The Appalling Silence

Neoliberalism has killed our courage, if we ever really had it.

There are days when I feel like giving up.

Friday was one of those days.

I woke up to a catechism of grief.

The Trump administration is bearing down on Harvard, using levers of state power that a university - or a business, for that matter - cannot counter. The administration is simply not going to give visas to foreign students who go to Harvard. Taking away roughly a third of the university’s income.

And leaving thousands of students stranded.

Unless, of course, Harvard gives the federal government total control of their structure and curriculum.

State-run blackmail.

In the early days of social media, when people could still talk about policy on Facebook, there were a lot of us pointing to the Social Contract - as Elizabeth Warren would argue so eloquently in the years to come, even as the right twisted the message.

The state invests in roads and bridges and internet(!) and electricity generation and traffic control and has entire departments that deal with things like student visas and loans and making sure we don’t get scammed when we buy something.

Now, I fear, we are all getting scammed by the federal government.

Also this week, the House passed - by one vote - a bill that is going to actually hurt people, mostly poor people, including a lot of MAGA voters, who don’t seem to care that they will get hurt. It is, to them, the price of owning the libs or torturing brown-skinned people who don’t speak English or shutting down all that queer crap.

As Adam Serwer said, cruelty is the point. But what gets me is that the people who want to do good are ignored at best and beaten up at worst.

In Nevada, we have a Democratic state legislature that seems to be capitulating to very conservative, problematic ideas such as privatizing education, that the Republican Governor is bringing to the table.

And the only reason we have a Republican Governor is that the previous Democratic governor made clear in 2020 that his constituents were casino owners, not workers, many of whom lost everything while waiting for help from the understaffed and under-resourced unemployment office that neoliberalism pretty much succeeded in drowning in a bathtub.

Then there’s Robert Reich. Whom I idolize for his plain speaking and relentless messaging about how neoliberalism created corporate power structures that deliver for shareholders rather than stakeholders, and how both Republicans and Democrats structure their governing on that view. They have been looking through the neoliberal lens for so long, they don’t even know it’s a lens. It’s just the way the world is.

So any solution they might offer to people who still make $40,000 but need at least $20,000 more to make ends meet sounds hollow to voters.

“Don’t tell me what the world is,” they say to Democrats. “Tell me how you’re going to make it better for me. Not just better for your corporate donors.”

The thing that gets me, though, about Reich is that he has been sounding the alarm for decades. Literally. And we are worse off than when he started. He is a superb communicator. And we are sitting here watching the very fabric of democracy die.

If Robert Reich can’t make a difference, how can I?

That’s how I woke up on Friday, at the beginning of a weekend in which we are supposed to remember all the people who fought and died for our democracy.

Our democracy which, itself, is dying.

Later that morning, I got in the car, which is tuned to MSNBC, and I heard Marc Elias on Deadline Whitehouse, talking about the abject cruelty of the Trump administration.

Elias fought and won over 60 lawsuits after the 2020 elections. In retaliation, his former law firm, Perkins Coie, is being targeted by Trump. They are fighting back.

And yet, when asked by Nicolle Wallace about retribution, Elias answered, “Candidly I’m worried.”

He then talked about Alina Habba, acting U.S. Attorney for New Jersey, bringing charges against Congresswoman LaMonica McIver.

“They are trying to not just intimidate her, but other Democrats who might do oversight,” Elias said.

He talked about Ed Martin, Trump’s acting U.S. Attorney for D.C., who stepped aside amid conflict of interest and corruption criticism to head the frighteningly (and honestly) named Weaponization of Government division of the Dept. of Justice.

He talked about Miles Tayler and Chris Krebbs, who became the subject of specific executive orders after serving in the previous Trump administration and having the audacity to tell him no. Now, Trump is punishing them with bogus investigations that courts will throw out in a heartbeat, but that will cost the two men lots of time and money and anxiety before it even gets to court.

