Moscow on the Potomac

                                                         By David K. Shipler 

            Back in the bad old days of Soviet Communism, a dissident in Moscow was summoned for interrogation by the KGB, the secret police. As the agent ticked off a list of charges, the dissident rebutted each by citing one guarantee after another in the Soviet Constitution, which protected free speech, privacy, and other rights. “Please,” the KGB agent interrupted. “We’re having a serious conversation.”

            I have treasured that story since I heard it decades ago. It dramatized the difference between the Soviet and American systems, between a constitution of fictional rights and one of actual rights. When an American political scientist, Robert Kelley, taught for a semester at Moscow State University, he used to tell his students that if the United States had a state religion, it would be constitutional democracy.

            No more.

            President Trump and his zealous aides do not blatantly mock the Constitution in words, but they do so in actions. They are ignoring some of its central principles, particularly the separation of powers, defying both the legislative and judicial branches. And while I’m always diffident about drawing parallels since no analogy is perfect, I am feeling an uneasy sense of familiarity as Washington spirals down into a darker and darker place. Trump and his allies—plus Americans who are capitulating in their businesses, politics, and universities—would have fit comfortably in Moscow, where they would have survived and prospered.

            The essence of the American idea is the din of ideas, exactly what Soviet leaders found distasteful, and what American leaders are now trying to muffle. There was a way of thinking in the Soviet Union, which continues today in Vladimir Putin’s Russia, that eschewed pluralism and imposed conformity. Only a single truth was tolerated. Disagreements and debates were considered antithetical to the historical progress that Communist theory envisioned. Political irreverence might be heard quietly around the kitchen table, but elsewhere it was punished.

            That compulsion to dictate obedience was more about holding power than upholding Marxism. In authoritarian structures, the high perch can seem so precarious that legitimate disputes below look dangerously anarchic. Therefore, political loyalty is a prerequisite for key positions, which is Trump’s demand and erodes expertise. An American scientist who grew up in Moscow told me recently that Trump’s assault on academia reminded him of the Soviet Union in the 1970s, when “scientists were replaced by political appointees, which led to Chernobyl among other disasters.”  

Even such loyalty can be empty. Being accepted into Communist Party membership was more careerist than communist; without that party card, you couldn’t be an editor, history professor, factory manager, hospital director, and the like. As a result, cynicism prevailed. “Nobody believes in anything,” a 17-year-old girl told me in 1978. She was right. Soviet ideology had become a hollowed-out shell that could not keep the country from disintegrating in 1991.

            Russia’s autocracy soon returned, though; its long authoritarian history prevailed. The United States is only at the beginning of this chapter, which marks either an episode or a turning point, depending on how devoted to democracy Americans prove to be. So far, it doesn’t look good. In merely weeks since Trump’s inauguration, committed ideologues with dogmatic views  have penetrated most government agencies, operating under a personality cult unique in the American experience. Like most dictators, Trump covers his thin skin with toughness. He has forged an amalgam of lust for personal authority, revenge toward his opponents, white supremacy, and a totalitarian mindset that seeks a much broader remaking of America than is conventionally understood.

What is important to grasp—something the mainstream press has mostly missed—is that the belief system reaches far beyond government spending cuts. It seeks to saturate the entire society with a set of worldviews, as outlined in the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025. Harnessing the investigatory power and funding leverage of multiple agencies, the Trumpists are using government to dictate behavior and speech to universities, businesses, and law firms, and are gearing up to pressure news organizations, social media, secondary schools, and the arts.

All that was easier for Soviet officials, because the government owned every institution and means of production—every college and school, every newspaper and broadcaster, every store and restaurant and mine and factory. The Kremlin could turn off citizens’ phones, deny them travel abroad, fire them from jobs, and ultimately imprison them.

American society is not as easily tamed unless Americans allow it. But the goals are similar, and the US government turns out to have more intrusive power than many citizens realized over universities dependent on federal research grants, theaters reliant on arts funding, law firms depending on security clearances, businesses surviving on government contracts, hospitals kept afloat by Medicaid.

Trump’s zealots, who had four years out of office to prepare for this opportunity, are pulling those levers effectively, curtailing funds in one area to get changes in another. They threaten funds for learning-disabled children in secondary schools to force anti-historical teaching on race. They cut off medical research funds to force universities to suppress freedom of speech and to abandon programs that combat anti-minority discrimination. They ominously demand detailed data on minority and LGBTQ+ hiring at law firms. They sift digital files for the use of certain words by federal employees, contractors, and immigrants, just as certain terms are avoided by Afghans under the Taliban.

These and many other Trump actions are such obvious violations of the Constitution’s various protections that multiple federal judges, nominated by both Republican and Democratic presidents, have peppered the administration with adverse rulings. There have been blatant violations of the Article I empowerment of Congress, the First Amendment’s protection of free speech, the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendment’s requirement for due process, and the Sixth Amendment’s right to counsel. None of the cases have yet reached the Supreme Court for substantive judgment.

Undermining an independent judiciary is a key step in dismantling a democracy, as seen in Hungary, Venezuela, and elsewhere. And Trump seems intent on doing that. He and his officials have railed against judges, called for their impeachment, and ignored most of their rulings.

We are learning how little muscle the courts have to enforce their decisions. In the Soviet Union, judicial powerlessness was sardonically called “telephone justice,” meaning that the judge would call the local Communist Party secretary for instructions in key cases.

In the US, the tactic is outright disobedience. That might produce a different form of acquiescence, one that evades confrontation with an executive branch that seems intent on defiance. As in most power relationships, the American rule of law has depended on an unwritten compact of willing acceptance of judicial authority between the courts on the one hand, and citizens and officials on the other. That voluntary relationship is being shredded by Trump and his apparatchiks.

Acquiescing to the new authoritarian norms, higher courts could rule on narrow grounds: that those who brought the suits don’t have standing, or that the administration based its action on a legal basis different from the one the lower judge considered. Or, in certain areas, right-wing justices might give Trump victories, large and small, either because they agree to a so-called “unitary executive” with extensive authority or simply because they want their ruling obeyed.

Outside the myriad lawsuits, Americans have not shown much courage so far. Currying favor has emerged as a tactic in the private sector. For example, Columbia University, attempting to get Trump to restore $400 million in funds suspended because of antisemitism and anti-Israel protests, has agreed—at least on paper—to regulate demonstrations, combat antisemitism more firmly, enlarge the campus police force with the power of arrest, scrutinize and derecognize student groups for unspecified behavior, and increase the “intellectual diversity” of the faculty—which probably means hiring more conservatives.

Some lawyers have also caved. Under authoritarian regimes, it’s hard to find lawyers willing to defend the victims, and so Trump is intimidating firms that represent his opponents or sue the government. He has issued a memorandum to the departments of Justice and Homeland Security to “seek sanctions against attorneys and law firms who engage in frivolous, unreasonable and vexatious litigation against the United States.” He has removed security clearances and access to federal buildings from some firms, which have lost important clients as a result. One of them, Paul, Weiss, agreed to do $40 million worth of pro bono work to support Trump’s agenda.

            Giving in reinforces autocracy. Without broad resistance, the day could come when an American citizen complains to an official about a violation of the Constitution, and the answer will be: “Please, we’re having a serious conversation.”