A year before Trump was first inaugurated in 2017 was the last time I felt motivated to quote Marx. Now I just can’t help quoting myself quoting him:
“History repeats itself,” wrote Karl Marx in 1852, “first as tragedy, second as farce.” He was referring to Napoleon I and his nephew Louis Napoleon. One hundred and sixty-four years later, my subject is Ronald Reagan and Donald Trump.
In that 2016 essay, the tragedy was the hopeful naivete that had allowed me and a great many people I knew to be shocked and surprised by Reagan’s 1980 election to the presidency, and the kind of purist politics that lets the worst be elected because too many voters feel contaminated by voting for the (even slightly) better. I never could have guessed nearly a decade ago that the epitome of farce would win that November, let alone that a second Trump election would come last year. I never imagined that I would wake up and go to sleep in state of peak incredulity every day.
Yet here I am, writing about Reagan and Trump again because following in Reagan’s footsteps, Trump has announced that the US will withdraw from UNESCO—again. If you aren’t familiar with the UN’s education, scientific and cultural organization, it’s easy to find out: here’s its website. Like all worthy bureaucracies, the agency does work of great value and some judged not to be. It will always be dear to my heart because it embodies Article 27 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the foundational principle of cultural democracy:
Everyone has the right freely to participate in the cultural life of the community, to enjoy the arts and to share in scientific advancement and its benefits.
How the declaration came into being is a beautiful story. In the aftermath of World War II, having seen oceans of blood spilled in service of the same white supremacist ideas that now animate the MAGA regime—kidnapping of legal residents and asylum seekers, construction of concentration camps, and much more—people of goodwill came together to craft a simple document to assert—and they hoped, ensure—that every human has inalienable rights.
Do me a favor. Take breath, hold it in for a few seconds, and release it slowly. Then read Article 1, and as you do, imagine a world guided by its wisdom and committed to practicing it in spirit and deed:
All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood.
I wrote about it in 2007 on the anniversary of the passing of the great Rene Cassin, a coauthor along with Eleanor Roosevelt and other heroes of human rights; and again in 2008 on the 60th anniversary of the Declaration; and a lot more times before that. (If you’re interested, go to my blog page and put “Universal Declaration of Human Rights” in the search box.)
The Universal Declaration was adopted in 1948. More than 75 years later, much of it is still aspirational, but it has also repeatedly given birth to fuller expressions of human rights. What’s sad is that in the last 40 years, the United States has seldom been a party to these. Here’s a snippet I wrote about it in my 2006 book, New Creative Community:
“[A]mong the 191 member states of the United Nations [there are 193 today], there were two votes against UNESCO’s 2005 Convention on the Protection and Promotion of the Diversity of Cultural Expressions, the U.S. and Israel, as well as four abstentions, Australia, Nicaragua, Honduras and Liberia.
“This is not a new position for the United States. The U.S. role in international discourse concerning the problem of imbalance between American cultural industries and other countries’ has consistently been to dismiss it as no problem at all. The U.S. government waited until 2003 to reverse Ronald Reagan’s 1984 decision to leave UNESCO, the primary international forum for such dialogue. For the nearly two decades the U.S. sat out, official policy was simply to refuse to engage.
“On those pre-1984 occasions when an official American voice joined the UNESCO dialogue, it was to reject any ‘internationally imposed cultural standards or norms limiting, in any way, the rights of individuals. … Our cultural policy is a policy of freedom,’ as articulated by Jean Gerard, United States Ambassador to UNESCO, at the organization’s global cultural policies conference in Mexico City, August 1982. The classic interpretation of this language was provided by French cultural minister Jack Lang at that same conference: ‘Cultural and artistic creation is today victim of a system of multinational financial domination against which it is necessary to get organized…. Yes to liberty, but which liberty? The liberty … of the fox in the henhouse which can devour the defenseless chickens at his pleasure?’”
If you want to know more about Reagan’s reasons, here’s a contemporaneous summary from the New York Times.
The US rejoined the agency under George W. Bush. But in 2011, under Barack Obama, the U.S. cut funding for UNESCO to protest admitting Palestine as a full member. When Trump was elected in 2016, he pulled us out altogether. Two years ago, President Biden announced that we were rejoining and began repaying many millions in back dues. That brings us to today and the announcement of U.S. withdrawal.
You could see this latest news as part of the MAGA regime’s general paring away of international organizational ties to cement a dangerous isolationism—under Trump the US has already pulled out of the UN’s World Health Organization and Human Rights Council—and that would true but not sufficient. I see it in moral and spiritual terms, as an expression of the cold and baseless hatred that fuels the MAGA regime, a contagion I hope and pray will not spread to overwhelm the people who live here. The human species has distinguished itself by giving birth to the most astonishing creativity, beauty, and meaning. Culture, and within it, art, express what it is to be human and remind us to live into our capacity for free expression. To MAGA, that is deeply dangerous and must be eradicated.
The farce which is playing itself out now is a barrage of distraction—from this resignation to accusing Obama of treason, to demanding that sports teams restore their former racist names and so laughably many more crackpot gestures—designed to pull attention from the longterm friendship of Donald Trump and the world’s most infamous pedophile, which seems to be fooling almost no one. I can’t claim that leaving UNESCO again is the worst MAGA misdeed. But as MAGA’s toxic buffoonery inflates, it’s one among many that need to be recognized and protested.
If moral and spiritual appeals don’t reach you, look at it in political terms, as Rep. Gregory Meeks of the House Foreign Affairs Committee put it, “Once again, this administration is undermining U.S. global leadership and inserting corrosive MAGA culture wars into U.S. foreign policy. It’s reckless, counterproductive, and will harm American interests for years to come.”
Mighty Mo Rodgers, “Heaven’s Got The Blues.”