laser-focused on keeping his public approval north of fifty percent. His market reforms and privatizations of state industries benefitted both Istanbul-based capitalists and the provincial businessmen who had flocked to the AKP in 2002. He showered subsidies on the urban working class, helping to secure support among a rapidly burgeoning portion of Turkey’s population.

Perhaps most important, however, were his efforts to tamp down inflation. Over the two decades preceding Erdoğan’s premiership, the Turkish Lira’s value had plummeted. When Erdoğan took office, one US Dollar was worth well more than one-million Turkish lira. A street simit—that classic on-the-go breakfast staple—would set you back five hundred thousand lira. By 2005, inflation had stabilized enough that the government was able to issue a new version of the lira. Gone were banknotes denominated in the millions, replaced with notes that read 1, 5, 10, 20, 50, and 100, and were worth nearly that much in US dollars. That street simit now cost less than a lira. As Turkey’s economy stabilized, foreign investment poured in while Turkish exports grew rapidly, flooding markets in the greater Middle East and Africa. The visual trappings of prosperity—or, at least reduced economic precarity—became a key feature of Erdoğan’s success in these early years.

Internationally, Erdoğan revelled in plaudits from the Davos elite. He promoted Turkey’s EU candidacy hard, even as it became clearer that Turkey would never be able to satisfy the opposition posed by France and others. Erdoğan used their opposition to his advantage, making the EU’s foot-dragging look more like truculence on their part rather than justifiable concerns to Turkey’s membership. He also successfully navigated the threat posed by the United States’ invasion of Iraq in 2003. The parliament refused to allow the US to use Turkish bases to stage their invasion—reflecting the war’s deep unpopularity in Turkey.

But as prime minister, Erdoğan took care not to scupper Turkey’s close relationship with its NATO ally. Importantly, in a political moment when Islamist politics had become associated in the minds of many in the West with the terrorist violence of 9/11, Erdoğan’s politics seemed to offer an alternative: an Islamist politics that was amenable to democracy and free trade. By the end of the decade, Erdoğan’s admirers at home and abroad stretched across the political spectrum, from Davos-style neoliberals to members of the Nakşibendi Sufi order living in Çarşamba—arguably Istanbul’s most religiously conservative neighborhood—who saw Erdoğan as an acceptable substitute to a true Islamic revolution.

III. A Confident Man

Erdoğan and the AKP were rewarded in 2007 with a massive electoral victory in parliamentary elections. The election revealed Erdoğan’s deep support across a wide swath of Turkish society outside of a few redoubts of support for the secular nationalists along the Aegean coast and the border with Bulgaria. These elections provided Erdoğan with an opening and the confidence to begin remaking Turkish politics in a more profound way. The waning years of the aughts were shaped by two separate but interrelated phenomena: the so-called Democratic Opening, and the Ergenekon trials.

The 2007 elections revealed deep divides within the opposition, a running theme throughout Erdoğan’s road to authoritarian consolidation. Two opposition parties exceeded the 10 percent threshold needed to win seats in parliament: the secular nationalist Republican People’s Party (CHP), and the hard-right National Movement Party (MHP). These two parties were far too ideologically dissimilar to form a united anti-Erdoğan front. Kurdish voters—another well of potential opposition to Erdoğan—would be hard pressed to vote for either party given their long respective histories of hostility to Kurdish interests. Kurds were themselves divided.

The law that placed the threshold for winning seats in parliament at ten percent had been engineered to ensure Kurdish parties were shut out of parliament. A left-wing Kurdish party, Democratic Society Party (DTP), elected not to put forward a slate of candidates in 2007. Instead, several DTP-aligned candidates ran as independents in order to skirt the threshold requirement. The AKP, hoping to undercut support for DTP-aligned candidates, campaigned hard in many Kurdish-majority provinces. As a result, AKP won significant support among Kurdish voters looking for a more conservative option.

