Copyright berkshireeagle
In his tribute to the late comedian Andy Kaufman, Michael Stipe of R.E.M. sang, “If you believed they put a man on the moon, man on the moon, if you believed there’s nothing up his sleeve, then nothing is cool.” Lately, I can divide my progressively inclined friends and relatives by whether they are horrified yet bemused or undeterred by the shenanigans of the White House, the Supreme Court and Congress, or whether they see in the bad moon rising the reenactment of the Viktor Orban authoritarian presidential playbook as enacted in Hungary. For these folks, cocktail discussion has begun to migrate to whether global warming will make Canada a suitable retirement home or if they do speak English in Belize. There was a time when I scorned paranoia. It hasn’t helped that The New York Times, bellwether for much news media, has had a lock on Chicken Little pronouncements for as long as I can remember. When the sky in its pages isn’t falling on democracy at home, it is of late caving on Israel. The plot always seems to thicken on its editorial pages. The slow drip of paranoid thinking is becoming a waterfall. What sacred cow will they turn to hamburger today? Brick by brick, they take down democracy. Even a broken clock on the Times’ editorial board is right twice a day. Doubt is creeping into my paranoia-resistant cortex. A slow drumbeat is building to a crescendo. What gives with the National Guard deployments? Are they just showmanship and denigration of Democratic governance in blue zones, or is this a trial run for martial law at election time? If Congress can override mail-in balloting, it’s all about intimidation at the polls, just like the good old days in the South. What once appeared over-the-top paranoia feels like a plan. In my Eagle Reels talk with former Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall, he warned that the dismissals of the judge advocates general, replaced by compliant tools of the president, pose a threat to democracy. Members of the military can only disobey an order is if it is deemed illegal. JAGs can do that. Next came dismissals in the Department of Justice and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. There is unseemly retribution, but there is also groundwork being laid on the road to autocracy. The assault on media with any perceived taint of liberal bias has gone where no administration has succeeded before. The Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which funded public media, has shuttered, and before it, the gutting of Voice of America and the evisceration of USAID, opening the floodgates to our enemies filling information and assistance vacuums. What sense does that make? Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin couldn’t have designed a more effective way to cripple critical U.S. influence worldwide. Academia was under attack in the McCarthy era in the 1950s, when it was hell on supposed communist sympathizers, not to mention union and civil rights organizers, but we never saw the wholesale blackmail of institutions of higher learning on this order of magnitude. Add the caving of white-shoe law firms that, by definition, should be better equipped to fight fire with legal fire. In my Eagle Reels conversation with Boston First Amendment attorney Jeffrey J. Pyle, he regretfully advised “better for a law firm to go out of business than to become an agent of totalitarianism.” Like Kendall, Pyle is not an alarmist. Then we come to the Federal Reserve, with its historic independence under challenge. In the overreach of the executive branch and the capitulation of a craven Congress, the entire bulwark of separation of powers and the independence of agencies and institutions— the beating heart of a strong republic — is surrendering to loyalty to the chief and autocratic rule in all but name. Irrespective of whether any beneficial outcome might ensue (giving the extreme benefit of the doubt), the ends do not justify the means. In the absence of debate and difference, the American experiment will fail, pure and simple. It didn’t even take 250 years. In a recent op-ed published by The Wall Street Journal, former White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel concludes: “The path to a second American century will flow through a rediscovered confidence in American exceptionalism.” This is entirely wrong. He is one more prominent Democrat unable to figure a way forward. American exceptionalism is exactly the blarney behind tariffs and every other phantom run amok in Donald Trump’s brain, like mad-cow disease through one too many Big Macs. It is one world we live in. Science, economics and governing principles matter. A smokestack on one continent spews poison on another, and a Euro there affects a dollar here. Wars overflow borders. Democracy itself is a currency only worth acquiring when healthy. You’re not paranoid if there is reason to be.
