I Have Been Here Before

Whether to lose one's life or find it: that is the question.

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The February 4 episode of The Bulwark Podcast with Tim Miller hosted Anne Applebaum, a journalist and historian whose expertise is in the history of communism. The topic of the episode, titled “Outside the Rule of Law,” is the seeming extralegal status of many of the actions being undertaken in the federal government over the past couple of weeks, including the takeover of government offices and databases.

Most of the things being discussed are unprecedented in American history, perhaps even all of history. These actions are alarming, shocking, and confusing (as they are surely intended to be).

But as I listened to the podcast, some of what Applebaum was saying sounded uneasily familiar. She was describing things happening in a major institution—the federal government of the United States—but there are other institutions. There are other power-hungry, paranoid leaders who wield force in place of leadership and sow confusion where they lack competence. If you have been in such an institution, if you have been subject to such authorities, then what Applebaum describes is the same, even if less is at stake.

Drawing on her expertise in studying European dictatorships to analyze what is happening in America right now, Applebaum says,

… you have to look at dictatorships where single people took the law into their hands. And of course, it doesn’t feel like that to most people [in America now] because it’s just something happening inside some Washington buildings, you know, and it’s not yet affecting ordinary Americans, but it could.

Applebaum mentions a U.S. attorney threatening to investigate someone who recently criticized the new administration. Such, Applebaum says, “leads us into a new realm.”

She continues,

People working inside the U.S. government … they’re going to have to face choices, and some of them have faced them already this weekend and some of them have paid prices for it.

Whenever talk of “making a choice and paying a price” comes up, it hits hard. This is the point in listening to the interview where my stomach began to churn.

The memories of being pulled into a meeting, exchanging countless phone calls, texts, and emails in which I had to defend my political statements, explain and defend my voting choices, and even issue a public statement to appease critics who disagreed with how I voted have faded very little over time.

I tried so hard at first to conform.

As

Janyne McConnaughey

so poignantly puts it in “Religious Trauma: An Educator’s Perspective”:

The pressure I felt within Christian higher education by those who would like to control and prescribe “acceptable” views and teaching is now being felt across all academia. When the church holds the power to dictate and destroy the lives of those who do not comply with mandates caused by the pressures placed on institutions, it is religious trauma.

Over the past year, I have watched the fruition of the church’s belief that gaining power gives them the authority to control others—including educators. I have lived under this oppressive controlling power and struggled to break free of its hold over me, only to watch that same powerful force consume our nation.

Applebaum had interesting insights to bear on this natural impulse to conform that few overcome. She describes asking during her research a dissident from East Germany what percentage of people went along and simply conformed:

She said, everybody went along with it. She said, sooner or later, if you wanted to keep your job and you wanted your kids to go to university and you wanted your wife to get her health care, you had to go along with it. I mean, once the system is constructed in a way that there are no options, 99% of people will conform.

And she said, the real question to ask is, why is anybody a dissident? Because the dissidents, in that system anyway, they paid a pretty big price, right? You lost your job and maybe they didn’t kill you …

Then Applebaum returns to the current situation in America and says,

People are going to be faced very soon with the choice of either you stay in your job and you conform to the new rules, or you’re fired.

That phrase “conform to the new rules or you’re fired” really hit home for me. That is exactly what I faced from my previous employer. I had done nothing wrong. I had not changed. But the rules had changed. The goal posts were moved. I was told to get off social media or leave my job, and I had to make a choice and pay a price either way. For me social media isn’t just for fun. It is the way I use my voice and say what I believe needs to be said. I have a conviction that it is, for me, a calling.

This is why you are reading these words now. I am still here.

It was not an easy decision.

Applebaum acknowledges how great that difficulty is for people working inside corrupt institutions who want to bring change to the world, who are devoted to their jobs, who need their jobs:

If you say, no, I won’t do that, and then you’re fired, that then creates a kind of cascading psychological effect on everybody else that works at that agency. So then will other people be willing to say, no … knowing that the price is they’re fired. So it’s not only that they’re overcoming people, it’s also that they’re scaring people and they’re using tactics of intimidation … threatening people with their jobs and so on.

Usually conformism is like you don’t need to threaten people with the gulag, you know, or a concentration camp … you just say either you conform to this, or you lose your job, or you lose your benefits or something. And for most people, that’s too much.

It’s a moral choice, she explains, the kind people make in occupied countries. Do you stay to try to make change from the inside? Do you remain inside to make sure people aren’t harmed and become tarnished in the process? Do you dissent and then lose influence? Do you quit in a principled way? Or do you eventually just conform completely? I have so very many friends and former colleagues in these places, facing these decisions (or earnestly trying to ignore the reality that these choices are being made every day).

It’s also a choice, Applebaum says, that more Americans—who are not used to facing such choices—will likely soon face. We may not face the gulag. But the choice for many of us will be between losing our life and finding it.

I have already made mine.

It may not be the last one I face. But I know I have been here before.