Erdoğan initiated the Democratic Opening in 2009 with an eye toward strengthening support for the AKP among Turkey’s Kurds. Since 1994, Turkey had engaged in a counterinsurgency against the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK), a conflict that had, to that point, killed thousands and displaced millions. The government’s official position since the founding of the Republic of Turkey was that Kurds did not constitute an ethnic community distinct from the dominant Turkish population. Use of the Kurdish language was banned in almost all public places, Kurdish-language education was outlawed, and expressions of Kurdish ethnic identity were deemed as inherently separatist. Additionally, the predominantly Kurdish regions of Turkey were systematically denied government aid and economic development, leaving them poorer than the rest of the country.

The Democratic Opening was, in its essence, a neoliberal project. Erdoğan proposed lifting many of the draconian limits on the use of the Kurdish language and ethnic expression without significantly transforming the semi-colonial economic relationship between Ankara and its Kurdish periphery. The opening also brought about a fleeting liberalization in other areas as well. Turkey flirted with normalizing relations with Armenia and signaled a willingness to tolerate more open discussion about the Armenian genocide. The effects of the opening were visible even in the Ottoman archives. When I came into the Ottoman archives in 2009, I encountered none of the challenges that other scholars working on “sensitive” topics had long described. Whatever Erdoğan’s motivations for the opening may have been, many in Ottoman history took it as a signal that they could challenge the taboos that had long shaped—and held back—the field.

Backlash was fierce. The ultra right-wing MHP openly denounced the opening as treasonous. And many Kurds viewed the opening as a limited and reversible attempt at placation. As we will see in Part II, Erdoğan would learn the hard way that Kurds weren’t interested in being instrumentalized for his own political ends. But on the surface, at least, one could be forgiven for thinking that the prime minister was ushering in a more liberal era, despite his conservative and Islamist political leanings. Many other observers were more skeptical, but they seemed to be in the minority.

Whatever its flaws and limitations, the Democratic Opening was a straightforward electoral, not dictatorial, power play—Erdoğan simply wanted to out-politic his already divided opposition. The Ergenekon trials were something altogether different. But they had the effect of weakening the single institution in Turkey that had claimed the premierships of Erbakan and Menderes: the army.

The Ergenekon trials are too sprawling and sordid to describe in full here, but some detail is critical. The architects of the trial were judges affiliated with an Islamic movement associated with a cleric named Fethullah Gülen. Gülen’s movement had a significant following in Turkey and, by the early-2000s, ran a number of schools and other organizations that, among other things, emphasized the virtues of both community and government service, particularly within the police, bureaucracy, and judiciary. Although the relationship between the Gülen movement and Welfare/AKP was not always strong, by the late aughts, they had developed a functional alliance.

Beginning in 2008, prosecutors and judges brought charges against several prominent military and government officials accusing them of being part of a conspiratorial organization called Ergenekon, that allegedly worked hand-in-hand with organized criminal networks to assassinate political figures and undermine Turkish democracy. Allegations that a “deep state” (derin devlet in Turkish) was running parallel to the elected government and undermining the democratic will have long existed in Turkish politics.[1] The Ergenekon trials marked the first concerted effort to actually prosecute this deep state.

The Ergenekon trials further weakened the secular elite that had long viewed the republic as their patrimony and the army as their enforcer. Whether or not the charges leveled against them had any merit, the Ergenekon trials unfolded against the backdrop of a society that no longer looked to this elite as exemplars of the nation. It couldn’t have worked out any better for Erdoğan. The single greatest threat to his government appeared increasingly neutered—and he didn’t even have to get his hands dirty.

Erdoğan was entering the 2010s with an extra skip in his step.

This is the first of a three-part essay.

[1] Yes, we can thank Turkey for gifting US politics the deep state concept.

Two weeks ago, a group of protesters from Sarah Lawrence’s chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) disrupted a primetime campus event featuring prominent New York Times columnist Ezra Klein. Under the pretense that Klein was a “genocide denier,” an “enabler of fascists,” a “normalizer,” and many other unsavory things besides (the word “Nazi” featured prominently on at least one of their signs), the protest leaders shouted disparaging remarks about Klein in front of an audience of hundreds. Despite Klein’s sincere and repeated efforts from the dais to initiate dialogue, they refused to engage with him. Instead, they formed a blockade just beyond the auditorium, where—along with some fifty supporters—they led a series of raucous chants set to the grating clang of a cowbell, making it difficult for audience members to hear Klein’s conversation with SLC president Cristle Collins Judd for the better part of an hour.

