I receive a lot of email requests from progressive and environmental groups to sign their online petitions. My policy has generally been to sign those which concern issues or topics I’m particularly interested in and ignore the rest. So the percentage I sign has been fairly low. Going forward, though, I’ve decided to take an entirely different approach.
What triggered this change of heart was listening to a fascinating podcast in which author Sam Harris interviewed another author, Timothy Snyder, about a book Snyder recently wrote called On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century. He started working on the book almost immediately after the election of Donald Trump and it was published this past February.
Timothy Snyder is a history professor at Yale and has spent a lot of time researching the rise of the Nazi regime in Germany in the 1930s. One of the key points he makes in the book and emphasized during the interview is how important early resistance is to containing the ambitions of authoritarian regimes. When a society takes an authoritarian turn, the leaders driving the change don’t know how far they can go. This is why early resistance is so important.
As an example of this, Snyder talked about what happened when Hitler moved into Austria in 1938 in an action known as the Anschluss and began aggressively persecuting Austrian Jews. Policies were rapidly implemented which had the effect of excluding them from the country’s cultural, economic, and social life. Those who chose to flee the country were subjected to “taxes” which stripped them of whatever wealth they possessed. There was very little resistance from the rest of the Austrian populace so in 1939 the Nazis moved on to genocide to eliminate the Jewish population altogether.
It’s of course impossible to know if things would have turned out differently had the Austrian people put up a staunch resistance to Hitler’s invasion and his subsequent persecution of the Jewish minority. But Snyder argues that early and vigorous resistance can cause authoritarian leaders to realize they won’t be able to move as quickly as they had hoped and may even force them to settle for less radical transformation of the society and its governing institutions.
Snyder noted that authoritarians like Hitler are opportunistic, so once they’ve attained power, they start pushing against the political, economic, and social boundaries of the society to see how far and fast they can go. If no one resists, they can rapidly turn a society into the kind of horror show Nazi-controlled Austria became. Early resistance, on the other hand, defines the boundaries which can only be crossed at significant cost and may force an authoritarian to rethink what is possible.
When Hitler went into Austria, he believed the majority of Austrians would welcome the annexation, but he couldn’t know that for a fact. Had he run into significant push-back, who knows how different the outcome might have been for Austrian Jews and for Jews in the rest of Europe. I’m sure he still would have continued to persecute Jews whenever and wherever possible but perhaps with somewhat less genocidal ferocity.
Donald Trump has been using a similarly opportunistic approach since he took office. The way in which his notorious travel ban was initially rolled out was likely in part an attempt to see what the reaction of the courts and the public would be. It also served as a loyalty test for DHS employees, i.e., who among them would be willing to aggressively enforce the ban even when it meant violating the civil rights of travelers whose only “crime” was being Muslim.
Thankfully, what Trump learned was the United States in 2017 is not Austria in 1938. The resistance to his ban was immediate and widespread. There were numerous protests at airports around the country. A huge swath of American society — including members of Congress, leaders and prominent people in business and academia, religious leaders, civil rights organizations, university students, and ordinary citizens — decried the travel ban. It was quickly dubbed the Muslim ban and the Trump administration was forced into a defensive posture almost immediately.
In the legal arena, a number of law suits were initiated very shortly after Trump signed the executive order which enacted the ban. The order was signed on January 27, 2017, and by the 31st, nearly 50 cases had been filed in federal courts challenging the legality of the ban. Lower courts quickly issued restraining orders which were then upheld by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. While there were DHS agents who sided with Trump and aggressively implemented the ban, the DHS agreed to abide by the court decisions and ceased to enforce the portions of the ban targeted by those decisions. The State Department also complied and re-validated visas which were revoked under the ban.
In March, Trump’s original executive order was replaced by another which attempted to address the concerns raised in the various legal challenges. Trump has referred to the new order as the “watered down, politically correct version” of the ban. This new order was also challenged in federal court and has been appealed up to the Supreme Court. While awaiting a decision by the Supreme Court, an indefinite preliminary injunction blocking reinstatement of the ban is in effect.
Trump may ultimately prevail and get some variation of his ban in place, but he now knows there are limits to what he can achieve. Persecuting Muslims isn’t going to be nearly as easy as he might have hoped. Too many non-Muslim Americans will resist his efforts, something far too few non-Jewish Austrians were willing to do when Hitler began persecuting Austrian Jews in 1938.
After listening to Sam Harris’ interview with Timothy Snyder, I realized I needed to rethink my approach to the emails I receive which ask me to sign online petitions. Instead of limiting the ones I sign to the small number which touch on issues I’m particularly passionate about, I’ve decided to apply a different test. The question I will ask myself going forward is — will signing this petition potentially make things more difficult for the Trump administration as it seeks to implement its authoritarian agenda? If the answer is yes, then I’ll sign.
Sure, signing a petition is a small act of resistance, but small acts add up. When an organization gathers thousands of signatures, hand-delivers the petition, and notifies the press, it does get noticed. It may even cause change. I’ve read about instances where politicians or other government officials have deemed it wise to change their position on something because of public outcry and often online petitions are part of the feedback they’re receiving.
So, going forward, I’ll sign a lot more petitions as part of my personal resistance to where Trump is trying to take the country. I will not be silent. Instead, I’ll be as noisy as possible and signing petitions is one of the ways I’ll do that.