The First Chill of Self-Censorship

                                                         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.