A Warning in Marble: Part 2 of the 5-part series.
The week of its 250th, what's the real state of American democracy?
II. Dissent
Listen closely, and that sound you can barely hear is the sound of the second pillar of democracy starting to buckle. It’s coming apart in bits and pieces. Every so often, a rock or two hits the floor below, but the onlookers are too distracted by the rest of the rubble to notice. After all, the first pillar tumbled down with great force from the blitz of presidential efforts to seek revenge and riches — the first of five pillars of democracy we assessed in the lead-up to America’s two-hundred-fiftieth birthday.
This next one is different. You cannot hear the question a government employee decides not to ask, the program that gets corrupted while its staff say nothing, or the social media post a frightened federal official deletes before sending. Yesterday, I told you the weight of the fallen first pillar had shifted somewhere unseen. Here’s where it went: into silence. In key places where it matters, truth-telling has been quashed.
Dissent is the second pillar of our democracy. When the “restraint” pillar fails (when a president decides the rule of law is less important than the ruler himself and embarks on a crime spree as we are witnessing), then the weight shifts to whoever is prepared to sound the alarm. Indeed, if an offense against democracy cannot be prevented, the next best hope is that there will be voices willing to identity it and cry out, loudly, that the structure itself is unsound. A free nation’s errors are not self-correcting. They must be named to be fixed.
To grasp what we’re losing, remember how strange it was to build in the first place. For almost all of human history, to criticize the ruler was a crime. Most people who’ve walked this earth lived under the fear that they couldn’t question their government, let alone condemn it. Doing so was seditious libel, or lèse-majesté, an injury to the majesty of the king. The truth of what you said was no defense. In fact, a true charge against a powerful man was thought the most dangerous kind of all, for he would be more grievously injured by the revelation of his real transgressions rather than imagined ones.
Yet the colonists smuggled in a dangerous idea, Carried over from London in the 1720s, in a set of essays called Cato’s Letters, they imported the notion of dissent by design. “Freedom of speech is the great bulwark of liberty; they prosper and die together.” Only wicked rulers, Cato wrote, dread what is said of them. To expose a corrupt official was not a libel but a legitimate public service.
In 1735, those two worlds collided in a New York courtroom. A German immigrant printer named John Peter Zenger had published a newspaper that needled the colony’s royal governor, and for that, he was charged with seditious libel and jailed for months. Under the law of the day, he had no defense, because the truth wasn’t one. It didn’t matter whether what he printed was accurate or not. But his lawyer, the famed Andrew Hamilton, urged the jurors to do what the law essentially forbade and to acquit a man for telling the truth. What’s more, he exhorted them to decide the matter for themselves rather than leave it to the governor’s handpicked judges. They came back in roughly ten minutes. “Not guilty.”
While the verdict changed nothing in the statutes (royal governors went on jailing printers for decades), it changed something in the American mind. The conviction took hold that a free people should have every right to say true things about the men who rule them.
When the founders finally had a country of their own, they did what no government before them had dared. They enshrined the right to criticize the government into the supreme law, above the government’s own reach. Congress shall make no law abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press, read the First Amendment. Like the first pillar, this was another novelty in the annals of human civilization.
They understood the concept more deeply than other constitutional features because they were dissenters themselves. As escaped slave Frederick Douglass said of the founders, they were quiet men, but they did not shrink from agitating against oppression. Douglass knew, too, because he became perhaps the greatest and most radical dissenter this country ever produced. On the fifth of July, 1852 (the day after a Fourth, which he would not celebrate), he stood in Rochester and asked, “What, to the American slave, is your Fourth of July?” He honored the founders and indicted their heirs in a single breath, loving the principles of the Declaration enough to damn the nation for betraying them.
THAT is what dissent is. It’s wrongly viewed as hatred of your country, when in reality, the practice often shows greater fidelity to it than any of a nation’s unquestioning flatterers can stomach. And listen to how Douglass described the alternative. To stay silent about the cruelty in front of him, “to chime in with the popular theme,” would have been, in his mind, “treason most scandalous and shocking.”
The silence was the treason. Radical indeed.
So hold that against our present moment. When Donald Trump came back and signed orders and threatened probes into his critics for “treason,” what he really meant was he was punishing them for unfriendly speech that offended the king. When Douglass faced that same word, he turned it the other way around. The real betrayal was saying nothing. In a healthy republic, dissent is the highest form of patriotism and silence is the betrayal, yet in a captured one like ours, the labels are deliberately and ham-handedly switched.
The response to the switch over the past 18 months, at least for a subset of America, will earn epochal shame. When Trump’s revenge campaign barreled forward upon his return, the safeguard should have been immediate and forceful dissent by society’s leaders. A vocal protest from the elected and elites. Yet most saw their courage run exactly the opposite direction toward safety.
