Forgetting to Learn the Moral

American Samizdat: On Losing American Democracy

I’ll be frank. I’ve lost paid subscribers because of what they think my “politics.” There is much I could say about that but what I want to say is this. I’ve written many times that what I’m doing with American Samizdat is not about “politics.” I have politics. But I don’t write about them. If there were a political leader who represented all of my political views but who behaved like Donald Trump and demonstrated his pathological corruption and absence of character, I would oppose him. That point falls on apparently literal deaf ears. American Samizdat defends and pursues human dignity, human freedom, and human decency, all of which are inseparable from each other — so I’ll let none claim to me that they believe in freedom and support and vote for Donald Trump. About dignity and decency, I don’t think they would even make the effort.

The philosophy — it’s not a political ideology — that supports those three virtues and that vision of humankind is that which arose from the Enlightenment and with the Renaissance of human culture. I’ve written from the start here and many times, all over, that such is the vision to which Homo Vitruvius, in name and in creative spirit, is dedicated. It is that same spirit that led me to create American Samizdat with its specific mission.

I could not not do it.

And both efforts converge in meaning with the intellectual and spiritual memoir I am currently writing and publishing here on Substack, Reason for Being in the World. They are all three of a piece. The person who emerges by the end of the memoir, the writer that person becomes, is the writer who would create Homo Vitruvius and who could not not create American Samizdat.

If I lost every paid subscriber, I would feel bad and still do the same.

So I’ll be frank again. If you have been reading me for some length of time and appreciating the creative writing and intellectual work I do here, if you are a newer reader who quickly came to think that what I provide on these digital pages offers creative and intellectual value to you, please, if you are able, consider becoming a paid subscriber.

Whatever you feel able to do, remember: you read; therefore, the writer exists.

Forgetting to Learn the Moral

It cannot be emphasized enough: this has never happened before.

Political entities have persisted as autocracies in one form or another for centuries long. Already autocratic tyrannies revolutionized themselves into still worse totalitarian terror states. Incipient democracies succumbed in incipient stages to illiberal, reactionary subversion or attack. Still young, small democracies slid into illiberalism. Great empires like the Roman have fallen. Others sank below the horizon.

But never in the history of the world has a centuries-old democracy, the third most populous nation in the world with the fourth largest territory, the culturally, economically, and militarily most powerful nation – not just in the world but that the world has ever known – deteriorated into pluto-kleptocratic autocracy. There is no true precedent for what is in progress in the United States. There is no roadmap to read. And there is more.

Beyond what the United States has been in itself, for its citizens, there is the effect of its presence, its action in the world. After the resounding total victory of U.S.-led allied forces in the Second World War, even in the face of an adversarial Soviet Bloc during the Cold War, the U.S. became a unipolar world power across all areas of influence. Notwithstanding continuing internal social weaknesses and grave missteps during those years, with well-known American transgressions against democracy, American power supported and sustained the spread of democracy around the world in the second half of the Twentieth Century. Second wave post-war world democratization increased the number of democracies in the world from 12 in the early 1940s to 36 by the early 60s. The third wave, beginning with the Spanish and Portuguese transitions from dictatorship in Western Europe, and after U.S. misadventures in Southeast Asia were over, led to new democracies in the Asia-Pacific region. In 1979, when I first visited Venezuela, it was one of only three democracies in all of Latin America. By the mid-90s, another 20 could be added to the list.

The fall of the Eastern bloc and democratization throughout Eastern Europe is unthinkable absent a global ground in the power and influence of a democratic United States.

Already, as part of a global development, democracies are in retreat and illiberal autocracy is expanding. Already the United States ranks only 36 on the Democracy Matix, listed as a “deficient democracy.” (The Global State of Democracy Index ranks nations in the categories of representation, rights, rule of law, and participation.)

Absent a democratic and democracy-supporting United States, the American nation gets added to Russia and China as three dominating authoritarian world powers contending and cooperating with each other in earth, wealth, and freedom-extracting consumptive domination. Outposts of democracy would remain, with Europe the most unified and powerful, but there is little basis for envisioning any course more successful than a sustaining, defensive retrenchment against multiple threats, with no true, if any, U.S. alliance through NATO.

How does the world develop from that sorry arrangement?

In nations that never enjoyed a liberal democratic state, such as Russia and China, totalitarian states have long persisted, for nearly a century so far for China, with devastating losses in both nations of tens of millions of lives. After the fall of the Soviet Union, Russia experienced a brief window of democratic rule, supported by the United States, but Boris Yeltsin’s mistaken choice for a successor, in Vladimir Putin, condemned Russia to a quick return to a different kind of murderous, criminal state.

Portugal and Spain were small, weak nations, and it took four decades and economic and cultural envelopment by a democratic Western world for their autocrats to fade from the scene. Pinochet’s Chile offers a relative success story to recovery from autocracy, after, still, 17 years, with over 3000 dead from political persecution and over two hundred thousand driven to exile.

