The Best Offense Is a Good Offense

What teaching writing and defeating nascent fascism have in common.

Hey! This matters more than you think!

For years, without knowing it, I made an opening tactical error with my students when it came to discussing the importance of our first year writing course.

My pitch was the course was important for their success in future courses, that their professors would expect them to know the stuff I was about to teach them (“academic writing”) and a failure to master what I had to offer would result in future pain at the hands of the important professors.

That last bit about important professors was implied, rather than explicit, but it was present because I knew the students believed it, and for awhile at least, I did too.

I was perpetuating a system built on what I’d come to call “indefinite future reward,” essentially that what students were doing in my class wasn’t for the sake of anything other than how they were going to perform in some future class. Our entire educational system and perhaps even our whole society is built on this notion that we should not expect the present to be interesting or meaningful or, god forbid, joyful, because what we do now in meant to pay off at some indefinite point in the future.

As I gained experience and confidence, I began to shed my internalized inferiority complex over the fact that I labored without status (non-tenure track faculty), and that I taught in the general education program, the courses students wanted to get out of the way so they could get to the real stuff.

I came to recognize the truth that a first-year writing course, done well, is the most important stuff and the fact that the institutional structures discounted my labor had nothing to do with my work’s worth.

The way I approach my teaching evolved along with my attitude, as I moved steadily away from the standard checkpoints of teaching “academic writing” to what I now call “the writer’s practice” where the focus is on becoming someone capable of deploying theskills, knowledge, attitudes and habits-of-mind of writers in order to solve unfamiliar (to them) writing-related problems.

In presenting the course to students, I stopped being defensive about what I knew about their attitudes towards gen ed courses in general and writing courses in specific, and instead went on offense. From jump street I was going to try to convince them that their first-year writing course, the course they would gladly avoid if they could, was going to be something deeply meaningful and important to them not just in the future, but in the present.

I went on offense on the first day of class, as manifested in my course policy document which was structured as a “Frequently Asked Questions” document where the questions were written from the students’ perspective, followed by my answers. As a little bit of extra fun as a first-day activity I would number and print out the questions and give them to the students and make a big, corny show of it, announcing from the front of the room that I understood they might have some questions about the course, and who had the first question?

After a couple of introductory questions about me and my background we’d get to the meat of the document. This is from a course circa 2011-2012 as best as I recall.

In the above I am already trying to map out the difference between how they viewed the activities of school in high school versus my expectations. I would often improvise and ask someone to tell me the difference between meiosis and mitosis and someone would dutifully explain it with some kind of textbook definition and I would look at them straight and say, “I don’t understand what that means. Why is that important?”

Very rarely would any student have a ready answer to that second question.

The exchange moved on:

The intersection of our broad purpose combined with their role. We are going to be working in the “academic conversation,” in which the goal of our expression is to increase the sum total of illumination on a given subject by deploying our “unique intelligences.” It will be a semester or longer project to convince the students that I am not interested in them parroting what I already know, so I have to get this rolling early.

I then get even weirder, at least to students’ minds:

This was all written long before our now omnipresent worries about the influence of social media. When I first started using this frame most students didn’t have smartphones, though Facebook was increasingly ubiquitous. I can’t claim that I ever convinced any of the many hundreds of students who heard this pitch to agree with me, but I know for a fact from conversations and end-of-semester evaluations that they believed that I believed it¹ and that our classroom would run accordingly.

By going on offense, I’d upped the stakes from “this is important for school” to “this is important for life.” I know from conversations with students and seeing their evaluations that this improved their engagement with the course, but more importantly, it also improved mine. I had a mission I believed in and which was therefore important to follow through on.

I wanted students to know that they will benefit from being engaged, thinking people, and the activities in the class would help them engage and think. What they did with that was up to them, but I believed sincerely then and continue to believe today that being an engaged and thinking person remains the key to ultimate happiness and fulfillment.

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Going on offense against a fascist threat

Unfortunately, the shitshow that is our country has made the present moment particularly hard if you are an engaged and thinking person. A thought I’ve been having quite often recently is, I think that looks like fascism.

This scene from out front of Washington D.C.’s Union Station looks like fascism:

Unreal, indeed, except, you know…real. While being engaged and thinking helps in these times in order to understand the stakes and have agency over your own mind, there is such a thing as too much exposure. I strive to be aware without being obsessed. I’m glad I saw that video so I know what’s going on, but I don’t need to see it three-hundred more times.

Events over the past couple of weeks have convinced me more than ever (and I was already convinced) how important it is in this moment to go on offense against Trump’s authoritarian push or to risk being overwhelmed. I’m not a huge fan of post-election recriminations, but it seems undeniably true at this point that the Democratic Party’s stance of “defending democracy” was weak and unpersuasive because defense is inherently weak. This is the moment to go on offense against authoritarianism.

