Trickle-Down Lawlessness

I had what turned out to be an unoriginal phrase pop into my head last week: trickle-down lawlessness. The thought being that while the Republican policy of trickle-down economics has been a failure and will continue to be a failure for as long as it exists, Republicans are more likely to be successful in their attempt to dismantle the rule of law in the world's oldest democracy. You can't fundamentally reorder the highest levels of American democracy in a personalized, authoritarian direction, the theory goes, without that reordering necessarily spreading through the system at the state and local levels.

But as I said, it's an unoriginal phrase. Interestingly, when I googled it, I found a nearly 20-year article by noted authoritarianism scholar Anne Applebaum. It was written in 2007, near the end of Vladimir Putin's first term as president of Russia. I am no expert on Russia, but this was seemingly before he had consolidated power and started his current reign as president for life, and there was still some hope (albeit fading) that the country could avoid its descent into oligarchy and autocratic rule. The article focuses on local lawlessness, corrupt cops and bureaucrats, how daily life is harder and often debilitating when there are no rules other than what the strongman says. The lawlessness trickled down from the top. Putin set the tone. The local authorities followed his lead.

The absolutely brutal newsfeed last week is what had me thinking about local lawlessness developing here. It was, as the kids (do not) say, a real humdinger of a week. 

The U.S. Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, which is dominated by rightwing extremists (many of them appointed by President Trump), ignored 90 years of law to declare the National Labor Relations Board unconstitutional and thus continued the demolition of the New Deal.

The former second-in-command in the U.S. Department of Justice’s Antitrust Division blew the whistle on a corrupt pay-to-play culture inside the agency:

U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi got called out for her love of lavish gifts:

President Trump promised to abolish mail-in voting, something he most definitely does not have the power to do:

President Trump threatened Colorado with “harsh measures” if election fraud conspiracy theorist and convicted felon Tina Peters is not released from prison:

F.B.I. agents raided the home of high-profile Trump critic John Bolton:

And President Trump rounded out the week by seizing 10% of Intel not by legal process of any kind, but by simple fiat:

That’s a lot but not exhaustive by any stretch and doesn’t even include whatever Trump is doing with convicted sex trafficker Ghislaine Maxwell, which, whatever it is, is certainly not good. The scope of the lawlessness is staggering, stretching from labor law to antitrust law to ethics law to election law to criminal law to corporate and securities law. It covers it all. It's soup to nuts lawlessness.

No one wants to think about this. It is depressing and terrifying, and we're all juggling a lot: back-to-school, practices, games, work, just daily life. But we can't avoid it. The lawlessness can't be this blatant and pervasive in Washington, D.C. without it trickling down to the rest of us. The stability and predictability that we've all taken for granted can't be taken for granted anymore.

There's simply no way that this won't start reaching into our daily lives, regardless of where we happen to be living them. We're human. We follow cues. If our leaders are telling us explicitly and implicitly that the law doesn't really apply anymore, then we're going to start conducting ourselves accordingly.

The natural inclination is to try to avoid it — sure, that craziness is happening over there, but I’m going to keep taking care of my business over here — but at some point, the ability to compartmentalize breaks down. Where is that point? Well, you've definitely passed it when you have to pay the BMV clerk or the cop an extra $50 under the table to do their jobs. It's somewhere well before that, when the regulators stop doing their jobs, when companies stop honoring their contracts, when you can no longer receive the medical care you need because it’s been unconstitutionally eliminated, when your ability to enjoy the full protection of the law depends on your political affiliation.

If you’re not already there, you probably will be soon. It doesn’t have to be permanent. But fixing it will require our collective commitment to hold accountable the criminals currently wrecking the system and to rebuild what they’ve broken, starting at the top and working our way down.