This piece is part of Letters on Pragmatic Hope, an essay series in which Wesleyan professors and administrators reflect on a daunting question: How can students act with purpose and efficacy amid an increasingly authoritarian environment? The series aims to gather responses from a diverse group of Wesleyan faculty, offering a vision for how students can turn despair into pragmatism and action.
The editors of the Wesleyan Argus asked me to reflect on how political life today compares to the situation when I was at college.
Last month, after fall break I asked my class how many had attended a No Kings rally. One hand went up, out of 18. More of them had taken trips to Europe or the Caribbean.
It did not surprise me. At the No Kings rally in New York City, I noticed a preponderance of middle aged and older people. Many of them carried idiosyncratic and witty hand-made posters. As someone joked, it had the vibe of an edgy farmers’ market.
I was struck by the absence of collective banners. In Europe, protests typically consist of a string of groups marching under their own banner—labor unions, political parties, regional associations, whatever. Not so in this crowd, though.
It was a striking example of the radical individualism of American society, even among the anti-Trump camp. Alexis de Tocqueville noticed this back in 1835 as being distinctively American, so much so that he used a new word to describe the phenomenon: individualism.
Individualism makes collective action difficult. It has been super-charged since Tocqueville’s time by rising living standards, and the arrival of the internet and social media.
Donald Trump has skillfully used these new media to pump up his base and disorient the opposition. Trump’s return to power—through the ballot box—left the Democrats in shock. How could this happen? It led to what Amy Beckett has called “angry apathy” and “conscious disengagement” as coping mechanisms, “refusing to rise to Trump’s attention-seeking.” Michael Luttig talks about “feelings of fear, vulnerability, hopelessness, and political inevitability.”
Philosopher Alenka Zupančič argues that “disavowal” is a common response to the threat of climate change and other challenges: one does not deny the facts, but one carries on with daily life regardless (“I know, but all the same …”).
The problems with US democracy are structural, and not just the result of a bad actor. The US constitution stacks the deck against majoritarian democracy and hobbles the ability of the federal government to respond to collective action dilemmas. But all the mature democracies are experiencing political crises, so the problems go beyond the US. They are the result of the deepening of globalization, which has unleashed tremendous innovation and prosperity at a cost of declining accountability and rising inequality.
I went to college a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away. Growing up in the depressed industrial city of Stoke-on-Trent, I got into Worcester College, Oxford, where I was one of three state school students alongside 97 private school boys. I started in September 1973: the same month that General Pinochet took power in a bloody coup in Chile. I had joined the Labour Party at age 16 and spent much of my teenage years supporting striking coal miners and protesting this and that: the Shah of Iran, racism, high rents, the need for a new student union building.
I was convinced that the world was on the brink of epochal changes, and I wanted to help nudge history in the right direction. At college, I ran a team who went out at night posting flyers about upcoming rallies on walls around town. Senior year, in our off-campus house two Chilean political refugees lived with us for several months. One had jumped off a truck that he assumed was carrying him to his execution.
I was somewhat obsessed with the threat of nuclear annihilation (as were many people). People stopped thinking about the Bomb because a nuclear war would be so devastating there was no point trying to plan how to survive. My high school project was a study of what would happen if a nuclear bomb hit my hometown.
So I was interested in understanding the Soviet Union, our mortal enemy. At college, over successive summers through Quaker Peace and Service I participated in work camps behind the Iron Curtain. I worked on a farm in Hungary, a construction site in Bulgaria, an archeological dig in Czechoslovakia and an auto factory in Poland. Moscow did not allow Westerners to take part in student work camps inside the Soviet Union, though there were some Soviet students at the camp in Bulgaria.
It was an eye-opening and chastening experience. With each successive trip, I came to understand that capitalism is preferable to central planning, and that freedom from foreign occupation is something that people are willing to fight for.
After failing to land a job in journalism I ended up in grad school, learned Russian, and wrote a dissertation about the Soviet Communist Party. I spent more time studying than protesting, though I continued to smuggle banned literature and fax machine supplies to dissidents in Czechoslovakia and the Soviet Union. I moved to the US after I was offered a job at the University of Texas, Austin.
Somewhat amazingly, in 1989 the Berlin Wall came down, and then in 1991 the Soviet Union collapsed. Things were looking good in my part of the world, until suddenly they weren’t. Putin’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022 has set the clock back four decades, and I am still struggling to comprehend how and why this happened.
I don’t regret my youthful political activism, but I don’t have any illusions that I moved the dial of history one iota. It seemed like the right thing to do at the time. I still have great faith in the decency of the American people and the robustness of American institutions, despite all the evidence to the contrary.
Peter Rutland is the Colin and Nancy Campbell Professor in Global Issues and Democratic Thought. He can be reached at prutland@wesleyan.edu.
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