This Independence Day, It's on us. As it always has been

 

I'm more comfortable with this image after having spent quite a bit of time recently in New England. To many people of that part of this huge country, the image feels fitting. Elmer Davis was a radio journalist who served FDR's war against European fascism and Japanese imperialism in the role of Director of the Office of War Information.

 

How might similar sentiments be expressed these days in my home state of California? Perhaps like this:

Here on the Left Coast, we'll take a dose of snark with our defiance of unjust rulers. But that doesn't mean we are not a force to be reckoned with when aroused. And we're getting aroused.

• • • 

The USofA has had quite a good 249 year run. Not saying we've always (or even most often) been on the side of justice, against oppression, for full liberation of all. In fact, this enterprise has always been murderous to some. It's taken us all those years to more fully recognize some people are really people. But in our better seasons, African people imported as slaves, and foreign newcomers, and women, and LGBTQ+ people, and even the native people whose land the rest of us stole have been increasingly recognized as fully human by the polity we have made for ourselves. 

 

Our institutions are creaky and not currently serving our best aspirations. We need to remember that there's more in our Declaration of Independence beyond the bold assertion that "all men are created equal' and should be understood to have "inalienable rights." The declaration goes on to insist that this understanding of where and from whom government acquired legitimacy means we can have expectations: 

... Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, --That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.

Current US institutions -- the Congress, the Supreme Court, the Constitution of 1789, the various states -- are proving no match for an oligarchic aspiring king whose executive power derives from the votes of 31 percent of the citizens. (Kamala got nearly another third and the rest stayed home.) 

Trump is governing by arrogating to himself powers our system never gave him nor meant any executive to have. And the system itself is proving incapable of stopping him.

Looks like the future of the United States of America is up to the consent of the governed, once again. Are we going to let King Donald get away with his heist?

This is a test -- and it is no rehearsal

Maybe they thought she was a pushover because she has blonde hair that hangs down to her shoulders. Women in the Trump world tend to present such an appearance. They were wrong. The glasses might give her away.

They expected Danielle Sassoon, a thirty-eight-year-old conservative lawyer whom Trump had named acting U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York, to violate her understanding of her professional responsibility by dropping the federal corruption case against New York's Mayor Eric Adams in return for Adams' aid to Trump's goons at rounding up migrants. She wouldn't accept the bargain; after all, her office had reason to believe Adams is crook. Instead she argued back and resigned/was fired. (I expect which to be a contested question.)

And then six or seven attorneys at the Department of Justice in Washington in the Public Integrity Section of the Criminal Division also refused to do the corrupt deed.

Then lawyer Hagan Scotten who was prosecuting the Adams case in New York joined the defectors. “I expect you will eventually find someone who is enough of a fool, or enough of a coward, to file your motion,” he wrote. And he quit. 

Emil Bove, Trump's flunky at DOJ, eventually did find such a cooperative underling. He also made his corrupt reasons for dropping the case clear in a vituperative letter, as did Trump's new more tame blonde Attorney General Pam Bondi.

Former US Attorney Joyce Vance immediately highlighted the human cost of these dramatic events. The attorneys at the Public Integrity Section proved their legal and personal integrity.

Rather than violate the oaths they took by following orders they could not abide by, they gave up their jobs, their incomes, and their benefits. It’s no small thing to forgo medical insurance when you’ve been living on a prosecutor’s salary and have given up your job with scant warning on a Thursday afternoon in February.

That’s the kind of courage that inspires us, and we hope it will inspire you, too. We have to stand up for what we believe in and what is right. We have to maintain our fight for democracy. It is up to us.

Writing in the New York Times, Masha Gessen draws on experience of Putin's Russia to share lessons from this drama:

In a column published last weekend, I mentioned the concept of collective hostage taking, pioneered by the Russian sociologist Yuri Levada. He spent decades trying to understand the methods of enforcement used by totalitarian regimes and the accommodations people make in response. He identified collective hostage taking as one of the most important totalitarian tools. It functions by enforcing collective responsibility and threatening collective punishment. 

In Stalin’s time, if people were arrested for a (usually invented) political crime, suspicion would also fall on their family members, their co-workers and their children’s schoolteachers and classmates. In later Soviet years, if dissidents were arrested, their colleagues would be scrutinized; some could lose their jobs or be demoted for “failing to exercise sufficient vigilance.” It is remarkable that Bove, if the reports are accurate, enacted collective hostage taking literally, by putting attorneys in a room and tasking them — over a video call — with finding at least one person to take the fall.

Levada had compassion for people who folded under conditions of collective hostage taking. Normal people confronted with abnormal demands will just try to survive, he wrote. Nothing prepares ordinary people for extraordinary times.

In fact, though, many life experiences do prepare us for times such as these. Most American schools, for example, practice collective punishment: If half of the class is unruly, the entire class may be docked recess. When I heard about lawyers being put in a room, I thought, “This has happened to my kids in New York City public schools.” In this way, U.S. schools are almost indistinguishable from the old Soviet ones.

The legal officials involved in the Adams debacle ... are only some of the first people to confront a choice most of us will face, if we choose to recognize it: Do you act like a schoolchild, who can survive and succeed only by conforming, or do you insist on your dignity and adult agency? 

Even in situations where the end seems preordained, as it certainly seemed to be in this case, will you be able to say, “I won’t be the one to do it”? If enough people withhold their cooperation, the end is no longer preordained.

The paragraph I've highlighted is our test. Opposing creeping tyranny requires both individual courage and collective solidarity. Americans aren't used to this, but we have many models in our history to draw on: George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, FDR, Fannie Lou Hamer, Dr. Martin Luther King, Harvey Milk, Cesar Chavez, and so many more among the immigrants who made and are still making this land. The people who built this county weren't wimps and we needn't be either.