The Circular Spectrum

By David K. Shipler

“It reminds me of the Soviet Union.”

--Philip B. Duffy, president of the Woods Hole Research Center, on the Trump Administration’s politicization of climate science.

                The spectrum of political and social views is usually pictured as a straight line running from left to right. But the range of positions on some matters might better be rendered as a circle, with the line bent around until the two extreme ends are joined in common excess.

                Take the rejection of science, for example. On the right are the deniers of all the careful and extensive research documenting the human contributions to global warming. On the left are the deniers of all the careful and extensive research into the human immune system’s activation by means of vaccines. They are not identical in their suspicion of elites in the scientific community, but they are close enough to be put together at the bottom of that circle.

                And anti-Semitism. Typically seen on the extreme right among neo-Nazis and other white supremacists, ugly manifestations have also surfaced on the left. In the US, some college students have mixed anti-Semitic stereotypes into their criticisms of Israel, as has Democratic Congresswoman Ihlan Omar. Britain’s Labour Party is under investigation for anti-Semitism by the UK Equality and Human Rights Commission. Seven members of Parliament quit Labour in February in protest over its leadership’s failure to deal sufficiently with anti-Semitism as well as Brexit.

                Left-right similarities can be seen on some college campuses that have been stages for intolerant assaults in both directions. Shortly after 9/11, conservative students and alumni monitored and reported liberal professors for views expressed in and out of class, and tried to get some fired. More recently, liberal and minority students have shouted down conservative and racist speakers, or have pressed administrators to disinvite them. These attempts to silence expression are less prevalent than they appear from the news coverage they receive, but they have special gravity at institutions supposedly devoted to free intellectual inquiry. In places of higher learning, especially, a viewpoint considered offensive is best confronted with solid research, sound argument, and precise rebuttal.

For years, the conservative radio host Rush Limbaugh has been lambasting liberals as terrible people, unworthy of dignity or respect. We’ve witnessed the distaste on TV at Trump rallies, where dissenters have been roughed up as Trump cheers on the attackers. It would be wrong to see a false equivalency, because Democratic leaders have not encouraged liberals to use violence, far from it. But many on the left use epithets, branding Trump supporters as thuggish, narrow-minded, and unworthy of respect—“deplorables,” in Hillary Clinton’s term.

So toxic are current political differences that conversation across the lines are practically impossible, especially in workplaces and families. If the differences do surface, they can be painful, as they were for Susan P., an IT specialist at a Massachusetts company. When the facilitator of a management seminar asked all those who had voted for Trump to stand, Susan was the only employee who rose to her feet. A gasp swept across the room. And then, for months, four of her coworkers refused to speak to her, she said. Only eventually, when they needed her technical help, did they finally break their silence.

She and other Trump supporters in the liberal milieu of Massachusetts keep a low profile, she explained, connecting almost secretly by detecting one other’s politics through oblique remarks and guarded hints. Suppression of dialogue covers a large part of the circular spectrum.

It’s obvious, too, that dictatorship and its proponents come in both leftwing and rightwing varieties, sometimes in the same country over time. Under communism, Hungary was a leftwing autocracy that muzzled the press, coopted the judiciary, and operated an oppressive system. Hungary under Viktor Orban is now a rightwing autocracy that muzzles the press, undermines the independent judiciary, and operates an increasingly oppressive system. Venezuela’s Nicolas Maduro and the Philippines’ Rodrigo Duterte are more alike than different, notwithstanding their location at the linear spectrum’s remote left and right, respectively.

Although Trump denounces Maduro and has tried to overthrow him, the president’s affinity for an array of strongmen spreads far and wide in the spectrum. He admires (perhaps envies) the likes of Duterte, Orban, Vladimir Putin, Kim Jong-un, Abdel Fattah al-Sisi of Egypt, and others who would not be clustered on a line but certainly should be at the point on a circle where extremes connect.

Some of Trump’s language is eerily familiar to anyone familiar with Soviet history. Stalin had upstanding citizens condemned to imprisonment or execution as “enemies of the people.” No free press existed under communism; facts and truth were endangered species. In the rightwing Trump administration, facts and truth are endangered species, and the free press is condemned by Trump as the “enemy of the people,” while still protected by the bulwark of the First Amendment.

Other peculiar shadows of Soviet-style autocracy have flickered across the landscapes of conservative American administrations. Rightwing American ideologues (libertarians excepted) and leftwing Soviet ideologues both believed fervently in expansive executive power against weak legislative branches. Under President George W. Bush, Arabic speakers in the US Army were tainted by suspicions of disloyalty, just as German speakers were in the Soviet Red Army. [See The Rights of the People, pp. 382-84.] The Bush Justice Department questioned prospective employees about their political attitudes to be sure they weren’t Democrats, as Soviet authorities used to demand communist orthodoxy from candidates being screened for government positions.

                Sycophants who are prepared to abandon principles are readily available at both extremes. You can read about Stalin’s skill in cultivating a quivering mass of subordinates anxious to please, for fear of their lives. President Trump, even without the gulag or the firing squad as penalties, has succeeded in promoting anxiety among trembling political appointees eager to kneel before his narcissistic whims. To wit, the recent impulse by White House operatives and mid-level Navy officers to cover, block, or move the destroyer John S. McCain so the president, on his visit to Japan, wouldn’t see or be photographed near the ship that bears the name of the late senator (and his father and grandfather) whom Trump continues to despise. Crew members who wore their ship’s name on their uniforms were blocked from attending Trump’s Memorial Day speech.

American pluralism prevents the imperious presidency from corrupting the entire society. Attitudes and impulses of those in power matter, however, even as they are restrained by the constitutional system. So, the resemblance between fawning over Trump and deferring to autocrats is a matter of degree, but that doesn’t make them as different as Americans would like to think.

Collaboration is a complicated chemical reaction of strength at the top and weakness below; the United States, it seems, is not entirely resistant. The point was demonstrated in Trump’s televised cabinet meetings of agency heads who decorated him with effusive praise as if they were playing in politburo-type pageants of fearful flattery. Americans who care have observed that communist apparatchiks and official Trumpist apologists stand together at the bottom of that circular spectrum.

Christopher Wren, with whom I shared the Moscow Bureau of The New York Times, used to say that doctrinaire Soviet officials reminded him of the Southern segregationist leaders he covered during the civil rights movement: dogmatic, authoritarian, brutal, intolerant of any view besides their own. No analogy is perfect, but that one sure came close.