C. Wright Mills

Watching the Death of Nation in Real Time

~ Randy Blazak ~ 4 Comments

April 1, 2025

A hundred bucks says Donald Trump has never read the U.S. Constitution. Or The Bible. Or a book. His latest blather about running for a third term is either an overt telegraphing that he’s going to pull a Putin and declare himself “President for Life” or it’s another distraction from that fact that he and Musk are crashing the system so they can scoop up the pieces.

Either way, America is screwed.

I’ve written ad nauseam about the elements of the Trump movement that map directly on to the rise of fascism, starting back in 2015. The parallels this time around are even more stark, including hollowing out America’s system of checks and balances (starting with firing inspector generals), alienating our long term allies (Blame Canada?), flaunting the rule of law, especially due process, and the vision of expanding empire. Leave Greenland alone.

In 70 insane days, Trump has transformed the United States from a democracy to an anocracy. Anocracies are hybrids of democracy and authoritarianism. Russia has elections, but they are Putin-controlled cosplay. Trump is playing by Putin’s playbook, step by step, where a democracy is transformed into a dictatorship, with the support of the loyal oligarchs. And when your favorite oligarch is the richest man on the planet it’s that much easier.

The damage Elon Musk is doing to America may be irreparable. The 2400 Americans that Musk fired from the CDC today will have ripple effects across the world, but especially in communities that voted for Trump who require federal support in disease prevention. But, hey, MAGA got to own those liberal scientists! America is unravelling. Our safety net is being shredded. Social security is next. Our national security is already splayed open on the Signal app. The nation collapsing. And it’s not in slow motion.

Trump, his drunk frat boy sycophants, and the crafty billionaires that cleverly steer the President of the United States have a plan, to remake America into Russia, a feudal state where the landed gentry collect the wealth and the rest of us pay the interest on our debt to them. Trump going after DEI, civil rights protections, and vote by mail is all part of the race to autocracy. All that was great about 20th Century America is being erased before our eyes.

But in a moment straight from Monty Python and the Holy Grail, we’re not dead yet. We still have time to jump off the corpse wagon.

The natives are restless. Protests are growing all over the country, including in red states. Americans are waking up to the threat. Sociologist C. Wright Mills called it the sociological imagination. When you are aware of your values and those values are under threat, the crisis moves you to develop a wider analysis. If you value American democracy, this is a fucking crisis. And the irony is that it will be disaffected Republicans who tip this thing into a national surge against Trumpism. Yeah, Idiocracy requires idiots and there will always be MAGA cultists who will follow their orange god off a cliff, but we can do this without them. We need Reagan Republicans and the ghost of John McCain. (Eighties Me can’t believed I just typed that, but this is an emergency!)

This is go time, America. It’s time for old baby boomers and young Gen Alphas to make noise, monkey wrench, flood the courts, take to the streets, sit in, stand up, and stop this madness. Or there will be a point when we can no longer claim to be free.

“It’s not my job to make you comfortable”: Teaching in the Era of Trump 2.0

~ Randy Blazak ~ Leave a comment

January 6, 2024

As a student of the history of fascism and a teacher of that history, I’m well aware of the echoes of the past. When Hitler came to power in Germany in 1933, the first targets of the Third Reich were not Jewish shop owners, but college professors. Germany’s universities were purged of faculty that were Jewish or branded to be communist, socialist, or liberal. Albert Einstein, among other intellectuals, wisely fled his home country. The main work of the Nazi purge was not done by the SS, but by fascist students who were part of the Hitler Youth movement.

One the reasons Einstein and others, including the brilliant social theorists of the Frankfurt School, came to America is because of our value of academic freedom. Academic freedom creates a space for faculty and students to have the right to the free exchange of ideas. One core tenet states, “Academic freedom gives both students and faculty the right to express their views — in speech, writing, and through electronic communication, both on and off campus — without fear of sanction, unless the manner of expression substantially impairs the rights of others or, in the case of faculty members, those views demonstrate that they are professionally ignorant, incompetent, or dishonest with regard to their discipline or fields of expertise.” (Source: Inside Higher Ed)

I highlight this passage because it is clear that Donald Trump plans to go after universities in his second term, which is also laid out in Project 2025, authored by his former and current advisors. Trump has derided universities as engaging in “radical left indoctrination” and promised using federal levers to turn higher ed into centers of ideological loyalism. This includes making it harder for non-wealthy students to attend college, deporting student protestors, and firing accreditors. American universities are encouraging international students to return before Trump reinstates his Muslim travel ban and other draconian travel restrictions. His vow to reclaim universities from the “radical left” is a page torn from 1933.

Trump is not even sworn in and academics are already feeling the pressure as emboldened MAGA students try to out their liberal professors at colleges and on social media. I remember the last version of this in the 1980s when the group, Students for America, tried to publicly ostracize professors they deemed to be leftists. It was chilling. This time those students will have POTUS and the repurposed Department of Education on their side. Teachers and professors, especially those who are un-tenured, may censor their lessons out of fear of being dragged before institutional review boards or disciplinary hearings for making MAGA students feel uncomfortable.

My job as an educator is to make students feel uncomfortable so I am not looking forward to the Trump Reich. As a sociologist, my entire pedagogy is based on C. Wright Mills concept of the sociological imagination, popularized in his 1959 book of the same name. Mills, writing at a peak moment in the Cold War, wanted Americans to be focused, not just on their (micro) personal lives, but the larger (macro) social structures that affect their personal lives. Mills argued that that happens with two conditions. First people have to be aware of their values and second is some sort of threat to those values. Mills argued that the threat puts people in a “crisis” where they begin to see things in a more sociological way.

