Thomas Zimmer

https://mastodon.social/@tzimmer_history

Historian at Georgetown - Democracy and Its Discontents - Podcast: Is This Democracy https://anchor.fm/is-this-democracy - Newsletter: Democracy Americana https://thomaszimmer.substack.com/

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Last Notes

2024-08-21 23:59:44

A stark contrast in patriotism at the conventions:
Democrats: We love America - by which we mean the demographically, socially, and culturally pluralistic country as it actually exists.
Republicans: We love America - by which we mean we hate the pluralistic America that actually exists and vow to extinguish it.

2024-08-07 15:04:00

Another great thing about the Walz pick:
Republicans are trying to transplant to the national level what they’re already doing in “red” states: Impose a reactionary vision by increasingly authoritarian measures.
Walz stands for the equivalent project, but with a progressive vision.

2024-06-19 15:17:28

Why the Right Has a Problem with Juneteenth
This, from last year, certainly holds up: Today’s Republican Party is dominated by reactionaries who stand in the political, ideological, and spiritual tradition of the (neo-) Confederacy.
Some thoughts - with an added voiceover option:
🧵1/
https://thomaszimmer.substack.com/p/why-the-right-has-a-problem-with

2024-05-11 14:22:26

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Whatever social, racial, and political progress we have achieved since the final third of the twentieth century: The protests of the 60s have had a lot to do with that. To reduce their legacy to “Nixon won” is simplistic and disingenuously reductive. 11/

2024-05-11 14:21:42

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The vast majority of young people who were politicized by the protests of the 60s didn’t become terrorists or just retreated into hedonism. Many actually channeled their frustration into new political ventures - their energy fueled the social movements of the 70s. 10/

2024-05-11 14:20:56

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The 1960s protesters were not rejecting the ideals America had always proclaimed – they were demanding the country finally live up to them. It was the anger over the gap between grand democratic promises and discriminatory realities that animated them. 9/

2024-05-11 14:19:36

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The campus was the epicenter of the “unrest” that was animated by a longing to overcome the status quo, as the students were convinced the elites in power were betraying the ideals and promises they constantly invoked to perpetuate and legitimize the existing system. 8/

2024-05-11 14:18:54

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What has entered our collective memory as “1968” was the culmination of student-led protests that erupted in around 60 countries at the same time. This was a truly transnational phenomenon, and those who protested perceived of themselves as part of a global movement. 7/

2024-05-11 14:18:11

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The 1960s loom large in the collective imaginary of mainstream America. 1968, in particular, is constantly invoked to lend more credence to the idea that we are currently looking at a destructive uprising, as young people are – yet again! – giving in to irrational impulses. 6/

2024-05-11 14:17:28

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The approach that dominates the mainstream discourse has been invariably used to delegitimize every major (left-coded) protest movement in history, very much including the ones that polite society today likes to affirm and claim as examples of the *good* protest. 5/

2024-05-11 14:16:41

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The accusations against the students are also disingenuously inconsistent: They are derided as *both* extremist ideologues (who never fight back when the armed agents of the state arrest them?) and cosplaying children (why send police in riot gear then?). 4/

2024-05-11 14:15:29

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This is certainly not how mainstream opinion has approached rightwing protests: When it comes to the Tea Party, Trump rallies, or Trucker convoys, we are asked to look for the least incriminating, most empathetic interpretation, one that does not foreground extremism. 3/

2024-05-11 14:14:37

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Commentators look for the most extreme voices and insist they define the whole movement. They often do this while conceding that the vast majority of students are genuine in their concern for the lives of innocent civilians. Why not foreground this reality about the protests? 2/

2024-05-11 14:13:46

Weekend reading: I wrote about how mainstream commentators constantly raise the specter of 1968 to denounce the student protests - willfully ignoring the long pattern of leftwing student movements acting as an indispensable corrective.
Some thoughts from this week’s piece:
🧵1/
https://thomaszimmer.substack.com/p/the-students-have-never-been-the
https://files.mastodon.social/media_attachments/files/112/422/395/739/164/161/original/56368f409507f53f.jpeg

2024-05-10 16:48:33

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I am quoting a piece from a WaPo columnist there. Not my words.

2024-05-10 15:01:45

The Students Have Never Been the Enemy
Student protest movements have historically functioned as an indispensable corrective for America and the West. That is the legacy of 1968 we should be talking about.
A thread, based on my new piece:
🧵1/
https://thomaszimmer.substack.com/p/the-students-have-never-been-the
https://files.mastodon.social/media_attachments/files/112/416/922/079/342/982/original/16c8ae0518429f06.jpeg

2024-05-10 01:57:22

The Students Have Never Been the Enemy
Student protest movements have historically functioned as an indispensable corrective for America and the West. That is the legacy of 1968 we should be talking about.
New piece:
https://thomaszimmer.substack.com/p/the-students-have-never-been-the
https://files.mastodon.social/media_attachments/files/112/413/837/780/385/739/original/a7dbadffb1b4ee13.jpeg

2024-05-05 15:09:06

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This crackdown on college protests and the support it is receiving from mainstream elites is about Israel and Gaza – but not just about Israel and Gaza. It is also fueled by a pervasive sense that things have gone too far, that these “woke” radicals urgently need to be reined in.

2024-05-05 15:08:22

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Packer’s argument that there is a direct line of leftwing indoctrination from 1968 to today doesn’t hold up to the least bit of scrutiny - but it provides a window into the elite anxieties that are driving so much of mainstream politics in America.

2024-05-05 15:07:31

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Rufo and Packer both present Dutschke’s “march through the institutions” as if it was the smoking gun that proved a vast conspiracy – as if the fact that a West-German student leader in the 60s made a grand proclamation was sufficient evidence of a leftist takeover of America.

2024-05-05 15:06:39

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The story George Packer presents in The Atlantic is very much in line with what Christopher Rufo has been propagating. A straight line of evil ideas from the “cultural Marxism” of Critical Theory (Marcuse!) to the protests of 2020 – in Packer’s telling: to Columbia 2024.

2024-05-05 15:05:56

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Packer claims the postwar “liberal” university was devoted to the “disinterested pursuit of truth” before it was “trashed” by leftwing radicals who turned it into an indoctrination chamber brainwashing kids into a bunch of restless extremists. What brutally ahistorical nonsense! 2/

2024-05-05 15:05:05

Weekend reading: Why is the “moderate” mainstream propagating rightwing conspiracies about “woke” indoctrination?
A deep dive into what George Packer gets so wrong about the university, critical theory, and the legacy of the 1960s student protests.
This week’s piece:
🧵1/
https://thomaszimmer.substack.com/p/americas-elites-fear-the-ghost-of
https://files.mastodon.social/media_attachments/files/112/388/623/699/941/431/original/976e07b83b17797c.jpeg

2024-05-01 15:42:14

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The intended effect of equating student protests with the horrors of the mass atrocities committed by Nazi Germany is to legitimize violence against the protesters.
What a shameful, disgusting instrumentalization of the Holocaust.

2024-05-01 15:40:48

The actual Kristallnacht was a country-wide pogrom in November 1938 in which the Nazis killed hundreds of German Jews, threw tens of thousands in concentration camps, destroyed hundreds of synagogues and thousands of Jewish businesses.
Was even a single person hurt at Columbia?
https://files.mastodon.social/media_attachments/files/112/366/114/857/091/753/original/82c8cb101addc3e1.jpeg