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.

A Mayor as President?

By David K. Shipler

                American voters have never sent a city mayor directly to the White House. They have never regarded being mayor as sufficient qualification. It’s OK to be a corrupt businessman, a mediocre governor, or a senator who hasn’t managed anything more than his own staff. But to work at gritty levels where ordinary folks meet the schools, police, and other essential services? To navigate the intricacies of race? To witness the intimate impact of government callousness or compassion? All that is deemed irrelevant by the political professionals and the electorate. As America burns, maybe it’s time for some rethinking.

Some mayors in this crisis have found the right tone of passionate eloquence to voice the country’s widespread revulsion at Officer Derek Chauvin’s murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis. They have touched the chords of historical outrage over deprivation and oppression. They have mixed moving pleas for peace with scathing condemnations of those whose violence, arson, and looting have sullied the noble purpose of the protests.

The fine words have not always worked. Being mayor is a tough job, and mayors across the country have been exercising tough love. They’re not all good at it, and ingrained cultures of both police and citizens impede progress even by the most enlightened. But they’ve had actual experience at the grass roots, never a bad thing in governing, especially from the highest post in the land.

That experience has not proved persuasive to voters. Grover Cleveland was mayor of Buffalo, but his stepping stone to the presidency was as governor of New York State. Calvin Coolidge was the small-town mayor of Northampton, Mass., but before and after that, he served in the state legislature, from which he was elected vice president; he became president when Warren Harding died.