I’m here to present the threat.

Don’t get me wrong. College classes are intended to be safe spaces, free from harassment. The threat is presented as challenges based on the Mills model. For example if your values say that women should have autonomy over their bodies, I will present how that right is threatened by politicians (including Trump) who have actively limited access to legal abortion procedures. That news should put you in a state of crisis, where you start thinking about social systems that allowed this to happen.

In my classes, we talk about race, gender, God, class, sex, and a bunch of other “uncomfortable” topics and my goal is to never make students feel more comfortable. (We called my own college Sociology 101 course, taken in 1981, the “everything you know is wrong class,” and I’m better for it.) I’m here to push buttons, but I’m guessing educators like me are concerned that some MAGA snowflakes are not going to respond well to intellectual challenges. They will be encouraged by a president who has positioned himself as the enemy of truth and science and the core values of The Enlightenment that brought us here.

When Trump is sworn in on the 20th, there will be numerous battlefields across the country, including the places where immigrants work and live, where women and girls get health care, and where trans people simply exist. I fear the classroom will also become a battleground. But instead of falling into the us vs. them narrative the fosters more conflict, my work will be to bring those students in, valuing their different views, and engaging them in the magic of academic freedom. I am not afraid.

Your biography is history: Taking in the Trump impeachment

~ Randy Blazak ~ 1 Comment

October 3, 2019

When I was a teenager in the late-1970s, I wished I had been a teenager in the 1960s, so I could have swum in the countercultural revolution. Of course, I was already in history. It was called the punk rock rebellion, and there are a million kids now who wished they could have been in my shoes, buying Ramones albums (on vinyl!) as they came out. I was just too close to it to see it as a moment in history. It was just my life.

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The great sociologist C. Wright Mills argued that for people to start to understand how society works they have to understand their own biographies as history. When we read a biography, we see it as a reflection of the history that was unfolding around that person’s life, whether it’s the biography of George Washington or Judy Garland. My students are reading The Autobiography of Malcolm X this quarter and you can’t view the life of Malcolm Little/Malcolm X/Malik Shabazz outside of the context of the racially oppressive twentieth century. His biography is the history of hi century.

And so is yours. The goal of any individual should be to create a biography that both reflects the times and impacts the times. Live in the moment and shape the moment. You are living history. Most fascinating of all histories is the present.

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This couldn’t be any truer than right now. This era will be analyzed for centuries. People are still debating whether or not the French Revolution worked. That won’t hold a candle to the late night conversations students, history buffs, and robots will have about the spectacular rise and fall of Donald J. Trump. We are in perhaps the most significant turning point in U.S. history since the test of World War II. This generation may be witnessing the end of the American Century or the birth of a global youth revolution to save the Earth, sparked by a Swedish kid with Aspergers who demonstrates more class and intelligence than our president does on his very best day (which, I know, isn’t saying much).

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I cut my political teeth on the Watergate hearings in 1973. I was 9-years-old and watched it with rapt attention. When Nixon named Gerald Ford as his vice-president in 1974, I knew there was a quid pro quo that would lead to Ford’s pardon of Tricky Dick. My first trip to the White House was while Nixon was deciding to bug out instead of enduring impeachment proceedings. I probably could have stolen the china and they would have assumed Pat Nixon was looting the place before their shameful exodus.

It felt like history was happening and it feels that way again. The impeachment of Bill Clinton felt more like politics as usual. Bill’s shenanigan’s definitely sparked a national conversation about what constitutes “sex.” (To future generations, blow jobs are, in fact, sexual relations.) It all unfolded during my disastrous first marriage and I don’t doubt that couples across the country were having uncomfortable conversations about the nature of infidelity thanks to the Oval Office antics of Slick Willy. But it didn’t seem monumental, just sad. This feels monumental.

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History is always happening and always has a soundtrack. Yeah, the upheaval of 1968 had the Beatles’ “Revolution” and the Rolling Stones’ “Street Fighting Man,” but you better believe the “look backs” 20 years from now will have Billie Eilish and Lizzo playing along. (“Why men great ’til they gotta be great? Don’t text me, tell it straight to my face.”) This moment in history is framed by news apps, bipartisan divides, and generational warfare. The old white men would rather die guns blazing and burn the house down on their way out than see young women (especially young women of color) even the playing field. Sorry Mitch McConnell, the future of America looks more and more like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez every day. We’re no longer being handed history by Walter Cronkite on the CBS Evening News, we’re finding it on our phones and Twitter feeds. And we’re sharing the news that the Orange Emperor has no clothes. (Cannot unsee!)

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There’s a great 2011 Woody Allen film called Midnight in Paris all about how we over-romanticize the past. It was always better in some previous era. I’ve often thought about how great it would be to live in the Bohemia of 1840’s Paris or 1950’s San Francisco. No doubt the food would suck in both and no wi-fi to boot. The same is true for the Make America Great Again suckers who think the country was better off back in the days of Jim Crow. (Also no wifi.) This is the moment to be in. This crisis. This opportunity for transformation.

I’m committed to taking all this in, every presidential tweet storm, every unhinged Rudy Giuliani interview, every cabinet member indictment, every smirking Stephen Colbert monologue. Future generations will ask us what it was like to witness the compete collapse of America’s mad king. I’ll tell them I LMAO. They’ll have no idea what I’m talking about.