At the center of SJP’s objection to Klein’s presence on campus was their impression that he is a Zionist. Klein’s alleged Zionism—even though he has never self-identified as such and frequently advocates positions that are fiercely critical of Israel—dominated much of SJP’s promotional material before the event. Then came the coup de grace, which many on campus felt crossed a serious line into hate speech: in the lead-up to the event, someone painted the words “Zionist pig,” among a list of epithets directed at Klein, on the College’s “free expression board,” located outside the main dining hall on campus.

Shocking as it was, this was the same playbook that SJP had used to denigrate and delegitimize another invited speaker two years ago: award-winning journalist Jodi Rudoren, then editor-in-chief of The Forward, perhaps the most storied Jewish periodical in the U.S. With the Israel/Hamas war raging and student interest in Palestine/Israel at its zenith, my colleague and I had thought it made sense to ask Rudoren—who had deep experience reporting from Gaza for the New York Times and other publications—to reflect on the challenges of covering the war. But Rudoren’s selection as a keynote was rejected by SJP students well in advance of the event, chiefly because of her presumed identity as a Zionist. The messaging on SLC SJP’s Instagram feed at that time was unmistakable: in one post Rudoren, her likeness surrounded by bloody handprints, was branded “not welcome” because she “is a Zionist.”

What is going on here? I certainly empathize with the anger and frustration of so many of our students, who have lived through Israel’s utter devastation of Gaza over the past two and a half years—war conduct that I agree should be labeled genocidal. I also ardently support our students’ right to protest against the manifold injustices of our moment.

None of that, however, should excuse this appalling spectacle, which felt like perverse performance art—obnoxiously over-the-top, tone-deaf, and needlessly inflammatory, especially considering the irony that Klein shares many of SJP’s positions on Israel and Gaza.

As an academic historian of the modern Middle East, I was particularly struck by the lazy, overly simplistic—indeed, intellectually dishonest—use of the word “Zionist” in SJP’s attacks on Klein. On my campus, at least, “Zionist” has become an expletive, wielded expressly to shut down conversation. It often seems like “Zionist” is the worst thing you can call someone—tantamount to Nazi storm trooper or Ku Klux Klansman. To label your political opponent a Zionist on my campus, as SJP did with Rudoren and now Klein, often seems to imply that you think they are an irredeemable racist—complicit in genocide and aligned with the baby-killers.

II.

The kind of history that has most influence upon the life of the community and the course of events is the history that common people carry around in their heads. It won’t do to say that history has no influence upon the course of events because people refuse to read history books. Whether the general run of people read history books or not, they inevitably picture the past in some fashion or other, and this picture, however little it corresponds to real past, helps to determine their ideas about politics and society.

- Carl Becker, from “What Are Historical Facts?” (1955)

When you’ve read a ton of academic history, as I have, you notice the same kinds of arguments being made over and over. The most typical is about change: why, how, or when it happened, or which of many factors was decisive in catalyzing it. Just as often, however, historians revise older arguments about change by emphasizing surprising or oft-neglected continuity.

Another type of argument I encountered a lot in graduate school emphasizes historical contingency. Where an older generation of historians might have seen some important change as a historical inevitability—due to deep structural forces (or even cultural essences)—revisionist historians instead illuminate the many micro-decisions that actual human beings made to produce a given outcome. To put it crudely, the contingency argument often boils down to saying: “It’s actually a lot more complicated.” This sort of argument can be equally effective at deflating both the right’s essentialist narratives (triumphalist nationalist mythologies, say) and the left’s (e.g., teleological Marxist histories). Contingency-minded historians like to peek under the hood and show us the dead ends, disputes, near misses, and surprising twists and turns that underlie all major change and serious collective decision-making. Change, even or especially progressive change, rarely happens in the neat and tidy way we might think, or wish, it did.

