Democracy crumbles slowly at first - then really, really fast

I've been intending to write some version of this post for about a week now, but I just watched something today that reignited the fire.

I'm a big fan of The Colbert Report, as I've mentioned before. But I normally just enjoy its content in passing and then forget about it. A few weeks ago, though, there aired an episode of The Report that just hit home. This video is from The Colbert Report's Word clip from September 19, regarding the recent tasering of a student at a John Kerry speech. The taser incident was one of the things that got me fired up about posting after talking with a colleague at the end of September. Not only did John Kerry appear not to do anything significant to stop this incident, but the crowd at the event - perhaps guided by Kerry's stunning leadership example - just sat and watched. Watched a college student get accosted and attacked by multiple law enforcement officers just for asking questions.

There have been many expressions of outrage, but the news also seemed to be filled with nearly as much justification. It doesn't really matter whether or not the student is a prankster, or has a web site full of half-baked rants. None of that has any bearing on the fact that the response of the University of Florida police was completely inappropriate and unnecessary. Sometimes people overrun their time and are belligerent at public forums. This actually happens all the time at community meetings. You let the speaker handle it, or the moderator handle it, or the sponsor of the forum. The police are only necessary for physical threats, or when all other means to control a participant in a forum have been exhausted, and the situation is dangerous.

But speaking out at a public meeting is not dangerous - except in a society that represses free expression. Even if the student had to be forcibly removed from the podium because he refused to leave the floor (say, after Kerry had answered his question), why on earth were charges filed? The primary disturbers of the peace were the officers who dragged a speakers out of an open forum; and what he was resisting was the complete excess of force used on his person.

I'd like to look at this as an isolated incident, but it is part of a growing pattern of overreaction in the name of "security". When you start to couple it with the MIT student arrested at Logan for a "fake bomb," the marketing folks penalized for a "bomb hoax" in Boston earlier this year - interestingly, neither of these things was a bomb or anything pretending to be a bomb, making the words "fake" and "hoax" both completely inaccurate (but effective for scaring people) - the reliance on overly stringent airport search procedures which don't catch anything (as opposed to vigilance and attention by airline and law enforcement personnel to truly suspicious or dangerous behavior, which has caught a number of potential threats recently), the fact that even saying (not yelling, as in the Supreme Court example) the word "bomb" in an airport can get me arrested ... not to mention new laws like the Patriot Act, which contain multiple incursions on civil liberties and rights to privacy, the Military Commissions Act, allowing anyone to be named an enemy combatant, or the NSA's civilian surveillance programs. This a serious pattern, not just for policy wonks or Washington watchers, but for every ordinary citizen. We need to be scared, to be shocked into action.

One person who seems to be recognizing this pattern - and trying to shake us up about it a bit - was a guest on this same episode of The Colbert Report. In this clip from Stephen Colbert's interview with author Naomi Wolfe about her new book, The End of America, A Letter of Warning to a Young Patriot, Ms. Wolfe only gets to explain four of her 10 steps to a fascist state; the full list can be found here, and the number of points we've already hit on this list as a nation should frighten us. Why? Because the loss of democracy doesn't happen overnight, in a big dramatic event; it happens step-by-step, with the assent of ordinary people.

As everyone knows, the quickest way to end an argument is to bring up Nazi Germany. But in this case, the comparison is not overly dramatic, and is very instructive. The Third Reich developed over the course of a decade, building off of the national crisis following the First World War. It started with anger and discontent and the need to find a scapegoat for the national ills; it proceeded through propaganda; it achieved power through the democratic process of elections and legislation; it developed a network of fear and suspicion, enforced as much by ordinary citizens as by those in official positions; and by the time the dramatic dismantling of democracy occurred, the way had been prepared both to build supporters for the move and to build a structure that could quash dissent by physical and social force. While many German citizens, Gentile as well as Jewish, were imprisoned for dissent, many, many more participated willingly in the Third Reich - either by actively enforcing it or by refusing to fight it in the interest of self-preservation. These were normal people, not a nation of monsters. And each step they could justify by saying it was regrettable but necessary, or that only a fool would try and test the boundaries in that kind of climate.

We are already well on our way. There are still people among us who remember how fascist states develop, and they're beginning to recognize the signs. We have an opportunity to stop what is happening, but only if we rise up and act in protest. I admit that I am not sure what that means yet; I don't want to be one of Stephen Colbert's jokes, a young person who will write out a long missive from the security of her couch, but who wouldn't know civil disobedience if it hit her in the face. Part of it is talking, and sharing the need with others I know. But there is an action piece, an involvement piece, that I am also responsible for as a citizen, and I have to find it.

This quote gets trotted out so often that it feels played; but cliches only become cliches when they contain that strong element of truth:

“The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.” --Edmund Burke (1729-1797)