{"id":6230,"date":"2025-05-28T11:29:56","date_gmt":"2025-05-28T15:29:56","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/thunderingpawsfarm.com\/?p=6230"},"modified":"2025-05-28T15:59:56","modified_gmt":"2025-05-28T19:59:56","slug":"where-is-the-resistance-to-autocracy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thunderingpawsfarm.com\/index.php\/2025\/05\/28\/where-is-the-resistance-to-autocracy\/","title":{"rendered":"Where is the Resistance to Autocracy?"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Harvard Law Professor Randall Kennedy quoted in Thomas Edsall’s 22-April-2025 column in The NY Times, Trump Is Insatiable (free link)<\/a>, tells us \u201cthere is good reason to be worried.\u201d<\/em> Not only has the Republican majority in Congress \u201cexhibited little interest in monitoring, much less checking, the president,\u201d but \u201cthe ultimate guardrail against tyranny, the electorate,\u201d cannot be relied on<\/em><\/strong>:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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A decisive chunk of the American electorate elevated Trump to the presidency after he had shown his authoritarian proclivities. And even now after Trump has menaced the civil service, unions, universities, news media and professions in a reckless, dangerous, dictatorial fashion, the number of Americans vocally upset is disturbingly small.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

Edsall notes, “a crucial tactic adopted by Trump in his second term is to isolate a target. Justin Gest, a professor of public policy at George Mason University, elaborated on that point”:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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In each case, the president isolates key targets and threatens them, and seemingly them only, if they don\u2019t bend to his will. And for each target, the calculation is simple: Resisting entails concentrated costs to their organization and diffuse public benefits to American democracy, whereas capitulating transfers diffuse costs to American democracy and concentrated benefits to their organization.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

Edsall warns us:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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What appears to be happening is that recognition of the fact that making even small concessions will only encourage the administration to keep asking for more is spreading.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Why? Because Trump is insatiable.<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

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Sound (too) familiar ???<\/em><\/strong> <\/p>\n\n\n\n

In all<\/span> respect<\/em>s:<\/strong> \u201cWhen you\u2019re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Michael Klarman, a professor at Harvard Law School, writes:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Republicans in Congress have done nothing. They are fully beholden to Trump and will do nothing to resist his authoritarian inclinations. It is one of the most shameless capitulations in American history.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It is hard to believe these people genuinely love their country. They have confirmed cabinet nominees who are the most unqualified in history. And they have raised not a finger to resist DOGE\u2019s assault on Congress\u2019s constitutional powers to appropriate funds and create federal offices.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

Robert C. Post, a law professor at Yale, argued in an email to Edsall that by acting with such speed that his adversaries have been caught by surprise, Trump has been unexpectedly successful in the opening months of his second term:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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The entire society has been taken aback by the suddenness and violence of Trump\u2019s first 100 days. He has worked astonishing innovations in the exercise of executive power. Much of what he has done is obviously lawless.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Trump has seized the high ground in the belief that possession is nine-tenths of the law. He has dared the courts to defy him. And the courts are on this point cautious, because, as has been true for hundreds of years, their authority depends upon the force of their reason.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Many of Trump\u2019s executive orders suggest that he cares little about legal reason. To speak figuratively, Trump cares only how many divisions the courts can mobilize. In such circumstances, the force of judicial reason depends upon public opinion, and Trump is presently still on a honeymoon with the sectors of the public that elected him.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

Trump\u2019s strategy is to divide his adversaries, Post wrote:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Unbound by law, immune to shame, the Trump administration has unleashed the full force of the executive branch on institutions of civil society like universities and law firms.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Civil society is splintering under the assault. Harvard resists; Columbia bends the knee. Paul, Weiss bows in obeisance, Perkins Coie sues. Resistance is genuinely difficult, because the main institutions have left themselves exposed to blackmail from the federal government that has determined to trash all previous norms of behavior.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

For those who think things will just bounce back, Edsall’s panel has some bad news, Jack Balkin, at Yale Law School, said in an email that the wreckage will be hard to repair: \u201cA great danger of the Trump revolution is that it may be very hard to reconstruct the public and private institutions that he has damaged. Even when Trump leaves office, he will have created a playbook for future administrations to follow.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Enormous amounts of expertise and institutional memory have departed from the U.S. government in multiple areas. The purges have badly compromised the professional culture of government institutions. That culture was premised on people making long-term career commitments to gaining expertise and working in the public interest.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

And finally, Edsall refers us to an essay, Universities in Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union Thought Giving In to Government Demands Would Save Their Independence,<\/a>\u201d by Iveta Silova, the associate dean of global engagement and a professor at Arizona State University, in which she reminds us “after Hitler took office in 1933, his regime moved swiftly to purge academic institutions of Jews and political opponents.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Harvard Law Professor Randall Kennedy quoted in Thomas Edsall’s 22-April-2025 column in The NY Times, Trump Is Insatiable (free link), tells us \u201cthere is good reason to be worried.\u201d Not only has the Republican majority in Congress \u201cexhibited little interest in monitoring, much less checking, the president,\u201d but \u201cthe ultimate guardrail against tyranny, the electorate,\u201dContinue reading “Where is the Resistance to Autocracy?”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6230","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","entry"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thunderingpawsfarm.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6230","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thunderingpawsfarm.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thunderingpawsfarm.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thunderingpawsfarm.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thunderingpawsfarm.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6230"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"https:\/\/thunderingpawsfarm.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6230\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6243,"href":"https:\/\/thunderingpawsfarm.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6230\/revisions\/6243"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thunderingpawsfarm.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6230"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thunderingpawsfarm.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6230"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thunderingpawsfarm.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6230"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}