Hope is a thing with a diploma
Relying on resurgent conscience and good journalism to do battle with Trumpism
Dean Jelani Cobb shots a selfie with jubilant Columbia Journalism School graduates this week (RS photo)
From the home where I grew up, we could see 60 miles across the barren prairie to our east on a clear day. Those of us who come from what some people consider remote parts of the country have a different perspective on distance: We understand that to get to where you need to be, you have to keep going. You don’t really have the choice of turning around when you get tired — unless you’re willing to settle for where you’ve already been, and that’s a retreat too far.
If that sounds like a guiding philosophy, it was actually just the way a kid from South Dakota looked at his surroundings. But I’ve come to understand over the years that I was shaped by my experience as a traveler — that is, as someone who had to drive two days to see any relative outside my immediate family, or put in 20 hours on the road to get home from college at Christmastime. You can’t be daunted by a long haul. You just have to keep at it.
That notion came back to me this week when I had the great privilege of speaking at the graduation ceremony of the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. My term as chair of the school’s Alumni Board is ending, meaning this was my valedictory — a final opportunity to share some thoughts with young people just beginning the trip that I launched from the same place so many decades ago. For a lot of them, the trip just to reach the launchpad had already been a long one — even further, both literally and figuratively, than I had traveled to get there when I was in my 20s. And now they had arrived at an inflexion point.
Here's the thing about graduations: They inherently offer a vision of hope. That’s true whether the graduates are moving up to middle school, aiming for a job after high school or being draped in a doctoral hood. Whatever uncertainty a graduate may feel about the road ahead — where they’ll find a paycheck, how they’ll pay off student loans, whether they’re even ready for a life’s next step — there’s a sense when people show up in a graduation gown that the closing of one chapter presents a fresh opening for the next.
That’s the notion that I took to heart this week in what has to be considered a quite unlikely place for any encouraging thoughts in Donald Trump’s America. After all, if any dominion might realistically imagine its proud palace reduced to Trump-trashed rubble, it would be one connected to both journalism and higher education — especially, surely, at Columbia University, the first big institution targeted by our nation’s experiment in authoritarianism. Yet in a crowd of nearly giddy graduates and their glowing loved ones, you couldn’t help but sense an elusive emotion in the Era of Trump: We felt hope.
Even in a landscape already ravaged by Trump’s malignancy, there is reason for hope. And we need to let it come. We’ve traveled a long way to get here — that is, America has endured a lot over the past 249 years — and there’s simply no way to turn back now.
There are so many reasons, certainly, to feel beleaguered and dispirited these days, one-tenth of the way through what we have to presume will be a four-year term of the most corrupt, malicious and erratic leader in our nation’s history. Mornings bring the dread of overnight news alerts; updates during the day rarely offer respite. It’s hard to keep up with all the bad news
Trump is carelessly imperiling America’s future by demanding a “big beautiful bill” of huge tax cuts mainly benefitting the wealthy while adding trillions of dollars to the debt that successive generations will have to pay. In addition to the market-roiling debt, the legislation will pay for the tax cuts by slashing nearly $1 trillion from Medicaid and nutrition benefits, likely cutting off food aid for 5.4 million people and healthcare for 7.6 million. Trump’s rash tariff plans that have upended both stock and bond markets are making economic enemies of historically friendly nations around the world, leaving gaps in partnerships that China and other powers are already moving to fill. He is eagerly making the world dirtier and less healthy by ripping up efforts to encourage the transition to clean energy and limit climate change.
He is decimating the research that has for generations put America at the forefront of science research and made our higher education system the world’s envy. He is dismantling government programs that have built the nation’s economic stability. He is resetting our defense commitments in a way that is making Vladimir Putin very happy.
Some of what he is doing seems simply idiotic: making our weather forecasts less dependable and our disaster response less robust, disabling the Internal Revenue Service, downgrading veterans’ health care, even giving tax breaks for gun silencers and gym memberships, the latter at a cost to the U.S. Treasury of $10 billion a year. Some of his moves reflect Trump’s deeply flawed character and his contempt for the U.S. Constitution: deporting people without the due process that the Constitution demands and that federal judges have ordered; attacking law firms for representing clients he dislikes; encouraging discrimination against and cruel treatment of LGBTQ citizens.
Trump has never seemed to care much for facts, but his re-election has seemed to free him from any lingering constraints that might signal respect for truth. This week, for example, he advanced the wholly fictitious notion of “white genocide” in South Africa, and welcomed the resettlement in the United States of 50 Afrikaners whom he claimed were legitimate refugees, even as his administration continued to speedily deport non-white people who fled to America for safety, many with our government’s blessing. It was a display as racist as it was fallacious.
Any listing of the latest egregious behavior by the president is necessarily incomplete; his offenses against America’s historic principles of fairness and justice over the first 14 weeks of this 47th presidency have been too many to recount here. But while Trump’s popularity has fallen to the lowest point of any recent president at this early point in a term, he shows no sign of letting up, and his political clout is enforced by a campaign cache of $600 million, with a target of $1 billion.
