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I don’t know how many of us have the stomach to be dissidents. I certainly don’t know what I will do if I’m forced to ask myself that question. But it’s probably something we should all think about at least a little bit ahead of time. With people like Tom Hohman saying they plan to arrest people who “harbor” undocumented workers and Trump and his henchmen threatening to jail everyone in sight, it’s not completely out of the question that we might be confronted with some unpleasant choices before too long.
The Atlantic features an interesting article this week on that question and I wanted to offer a gift link for you. Here’s a short excerpt:
In the 1970s, the writer Andrei Amalrik characterized the secret power of his fellow dissidents in the Soviet Union: “They did something simple to the point of genius: in an unfree country, they began to conduct themselves like free people.”
Recent examples of people acting out of this same humble presumption—and being slapped down for it—are abundant. In just the past few weeks, a 75-year-old Algerian novelist was detained for expressing opinions that were thought to be “endangering the nation”; a Thai human-rights lawyer had two years added to his existing 14-year prison term for writing a letter to the king that apparently violated the country’s “royal defamation law”; the police in Belarus, ahead of the presidential election in January, held 100 relatives of political prisoners out of fear that they might speak. And we haven’t even gotten to Iran, Russia, or North Korea.
These contemporary dissidents share a mindset, what Václav Havel once called an “existential attitude.” They did not wake up one day and decide to take on the regimes of their countries. They just allowed themselves to be guided by their own individuality—an Iranian woman who decides to no longer wear a hijab, a Uyghur teacher who tries to share his people’s history—and collided with societies that demanded conformity and obedience. Dissidents are born out of this choice: either assert their authentic selves or accept the authoritarian’s mafioso bargain, safety and protection in exchange for keeping one’s head down. Those rare few who just can’t make that bargain—they transform into dissidents.
The equation is simple: The more authoritarianism in the world, the more dissidents. And we are undeniably in an authoritarian moment. According to a report last year by the Varieties of Democracy Institute at the University of Gothenburg, in Sweden, when it comes to global freedom, we have returned to a level last seen in 1986. About 5.7 billion people—72 percent of the world’s population—now live under authoritarian rule. Even the United States, vaunted beacon of democracy, is about to inaugurate a president who openly boasts of wanting to be a “dictator on day one,” who regularly threatens to jail his opponents and sic the military on the “enemy within,” and who jokes about his election being the country’s last.
You don’t need to believe that Donald Trump is planning Gulags to see why those who resisted the repressive regimes of the 20th century, as well as those who fight all over the world today, might be worth paying attention to. When Havel talked about an existential attitude, he was describing a fervent sense that certain fundamental principles matter, and that even if a society begins to degrade and devalue those ideals, abandoning them, for these people, is not an option. Many Americans understand today what political exhaustion and complacency look and feel like. But the dissident is the one who hopes against hope.
I’m certainly not convinced that we’re there but I do see the possibility. And it’s not the first time. I’ve written a lot about the parallels between this time and the red scares, particularly in the 1950s, and even more recently in the wake of 9/11. I’m sure I don’t have to even mention the century of Jim Crow as an example of repressive government. But there is something different now in that the democracy itself is under threat in a way that I don’t think we’ve experienced. The authoritarians are turning on the rule of law in a much more explicit way.
I think there will be plenty of people who come into the crosshairs of this new regime. If Trump has his way it will be in the millions as they launch their raids on immigrant communities. And it might not stop there. Once they get a taste for it, these types tend to want to keep going. So we’ll see. But it pays to stay alert, think things through and be prepared for anything.
We’ll try to keep you informed as best we can about the various goings on over the next few years. Obviously, we can’t catch everything but we’ll do our best to synthesize the news in ways that are useful to you. And if we can keep a little bit of humor (gallows?) we’ll do that too. So I hope you’ll continue to stop by, even if you are generally avoiding the Great Cacophony in service of your sanity. We’ll do our best to keep it real.
If you would like to put a little something in the old Hullabaloo stocking to help us keep it going, I’d be so grateful. We’re all in this together.
cheers,
digby