White House Chronicle

News Analysis With a Sense of Humor

Political Fear Stalks Law, Education, Journalism, Migration

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Something new has entered American consciousness: fear of the state.

Not since the Red Scares (the first one followed the Russian Revolution and World War I, and the second followed World War II and the outbreak of the Cold War) has the state taken such an active role in political intervention.

The state under Donald Trump has a special interest in political speech and action, singling out lawyers and law firms, universities and student activists, and journalists and their employers. It is certain that the undocumented live in fear night and day.

Fear of the state has entered the political process.

Presidents before Trump had their enemies. Nixon was famous for his “list,” which was mostly journalists. His political paranoia was always there, and it finally brought him down with the Watergate scandal.

Even John Kennedy, who had a soft spot for the Fourth Estate, took umbrage at the New York Herald Tribune and had that newspaper banned for a while from the White House.

Lyndon Johnson played games with and manipulated Congress to reward his allies and punish his enemies. With reporters, it was an endless reward-and-punishment game, mainly achieved with information given or withheld.

The Trump administration is relentless in its desire to root out what it sees as state enemies or those who disagree with it. It includes the judicial system and all its components: judges, law firms and advocates for those whom it has disapproved. If an individual lawyer so much as defends an opponent of the administration, that individual will be “investigated,” which, in this climate, is a euphemism for persecuted.

If you are investigated, you face the full force of the state and its agencies. If you can find a lawyer of stature to defend you, you will be buried in debt, probably out of work, and ruined without the “investigation” turning up any impropriety.

One mighty law firm, Paul, Weiss, faced with losing huge government contracts, bowed to Trump. It was a bad day for judicial independence.

The courts and individual judges are under attack, threatened with impeachment, even as the state seeks to evade their rulings.

Others are under threat and practice law cautiously when contentious matters arise. The price is known: Offend and be punished by loss of government work, by fear of investigation, and by public humiliation by derision and accusation.

The boot of the state is poised above the neck of the universities.

If they allow free speech that doesn’t accord with the administration’s definition of that constitutional right, the boot will descend, as it did on Columbia.

Shamefully, Columbia caved to try to salvage $400 million in research funds. Speech on that campus is now circumscribed. Worse, the state is likely emboldened by its success.

Linda McMahon, the education secretary, has promised that with or without a Department of Education, the administration will go after the universities and what they allow and what they teach, if it is antisemitic, as defined by the state, or if they are practicing diversity, equality and inclusion, a Trump irritant.

One notes that another university, Georgetown, is standing up to the pressure. Bravo!

At the White House, press secretary Karoline Leavitt has decided to usurp the White House Correspondents’ Association and determine who will cover the president in the reporters’ pool — critical reporting in the Oval Office and on Air Force One.

Traveling with the president is essential. That is how a reporter gets to know the chief executive up close and personal. A pool report from a MAGA blogger doesn’t cut it.

Trump has threatened to sue media outlets. If they are small and poor, as most new ones are, they can’t withstand the cost of defending themselves. ABC, which is owned by Disney, caved to Trump even though its employees longed for the case to be settled in court. Corporate interests dictated accommodation with the state.

Accommodate what they have, and they will. Watch what happens with Trump’s $20 billion lawsuit against CBS’ “60 Minutes. The truth is obvious; the result may be a tip of the hat to Trump.

Nowhere is fear more redolent, the state more pernicious and ruthless than in the deportation of immigrants without due process, without charges and without evidence. ICE says you are guilty, and you go. Men wearing masks double you over, handcuff you behind your back and take you away, maybe to a prison in El Salvador.

Fear has arrived in America and can be felt in the marbled halls of the giant law firms, in newsrooms and executive offices, all the way to the crying children who see a parent dragged off by men in black, wearing balaclavas, presumably for the purpose of extra intimidation.

U.S. Is in Golden Age, Despite Brexit-Type Sentimentality

(CREDIT: Gage Skidmore, via Wikipedia)

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(Photo Credit: Gage Skidmore, via Wikipedia)

The social and cultural forces behind MAGA in the United States and those that led the British in 2016 to vote to leave the European Union — by a small margin of 51.9 percent to 48.1 percent — are closely linked. I know those forces, and I feel connected to them.

They reflect common yearning, shared frustration, and a vague but deep belief that once things were better. That once for their nation, there was a time of contentment, prosperity and certainty all wrapped up in patriotism or, more accurately, nationalism.

“Great” is a word with meaning for those who get caught up in this deep desire to find a kind of national fulfillment, which they feel, and feel deeply, is missing.

In Britain, all the years from Britain’s entry into the European Economic Community (EEC) on Jan. 1, 1973, to the fateful vote, there was a feeling among many people, but especially men, that the nation had abandoned its hereditary path of greatness for domination by Europe. They wanted the term Great Britain (officially adopted after the Acts of Union with Scotland in 1707) to mean something.

Their romantic nostalgia was for some amalgam of history when they felt Britain was “great”: maybe the last days of the Empire in the 1950s, maybe the late Victorian era. It was a moveable feast of yearning for something other than multicultural, essentially woke, Britain.

In America, that yearning, as deeply felt and real, is centered on some romanticized appreciation of the 1950s.

The hard thing for people dreaming of an imaginary past of plenty and happiness is that they never existed for everyone and that the golden age for the ordinary people of Britain was the EU years and the present is a unique golden age for America.

