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.
