“We will never, ever, in any way, shape or form be part of the United States,” says Mark Carney, Canada’s new prime minister, about Donald Trump’s designs on his country. “It’s crazy. It’s very simple. That’s all you can say.” That message would make no sense coming from a US governor, president of an Ivy League university or a Fortune 500 chief executive. But there is nothing to stop them from sharing Carney’s spirit of defiance. Many who in fair weather routinely cite the heroism that launched the US republic have held their tongues since the storm clouds arrived. When a government fears the people there is liberty, goes the saying, but when a people fear their government there is tyranny. The US establishment lives in dread of the kraken.
To be fair to America’s best and brightest, their counterparts in other backsliding democracies have been just as timid. Where were India’s captains of industry or Turkey’s profiles in courage when Narendra Modi and Recep Tayyip Erdo?an were suppressing their civil societies? Which Hungarian can you name as having successfully resisted Viktor Orbán’s takeover of the country’s institutions? Yet American civil society is deeper and thicker than in other nations. Power has always been widely dispersed. But that only counts if it is exercised. Trump’s opponents are paralysed by a collective action problem. If one chief executive speaks out, that company will be punished. Only in numbers can there be safety.
Lest there be doubt that corporate and civic leaders’ silence is dictated by fear, ask any newspaper reporter how hard it is nowadays to get such figures to talk on the record. There are brave exceptions. Georgetown Law School’s dean, William Treanor, issued a professor’s version of the middle finger when a Trump attorney tried to dictate his curriculum. Random judges have been putting stays on some of Trump’s most blatant moves — such as claiming the right to deport any permanent resident whose speech he deems anti-national, or the unchecked power to identify domestic enemies under a revolutionary-era act that was meant for wartime. Such speed bumps matter. But Trump has so far encountered no road blocks.