The Power of the People When America’s Elites Are Absent

MICHEL MARTIN: Thanks Bianna. Adam Serwer, thank you so much for talking with us.

 

ADAM SERWER: Thank you so much for having me.

 

MARTIN: I wanna talk about your recent piece in The Atlantic. It’s titled “Lower Than Cowards,” which says a lot, it doesn’t say at all, but “Lower Than Cowards.” And it describes what you consider the response of American elites to what you call Trump’s authoritarian bullying. 

You are arguing in this piece that private companies and other elites, unlike the military, do have the freedom to resist. Yet many have chosen not to. You write quote, “Cascading acts of cowardice from the people best positioned to resist Trump’s authoritarian power grabs have made Trump seem exponentially more powerful than he actually is.” Unquote. Can you just unpack that a little bit? Give an example of people who you think could resist his bullying, but don’t.

 

SERWER: Well, you know, all these large private corporations that have, you know, huge, you know, huge budgets that, and, and, and a tremendous amount of influence — and that includes media companies, you know universities like Harvard, some of them are actually fighting back, but universities, prominent universities could say no right now. The Trump administration is trying to coerce these universities into teaching only regime approved curriculum. And the issue is that when people, when so many people fold, and I think —  you know it’s important to say that, you know, a lot of these institutions are optimized for people who want to compromise. They’re optimized for, you know, a a a, a civil society in which there is not an authoritarian leader who’s trying to bully people into submission. And so they’re not, they’re not you know, the qualities that led them to that position are not the kind of qualities that you would want in a leader in terms of being brave enough to stand up to a bully. But I think it’s — 

 

MARTIN: Say more about that. Explain, explain that. 

 

SERWER: Well I think that’s just you know…

 

MARTIN: Like the law firms, for example, who have paid well,

 

SERWER: I mean, you know, these have, you have these law firms that have made agreements with the Trump administration. These are people who, if anyone is equipped to, to, you know, fight the Trump administration to a standstill, it’s prominent white-shoe law firms. And yet so many of them have agreed, you know, to what is a frankly, frankly, unconstitutional agreements, defining what kind of cases they can take, obligating them to you know, help the Trump administration in some of its legal goals. These are people who could have fought the, the Trump administration and did not.

And the reputations have suffered as a result. In some cases, they’ve lost clients because, you know, if you are, if you’re looking for an attorney, if you’re looking for zealous representation you know, you know, you’re not gonna, you really don’t want to hire an attorney that has dual loyalties in terms of, you know, their interest in appeasing the government. It, it, it really undermines the legal system tremendously. And it’s, and it, and that’s precisely why it’s so shocking that so many of them have capitulated now. So now — 

 

MARTIN: But why do you think they have?

 

SERWER: I think it’s some cases, you know, these are organ — there are organizations that have leadership that are used to trying to figure out a way to get along rather than — they are averse to conflict. And I think in some places, they actually agree with the administration and they are happy to be looking like they are forced to do things that they otherwise would want to do, but that might incur a backlash if they look like they wanted to do it instead of they were being forced to do it.

 

MARTIN: Like the tech companies, for example? I mean, the tech companies are an example. There are no more content moderation. You know, the unfettered ‘free speech’ as it were, things of that sort. 

 

SERWER: Yeah, I mean, I think it, it’s, it’s very clear that by, by unfettered free speech, they mean privileging conservative speech. When they talk about unfettered free speech, they don’t really mean that. You know, they have internalized the definition of free speech that, that you know, is prominent in the Trump administration, which is free speech is when Republicans can say what they want and when everyone else can say what they want. You know, but the issue with private firms in general is that, you know, if, if you are subject to regulation or tariffs on the basis of your relationship with Trump, that’s a system where corruption and rent seeking thrives. That’s not a system where, you know, you succeed on the quality of your product or your service. That’s a, a system where you succeed on the basis of your relationship to the White House.

And, you know, a lot of companies are acting in their short-term interest and, you know, currying favor with Trump. And, but, you know, profit-seeking institutions are often not very good at looking at the long term. That’s why we have a state-regulated marketplace. That’s why we have regulations in the first place, because sometimes that short-term profit seeking can be extremely destructive to the larger system. And it is extremely destructive to the larger system because the end product is a degraded marketplace where corruption eats up most of the growth and profit. And the American people will be poorer as a result, even if, you know, a, a select set of oligarchs at the top of American society who are aligned with Trump continue to see their bank accounts grow.

 

MARTIN: You know, you contrast — 

 

SERWER: And that’s a conservative point, by the way. I’m, you know, I’m a liberal. I, I’m not a conservative, I’m not like a market fundamentalist, but these are their insights. 

 

MARTIN: Right.

 

SERWER: These are the things that they used to believe that they have jettisoned in the name of protecting, you know, this administration, which has an ambition of becoming a fully consolidated authoritarian state.

