Masha Gessen writes:

The price of admission to Trump’s America is aggressive compliance, the sort demonstrated by more and more universities. Columbia and Williams College, for example, have been voluntarily flying flags at half-staff in honor of Kirk. Meanwhile, the University of California, Berkeley, has notified about 160 students, faculty members and staff that it has given their names to the federal government in connection with “alleged antisemitic incidents.” The philosopher Judith Butler and the Middle East historian Ussama Makdisi are perhaps the only two notified people who have spoken publicly about the email they received. Butler sees the silence of the others as a sign of fear.

These people have good reasons to be frightened. Over the last eight months, we have all learned how such lists are used: to exile students and professors from the university or from the country — and to put others on notice that they are living or working on borrowed time. That they are, to borrow a term from a previous era of lists, un-American.

A friend of mine is in the cross hairs of the administration. I asked her if her world had gotten smaller. Not exactly, she said. “It’s like what happens when somebody dies. There will always be people who will disappoint you. And other people show themselves, having been through what you’ve been through.”

Something is dying: the sense that we know our country. [Continue reading…]