Phase Four: The Police State

 

By David K. Shipler 

            America’s march toward autocracy is now trying out the tools of a possible police state. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has emerged as a national force aimed not merely at deporting undocumented immigrants but at surveilling Americans and violently suppressing constitutionally protected dissent. The effect—and the evident purpose—is to sow widespread fear.

The agents, masked and camouflaged in combat gear, are accountable to nobody except the strongman at the top, Donald Trump. His key aide, deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller, reassured them: "To all ICE officers: You have federal immunity in the conduct of your duties.” As these “law enforcement” officers violate the law with impunity, they are taking the country into phase four of its rising authoritarianism: the embryonic stage of a system whose brute force overcomes the rule of law and the liberties of the citizens.

The First, Fourth, Fifth, and Tenth Amendments in the Constitution’s Bill of Rights are being shredded by militarized policing and the beatings and murders of peaceful demonstrators (First Amendment); the warrantless break-ins and searches of homes (Fourth Amendment); the seizures of pedestrians and drivers without probable cause or due process (Fourth and Fifth Amendments), and the bulldozing of states’ rights (Tenth Amendment). All that is being done in service to President Trump’s semi-dictatorial powers.

How far it will go is an open question. The murders of two American citizens during Minneapolis protests have sparked condemnation from much of the population, even from a few Republicans who have belatedly found their spines. Yet the Trumpists’ longterm design looks clear enough: the recruitment and creation of a centralized apparatus above local control.

This is in the playbook of every dictatorship: Iran’s Revolutionary Guard, the Soviet Union’s KGB, Venezuela’s Bolivarian National Guard. In the US, the Trump government’s totalitarian aspirations to spread a radical right ideology into broad areas of America’s civil society require enforcement mechanisms that stand outside the normal structure of constitutional democracy. They include aggressive policing, political prosecutions, a cowed and self-censored press, physical threats, selective taxation, enticements to bribe under the guise of “donations,” and financial punishment.

An element of secrecy usually accompanies police-state practices, with anonymous agents out of uniform. Such is the case with federal agents, both in ICE and Customs and Border Protection. Although they operate openly, they hide their faces, display no badges or nametags, and are barely distinguishable from gang members. A photograph of the American nurse, Alex Pretti, being shot in the back while on his knees in Minneapolis could easily be mistaken for an execution by Hamas in the streets of Gaza.

Three Questions for an ICE Agent

 

By David K. Shipler 

            In the unlikely event that I ever have a chance for a conversation with an agent after he has dragged a half-dressed middle-aged citizen from his own house, wrenched a husband from his weeping wife and children, taken a five-year-old boy into custody, or shot into the innocent face of a mother of three, here is what I would ask: 

1.      Do you realize that the person’s face will haunt you for the rest of your life? (A former NKVD secret police agent under Stalin, writing in a letter to the Soviet magazine Ogonyok decades later, described his torment: “Now the people in the cases I investigated visit me at night, and instead of fear in their eyes I see that they despise me. How can I tell these people I tortured, how can I explain that my damned life was a tragedy, too?”)

2.      When your children and grandchildren ask what you were doing during the assault on America’s democracy, how will you answer? (Many young Germans, coming of age after World War II, questioned their elders closely about what they had done during the Nazi era; searing conversations often followed.)

3.      What did your parents do to you? (A line from a Seinfeld episode.)

Mobilizing the Conscience of America

 

By David K. Shipler 

            My earliest political memory is watching television film of Southern segregationists screaming epithets at Black children as they integrated schools in the 1950s, and police attacking peaceful civil rights demonstrators with truncheons, dogs, and fire hoses. I remember not only my own revulsion but my grandmother’s. 

            She had been raised in rural Maryland and had her streak of racial prejudice. But as she sat upright in her straight-backed chair, she seethed with indignation at the crude inhumanity unfolding on the screen. Her disgust became my first lesson in the power of decency to honor nonviolence against violence, and to generate reform.

The scenes eventually mobilized the conscience of much of white America. A question is whether it can happen again.

This year’s holiday marking the birthday of the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., the architect of nonviolence in the Civil Rights Movement, is a fitting moment to wonder if the furious episodes of masked ICE agents shooting and brutalizing protesting Americans can activate—broadly enough—whatever conscience has not been snuffed out by President Trump and his collaborators.