But a nation such as the United States? How, once fallen, do we imagine a recovery to occur? The Trumpist mission over the next four years, with this second chance, already under way in the Supreme Court and judgeships (Aileen Canon) and at the state party and government level, will be to gain typical autocratic control over the small levers of law enforcement, military, and electoral power to distort election outcomes by the next midterm and control them by 2024. That roadmap we have. That’s how it’s done.

Once the authoritarians have adequate control over government, what paths are available? And adequate is all that’s needed early on: not only Putin in Russia but Hugo Chavez in Venezuela and Recep Erdoğan in Turkey took up to a decade to reach the full extent of their autocratic powers. There has been much talk over the past decade, from both Trumpists and fervent antifascists, about the possibility of civil war in the United States. But, again, consider: never in the history of the world has a nation so powerful as the U.S., with a military so massive, fallen into a state of civil war. When I say that such an eventuality is unimaginable, I don’t say it as the usual indirect moral dissuasion. I mean it literally. There is no model on which to build an imagination of how such a conflict in the U.S. would proceed, of its catastrophic destruction.

There is, however, a current example in the world of a nonviolent effort to recover democracy from an illiberal fall, in Poland, where last year’s national election returned power to true democrats.

Since the 1989 Eastern Bloc fall, Poland had emerged as the East European exemplar of successful democratic development. Then, from a 2015 victory by the rightwing Law and Justice Party, followed the steady erosion of liberal democracy. All that follows will read familiarly to Americans and America watchers.

Writes Anna Grzymala-Busse in “Poland’s Path to Illiberalism,”

[T]he [Law and Justice Party] openly views the post-1989 democratic transformation and accompanying market reforms as products of an illegitimate compromise between the former communist regime and the opposition liberals who allegedly sold out Poland’s interests when they held power.

These actions and ideas amount to illiberal populism. It is illiberal because the governing party has attacked the critical institutions of liberal democracy, starting with the independence of the courts and their ability to exercise judicial oversight, not least of elections. The party’s control of public media (especially television) outlets has remade them into propaganda mouthpieces. And PiS denounces the post-1989 elite establishment as a corrupt cartel, while repeatedly claiming that it alone represents “the real people,” a textbook example of University of Georgia political scientist Cas Mudde’s definition of populism.

. . . .

[The Law and Justice Party] has followed the authoritarian template first developed by the right-wing Fidesz Party in Hungary, led by Prime Minister Viktor Orbán. After winning a parliamentary supermajority in 2010 elections, Fidesz proceeded to neuter the courts, the media, and nongovernmental organizations, and then turned to politicizing the civil service and revising the electoral law in its favor. Fidesz also introduced a new constitution in 2011, which locked in its advantages of incumbency—and in effect gave it a permanent veto over future governments.

This, again, is how it happens. According to Piotr Buras for the European Council on Foreign Relations,

After the Law and Justice government was elected in 2015 with almost 38 per cent of the vote, it carried out nothing less than a brazen coup d’état against the liberal-democratic constitutional order. It disempowered, politicised, or corrupted the institutions enshrined in the constitution – the Constitutional Court, independent courts, public television, the prosecutor’s office – by removing the restrictions on power characteristic of liberalism to protect minorities.

What followed can be described as a tyranny of the (parliamentary) majority.

Just as we see in the United States,

[Pro-democracy leader Donald] Tusk [of last year’s victorious democratic Civic Coalition] is a strong leader whose position in the party and among liberal voters remains unchallenged. At the same time, he is like a red rag to many voters, including opposition voters. His negative electorate – those who will not vote for him under any circumstances – is as large as that of his rival Kaczynski.

But now here is the challenge:

The current opposition will face a task that no one has ever had to face before: it will attempt to dismantle an illiberal system that was established in the last eight years by seemingly democratic means. European history contains many examples of political transformation towards democracy, both from right-wing authoritarianism (Portugal, Spain, Greece) and from communism (the former Eastern Bloc) or defeated National Socialism (Germany, Austria).

Overcoming an illiberal system that maintains the pretence of democracy is uncharted territory. [Emphasis added.]

Further,

the current illiberal system was created with the help of apparently legal, but in fact unconstitutional, laws. The Constitutional Court was staffed with apparatchiks loyal to the Law and Justice party, the Supreme Court with people who, according to European courts, are not independent judges.

Thus, fundamentally, critically,

on what legal basis should the institutional reconstruction take place? Does the extraordinary situation justify unusual means, perhaps even means that test the limits of legitimacy?

