By David K. Shipler
The decisions by the rich men who own the Los Angeles
Times and the Washington Post to
kill their editorial boards’ endorsements of Kamala Harris are reminders of
how an authoritarian culture works. It has official censors, of course, but the
system’s everyday mechanism doesn’t always rely on edicts from on high. It can operate
automatically as private citizens police themselves and their peers, avoiding risk
and informing on those who deviate or dissent.
That is
how the surveillance state of the Soviet Union functioned. Editors and writers
knew instinctively what content was permitted in their newspapers and broadcasts;
they were Communist Party members themselves, so official censorship was internalized,
embedded in their professional judgments. There wasn’t much the censors needed
to delete.
In
schools and workplaces, fellow students and colleagues were on guard against
political irreverence and would report it. Pressure and punishment were often
exacted there, at that level by those institutions. The same is happening today
in Russia, which has been dragged backward by Vladimir Putin. In other words,
the authoritarian structure presses people horizontally as well as vertically,
not only from the top down but also from within the lowly communities where
individuals live their lives.
Oh, please,
some of you will say. The US is not Russia. We have a passionate tradition of
free debate, suspicion of government, and fervent individualism. “It Can’t
Happen Here,” you might insist, the ironic title of Sinclair Lewis’s 1935 novel
about a fascist who rises to power in America—and who holds a huge rally in
Madison Square Garden, by the way, its adoring crowd described with prescience by
Lewis decades before Donald Trump’s ugly rally there this week.
Trump is trying to seed the ground
for that dynamic of self-policing. He has illuminated the most significant
divide in America, which is between those who see it coming and those who do
not. You can call it the divide between the left and the right, or between
Democrats and Republicans, or between Blacks and whites, or women and men, or
college and high-school graduates. Those lines exist. But more fundamentally,
it is a divide between those who understand how pluralistic democracy can be undermined
along an insidious path toward autocracy, and those who do not. Apparently, Americans
don’t study this. Our schools have failed miserably.
Trump is not coy about the visceral
aggressions that fuel his agenda. He threatens and curses like a Mafia boss, openly
admires foreign dictators, uses the Stalinist term “enemies of the people” to
describe news organizations, and says broadcasters who fact-check him should
lose their licenses. As demonstrated by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos and biotech investor
Patrick Soon-Shiong, who own the Washington Post and Los Angeles
Times respectively, there is plenty of cowardice in America beyond the ranks
of Republicans who simultaneously detest and fear Trump. Bezos has federal
contracts, and Soon-Shiong’s interests could be subject to federal regulation. They
obviously assume that Trump would abuse his office to take revenge on them, and
so they shrink from endorsing his opponent. The chill begins.
In
addition, Trump’s demonization of Democrats as “enemies from within” would
encourage grassroots vigilantism, which is already on the rise, and probably
lead right-wing prosecutors to bring charges, as Trump has advocated, spreading
fear and corroding the pluralism of American politics.
His draconian pledge to mobilize
the military and police to deport some 12 million undocumented immigrants would
also mobilize ordinary citizens to report on people with “foreign” names and
swarthy skin, exposing American citizens and legal immigrants to unjustified document
checks and roundups. A spasm of racial profiling and harassment would sweep the
country, activated in large measure by hateful and suspicious citizens with “American”
names and white skin.
We saw
a preview against Muslims after 9/11 under the George W. Bush administration. Reports
to the FBI from the public were often motivated by personal vendettas, random
encounters, and domestic disputes, according to FBI agents I interviewed at the
time. One agent told me his colleagues felt guilty and embarrassed checking out
every tip, as they were ordered to do by the White House. The agent in charge
of the Washington, DC office acknowledged to me that the bureau’s resources to
fight real crime were being dangerously diluted. Multiply those effects manyfold
under Trump’s mass deportation scheme.
Then,
too, Trump and the extreme right Heritage Foundation are preparing to purge the
federal government of specialists who don’t fall in line politically, another
feature of authoritarian systems from Hungary, Venezuela, and other countries
that have voted democratically to vote down democracy.
It
might be asking too much for folks to risk their jobs and their comfort, much
less their liberty, to stand up for their right to speak and act in violation
of whatever limits the president and his collaborators set. Reporters like me,
who have covered dissidents in dictatorships, ask ourselves whether we would
have such courage of defiance. If we’re honest, we don’t know.
But what
Americans have learned about themselves is not encouraging. That about half the
population is not alarmed by Trump’s authoritarian playbook is itself a cause
for alarm, for you have to be intensely alert to protect democratic liberty. That
his crowds are excited into ecstasies of growly cheers by his rants of
vilification against his Democratic opponents suggests a broad acceptance of
political oppression. The Trump phenomenon has exposed an American society not
very different from most other countries.
Trump got one of the loudest cheers at Madison Square Garden by proposing a bill with a one-year prison sentence for burning an American flag. Evidently, neither he nor his supporters knew that the Supreme Court, in the 1989 case Texas v. Johnson, found a prohibition of flag burning unconstitutional, violating the First Amendment’s guarantee of free speech. It was the latest in a long line of cases protecting symbolic expression. Trump might get his way, though: That Court’s majority was only five to four. The current Court is much farther to the right.
Burning a flag surely disgusts most Americans,
and it’s paradoxical to destroy the emblem of the freedom that permits the
emblem’s destruction. And yet, to criminalize the act is to destroy the freedom
itself.
What the zealous American right does not get
is this: Destroying your opponents’ freedom might feel good until the protections
of liberty that you’ve torn down fail to protect you when your opponents are in
power, until the machinery of oppression you’ve constructed against them is turned against you. Intolerant impulses cross
party lines. So far, while the left has canceled professors and others for
their offensive speech, inducing pockets of self-censorship, Democrats have no governmental agenda of authoritarianism.
Not in 2024.
