John K. Cox, who specializes in the history of the Balkans and has translated works of prominent Serbian authors like Danilo Kiš, discusses the growing political polarization in America under Trump. He reflects on the challenges faced by universities in both countries, including pressures on academic freedom, and the rise of grassroots movements demanding change. Through his unique perspective, Cox explores the connections between political unrest in Serbia and the U.S., offering a thoughtful analysis of the global struggle for democracy and justice.
You are a professor of history at the North Dakota State University currently teaching about the Holocaust, though you have other courses on the Ottoman Empire, Modern Russia, and Theories of Nationalism. Your research ranges across the history of Serbia, Yugoslavia, and Central Europe and the Balkans. With this breadth of knowledge and experience, how do you view the current moment in the United States?
My country is in its greatest, or second greatest (after the Civil War of 1861-1865) crisis ever. Democracy is breaking down extremely fast in the US of today. During Trump’s first administration, I used to say that his rule was “corrupt, chaotic, and cruel.” Little did I know how much further those characterizations could be taken. The phrase still applies, and now we are at unprecedented lows in the mainstreaming of far-right ideas, the breaking of guard rails and the erosion of norms and common decency; the drift in American foreign, trade, and aid policy; the moral bankruptness of the Republic Party; militarization and division; and the distressingly stubborn cluelessness on the part of almost all Democratic leaders on how to function as an effective opposition party and how to move beyond yesterday’s platitudes and addiction to big money and careerism to become a partner for regular Americans.
This time Trump has numerous think-tanks behind him, pushing a much broader take-over of US institutions and stoking a much more coherent set of ideological battles. By the way, one of the common misnomers I’d like to try to correct is one that you hear all the time among us Americans: “We’ve never been this divided!” Or: “Our society has never been this polarized!” I understand the need to vent in this way, and plenty of historians are out there, on the airwaves and in print, reminding us of times when we WERE this divided or polarized, or nearly so. But I believe something different, and the distinction is more than semantic: Actually, we have never been this POLITICIZED. And I don’t know how that goes away in the short-term.
Being a professor of modern European history means that I know what fascism is. I never thought things like these, whatever we call them, would happen in my country. People say I am wrong to blame Trump as much as I do; but I continue maintain that without his peculiarly corrosive, destructive role and the insane influence of the internet, our political dysfunction would be a lot different and a lot easier to deal with. I usually incline towards green or social democratic political positions, but saving this country’s political system, and giving our political culture a chance to mend in defense of our Constitution, depends on the Democrats and on some Republicans who have “Road to Damascus” experiences. My fellow citizens used to infuriate me by shutting down debate on America’s problems by falling back on the nonsensical line, “Oh yeah? Show me a country where it’s better!” Nowadays the reaction is much more sinister: “I’m still fine” or, even worse, “So what?”
How has Donald Trump’s second term affected the work of American universities? Has it made your own job, and that of your colleagues, more difficult? Is the pressure financial, or primarily ideological? Do you notice signs of self-censorship among faculty or students?
There’s never been a US president who affected universities more than Trump. I assume that many faculty are self-censoring, or at least we are all – and I include myself here – having a lot of debates with ourselves about what is necessary and what is, in these polarized times, likely to be effective in the classroom. I am relieved to say that my university, beyond changing the names of a few programs and offices, has not “capitulated” in advance to a broad, anticipated far-right agenda. And some faculty here are speaking out very courageously about DEI. A lot of our scientists on campus, and some social scientists and historians, have had their funding cut by the so-called DOGE. (It’s not actually a government department.) There will be debates about the anti-anti-semitism and visas for international graduate students soon enough, I think. A lot of bigger universities than mine have pro-actively complied with a lot of MAGA demands. It’s capitulation and it’s rife in the American culture right now, from the way most people accepted Trump’s moves, from the re-naming the Gulf of Mexico to sending National Guard and regular army soldiers to LA and DC to bullying and gutting all sorts of independent federal agencies.
In terms of attacks on university procedures, research, and even curriculum, demands are now being filtered through state legislatives in a frighteningly coordinated campaign. This started even before Trump won the most recent election. The pressure is exercised financially and through public relations and polemics; there’s also increasing state-level involvement in academic processes like hiring, tenure, and promotion. In elementary schools, junior highs, and high schools (what we call K-12), most pressure is related to curriculum and training of teachers. Most American universities are public and not private. There is also a lot of change underway in higher education here that is unrelated to MAGA, like declining enrollments and financial restructuring that started after 9/11.
Perennial doubts about the “usefulness” of the humanities and liberal arts and, most specifically the study of foreign languages, have proliferated greatly. Foreign languages are, unbelievably for this day and age, in absolute free-fall in the US. But let’s just say that the mood on all campuses has worsened considerably, if only because of radical uncertainty, since January 20.
Alongside your academic work, you are also an accomplished translator — from German, Slovenian, and even Sorbian into English. What is especially interesting for us is your translation of Serbian literature: you are the key figure behind six volumes of translation of Danilo Kiš into English, but also of works of Biljana Jovanović and Judita Šalgo. In 2021 you received the Serbian PEN award for best translator from Serbian. What first drew you to Yugoslavia and Serbia?