Echoes Heather A. Conley of The German Marshal Fund, writing “Poland is Writing the Manual for Illiberal Detox”:

Eight years of operating by an illiberal playbook left an indelible mark on the country’s democratic institutions, particularly its media and judicial systems, which were significantly diminished and commandeered to preserve the former ruling party’s power. Unfortunately, institutions do not magically “snap back” under a new liberal government, as Prime Minister Donald Tusk painfully discovered in the earliest days of his tenure. The previous government of PiS left some legal traps designed specifically to slow down the process of rebuilding democratic institutions. The new Polish government quickly tried to reverse the former ruling party’s control over Poland’s state television, radio, and government news agency by first attempting to wrestle control of them and then, when that failed, by declaring the broadcaster insolvent. Their efforts ran into strong resistance from recent laws and new institutions such as a special media council and a less-than-independent Constitutional Court created by the former government. Because these changes were criticized as illegitimate by a number of PiS MPs, polarization in the country has continued to rise.

The illiberal detoxification process for Poland will be long and laborious—akin to withdrawal symptoms—without any guarantee against relapse. A change in leadership does not deprogram the mindset of a significant portion of the Polish society. And we don’t have a democratic manual for this. [Emphasis added]

Again, we approach the critical fundamental question:

Does a new government follow the illiberal procedures and mechanisms put in place by the previous regime? Or do they dissolve them, opening the door for retaliation in a future transition? Tusk acknowledged that his government could have moved more slowly on media reform, but the stakes are high if the Tusk government is not successful in restoring independence and resilience to Poland’s institutions.

Says Conley,

Poland is a compelling example of the need for more nimble and flexible tools to restore institutional independence after a prolonged period or slide toward illiberalism.

Everyone of these considerations is magnified incalculably in application to the historically singular and powerful nation that is the United States.

As we contemplate, as we must, a road to rescue, even as the accident itself has not quite yet disrupted the air waves with its crash and injury, this challenge looms before us. History shows, democracies get few mistakes in resisting autocracy before they fall, and the U.S. has already made too many mistakes. Currently, agitation is building for, and the White House is considering, preemptive pardons for those that Trump and his nominees, aides, and allies have threatened with retribution. If the current U.S. government and democratic forces wish to signal that they truly recognize the clear danger to democracy of Trumpism and are finally willing to act decisively to try to thwart it, this will be the sign of a new, resolute resistance in support of an assertive offense to rescue the nation. Failure to take this step, leaving so many vulnerable to prosecution and intimidation, injecting a repressive fear into the citizenry, as authoritarian governments do, would represent a fatally feckless and, frankly, foolish, even stupid inaction.

Let me understand – they threatened all those people all those many times, in the clearest possible expressions of enmity and intention, and when you still possessed the power to prevent it, you did nothing?

We thought they didn’t really mean it.

Did you have any basis for believing that?

He said he was joking. Sometimes. Sometimes he sounded pretty serious.

Did the others say they were joking?

No.

Does that sound like something to joke about?

No.

But you thought it was worth the risk?

We thought our institutions would stand in the way.

You mean the ones that had been steadily failing to do that for nine years?

Right.

They are historians and great writers who will earn our admiration and fulfill a mission by their deep insight into people and events after the fact.

The demand of political actors is that they see the future (from the past) before events occur, then help to shape them. And there is no great vision required here and now, in any case, but rather resolute courage.

Once before during this election year I offered a clip from the great Emeric Pressburger and Michael Powell World War II era film, released in 1943 during the war, The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp. Roger Livesey and Anton Walbrook play British Colonel Clive Candy (Colonel Blimp) and German Colonel Theo Kretschmar-Schuldorff, who are enemies who become friends after the First World War. Here, at the start of the Second World War, in older age, the now anti-Nazi German tells his British friend something very important. Walbrook’s performance is especially fine.

Theo talks of Naziism, but when he did, that particularly hateful form of fascism represented a more general kind still only two decades old among political ideologies. The capacity for mass destruction in modern war had been revealed by World War I. The evil capacities of modern authoritarian and totalitarian states, usually most easily represented by death tolls, was still unknown. Only later would we learn not only of Hitler’s numbers but also the 9-12 million dead in Stalin’s forced famines and purges, the 35-45 million from Mao’s Great Leap Forward and Cultural Revolution, a quarter of the Cambodian population in the Killing Fields. But the numbers needn’t be so incomprehensible to shock. Autocracies around the world of lesser fatal severity have killed many thousands, imprisoned tens of thousands more opponents.

None of these outcomes were pre-existent realities before they came to pass to satisfy the irresistibly skeptical or the immovably hopeful and reliant on a Constitutional “bulwark.”

But by now, more than enough is known to foresee possible, even predictable futures and to work to prevent them. This the Biden administration in its waning days and all other democrats need to begin to do immediately. Or there may not be a rematch in even a hundred years.

AJA

Poet. Storyteller. Dramatist. Essayist. Artificer.

ajayadler.com