The Authoritarian Mind

The nation’s top enforcement officer “joked” about locking up a political rival based on nothing today. It was so funny I forgot to laugh:

Disturbing, but not necessarily surprising. Sessions has always been the most Trump-esque member of Trump’s cabinet. Sessions was the first senator to endorse Trump for the Republican presidential nomination. Trump’s belief in the use of the law as a weapon against perceived enemies was central to Sessions backing him. And Stephen Miller, the Trump adviser behind the Trump administration’s vile family separation policy and “Muslim ban,” was a Sessions aide.

Sessions also exemplifies the evolution of the Republican Party into a coalition that could be led by Trump’s white nationalist authoritarianism. In 1986, a Republican-controlled Senate rejectedSessions for a U.S. District Court judicial nomination because of his history of racism. Trump then became a major figure in the Republican Party through his embrace of the racist conspiracy theory that Barack Obama was not born in the United States and Sessions became his logical choice for his Attorney General. In the Trump-era Republican Party, it seems, racism does not disqualify someone from becoming Attorney General of the United States.

That is, to put it mildly, a dismaying trend.

And there is a further irony to Sessions kidding on the square about locking up a political rival who hasn’t actually done anything illegal: The context of Sessions’s speech was an argument against the alleged suppression of conservative speech on campus. Sessions unleashed a series of conservative buzzwords to make this point, asserting that colleges are “coddling” students “through things like trigger warnings about microaggressions, they have cry closets, safe spaces, optional exams, therapy goats, and grade inflation.” Leaving aside the exaggerations inherent in stories about “cry closets,” talking about throwing political opponents in jail exists in some obvious philosophical tension with the overall message.

But Sessions’s Department of Justice has not exactly demonstrated a robust commitment to the values of free and open exchange. Dozens of protesters were prosecuted by Sessions’s DOJ for protesting at Trump’s inauguration, a much greater threat to free speech than campus discourse about “microaggressions.” It is another common Trump administration tactic: Immigration and Customs Enforcement has also targeted journalists and activists. And Trump has threatened to take press credentials away from critical reporters and made threats to selectively use antitrust law against media it considers unfriendly to the administration.

All of this represents an apparent belief that opposition to a Republican administration or conservatives in general is fundamentally illegitimate. This can be seen in many ways, most notably in the efforts of Republicans at both the federal and state level to prevent people of color from voting. Demonizing the opposition is a critical part of advancing such efforts.