Then Elias said:

“The reason why I’m worried is that I had hoped that when we saw these political misuses of the criminal justice system, we would see outrage in all quarters; we would see the non-profit community step forward, we would see the legal community issue statements, we would see the media all denounce this. Instead it’s actually been pretty muted.

“So, I’m quite worried that what begins is only going to escalate and we are going to see a cycle of ever more abusive political misuse of government power, including the criminal power, but not exclusively the criminal power, and we are being met by, frankly, a lot of what Martin Luther King referred to as the appalling silence of the good people.”

We knew this was going to happen. We knew when, in the spring off 2024, the Gerald Ford Foundation declined to honor Liz Cheney, for fear of angering Trump, who was at that point blowing through the Republican primaries.

We knew it when Jeff Bezos forbid the Washington Post from issuing an endorsement of Kamala Harris.

We knew it when the White House press corps threw a hissy fit over Biden’s health, and then didn’t report on Trump’s rambling, dissolute speeches.

We knew when most of the national press laughed off Trump’s assertion in Florida that “we need your vote one more time,” then, after four years, “the country will be fixed, and frankly, we won't even need your vote anymore.”

We knew it when Paul Weiss and Skadden Arps bent the knee to Trump and offered him pro bono legal services that he is now trying to use to defend his abuse of government.

But we didn’t just know this on a national level. Local journalists have seen and participated in this kind of capitulation to power for a long time.

When the Wall Street Journal broke the news about years-long sexual assault and harassment allegations against casino mogul Steve Wynn in January of 2018, every journalist who had been in Vegas for more than a decade looked at each other with relief that someone finally revealed the stories that they had been hearing about - and sometimes investigating before being called off by editors.

Steve Wynn had the power to ruin the reporters and their news organizations.

And even though the journalists would have been in the right, the systems for allowing the press to take on the powerful had been hobbled since the 1980s, when the rise of “shareholder value” over “stakeholder” or “user” value created “vertical integration” in which every part of the business had to make a profit. Previous to that, news divisions were seen as loss leaders - the patriotic duty of media companies to ensure a free press that would uphold democratic norms.

But in late-stage democracy, a competition between share price and truth will always make truth the loser.

And so, no one but one man* in Vegas publicly said anything about Steve Wynn. Not his victims. Not employees who witnessed it. Not the (rest of the) press.

Until a national publication with deep pockets started asking questions.

Now, the national press is acting with the same fear and deference regarding Trump that the local press did regarding Wynn.

The cozying up to power by news organization owners and publishers is part of the reason local journalism is in such dire straights. It didn’t stand up for it’s readers/listeners/viewers interests.

So, the readers/viewer/listeners weren’t there for them when Alden Global Capital or some other vulture capital firm swooped in to tear up the meat of their operations and sell the parts for scrap.

Honestly, this is what I feared all of last year. This knowledge that our artists (the David H. Koch Theatre in Lincoln Center), our universities (Raytheon Amphitheater at Northeastern University) our medical institutions (the Adelson Medical Research Foundation) all have so much to lose monetarily if they don’t bend the knee to Trump.

Hell, before Trump even took office, Disney forced ABC to settle the lawsuit the president-elect had brought against them. And Paramount Global, which is looking to finalize its merger with Skydance Media, seems intent on settling a lawsuit Trump brought over an interview they aired with Kamala Harris on 60 Minutes.

It’s worth noting that Skydance is controlled by GOP billionaires Larry and David Ellison

So, of course, there is going to be “appalling silence” in news organizations, arts organizations, universities, and legal organizations.

Because we are a country that doesn’t stand together for the greater good. We don’t know how anymore. The very idea has been strategically excised from our culture. Most of our instutitions define “greater good” as whatever it takes to ensure their own survival.

While the people they are supposed to be serving wake up more mornings than not panicking about how they are going to get through their day.

*I am lucky that John L. Smith is both a hero and a friend.

Gonna level here, You’re Overthinking It needs more paying subscribers. Please, if you can, sign up for $7 a month or $70 a year. Support thoughtful commentary. And help keep me sane.

Or buy me a coffee.