The First Chill of Self-Censorship

                                                         By David K. Shipler

                The decisions by the rich men who own the Los AngelesTimes and the Washington Post tokill their editorial boards’ endorsements of Kamala Harris are reminders ofhow an authoritarian culture works. It has official censors, of course, but thesystem’s everyday mechanism doesn’t always rely on edicts from on high. It can operateautomatically as private citizens police themselves and their peers, avoiding riskand informing on those who deviate or dissent.

                That ishow the surveillance state of the Soviet Union functioned. Editors and writersknew 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 neededto delete.

                Inschools and workplaces, fellow students and colleagues were on guard againstpolitical irreverence and would report it. Pressure and punishment were oftenexacted there, at that level by those institutions. The same is happening todayin 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 whereindividuals live their lives.

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

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

Trump is not coy about the visceralaggressions that fuel his agenda. He threatens and curses like a Mafia boss, openlyadmires foreign dictators, uses the Stalinist term “enemies of the people” todescribe news organizations, and says broadcasters who fact-check him shouldlose their licenses. As demonstrated by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos and biotech investorPatrick Soon-Shiong, who own the Washington Post and Los AngelesTimes respectively, there is plenty of cowardice in America beyond the ranksof Republicans who simultaneously detest and fear Trump. Bezos has federalcontracts, and Soon-Shiong’s interests could be subject to federal regulation. Theyobviously assume that Trump would abuse his office to take revenge on them, andso they shrink from endorsing his opponent. The chill begins.

                Inaddition, Trump’s demonization of Democrats as “enemies from within” wouldencourage grassroots vigilantism, which is already on the rise, and probablylead right-wing prosecutors to bring charges, as Trump has advocated, spreadingfear and corroding the pluralism of American politics.

His draconian pledge to mobilizethe military and police to deport some 12 million undocumented immigrants wouldalso mobilize ordinary citizens to report on people with “foreign” names andswarthy skin, exposing American citizens and legal immigrants to unjustified documentchecks and roundups. A spasm of racial profiling and harassment would sweep thecountry, activated in large measure by hateful and suspicious citizens with “American”names and white skin.

                We sawa preview against Muslims after 9/11 under the George W. Bush administration. Reportsto the FBI from the public were often motivated by personal vendettas, randomencounters, and domestic disputes, according to FBI agents I interviewed at thetime. One agent told me his colleagues felt guilty and embarrassed checking outevery tip, as they were ordered to do by the White House. The agent in chargeof the Washington, DC office acknowledged to me that the bureau’s resources tofight real crime were being dangerously diluted. Multiply those effects manyfoldunder Trump’s mass deportation scheme.

                Then,too, Trump and the extreme right Heritage Foundation are preparing to purge thefederal government of specialists who don’t fall in line politically, anotherfeature of authoritarian systems from Hungary, Venezuela, and other countriesthat have voted democratically to vote down democracy.

                Itmight be asking too much for folks to risk their jobs and their comfort, muchless their liberty, to stand up for their right to speak and act in violationof whatever limits the president and his collaborators set. Reporters like me,who have covered dissidents in dictatorships, ask ourselves whether we wouldhave such courage of defiance. If we’re honest, we don’t know.

                But whatAmericans have learned about themselves is not encouraging. That about half thepopulation is not alarmed by Trump’s authoritarian playbook is itself a causefor alarm, for you have to  be intensely alert to protect democratic liberty. Thathis crowds are excited into ecstasies of growly cheers by his rants ofvilification against his Democratic opponents suggests a broad acceptance ofpolitical oppression. The Trump phenomenon has exposed an American society notvery different from most other countries.

                Trump gotone of the loudest cheers at Madison Square Garden by proposing a bill with a one-year prison sentence for burning an American flag.Evidently, neither he nor his supporters knew that the Supreme Court, in the1989 case Texasv. Johnson, found a prohibition of flag burning unconstitutional, violatingthe First Amendment’s guarantee of free speech. It was the latest in a longline of cases protecting symbolic expression. Trump might get hisway, though: That Court’s majority was only five to four. The current Court is much fartherto the right.

 Burning a flag surely disgusts most Americans,and it’s paradoxical to destroy the emblem of the freedom that permits theemblem’s destruction. And yet, to criminalize the act is to destroy the freedomitself.

 What the zealous American right does not getis this: Destroying your opponents’ freedom might feel good until the protectionsof liberty that you’ve torn down fail to protect you when your opponents are inpower, until the machinery of oppression you’ve constructed against them is turned against you. Intolerant impulses crossparty lines. So far, while the left has canceled professors and others fortheir offensive speech, inducing pockets of self-censorship, Democrats have no governmental agenda of authoritarianism.Not in 2024.