Notes from an Occupation

A well-planned occupation seizes the heights of the defeated civilization, so that the people will see their leaders ousted or humiliated and made docile. It will likewise discredit and weaken those features of the culture in which its people placed confidence and pride. If this model were applied to our situation, we might expect to see the Supreme Court diminished, the Congress disempowered, and the Constitution desacralized by indifference or contempt. The press would come under attack. Our incomparable universities and research institutions would lose autonomy and resources. The mighty dollar would be weakened. Bonds with allies would be breached, and the occupied country would be held in contempt for the damage its default had done to the world order, and to democracy, having put aside its responsibility for demonstrating the viability of popular government.

Examples of the seizing of cultural heights abound. In 70 AD the Romans utterly razed the Temple at Jerusalem and Jerusalem itself in order to deal with the Jewish population’s resistance to their oppression. In 1814 the British, still wanting to break the back of the Revolution, burned the American Capitol Building, destroying the Library of Congress. Someone among the insurrectionists of 2021 might have read a book on imperialism and realized how easily the same results could be achieved if the occupiers were not an alien force, but merely partisans hostile to what the idea of democracy had made of the country over the decades and centuries of its flourishing.

Historically, in America, two contending factions have had enough in common with each other to maintain a basic coherency in government. Then in the late twentieth century their differences became inflamed. The competition became both brutal and unserious. On the right, real interest in the general welfare became secondary to a crusade bent on unconditional and permanent victory. An entanglement with something resembling religion gave it claims to a special righteousness that owed nothing to fact or reason or to the conventions of civilized politics.

Homegrown insurrectionists would have special knowledge of a culture’s vulnerabilities and sensitivities. They would know how to induce corrosive shame, for example. They might have resentments specific to the culture’s measures of status and accomplishment, which would add piquancy to the neutering of centers of influence. None of this is normal, though it has consolidated itself under cover of the customary transfer of power. It claims a mandate to transform the country fundamentally, to return it to its competitors, if there should be another election, irreversibly changed and damaged.

I am proposing, of course, that America actually is, at present, an occupied country. I will call the occupiers Red and the occupied Blue, since these colors are in general use for distinctions of this kind and seemingly cause no offense. To the extent that this statement is complicated by the fact that those in power were elected, their conduct in office seems not to be what many of their voters were led to expect or would have chosen. So the polls tell us. Elections do indeed have consequences, and should have them. The sovereignty of the people must be honored even as they begin to repent of their choices. This is among the many crucial norms that depend altogether on respect. It cannot mean only that the electorate must be deferred to, even when it is misinformed or aroused to unhealthy excitements.

Democracy cannot decline far without ceasing to be democracy. The spirit of its politics might well become so degraded that the people, whose authority can have no legitimate successor, are ousted altogether. We can see who would displace them—the ultra-rich, the tech visionaries, and the hordes of hangers-on who are enchanted and ambitious. To note that these interests are powerful now and have been for many years is to toy with the kind of disrespect for the American system that could be fatal to it. But in our present circumstances, it should be the first order of business to speak forthrightly about the need to reform the culture so that it can sustain democratic institutions. New attention to the First Amendment would be a beginning. We could have excellent arguments about what this reform would mean and how it could be accomplished, if we managed to keep these corrupting influences from compromising any attempt to restore democracy.

Simultaneous with corruption there is also a clash of worldviews that is rarely acknowledged. The country is said now to be polarized, an image that implies that we lie along the same continuum of belief, at opposite extremes but with an expansive middle ground between the two sides that awaits only certain moderating concessions to bring us closer. This metaphor does not really suggest the nature of our problem or the depth of it. It has not been helpful. It is past time to try considering a new image for our situation.

We might think of America as two nations of roughly comparable power, contending with each other for authority and resources and cultural influence. Since they occupy the same terrain and govern the same population, each of them, when it wins an election, is in effect superimposed on the other for a limited period. This system maintains equilibrium well enough, so long as both sides accept it. It has been manipulated, especially by means of laws that affect voters’ eligibility. Lately the Red side has claimed that the system is rigged by corrupt election workers or faulty machines. In these times, accusation is more potent by far than exculpation, since there is a prevalent cynicism that inclines the public to credit slander. Nevertheless, with all these defects and encumbrances, meaningful power has remained in the people’s hands.

What kind of power? How much power? Can one election signify, to history and posterity, that the practices of many generations will be put aside? We hear endlessly, with diminishing grounds for the claim, that we are the richest and strongest nation of all time. If this is true, ought there not to be presumptive respect for the political achievements of the generations whose effort and ingenuity brought us here? This might sound like conservatism. Adherence to the Constitution is conservative in the strict sense. Valuing our great institutions, our great reforms, and the good name our parents and grandparents gave us for generosity toward the world’s poor would be conservative, and patriotic, since our nation has created itself through the continuous development of its laws and the scrutiny of its conscience—at best, of course, and somewhat intermittently, but effectively enough to allow us a rough notion of what we have to lose. The threat to all these things and much, much more is now very real. These people who call themselves conservative are root-and-branch radicals. So it is time to face the fact that their demolition of government and society as we have known them more strongly resembles a hostile occupation than a normal presidency.

