America's March to Autocracy Enters Phase Two

                                                            By David K. Shipler 

            If you gain altitude higher than the daily run of the news and look down from, say, 30,000 feet, you see a logical progression in the demise of American democracy. Step by step, the constitutional structure is being dismantled, and the limits of the public’s acceptance are being tested. In seven months, in the first phase of his project, Donald Trump has caused remarkable damage without encountering successful resistance. Now, a new phase has begun. Let’s call it Phase Two. It contains three main elements:

1)    Getting Americans used to seeing camouflage on the streets by ostentatiously posting national guard troops in the nation’s capital and allowing police to “do whatever the hell they want,” in Trump’s words, with threats of the same in other cities. This is a step toward the militarized state that Trumpists favor.

2)    Hiring right-wing ideologues to fill key mid-level vacancies created by the mass firings from federal agencies. The purge was not so much to save money—little was saved—as to open opportunities for zealots to weaponize government and stifle expertise and debate. Recruitment by the Heritage Foundation has been going on for years. New hires will remake federal law enforcement into a tool of Trump by expanding ICE with politically-vetted agents, possibly from the ranks of white nationalists. The FBI will no longer require a college degree and extensive training for its agents, who will also be subjected to ideological screening.

3)    Subverting elections. Trump has prepared the ground for arrests of Democratic candidates in close races or, at the least, having the Justice Department publicize unproven allegations to damage their reputations. Several elected Democrats, have already been arrested on exaggerated charges during altercations. “We are arresting the mayor right now, per the deputy attorney general,” a federal agent on the phone with Washington said of Newark Mayor Ras Baraka, who was attempting an oversight visit to an immigration center in New Jersey. Democratic Representative LaMonica McIver was also arrested while jostled; she was charged excessively with assaulting a federal officer. In addition, Trump wants to control elections, saying he’s going to ban mail-in ballots, citing advice from that champion of democracy, Vladimir Putin. (So far, that power rests with Congress, not the president alone.)

Underlying these and other measures is Trump’s constant stream of hyped-up declarations of emergencies, as if the United States faced perpetual crises: at the border, in energy, in its cities. No doubt his extreme rhetoric falsely picturing bloodthirsty gangs marauding through his country’s significantly nonwhite cities strikes a chord with his white rural base. But, as usual, he manufactures a problem for which the only solution—also fictitious—is his tough hand at the top.

Phase One, initiated immediately after his inauguration January 20, overcame the checks and balances among the three branches of government that the Framers of the Constitution had so ingeniously created to avoid the scenario that is now unfolding 238 years later.

Trump and his comrades swept aside funding duly authorized and appropriated by the legislative branch. They ignored and evaded some orders from the judicial branch restoring government grants and immigrants’ constitutional rights to due process. They took the first steps in imposing their ideological doctrine on civil society by weaponizing federal funding and law enforcement against independent thinking, speech, teaching, and advocacy in universities, museums, theaters, law firms, and corporations.

            The Trumpists have normalized breaches of legal and ethical standards to the point of danger—the danger that the outrages will no longer seem outrageous. The threshold at which shock and opposition are triggered has been raised higher and higher.

Some citizens complain and mobilize to fight back, of course, but not as a broad movement. Americans have grown accustomed to masked ICE agents hauling off peaceful international students and essential foreign workers, locking them up without recourse. Americans are no longer surprised by the purges of websites and archives of historical facts, the removal of books on race and gender from military libraries, the subjection of data to political filtering, the screening of government workers for ideological conformity.

Experts who know their fields are ridiculed and fired. That’s to be expected now. If there are objections, they are raised increasingly in private. The Trumpists scare many Americans away from dissent and into silence, for fear of retribution that could include vigilante violence, perhaps by those January 6 rioters Trump pardoned. The fear extends even to Republican members of Congress. “We are all afraid,” said Republican Senator Lisa Murkowski. Many fear speaking out or demonstrating.

Most leading institutions in the United States are also afraid and have been complacent and compliant. Congress is supine, controlled by the Republican Party that Trump hijacked and twisted away from traditional conservatism. District federal judges have tried to restrain the administration, sometimes overreaching, but Trump appointees in appeals courts and the Supreme Court have reversed many of those restraints, unleashing Trump with extraordinary powers to usurp the role of the legislature.

If a leftist president is eventually elected, those powers can be invoked to swing the country wildly in another direction, creating a pendulum of instability akin to the worst authoritarian states in the non-industrialized world.

Americans learned in Phase One how much of their constitutional democracy is voluntary, how much it rests in the values and courage and selflessness of the citizens. As Judge Learned Hand said in 1944: “Liberty lies in the hearts of men and women; when it dies there, no constitution, no law, no court can even do much to help it. While it lies there it needs no constitution, no law, no court to save it.”

Does liberty lie in the hearts of Americans? It is a serious question now. With notable exceptions, leading institutions and citizens have failed to rally for the free society that they say they value. Or, they have resisted only in their own parochial interests, not in the larger interest of the nation at large. Companies, universities, and major media conglomerates try to flatter the mercurial, narcissistic president and cut separate deals rather than negotiate broadly for the preservation of a pluralistic system.

The victims are not uniting. Even Harvard, which mounted a strong court case in the face of Trump’s arbitrary cutoff of funding for valuable research, is on the cusp of a deal that would reward the president’s dictatorial impulses. Some big law firms caved when their largest corporate clients were poised to abandon them, while others are fighting, and pro bono attorneys have organized to help targeted individuals and institutions. Big media conglomerates, which had strong cases against ridiculous libel suits filed by Trump, capitulated and bought him off with huge sums, while other respected news organizations persist in reporting truthfully.

Trump is dividing and conquering. That’s been Phase One.

Phase Two will almost surely see government fabricating statistics or withholding negative numbers, as the Soviet Union did. Trump recently fired the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics for the customary correction of previous job-creation numbers—downward, as it happened. So, who’s going to tell the truth when you can get fired for it? Dictatorships are chronically good-news systems, where only the positive gets passed up the chain of command until the man at the top (it’s always a man) holds power at a pinnacle of ignorance.

Steven Levitsky and other scholars of dying democracies believe the United States is descending into “competitive authoritarianism,” in which elections are held but with such restraints on the opposition that it cannot gain power. That has been the case in Turkey and Hungary, for example, whose leaders have gained effusive praise from Trump.  

As the United States enters Phase Two, then, the question arises: Is this just a bad moment that will pass, or a new chapter in American history? What will Phases Three or Four include?

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.

Trump: Promises Made, Promises Broken

 

By David K. Shipler 

                One of President Trump’s campaign slogans most popular with his supporters was the mantra, “Promises Made, Promises Kept.” But the most important promises that presidents are obligated to keep are those made by their country. And in merely three weeks, Trump has broken multiple solemn promises made by the United States, many longstanding and life-saving.

                His message is clear: Don’t trust America.