Over the past few years, I’ve noticed the increasing prevalence of a different kind of historical argument. I call it the “stamped from the beginning” meta-narrative, borrowing from the title of Ibram X. Kendi’s National Book Award-winning history of racist thought in the U.S. I invoke Kendi not because I dislike the book or think it’s bad history; Kendi’s analysis raises a raft of important historical questions we need to be grappling with as a nation. Rather, I think Kendi’s title reflects a disturbing habit of mind that has become all too common in what passes for historical discourse in our country these days, both within academia and beyond: namely, the tendency to dismiss massive, complex historical subjects out of hand by branding them with the stigma of original sin.

The “stamped from the beginning” meta-narrative gained popular currency in 2019, with the publication of Nikole Hannah-Jones’s “The 1619 Project” in The New York Times. The project’s historiographical intervention was significant in many respects. Much like Kendi, Hannah-Jones forced us to confront tried-and-true mythologies that have long undergirded our national story. Most centrally, she challenged us to reconsider the temporal bounds of how we tend to narrate that story, arguing that slavery must be front and center in any honest reckoning with America’s founding. This was all commendable.

At the same time, however, “The 1619 Project” played fast and loose with much historical evidence, and it was nearly unanimously criticized on factual grounds by the panel of academic historians who had been invited by the Times to vet it. Perhaps most notoriously, Hannah-Jones doubled down on her argument that the American Revolution was fought in large part to protect the institution of slavery, despite flimsy evidence and the fact that most U.S. historians vigorously disagreed with this interpretation.

Even with all this pushback from the professoriate, the mode of historical understanding implicit in The 1619 Project—slavery and white supremacy as the underlying meta-narrative of American history—is what seemed to stick. Once established, totalizing meta-narratives such as these can take on a life of their own. For instance, when Princeton historian Sean Wilentz intervened in the burgeoning historiographical debate about a so-called “proslavery Constitution” by making a sort of contingency argument—carefully outlining the differences between pro- and anti-slavery forces and rhetoric that prevailed at the time of the Constitution’s drafting—his book was savaged in the New York Review of Books by his former student, Nicholas Guyatt, whose beef with Wilentz seemed to be motivated by an activist conviction that white supremacy, America’s original sin, is the skeleton key that unlocks all of our political history.

The “stamped from the beginning” meta-narrative, which also often takes over in historical discussions of huge topics like capitalism, empire, and liberalism, is understandably seductive. Who doesn’t like to dabble in monocausal explanations now and then? They certainly make the complexity and unknowability of the world infinitely more palatable. The “stamped from the beginning” meta-narrative also mirrors the frenzied media climate of our age—one in which quick or hot “takes” are privileged over deeper understanding and rigorous debate. Many college students, at least at institutions such as mine, face intense pressure not only to have the “right politics” on every issue under the sun, but to perform their political bona fides on campus and in their social media feeds. Having a convenient meta-narrative to do the explanatory heavy lifting for them certainly makes that daunting task much easier.

But it’s not really the students’ fault—not when so many professional historians, who should know better, are leading the way. In my own field of Middle Eastern studies, I see this dynamic most clearly at play with the steady bastardization of Zionism—a complex historical formation that merits the most careful consideration and scrutiny, especially because it is so contentious. But this is not what I feel we’ve been getting—perhaps unsurprisingly, as my field has adopted a much more assertive and activist anti-Zionist orientation.

The “stamped from the beginning” meta-narrative is lazy. Not only does it ignore the complexity of the past—complexity that stems from the immense diversity of the historical actors who seek to shape it—but it also overrides the degree of contingency that professional historians ought to know always plays a significant role in propelling events forward.

It is also dangerous, particularly for the way it tends to neatly divide the world into angels and demons—righteous victims and evil victimizers. If we take such essentialist meta-narratives at face value, then we absolve ourselves from the hard work of exploring the nuances of human behavior, both at the individual and collective level; or of trying to understand the dynamics of a mysterious, foreign past without judging it by the moral standards and cultural frameworks of our tumultuous present.

III.

Studying history calls into question totalizing views of society as governed—and as should be governed—by an absolute coherent voice, and instead does justice to the multiplicity of human voices in society, often contradictory and opposed to each other, and to the complexity of human behavior.