 We saw a moral uprising after a long history of police killings of unarmed Blacks culminated in the videoed 2020 suffocation of George Floyd in Minneapolis. That and other murders propelled demonstrations across the country by millions of Americans—most of them white, significantly. And since Trump’s inauguration a year ago, citizens not vulnerable to deportation have rallied against the inhumane practices by ICE agents, especially in Minneapolis, once again the center of conflict after an agent wantonly shot and killed Renee Good, a US citizen and a mother of three; she posed no threat, videos show, contrary to slanderous assertions by Trump and his subordinates.

In a current CBS poll, 61 percent of those surveyed said that ICE was being “too tough,” up from 56 percent in November. Among independents, 65 percent thought that protesters were either doing things “about right” (33 percent) or had not gone far enough (32 percent). The remaining 35 percent blamed demonstrators for going “too far.” As one might expect, Republicans and Democrats were heavily skewed in opposite directions, but overall, 52 percent said that ICE was making their communities “less safe.”

The numbers appear to show a gathering storm of resentment. But how that might translate into the kind of moral mobilization that produced the civil rights laws is a question. The parallels with today are far from precise.

Civil rights demonstrators were trained in the discipline of nonviolence, never fighting back when attacked as they marched peacefully, illegally rode segregated buses, helped Blacks register to vote, or sat in at segregated lunch counters. King, a disciple of Mahatma Gandhi, called this the “love ethic.” He and others bet correctly that the Southern power structure, through white thugs and cops, would play its role in the pageant, revealing a cruelty that did, in the end, galvanize onlookers across the country.

Anti-ICE protesters have no such coherent training and no resonant voice of leadership, and while most are peaceful, clashes with agents draw the most vivid videos. Those taken and doctored by right-wing activists circulate on social media, which did not exist sixty years ago, and influence policy-making in the White House, which had not been captured back then by an authoritarian ideology of white supremacy.

Before the internet and cable news, television was dominated by the three broadcast networks, ABC, CBS, and NBC, which generally kept opinion out of their reporting. Today’s opinionated news coverage, particularly on the right, has distorted much of the public’s perceptions of reality. A side effect has been the erosion of public trust in news organizations that strive for fairness and accuracy, including The New York Times, The Washington Post, and National Public Radio. Opinion, it seems, is alluring enough to attract people who want their views upheld—confirmation bias, it’s called.

Right-wing “news” outlets have unquestioningly conveyed Trump’s effort to discredit protesters as being paid by nefarious domestic enemies, a smear from the top. In the fifties and sixties, that rhetoric came largely from the bottom as local and state officials dismissed civil rights demonstrators as “outsider agitators.”

The dynamic today has been inverted, with Washington the enemy of peaceful protest and some state and local governments defending that right, which is enshrined in the First Amendment.

In 1957, for example, after Arkansas Governor Orval Faubus called out the state national guard to prevent nine Black students from entering Little Rock’s Central High School, President Dwight D. Eisenhower acted. He pressed Faubus to use the guard to assure peaceful integration, as the Supreme Court had ordered in Brown v. Board of Education three years earlier. But when Faubus withdrew the guard instead and rioting erupted, Eisenhower federalized the guard and sent 101^st Airborne troops to restore order and protect the students.

Today, it is the federal government that is trying to crush demonstrators and the state and local governments in Minnesota that are trying to protect them. It is the White House that is suppressing an investigation into the Minneapolis shooting and the state that wants to hold the agent accountable.

The inversion of righteousness is telling. America is a different country now. The threshold at which outrage is triggered has risen very high as Trump and company have numbed us to violations of ethics, laws, social norms, democratic processes, racial respect, and other features of a pluralistic and orderly culture. He has created, in ICE, a national, paramilitary force unlike anything seen before in the United States, unaccountable to the law or to the norms of decency.

Seared in my memory is the photograph, from Little Rock, of a white girl’s face twisted in hatred as she screamed at a Black girl seeking to go to Central High. The country came to see itself in this mirror.

My grandmother did not become a flaming liberal, but she loved Eisenhower, and I think his actions affected her views on race. She did not object on principle when my mother and I went to the 1963 March on Washington, where King declared, “I have a dream.” She was worried for us, because violence was ridiculously predicted by J. Edgar Hoover, the FBI director. But in the end, the crowd was a sweep of massive friendliness and uplifting harmony, a tribute to the conscience of America.