If you work for our soldiers in war and are promised safe passage to the US, don’t believe it. If you’re promised continuing treatment with HIV medication, don’t believe it. If the world’s leading democracy promises to keep supporting your pro-democracy efforts in your not-so-democratic country, don’t believe it. If you’ve obtained a hard-won promise to fund effective work combating sex-trafficking, civil conflict, ethnic strife, or radicalization that leads to terrorism, don’t believe it. If you have a subcontract or a lease or an employment commitment from a non-profit organization funded by the US, don’t trust it. Don’t think that promised funds for hospitals, ports, roads, or other development projects already underway will actually be paid—unless the money is coming from China.   

                Don’t trust any international agreement with the United States, not on nuclear weapons, climate change, or trade. Don’t believe in any alliance with Washington. Don’t think that common security interests or economic interdependency protects you from a blizzard of broken promises.

If you’re in the US, don’t believe the promise of a written contract based on federal funding; it can be scuttled at midnight. If you’re a federal employee, don’t believe in the promises of the law, civil service protection, due process, or even plain ethics; you can be kicked out of your office in an instant. Don’t believe that your long expertise will protect you; in fact, it is likely to hurt you, since the Trump movement resents, vilifies, and distrusts “experts.”

Do not, under any circumstances, text or email anything sensitive, particularly with such terms as “gender” or “diversity.” Use the phone if you have to communicate. Don’t trust your coworker, who might be an informant.

Trump's Coup d'Etat

 

By David K. Shipler 

                Anyone who has seen the overthrow of a country’s government, either peacefully or by force, must be watching the United States with an uneasy sense of familiarity. In less than two weeks since his inauguration, President Trump and his zealous staff have committed offenses typically associated with a sudden takeover of an unstable autocracy.

Is this what most voters who elected Trump wished for? While stopping short of arresting political opponents (so far), the new regime has threatened criminal investigations of disfavored officials, begun ideological purges in government agencies, ordered federal workers to inform on colleagues, yanked security details from former officials who criticized Trump, risked the health of millions by halting worldwide humanitarian programs, erased essential medical information from government websites, pressed colleges to report on foreign students’ supposed antisemitism, undone rules against racial and gender discrimination, dictated that schools nationwide indoctrinate children with a “patriotic” curriculum, and more.

 The widespread destruction of norms and institutions, aimed at creating immense vacuums to be filled with a new belief system, has never before been seen in the United States. It reflects an aspiration that might be called totalism—not totalitarianism, which connotes complete subservience of the population to the will of the state. But rather, an effort to infuse both government and civil society, as totally as feasible, with a comprehensive ideology. Part of that is borne of a distaste for government itself, except when used to expand raw presidential power.

This cannot be accomplished within the confines of the Constitution’s separation of powers and the republic’s decentralization of authority to the states. Therefore, Trump has been ignoring the legislative branch—the laws passed by Congress—and in one case so far (not shutting down TikTok), ignoring both the legislative and judicial branches. He also seems poised to bully recalcitrant states by withholding federal aid.

From Democracy to Kakistocracy

 

By David K. Shipler 

Kakistocracy, n: government by the least suitable or competent citizens of a state 

[Note: Bowing to the influence of The Shipler Report, Gaetz withdrew only hours after this was posted.]

            When President Richard Nixon nominated Judge G. Harrold Carswell to the Supreme Court in 1970, his lack of intellectual heft was defended by Republican Senator Roman Hruska of Nebraska, who famously declared: “Even if he were mediocre, there are a lot of mediocre judges and people and lawyers. They are entitled to a little representation, aren’t they, and a little chance? We can’t have all Brandeises, Frankfurters, and Cardozos.”

            The Senate rejected Carswell, with 13 Republicans joining Democrats in voting no.

            Ah, for the good old days. This time around, it is not just mediocrity that is ascending to power but wild incompetence seasoned with wackiness. From Donald Trump on down, the federal government is about to be converted into a cesspool of financial and moral corruption, and into a juggernaut of fact-free autocratic decrees, political arrests, and military roundups. At least that’s Trump’s goal, which his key nominees are poised to pursue.

If Hruska were still with us, he would have to update his argument by noting that the country’s sexual assailants also deserve “a little representation.” Since most voters just elected a court-proven sexual assailant president, he would surely find sympathy in the supine Senate. And remember, Republicans in years past confirmed Clarence Thomas and Brett Kavanaugh for the Supreme Court despite credible accusations, respectively, of sexual harassment and assault. Today, Trump seems partial to men who do that kind of thing, since the accused (but not proven) assailants he’s picked for his Cabinet include Matt Gaetz for Attorney General, Pete Hegseth for Defense Secretary, and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. at Health and Human Services.

The First Chill of Self-Censorship

                                                         By David K. Shipler

                The decisions by the rich men who own the Los Angeles Times and the Washington Post to kill their editorial boards’ endorsements of Kamala Harris are reminders of how an authoritarian culture works. It has official censors, of course, but the system’s everyday mechanism doesn’t always rely on edicts from on high. It can operate automatically as private citizens police themselves and their peers, avoiding risk and informing on those who deviate or dissent.

                That is how the surveillance state of the Soviet Union functioned. Editors and writers knew instinctively what content was permitted in their newspapers and broadcasts; they were Communist Party members themselves, so official censorship was internalized, embedded in their professional judgments. There wasn’t much the censors needed to delete.

                In schools and workplaces, fellow students and colleagues were on guard against political irreverence and would report it. Pressure and punishment were often exacted there, at that level by those institutions. The same is happening today in Russia, which has been dragged backward by Vladimir Putin. In other words, the authoritarian structure presses people horizontally as well as vertically, not only from the top down but also from within the lowly communities where individuals live their lives.

                Oh, please, some of you will say. The US is not Russia. We have a passionate tradition of free debate, suspicion of government, and fervent individualism. “It Can’t Happen Here,” you might insist, the ironic title of Sinclair Lewis’s 1935 novel about a fascist who rises to power in America—and who holds a huge rally in Madison Square Garden, by the way, its adoring crowd described with prescience by Lewis decades before Donald Trump’s ugly rally there this week.

Trump is trying to seed the ground for that dynamic of self-policing. He has illuminated the most significant divide in America, which is between those who see it coming and those who do not. You can call it the divide between the left and the right, or between Democrats and Republicans, or between Blacks and whites, or women and men, or college and high-school graduates. Those lines exist. But more fundamentally, it is a divide between those who understand how pluralistic democracy can be undermined along an insidious path toward autocracy, and those who do not. Apparently, Americans don’t study this. Our schools have failed miserably.

Targeting America

 

By David K. Shipler 

              The bullet just grazed Donald Trump, but it struck the heart of America.

At a moment of critical care for a suffering democracy, the assassination attempt last night in Pennsylvania further weakens the stamina of an ailing culture of pluralistic politics. It adds toxins to the chemistry of the country. It has already provoked blame rather than introspection. Instead of strengthening Americans’ bonds of common citizenship, as the assassination of President John F. Kennedy did sixty years ago, this near miss will only deepen the divisions. It will be taken to justify the rage, hatred, and passion for revenge that Trump himself has fostered.

Moreover, it is hard to see how that apostle of autocracy fails to get elected in November. This bolsters the image of macho victimhood he has promoted, an ironic way of channeling the alienation and sense of helplessness felt by millions of white working-class voters who adore him. He was a cult figure before and now, in near martyrdom, he perfects the performance. Before allowing Secret Service agents to move him to safety, he needs to play his part, so he tells them, “Wait,” is helped to his feet, his bloody ear now visible as he raises his fist and apparently shouts, “Fight!”  And fight they will, in one way or another.

