Franks on Little Fascists Everywhere: The National Socialist Playbook of Trump's War on Universities

Mary Anne Franks, George Washington University Law School, is publishing Little Fascists Everywhere: The National Socialist Playbook of Trump's War on Universities in Academic Freedom in the Era of Trump (Lee Bollinger and Geoffrey Stone eds., 2026) (forthcoming). Here is the abstract.

While there is no real predecessor in U.S. history for the breadth and depth of the MAGA movement to destroy higher education—even the McCarthy period pales in comparison in fervor and scope—the Nazification of German universities in the 1920s-30s provides eerie and instructive parallels. The Nazification movement, like the MAGA movement, was organized around unquestioning obedience to a single leader and, correspondingly, hostility toward democratic ideals. The frontline soldiers of Hitler’s war on universities were students resentful of progressive changes to higher education, and the tactics they used to convert German universities into right-wing propaganda factories closely resemble the ones used today to lay siege to American universities: disrupting classrooms, surveilling professors, and monitoring curricula for “undesirable” ideas; countering the “liberal indoctrination” of students with external speakers promoting far-right talking points; purging “degenerate” books from schools and libraries; and organizing watchlists, harassment campaigns, and public exposures of allegedly biased or immoral professors, with the goal of having them removed from their positions. And, in a crucial moment in their push for totalitarian control, the Nazis used the murder of a young, charismatic Party member known for his provocative debate style as a pretext to escalate their ruthless repression of dissent and violence against critics of the regime. Among the urgent and important lessons to be learned from this historical precedent is that totalitarian impulses cannot, in fact, be tamed, and that when universities succumb to them, the rest of society will follow. The preservation of democracy requires the uncompromising rejection of all efforts to interfere with academic freedom and to zealously defend the autonomy of institutions of higher education.

Download the chapter from SSRN at the link.

ICYMI: Pierre Schlag, Twilight of the American State (2023)

ICYMI:

Pierre Schlag, Twilight of the American State (University of Michigan Press, 2023).

Here from the publisher's website is a description of the book's contents.

The sudden emergence of the Trump nation surprised nearly everyone, including journalists, pundits, political consultants, and academics. When Trump won in 2016, his ascendancy was widely viewed as a fluke. Yet time showed it was instead the rise of a movement—angry, militant, revanchist, and unabashedly authoritarian.
How did this happen? Twilight of the American State offers a sweeping exploration of how law and legal institutions helped prepare the grounds for this rebellious movement. The controversial argument is that, viewed as a legal matter, the American state is not just a liberal democracy, as most Americans believe. Rather, the American state is composed of an uneasy and unstable combination of different versions of the state—liberal democratic, administered, neoliberal, and dissociative. Each of these versions arose through its own law and legal institutions. Each emerged at different times historically. Each was prompted by deficits in the prior versions. Each has survived displacement by succeeding versions. All remain active in the contemporary moment—creating the political-legal dysfunction America confronts today.
Pierre Schlag maps out a big picture view of the tribulations of the American state. The book abjures conventional academic frameworks, sets aside prescriptions for quick fixes, dispenses with lamentations about polarization, and bypasses historical celebrations of the American Spirit.

 

Sherwin on Law's Tacit Dimension: Audiovisual Proof of Incitement in the Impeachment Trial of Donald J. Trump @RKSherwin @NYLawSchool

Richard K. Sherwin, New York Law School, is publishing Law’s Tacit Dimension: Audiovisual Proof of Incitement in the Impeachment Trial of Donald J. Trump in the International Journal for the Semiotics of Law. Here is the abstract.

In arguing their case for the impeachment of Donald J. Trump for inciting a violent insurrection, prosecutors made extensive use of video images of Trump supporters violently overtaking Capitol police and ransacking the Capitol building once they had forced their way inside. But the rally video that immediately preceded Trump’s January 6 speech was ignored completely. Should it have been brought into the prosecution’s case? If it had been, how might it have aided the prosecution’s contention that Trump was guilty of inciting violent insurrection? In this article, I contend that the prosecution team’s insufficient understanding of how, and with what predictable behavioral impact, Trump’s video helped to incite his supporters to violent insurrection plausibly accounts for their failure to make use of it. This lost opportunity provides a useful test case for exploring law’s operation in the tacit dimension of thinking with pictures and sounds – a mode of thinking that is resistant but not impervious to critical reflection and collective deliberation. It can hardly be gainsaid that thinking with sounds and images occupies an increasingly influential, if not dominant role in society. Given this reality, we can ill-afford to ignore the implications of such a massive blind spot when it comes to the strategic composition and critical assessment of such a pervasive form of communication. If the fate of liberal democracy turns on preserving modes of public communication that are indispensable to the discovery and dissemination of factual truth in the quest for justice, then jurists and lay citizens alike must strive for greater audiovisual literacy.

Download the article from SSRN at the link.