No wonder ambitious Republican politicians are giving Trump whatever he wants. No wonder people of good will are discouraged.
Yet we can’t overlook the fact that when what Trump is doing is made clear to Americans, a lot of us are horrified. His actions aren’t popular. Sooner or later, public opinion will catch up with him — that is, if people figure out what’s true.
It was against this backdrop — all the now-usual bad news of the day — that I visited the Columbia University campus this week for the awarding of master’s degrees to journalism students. It’s an easy Amtrak trip down along the Hudson River from my Upstate home.
From the auditorium stage, I looked out on more than 200 young people in blue academic gowns; behind them sat their families and friends. They listened as the school’s brilliant dean, Jelani Cobb, decried the “effort to suppress dissent and freedom of the press” that they had witnessed during their time at Columbia — a free press which, he declared, remains “a prerequisite for a free society.” Yet amid “the tempest surrounding both higher education and journalism,” the dean said, he remained optimistic for one reason: “It is your talent, your courage, your caliber and idealism,” he told the graduates.
It occurred to me at that moment that the most encouraging point of the day might be the fact that the newest recruits to honest journalism are likely better prepared than those of us who have been around for years at a crucial task: delivering essential truth-telling in a way that can reach a contemporary audience. After all, as I explained in my own remarks to the class, I went through the Columbia program when we were still using manual typewriters; it wasn’t until 14 years after I wore one of the Columbia blue academic gowns that I first saw something called a web site. We Boomer journalists have now mostly yielded newsroom leadership, but the digital revolution occurred on our watch, coinciding with a decline in the audience for news. Maybe tomorrow’s generation of newsroom leaders will do a better job.
The challenge facing the new journalists is daunting: a lot of people aren’t paying attention. A New York Times/Siena College poll last month found that while most voters don’t support the direction of Trump’s presidency, many of the 42 percent who do approve have something in common: Nearly half said they had not heard much about at least some of the ups and downs of his administration. For example, the Trump term featured the worst stock market plunge since 1974, but about one-fifth of voters had heard little or nothing about it; likewise, about one-third of the Trump supporters said they didn’t know about the chaos created by DOGE, the Elon Musk-led Department of Government Efficiency.
Trump has always done best with these so-called “low-information voters.” The Siena poll found that the voters who hadn’t heard much about the problems associated with Trump’s tenure were much more likely to get their news from social media — a platform filled with influencers and podcasters with less allegiance to the truth-telling than to audience-building. A key challenge facing today’s journalists, then — and one that the young people I saw this week are surely ready to tackle — is to deliver honest reporting in a way that will reach even people who aren’t usually inclined to seek out news. I think they can do it.
For those in search of hope beyond what can come from the promise of journalistic truth-telling, though, it might be found most readily in the fact that American democracy has been in retreat before, and has recovered.
It wasn’t only the threat to the Republican posed by the Civil War, though that was the closest we have come to losing the nation. A dozen years after the war, the Compromise of 1877 led to the withdrawal of federal troops from the former Confederate states, ending Reconstruction and giving rise to a new era of repression of civil rights and the resurgence of white supremacy as accepted custom. The Ku Klux Klan ran rampant; lynchings were common. The so-called Jim Crow era was an ugly time in America, especially for non-whites and under-represented ethnic groups. It was a shameful period that lasted for decades, faltering after World War II, but only falling, finally, during the Civil Rights era of the 1960s.
Twice in the 20th century, so-called Red Scares led to government persecution based on political beliefs: After World War I, the Justice Department authorized raids targeting suspected radicals, leading to thousands of arrests and deportations. It happened again after World War II, during a political cycle now labeled McCarthyism: Intense political repression cost thousands of innocent people their reputations and livelihoods; governments and private employers alike screened people for beliefs that some politicians considered un-American.
In each instance, Americans rediscovered their conscience and regained their senses, and lawmakers followed the lead of their constituents. Citizens turned away from demagoguery and toward honesty, and began to insist again that the nation apply the values of fairness and justice that underpin the Constitution. The law followed public opinion.
It’s not that the dark days didn’t do great damage, nor was the resurgence of Americanism speedy in each case. But the truth caught up with even those public officials who committed the worst offenses against the nation’s values.
Our best hope now, then, is that the sheer weight of the Trump administration’s offenses against what people truly want will begin to drag down the president’s popularity to the point that the unswerving Trumpian allegiance of Republican officials will falter. The recovery will take time, but it can be speeded by the work of a capable and energetic corps of truth-tellers now finding their way into the field.
In these difficult days, we need to remember how far America has come. It is a distance that included some hard times for democracy. And so we find ourselves today. But there’s no turning back. Eyes on the horizon, maintaining our forward course, we need to keep hope alive until we’ve regained sure footing on the values and principles that have always sustained the nation.
TRAINING
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ENDNOTE
THANK YOU for reading The Upstate American, and for joining us in the conversation about our common ground, this great country. As we together navigate these challenging times, I hope you’ll join us again next week — or send me a message with ideas you’d like to see us address. - Rex Smith