When I described the constraints on immoral, unjust, or illegal executive branch action and behaviour in my piece two weeks ago, I included just the institutional/formal constraints built into the US Constitution. What was left out of course, was the media, the informal institution with equal, if not more power if left unfettered, than Congress—certainly more likely in the near- term to exercise its power to hold government action and behaviour to critical scrutiny of those same people that President Trump says is their enemy. It remains to be seen how much effect will this have in what is now termed “the Post-Truth” world; Trump’s supporters still seem to regard him as on the right track and delivering what he promised?
And who are these people of which the media are enemies? Well, I guess it would be most, if not all, the people who voted against Mr. Trump, meaning about three million more than those who voted for him. But that hardly matters to a strong ethnic nationalist movement. Nationalists always refer to “the people” when they really mean “their people.” This kind of nationalism is really nativist in character. But beyond being essentially nativist, the movement is also purely populist. And populists always claim they represent “the people.” Trump talked on Inauguration Day about power being given back to the people. Thus, those who oppose Trump oppose “the people”—never mind that his people are a minority of those who voted.
When I saw Trump's label for the media he doesn't like, I thought of the 1882 play "An Enemy of the People" by the great Norwegian playwright, Henrik Ibsen. It could be the first play, at least the first modern one about whistleblowing
Populists also want to politicize all aspects of policy making, and are likely to try to dismember, or sideline, a professional bureaucracy. Current examples abound (e.g. Turkey, Hungary). They tell their supporters they are doing so for them, for “the people.” Trump’s éminence grise, Steve Bannon, the alt right voice near power, received a happy response at the Conservative conclave last week with his assertion the Trump government was “deconstructing the administrative state.”
Now the definition of nativism is “a policy of favouring native inhabitants as opposed to immigrants,” but who are the native inhabitants? In 1492, nativism would have meant the preservation of the western hemisphere for the indigenous cultures which were here when Columbus and the Europeans arrived. Let’s put that possibility aside as ahistorical (perhaps a euphemism). In 1850, It was the white Protestant population that supposedly needed preservation from the Irish and other Catholics flooding in to the US from famine and revolution. In 1900, it would have been the White Protestant and Irish Catholics who supposedly needed preservation from the Southern and middle European Jews and Orthodox people fleeing pogroms and/or seeking a better life, and so on.
Nationalist/Nativist/Populist movements need two things to prosper: immigrants and enemies. The US has always had plenty of immigrants. They make the country stronger (but that is a subject for a subsequent piece). They can be portrayed as enemies too, but that gets politically dangerous if done too broadly and stridently. At this point, therefore, the Trump government is singling out the 11 million illegal immigrants as “the Other,” from which the rest of us need to be protected. It is not attacking legal immigrants. (The restrictions on visitors are likely to be another story.) It is using the press as the enemy, because it needs an enemy to rile up its adherents, and also because it would like to suppress the bad press it is getting in order to evade the impression that it is against all immigrants.
True to his word, Trump issued a new executive order expanding the power and easing the rules for the Immigration Service enforcement officers to pick up and deport illegal immigrants, and such roundups appear to have already begun. It may be that this policy received almost as little vetting in the administration as did his ill-fated order banning Muslim immigrants. This new policy will further strain relations between those states that have pledged sanctuary to their large populations of illegal immigrants and the federal government. It could also cause a blowback from some supporters of Trump. For example, the farmers of the southern part of California’s Central Valley, a region that is one of the most important producers of food in the US, who were strong supporters of Trump in a state in which he lost by four million votes, have suddenly awakened to the fact that his expanded policy to deport illegal immigrants may leave them without workers to pick their crops next summer and fall. This will not be tested in the courts, it seems, but is likely to be tested in the court of public opinion.
Of course, muzzling the press is the first thing that authoritarians do on their way to weaken democracy and eliminate constraints on their action. And it works in two ways. First, those who are not readers of the “chosen” outlets (e.g. Fox News and Breitbart News) have to go, uncomfortably for some, out of their way to get objective reporting on what the Trump government is doing. Both Fox and Breitbart are pretty far out of the way for me. But Trump supporters get the raw meat they usually get, without any leavening. Frankly, I suspect that this exclusion was a signal as to what would happen to the outlets that report facts instead of government spin if they continue to hold the Trump government to the light of real transparency, and will not be turned into policy, at least until later in the year.
The second thing that authoritarian governments do to muzzle dissent is to find ways to force the media to eschew critical commentary and unhelpful facts. Governments can use threat, bribery, or outright suppression. Threat and bribery aim at getting media outlets to change their tone and their reporting. Outright suppression is just to seize the outlet, jail the journalists, and stop the voice of dissent. If one looks at the history of 20th century authoritarian takeovers of governments, one can see the pattern clearly.
When I saw Trump’s label for the media he doesn’t like, I thought of the 1882 play “An Enemy of the People” by the great Norwegian playwright, Henrik Ibsen. It could be the first play, at least the first modern one about whistleblowing. The hero uses his scientific expertise and knowledge of the scientific method itself to discover toxicity in the public baths, and stands his ground against the city fathers, who want to suppress the information because of its economic impact. He makes it public even when the town newspaper refuses to print it. For his effort to save them from severe illness, the townspeople turn against him and declare him an enemy of the people. It is the story of, to quote a review, “an apathetic public [that] lays the path to its own downfall.” “Perhaps our best hope is that the independent press remains the enemy of Trump and Trump’s ‘people,’ and that like Ibsen’s hero, stands firm on the truth in the face of the inevitable calumny and threat.”
The author is a Senior Scholar at the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington DC, and a former US diplomat who was Ambassador to Pakistan and Bangladesh