A Silence Spreads

 Earlier today, Michelle Goldberg published a truly sobering column in the Times. Her main point—or at least, the lesson I took from it, after applying it to my own situation, was: it’s not just me. That is to say, I’m not the only one who feels like they don’t have the energy to struggle against Trump a second time around. I was hoping this was merely a personal matter: I spent the four years of the first Trump presidency as a professional activist, after all, and eventually I ran out of steam. But I assumed that other people, especially younger people, would not be in this same boat. They would still be up for the fight ahead. 

But no, Goldberg confirms: apparently, the resignation is universal. Surveying the present ideological scene on the left, she finds a general sense of disengagement and fatalism. People are simply tired, just as I am. There’s nothing new to say about Trump. He’s terrible in all the familiar ways. We’d love to go out and think about something else for a change. But he’s still there; and demands that we keep jousting with him. If we don’t, he rides back into the White House unobstructed, and has an even more destructive second term than his first. American democracy itself may not survive. But who among us has the energy left to stop this? 

It wasn’t like this the first time around, as Goldberg too recalls. Back in 2016, I even felt a kind of excitement, I'm ashamed to admit, after Trump was elected. Here, at last, was the great Cause of our time. Here was something worth struggling against! 

Plus, we still believed at that point in the efficacy of political action. We had all been raised on that Martin Niemöller quote, in which the speaker reckons with the fact that he enabled tyranny to rise because he “did not speak out.” Likewise, we all knew that the "only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for good people to do nothing," or whatever that Edmund Burke quote is. Ergo, if we “spoke out,” and if we “did something,” democracy would prevail. 

It therefore seemed inevitable that all it would take to defeat Trump and restore sanity to our politics would be a vigilant citizenry and effective political mobilization. We would organize ourselves; we would march; we would protest. And there were certainly victories along the way: Trump isn’t still president today, for one thing; his family separation policy was eventually halted, seemingly through little more than the power of collective moral outrage. 

But we also discovered another ugly truth: “speaking out” and “doing something” are not always enough. Indeed, a growing number of today’s authoritarian regimes are discovering that they have nothing to fear from an engaged citizenry, a vocal press, and a robust civil society. Instead, they can let the protesters scream themselves hoarse, get it out of their system, and then—when they are exhausted—swallow them up into oblivion. 

Look at what happened in Hong Kong. The reason PRC authoritarianism triumphed there wasn’t that the people failed to “speak out.” They certainly did. They cried out so loud the whole globe could hear. They "cried so high thermopylae [...] and finally The UN" took notice (to borrow a line from E.E. Cummings). But the Orwellian super-state won anyways. Leviathan swallowed them up. The dark night of authoritarian rule closed over them, and then a silence fell.

So no, "speaking out" and "doing something" is not always sufficient to prevent the triumph of evil and tyranny. 

Plus, there’s the even worse danger that all of one’s “speaking out” and “mobilizing” might not just fail to achieve their intended purpose; they might actually be counter-productive. All the activism in America may have merely served to make people annoyed with the activists. Activists, after all, are generally the bearers of bad news. And with all our talk of “I’m marching; I’m speaking out,” perhaps people heard an implied sneer: “what are You doing about it, by comparison?” Maybe we served only to alienate the not-already-persuaded.

Having discovered these harsh truths, many of us are prepared now to stop thinking about it. We're tired; we've had a long day. We’d rather tune Trump out than keep fighting the hopeless battle to make other people more conscious of his flaws. If at first, my attitude to Trump was that of the energized crusader; now it is that of the speaker in Auden’s poem “Refugee Blues,” who takes a walk in the woods and regards the birds in the trees; he envies them their natural freedom, for—they have "no politicians." That now seems to me the ideal. 

But not everyone has been through this same disillusioning experience. What about the young people, I thought—the ones who were not even political conscious the first time Trump was elected? Surely, they still have the energy to fight. Surely we can pass the baton to them. 

