Opinion Pratap Bhanu Mehta writes: Under Trump, America teeters on the edge of authoritarianism

The nature of the new is hard to acknowledge. Sometimes we do not connect the dots. There are constituencies that say “nothing has changed”. The forms of the republic are being maintained. The executive is passing executive orders. People are still going to court and judges are still stopping the executive. But two institutional realities are palpable. Even if judges are able to halt parts of the agenda, a sufficient number of executive actions that maintain the core momentum and objective of the regime will go through. It also underestimates how much due process is a punishment — individual and institutional lives can be upended, even if you eventually get the right ruling.

We also underestimate how independent institutions subtly begin to adapt. Over time, even the best professionals see more downsides to resisting than upsides to taking a stand. Many hope that all it will take to stop the regime is a few Republicans to oppose the agenda. But even if we assume the regime is not using fear as a weapon, whatever some of the Republicans’ private views may be, they see no upside to resisting. There might be hope in a political backlash against perhaps the mismanagement of the economy. But that will take two years to manifest effectively in mid-term elections. It also underestimates how much slack an administration might have on the economy — after all it is not promising a painless revolution. Economic fatalism is fatal for politics. The opposition does not know which way to turn, in part because ruthless regimes have a “heads we win, tails you lose strategy”. There is something quite politically gifted about ruthless opponents: They simply have more options. Visible opposition is fodder for the regime’s narrative that vested interests are out to oppose it. In any case, even if the regime’s approval ratings plummet a bit, they don’t plummet nearly as much as those of the Opposition — the Democratic Party finds its approval ratings are dropping faster than Trump’s.

The process of normalisation of the new regime’s action is being helped by a sense of bewilderment: This cannot happen here. The denial is reinforced by “statistical innocence” — there is no overt mass repression. But this denial fails to understand that fear and compliance can be generated by exemplary targeting more effectively than by targeting large numbers. The basis of compliance with the regime’s actions is often hard to discern. Many are genuine believers. More come out of the woodwork with the passing of time. But the regime has two big assets. The first is to rely on charges of “hypocrisy” as an effective tool of psychic warfare. The old regime’s hypocrisy becomes a pretext for taking our sights away from clear and present danger. So long as the current regime is targeting this one thing we did not like about the old order, so long as it can tap into one antipathy (DEI for example), its own misdemeanours can be excused. The second is that collective action is genuinely difficult. Adaptive self-restraint is an easier equilibrium to attain. Civic courage is harder.

Leo Strauss had, in a 1941 lecture on nihilism, identified it as a “desire to destroy the present world and its potentialities, a desire not accompanied by any clear conception of what one wants to put in its place”. This is what the current revolution feels like. One colleague asked me, Modi at least had a temple he wanted to build. What is Trump’s temple? The answer is not easy: American power, one might say. But that project seems entirely subordinate to personal power and destroying the potentialities of the present. America is not Germany by even the longest stretch of the imagination — it still has a strong love for liberty. But it is now locked in a political dialectic whose outcome, in the short and medium run, looks very dispiriting.

The writer is contributing editor, The Indian Express