Josh Marshall has a sobering post at Talking Points Memo in which he quotes Lee Bollinger from an interview for the Chronicle of Higher Education:
We’re in the midst of an authoritarian takeover of the U.S. government. It’s been coming and coming, and not everybody is prepared to read it that way. The characters regarded as people to emulate, like Orbán and Putin and so on, all indicate that the strategy is to create an illiberal democracy or an authoritarian democracy or a strongman democracy. That’s what we’re experiencing. Our problem in part is a failure of imagination. We cannot get ourselves to see how this is going to unfold in its most frightening versions. You neutralize the branches of government; you neutralize the media; you neutralize universities, and you’re on your way.
We’re beginning to see the effects on universities. It’s very, very frightening.
“Failure of imagination” is a nice way of saying “people who shouldn’t be are in denial of what’s happening.” I’d point to Chuck Schumer’s failure to hold the line this past week.
Back to Marshall:
That is what is happening. And we’re in the middle of it. As semi-familiar as the words and concepts are, we all collectively need to concentrate on that statement. It’s neither a future possibility nor an accomplished fact.
That is, as John Connor says in Terminator 2, there’s no fate, and we can’t act like there is.
Trump and his administration, with the help of the Republican Party, while dismantling the federal government, are also simultaneously attacking other nodes of power outside of government: the government. Obviously higher education, but also, and here’s where Marshall goes deeper, the law firms that are necessary for private actors to work within the legal system.
A free society exists not simply because there are limits on the power of the government. The state may have a monopoly on the legitimate use of violence. But it does not have a monopoly on power. It’s free because there are multiple nodes of power — cultural, economic, social — in the national space. Universities are one of those. The private sector economy is another.
We each need to resist in our own spaces and places.
We’ve got a huge job on our hands and there’s no guarantee we’ll succeed. But the first step of acting is knowing exactly where you are. People who are thinking in terms of Viktor Orbán are not surprised by each successive move. It’s actually pretty textbook. How it all shakes out comes down to the decisions countless private actors make. It also means supporting institutions that are meaningfully supporting free society. That doesn’t have to be a matter of performative spectacles. At its most essential, it means not changing behavior.
This is war, and we need to observe, orient, decide, act faster than those we oppose.