- Alon Confino, from “Miracles and Snow in Palestine and Israel: Tantura, A History of 1948”

Is it possible to advance a suitably critical, comprehensive understanding of Zionism without succumbing to the impulse to flatten all of Zionist history into an overdetermined meta-narrative? No doubt, many on the anti-Zionist left—including many academics within my field—no longer believe this can be done, so deeply ingrained is their conviction that all of Zionism is reducible to a particularly pernicious form of settler colonialism.

I’m going to try, anyway.

The truth is that Zionism is not a monolith. It has always meant, and continues to mean, many different things to different people at different times. The “stamped from the beginning” meta-narrative of Zionism always ignores this fundamental fact.

It ignores the thought of practical Zionists like Lev Pinsker, who argued in his famous manifesto “Auto-Emancipation” (1882) that saving Jewish lives was what mattered most, not a political state and certainly not the ancestral homeland of Eretz Yisrael. It ignores the fact that even Theodore Herzl, the great pre-WWI champion of Zionism who helped organize it into a global movement, was agnostic about the idea of returning to Eretz Yisrael for much of his career (having explored other territorial options, like Uganda, for a period).

It ignores Zionists like Albert Antebi, a Sephardic Jewish leader in Palestine who advocated strongly for learning Ottoman Turkish—then the official language of the land. Or the Zionists who were insistent upon learning Arabic and finding common cause with their Palestinian neighbors.

It ignores cultural Zionists like Ahad Ha-Am (aka Asher Ginzberg), for whom the essence of Zionism was the spiritual awakening of the Jewish people. For him, Palestine was only meant to serve as a spiritual center anchoring Jewish revival, not any sort of majoritarian state where Jews would exercise political sovereignty.

And it ignores pacifist Zionists like German philosopher Martin Buber, whose organization Brit Shalom advocated for a binational state. For Buber and his allies, there was absolutely no contradiction between being a Zionist and believing in the political equality of Jews and Palestinian Arabs.

It ignores the fact that early Zionist “pioneers” in Palestine, in the period now known (however imperfectly) as the “First Aliyah” (c. 1882-1900), were not particularly ideological in their approach to settlement—that they regularly employed Arab workers and were not motivated by demographic domination of the land.

More significantly, it ignores the fact that not every Jew who immigrated to Palestine should be called a “Zionist.” As historian Gur Alroey has demonstrated, many if not most immigrants before 1948 eschewed the ideological bent of the official Zionist movement, choosing to settle in cities where they could continue their daily lives much as before, instead of becoming pioneers in labor-Zionist agricultural projects like the kibbutzim. Alroey argues compellingly that official Zionist history has retroactively sought to claim all Jewish immigrants to Palestine as olim [those who “make Aliyah,” which for Zionists connotes a process of spiritual ascent], even though many of them would never have identified as such. They simply came to Palestine to escape antisemitic persecution, or to have a fresh start outside of Europe, and did not have much interest in ideological nation-building, as it were. Moreover, many of them soon left for greener pastures, finding little in Palestine to like.

In short, there were many ways to be Zionist before the state of Israel’s establishment in 1948, and not all of these implied the pursuit of full political sovereignty, let alone the resort to militancy and violence. And there were even more ways to be Jewish in Palestine before 1948 that didn’t necessarily imply real allegiance to Zionism as a political or ideological movement. It is this underlying diversity of Jewish and Zionist lived experience in Palestine before 1948 that gets erased when we impose a rigid and teleological definition from our polarized present onto a past reality that was far messier and more fluid.

I can already hear the angry retorts. Yes, Palestinian leaders and intellectuals understood the threat that Zionism posed to their own national aspirations and opposed it from quite early on. Yes, the interwar period saw the emergence of the Revisionist Zionists, led by the execrable Ze’ev Jabotinsky, whose notorious “Iron Wall” text (1923) lays out a clear blueprint for military domination over the Palestinians as the only way to secure the goals of Zionism—which for the Revisionists was a territorially maximalist state where Jews were the decisive demographic majority. Revisionism is the ideological core of today’s Likud party. But the Revisionists were never more than a minority within the Zionist movement for a long time, and it is often forgotten that even Jabotinsky explicitly rejected the expulsion of Palestinians as a legitimate option in “The Iron Wall.”

