By David K. Shipler
A
crucial feature of the Soviet Union’s dictatorship was its enforcement by
peers. Your co-workers, your schoolmates, the fellow members of your local
Communist Party committee or Komsomol (Communist youth organization) were
primed to call you to account if you deviated from the norm. If you went to
church regularly, your Komsomol committee might hold a meeting to denounce you.
If you went farther and made “anti-Soviet” statements—criticizing government
policy or advocating democratic reforms—your peers in Komsomol might be
assembled for a vote to expel you, which would handicap your future job
prospects. In the post-Stalin era, imprisonment was usually reserved for the
most stubbornly outspoken; less dramatic disobedience could be curtailed by
lesser means.
It was not an airtight system. It aspired to
totalitarianism but fell short. It contained eddies of quiet noncompliance,
which allowed small pools of independent thinking. But orthodoxy had power, wielded
both vertically from the top down, and also horizontally in a milieu of
conformity. As a result, most Soviet citizens acquiesced politically and never
bumped up against the hard limits of dissent. Newspaper editors, for example,
rarely had to be confronted by the censors; writers and their bosses
internalized the restrictions, even endorsed them, and so knew the comfortable scope
of the permissible.
That is
approximately what the Republican Party appears to strive for in 2021, not only
in the party organization itself but in the broader society. It is a new
American Dream, aspiring to a comprehensive, unitary way of thinking about
history, culture, law, politics, science, religion, and race. The odd thing is
that it is pursued in the guise of individualism, touting the preeminence of
personal free choice, while in fact it is driven by just the opposite—the thrust
of group-think.
This horizontal enforcement is a hallmark of the emerging Republican strategy. A catechism of professed beliefs is monitored for irreverence, and the punishment is akin to excommunication. Absolutism is required: adore Donald Trump, reject the 2020 election as stolen, dismiss the January 6 insurrection as insignificant, refuse to investigate it.