Athough I have lived in Munich, Ljubljana, Vienna, and Szeged (twice), I had never had the opportunity to live in Serbia until 2024. I first visited Serbia in 1986, when I was studying for a year in Hungary. I liked Subotica and Novi Sad immediately. Belgrade, which I love dearly now, seemed gritty and jangly, loud and tense, and I didn’t know any people there, and the old train station (may it rest in peace), Kalemegdan and the dvojka (may it rest in peace), and some self-serve restaurants were the only places this poor student hung out. The next year, though, I ended up going to graduate school in History at Indiana University-Bloomington and intended to write my dissertation on the Yugoslav architects of the nonaligned movement. The wars that began in 1991 made that impossible, so I moved to Slovenia and wrote a biography of Edvard Kardelj.
Given your knowledge of the region, how do you interpret the causes and meaning of the months-long protests in Serbia?
The recent news reports showing the violence against protestors in Serbian cities have shocked me deeply. I think it’s obvious that the current, very substantial protest movement originated with the Novi Sad train station disaster of November 2024. Had the government carried out a responsible and swift and public investigation of the collapse, and had there not been early attacks on peaceful demonstrators, the movement might not have taken on the dimensions it has now.
Nonetheless, public dissatisfaction is high (if polyvalent) in Serbia and the recent protest movements relating to Savamala and also the mass shootings of 2023 show us that the distrust in society goes far beyond dissatisfaction.
The courage of the students and their teachers and the many citizens who support them on marches and at demonstrations is heartening and admirable.
Can you see parallels between developments in Serbia and those in the United States? Do you believe a similar student movement could emerge in America?
We Americans aren’t marching much anymore. I doubt we will. We are not convinced of its effectiveness, or even of its necessity, as sad as that sounds. There’s no one group organizing demonstrations, or even using the internet or press to call for any coherent response to Trumpism. Everything is ad hoc, and the Democratic Party is asleep at the wheel. It is showing signs of life (Gavin Newson, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Bernie Sanders,), however, and some small but important local elections are starting to go against MAGA.
I have been to one protest since Trump got re-elected. We had 3,000 people come out in Fargo in June, and that provided a breath of fresh air given the endless bombardment of bad news that the Trump administration unleashes, but I felt the infinite fragmentation even of our local group of demonstrators (every second person was there for a different cause, it seemed) and I just kept remembering all the “pink-hat” protests in 2017: massive, well-organized movements, for and against a variety of causes, yes, but with a the sense of motivation and unity and hope that was real. Not anymore.
Back to Serbia: if elections happen, but the opposition isn’t unified, even or at least in Belgrade, how is it going to be any different from last time? I mean, greater election integrity might also enable a different outcome, but with the US and the EU sticking their heads in the sand…..how is that going to happen? I have no crystal ball and these observations and ideas are not original and, after all, my country is really screwed up right now. Some of your readers would say my country has always been screwed up. Anyway, I believe that Serbs deserve better. We all deserve governments that are fair and transparent, observe the rule of law, respect basic civil and human rights, and respond peacefully to the calls of their citizens for change.
Finally, a documentary film will soon be released about one of your projects: a list of twentieth-century books written in Serbo-Croatian that remain untranslated into English, which you propose as a kind of new literary canon. Could you tell us more about this initiative? When will audiences be able to see the film?
My Fulbright project in Belgrade in 2023 was called “33: Komšiluk knjiga.” No one person can create a canon especially not a foreigner, so let’s just say this is a project born of my love for Serbian literature, and my simultaneous disappointment with how we non-Serbs tend to approach its themes and contents. “Komšiluk” is based on my belief that publishers, translators, and academics in the Anglosphere are doing a poor job representing Serbian society and culture to world readers through the books we are choosing to foreground from Serbian literature. Because I have been reading and translating Serbian literature for a long time, and work with a number of other languages in my professional and personal life also, I am confident in my conclusion that writing in Serbian (including writing about Serbia or in Serbia), is of truly high quality and contains many perspectives about society, philosophy, and history that go beyond the familiar terrain of war and related phenomena that we usually focus on.
This project has been written up in Vreme and in Knjizevni magazin. At any rate, I put together, after careful reading and a lot of consultation with Serbian colleagues, a list of 33 books that I think should be translated into English as soon as possible.
An independent film producer from Belgrade, Petar Petrovic, heard through friends about the “Komšiluk” project. He and I got to know each other over a few months in 2023-24, and we decided to work together on this documentary, which is called “33 Books: A Farewell to Arms.” The film is an homage to reading; to great, neglected works of Serbian literature between 1891 and 1991; and to Serbs who make and love books. I sort of think of this movie as the pinnacle of my career.
Maybe it’s my swan song. Anyway, it will be 60-80 minutes long and I hope it sparks debate. Above all, I hope it makes people want to read. I don’t mean to sound pompous, but four of the books on the list have already made some of my friends go from head-scratching to book-buying to reading to feeling like they have really discovered something. That makes me very happy. Because that’s the goal.