But what does that look like? Below are some examples I’ve collected. I’m curious to hear what others may think, or examples you’ve thought of.

The DOJ employee who mocked and then hurled a sandwich at one of Trump’s geared-up goons is an example of going on offense:

It’s not just the sandwich throw itself, but also the video showing these lumbering idiots unable to chase down the man, later identified as Sean Charles Dunn, a now former employee of the Department of Justice. Writing at Slate, Christina Cauterucci captures the spirit of Dunn’s act as an act of offensive (in the literal sense) resistance against fascism.

In a photo taken of Dunn’s arrest on Sunday night, at least 13 officers crowd around a street corner to apprehend him, a breathtaking show of force against a man who threw a piece of bread. The entire incident is rife with such ludicrous disproportionality. The video still of a submarine sandwich bouncing off a bulletproof vest will be an indelible image of this administration’s response to political opposition. It’s the modern-day version of a row of bayonets facing down an anti-war demonstrator with a chrysanthemum, with an added veneer of 2025 stupidity courtesy of Subway.

Trump’s lackey, Pam Bondi, is pushing for a prison sentence, but a judge has already signaled that the felony charge is excessive. We’ll see what plays out. I have no wish for Dunn to become a martyr to the cause, but these are the actions of a weak regime and pointing out the ways they are weak - including cratering approval numbers - is another way to go on offense.

Another way to go on offense is to mock what is obvious, bad-faith stupidity. I had heard the name Markwayne Mullin, and assumed it was a secondary character in a Yellowstone spin off, but apparently he’s a United States Senator from Oklahoma who said on Fox News that in Washington D.C. he drives without his seatbelt on so he can more easily bail on his vehicle if he is carjacked.

Absurd. This sort of thing should be responded to with dismissal and mockery, and not just by places like McSweeney’s, which pierced the veil of the absurdity of the Texas republicans attempts at establishing a mega-gerrymander at Donald Trump’s behest in Carlos Greave’s, “Texas Democrats Are Subverting Democracy by Preventing Us from Subverting Democracy.”

The style of going on offense

In terms of political style and going on offense, our leading current example is Democratic Nominee for Mayor of New York, Zohran Mamdani, who has established himself as a happy warrior for the working class thanks to his obvious charisma highlighted in his signature videos.

Here is a video of Mamdani going on the offense against his opponent Andrew Cuomo over the circumstances of Cuomo’s resignation as governor and subsequent “consulting” work when out of office.

Mamdani shivs Cuomo multiple ways, highlighting his disgrace, his dishonesty, his greed, all inside 90 seconds, and delivered with a winking humor that invites you in on the joke.

Following a previous tour of the studios of right-ist brocasters in which he signaled his willingness to sell out trans people in exchange for centrist cred, California Governor Gavin Newsom seems to have found his inner Mamdani in dealing with Donald Trump.

Illinois Governor Jay Pritzker has been more consistently on offense, sheltering those democratic Texas lawmakers and likening Donald Trump’s regime to Nazi Germany all the way back in February. I don’t really care if politicians are doing this out of some kind of political calculation as long as it’s the right thing to do to resist authoritarianism. We can go back to the internecine fighting when the threat to end democracy is past.

I can also tell you what offense doesn’t look like. It doesn’t look like House minority leader Hakeem Jeffries validating Cuomo’s idiotic criticism for Mamdani (like 50% of New Yorkers) living in a rent-stabilized apartment.

It doesn’t look like responding to Donald Trump’s authoritarian power grabs with “maybe Trump’s got a point” as this fool did at The Atlantic.

This is an elite trying to downplay the fascist threat of Donald Trump by claiming some other elites are downplaying crime. Meanwhile the good people of Washington D.C. are going on offense by booing Trump’s shock troops in the streets.

Offense also doesn’t look like the chancellors of Wash U. and Vanderbilt apparently trying to take advantage of Trump’s authoritarian attacks on Columbia, Harvard, Penn, et al., to elevate their own status inside the competition for prestige.

There is no such thing as a genuine university in an authoritarian country, you utter clowns.

I’m getting myself heated up again, the way I was apparently heated up when Perry Bacon Jr induced me to go on Substack Live and declare that former Harvard president Larry Summers is betraying democracy because he’s encouraging his institution to make a “deal” with Trump.

Claims that Trump is taking on universities to combat anti-semitism are lies as are his claims about crime in Washington D.C. and other cities. Having a debate about whether there’s substance under Trump’s lies is the opposite of offense.

The substance of going on offense

To this point, everything I’ve been talking about is a matter of rhetoric, messaging, and framing, but this is only part of the equation. My approach to teaching writing worked not only because I framed the task in ways that invited students to dig in and do the work, but I did my best to give them interesting work to do. If you’re going on offense you need something to do.