This Sunday morning, there have undoubtedly been preachers crediting God, as Trump did in a post, for making the bullets narrowly miss. Some of his followers believe he has been divinely assigned to lead the nation, and this will be taken to prove their case. And there have surely been preachers admonishing their congregations to seek reconciliation, to gaze inward, to love the other, to examine themselves for the wrongs that they and the broader society must right.

The sermons on taking responsibility and seeking healing and listening to the other side will not make the front pages, sadly. They will not generate a lot of followers on social media or even find their way into most politicians’ stump speeches on the campaign trail. Senator J. D. Vance, a possible vice-presidential candidate, instantly blamed President Biden’s harsh rhetoric against Trump for a shooting whose motives were still unknown. Vance didn’t mention Trump’s years of violent rhetoric, of course, or his vitriol loosening the restraints of civil order, culminating in the January 6, 2021 invasion of the Capitol by his violent supporters.

That’s the nature of American political leadership today. Some of the worst people rise to some of the highest levels.

What Trump and his Republican acolytes—including those on the Supreme Court—fail to realize is that whatever they unleash in governmental power or private aggression can be used by the left as well as the right. In other words, the authors themselves can someday be the targets. In her dissent from the Court’s recent grant of broad presidential immunity against criminal prosecution, Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote that a president could now “order the Navy’s Seal Team 6 to assassinate a political rival” and avoid prosecution. Her hypothesis, signed by the three liberal justices, drew no distinction between a Republican or a Democratic president.

At this writing, the public knows little about the alleged shooter, Thomas Matthew Crooks, who was killed by the Secret Service. He was white and apparently not an immigrant, so Trumpists won’t be able to blame all people of color and all immigrants, as many (Trump included) are wont to do for the ills of the country. He was not a member of Seal Team 6, evidently, so Biden’s off the hook for using his newfound powers from the Supreme Court. Crooks was reportedly a registered Republican who gave a small contribution a Democratic cause, so take your choice about his reasons for wanting to take Trump out.

Unless his online posts, friends, and family offer insights, a vacuum of information on his disturbed thinking will allow room for fantastic conspiracy theories. Those will further deteriorate the health of the society, and a society’s health depends on how self-corrective it is, especially in a moment of crisis.

It doesn’t look good for the United States. In this heated atmosphere, political violence begets more political violence. It would not be amazing for some of Trump’s militant supporters to take up arms against any target they deem worthy of their attention. Trump has called for unity but not peace. He might be incapable of preaching nonviolence to those who love him and value his raised fist. We’ll see.

What does appear reliably predictable is that a weak-looking, impaired Joe Biden cannot win over Trump. If Biden remains the candidate, Trump will be inaugurated next January. And at that moment, the world’s three most powerful countries will be led by criminals. Granted, only one will have been convicted. But Xi Jinping of China for his persecution of the Uighurs and Vladimir Putin of Russia for his war of atrocities in Ukraine certainly deserve prosecution. If you think of Trump’s crimes as minor, just wait.

The bullet that Trump heard whizzing past his ear? We all heard it as it found its mark.

Democracy: The Political Right's Alarming Lack of Alarm

 

By David K. Shipler 

                Right-wingers who tamper with democracies should be careful what they wish for. They might hold positions of power today, but as they undermine the checks and balances that stabilize and restrain, they hand formidable tools to their opponents who might take over tomorrow.

This is poorly understood in both Israel and the United States, two democracies now imperiled by extreme agendas that would weaken longstanding mechanisms designed to protect minority rights and moderate governmental authority.

The political right ought to take note: If Israel’s religio-nationalist government dismantles the separation of powers by emasculating the judiciary, what’s to prevent some centrist or more liberal government from driving unencumbered through the same gaping holes? After all, the right-wing governing coalition has only a four-seat majority in a 120-member parliament.

In the US, similarly, if Republican “conservatives” regain the White House and disempower independent agencies by transferring power to the president, as Trump’s team plans—and if they continue dismantling the non-partisan machinery of elections in swing states they control—what’s to prevent Democrats from doing the same where they hold or gain majorities? When you destroy the careful balances in a pluralistic system, the new structure is available to everyone, not just to you.

A case in point is Donald Trump’s anti-constitutional argument that Vice President Mike Pence, as President of the Senate, could have rejected slates of electors from some states that went for Joe Biden in 2020. But if Pence had that power, so would every vice president: Vice President Al Gore could have thrown out Florida’s Bush electors in 2000, where the popular vote was razor close and justifiably contested. And Vice President Kamala Harris could do it in 2024 if she doesn’t like certain states’ results.

Why don’t reporters interviewing avid Trump supporters ever point this out and ask for reactions?

It could be that Trump and his spellbound flock don’t grasp the universality of the powers they seek to acquire. Perhaps they think that only they will benefit by eroding the professional integrity of vote-counting, for example, not imagining that their opponents might use the same tactic. Perhaps they don’t see how a Democratic president could use the immense authority they seek for Trump should he be re-elected. In a society still largely subject to the rule of law, which carries with it a respect for precedent, consistency, and equal protection, systemic changes are just that: systemic. They flow through the entire system, no matter which faction is in charge, now or in the future.

It could also be that Republicans—privately—don’t really think Democrats are nefarious. Maybe right-wing politicians don’t believe what they say about liberals and progressives. Perhaps, in their heart of hearts, Republicans recognize that the “radical left” is not so devoid of civic and moral virtue that it would threaten democracy with the tools the Republicans are forging for themselves.

Indeed, that’s the flaw in this doomsday scenario: The Democrats are not the same, at least not now. Gore didn’t throw out Florida’s electors, and neither will Harris. Democratic state legislatures are not rushing to curtail voting rights or politicize vote-counting. There is no moral equivalency between Republicans and Democrats.

But will that be forever? Power is an aphrodisiac. The judicial system is growing more sharply partisan on both sides. Gerrymandering is a time-honored tradition by both parties. Imperious moves to stifle speech come from the left as well as the right. The danger of concentrating authority in too few hands, without sufficient checks, remains as acute today as when James Madison warned at the Constitutional Convention: “All men having power ought to be distrusted to a certain degree.”

So it also is in Israel, which has no constitution but a set of Basic Laws that are supposed to set the standards for governmental action. Without a constitutional text, the Supreme Court has overturned some statutes and practices as “unreasonable,” a squishy concept that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government has just outlawed. (The Court itself will hear a case requesting that it overturn that new ban on its authority, setting up what Israelis loosely call a “constitutional crisis.”)

In addition, Netanyahu has proposed giving government officials a majority on the commission that appoints judges, and granting the Knesset, Israel’s parliament, the power to overturn any Supreme Court ruling with a simple majority vote. The specter of emasculating the courts—the only check on executive/legislative power—has ignited vast street demonstrations, disinvestment, protests by respected former intelligence and military officers, and refusals to serve by numerous military reservists. At least the center and left are alarmed, even if the right is not.

