Here we go again. Autocrats always end up resorting to the same tactics: Those who are with me are “good people.” Dissenters are disloyal, they must be categorized and eliminated. Our new president seems to like the old recipe. Let’s do more than passively hope it won’t work.
Crisscrossing Argentina from the Iguazu Falls to the glaciers of Patagonia for the past 15 days couldn’t completely disconnect our little group from news of the US and the only-too-real scene in the White House. In particular, one presidential pronouncement, calling the media “The enemy of the American people,” dredged up decades-old bad memories.
It’s a summer evening in France, 1983. Just before dinner time, a visitor and I sit on the couch ready to watch the 8pm TV news. We see the ads before the show and commiserate: they’re terrible, especially the one peddling diapers. But I suddenly realize we’re not kvetching about the same thing. My couch companion isn’t complaining about the commercial’s tackiness and broad humor; no, he’s concerned about the waste and disorder created by too many diaper brands.
My free-market antennae now deployed, I probe: “Perhaps it is wasteful and possibly inefficient, but who gets to decide how many diaper brands and which ones?” Unfazed, my guest calmly and patronizingly explains: “That’s what The Party is for.”
My friend is a hard core, card-carrying member of the Parti communiste français—and a strict Lacanian psychoanalyst to boot. By hard core I mean he spends his long French vacation in the Soviet Union (although with precautions: the bottom of his suitcase is lined with Kool cigarettes and soft Western toilet paper, scarce necessities that can also be used as currency at his destination).
I give him a hard time about The Party and the Soviet Union’s dismal record on personal freedoms. For example, why must Jews list their nationality as Jewish on their identification papers? “Do you not realize that the designation has been used by Soviet officials to bar entry into prestigious tech institutes?”
His reply made me shudder:
No, no no. The Constitution protects the rights and personal freedom of all. With one exception: The Enemy Of The People. Their nature is such that they can’t have any rights.
Born in 1944, I grew up in a France that was dominated by the post-WWII Communist Party. The Soviet Union-financed unions had the run of coal mines, steel mills, railways, seaports… And, perhaps most importantly, the printing and distribution of newspapers and books. Although the situation in France is quite different now—the French Communist Party is an irrelevant cadre that mutters the old slogans in empty halls—the memories of the old abuses linger.
And they should linger. There’s always an autocrat ready to ride to power with the old ideology in places such as Hungary, Poland, and Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin’s Russia. (If you insist on getting depressed, among the abundant literature on the topic, there is Joseph Vissarionovich Djugashvili’s—a.k.a. Stalin’s—biography by Edvard Radzinsky, deeply researched. Or Simon Sebag Montefiore’s Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar to somberly meditate upon.) It’s a shock that the autocratic ideology (actually dating back to Romes’s hostis publicus or Robespierre’s ennemi du peuple) has taken rise here in America.
I moved to Silicon Valley in 1985 and later became a US citizen by what I like to consider mutual choice. I enjoyed the freedoms and cultural melting pot, including practicing the Spanish I learned as a child.
But the bad memories returned when, after Sept. 11, we labeled some people “enemy combatants,” deprived them of constitutional protections, and, in some cases, tortured them. To justify these crimes, deputy attorney general John Yoo tortured language and precedent. For a lot of citizens, myself included, it was a hard come down—an unpleasant jolt from what we assumed was a collective reverence for the Constitution by the American people and their government.
Today, the bad memories come back again.
The 45th president of the United States has declared the press to be “the enemy of the American people.” He has repeatedly accused the news media of publishing and broadcasting falsehoods and, more recently, he has excluded prominent offenders from a White House briefing. This from someone whose lies, fake news, and managed leaks are part of the public record via his tweets, TV appearances, and court documents.
I thought that, among other freedoms, the Constitution of my country guaranteed a free press:
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.
If the president sincerely thinks that the press is the enemy, the potential for “justified” abuse is terrifying. Will another John Yoo torture existing law and “open up” the libel laws as Trump has said he’d like? Or find ways around the protection of religious freedoms and imprison or harass people for the content of their minds (or their smartphones)? All in the name of keeping us safe from “the enemies of the people,” of course.
We’ve seen it happen in not-so-distant places and times. It can happen again, especially if the party to which Trump nominally belongs pretends it’s just Trump being Trump—nothing to worry about, we have to proceed with our agenda. In a way, these senators and representatives are even more toxic than the 45th president: Because it would be an inconvenience, they refuse to protect our rights.
There is another perspective. Such Trump tweet-jerk pronouncements are an admission of weakness. He feels threatened—rightly so—and, like all bullies, he’s lashing out at imagined slights. But, also like all bullies, he will inevitably stumble. After a couple of serious accidents, or a couple really damaging and incontrovertible revelations, those who have ignored or defended his misdeeds will suddenly wake up and protect themselves by rendering him impotent…and perhaps jobless.