The Readers Will Turn Feral

We don't like having our fields devalued and our jobs destroyed. And MAGA is not going to like us when we're even more enraged.

The MAGA crusade against the humanities has intensified. No one on the Trumpist right is pretending to care about education anymore. Conservatives like William Buckley and Allan Bloom used to say they only wanted a return to the canon, the classics. They wanted to jettison politics, especially woke ones, out of their aesthetics and out of their meritocracy. They only wanted to ban Toni Morrison and Ibram X. Kendi.

But now they want to ban it all. Plato, Milton, Ernest Hemingway—no one is manly and white enough to escape their anti-intellectual nukes.

As of this week, the the rightwing government of Indiana have humanities have been all but annihilated in public colleges in the state.

That’s right. The great universities of Purdue, Indiana University, Ball State: art history, history, philosophy, East Asian studies—all folding. If you majored in it, dear reader, it’s likely endangered in Indiana—and across the red states.

With measles back in force, and education increasingly deleted, MAGA really is determined to make the country sick and stupid.

Humanities are also up for vanquishment at nearly every institutional that receives federal funding, including cultural institutions and of course the Ivy League. Hate liberals? You now hate liberal arts, liberal democracy, civil liberties, and baseline humanism.

Shutting down the humanities during the rise of AI and MAGA may have some unintended consequences. And not just “soft” consequences for empathy and critical thinking.

The anti-humanities crusade—first their target was “wokeness,” now they reject the whole enchilada—may lead to the creation of an enraged, educated, and empowered class. People with degrees. Like you.

We’ve seen, of course, the formidable LA immigration protests and pro-Palestine demonstrations on US campuses over the last year and a half. Students are pissed off. And women, before they are shunted into the white-collar work force, have been the driving force behind campus activism.

At the same time, the job market is getting tougher for college grads. Hit hardest may be those professionals on the clean-hands side of the economy (finance, accounting, legal discovery) whose jobs are increasingly threatened by AI. These are what Graeber called the bullshit jobs that soak up the workforce, even as the workers themselves don’t know if their makework is adding value to the world at all.

These industries attract a huge proportion of humanities graduates. Which means women. Middle class women, nearly always expected to be heads or co-heads of households now, are the nation’s only surviving readers—and make up almost two thirds of humanities graduates. As AI expands, there won’t be enough of the jobs they’re trained for to go around, which will drive down wages and leave people unemployed.

Our alienation from the patriarchy, capitalism, and even our own bullshit jobs has been galling enough. When we—and the many male readers too—find ourselves with heavily devalued educations and without economic, professional, and cultural power—the stock-in-trade with which we support our families—we’ll be hornets.

And we may be hornets with a calling. Rutger Bregman, the author of the galvanic Moral Ambition, has argued that all the extremely talented college graduates who go into “private equity” and other BS sectors, now must to raise their expectations. Use all that talent and training to solve the world’s hardest problems, including the defeat of autocracy in the U.S.

As I’ve written before, the middle class is the engine of social transformation. They’re the ones whose pressures on kings led to the formation of the Magna Carta. They catalyzed the French and American revolutions. In short: MAGA won’t like us when we’re angry, and really neither will anyone else.