Ironically, Israel’s Supreme Court has moved somewhat to the right as new justices have been appointed during years of conservative government. So, if the judiciary is weakened and the rightist coalition loses its narrow majority in the future, a more centrist or left-tilting government could presumably overturn conservative Supreme Court decisions.

These might include rulings limiting the rights of Arab citizens, for example, or allowing more Jewish West Bank settlements on Palestinians’ land, or permitting gender discrimination by Haridim, the ultra-religious Jews who increasingly demand the separation of men and women in public transportation and elsewhere.

In fact, for many Israelis on both sides of the conflict over the judiciary, the very nature of the country is at stake—whether it remains a secular and pluralistic state or becomes increasingly theocratic, run by extensively by religious law. A centrist or slightly liberal government, empowered to overrule the Supreme Court, could conceivably sweep away judgments that uphold an expanded religious authority in domestic life, open the door to Israeli annexation of the West Bank, and other policies favored by the hard right. That is the risk that Netanyahu and his extremist partners run by changing the rules of the game.

Ultimately, citizens in both Israel and the United States will decide the momentous question, which is much larger than the personalities or slogans or temporal policies of the candidates. All democracies contain the built-in mechanism of their own destruction: the popular vote, which can elect those who will slice away the protections, usually little by little, until the citizens wake up one morning to find that their precious freedoms to choose how they are governed have disappeared. In a well-informed citizenry, the alarm sounds long before, across the entire political spectrum.

The Mixed Human Rights Record of Israel's Judiciary

 

By David K. Shipler 

                The right-wing Israeli government’s plan to eviscerate the powers of the country’s courts has generated massive demonstrations in the streets, worries by foreign investors, and boycotts of military service by hundreds of reservists in elite special forces and air force units. But the “independent judiciary” the protesters are defending does not have a sterling record on civil rights, especially those of Palestinian Arabs.

                The Supreme Court has refused to rule against the government’s inflammatory strategy of settling Jews in the occupied West Bank, a practice barred by the Fourth Geneva Convention. It has generally permitted the army to demolish the family homes of Arabs accused of terrorism, a form of collective punishment that the Geneva Convention also forbids. (Demolition is never used against Jews charged with terrorism against Arabs.) Inside Israel, the court has upheld a form of segregation by allowing rural villages and kibbutzim to reject would-be residents for “incompatibility with the social-cultural fabric of the town.”

The justices have only tinkered around the edges of the government’s tough practices. They have occasionally ordered a small Jewish settlement dismantled for taking Palestinian land. For similar reasons, they have required minor changes in the route of Israel’s security wall built on the border of the West Bank. They have ruled against demolishing a house where the accused did not actually live, and where a family tried to prevent the terrorist act. But the justices have typically avoided sweeping judgments on major policies affecting Palestinians’ rights, deferring to security concerns and gradually reducing the influence of international law.

                “Over the years,” says B’Tselem, an Israeli civil liberties organization, “the Supreme Court has permitted nearly every kind of human rights violation that Israel has committed in the Occupied Territories.”

Why, then, is the extreme political right so intent on emasculating the judiciary? First, the Supreme Court has gone the other way in a few important areas. It struck down a law exempting the state from liability for damaging civilian property during security operations in the West Bank. It limited the length of time that “infiltrators,” namely illegal immigrants from Africa, could be held in a desert prison camp that was designed as a deterrent to further arrivals.

And, most politically charged, the court overturned, as discriminatory, the exemption of ultra-Orthodox men from the military service that all other Israeli men and women must perform. (Although, with ultra-Orthodox parties giving governing coalitions their parliamentary majorities, governments have repeatedly obtained the court’s permission to extend the exemption.)

                Second, if Israel annexes the West Bank as many on the political right desire, the military’s authority there would presumably end, along with the military courts that have tried Palestinians on both security and criminal charges since the territory was captured in the 1967 war. It is conceivable that the Supreme Court would grant Palestinian residents access to the same rights in the same criminal justice system as Israelis. That would not be welcomed by the virulent anti-Arab members of the current government.

                Last but certainly not least, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu would like to stay out of prison if his endless trial on corruption charges, which began in May 2020, ever ends with a conviction. An independent judicial system is such an inconvenience to authoritarian-minded leaders, as former president Donald Trump might soon discover.   

Nevertheless, Israel’s Supreme Court seems less of a threat to some of the right-wing agenda than the protests in its favor might suggest. It has grown more restrained and more conservative in recent decades, especially since the retirement in 2006 of its president, Aharon Barak, a jurist revered both in Israel and abroad for his capacity to apply human rights to the exigencies of security interests.

In 2011, for example, the court essentially reversed a 1983 judgment by Barak against ten Israeli-owned quarries that were extracting building materials from the occupied West Bank. Citing the Geneva Convention and the Hague Regulations, Barak’s court had ruled, “An area held under belligerent occupation is not an open field for economic exploitation.” He reaffirmed the judgment in 2004. But in 2011, Supreme Court President Dorit Beinisch found that the long period of occupation “requires the laws be conformed to meet reality on the ground,” which she said included “the right to utilize natural resources in a reasonable manner.”

  In retirement, former Justice Barak recently called the Netanyahu government’s judicial overhaul plan “a string of poison pills” that would be “the beginning of the end of the Third House,” meaning the third historical period of Jewish sovereignty after the eras of the ancient First and Second Temples.

Barak’s warning was airily dismissed by Justice Minister Yariv Levin, who declared that the former Supreme Court president “does not understand the essence of democracy,” endangered, in Levin’s view, because “all power rests with the judges, and they decide what’s proportionate and reasonable. That’s not democratic.”

But it is the Justice Minister who does not understand the essence of democracy, which relies on the separation of powers, a cardinal principle recognized by the hundreds of thousands of Israelis who have taken to the streets. Israel’s Supreme Court is the only institution standing in the way of unfettered political diktat. With a parliamentary system whose majority always controls the executive branch, no other check or balance exists.

The country has no constitution; a failed constitutional assembly after Israel’s creation in 1948 led to the enactment by the Knesset, the parliament, of what’s called Basic Law, a dozen principles on “human dignity and liberty” derived from the Israeli Declaration of Independence. The Basic Law figures in the Supreme Court’s rulings on the “constitutionality” of statutes passed by the Knesset. Yet the court has been cautious, overturning only 22 laws since the power of judicial review was established in 1992, an annual rate lower than the United States, the United Kingdom, and Canada.

It appears that even as the authority to annul laws has been rarely used, its existence has restrained the executive and legislative branches in the past. Not so much today, as the government has shifted to the right, and “elected officials have become less likely to accept legal advice to amend or withdraw bills that are constitutionally problematic,” according to Yuval Shany and Guy Lurie of the Israel Democracy Institute.

Ironically, given all the protests, the Supreme Court has suffered a decline in public trust, from 80 percent in 2000 to 49 percent in 2010 to 41 percent in 2021. “While the words ‘there are judges in Jerusalem’ used to put an end to public debate, today they provoke it,” wrote Yedidia Z. Stern, former dean of the law faculty at Bar-Ilan University, back in 2010. Dissatisfaction reigns on both the right and the left of the political and religious spectrums.

