The Tragedy of Freedom

Trump is attacking our shared freedom. Some ideas for making resistance easier.

"That which is common to the greatest number gets the least amount of care. Men pay most attention to what is their own: they care less for what is common."

Aristotle, Politics

There is little potential for hyperbole right now. We are on the precipice, not just of losing our constitutional order, but of losing the blessings of liberal democracy.

Trump is ignoring the constraints of the law. Presidents have broken the law before, but we had mechanisms to constrain them. Congress was seen as a co-equal branch of government, able to pass laws to prevent law-breaking or to impeach if necessary. Now Congress sits as a hollow shell of a lawmaking body, unwilling and unable to constrain the man making himself a dictator right in front of our eyes.

Things look like they might get worse. Despite some hope that the bulwark of the federal courts will defend us, the administration and its allies are using language to justify ignoring the courts’ rulings against their illegal actions. If this comes to pass, Trump’s power will be unchecked, and our form of government will be constitutional in name only.

However, what concerns me most about Trump right now is not his illegal actions that are laying waste to our constitutional order. As bad as illegal impoundment is, even with a feckless Congress, voters can, in theory, punish Trump and his allies at the ballot box for these actions. Instead, what keeps me up at night is his legal actions that are laying the groundwork for the dissolution of the liberal democracy we have enjoyed and taken for granted.

Sometimes lost in the haze of his flurry of actions are moves by Trump that, despite being clearly unethical, are not against the law or are in a legal gray area. These include the imposition of loyalty tests on security services, which should be a wake-up call to us all about the gravity of the threat we face, attempts to silence the critical press, and the overt politicization of the justice department.

Even if these actions are not against the law, they may come to severely undermine, if not destroy, the rule of law in the long run by effectively dismantling democratic competition in the United States and replacing it with a system of competitive authoritarianism, a system in which the trappings of electoral democracy exist but the incumbent party maintains their grip on power through illiberal means.

These competitive authoritarian systems are what is left in many of the putatively constitutional republics (sometimes modeled after the United States) in Latin America and elsewhere after a democratically elected leader has smothered democratic opposition.

Daniel Ortega, Nicaraguan dictator, was first elected in a free election (Getty Images)

Trump’s legal actions are taking us down this path; potentially very quickly. Consider how hard it is to unseat a ruling regime without a free press. Even more so, consider what it can do to fair elections if the commitment of security services is to the power of the ruler, as Trump is now asking of FBI and CIA agents, and not the rule of law. I am sure it goes without saying that men with guns, loyal to the ruler, can make elections very unfair, even if those elections nominally still exist. On top of all of this, Trump has wielded his lawful power to pardon, to signal that violence and other lawbreaking in his name will go unpunished, thus hanging the specter of violence over all of our politics.

Trump remains unpopular, and his illegal actions remain very unpopular, but it is his legal actions that are setting the groundwork for this unpopularity not to matter because the public will, as expressed in elections, the one final sovereign in a democracy, may be rendered powerless in the coming illiberal regime. And unfortunately, an authoritarian’s incentive for illiberalism and oppression increases as his popularity decreases.

Which leads me to resistance.

The issue with resisting is that it presents a type of collective action problem where we would all be better off if we resisted these incursions on our freedom, but we are disincentivized to pay the individual costs of doing so. Rather than fighting for our freedom, we each would prefer to freeride on the struggle of others for the freedoms we enjoy. The stakes for this were elegantly explained by M. Gessen, recalling how, as Russia’s short-lived democracy slipped away, individuals were unwilling to pay the costs of opposing or may have even benefited from going along with the authoritarian.

Put another way, I think we can consider the protection of freedom to be a sort of “commons problem,” captured in the Aristotle quote above. The most famous example of this class of problems came in the description of the English common pastures that benefited all members of a community but the maintenance of which no one person was responsible for. Each individual exploited these commons for their own small gain until, one day, the common pastures were gone. This has been described as the “Tragedy of the Commons.” The freedom we enjoy is a common resource that we all must be committed to protecting, but no single one of us is responsible for it. In our everyday life, it just exists and each of us is better off for it. But when it is threatened, each of us individually will let it erode ever so slightly…until it is gone. The tragedy of freedom.

