Vance’s form of far-right politics is so ominous because it responds in a primal, perverted way to something actual. We are caught under a heap of wreckage, an accumulation of social and historical trauma that we are largely without means of getting out of. Millions are dead, and millions more permanently sick, from a pandemic that everyone now pretends didn’t happen, and even more vigorously pretends is not still happening.
Vance’s form of far-right politics is so ominous because it responds in a primal, perverted way to something actual. We are caught under a heap of wreckage, an accumulation of social and historical trauma that we are largely without means of getting out of. Millions are dead, and millions more permanently sick, from a pandemic that everyone now pretends didn’t happen, and even more vigorously pretends is not still happening. This massive new collective burden was piled on a society already stumbling under the weight of organized abandonment, environmental racism, for-profit health care, and mass incarceration. Vance, in the end, cannot abide the idea that what he suffered has to do with any of that disabling stuff.
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The strike at Temple, therefore, was not just about material benefits for graduate workers: it was also about the long-term structural nature of what the contemporary university will be. It was about exposing the precarity of everyone not just graduate workers but also adjuncts and even TT faculty under academia’s current system.
Then the parents threatened a class-action lawsuit. The students occupied a university building. The full-time faculty began rumbles about a vote of no confidence against the president. They had nowhere left to go.