Rule No. 1 in Timothy Snyder’s On Tyranny is “Do not obey in advance.” The subtitle of the Yale historian’s handbook on dictatorship is, “Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century.” And they are as relevant today as they were in July 1932 when the National Socialists (the Nazi Party) won 230 seats in the German congress, the Reichstag.
Six months later, Adolf Hitler was the German chancellor.
Synder’s reasoning runs like this: When the National Socialists came into power, they “did not initially know that citizens were willing to compromise this value or that principle. … (But) because enough people … voluntarily extended their services to the new leaders, Nazis … realized that they could move quickly toward a full regime change. The first heedless acts of conformity could not then be reversed.”
Richard Conville
Such acts of conformity Snyder calls “anticipatory obedience.”
So here we are, just days away from the inauguration of President-elect Donald Trump. Look around. Do you see any signs of anticipatory obedience?
Here are a few to consider.
Christopher Wray announced his resignation as FBI director, this with two years left on his 10-year term — a term established by Congress to protect the independence of the FBI from executive interference. During the campaign, Trump repeatedly threatened to fire Wray. Now Wray has resigned. Classic anticipatory obedience.
ABC News has agreed to settle a defamation suit filed last March by Trump in Miami’s U.S. district court. ABC agreed to pay $15 million toward Trump’s future presidential library and museum plus $1 million toward Trump’s legal fees. News organizations typically fight such suits because the bar is so high for conviction.
As University of Utah law professor RonNell Anderson Jones, put it, “Major news organizations have often been very leery of settlements in defamation suits brought by public officials and public figures, both because they fear the dangerous pattern of doing so and because they have the full weight of the First Amendment on their side.”
Professor Jones then added this troubling observation: “Compared to the mainstream American press of a decade ago, today’s press is far less financially robust, far more politically threatened, and exponentially less confident that a given jury will value press freedom, rather than embrace a vilification of it.”
The press today is “politically threatened,” and popular support for freedom of the press is uncertain. Now ABC News has settled. Anticipatory obedience? I think so.
But wait. There’s more! A herd of Big Tech billionaires has made its way to Mar-a-Lago to get a ticket on the Trump Train. Mark Zukerberg, chief executive of Meta, has donated $1 million to Trump’s inaugural fund. Amazon Founder Jeff Bezos (who also owns the Washington Post), has pledged $1 million, as has Sam Altman, chief executive of OpenAI. They went. They gave. Voila! Anticipatory obedience.
Finally, there is an even more dangerous form of anticipatory obedience hanging in the toxic air of Foggy Bottom. Listen carefully how news outlets report the president-elect’s “policy proposals” — the verbal salad he throws against the wall to see what sticks (mass deportations; sky-high tariffs; revenge investigations). All too often reporters and commentators speak of those proposals as if they already have stuck to the walls of Congress, as if they are real things, policies already in place.
In reality, they are only the president-elect’s words. That’s all they are now. Treating them as accomplished fact hand Trump power he does not have. Unlike ancient deities, he cannot speak the world into being. Granting him that magical power is anticipatory obedience to the max. Granting him that power breaks Rule No. 1: Do not obey in advance.
Trump is testing us. So far, we are not doing so well resisting the bully. How far will we, the people, let him go in his quest to take the government from our hands and claim it all for himself?
Enough of those “heedless acts of conformity” by government officials, news organizations, fawning billionaires and political commentators, and the damage cannot be undone.
Richard Conville is professor emeritus of communication studies at the University of Southern Mississippi and a longtime resident of Hattiesburg, Miss. This column originally was published in the Pine Belt News of Hattiesburg.
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