Can The Topeka School Explain Whats Wrong with Josh Hawley?
If you enjoy reading Electric Literature, join our mailing list! Well send you the best of EL each week, and youll be the first to know about upcoming submissions periods and virtual events. America is adolescence without end, Ben Lerner writes in The Topeka School. His witty, revelatory novel follows the Gordon FamilyAdam, a high school debate star, and his parentsin 1997 Kansas. The book is dense with themes, but none more haunting than the question of toxic masculinitys source. While Lerner offers no straightforward answernothing about this book is straightforwardthe setting itself is a clue. The Topeka School stayed with me for months. In the weeks after reading, I relived every infuriating experience from my own high school debate league. The boy who explained that the distribution of semi-finalists was designed to ensure a girl must make it to finals, because without interference, she wouldnt get there. The boy who suggested Hillary Clinton was too angry to be President, and then, when I countered, asserted I was too angry to be the victor. The judge who docked points from me because I was too emotional (I wasnt even crying!). Its a scary thing to imbue a young boy with confidence he hasnt yet had the time to earn. I knew Lerners characters. Id debated them in high school and college. Its a scary thing to imbue a young boy with confidence he hasnt yet had the time to earn. As Lerner writes of Adam and his classmates, they are told constantlythat they are individuals, rugged even, but in fact they are emptied out, isolate, mass men without a mass, although theyre not men, obviously, but boys, perpetual boys, Peter Pans, man-children.  Several of Lerners boys turn alt-right years in the future, and I wondered if the same became of any of my former debate rivals. By the end of October 2020, Id Googled each and every one of my former debate competitors to determine which way they were voting. As I figured it, nothing about a Biden vote suggests someone has turned out okay, but a Trump vote screams something went wrong. I scrolled the profiles of the few rogue Trump supporters. I read their arguments. I reread their arguments. I screenshotted their arguments and sent them to dozens of group chats. ? Id write, as though it was shocking to know one of the 74 million Trump voters. But the thing is, it was. She used to be fun! It was even eerier to see this uncritical embrace of our fascist President from the people with whom Id learned to think critically about politics. My old debate pals used skills Id watched them develop as teenagers to defend our ignoble Commander-in-Chief. By 2021, I had become a curious observer, but I must admit that in high school, I was one of Lerners boys. I always thought I was right. I was (and am) a privileged white person who believed my opinion mattered more than it did. I once hid a competitors shoes to prevent him from getting to the round on time (in my defense, he shouldnt have taken them off). Another schools coach once yelled at me for openly talking shit about a competitor. His exact words were we never root for someone else to lose. (I was confusedin a world where only one can win, isnt rooting for yourself the same as is rooting for everyone else to lose?) No one I knew in high school would have been surprised if Id sought public office, although I consider it a great act of service that I have not. Still, my membership into their clubnot so much a friend but rather a person worthy of being treated as a threatdepended more on my assimilation than anything else. It was still a boys club, with or without me, and toxic masculinity depends on the compliance of some womenwhite women in particular. Arrogance and an inability to admit error arent unique to men, but they are more common. Like the U.S. Senate, my debate league was mostly boys. Id argue its not a stretch to attribute much of the toxicity to their nascent masculinity. I didnt need to wait long to meet another of Lerners boys. On January 6th, 2021, violent protesters stormed the Capitol to protest the results of our election. Six Republican senators voted to overturn the results, and on that day, our nation minted a new villainMissouri Senator Josh Hawley. Josh Hawley is no ordinary Josh. Like Lerners characters, his familiarity shook me: his ability to talk around an issue, his champion high school debate record, his smug confidence. Look at his Wikipedia pagehes literally sneering in the photo. It took no effort to picture him as a 17-year-old cross-examining me in the finals, lamenting my ill-preparedness, leering just the way he does on FOX News. Of course, debate is not the only high school activity that breeds overconfident youngsters, and Hawley is far from the only right-wing senator with a high school debate record. You cant throw a stone in Washington without hitting an Ivy-League-educated right-wing senator who cut their teeth on high school debate, although Id encourage you to try. Ted Cruz, a champion Princeton debater, has a similar background, but he simply didnt strike the same spooky chord as Hawley. Perhaps its that Cruz is older, so he feels more distant. Hawley is disturbingly boyish, and the familiarity haunts me  his hairline cannot recede fast enough for him to become a stranger. Perhaps its that I was given more time to ease into Cruzs villainy. With a personality like his, Hawley should have had the courtesy to offer us some warm-up time! Instead, he turned himself into a household name overnight by opposing Democracy in a country notoriously obsessed with Democracy. In the most toxically-masculine-high-school-debate move of all, he took an unwavering line on an unpopular position to turn the spotlight squarely on him. You cant throw a stone in Washington without hitting an Ivy-League-educated right-wing senator who cut their teeth on high school debate, although Id encourage you to try. Teenage debaters do this tactically. In the climax of The Topeka School, Adam competes against a team from Austin. His opponent employs a tool not common to their category: the spread, in which you speak at a pace of several hundred words per minute so the other team cannot possibly refute every argument. Some judges love the spread, others hate it, but either way, its a strategy that allows the debater to center himself (or herself  but probably himself). The gamble pays off: Adam is caught off guard, and the spreaders win. Hawley essentially did the samehe intentionally confused us to garner attention very quickly. He took a shocking viewpoint to force the conversation further to his side, when in truth, his position was so unreasonable we should never have needed to address it. Whether or not hes won remains to be seen. Hawley may well have learned