The Anger of the Gods

 So I guess Trump really is doing the whole authoritarian repression bit. 

Not only has he secured flagrantly baseless and politically-motivated indictments against two of his perceived political enemies in recent weeks—the Wall Street Journal also reports this morning that he is readying plans to turn the IRS into an arm of his repressive apparatus. 

The immediate goal appears to be to use tax information to set up some kind of bogus criminal probe into George Soros—a Holocaust survivor who escaped Hitler; endured political repression at the hands of Hungary's Viktor Orban; and now—in the very country that was supposed to be the world's last best hope for freedom and democracy—is being targeted by yet another would-be dictator who openly follows the Orban playbook. 

Soros's Open Society Foundations appear to be at the top of Trump's list of progressive NGOs to target. But it's certainly not the only one on that list. If Trump has any success in disrupting their operations and making life hell for members of Soros's team, we can only assume that he will move on from there to target various other civil society groups too. 

Trump has described the most mainstream liberal philanthropic organizations in the country as "anarchists" and sponsors of "domestic terrorism"—and his long-term plan appears to be to concoct some sort of RICO case that would recast all progressive civil society in the country as an interlocking criminal network. 

I have spent my whole career working for left-wing nonprofits of this sort, and I can tell you—I wish we were one-tenth as scary and effective as Trump made us sound. 

This is the problem with persecution of this sort—it tends to backfire by turning its victims into heroes that they never were before. As Anatole France writes in Penguin Island, the Dreyfusards—people like himself and Émile Zola, who stuck up for the wrongly-accused officer Alfred Dreyfus—were never actually a very impressive force—not, that is, until the French military started attacking them—and thereby made them seem more potent than they were. 

In his satirical version of the events surrounding the Dreyfus case, France casts himself in the role of a clueless, unworldly astronomer—married to a prostitute—who stumbles into the limelight out of a vague desire for glory. If his opponents had actually known their business—he writes—they would have simply mocked him into oblivion. He was a ripe target for it. 

But instead, writes France: "The gods, in their anger, had refused to those men the precious gift of humour." And so—they could think of nothing better to do than to "gravely accuse the courtesan and the astronomer of being spies, of treachery, and of plotting against their country." As a result, they turned France and the other Dreyfusards into martyrs and heroes: "Bidault-Coquille and Maniflore grew visibly greater beneath insult, abuse, and calumny."

That appears to be what is happening here. It should be all too easy to lampoon progressive NGOs or simply ignore them—it's not like we effectively achieved political power in this country, as anyone looking around can see. But Trump, Vance, and his kind have been deprived of the precious gift of satire that would enable them to perceive this. All they can think to do—as they conduct their own highly Dreyfus-like antisemitic persecution of a completely innocent man, George Soros—is to accuse all the people defending him or allied with him of being "anarchists" and "domestic terrorists." 

They only make us greater, in doing so, than we ever were before. 

As Yeats would put it: we are all "changed, changed utterly: / A terrible beauty is born."