Standing up against authoritarianism

The effort to punish and humiliate Harvard is just one more instance of authoritarian overreach.

More than one of my readers has urged me to stick to economics and stay out of the purely political; and, at least recently, I’ve tried to adhere to that advice. I’m afraid, however, that I feel compelled to override that guidance, as the political realm has become a larger concern to me.

It’s not that I have somehow become less critical of Trump’s economic policies. I’ve not. Any escalation of tariffs will inevitably raise prices and retard economic growth, and they will have little effect in terms of stimulating additional manufacturing in the near term here at home. And the meat axe that he has applied to scientific and medical research will have lasting and devastating impacts on prospective advances and benefits that we would otherwise realize – to say nothing of the callous disregard for the lives that will unnecessarily be lost as a direct consequence of the aborted research that Trump has ordered.

The same can be said, of course, for the dismantling of critical safety net programs, both here and abroad. The programs that are slated to be cut under the latest budget bill passed by the House have played important roles in providing nutritional and educational programs for many of the most vulnerable among us. Whatever short-term savings that the champions of these cutbacks hope to achieve, they surely will pale in terms of the longer-term consequences of increased numbers of children compromising their nutritional intake and facing more limited access to adequate health care and education. Obviously, the economic effects of these various policy reversals that Trump has instituted have yet to be fully realized, but getting lemonade out of these lemons will be quite a trick.

What’s motivating this blog, however, is the administration’s latest moves to subjugate Harvard. But it’s not just Harvard. Harvard is just the latest on Trump’s list of institutions and individuals that he’s seeking to humiliate. The targets of Trump’s intended retributions are expanding, seemingly day by day. They now include virtually any undocumented immigrant, whether having entered the US legally or otherwise, civil servants in various departments who haven’t satisfied some amorphous loyalty test, celebrities who have publicly criticized Trump, law firms with past or current partners who played adversarial roles in investigations or lawsuits seeking to challenge Trump’s use of power, and various press outlets that Trump has accused of publishing “fake” news to his detriment.

Virtually all the punishments and constraints that Trump has imposed on his various perceived enemies have come about by executive order, in certain cases followed by some kind of “deal,” where these targets have acceded to Trump’s extortion. To its credit, Harvard has not yet succumbed to Trump’s efforts to shake it down, but the institution, its students and faculty, and the world at large, which benefits from the contributions that Harvard has made will continue to pay a price if Harvard remains in Trump’s cross-hairs, which seems likely to be the case despite a court’s restraining order that has temporarily nullified the revocation of Harvard’s Student and Exchange Visitor Program certification. Without that restraining order, about 27 percent of Harvard’s student body would have been forced to leave Harvard or lose their legal status to remain here in the US. Unfortunately, despite this order this saga isn’t yet over.

If the administration believes Harvard or any other of its presumed enemies have committed crimes, they should be investigated; and if a grand jury finds sufficient evidence of a crime having been committed, those accused should be indicted and given their day in court. Otherwise, Trump’s administration has no business meddling in the affairs of private institutions and individuals or trying to micromanage how these entities conduct themselves. We might expect to see authoritarians in shit-hole countries using executive orders to bully and preemptively punish their political enemies in lieu of due process and the rule of law, but these kinds of practices have no place in the USA.