his behavior as a Missouri debate star in the 1990s, one state over from Adam. Early in The Topeka School, Lerner describes a debate round in which Adam scores an easy victory: Adam had no idea if what he was saying was trueThe key was to narrate participation in debate as a form of linguistic combat; the key was to be a bully, quick and vicious. Debate is less about figuring out what you think is right than it is about proving someone else wrong. It doesnt teach valuesthere is no discussion of whats actually good or bad, only that such a dichotomy exists at all. High school debaters take fixed positions on issues they cant possibly fully comprehend, whose outcomes theyll never see. The judgelikely a parent who doesnt have the answers eitherhas a matter of minutes to decide whos right. Aggression wins. Volume wins. Confidence wins. Being right doesnt winif a high schooler knew how to solve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, wed surely live in a very different world. Of course, kids should grapple with our social issues. Theyre our only hope. But we dont have to teach them the other side is always wrong, and that truth is determined by persuasive elocution. We can teach them to hold opposing viewpoints in their head at once. We can teach them to be kind. We can teach them that they dont yet have all the answers. Its terrifying that we teach kids how to argue before we teach them how to empathize. In debates defense, it teaches students to follow the rulesat least, as long as the power resides with the judge. In the most iconic image from the January insurrection, Hawley holds his fist in the air, saluting his supporters. This photo is an undeniable salute to white supremacists. But I saw something else, too. In debate, a fist in the air means stopyoure out of time, and youll be disqualified if you continue. Hawley was, by all accounts, a successful debater. He stopped when he saw the fist. Now, he was using the fist to egg people on. In debate, if you dont follow the rules, you lose. In politics, you can break all the rules (laws), and still be elected President of the United States. Hawley would listen to a debate judge who could bar him from the final round, but not the will of 81 million Americans. Its terrifying that we teach kids how to argue before we teach them how to empathize. If a fist in the air reminds me of debate, a stop sign means something else to me, too. My freshman year of college, I was sexually assaulted by a boy on the Stanford Debate team. I said no, and he went forward. He was also a skilled debater; he respected the fist of a judge. When the judge had authority, his stop sign mattered. But mine did not. Boys who want to win know what rules they must follow. Those with power must be obeyed. Those without it can be ignored. I may have just made the January 2021 insurrection about me (thats sort of my thing), but I do think the fist is important. Stop counting votes. Stop respecting democracy. Not all former debaters turn into Josh Hawley, of course, and not all become sexual predators. Nor are white supremacy and sexual assault the only two ways to be bad, but they are significant both in their severity and in their frequency (case in point: Trump became President). Maybe theres hope, though. Maybe we can find these boys at their forks in the road and prod them in the right direction, or at the very least, away from power. As Lerner writes of Adams young, right-wing debate coach, one moment, Evanson struck him as a precocious young man, destined for the corridors of powera conservative judge, a senator, the president of the NRAand at other times Evanson seemed fated to drive sleeping debaters, sleeping drivelers, home from Junction City. Perhaps this is the crux of it, the turning point. Go one way, and you might be okay. Turn the other, and youre Josh Hawley. The Topeka School doesnt tell us, though, how its characters choose which way to go. The liberal Adam isnt seduced by bad politics, but continues to treat other people poorly; the violent, future-MAGA fan Darren is dealing with cognitive challenges that complicate his behavior; the right-wing Evanson shows up after college, with only brief hints of his past. Without answers from Lerner on how his boys turned into his men, we must look elsewhere. A former college classmate said of Hawley, Most freshmen are on a journey to discover who they are and what strengths they have to offer the world, but Josh seemed to have already completed that process by the time he arrived at Stanford. And thats just the danger. In Hawleys 2021 world, Donald Trump was President, and he was unwilling to consider another option. His signature on a friends eighth-grade yearbook chillingly reads Josh Hawley, President 2024. A 13-year-old wanting to be President isnt terriblea 13-year-old who has already become Josh Hawley is. 2024 is soon, but dont rush it, Joshyou have the next 40 years to destroy us. One genre of post-insurrection-Hawley-tweet that annoyed me most was the joke that hes proof idiots can go to the top-tier universities, too. Im not offended by the sentimentIm intimately aware that top universities are populated by people with a wide range of intellectual capacities. Rather, its the idea that Hawley is an idiot for having heinous political views. The word idiot is a dismissal (and one with an ableist history). Idiots arent scary. Idiots arent a threat. Hawley did not think Trump was the legal victor; he was making a bet on January 6th. And we should all be very afraid of whatever hes betting on. Taking the wrong side and doubling down may have been impressive when he did it in high school, but now, its simply terrifying. They know their power is fragile. They know theyre no better than anyone else, and they know we know. I hope the past four years have made us keener to identify toxic masculinity early. Lerner agrees, writing, If weve learned anything, its how dangerous that fragile masculinity can be. The fragility is what makes it so toxic. Thats why the neo-Nazis in Charlottesville chanted, Jews will not replace us, why Republicans fight against affirmative action, why men fear the #MeToo movement. They know their power is fragile. They know theyre no better than anyone else, and they know we know. The Topeka School points towards the roots of toxic masculinity, but it doesnt offer all the answers. Josh Hawley is one version of what Lerners boys could grow up to be, but there are others. Lerner uses a high school debater to show us that language is no longer used for communicationits used as a weapon. If were going to give it to children, we must teach them to wield them responsibly, teach them to think through their positions before attempting to win with them. If we dont, we may be looking at a whole lot more Josh Hawleys.