ESSAY: What are you waiting for?

Twenty-first-century American authoritarianism is here. Too many Americans are waiting for irrelevant, outdated red lines

The other day, someone I know said to me, I don’t read the newspaper anymore, because it’s too depressing. This is an otherwise well-informed, morally committed person, someone with a deep belief in values of free expression, democracy, and human rights. I thought to myself, My, what a perfect authoritarian subject you are.

In the end, this is all they really want. Withdrawal. It may seem a strange thing to say, because they clearly also want many more dramatic things: disappearances by masked men, unvaccinated children, malnourished babies reaching over their distended bellies to pull themselves up by their bootstraps, universities teaching “Leadership Secrets from ‘The Apprentice,’” a dismantled administrative state, alliterative concentration camps, women delivering their rapists’ children, and more.

But in the hierarchy of their priorities, none of those things is possible if you, and enough other people, are a certain kind of citizen: pesky, inquiring, knowledgeable, capable of outrage, capable of solidarity, without fear. And all of those things are possible if you, and enough other people, are a certain kind of citizen: reticent, consumed with private life, content to outsource public life to your rulers.

I think Americans have a tendency to be on the lookout for the wrong kind of thing when it comes to authoritarianism. The modern American superpower’s origin story, you could say, began with descending on Normandy and taking on the Nazis and liberating Europe, and then continued with a cold war against the Soviets; and so the American mind holds those two nations as the paragons of authoritarian rule.

For the vast majority of Americans who are not super political, who don’t follow every development and congressional hearing, who cycle through many channels, not just the news, the things to be on the lookout for are: gulags, mass death, even genocide, the summary execution of political rivals, gas chambers, foreign invasions, and such.

My empathetic read on the person who says, I don’t look at the paper, too depressing, is that he probably maintains enough of an ambient awareness to be on the lookout for those truly grave warning signs above. And he has probably contented himself that things, while bad, are not anywhere near that.

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The American tendency to paulrevere for those particular and most extreme forms of authoritarianism, from those specific places and times, in those rather different historical circumstances, is blinding us to what is here now. It is allowing a vast number of morally committed and serious people to maintain that same ambient awareness, keep a basic tab on developments, but soldier on, mostly focused on their regular private lives, because we’re not in the kind of thing that presumably would snap them out of normalcy and into action.

The problem is that authoritarianism also takes less dramatic forms all around the world, including now. In those less dramatic forms, life looks pretty normal. People kiss on the street late at night, choose their jobs, have as many children as they want, go on trips, travel abroad even, throw parties, arrange play dates, cook, drink, try to lose weight, fight, dance. The only thing they cannot do is help govern themselves.

Go to Istanbul. Go to Shanghai. Go to Dubai. You can have a great time. You might even forget how those places are ruled. That’s the idea. A lot of people who live there have forgotten, too. That’s all they ask of you. Those places don’t feel like tyrannies as long as all you want is to live your life, make your plans, keep it small, keep it light, keep it private, leave the world to Them. Go clubbing all you want. Don’t organize any marches. Start your startup. No petitions. Many people are happy to take the deal.

I remember visiting China for the first time in the 2000s. I came with my American questions about democracy and whether people felt put upon. First of all, no one I spoke to seemed unwilling to answer my questions candidly. Second, I remember one person asking how he could feel unfree when his family had not been able to afford so much as chicken when he was a kid and now he worked in a giant multinational corporation and ate what he pleased and had the chance to travel the world.

He was an authoritarian subject, a good one, and I completely understood his feeling.

We have a choice. Either we decide, and we can decide this simply by not deciding, by giving in to the present inertia, that we are fine with this kind of illusory freedom, sitting atop an authoritarian reality. That we will reassure ourselves we will remain vigilant about not becoming the Soviet Union or Nazi Germany, but that we’re fine with this other thing shy of that: a seemingly (often genuinely) free private life, in work and family and other realms, and the outsourcing of governance to the rulers.

Or we decide to revise our lookout. To move the goalpost closer, to here where we are already standing. To realize that even this seemingly subtler form of tyranny, the kind that wants only our withdrawal, is unacceptable to us. That we will not bargain with freedom, will not meet it halfway. That we want it all, because it’s no one’s but ours.

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