On Tyranny: Obeying in advance

Here’s a short video from the great historian of European totalitarianism Timothy Snyder, on how authoritarian and totalitarian regimes depend on people, especially people like Jeff Bezos, obeying in advance, and how important it is for all anti-fascists not to do that.

Jonathan V. Last describes exactly what’s happening here:

ON FRIDAY, after the Washington Post’s publisher announced that the paper was suddenly abandoning the practice of the editorial page endorsing presidential candidates, news leaked that—on the very same day—Donald Trump met with executives from Blue Origin.

Blue Origin, of course, is the rocket company owned by Jeff Bezos, who also owns the Washington Post.

This was neither a coincidence nor a case of Bezos and Trump being caught doing something they wished to keep hidden. The entire point of the exercise, at least for Trump, was that it be public.

What we witnessed on Friday was not a case of censorship or a failure of the media. It had nothing to do with journalism or the Washington Post. It was something much, much more consequential. It was about oligarchy, the rule of law, and the failure of the democratic order.

When Bezos decreed that the newspaper he owned could not endorse Trump’s opponent, it was a transparent act of submission borne of an intuitive understanding of the differences between the candidates.

Bezos understood that if he antagonized Kamala Harris and Harris became president, he would face no consequences. A Harris administration would not target his businesses because the Harris administration would—like all presidential administrations not headed by Trump—adhere to the rule of law.

Bezos likewise understood that the inverse was not true. If he continued to antagonize Trump and Trump became president, his businesses very much would be targeted.

So bending the knee to Trump was the smart play. All upside, no downside.

What Trump understood was that Bezos’s submission would be of limited use if it was kept quiet. Because the point of dominating Bezos wasn’t just to dominate Bezos. It was to send a message to every other businessman, entrepreneur, and corporation in America: that these are the rules of the game. If you are nice to Trump, the government will be nice to you. If you criticize Trump, the government will be used against you.

Which is why Trump met with Blue Origin on the same day that Bezos yielded. It was a demonstration—a very public demonstration.

But as bad as that sounds, it isn’t the worst part.

The worst part is the underlying failures that made this arrangement possible.

My friend Kristofer Harrison is a Russia expert who runs the Dekleptocracy Project. This morning he emailed, “America’s oligarch moment makes us more like 1990s Russia than we want to believe. Political scientists can and will debate what comes first: oligarchs or flaccid politicians. 1990s Russia had that in spades. So do we. That combination corroded the rule of law there, and it’s doing so here. Russian democracy died because their institutions and politicians were not strong enough to enforce the law. Sound familiar? I could identify half a dozen laws that Elon Musk has already broken without enforcement. Bezos censored the Post because he knows that nobody will enforce the law and keep Trump from seeking political retribution. And on and on. The corrosive effect on the rule of law is cumulative. The Bezos surrender is our warning bell about entering early-stage 1990s Russia. No legal system is able to survive when it there’s a class not subject to it because politicians are too cowardly to enforce the law.”

And that’s the foundational point. The Bezos surrender isn’t just a demonstration. It’s a consequence. It’s a signal that the rule of law has already eroded to such a point that even a person as powerful as Jeff Bezos no longer believes it can protect him.

So he has sought shelter in the embrace of the strongman.

Bezos made his decision because he calculated that Trump has already won—not the election, but his struggle to break the rule of law.

Donald Trump tried to overthrow the government between November 2020 and January 6, 2021. He did this more or less out in the open, and to the extent his efforts were covert, they were quickly exposed in the days immediately after the January 6th insurrection at the Capitol.

The reaction of the most powerful people in the American political system to this, starting with Mitch McConnell’s Senate Republicans, and soon moving on to Merrick Garland’s DOJ, was to do nothing about it. A great number of institutionalist Democrats spent the first couple of years of the Biden administration gaslighting themselves and the country about the fact that Trump had tried to overthrow the government, and the laws against this were not enforced. By the time any real effort to do so was finally undertaken, it was far too late to actually do it.

Would an actual effort to enforce the law against Trump that began on January 20, 2021, have failed anyway? Quite possibly, but we’ll never know.

What we do know is that now Trump has every reason to believe that the criminal law will never apply to him. Even his conviction in New York state court for crimes that are approximately 10,000 times less serious than those he committed on TV at the end of his first maladministration hasn’t led to any real consequences. It has turned out to be impossible to even sentence him to the slap on the wrist that he might eventually receive, assuming he isn’t re-elected to the office that he will use to wreak vengeance on all the people who decided the best way to avoid fascism was not to resist it in any meaningful way.

The coup de grace for American liberal democracy may well prove to be Trump v. United States, but that case merely told Trump explicitly what the entire system has been telling him implicitly for his entire life, and most particularly since January 6, 2021: That the law doesn’t apply to him.