Unidentified heavily militarized “cops” in unmarked vans are pulling innocent citizens off the streets and hustling them into custody with no explanation to their captives. Who could ever have imagined such a thing happening in America?
Answer: Anyone who’d paid even a scintilla of attention to what candidate Trump was saying out loud and threatening to do. Anyone who hasn’t been deaf and dumb to the havoc this wannabe dictator has long been wreaking on the rule of law.
In the wake of what’s been happening in Oregon’s largest city, a lot of inexplicably shocked Americans are suddenly lamenting, “This is not us!”
Oh yes it is. This is definitely us. A fatal share of oblivious voters lit the fuse four years ago. And this kind of lawless militarization will continue to be us, only a lot moreso, unless November’s voters wake the hell up en masse and take the very last opportunity to salvage this tattered democracy.
Along with many others who were conscious in 2016, I warned on election eve that Trump posed “the existential dangers of an authoritarian future.” His impulse was naked to anyone who was not in denial. And he has been slowly boiling the water ever since.
Madeleine Albright, in her 2018 book On Fascism, quoted a well-educated but politically apathetic German who explained what it was like to be an oblivious citizen in Hitler’s Germany: “To live in this (authoritarian) process is absolutely not to be able to notice it…each step was so small. So inconsequential…one no more saw it developing from day to day than a former in his field sees the corn growing.” (I referenced that quote when I interviewed Albright at length for the Free Library of Philadelphia.)
Well, the corn is being harvested in Portland. An “acting” federal homeland security director (a former airport security bureaucrat and current Trump toady unconfirmed by the Senate) has stormed into town with his unbadged, ill-trained federal agents to detain what he calls “violent lawless anarchists” – who in truth are guilty of nothing more than scrawling graffiti on federal buildings. Or simply walking down the street, as one captive was doing when he was pulled into an unmarked van.
Policing Portland’s civil rights protests – protests that are permitted by the First Amendment – is a job for city and state authorities. Oregon officials didn’t ask Trump to send in his own goons, and Oregon officials are demanding that the goons leave. The state’s attorney general is suing the feds for making arrests without probable cause. And Jeff Merkley, one of Oregon’s U.S. senators, has tweeted at Trump: “Get your DHS lackey and uninvited paramilitary actions out of my state. Our communities are not a stage for your twisted reelection campaign.”
But Ken Cuccinelli, the “acting” deputy secretary of homeland security (a failed right-wing Virginia politician who was salvaged by Trump), signaled the other day that Trump intends to go national with his paramilitary force. And one of his helpers, “acting” U.S. Customs and Border Protection Commissioner Mark Morgan, told Fox News on Thursday: “We’re really going to take a stand across the board…We’re going to do what needs to be done.”
This is classic banana republic behavior – but, naturally, there has been barely a whiff of complaint from Trump’s banana Republicans. I’m old enough to remember when Republicans routinely freaked out about federal “overreach” and federal “tyranny.” But I guess that only happens when a black president is trying to give people health care.
Republicans have been trundled into the unmarked vans as well. They’ve gone willingly, captives of Trump’s desperate re-election campaign. It doesn’t take a stable genius to see what he’s trying to do. If he dispatches his personal paramilitary force to Portland and other blue cities, he can stoke the cultists whom he needs in November. If his paramilitary force ratchets up the tensions and provokes violence, he can then try to sell himself as the savior who pledges to rescue us from carnage.
It’s a dark strategy culled from the Dictator 101 textbook. But after disgracefully punting on the pandemic and cratering the economy, what else does he have?
We should never have allowed ourselves to reach this precipice, but here we are. There’s one last chance – in November – to save America from becoming an authoritarian sinkhole. Let the words of the late John Lewis guide us going forward:
“When you see something that is not right, not just, not fair, you have a moral obligation…to do something. Our children and their children will ask us, ‘What did you do?’…We have a mission and a mandate to be on the right side of history.”