Ken Burns delivers the best graduation advice of the year. T

The Washington Post
Opinion 

The media and sullen nonvoters should listen to Ken Burns

The historian knows something about civil war — and moral responsibility in politics.

By Jennifer Rubin

Columnist

May 28, 2024 at 7:45 a.m. EDT

A skilled graduation speaker who poetically delivers life lessons and imparts insightful advice can leave me teary-eyed. Unfortunately, this graduation season — rife with protests, walkouts and cancellations — deprived many graduates of an inspiring rite of passage. There was one standout: Celebrated filmmaker and chronicler of American history Ken Burns delivered a powerful address at Brandeis University to a rapt audience.

Burns offered some elegantly phrased life advice — “Leadership is humility and generosity squared.” At a university with a long Jewish heritage and large Jewish student body (which has withstood the threefold horror of Oct. 7, the Gaza war and a spike in antisemitism), he counseled: “There’s only us. There is no them. Whenever someone suggests to you, whomever it may be in your life, that there is a them, run away.” He added, “Othering is the simplistic binary way to make and identify enemies, but it is also the surest way to your own self-imprisonment.” His plea to oppose repression everywhere earned sustained applause.

His most compelling words came when he departed, apologetically, from his usual position of neutrality. “Do not be seduced by easy equalization,” he said. “There is nothing equal about this equation. We are at an existential crossroads in our political and civic lives.” He bluntly warned that “the presumptive Republican nominee is the opioid of all opioids,” a drug meant to alleviate pain whereby “you end up re-enslaved with an even bigger problem, a worse affliction and addiction, a bigger delusion.”

The choice this election, he explained, boils down to this: “There is only the perpetuation, however flawed and feeble you might perceive it, of our fragile 249-year-old experiment, or the entropy that will engulf and destroy us if we take the other route.” If we choose former president Donald Trump, then we will see what happens when “the checks of conscience are thrown aside and a deformed picture of the soul is revealed.” There is no third choice.

These sobering words should resonate widely. They should be essential reading/listening for traditional media, as well as for voters who know the presumptive nominee is the “opioid of all opioids” but threaten to stay home or throw away their votes.

The media should collectively recognize that the pretense that “an unequal equation is equal” amounts to an in-kind gift to authoritarians who crave the appearance of normalcy and respectability. Sharp contrasts and moral judgment are kryptonite to MAGA forces, who would love nothing better than months more of fantasy politics (“What if Biden backed out?”) and poll obsession (that only now begin to reflect the views of likely voters).

The media would do well to focus on the authoritarian threat. A candidate such as Trump, who lies about his crowd size, the results of past elections and the sentiments of certain voters, intends to convey inevitability, strength and the futility of resistance. Trump assiduously follows the totalitarian playbook to demoralize opponents and condition the public to believe only he can possibly win. (He also sets the stage for election denial: How could I lose with such big crowds?). The false premise that President Biden is destined to lose (because Trump says so? because of premature, irrelevant polling?) is not news; it’s Trumpian propaganda. The press can avoid Trump’s manipulation by explaining the playbook and refusing to present his braggadocio as fact.

Voters must grow up — fast. Burns’s exhortation that “the kinship of the soul begins with your own at times withering self-examination” should sound an alarm for voters (particularly 20-somethings at elite schools) who condemned Biden’s handling of the Gaza war and vowed to withhold their votes, essentially abdicating the moral decision Burns describes.

How did they arrive at this nihilist position that thrills Trumpists? The Biden team’s handling of the nearly insoluble conflict in Gaza apparently failed to meet some leftists’ elevated standards. With no realistic idea how to end the crisis, they instead choose to bathe in indignation. They vow to let Trump win because the Biden administration has no magic wand to end the suffering. The mind-set is as illogical as it is morally perverse.

A similar phenomenon exists on the right, where some wizened baby boomers turn up their noses at Biden. They cannot bring themselves to vote for someone with the audacity to raise taxes on the rich, alleviate student loan debt or create incentives for green energy. The lack of proportion should deeply disturb democracy defenders. (How big must a tax deduction be to trade it for democracy?) The four-times-indicted former president is unfit, but they would rather write in a candidate than choose Biden. They throw away a vote but maintain the facade of responsible citizenship.

If voters on the right and left renounce “withering self-examination,” they at least might imagine how they would fancy a fascist regime under Trump, who promises to suspend the Constitution and round up millions, talks of blood purity and vows to seek revenge on enemies. The vote-withholders need not go back to research European fascism of the 1930s. Current examples of countries descending into authoritarianism include Hungary, Turkey, India and Belarus. The pretense of elections remains, but unchecked executive power, ethnic violence, religious discrimination, loss of reproductive freedom, endemic corruption and erosion of civil liberties define politics. (And if Biden’s foreign policy is not their cup of tea, critics might ruminate about a foreign policy in alignment with Vladimir Putin.)

Democracy defenders should hope the essence of Burns’s message reaches beyond Brandeis. The Biden campaign seems to get it. Biden recently implored the press corps to “rise up to the seriousness of the moment. Move past the horse-race numbers and the gotcha moments and the distractions … and focus on what’s actually at stake.” The campaign has also been soliciting Nikki Haley voters and deploying Vice President Harris to inspire college voters, both groups that might stay home. Biden’s message, like Burns’s, is simple: This is the existential choice of our time. There is nothing equal about this equation.

Opinion by Jennifer Rubin

Jennifer Rubin writes reported opinion for The Washington Post. She is the author of “Resistance: How Women Saved Democracy from Donald Trump” and is host of the podcast Jen Rubin's "Green Room."

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2024/05/28/ken-burns-graduation-election-trump/