By David K. Shipler
The
United States desperately needs a Lewis Carroll to depict the satirical farce
of our Wonderland. We have fallen into an alternative universe that cannot be
captured by any responsible news reporter scrupulous about facts or careful
nonfiction author tethered to footnotes. Only an imaginative talent for the bizarre
can give us our current equivalents of the Hatter of the Mad Tea Party, the
disappearing Cheshire Cat, the tyrannical Queen of Hearts with her dictum, “Off
with his head!” Not to mention the Jabberwocky’s “Twas brillig, and the slithy
toves, did gyre and gimble in the wabe.” He could be wearing a MAGA hat. Oh,
for a Lewis Carroll!
The
latest scene would be President Trump’s fictional southern border, a place of
dystopian invasion by swarthy, half-bestial creatures pouring in with drugs and
criminal intent, waved on by gleeful Democrats jumping up and down with joy
unrestrained. But fear not! The Great Wall of Trump hermetically seals the dark
evil from the pure white good, and all is calmly virtuous inside. And by the
way, when the wall is not actually built, the Trumpists merely have to say that
it is being constructed, and then pretend that it magically stands even where nobody
can see it. And all who hear the Jabberwocky’s enticing poetry dream peacefully
between their pure white sheets.
Exaggerated
fantasies of fictitious threats are not unheard of in American history. Driven
by fears of French subversion, the Alien and Sedition Acts under President John
Adams criminalized criticism of the government and subjected foreigners to
arrest and deportation without cause or due process. President Woodrow Wilson
led a campaign of paranoia, portraying opponents of entry into World War I as
disloyal and deserving “a firm hand of repression.” Under him, the 1917
Espionage Act facilitated the prosecution of 2,000 socialists, anarchists,
other political dissidents and labor union leaders. The 1918 Sedition Act set
criminal penalties for “any disloyal, profane, scurrilous, or abusive language
about” the American form of government, the Constitution, the flag, the military,
or its uniforms. Imaginary dangers from Japanese-Americans during World War II
landed them in very real internment camps. And the McCarthy era of nonsensical
anxiety about communist infiltration generated career-busting witch hunts.
Against
that background, Trump’s manipulation of his national-emergency power to move a
few billion dollars around looks like a moderate test of the constitutional
system’s checks and balances, but hardly the devastating wrecking ball that
opponents have described. It is unwise, opportunistic, and contemptuous of the
ingenious separation-of-powers mechanism that the Framers invented. If adopted as
standard practice, it could also be used by future, liberal presidents to
declare national emergencies in health care, climate change, and gun violence,
as the few Republicans willing to stand up from their party’s supine position
have warned.