Being themselves Americans, the insurrectionists know how to identify things that are especially valued, anywhere and everywhere, throughout the country. A very clear marker of special status is tax exemption. Schools and universities, research centers, charities, performing arts centers, and religious institutions all enjoy the passive subsidy of tax exemption because they have been seen as contributors to public life. This not only marks them out as the kind of thing Americans might take pride in, which might even be involved in their sense of self and country. It also gives them an enormous vulnerability. The exemption, long-standing and crucial in many cases to their stability or survival, can be abruptly ended. For all the talk about probing for corruption or antisemitism, this is basically a dirty trick. Given warning that the government had changed its views on fostering socially beneficial institutions, some of them would no doubt have made changes in their plans and their funding. Caught by surprise, they are vulnerable, not only to the fact that they must defend themselves against the hostile probing of the Red government, but vulnerable also to the pressures that force damaging concessions to their inquisitors. They have thrived any number of years as trustees of health and faith and culture, and now they are to expose their integrity, their reason for being, to “judges” who have only disrespect for them.

Aside from the fact that tax exempt institutions, by virtue of this status, are acknowledged as important presences in society and therefore constitute an elite, it is the underlying economics of the arrangement that offends. The services they offer, because they are passively subsidized, are a distribution of wealth to a public that would pay more for them, or be excluded from them, if they were available only at their true cost.

The same people who resent any sharing of wealth, however it may enhance their own lives, seem also to be indifferent to culture or suspicious of it. These traits are mutually reinforcing. It is as if the resources that have sprung up and matured on American soil had no legitimacy as heritage, no meaning as testimony to what we have made and who we are, what hopes our forebears had for us, what we enjoy and aspire to. Since these institutions have flourished on generosity and autonomy and have existed to serve a diverse public, they are generally associated with a generous view of things. They are, for the present, the shrines and monuments of the Blue country, the one that is occupied. They are in danger of harm or worse, as, by implication, are any or all of the institutions that have accepted this subsidy in good faith. What Blue America intended as an enrichment of national life, Red America has used as a standing threat.

This is a paradigm case for the Red approach to governing. Support can be pulled away from alliances, making foreign leaders regret ever having trusted us. The stock market can be altogether severed from reality, inflated with promises or deflated by threats. Research grants can be abruptly withheld. The simple willingness to be dishonorable destabilizes everything American power affects, instilling anxiety on every side. This is no doubt true among those nations we are told to consider hostile, at least until some whim suggests otherwise. Instability, shrewdly managed, is a great multiplier of power.

Is all this shrewd? Or is it desperate opportunism, an exploitation of resentment to distract “the base” from the damage kicked up by fecklessness? The methodology of the Red country is always to refuse or withhold money from services most people rely on, without regard to consequences other than their own empowerment, and with utter indifference to the value that is lost. If a research project is suddenly unfunded, the work done to that point may well be worth nothing no matter what it cost. If the research would have had consequences for health care, the future expense in terms of disability or early death would turn this supposed thrift into pure loss. Since education is a value, undermining its institutions is a loss, a depletion of the worth that has amassed in them during the long, and prosperous, period that Americans invested in them, believing that learning enhanced personal and societal well-being. There is such a thing as false economy. It is easy to undervalue implicit worth as opposed to cash, even when the amount of money involved is relatively trivial.

If a case were to be made that the Red regime is acting with a shrewd knowledge of Blue American sensitivities and passions, I would look at the campaign against the universities. The accusation made against them is that they have failed to adequately protect Jewish students from antisemitism. I have spent virtually my whole long life in universities, and I find it difficult to imagine that they are disposed to harbor, or to be indifferent to, this pathology. The word is very powerful, as it should be. But here its power has been put to cynical use. It has overshadowed and eclipsed the issues around DEI, around equity, which has evolved in the public mind into a form of discrimination against the white majority, more particularly against the white male minority. Not so long ago we were intensely aware of the complexities of racial justice, an awareness framed by one long history of inequity—a weak word in this context—that denied Black people the expression of their gifts, the recognition of their competence, their just earnings and their political rights.

The list is too long to be attempted here. The mindset that perpetuated this injustice persisted in various forms after and despite the civil rights movement. It pervaded the culture so thoroughly that no one can be certain he or she is not affected by it. Therefore policies that take into account the fact that prejudices might influence decisions are appropriate and necessary. Blue Americans, white or not, might be grateful for the corrective. But in Red America, now that they are in charge, these three letters can bring down disaster on anyone who accepts their meaning and the history that lies behind them. So protections fall away from one population and the loss is not noted because the pretext is the protection of another one. I will not mention the questions that should arise as we see Latin Americans jostled onto airplanes, expelled or imprisoned on no certain grounds except their ethnicity. We know that we can backslide, that we can act in appallingly bad faith. We know by whom this betrayal is most liable to be felt.

The Red country threatens friends, shamefully abandons a brave and resourceful Ukrainian people as they struggle to defend their country from invasion. Honor is not a concept invoked by Red America. It is another conservative virtue for which they have only contempt. Zelensky predicted—so far accurately—that offering the US a financial stake in Ukraine in their natural resources would be the only way to get Trump to soften his pro-Russia stance.

The crisis of democracy must find a democratic solution. Fortunately this is quite possible. The border between these two Americas is entirely open, and on the Blue side, migrants are welcomed with all possible warmth.