Yet for the sake of democracy, large numbers of Israelis seem to realize, the center has to hold. If Netanyahu and his justice minister looked around the world or into history, they would see how every dictatorship subverts and expropriates its judiciary. In the Soviet Union, pro-democracy dissidents used to speak of “telephone justice,” delivered by judges who first called Communist Party officials for instructions. In today’s Russia, supine courts mostly do the Kremlin’s bidding. Hungary’s semi-autocrat Victor Orban has emasculated the courts, which are also lapdogs of the regimes in Iran, China, and other authoritarian systems.

                Netanyahu and his extremist, anti-Arab cabinet are ramming through legislation that would require an 80 percent majority on the Supreme Court to invalidate a law, and would empower the Knesset to annul that ruling or any other with just a one-vote majority of legislators. Justices would be appointed mainly by governing politicians in a restructured Judicial Selection Committee, instead of the one currently dominated by nonpartisan judges and lawyers.

                That would set the stage for a kind of elected autocracy, placed in office by the voters but unchecked by the rule of law—or of any law other than the one enacted at the whim of the legislature, the executive, and their hand-picked judges, all three branches flowing into a single stream of authority.

                The sad question is whether Palestinians would notice much difference. Maybe not, since they haven’t had much success anyway, through Israel’s independent courts, fighting discriminatory laws and regulations.

The Dying Constitution, Part II

 

By David K. Shipler

See Part I Here 

                Like a broken clock that tells the right time twice a day, former President Donald Trump’s recent call for the Constitution to be terminated was a fleeting moment of honesty. He never honored the Constitution in practice, despite his oath to “preserve, protect, and defend” it. He sought to undermine its foundational separation of powers, and of course its mechanism of electoral democracy.

                Still raging and lying about the 2020 election, he wrote in early December, “A Massive Fraud [sic] of this type and magnitude allows for the termination of all rules, regulations, and articles, even those found in the Constitution.” His post appeared on his media platform, Truth Social, whose title aptly echoes the paradoxical name the Soviet Communist Party gave to its newspaper: “Truth” (Pravda in Russian). Need we cite Orwell yet again?

                This prominent a dismissal of the Constitution was a break from a long, modern American tradition. By and large, all sides in the most acrimonious debates ritually cite the document in reverence. They interpret it variously to suit their own arguments, to be sure, sometimes with convoluted sophistry. But they rarely hope to cast it aside. Even the January 6 rioters hailed the Constitution as they violated it by storming the Capitol to disrupt the sacred process of counting Electoral College votes.

                So, what is the significance of Trump’s remark? He has been sneered at for years whenever he utters absurdities, with much of the public thinking that he has finally crossed the line into a territory of his own demise. But for millions of his spellbound supporters, that line is as imaginary as the horizon, receding as he approaches it.

                After his comment on “termination,” only a bare majority (51 percent) of registered voters polled by Quinnipiac University said it disqualified him from running again for president. A substantial 40 percent said it was not disqualifying. The figures among Republicans were troubling: Disqualified—just 17 percent. Not disqualified—72 percent. Democrats, predictably, were the opposite: 86 percent said he was disqualified, 12 percent said not disqualified.

The Democratic Party's Cynical Caper

 

By David K. Shipler

               Now that the mid-term primaries are over, the cynical wing of the Democratic Party can tally its “wins.” Those are the radical right-wing election deniers and Pro-Trump fans of autocracy whose victories in Republican primaries were owed in part to Democratic-funded ads.

Six of thirteen such candidates won and are headed to the November election, where Democrats hope their extremism will be repulsive enough to the broader universe of voters that their Democratic opponents will prevail. That could happen, but it would be a sordid achievement.

              First, as some leading Democrats have warned, it’s a risky proposition. Some of those crazies could get elected, as Trump himself did after Hillary Clinton’s campaign ran as if Trump’s own flaws would defeat him.

Second, even where Democratic candidates prevail in the general election, the Republican radicals and their nonsensical conspiracy slanders will have been given more of a platform courtesy of Democratic money.

“Many of these candidates develop a much larger following, even if they lose the current race,” said Mike Madrid, a Republican strategist. “What we have seen is, they come back and win for school board or state legislative race or for city councils because of this new awareness and this new recognition.”

Third, spending $53-million in nine states has broken faith with Democratic donors who thought their contributions to the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee would be going to—duh—Democratic campaigns.

Fourth, and perhaps most important in the long run, to work against principled Republican House members who had the courageous patriotism to vote for Trump’s impeachment after January 6, is to help undermine the prospects for a reformation in the Republican Party. The country needs two responsible political parties, and the Democrats have now helped enhance the dangers of embracing decency.

The Promise and Failure of Gorbachev's Legacy

 

By David K. Shipler 

            On March 15, 1990, Mikhail Gorbachev swore himself in as president of the Soviet Union. The country had no transcendent institution with constitutional authority, so Gorbachev administered his own oath as he touched his right hand to a deep red binder holding the constitution, newly amended to contain some of the checks and balances that would be necessary, but not sufficient, to create democracy.

It was a culminating moment of his rule, which he had begun five years earlier as General Secretary of the Communist Party. He stood on the broad dais of the Kremlin’s Palace of Congresses, facing more than two thousand delegates who had just completed fractious days of argument over how much power an executive branch should retain.

That he died early this week, at this pivotal moment for both Russia and the United States, reminds us what the landscape looks like at the intersection of authoritarianism and democracy. Russia is descending. The United States is at risk of doing so.

When it came to executive authority, Soviet conservatives faulted Gorbachev for wanting too little, and for courting disorder in the land. Liberals attacked him for wanting too much, and for his canny parliamentary evasions to frustrate their demands. Watching from the gallery and hearing the fears from both sides, I wondered how he and the country could navigate between the Scylla and Charybdis of dictatorship and anarchy.

Those were the twin specters of Russian history. Lurching from one to the other, the society had endured unruly transitions, leaving a residue of apprehension about pluralistic politics and a fondness for the strong hand at the top. Gorbachev was trying to lift this weight of the past, but with a restraint that proved untenable. In the end, the center did not hold. Reactionaries kidnapped him but failed to unseat him, and their abortive putsch accelerated the centrifugal force of ethnic identities that broke the country apart merely nine months after Gorbachev had recited his oath.

Left was a great vacuum of national esteem, a ravaged sense of dignity that now helps drive policy in Moscow.

Gorbachev came out of a subculture within Soviet Communism, a quiet, reformist impulse that ran parallel to the self-glorifying propaganda of the party apparatus. He came of age as Nikita S. Khrushchev, in his so-called secret speech to the Twentieth Party Congress in 1956, stunned officialdom by revealing and denouncing the demented abuses of Stalin. Party members whose parents had disappeared into the labor camps knew of the atrocities, but mainly on the limited territory of their own experience. The larger scope, now disclosed, suddenly gave the lie to the reverence for Stalin that had animated patriotism and nourished cohesion.

Khrushchev thus wrote the first chapter of de-Stalinization. Thirty years later, Gorbachev wrote the second.