On that front, I recommend the work of Osita Nwanevu and his new book, The Right of The People: Democracy and the Case for a New American Founding.

If you want a bit of a primer on where Nwanevu is coming from, check out this podcast interview with Ross Douthat, which covers some of the specifics of his proposals, proposals which may unsettle even some folks who would say they’re strongly against Donald Trump, but which - I believe - are at least in part, if not in whole, a necessity for securing our country against future Trump-like threats should we get past this present one.

Imagine a world where the Biden Administration, taking the threat of Trump to democracy as seriously as it deserved, made it a priority to end the filibuster, add three seats to the Supreme Court and two states (Washington D.C. and Puerto Rico) to the union. This is country that is hardened against an authoritarian. As the last six months have shown, the Constitution as is, is not up to the task.

At least to my mind, this is a similar shift to my change in my teaching. At first, I’d believed that my job was to preserve a system that was generally working and if students couldn’t see it, that was their problem. But the reality was that the system I thought I was preserving was hugely dysfunctional, and clinging to the rules that had been laid down for (literally) generations, was going to lead to the ultimate diminishment and death of those values the system claimed for itself. I had to build a more solid foundation for those values to rest on.

Modesty aside, I was right, as our current challenges in teaching writing when students have access to a homework machine illustrates. I wanted students to believe that I wasn’t asking them to do homework. I wanted them to figure out how to live. Absurd, grandiose, not always effective, a constant struggle, but absolutely worth doing. You could even find a bit of joy in the attempt. I know that my attitude toward my teaching significantly improved. Looking, I don’t want anyone to think that I’d conjured some kind of classroom utopia. It was still a struggle, but the work had a purpose that animated the space.

I think we’re at a similar, far more consequential moment in our politics. We can’t stay wedded to notions of procedural “fairness” that aren’t actually tethered to the principles of democracy when there’s someone trying to end democracy.

What more proof do we need at this point? Everything Nwanevu proposes is absolutely within the boundaries of our Constitution. There’s nothing underhanded or illegal that he proposes. It’s simply a matter of committing to fight for the principles we claim for democracy.

Which sounds less comfortable, adding additional seats to the House of Representatives, something we haven’t done since 1959, steadily resulting in the erosion of individual voter power, or having a federalized police force of mask-wearing goons driving military vehicles down the street while you wait for your Uber?

This is the fight. We’re in it. Either you’re on offense or you’re losing.

Links

At the Chicago Tribune I reviewed Jessica Francis Kane’s astounding Fonseca. I honestly think we’re looking at an enduring classic.

At Inside Higher Ed I did some thinking on e-bikes and generative AI.

Alrighty, I need your help. Along with my friends at Frankenstories, I’m trying to make my way to next year’s SXSW EDU event in order to spread the gospel about doing authentic meaningful writing that delivers immediate benefits to students. The selection is done by popular vote which is where you come in. If you go to this link, establish an account and “heart” our panel, that registers as vote.

Here’s that link again. Thank you in advance for your help.

Without me noticing, The Booker Prize announced its longlist of finalists. I’ve only read one of these books. How about you?

Sam Adler-Bell and Matthew Sitman recently named their episode on Joan Didion “conservative” as one of their all-time favorites and I’m here to say they are correct.

A piece from Adam Fleming Petty that answers the question “What is the great football novel?” correctly.

I share one piece from my friends McSweeney's above, but why not another? “Honey, I Have No Clue What You’re Talking About — I Did Not Use AI to Write My Wedding Vows.” by Michael Pershan.

Recommendations

1. Trust Exercise by Susan Choi
2. Fundamentally by Nussaibah Younis
3. The Season by Helen Garner
4. Only the Astronauts by Ceridwen Dovey
5. Gliff by Ali Smith

Melanie K. - Melbourne, Australia

It’s been awhile since I recommended Jen Begin’s Big Swiss, a book that cracks me up just thinking about it.

1. Martyr by Kave Akbar
2. Hamnet by Maggie O'Ferrell
3. Shadow of Solstice by Anne Hillerman
4. The Safekeep by Yael van der Wouden
5. The Worst Hard Time by Timothy Egan
6. The Words We Know by Bruce Nash

Wayne N. - (Whereabouts not stated)

Wayne has not quite followed the instructions (one two many books, no hometown), but this felt like a good list for recommending John Banville’s The Book of Evidence which is a book people should know about.

I’m excited to say that I’ve got a handful of public events coming up in September and October that I’ll be sharing here. In the meantime, it’s never too late to buy your own copy of More Than Words: How to Think About Writing in the Age of AI.

Please feel free to share thoughts about any and everything in the comments, and let’s make a plan to meet here again next week.

JW
The Biblioracle

1. My favorite student evaluation ever came from a student disgruntled at the rigor I tried to prod out of students saying, “What Warner doesn’t yet understand is that his course isn’t as important as other classes.”