But no, apparently not. According to Goldberg, they are even more disengaged than the rest of us. They seem to be embracing the very Flosky-logic that I was warning against just a few days ago (in reference to a passage from the satirical novelist Thomas Love Peacock). That is to say, they are telling themselves that because Biden has not fixed everything, then he has in effect done nothing at all, and Trump can be no worse an alternative (or may even be a better one). As Goldberg puts it: “A potentially significant number of people on the left, particularly young ones, believe that because President Biden has disappointed them, it’s not worth voting for him to head off a Trump restoration.”

Part of the problem seems to be that people struggle with the concept of a moral hierarchy. I’m not sure why. Doctrinally, of course, it should pose no difficulty for the left—even the far left. The standard fellow-traveler orthodoxy in the 1930s, at least before the Popular Front was replaced by the Hitler-Stalin pact, was that the “bourgeois parties” may be bad, but the fascist parties are even worse. Thus, a tactical alliance with the bourgeois parties was justified to head off the even greater menace from the far right.

Even for the far left, then, it shouldn’t be so hard to see that whatever their disagreements with establishment Republicans or centrist Democrats, there is an even greater peril here to be resisted—in the form of Trump’s authoritarian ambitions—as well as his likely geopolitical alliances with far-right forces abroad. Have leftists not noticed that Europe's fascist parties are also in the ascendant—and that they share in common with Trump an affection for Vladimir Putin; that there is in short a neo-fascist global bloc emerging? If anyone should oppose such a thing, shouldn't it be the left? 

But a lot of people on the far left don’t actually seem to take this threat seriously. Or, they assume that everything in our current society is so deeply rotten and unjust anyways, that a Trumpist or Putinist revolution could scarcely be worse. Times columnist Charles Blow recently interviewed a young progressive voter in Iowa who said essentially this. In short, it seems that Floskyism is making deep inroads among the rising generation. 

Part of the reason why it is becoming difficult to convince young progressives to fear Trump is that many of the worst dangers he poses in a second term are precisely the kinds of things that progressives have no experience caring about—or that they are predisposed not to take seriously. 

Most of us on the left, after all, cut our political teeth denouncing “American imperialism”—leftist shorthand for the overweening arrogance and aggression of the Bush era. The fact that a Republican president might actually be about to inflict the opposite menace on us—namely, withdrawing from Western defensive pacts; abandoning our democratic allies to a far-right dictator intent on gobbling up their territory; in short, simply allowing our authoritarian adversaries to triumph throughout their spheres of influence—is never one that most leftists contemplated. 

We have no experience to draw upon here. We never had to worry, in our lifetimes, that the U.S. would abandon democracy to its enemies. What we had to worry about before was the U.S. trying to exert too much influence abroad. 

So the left is hardly a natural constituency to try to defend U.S. treaties or international commitments. And many no doubt sneakingly admire Trump’s stances on these issues, even if they would not say so publicly. I’ve received more than one communication from progressive advocacy organizations recently, for instance, that characterized Biden’s plea for military aid to Ukraine, simplistically, as a request for “money for war”—as if Ukraine had started this conflict; or as if there were no possible way to make a moral distinction between aggressive and defensive uses of military funds.  

And so we start to see how it is possible for a dictator to arise amidst an eerie silence and indifference. Still more, we see the resolution of a strange paradox that Brecht first pointed out. As he once wrote in a poem: "The first time it was reported that our friends were being butchered there was a cry of horror. Then a hundred were butchered. But when a thousand were butchered and there was no end to the butchery, a blanket of silence spread." (Willett trans.) 

Why would people protest so loudly against the smaller crimes, only to fall silent before the greater ones? It is perhaps due to a perversity of human nature that we are now seeing acted out all over again in our present society. The first time it was reported that Trump said this or that terrible thing, there were marches. The first time he tried to ban Muslim immigrants and refugees, people showed up at the airports to protest. But now that he is coming back to do even worse—promising more travel bans, bigger detention camps, more sweeping deportation raids, bogus investigations and prosecutions of his critics and political opponents—progressives are strangely silent. 

As the title of Goldberg's column frames the same paradox Brecht was talking about: "Trump Just Keeps Doing Appalling Things, and the Ranks of the Disengaged Are Growing." 

We are about to be swallowed by Leviathan. And, even conceding all we discovered during the last Trump administration, at such great pain, about the limitations of political action—will we actually want the history books to record that we did not even speak out?