Free speech is risky in a system long closed to introspection, and Gorbachev did not appreciate its uncontrollable fluidity. At first he allowed the press to examine current ills: alcoholism, corruption, drugs, prostitution, homelessness, teenage runaways, police brutality, street crime—most discussion of which had been previously taboo. Then came increasing candor about the Stalinist years: the 20 million dead in the purges, the decimation of the officer corps, the cruelties of collectivization, the atrocity of famine, the non-aggression pact with Nazi Germany.

It was a dizzying time of truth-telling that infected individual citizens as fear drained out of them. Once guarded behind a glass shield of formulaic conversation, many relaxed into honest discussion, flexing their minds and searching themselves for their own thoughts. Their stories from the past poured into newspapers and magazines. The journal Ogonyok published a letter from a prison camp guard who had lost his health and his honor, prompting a confession in reply from a former secret police investigator who begged forgiveness from those he had tortured, whose faces still haunted him at night. His letter went unpublished because it was anonymous—“My children and grandchildren do not know the whole truth about me,” he wrote.

Gorbachev evidently meant to liberate discourse and contain it at once, and specifically to insulate Lenin and the Bolshevik Revolution from the onslaught of irreverence. To stop the ruthless examination of history at the Stalinist era proved impossible, however, and soon the flood of criticism and reexamination coursed backwards into the past until it consumed Lenin and the revolution as well, hitherto sacred tenets of the country’s pride.

A poster boy of professional emancipation was Yuri Afanasyev, once a compliant historian, who began to denounce Lenin until, at the congress that approved the constitution, he condemned the Bolshevik leader as responsible for “the institutionalization of the state policy of mass violence and terror.”

            An echo of this was heard in 1993 from an unlikely figure: Aleksandr Yakovlev, the former Politburo member and chief architect of Gorbachev’s policy of openness. At a conference, I asked if they’d known where they were going when they began. No idea, Yakovlev replied. They had the mistaken notion that they could reform the system. If it had been a socialist system, he said, it could have been reformed. But it was a fascist, totalitarian system, he continued, and a fascist, totalitarian system cannot be reformed, only destroyed.

            When did Gorbachev realize that? Yakovlev answered at the time: He still doesn’t. That’s why we no longer speak.

            Stripping away the myths of a brutal history looked exhilarating from the West, and to some Russians as well. The country was alive with nervous excitement. But the truth-telling also eroded Russia’s pose of historical honor. It stole from Russians their foothold in their past, as if Americans were to lose pride in the founding fathers, the Declaration of Independence, the American Revolution, and the Constitution.

Adrift, humiliated, and without a sense of national purpose, Russians have since searched for points of dignity. Some fix on the country’s heroism during World War II or reach back to the imagined glory of the czars. Nostalgia for something that could be called Russianism—a purity of culture, language, and religion—feeds a xenophobic ethnocentrism, a yearning for a single truth and a firm autocracy, and a strong distaste for the West. In making war on Ukraine, Vladimir Putin plays to some of these reactionary impulses, while also trying to hold them in check.

So, Gorbachev leaves a contradictory legacy. The history written in the West will cast him as a pivotal figure whose bold liberalization led, inadvertently, to the collapse of communism in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. In Russia he is detested in many quarters, precisely for the same thing. Without a basic reformation there, he will not be treated kindly as Russians write their own history. Taking myths from people is never popular.

The Waning of America's Mission

                                                     By David K. Shipler 

              Here is the problem: The United States cannot campaign for democracy around the globe when too few Americans are willing to defend democracy at home. And since one of the major political parties has internalized Donald Trump’s authoritarian desires, making them its own, no serious foreign leader or activist can look upon the United States as a reliable model. No matter what President Biden says about the worldwide contest between dictatorship and democracy, the age of American evangelism appears to be over—or at least headed for a long pause.

              During the First Cold War, from the end of World War II in 1945 to the late 1980s, Soviet communism and American democracy staged an ideological rivalry across international boundaries in practically every region of the world. These were two irreconcilable theories of government and economics, both driven by strong moral arguments and deep cultural beliefs.

              Few Americans would have seen the Soviet Union as a moral enterprise, but that is exactly how many Russians saw themselves, as carriers of a torch of social justice. All countries, all peoples, would be better off in socialist, centrally planned economies, so the argument went, which would level the gross disparities under capitalism. And that could be done only with a one-party system, not the messy chaos of pluralistic democracy.

The Soviet Union itself had achieved nothing close to communism’s shared wealth, of course, with warrens of privilege reserved for the few at the expense of the many. Karl Marx would have been appalled. But no matter: Myths can be inspiring, and Moscow worked feverishly to spread that one to allies and client states, often as a condition of aid. After the Vietnam War, for example, it successfully pressed North Vietnam to snuff out the vibrant private entrepreneurship of the South Vietnamese, which took many years to recover.

The United States, meanwhile, was crusading for both private enterprise and pluralistic democracy, also as a moral enterprise. Not that either country neglected its national security interests; both Moscow and Washington were circling each other warily in many corners of the international arena, jockeying for influence wherever possible. The U.S. didn’t mind cozying up to dictators that were anti-communist, and even helping overthrow duly elected leftists who threatened Western business interests, as in Chile, Iran, and Guatemala, for example.

Many pro-democracy activists abroad saw through the hypocrisy yet also counted on the U.S. to support human rights, at least rhetorically. Inconsistency, a hallmark of foreign policy, doesn’t erase basic lines of belief. And the First Cold War was marked by an intriguing symmetry: Both the Soviet Union and the United States were inspired by the evangelical drive to spread their own systems for what each saw as the good of humanity.

Now, as the Second Cold War takes shape, the ideological landscape is quite different. The United States is losing faith in its own democracy. The Republican Party is placing partisans in key positions to undermine future elections, which will make the U.S. look familiar—but not inspiring—to those in countries where voting is manipulated by strongmen.

January 6 and the Hypocrisy of "Democracy"

                                                         By David K. Shipler 

                 Communist East Germany officially entitled itself the German Democratic Republic. The dictatorship of North Vietnam was named the Democratic Republic of Vietnam. North Korea is the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea. And the Trump insurrectionists of January 6, 2021 executed their violence against Congress in the guise of protecting democracy.

                Democracy—that alluring concept, that aspiration, that illusion—is still a moral ideal, even among autocrats and would-be oppressors who wear it as an empty label. In the United States, moreover, the Constitution remains gospel, cited even by those who would shred its principles as fiercely as many religious zealots corrupt their holy texts.

                If the United States has a state religion, the late historian Robert Kelley used to say, it is constitutional democracy. That remains so. The very threats to constitutional democracy are being made in its name. The radical right mob that invaded the Capitol, seeking to keep Donald Trump in power, did not reject democracy; they fought for it, or so they believed, having accepted Trump’s lie that he had won the election. “Stop the Steal” became their mantra. They did not reject the Constitution; they claimed to defend it, even while attempting to sweep its provisions aside.

                The Republican Party, now a conduit for radical-right fantasies and dreams, pretends to bolster democracy while becoming the most formidable anti-democratic force in the United States. Instead of sobering the party, the January 6 assault emboldened Republican-controlled state legislatures to enact onerous restrictions on voting and—more menacing—disempower local officials who administer elections honestly. Election officials, facing death threats, leave their jobs, opening the field to the miscreants. “Election integrity,” the Republicans’ rationale, means the opposite. It sets the stage for elections that would be truly stolen.

