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.
