By David K. Shipler 

There is nothing sadder than fear.

                                     --Isabel Allende  

     A newdivide is plaguing America: sharp disagreements over how to resist theauthoritarian juggernaut in Washington. Speak and fight forcefully? Thread yourway between principle and pragmatism? Capitulate to the rising autocracy? Or keepyour head down to present less of a target?

            All thosetactics are being used by a citizenry devoid of the skills needed to keep alivea dying democracy. By and large, Americans don’t see what’s coming. Only a fewhave experienced dictatorships (abroad) and fewer still have lived undergovernments with totalitarian aspirations.

In modern America, the native-born havenot been seized in the streets for their political views and imprisoned bymasked agents without recourse. University and school curricula have not beendictated by Washington. Science, art, and literature have not been censored. Governmentofficials tasked with impartiality have not been routinely screened for politicalloyalty to a lone leader. A central ideology has not been dispensed beyondgovernment into civil society at large, enforced by existential threats toprivate organizations that do not comply.

The country has enjoyed a happy,complacent spirit of assumptions about the permanence of the constitutionalsystem. That is now being swept away by the Trump maelstrom, its place taken byan unfamiliar fear—cleverly implanted by the president and his apparatchiks.

What opposition has developed hasbeen fragmented and too far from unanimous to rescue a failing democracy thathas already descended into a semi-dictatorship. The United States is nowgoverned largely by the whims of a single man. His daily impulses disrupt globalmarkets, end vital research, halt life-giving aid to children, turn workersjobless, impair education, promote white supremacy, and still dissentingvoices.

He has cowed huge law firms, richcorporations, major foundations, news organizations, and prominentuniversities—some of each—by imposing financial fear in various forms. A few imaginethat they can buy the favor of the bully. They must have lived a charmed lifeof never having encountered a bully, a mafia boss, a dictator.

The charmed life of the UnitedStates has ended. Yet what opposition exists has been fragmented. No masscoalition of resistance has taken shape across the country’s vast landscape ofclass, profession, religion, ethnicity, and party. Most dissent has beenparochial: university presidents defending universities, law firms defendinglawyers, immigrant rights groups defending immigrants, news media defendingnews gathering, business defending trade. They need to join to defend oneanother, and the country.

As Kamala Harris noted in her firstmajorspeech since losing last year’s presidential election, Trump and hisenablers think “if they can make some people afraid, it will have a chillingeffect on others. But what they have overlooked is that fear is not the onlything that’s contagious. Courage is contagious.”

Courage is also dangerous—acutely dangerousto the dictator, and obviously dangerous to the outspoken. That is why very fewpeople in autocracies hold the flame of freedom. The risks are high. And theyare getting higher in the United States.

As a triumvirate of scholars whohave written on dictatorships notedyesterday, the “simple metric” testing whether a country has crossed intoauthoritarianism is “the cost of opposing the government. . .  When citizens must think twice about criticizingor opposing the government because they could credibly face governmentretribution, they no longer live in a full democracy. By that measure, Americahas crossed the line into competitive authoritarianism.” They definecompetitive authoritarianism as a system where “parties compete in electionsbut the systematic abuse of an incumbent’s power tilts the playing fieldagainst the opposition,” as in Hungary, India, Serbia, and Turkey.

The United States has long beenpockmarked with injustices, and its history is stained with chapters of shame.Perhaps it is reassuring to look through the legacy of the wrongs that havebeen acknowledged and overcome: the slaughter of Native Americans and theirculture, the enslavement of African Blacks, the Civil War, the hatefultreatment of immigrants, the political prosecutions of labor leaders andantiwar activists, the internment of Japanese-Americans, the witch-hunts ofMcCarthyism, the legal segregation of the races, and on.

The Trump chapter looks different.It is structural, expanding executive power in the service of a totalistideological remaking of the society. It has the hallmarks of an aspiringtotalitarianism, absent the mass political arrests of citizens, so far. Evensome who fear the Trumpists’ assault speak of a phase that will end, a pendulumthat will swing back, a cycle that will turn. Republicans will finally object.Business will finally bring pressure. Voters will turn the House to theDemocrats next year.

But that hopeful reasoning lies whollywithin a constitutional framework that Trumpists evade, which makes this anasymmetrical struggle. Those who resist operate within a set of laws, rules,mores, and values that—we have discovered—rely largely on voluntary complianceand trust, the way you trust drivers to stick to the right and stop at redlights, even when cops aren’t around.

But Trumpists are working outsidethe constitutional framework, where no rules apply, not even judges’ commands. Theonly institution mounting consistent opposition to the assaults has been thejudiciary—not the legislature—and Trump has set an early pattern of ignoring orweaseling around court orders. When the last refuge of justice is overrun, fearwill rule.

History is still in the hands ofthe people, for a time. Whether this enters American history as a passing phaseor a fundamental turning point will depend on whether Americans mobilize tomake courage contagious. “In a free society,” said Abraham Joshua Heschelduring the civil rights movement, “some are guilty, but all are responsible.”