American Fear

 

By David K. Shipler 

There is nothing sadder than fear.

                                     --Isabel Allende 

     A new divide is plaguing America: sharp disagreements over how to resist the authoritarian juggernaut in Washington. Speak and fight forcefully? Thread your way between principle and pragmatism? Capitulate to the rising autocracy? Or keep your head down to present less of a target?

            All those tactics are being used by a citizenry devoid of the skills needed to keep alive a dying democracy. By and large, Americans don’t see what’s coming. Only a few have experienced dictatorships (abroad) and fewer still have lived under governments with totalitarian aspirations.

In modern America, the native-born have not been seized in the streets for their political views and imprisoned by masked agents without recourse. University and school curricula have not been dictated by Washington. Science, art, and literature have not been censored. Government officials tasked with impartiality have not been routinely screened for political loyalty to a lone leader. A central ideology has not been dispensed beyond government into civil society at large, enforced by existential threats to private organizations that do not comply.

The country has enjoyed a happy, complacent spirit of assumptions about the permanence of the constitutional system. That is now being swept away by the Trump maelstrom, its place taken by an unfamiliar fear—cleverly implanted by the president and his apparatchiks.

What opposition has developed has been fragmented and too far from unanimous to rescue a failing democracy that has already descended into a semi-dictatorship. The United States is now governed largely by the whims of a single man. His daily impulses disrupt global markets, end vital research, halt life-giving aid to children, turn workers jobless, impair education, promote white supremacy, and still dissenting voices.

He has cowed huge law firms, rich corporations, major foundations, news organizations, and prominent universities—some of each—by imposing financial fear in various forms. A few imagine that they can buy the favor of the bully. They must have lived a charmed life of never having encountered a bully, a mafia boss, a dictator.

The charmed life of the United States has ended.

Yet what opposition exists has been disjointed. No mass coalition of resistance has taken shape across the country’s vast landscape of class, profession, religion, ethnicity, and party. Most dissent has been parochial: university presidents defending universities, law firms defending lawyers, immigrant rights groups defending immigrants, news media defending news gathering, business defending trade. They need to join to defend one another, and the country.

As Kamala Harris noted in her first major speech since losing last year’s presidential election, Trump and his enablers think “if they can make some people afraid, it will have a chilling effect on others. But what they have overlooked is that fear is not the only thing that’s contagious. Courage is contagious.”

Courage is also dangerous—acutely dangerous to the dictator, and obviously dangerous to the outspoken. That is why very few people in autocracies hold the flame of freedom. The risks are high. And they are getting higher in the United States.

As a triumvirate of scholars who have written on dictatorships noted yesterday, the “simple metric” testing whether a country has crossed into authoritarianism is “the cost of opposing the government. . .  When citizens must think twice about criticizing or opposing the government because they could credibly face government retribution, they no longer live in a full democracy. By that measure, America has crossed the line into competitive authoritarianism.” They define competitive authoritarianism as a system where “parties compete in elections but the systematic abuse of an incumbent’s power tilts the playing field against the opposition,” as in Hungary, India, Serbia, and Turkey.

The United States has long been pockmarked with injustices, and its history is stained with chapters of shame. Perhaps it is reassuring to look through the legacy of the wrongs that have been acknowledged and overcome: the slaughter of Native Americans and their culture, the enslavement of African Blacks, the Civil War, the hateful treatment of immigrants, the political prosecutions of labor leaders and antiwar activists, the internment of Japanese-Americans, the witch-hunts of McCarthyism, the legal segregation of the races, and on.

The Trump chapter looks different. It is structural, expanding executive power in the service of a totalist ideological remaking of the society. It has the hallmarks of an aspiring totalitarianism, absent the mass political arrests of citizens, so far. Even some who fear the Trumpists’ assault speak of a phase that will end, a pendulum that will swing back, a cycle that will turn. Republicans will finally object. Business will finally bring pressure. Voters will turn the House to the Democrats next year.

But that hopeful reasoning lies wholly within a constitutional framework that Trumpists evade, which makes this an asymmetrical struggle. Those who resist operate within a set of laws, rules, mores, and values that—we have discovered—rely largely on voluntary compliance and trust, the way you trust drivers to stick to the right and stop at red lights, even when cops aren’t around.

But Trumpists are working outside the constitutional framework, where no rules apply, not even judges’ commands. The only institution mounting consistent opposition to the assaults has been the judiciary—not the legislature—and Trump has set an early pattern of ignoring or weaseling around court orders. When the last refuge of justice is overrun, fear will rule.

History is still in the hands of the people, for a time. Whether this enters American history as a passing phase or a fundamental turning point will depend on whether Americans mobilize to make courage contagious. “In a free society,” said Abraham Joshua Heschel during the civil rights movement, “some are guilty, but all are responsible.”