It is true, as historian Anita Shapira tells us, that the Zionist leadership underwent a crucial shift in strategy from the mid-to-late 30s onward, transitioning from a “defensive” to “offensive” ethos in pursuit of the goal of securing a sovereign state. But none of that fully explains the circumstances through which Israel ended up with the state it got, instead of the smaller proposed states that had been allocated for the Zionist movement in 1937 (by the British) or in 1947 (by the UN).

So, then, what about al-nakba? Isn’t Israel’s creation amid a brutal war that culminated in the dispossession and forced exile of 750,000 Palestinians clear evidence of what Zionism had been up to all along?

Not necessarily. As historian Alon Confino has brilliantly argued in his seminal essay, “Miracles and Snow in Palestine and Israel: Tantura, a History of 1948,” the nakba unfolded in real time, according to the logic of war, in a particular post-Holocaust context of Jewish desperation. In his view:

“When it became clear to the Jews during March-April [1948] that conquest and expulsion were working out surprisingly well, with little or no opposition, and at times with Arabs’ own initiatives to leave, they increasingly (though selectively) adopted the practice by April 1948. It was not premeditated but a confluence of particular circumstances in specific time and place: the early voluntary departure of local elite, Jewish victories, collapse of Palestinian society, and long-standing Jewish fantasies on emptying the land. The temptation to clear the land was too strong for Jews once the opportunity presented itself.”

Confino’s interpretation—the most properly historical account of Jewish agency in the nakba that I have encountered—gives us much to chew on. On one hand, Confino doesn’t downplay the role that Jews played in Palestinian dispossession. In clear contrast to official Zionist-Israeli history and so much mythology about the 1948 war, Confino accepts that Jewish forces expelled large numbers of Palestinians and deliberately carried out the erasure of Palestinian society.

On the other hand, Confino refrains from overly simplistic, teleological accounts about Zionist “necessity,” such as the one that Israeli journalist Ari Shavit offered in his morally repugnant 2013 New Yorker article about the Jewish massacre of Palestinians in Lydda in 1948. In that piece, Shavit argued imprecisely and disingenuously that it was all of “Zionism” that “had carried out a massacre in Lydda,” and that this episode was both foreordained and necessary for Jewish survival. “From the very beginning, there was a substantial contradiction between Zionism and Lydda,” Shavit writes. “If Zionism was to exist, Lydda could not exist. If Lydda was to exist, Zionism could not exist. In retrospect, it’s all too clear.” This is simply another iteration of the same teleological meta-narrative that anti-Zionists favor—namely, that ethnic cleansing was inevitable from the beginnings of Zionism. The only difference is that Shavit is okay with it.

But this is total nonsense. As Confino argues convincingly, while it is tempting to assume—especially given the increasing prevalence of “transfer thinking” in some Zionist circles during the 1930s—that something like nakba had always been the underlying goal of the Zionist movement, this view does not hold up under scrutiny. The events that led to the formation of Israel as a Jewish-majority nation-state were in fact sudden and unexpected. As Confino puts it:

“The notion that Zionism right from the start intended exclusively (also before 1939) to create a Jewish nation-state in Palestine is a Zionist teleology that emerged after the foundation of Israel in 1948. The notion that Zionists right from the start intended to expel Arabs is a Palestinian teleology that emerged after their loss of homeland in 1948.”

Moreover, “Zionism” is not a historical actor; it was specific Zionist Jews who carried out the expulsions. They did so, Confino explains, because they were operating within a historical context and moral framework where it made sense to do so—amid a brutal war that was widely understood to be existential for the Jewish people, against the backdrop of a post-WWII world order in which the transfer of massive numbers of displaced persons (DPs) had become the international norm. In Europe alone, there were around 60 million DPs in 1945. And the partition of India in 1947 led to the forced displacement of an estimated 14 to 20 million people.

And what of Zionism since Israel’s founding? It is undeniable that the achievement of a majority Jewish nation-state has narrowed the scope of Zionism in many crucial ways; to identify as a Zionist after 1948 is to accept, on some basic level, that Jews have the right to live in the state of Israel—even if you fundamentally disagree with everything that state has done in the name of protecting Jewish sovereignty (nakba included).

