Our System Of Laws Is Not Corrupt

Observations From 15 Years of Living in Authoritarian Countries

Many others have written about the dangers of one of the Trump Administration’s latest assaults on the rule of law: illegal Federal use of the California National Guard and deployment of the nation’s armed forces (in this case, several hundred Marines) to a law enforcement function. That is, use of the state’s armed power against its own citizens. Such a deed runs against the grain of what America stands for, as delineated in the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, various long-standing laws, and centuries of practice in democratic norms and expectations.

But what happens to ordinary citizens when a state slides, or is wrenched, into autocracy and dictatorship? Unfortunately, examples abound around the world. But let’s look at the Cold War, when for fifty years after World War II, the Soviet Union and its Eastern European client Communist police states represented the chief geopolitical threat to the United States.

Over a period of fifteen years, from the late 1970’s to the mid-90’s, professional assignments sent me to live and work in or near this region of the world. (The Soviet Union fell apart at the end of 1991.) Conditions varied, of course, from country to country, but the following is typical of what I saw during those years.

Everyone knows that in those countries, some basic rights Americans enjoy, such as freedom of speech to criticize the government, did not exist. But their governments did not just own a monopoly of armed force; their domestic intelligence capabilities and secret police organizations possessed complete freedom to do to their own citizens whatever they wished, including entering, searching, and placing monitoring devices in homes without restraint.

There was no such thing as due process, observing defendants’ rights, as we understand it. Trials were only for show, and judicially-assigned penalties were whatever the state wished them to be.

Written laws, often painstakingly crafted, which granted individual rights, did exist, but they were hollow, to be ignored or changed by the state at will.

With the state monopolizing all sources of information, citizens were cut off from everything but official propaganda, unless they could listen to foreign news broadcasts (itself a crime) or obtain access to other information smuggled in. What that meant was that those countries’ leaderships’ deeds and whims dominated the nation’s affairs.

Civil society as we know it did not exist; every organization to which the individual could belong – Scouts-equivalents or sports clubs, for instance – was a state instrument molding conformity. The state had unfettered access to information about each individual; privacy did not really exist, and state organs’ activities were only restricted by those offices’ disputes with each other or the leader(s) changing their minds.

The state was the sole source of reward and punishment. Promotions at work, apportionment of scarce consumer goods (more below on why they became scarce), internal travel privileges (but rarely outside the Communist world), access to tiny amounts of power (never autonomous, always serving the state, often granted for spying on family, friends, and neighbors) – all of this was determined by state authorities. Individuals only had the freedom to define personal “success” in those terms. Perversely, those tiny bits of privilege themselves became instruments of state control, because they could be just as arbitrarily taken away as awarded. Factories, offices, and other workplaces all had political “minders”; i.e, representatives of the authorities whose job was to monitor political “reliability.”

With so little to strive for – there was no correlation between effort exerted and personal attainment – incentive to exert oneself drained away. There was nothing to be gained by trying to excel or stand out. That meant that economic innovation and quality control disappeared. Firms gained nothing by attempting to produce more or better goods, and in fact were hampered at even trying by their suppliers being subject to the same pressures.

While money remained a necessity, its value declined as less and less could be obtained with it. The population got poorer with no way out of this vicious cycle. In some countries, alternative, informal currencies – chiefly American cigarettes – circulated, becoming so prized for the goods and services they could buy that they were too valuable to smoke, and people would do almost anything to obtain them.

Individuals lost the will to resist conditions or developments to which they might object. The incentives to just “go along” increased, as each citizen tried to keep intact a private space in which they hoped the state’s omnipresence might nevertheless just leave them alone. At the same time, the relative penalties for not doing so increased, forcing people to make greater and greater compromises with their consciences in order to stay relatively unscathed.

Each individual also had to consider how their families were equally exposed; nothing hindered the state from exacting punishments over any aspect of spouses’ or children’s lives. If a seven-year-old son wanted to join the only youth group going in order to be with his friends (even though it existed for state-directed indoctrination and manipulation) but whose parent, aunt, or uncle had stepped out of line? Probably didn’t happen. If one’s daughter, having done very well in high school, was in line for top honors, but through no fault of her own, bore similar baggage? Also very unlikely. To say nothing of bigger stakes, like university places or better jobs denied. And for “greater” offenses, like persisting in whatever behavior was deemed undesirable or “unreliable,” anyone could be arbitrarily rousted out of bed, swept off the street, interrogated, or imprisoned.

Those who cheer the Administration’s “strongman” behavior and policies, believing that the country’s problems can only be fixed by rooting out domestic opponents, are playing with fire. Very fortunately, we are still far from living under such conditions as described above. But they are the logical consequence of a government’s hacking away at the rule of law. It’s happened many times in many places, and as often pointed out, could also happen here.

Tom Wolfson is a former senior U.S. diplomat who has lived and worked in six foreign countries, occasionally multiple times. His work representing the U.S. has included assignments at the United Nations, in the U.S. Congress, and with an international democracy-building organization. He holds degrees from Dartmouth College, the University of Chicago, and the National War College.

Initially founded in 2016, The Steady State is a nonpartisan, nonprofit 501(c)(4) organization of more than 270 former senior national security professionals. Our membership includes former officials from the CIA, FBI, Department of State, Department of Defense and Department of Homeland Security. Drawing on deep expertise across national security disciplines including intelligence, diplomacy, military affairs and law, we advocate for constitutional democracy, the rule of law and the preservation of America’s national security institutions.