                When words come to mean the opposite of themselves, when noble ideas are twisted into tools of their own demise, a society dives into a whirlpool. It is sucked down not just by legal mechanisms or institutional processes. Those are mere cover for the deeper currents of distrust and alienation, of humiliation and an angry sense of helplessness. Those, in turn, nourish a vulnerability to demagogues—not only Trump but Tucker Carlson, Sean Hannity, and other propagandists—and a susceptibility to outlandish tales of malevolent conspiracy. Even if Trump disappeared tomorrow, those currents would still course through much of America.

The Secret Taiwan-Texas Deal

 

By David K. Shipler 

                Thanks to Russian hackers, we have a transcript of a startling portion of President Joe Biden’s video conversation last night with Chinese President Xi Jinping:

                Xi: Joe, as you know, I was honored recently to be elevated in history to the esteemed stature of our Communist Party’s two great leaders, Mao Zedong and Deng Xiaoping. This act signifies one of our most envied powers: to rewrite history. Leaders all over the world wish they could do it.

                Biden: Yes, I noticed, but we Americans don’t envy that at all. We like our history plain and truthful.

                Xi: Oh, do you? I have been admiring the skill of your Republicans in rewriting your history of racial oppression to indoctrinate children in the phony purity of your past. And this, just at the time when you accuse us of oppressing some of our people! That’s called hypocrisy, Joe.

                Biden: Look, man, that’s a long discussion that has nothing to do with our agenda. Let’s get down to the issues. Taiwan is next on the list.

                Xi: Exactly. Taiwan is my subject here. I have a bold idea, which I hope you’ll accept. Taiwan is a thorn in my side—not really part of my empire, not really independent, constantly making breakaway noises, and full of so-called democrats who love chaotic debate and discord. And who, by the way, will never rewrite history properly.

                Biden: So why don’t you just let Taiwan be Taiwan?

                Xi: Even better, let me give Taiwan to you.

                Biden: Huh?

                Xi: Give it away. Then I won’t have to worry over it all the time. It’s really a pain. But I want something in exchange.

                Biden: This is ridiculous.

Xi: You won’t think it’s ridiculous when you hear my proposal. You give me Texas.

Biden: [A funny noise that sounds like a snort, then a burble, then a chortle.] Wow, man, what an idea! We get Taiwan’s economy and great restaurants, and you get—hey, Texas is a bit recalcitrant. You sure you want it?

Xi: We have been studying Texas. The governor there claims to love individual liberty, but our autocracy experts can sniff out wannabe authoritarians. Greg Abbot would be our collaborator as much as Carrie Lam. And the rest of the Republicans, who still love incipient dictators like Trump, who just need to be flattered to become our lapdogs. And who don’t like free elections. And who don’t like public health—think Wuhan, Joe. They’ll fit right in.

Biden: Well, I don’t know about that. They’re pretty difficult people.

Xi: We have ways of taking care of difficult people.

Biden: But they have lots of guns.

Xi: Guns we can turn to our own use. All those swaggering cowboys looking for enemies, perfect matches with our Guoanbu agents. They’ll love each other. Brotherly love, Joe, a real peacemaking mission.

Biden: Hmmm. You know about our independent judiciary, right? Not exactly your style.

Xi: [Huge guffaw.] Independent? Come on, Joe, you don’t have to do propaganda with me. When was the last time you saw a Republican judge rule for the little guy? No, no danger there. I like their impulse to defer to the established authority. And we will be the established authority!

Biden: What about the judges who go against you?

Xi: Ask me that in a few months, and I’ll ask you back: What judges? Where are they?

Biden: I’ll admit, it’s an appealing idea. No more Greg Abbot, no more Ted Cruz, thirty-eight fewer electoral votes. And we get some great Chinese restaurants. But you get all that oil. What do we do for oil?

Xi: Switch to solar and wind, Joe! It’s what you’ve been campaigning for. We’ll just force you to make it happen!

Biden: Yeah, sounds good. But what about the border between Texas and the US? And how do I sell this to the American people?

Xi: Easy, Joe. You tell them you’ll build a wall around Texas, and that China will pay for it. 

 This is satire. It’s all made up, a disclosure made necessary by the absurdity of current reality, which prevents lots of people from telling the difference between truth and fiction.

The American Dream of Absolutism

 

By David K. Shipler 

                A crucial feature of the Soviet Union’s dictatorship was its enforcement by peers. Your co-workers, your schoolmates, the fellow members of your local Communist Party committee or Komsomol (Communist youth organization) were primed to call you to account if you deviated from the norm. If you went to church regularly, your Komsomol committee might hold a meeting to denounce you. If you went farther and made “anti-Soviet” statements—criticizing government policy or advocating democratic reforms—your peers in Komsomol might be assembled for a vote to expel you, which would handicap your future job prospects. In the post-Stalin era, imprisonment was usually reserved for the most stubbornly outspoken; less dramatic disobedience could be curtailed by lesser means.

 It was not an airtight system. It aspired to totalitarianism but fell short. It contained eddies of quiet noncompliance, which allowed small pools of independent thinking. But orthodoxy had power, wielded both vertically from the top down, and also horizontally in a milieu of conformity. As a result, most Soviet citizens acquiesced politically and never bumped up against the hard limits of dissent. Newspaper editors, for example, rarely had to be confronted by the censors; writers and their bosses internalized the restrictions, even endorsed them, and so knew the comfortable scope of the permissible.

                That is approximately what the Republican Party appears to strive for in 2021, not only in the party organization itself but in the broader society. It is a new American Dream, aspiring to a comprehensive, unitary way of thinking about history, culture, law, politics, science, religion, and race. The odd thing is that it is pursued in the guise of individualism, touting the preeminence of personal free choice, while in fact it is driven by just the opposite—the thrust of group-think.

                This horizontal enforcement is a hallmark of the emerging Republican strategy. A catechism of professed beliefs is monitored for irreverence, and the punishment is akin to excommunication. Absolutism is required: adore Donald Trump, reject the 2020 election as stolen, dismiss the January 6 insurrection as insignificant, refuse to investigate it.

How to Love America

 

By David K. Shipler 

                Americans who want to love their country have to do it unconditionally, the way a parent loves a wayward child. Not to overlook flaws but to believe that correcting them is possible. Not to ignore the racial hatred, the murderous wars, and the impoverished children, but to cultivate the opposites that coexist with the injustices: the embrace of pluralism, the repugnance to violence, the passion for opportunity. This requires clear eyes to see what is and clear vision to see what can be.

                America needs a Carl Sandburg, who in the poem “Chicago” could honor struggle alongside raw virtue:

On the faces of women and children I have seen the marks of wanton hunger 

. . . Come and show me another city with lifted head singing so proud to be alive and coarse and strong  and cunning.

                America needs a Langston Hughes, who could embed within a verse both grievance and desire:

America never was America to me,

And yet I swear this oath—

America will be! . . .

We, the people must redeem

The land, the mines, the plants, the rivers.

The mountains and the endless plain—

All, all the stretch of these great green states—

And make America again!