Each of us can rattle off who the cowards were by memory. The party faithful who didn’t dare question Trump’s sharpening of his power into a spear; the law firm chairmen with whole floors of lawyers, who cosplayed as worshippers of the Constitution, yet who bent the knee when they saw the parchment rolled up to swat them; the university presidents with billion-dollar endowments, whose soft minds were tamed long ago by tenure and who went easily mute for fear of losing their prestige; the network executives who wrote eight-figure checks to make a president’s animosity go away, lest they get taken off the air; and the titans of technology and finance who could move markets with a sentence and chose, instead, to stand silently behind the leader or pay tribute with donations to his inaugural fund and his ballroom and whatever other self-aggrandizing cause he put before them.
In other words, the marble at the top of the pillar — the high-up, load-bearing stone mass that belongs to the elite — is the portion that cracked first and put the rest of it at teetering risk of failure. But the pillar of dissent hasn’t crumbled. Why?
Well, the bravest noises came from people at the base of the column. Think of them when you need inspiration, e.g. the immigrant rights organizer with a mortgage and no lawyer, the local leader who resisted a federal invasion knowing no one would catch her if she fell, or the nonprofit team in the crosshairs of a sham investigation. They’ve defied the corruption and retaliation, like heralds against hubris, with a fledgling hope that the siren of their warnings might arrest the damage to all the other pillars. Here in America today, courage runs inverse to power.
I’ve written and spoken about this pillar more than any other. Not long ago, I gave a talk about what it costs to speak out and why we must do it anyway. You can watch it below, if you want, but I won’t relitigate the case here. Other than to say that the price of dissent is historically high.
I want to leave you with a single number because it shows why, despite all the bravery we’ve heard and seen from down below (and notwithstanding the deafening silence of the elites up top), that the gravest danger to the pillar of dissent is elsewhere. In the middle of the column — and perilously unseen. It comes in the form of self censorship.
After the President put a series of his former officials under federal investigation last year, his aides let the press know why. It was, the henchmen said, “to send a message.” The gangsters wanted to punish the few who’d observed and exposed Trump’s abuses of power, in order to intimidate many more who might bear witness. The message landed hardest where it hurt the most. Federal officials — the people whose frontline dissent could undo Trump’s campaign of corruption — have been largely cowed into silence and made to fear for their livelihoods, if not their lives.
Here’s the datapoint I promised. A year ago, under the government’s own workforce survey, roughly 72 percent of federal workers said they felt they could safely report illegal activity inside the government. Today, that figure has collapsed to 22 percent. You do not need a statistician to recognize that a dissent collapse from seven-in-ten down to two-in-ten is something never before seen inside federal agencies.
Please consider what that means. In a single year, an intimidation campaign run from the Oval Office took the share of public servants willing to blow the whistle on lawbreaking and cut it by more than two-thirds. What a cynical success. The stewards of government who witness corruption, abuse, and illegality are now far too frightened to say a word. Trump wanted a workforce that looks the other way, and he’s on the path to getting it.
They’re building the machinery to finish the job. The administration moved to strip whistleblower protections from tens of thousands of federal workers; fired the head of the Office of Special Counsel, the one agency whose entire purpose is to protect whistleblowers; purged seventeen inspectors general and hollowed out the Office of Government Ethics; deleted whole agencies that had challenged Trump in his first term; and is advancing a government-wide nondisclosure agreement that would bind some two million civil servants to silence for the rest of their careers, with refusal to sign as grounds for firing. With a stroke of the pen, he also stripped job protections from eight thousand of the government’s most senior career officials, including the people who draft the regulations and decide who receives federal grants, making them fireable at will for “subversion of presidential directives,” and roughly tripling the ranks he can purge on a whim.
Once a strong pillar of democracy, dissent within the official ranks is at risk of total collapse. It’s the proverbial canary in the coal mine. And Donald Trump has killed the canary and smeared its blood on the walls. The brutal English king Henry VIII didn’t have to behead every courtier to make people afraid. Just a few. Then the rest knew the axe could fall at any moment.
Alas, this is where the wannabe dictator and his allies have misjudged their power. Intimidation has a shelf life. Records are forever. We will remember who did this. We’re writing all of it down, including right here in the virtual pages of DEFIANCE. Tyrants can send missives and threats all they want, but in the final analysis, history sends the verdicts.
So look closely at this second pillar before we move on. The crack runs the entire length of it. The capital has been sheared off, the upper courses have fallen, and the strong and well-defended elements have broken away and crashed to the ground. The crack has not reached the base, thankfully. The base is holding, grain by grain, on the backs of people whose faces no one will ever put on a coin.
The middle is weakened by fear of a federal worker who’s been bullied ferociously into self-censorship and who wonders, in quiet moments, whether to take a stand while watching colleagues gagged and humiliated. This is the one pillar that cannot be knocked down from outside. It can only be surrendered from within, and time will tell whether it stands. Thought its condition as never been worse.
In my own whistleblowing experience, I learned that a warning is only as strong as the thing that can act on it. A shout in an empty house changes nothing. So for dissent to matter, the alarm has to reach someone equipped to act on it, whether the Congress or the courts or some rival power with the strength to take the warning and force a confrontation. That’s where the weight is shifting now.
And tomorrow, that’s where we will turn.
Your friend, in defiance,
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