This is how democracy dies. It is not by a dramatic coup of jackboots marching down Pennsylvania Avenue but by the dismissal of an independent bureaucrat here, another there. The silencing of a journalist here and another there. And by the silence of each potential critic as they remain quiet, waiting for the other person to say something.

So, what can we do? The problem is hard because we are all individually incentivized to let the common blessing of freedom dwindle and eventually die, even though we would all prefer to keep it alive. To change this calculation, we need to change the payoff structure: we need to make each individual act of resistance worthwhile. Here are a few ideas.

1. Increase the reward for resisting. First and foremost, we need to celebrate the hell out of resisters. Did they refuse to resign their post during a political purge? We need to give them all the possible kudos and the resulting psychological benefits of those kudos. We need to make them the most celebrated people in America. They should receive medals from every blue state governor. Put them on every morning show. We should have them each seeing seven-figure book contracts in the future.

Even better is if we can materially commit to resistance. Pro bono legal representation has never been more critical. Taking it further (and this may sound farfetched, I know) it would be great if well-resourced institutions and individuals could commit to financially supporting people who fall under Trump’s purges. It’s not much, but I can say that if somebody loses their job resisting Trump, I’ll do everything in my power to get them to Harvard.

2. Create a costly commitment to resisting. In other words, make it costly for somebody not to resist. I know this may sound coercive, so let me explain. I am saying that people should publicly commit themselves to stand up to Trump’s illiberalism now before it targets them or somebody close to them. Think about the signers of the Declaration of Independence signaling that they would not back down from their commitment to free themselves of the tyrant by publicly pledging their “lives, fortunes, and sacred honor.”

How does this change the incentives for resisting? For one, it creates a reputational cost for breaking commitments. Individual media executives must hate Trump’s lawsuits. However, each individual company attacked by Trump is incentivized to settle with him and keep quiet to avoid further attacks. Consider, though, if media executives publicly say that they will never, ever, under any circumstances, settle one of Trump’s frivolous free-press-killing lawsuits. Then, at least, if they do settle, they pay reputational and psychological costs for reneging on that commitment. Better yet would be if media executives do this collectively. Get together with other media executives, decide on your lines in the sand, and then announce those to the world.

If you think that you may be asked to carry out Trump’s illiberalism or are a target of one of his purges, write your letter of refusal now. Post it publicly. If you can’t post it publicly now, you and your colleague can each write a letter and entrust it to the other to be released when an agreed-upon line is crossed.

If your reputation is not enough of a motivation, put money in a shared pool and entrust a third party to hold that money with the promise of keeping it from you if you break ranks (perhaps by spending it on something you really don’t like).

Most of us won’t be asked to carry out Trump’s illiberalism directly, but we have a responsibility to resist it. Publicly commit with your friends to go to protests as they start to appear. Create a credible commitment to lose something if you break your promise.

3. Finally, we need to diffuse the costs by not relying on individuals to carry the burden of resistance. We can’t rely on brave individual bureaucrats to hold out against Trump’s purges. Institutions with inherent collective action potential, such as unions, need to be prepared to use this potential. This is especially true of institutions that can provide some counter-leverage against Trump’s illiberalism. Unions can hit Trump where it hurts with work stoppages. Trump is trying to purge the federal government workforce, but he still needs part of this workforce to carry out the essential tasks of the American government. A beautiful thing would be for these workers to stop work in protest and for Trump to pay the political cost of the resulting disruption to American life. An even more beautiful thing would be for other unions to be prepared to stop work in support of federal workers. It’s not much, but I would love to see the American Association of University Professors join such an effort.

I know these are not adequate ideas for the enormity of the problem at hand. I also know that urging resistance is easy for me to say. Right now, I am not facing the costs of resistance. But consider this my pre-registered commitment not to comply.

I am here trying to create strategies to make it easier for others to endure these costs. Finding these strategies is crucial because the dilemma of collective action is real, and the consequences of this dilemma are severe: when we don’t find ways to resist these attacks, working together as best we can, our common pool of freedom will evaporate until bearing the costs of resistance, hard as it may be for some, but relatively minor for most of us, will simply become overwhelming for us all.