But even after 1948, it is still wrong—still profoundly ahistorical—to assume that Zionism could suddenly be essentialized away as a simple monolith, as if all Zionist Jews and Israelis want the same thing out of Jewish nation-statehood.

To do so would ignore the plight of hundreds of thousands of Jewish immigrants from Middle Eastern and North African countries (and their descendants), who—as post-colonial scholar Ella Shohat has amply demonstrated throughout her career—also felt themselves to be victims of Zionist ideology and state-building. Many on the left have happily embraced the part of Shohat’s scholarship that highlights European/Ashkenazi racism against the Sephardim and Mizrahim, while downplaying the important corollary to her argument—that Jewish-Israeli society is majority non-white, and that many non-white Israelis have suffered at the hands of white-Ashkenazi hegemony. Seen in this light, we should be chary about equating the history of all Jewish migration to Palestine/Israel with the ideological thrust of white European settler colonialism (which itself, it must be said, is by no means monolithic as a historical phenomenon).

To paint Zionism with an overly broad brush would also ignore all the tensions within Zionism that have bubbled to the surface since the start of Israel’s military occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip, following the 1967 War. As contemporary scholarship on religious nationalism has made quite clear, Orthodox Israeli settlers in the West Bank see themselves as the true “Zionist pioneers,” having taken over from an erstwhile generation of secular Israelis who they now see as insufficiently Zionist—too morally bankrupt and hopelessly Westernized to carry the banner of authentic Jewish nationhood.

IV.

The simple fact is that Jewish and Palestinian experiences are historically, indeed organically, connected: to break them asunder is to falsify what is authentic about each. We must think our histories together, however difficult that may be, in order for there to be a common future. And that future must include Arabs and Jews together, free of any exclusionary, denial-based schemes for shutting out one side by the other, either theoretically or politically. That is the real challenge. The rest is much easier.

- Edward Said, from “Bases for Coexistence” (1997)

I do not identify as a Zionist, but I did once; it was simply taken for granted, part of the fabric of my Jewish upbringing. I credit my college years for giving me the time, space, and knowledge to thoroughly explore that identity and ultimately walk away from it. But I wonder how I would have reacted if I were in college now, starting that journey in today’s rhetorical climate—assaulted with epithets by peers who showed no desire to understand me or reach me where I’m at.

The general trajectory of young American Jews like me away from knee-jerk pro-Israel stances has long been the subject of much hand-wringing among major Jewish and Zionist institutions in the U.S. Just last week, the Jewish Federations of North America (JFNA) published the results of a survey that would seem to confirm their worst fears: only a third of American Jews now identify as Zionist, whereas 14% of Jewish young adults now actively identify as “anti-Zionist.” At the same time, however, that same survey indicated that nearly nine out of ten American Jews believe that “Israel has the right to exist as a Jewish, democratic state.”

Where some commentators see confusion or even a latent crypto-Zionism at play in such ostensibly contradictory findings, my wonderful colleague Joel Swanson sees a clear indication that many American Jews now insist upon more nuanced views on Zionism and Israel. What interests me most is the degree to which American Jews are rejecting the basic categories they’ve typically been presented with: that one must be either “pro-Israel” or “pro-Palestinian,” say; or that to be “Jewish and democratic” necessarily implies a Jewish demographic voting majority. As Swanson puts it: “If the survey teaches us anything, it is that this binary of ‘pro-Israel’ versus ‘anti-Israel’ no longer captures how Jews think or speak. The community is wrestling, openly and seriously, with what it means for Israel to be Jewish and democratic, and whether current political realities honor that aspiration.”

It is precisely within this context—as so many young American Jews are interrogating their Jewish identities and rethinking the basic premises of public discourse around Israel and Zionism—that I feel the pre-1948 history of Zionism highlighted in this essay matters so much. This earlier history of Zionist pluralism reveals that Zionism can be dissociated from the political project of building a particularistic ethno-state, and that accepting the idea of a Jewish national home in Palestine need not be equated with the shameful conduct of an Israeli nation-state that has steadily transformed that home into a repressive ethno-nationalist fortress.