 

MARTIN: I wonder though, is there something about just the institutional imperative once you become part of one of these big institutions? The idea is, ‘Oh, what do I need to do to preserve the institution, even if that is averse to all the things that I’ve been taught that this institution is supposed to stand for?’

 

SERWER: Yeah. I mean, I think that’s, that’s a, I think that’s a problem that every institution faces is, is, is when your institutional self-interest conflicts with your stated values. And the problem is that when you have that multiplied you know, when it’s not just one institution, but it’s many, many, many institutions, when you multiply it a hundred fold, you end up with very serious collective action problem where, you know, all these institutions that might have collectively been able to put up a really strong resistance to the constitutional overreach that the Trump administration is engaging in, they have instead, you know, put themselves in a position where they’re getting picked off one by one instead of, you know, fighting together. 

As, as, as you know, Ben Franklin famously put it, you know, we, we, we, we will all, we must all hang together or we’ll all hang separately. And what’s happening now is that, you know, all these institutions are, are hanging separately. 

 

MARTIN: You know, you, you contrast elite capitulation with the courage of ordinary people, you know, protestors, detainees, jurors, and, you know, grand jury proceedings who have resisted despite greater risk. 

 

But I think, you know, 

 

MARTIN: Yeah? 

 

SERWER: Someone like Jimmy Kimmel, I mean, Jimmy Kimmel was not the first person nor the person most harmed by, you know, by the administration’s crackdown on free speech. I mean, you know, you look at, you know, all these people who were detained by ICE, who were, who were locked up on the basis of their pro-Palestinian advocacy, who then came out and said, you know, ‘I’m, I still believe what I believe, regardless of the fact that the state could take away my freedom, you know, my home,’ things like that. 

I mean, you know, I think the issue is, again, it, it’s, it’s somewhat related to the issue of leadership, which is that when people become comfortable in their lives they can sometimes forget, you know, what actually matters beyond comfort. And that’s, you know, that’s related to a similar point that I was making, you know, in, in, in the piece itself, which is that, you know, cowardice is an understandable reaction to real danger. But this is something worse than cowardice, which is a, you know, an aversion to any kind of confrontation in defense of the values that you claim to hold.

And that, you know, the, the, the, the Trump’s, you know, real triumph was understanding that so many of these people claim to have values that they did not actually have and would abandon those values under any kind of sustained pressure. And it says something, I think — you know, it says something bad about elites, but it does say something good about the American people, that so many American, so many American people who, you know, are not, you know, people are, there isn’t gonna be a bunch of news story — if they are harmed by this administration, there are not gonna be a bunch of news stories about it in the way that there, there, there was with Kimmel who, you know, did an admirable thing in standing up to Trump. You know, the, these are not people who are going to become heroes in the media. They are people who are doing what they are doing because you know, they have real values and they are standing up for them.

 

MARTIN: Let, let’s look about the, let’s talk about the role of the military.  Because obviously, one of the more attention getting episodes in the first Trump administration was when he staged that kind of walk over–  to across Lafayette Park, which is in front of the White House over to the Church St. John’s and had it cleared out by the National Guard. The then chair of the Joint Chiefs General Milley walked over there. He later apologized in an all-call to the troops saying he was wrong. He should not have participated in that. 

So this week, you know, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, you know, pulled in, you know, some like 800, you know, senior officers from all over the world for this kind of, I don’t know what, it was like a group chat at at Quantico — present at great expense and, you know, incredible security risks, having all of these senior leaders in one place. And he said that, you know, he made his comments, We’ve promoted too many uniformed leaders for the wrong reasons, based on their race, based on gender quotas, based on historic so-called firsts. And then the president came on and said, we should use some of these dangerous cities as training grounds for our military. 

And things went on. I was just curious how that whole scene landed to you, and what did you draw from it?

 

SERWER: Well, one thing I would say is if you wanna see someone unqualified who was elevated to a position that they didn’t earn on the basis of their race and gender, you could look at the current Secretary of Defense, who is all of those things. And whose main qualification is largely that he is a, Trump sycophant. 

But when you talk about you know, I think the ma — first of all, Trump has always talked about my generals. He’s used that phrasing before. But actually, those aren’t his generals. Again, the, the American government elections decide who administers it — the American government. It does not decide ownership of the American government because the ownership of the American government does not change. It is owned by the public. And that is the same is true of the military. 

Now, what happened is these people are in a chain of command, and they have to follow orders legal orders. That is obviously, they’re not obligated to follow illegal orders, but they have to follow legal orders. And so they created this captive audience where you know, the President and the Secretary of Defense — you know, you, you, you just need to put two and two together. Here you have Hegseth saying, you know, the, the military is for killing. We’re not gonna do rules of engagement anymore. It’s for murdering people. And I think, you know, it’s bizarre to act like the laws of war are a recent invention or something, you know, that, that, that, that we came up in two, within 2020. They are actually hundreds of years old and arguably older than that. 