America needs a Martin Luther King, Jr., who could lament and challenge and believe within a single sentence: “I have a dream that one day even the state of Mississippi, a state sweltering with the heat of injustice, sweltering with the heat of oppression, will be transformed into an oasis of freedom and justice.”

America does have Rep. Jamie Raskin, the lead House Manager prosecuting Donald Trump’s impeachment, who said this in his closing statement:

“In the history of humanity, democracy is an extremely rare and fragile and transitory thing. . . .  For most of history, the norm has been dictators, autocrats, bullies, despots, tyrants, cowards who take over our governments. For most of the history of the world, and that's why America is such a miracle.”

How do we love a miracle betrayed? How do we love a nation tarnished? This is now a task for all citizens from the left to the right, from the depths of deprivation to the heights of wealth, from sea to shining sea.

The acquittal of Trump does not teach us how to love a broken country. Nor would conviction have done so, no matter how warranted. Either path would have turned millions of Americans of one persuasion away from millions of others. Justice could not be done in the Senate chamber. Justice has to be done in the hearts of the people. Justice has to arise naturally from whatever inner values have been sown in every citizen, whatever affection we hold for the cacophony of democracy, whatever beauty we can see in the messy differences among us.

 Love of country is the energy of reform. The Republican Party has made sure that Trump will continue to use his perfect pitch for propaganda. He will fix his marksman’s eye on whites who are alienated and outraged and frightened—and violent. He will not be vanquished from America any more easily than Voldemort from the world of Harry Potter.

The remedy to Trump’s toxic spell is a disapproving, combative love for an America wounded but capable of recovery—in short, an unconditional love full of contradictions. It is a pragmatic, persistent idealism and realism. It is a love not for a leader, not for a party, not for one policy or another, but a love for that miracle of self-government that has been, as Raskin noted, such an aberration in the course of human history.

The Religion of Democracy

By David K. Shipler 

                If America has a state religion, the historian Robert Kelley used to say, it is constitutional democracy. Among all the rancorous arguments across the American spectrum, no compelling bid to abandon the Constitution can be heard. No rhetorical attack on democracy is made. No threat to the nation, no fear of insecurity provokes such apostasy.

Even those who would undermine the Constitution, including the Capitol rioters, have acted in its name. Thus did Donald Trump’s appeals to “stop the steal” of the election intone the mantra of democracy, not the authoritarian rule he was attempting to install. Democracy was hailed by rioters who believed that they were fighting to defend it even as their insurrection moved to take it down.

That profound hypocrisy becomes less puzzling when Constitutional democracy is seen as religious. For religion can be perverted. It can be rationalized into destruction, as a world full of religious violence has witnessed. A creed can be selectively interpreted, twisted to fit parochial interests, and ignited as a call to arms. A religion’s righteous purity can be contaminated with hatred, which is then fueled by religion’s righteous certainty. No secular reasoning can rebut the divine inspiration, the holy cause. If it is for good, then that is good. But it is not always so.

American democracy is often elevated with religious language: “sacred,” “desecrate,” “temple.” Both sides in the Capitol invasion of January 6 used the terms. The lone police officer who tried to coax rioters out of the Senate chamber said gently, “Just want to let you guys know, this is the sacredest place.”

As the mobs roamed the halls searching for legislators to kidnap or kill, Trump tweeted, “These are the things and events that happen when a sacred landslide election victory is so unceremoniously & viciously stripped away from great patriots. . . . Remember this day forever!”

 Once the Senate was taken back, Senator Dick Durbin declared on the floor: “This is a sacred place. But this sacred place was desecrated by a mob today on our watch. This temple to democracy was defiled by thugs, who roamed the halls — sat in that chair, Mr. Vice President — one that you vacated at 2:15 this afternoon.”

President Biden, in his inaugural address, hailed the survival of democracy against those who sought “to drive us from this sacred ground.”

The Next Trump

 

By David K. Shipler 

                Whether Donald Trump runs again in 2024 or fades from politics, his enigmatic hold on tens of millions of Americans will be a lesson to the next demagogue. Much will be learned from Trump’s successes in manipulating huge swaths of the public, and also from his failures to translate his autocratic desires into practical power.

                Just the fact that 72 percent of Republicans tell pollsters that they believe Trump’s discredited claim that he won the 2020 election is a mark of his perverse success in selling the Big Lie. His outsized personality, his ridiculous assertions, his coarse and insulting talent for channeling resentments felt by masses of alienated citizens placed him so far above reproach in so many minds that his obvious corruption and damage to the country’s reputation and national security made no impact on the committed. After four years of falsehoods, incompetence, and immorality, he won eleven million more votes than in 2016 (up from 63 to 74 million).

                He has deftly played the dual role of tough guy and victim, of swaggering bully and persecuted prey. This is a skillful embodiment of the wishes and fears of the millions, mostly white working class, who feel marginalized and dishonored while yearning for the wealth and strength that Trump appears to possess. He has given them the dignity that many feel they have been denied by the liberal, urban, multiethnic society that their country is becoming.

Despite his serial fabrications, his lack of moral boundaries made him seem authentic and unscripted. He was a paradox: an outsider but a pampered part of the corporate elite, a non-politician whose every move was politically calculated for his own benefit, a drainer of the “swamp” who wallowed in corrupt self-dealing. He was right when he said that he could shoot somebody on Fifth Avenue and not lose voters.  

But because Trump did not understand government and antagonized authoritative agencies, he was often stymied as he tried to rule dictatorially, above the law. He crudely attacked the intelligence agencies, the military, the FBI, and other power centers, precisely those that an autocrat would need to muster under his control. His impatience and incompetence stymied many of his efforts to shortcut the due process built into the regulatory system.

The Dynamics of Democracy and Dictatorship

 

By David K. Shipler 

In a free society, some are guilty, but all are responsible.

--Abraham Joshua Heschel 

                The 2020 election and its aftermath have exposed the fragility and resilience of democracy, making this an opportune moment for national introspection by the United States. It is a crisis so serious that it calls for a non-partisan 911-style commission to help Americans wrench free of their myopic politics and look clearly in the mirror. Nothing less than the country’s constitutional freedoms are at stake.

Significantly, both Democrats and Republicans agree on one argument: that the other side is jeopardizing democracy. Each side contends that its opponent is only pretending to support free and fair elections, that either Republicans want to overturn the people’s vote, or Democrats want to win by fraud—take your choice. The antagonists, whether cynical or sincere, still put the ballot box on a pedestal. Democracy is still the lodestar.

But that is where equivalence ends. This is a clash between reality and unreality, a study in the power of manipulation, propaganda, and popular gullibility, which are ingredients of dictatorship. Rarely if ever in U.S. history have so many citizens fallen for such a grotesque fiction as President Trump’s evidence-free claim of a stolen election. Rarely if ever before have election officials been threatened with violence. And rarely if ever before have calls been heard for a new election under martial law, as voiced by a group calling itself “We the People Convention” and supported by retired General Michael Flynn, the pardoned felon who served as national security adviser and head of the Defense Intelligence Agency.  

Currently, the risks to democracy exist inside minds more than inside institutions. There are systemic problems, obviously, but the process held up well in this difficult election. By contrast, thoughts and beliefs did not.