Kim Lane Scheppele has seen a lot. She worked in Putin's Russia while that dictatorship was closing down civic space. Then she worked in Hungary until run out by the American fascists' good buddy Victor Orban. Now she's the Laurance S. Rockefeller Professor of Sociology and International Affairs in the Princeton School of Public and International Affairs. That is, she's a certified intellectual big thinker with experience.
You can get her informed take on our condition by listening to this podcast "Trump's American Takeover" with Dahlia Lithwick.
Scheppele knows what we're seeing in the United States during the Trump/Musk coup. Here are some words if that's your thing.
Governing through cruelty and loyalty reverses the basic premise of the rule of law, which is that people should be able to live without fear or favor. In a democratic and constitutional government, people are supposed to be treated with equal respect and with guaranteed rights under a government that is not permitted to entrench itself in power. But when generating fear through cruelty and demanding favor through loyalty become the central organizing principles of government, then rights fray, checks on government fail, the entrenchment of a particular leader begins, and autocracy is on the march.
Ernst Fraenkel, a Jewish lawyer writing from inside Nazi Germany in the late 1930s, described what he saw as a legal practitioner. For most Germans, life went on as usual. Laws were enforced as written; the courts operated predictably. He called this the Normative State.
But there was another parallel state operating at the same time into which people could be cast when the government had decided to target them. This was the Prerogative State, in which arbitrariness reigned and all safeguards of law disappeared. This Dual State relied on the surface appearance of normality from the Normative State to whitewash the use of emergency powers, enabling acts, special decrees and discriminatory laws that created a Prerogative State where cruelty was the order of the day. Hitler’s government counted on the appearance of the Normative State to avert people’s eyes from the Prerogative State.
Fraenkel’s description of the Dual State should warn us that we cannot be complacent because the United States just had a free and fair election followed by a peaceful transfer of power or because the Democratic Party now acts like they can will normality into existence by enacting their half of normal politics.
Even the most terrible dictatorships that history has produced found ways to make life seem normal for most people, as long as they demobilized politically and didn’t challenge the dictator’s hold on power. To understand what kind of government we have, we need to look at how that government treats those whom the leader believes are his enemies as well as those who are on the margins of society.
Trump’s parade of executive orders starts to build the foundations of a Dual State. With cruelty dispensed to enemies and favor to friends, he has bullied his way into power and now proposes to use the federal government to amplify his threats. Many vulnerable people in the US now live in fear, as Bishop Budde movingly explained to Trump directly on his first full day in office. She might have added that those who fear Trump include members of Congress and the judiciary and the media who, as a result of this fear, are now failing in their duties to check his powers. Out of fear, some are desperately trying to appear to be loyal or at least trying to acquiesce by telling themselves that democratic deference is due to those who win elections no matter how they choose to govern. But those unwilling to live in fear or curry favor are leaving government or disengaging from politics. Democracy dies when no one defends its promise of a life free from fear and without the requirement to grovel.
Buried in everything that happened in this exhausting first week of the new Trump administration, then, is this important big idea: Trump seeks to govern through cruelty and loyalty. Defending our constitutional democracy requires that we don’t look away when cruelty is visited on members of our community and that we refuse to allow our democracy to crumble into personalistic attachment to the leader. To stand up to this will require a unity of purpose so that we cannot be divided by fear and it will require that we defend the principle that no man is above the law—nor can he change the law to put himself above it. Those of us concerned about the future of our democracy need to regroup and prepare for a long hard fight. We cannot let ourselves be divided and conquered—or distracted by everything that is flooding the zone right now.
My emphasis.
Today we will attend a memorial service for a dear friend who lived a good and long life. Tomorrow we will go to church and then to a museum. We will live our lives, largely unafraid. But times are not normal.
