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Donald Trump is waging war against human conscience | Osita Nwanevu

It’s garnered less attention than the other events of our already wretched new year. But to understand why Renee Nicole Good was killed on Wednesday, why the White House has designs on Greenland, and why the people of Venezuela may soon be governed, in effect, by a junta of oil companies backed by the US military, we should also consider an email Martin Peterson, a philosophy professor at Texas A&M, received about his course Contemporary Moral Problems last week.

His syllabus, he was informed, contained material banned by the college’s board of regents in December – part of the wave of censorship the Trump administration and the Republican party have encouraged at universities across the country. He was given two options: change the syllabus “to remove the modules on race ideology and gender ideology, and the Plato readings that may include these” or teach another course.

The offending material included selections from Plato’s Symposium, one of his most important and widely-read works. In it, the philosopher Socrates and his companions at a banquet discuss the nature of love. And in one passage, the playwright Aristophanes offers an account of how love and sexuality came to be. There were once three sexes, he says – male, female and androgynous – and all humans were, at first, physically joined pairs. But after we mounted an attack on the gods, Zeus split us in two, and we’ve ached to complete ourselves with partners – ⁠of the same or another sex – ever since.

The “gender ideology” of this tale comes to us from the fourth century BC. And philosophers in the many centuries since have examined it not only for what it tells us about the Greeks in Plato’s day but for what it might tell us, as far removed as we might be from ancient Athens, about sex, love and longing. It is a tale about universal aspects of the human experience philosophers have examined in the service of understanding what it means to be a human being.

The efforts to answer or speak to that question ⁠are the highest and best accomplishments of what we’ve come to call “western civilization”. The coherence of thought implied by that phrase – invoked so often by a movement now cancelling Plato – have been belied by the bitter and bloody conflicts, often animated by philosophical and theological divisions, that characterized most of western history until very recently. But our disputes over what it means to be human have been fought out atop a consensus – a consensus Donald Trump and the American right now challenge daily – ⁠⁠that the question itself is of transcendent importance.

This year marks the 250th anniversary of the American answer to it – the idea that human beings are equal, possessed of a universal dignity that entitles us to basic rights and a chance to flourish and prosper, whoever we may be. That idea has always had flag-waving enemies. And today, the latent belief of the nativists vying to make America great again is that there is nothing especially interesting or consequential about the American project.

America, JD Vance tells us, is merely a nation like many others ⁠– a “homeland”, he said upon accepting his nomination to the vice-presidency, for “people with a shared history and a common future”. That’s a vision of American identity that would have described bands of cavepeople in skins just as well or better. Stephen Miller’s proleptic defense of seizing Greenland last week suggests the Trumpists themselves know this. “We live in a world, in the real world ... that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power,” he declared. “These are the iron laws of the world since the beginning of time.”

Miller’s laws are the laws of animals. It is true, obviously, that high ideals have long been deployed to obscure or justify predation, here and elsewhere. But Miller’s stance and the stance of the administration is that there aren’t, actually, any high ideals worth pursuing or even pretending to – that the human being, in itself, is nothing so much ⁠and that we are, fundamentally and forever, primitives.

Against the demands and best aspirations of civilization – western or any kind – they tell us the human being is a creature that yearns for nothing more than blood and soil, which is, of course, just mud. The lust for mud has taken up many guises in our history and has been many given names of late – neo-reaction, post-liberalism, fascism. But the name familiar to most is evil.

It was evil – the standpoint that only might matters, that human morality, and our sense of reality itself, must yield to the turfism of the primates with the biggest clubs – that ginned up the propaganda that provoked an act of terrorism against our legislature and the policemen defending it five years ago.

It is evil that undergirds pronouncements from the same voices responsible for that attack, in defense of the man who shot Renee Nicole Good, that those who disobey the commands of law enforcement, however unsound or unjust, deserve summary execution – that implies, as Fox’s Jesse Watters and others have, that Good’s killing was of trivial significance because she was a lesbian “with pronouns in her bio”.

It is evil that sends innocent men to foreign gulags, evil that condemns hundreds of thousands of destitute people abroad to death without a moment’s discussion or debate about what the country they had depended on might owe them, or the furnishing of alternative arrangements for their wellbeing.

The gutting of USAID remains this administration’s worst and least surprising offense against the human conscience – a president who rejects the idea that we might have obligations to all within our society can’t be expected to wonder or worry about whether we have obligations to those outside of it. This is also why, after all the noise and nonsense about the need to depose the Maduro regime, the Venezuelan people are now being told that regime will be left in mostly in place for as long as it takes to secure and extract the country’s resources on our terms – that Venezuela will not see democracy unless and until it is profitable for the United States.

Democracy has always been a useless abstraction to those who deny we have basic human entitlements – for those who believe, instead, that the idea of human liberty is a luxury for those wealthy and powerful enough to consider themselves our betters rather than the birthright of all.

As many who’ve taken to the streets in protest have noted, the Trump administration’s assaults on liberty here at home are the kinds of abuses that spurred the revolution we will commemorate this year. But no grand revolution is in the offing this time around. The only just and plausible recourse for our situation is politics – understood not merely as the contest to win any given set of elections but as the broader fight to forge a republic that honors and strengthens our humanity. The American project must and will succeed. Its enemies stand for too little. Our lives are worth too much.