The exercise of re-imagining a Zionism untethered from the present reality of Israeli nation-statehood is not merely academic. Instead, it allows us to envision the “common future” for Palestine/Israel that Edward Said argued for in his powerful essay, “Bases for Coexistence”—a future where the land must be shared among two national communities with equal rights, whatever the political configuration that ultimately supports that. When Said argues that Israeli Jews and Palestinians “must think [their] histories together,” he is emphasizing the historical reality that Jewish and Palestinian lives are inextricably intertwined, and always will be. But I wonder if he wasn’t also tacitly acknowledging the idea that the end of Israel as we know it today won’t necessarily spell the end of Zionism; and that perhaps some of the older alternatives contained within Zionist history could be the starting point for a blueprint of what a future pluralistic society in Palestine/Israel could look like. After all, it is absurd to think that Zionists won’t be involved in mapping out a shared future in the Holy Land, just as Afrikaners were always going to play a major role in transitioning South Africa away from apartheid.

Let’s hope this moment of reckoning comes sooner rather than later, because the state of Israel’s conduct towards Palestinians has been indefensible and is only getting worse. There is no excuse for the genocide in Gaza; for Israel’s mass imprisonment of Palestinians and use of torture; for its illegal occupation of Palestinian territory and its enablement of fanatical settler pogroms against Palestinian villages; for the disproportionate collective punishment inflicted during the Intifadas; for massacres of Palestinians committed during the nakba and after.

Zionism’s main problem today, in short, is the state of Israel. Not the founding Zionist visions that set the nation-building process in motion, but the country it has actually become since 1948—a country that started with the deliberate dispossession and erasure of Palestinians from the landscape; continued after 1967 with a brutal and unjust military occupation that deprives Palestinians of their most basic rights; and has culminated in the current government’s brazen attempts to annihilate the Palestinian presence from Gaza and the West Bank. If Zionism means defending that Israel at all costs, then of course many American Jews are going to abandon it, as I did over two decades ago.

But all of that doesn’t mean the only path towards Palestinian liberation is the complete rejection of Zionism’s foundational claim that Jews have a right to some kind of national life in Palestine. One need not fully accept Israeli novelist Amos Oz’s sanctimonious claim—“The Zionist enterprise has no other objective justification than the right of a drowning man to grasp the only plank that can save him”—to acknowledge that Jews in 1933, 1939, and especially 1945 needed a place to go, when the world’s doors were almost categorically shut on them.

Regrettably, the “stamped from the beginning” meta-narrative that prevails in many anti-Zionist circles right now completely erases this important dimension of pre-1948 Zionism as a Jewish liberation movement. Instead, it shoehorns the complexity and diversity of Zionist history into a reductive framework that assigns uniformly malevolent intent to a people who, in their time, were also just trying to live. This mode of historical understanding ultimately dehumanizes millions of Jews and Israelis: by branding them with the original sin of genocidal settler colonialism, they are deprived of their agency and complexity as human beings making difficult decisions in impossible times, and are instead transformed into a faceless and evil political abstraction. Once dehumanized in this way, it is not a far leap to what historian Yoav Di-Capua has called “genocidal mirroring,” a political outlook that clamors for an ethnic cleansing of Jews from Palestine.

In a recent edition of KITE, a weekly newsletter published by Sarah Lawrence’s chapter of Faculty and Staff for Justice and Palestine (FSJP), one of my colleagues defended the labeling of Ezra Klein as a “Zionist pig” by defining a Zionist as “someone…who supports the state of Israel as it commits a genocide.” Though this formulation might seem simple enough, it is deeply unfair and disingenuous—a way to silence political opponents and stifle much-needed discussion and debate. Moreover, I contend that this definition would actually exclude most Zionists, who support Jewish national life in Israel but are staunchly opposed to the genocide in Gaza. We need to be better than this, in our campus classrooms and public discourse about Palestine/Israel. We must insist on decoupling Zionism from full-throated support for Israeli atrocities. And we must extend our empathy to those who hold positions somewhere in the muddy middle between our polarized extremes—those who, like Edward Said once did, yearn for a future where Palestinian liberation and Jewish national life in the Holy Land aren’t mutually exclusive.