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| Bob Bauer, "Evil Genius" |
Back in June (on June 17th, to be exact), The New York Times had two stories that attracted my attention. On Page A4, The Times had a full-page story titled this way: "In Belgium, a More Peaceful Take on the U.S. Student Protest Playbook." On Page A17, The Times carried a story about Bob Bauer, who is pictured above. That story had this title: "A 'Partisan Warrior' Adjusts His Views." In both cases, the online headlines are different from the ones I am giving you here, which come from the print edition.
As it turned out, when I pulled out Page A4, I found that it was, actually, printed on the same sheet of newsprint as Page A17. With the intervening pages removed, these two stories were on facing pages, and a comment made in the story about protesters in Belgium, on the lefthand side, resonated with the story on the righthand side - the story calling Bob Bauer both a "Partisan Warrior" and an "Evil Genius."
Let me dispose of the Belgium protest story first. On the campus of a Dutch-speaking university, students have been demanding that their institution break ties with Israeli academia over the war in Gaza. Student actions parallel, it appears, what has been happening on U.S. campuses: "Students have set up an encampment. They have staged daily demonstrations. And they have sometimes used slogans that many Jews view as a call for the elimination of Israel, like, 'From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.'"
That sounds a lot like what is happening in the United States. So, naturally, I was interested in finding out why student protests in Belgium didn't result in the same kind of treatment of protesters thas has been occuring here - for instance at Columbia, and at UCLA, and at UCSC, our local institution of higher education. As you may remember, the Chancellor of UCSC made arrangements to have police called in from various communities throughout California to end a student protest (much like the one in Belgium, apparently), with the police beating and bludgeoning students at the base of the UCSC campus. That link will take you to an online media source that is, admittedly, sympathetic to Palestine, and unsympathetic to how Israel has been reacting to the Hamas attack on October 6th of last year. However, the facts cited tally with the coverage of the Chancellor's actions as reported by the San Jose Mercury News and the online news site, Lookout Santa Cruz.
Why didn't something similar happen in Belgium?
Well, among other things, The Times' story about the Belgium student protest said that "In the United States, the protests have taken place amid a hyperpolarized political environment (emphasis added). That might be one of the main reasons!
Let's switch, now, to the "facing page" story about Bob Bauer. Bauer is the personal attorney for President Biden, and was previously the White House counsel for President Barack Obama. The Times reports that "once, after he executed a particularly tough-minded legal attack on Republicans, Bob Bauer remembers a conservative magazine called him an "evil genius," [which he] took as a compliment." Bauer, in other words, is used to working in just the kind of "hyperpolarized political environment" that seems so prevelant in our politics today. Bauer may even, as a "Partisan Warrior," have helped create such an environment.
No more! Bauer has a new book out, titled, The Unraveling: Reflections on Politics Without Ethics and Democracy in Crisis, and Bauer is now quite concerned that a politics that is dedicated simply to "winning," to doing "whatever it takes," is "extremely dangerous."
When we are "all in this together," and that happens to be the truth, "wiping out" those with whom you disagree is contraindicated.
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