But when he, when when the Secretary of Defense says, ‘The military is for killing people,’ and the President says, ‘We’re going to send the military into American cities for practice,’ what that means is that the President is saying, I am declaring war on part on, on, on other Americans, and I expect you to kill them. Look it, you know, they didn’t intend that. They could have easily clarified it, but that’s what those two things put together mean.

 

MARTIN: I’m asking you how you feel the military responded.  

 

SERWER: I mean, look, the, the military is obligated to be apolitical. 

 

MARTIN: Right.

 

SERWER: And they understand that that’s why they are putting them in this uncomfortable position where they’re saying, ‘Well, if you don’t want to kill Americans, if you don’t want to use American cities as a training ground, then you should resign.’ And the reason why they’re doing that is they want to purge the officer corps of people who might not obey an order to kill American citizens. 

Now, if you, if we could, we could go back and talk about Milley. The, the, the problem that Republicans had with Milley, essentially, was that when in, in, in, in, during the protest in 2020, Trump told him to go out there and shoot protesters, and he said, ‘No, I’m not doing that.’ And then after the January 6th, you know, he was saying, ‘I wanted to understand,’ you know, he was reading about, you know, I, I think the, the phrase was called ‘white rage.’ And Republicans went crazy because what they want is a military establishment who — next time Trump attempts to steal an American election if he loses, and he is constitutionally barred from running again, but the Supreme Court doesn’t really seem particularly interested at the moment with what the Constitution says — what he wants, what they want is a military that is going to be willing to be used as a political tool to keep a president in office who does not belong in office.

 

MARTIN: What I saw in that room was a real uniformity of purpose and value, because they, to a person almost, kept silent. And it would have been easy, I think, for some of them to have been sort of laughing or chortling, or giving the president and the defense secretary the kind of response that they so very much wanted, in fact, expected, and often get, from their political audiences, from their rallies and so forth. And I do wonder whether you think their discipline in that moment speaks to a value system that supersedes that of self-preservation in the way that you have lamented with other institutions?

 

SERWER: Well, I think, you know, it’s different because they are part of the government. But these are, our men are, are our, our men and women who swear oaths to, to serve and protect the Constitution of United States. They do not serve oaths to serve and protect Pete Hegseth or Donald Trump — 

 

MARTIN: Well so did Donald Trump and Pete Hegseth, they both, they, they both took the same oath.

 

SERWER: They, they both took the same oath. But I think, you know, it’s very clear that Donald Trump is not one for, for keeping to oaths. And I, and I’m not, you know, I don’t know Pete Hegseth very well, but I suspect he isn’t either. But you know, that, that, that I think you are making an important observation that they, their silence was in a way, their refusal be used as a political prop. And many of them might actually agree with Donald Trump and Pete Hegseth politically. But institutionally, the military and, and in particularly the Officer Corps is encouraged to be as apolitical as possible. And I think that silence really reflects their institutional training of serving the American people, the public, not, you know, a particular political party. And that’s the exact thing that Donald Trump and Pete Hegseth want to change. They want the, the, the American military to be a partisan militia, not an actual military that serves the people of the United States.

 

MARTIN: So, before we let you go, one of the points that people make — who have studied authoritarianism in other historical periods and in other contexts — one of the points that they make is that authoritarianism often comes in through legal means.

 

SERWER: That’s right.

 

MARTIN: They vote these people in, and then they change the rules to make it impossible to vote them out or to, to — 

 

SERWER: That’s right.

 

MARTIN: So then the question becomes, what, what happens next?

 

SERWER: I mean, I, I don’t know. I mean, the burden is on the people to defend their democratic right to self-determination. You know, that that’s, that’s you know — politics, even in authoritarian regimes, politics does not cease. And, you know, to the extent that people do not like what is happening, they have the ability to change it. And I would add peacefully. You know nonviolent protests, nonviolent action has been very effective in dislodging authoritarian regimes who have plenty of guns and plenty of men who are winning, willing to use them. 

But right now, you know, we have — American <laugh>, you know, Americans have tolerated authoritarian regimes and parts of their country. You know, the, the, the you know, the Antebellum South, the post -Reconstruction South, we, you know, there are many millions of Americans who still have a living memory of living under one party, authoritarian governments that were, you know, enforced at the point of a gun.  And those governments fell and they didn’t fall because an army — well in the, in, in the Civil War, they did — but the, you know, the, the Jim Crow was not felt by violent action. And I think that people need to understand that, is it, it is — the public needs to understand, the American people need to understand that it is within their power to preserve their democracy, but they have to make a concerted effort to do that.

 

MARTIN: Adam Serwer, thank you so much.

 

SERWER: Thank you.