With AI, in which we are the global leader (China has technical parity but is limited by its closed, top-down-controlled society), we are about to see history’s largest surge in knowledge, productivity and health. The giant killers like heart disease and cancer may fall, and life expectancy will increase.

The challenge isn’t to transmute this gold into lead, not to seek the future in a sentimental myth, not to relegate America to being just another striving country.

Britain left a dominant position in the councils of Europe for the status of an island nation with an awesome history but a shaky future.

Behind Britain’s prosperity through the years (a prosperity that is now faltering badly) and America’s massive economic muscle (currently, we have the best-performing economy in the world) lay democracy, open markets and free trade.

Those also were the bedrock values of conservatism on both sides of the Atlantic. In today’s political confusion, they have been forgotten or put on a back burner.

MAGA supporters and those who voted Britain out of the EU share a common sense that there was a better time. Brexiteers said Britain had lost its “sovereignty” without anyone defining the loss.

When I was 21 years old, I worked in London in the movement to keep Britain out of what was then the EEC, precursor of the EU, believing it would be a big economic mistake. Not long after its entry, I changed my mind: It was a bonanza for the financial markets, the farmers, and all those who had goods to sell.

The forces of Brexit and MAGA were always present, but it took two Pied Pipers to fire them up, to shape them as voting blocks, and to have them take over the conservative politics in both nations.

Britain’s Pied Piper was Boris Johnson, who kept up a steady and often dishonest flow of anti-European information when he was the Brussels correspondent of the conservative Daily Telegraph. These fabrications remained alive throughout the Brexit campaign. So, when David Cameron, the Conservative prime minister, offered Britain a referendum on EU membership, Johnson, then a member of parliament, was ready.

Donald Trump rode into the presidency on four words: Make America Great Again.

Besides being larger-than-life and often clownish figures, Johnson and Trump are quite different people. They both rose to corral the loyalty of those yearning for a different reality, one that would inadvertently damage those they sought to lead.

They would effectively seek to transmute gold into lead and tell everyone it was platinum.

I don’t ridicule MAGA supporters, but I fear the power of false narratives. The past is prologue; it isn’t the future.

How the Movement to MAGA Britain Failed in Its Time

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“Make America Great Again.” Those words have been gently haunting me not because of their political loading but because they have been reminding me of something, like the snatches of a tune or a poem that isn’t fully remembered but drifts into your consciousness from time to time.

Then it came to me: It wasn’t the words, but the meaning, or, more precisely, the reasoning behind the meaning.

I grew up among the last embers of the British Empire in Southern Rhodesia. I am often asked what it was like there.

All I can tell you is that it was like growing up in Britain, maybe in one of the nicer places in the Home Counties (those adjacent to London), but with some very African aspects and, of course, with the Africans themselves, whose land it was until Cecil John Rhodes and his British South Africa Company decided it should be British; part of a dream that Britain would rule from Cape Town to Cairo.

Evelyn Waugh, the British author, said in 1937 of Southern Rhodesia that the settlers had a “morbid lack of curiosity” about the indigenous people. Although it was less heinous than it sounds, there was a lot of truth to that. They were there, and now we were there, and it was how it was with two very different peoples on the same piece of land.

However, by the 1950s, change was in the air. Britain came out of World War II less interested in its empire than ever. In 1947, under the Labor government of Clement Attlee, which came to power after the wartime government of Winston Churchill, it relinquished control of the Indian subcontinent — now India, Pakistan and Bangladesh.

It was set to gradually withdraw from the rest of the world. The empire was to be renamed the Commonwealth. It was to be a club of former possessions, often more semantically connected than united in other ways.

The end of the empire wasn’t universally accepted, and it wasn’t accepted in the African colonies that had attracted British settlers, always referred to not as “Whites” but as “Europeans.”

I can remember the mutterings and a widespread belief that the greatness that had put “Great” into the name Great Britain would return. The world map would remain with Britain’s incredible holdings in Asia and Africa, colored for all time in red. People said things like the “British lion will awake, just you see.”

It was a hope that there would be a return to what was regarded as the glory days of the empire when Britain led the world militarily, politically, culturally, scientifically, and with what was deeply believed to be British exceptionalism.

That feeling, while nearly universal among colonials, wasn’t shared by the citizens back home in Britain. They differed from those in the colonies in that they were sick of war and were delighted by the social services that the Labor government had introduced, like universal healthcare, and weren’t rescinded by the second Churchill administration, which took power in 1951.

The empire was on its last legs, and Churchill’s 1942 declaration, “I did not become the king’s first minister to preside over the dissolution of the British Empire,” was long forgotten. But not in the colonies, and certainly not where I was. Our fathers had served in the war and were super-patriotic.

While in Britain, they were experimenting with socialism and the trade unions were amassing power, and migration from the West Indies had begun changing attitudes. In the colonies, belief flourished in what might now be called a movement to make Britain great again.

In 1954, London got an organization, the League of Empire Loyalists, which was more warmly embraced in the dwindling empire than it was in Britain. It was founded by an extreme conservative, Arthur K. Chesterton, who had had fascist sympathies before the war.

In Britain, the league attracted some extreme right-wing Conservative members of parliament but little public support. Where I was, it was the organization that was going to Make Britain Great Again.

It fizzled after a Conservative prime minister, Harold MacMillan,  put an end to dreaming of the past. In a speech in South Africa, he said that “winds of change” were blowing through Africa, though most settlers still believed in the return of empire.

It took the war of independence in Rhodesia to bring home MacMillan’s message. We weren’t going to Make Britain Great Again.