My memories of Don Manuel in Chile help me understand America’s current reality – Ghana Business News
Photograph courtesy of Jon Lowenstein/NOOR
Don Manuel and I met during the summer of 2013 at his daily post outside of the Manuel Montt metro station in Santiago, Chile.
My wife Dunreith and I had sold our house the day before we moved south for a semester where I taught data journalism at left-leaning University of Diego Portales. Sporting a mustache and a full head of grey hair underneath a cap, Don Manuel informed me during our regular chats that he had plied his collection of household goods on a wooden cart for 58 years. He smiled in appreciation when Dunreith bought a pair of towels from him shortly after we arrived.
But his smile evaporated, replaced by a haunted look, when I asked him several months later about his memories of el golpe, the Spanish word for “blow”. In Chile it meant the Pinochet coup on September 11, 1973 that ended the country’s democratic experiment and ushered in 17 years of brutal dictatorship. Don Manuel grew silent and retreated into a distant place within himself. He was in the grips of what some Chileans called “el temor,” a word for internalized terror that combines fear, awe and dread. I moved on to another question to try to relieve his evident discomfort after it became apparent no answer would be coming.
Memories of that moment have risen within me as we approach the fifth months of the second Trump Administration and continue to move deeper into the evisceration of what had been for centuries one of the world’s leading democracies. Yet the kind of fear that has spread across our country garnered little attention in many of the sober assessments marking Trump’s second initial 100 days in office.
As I have written before about Germany and the waning days of the Weimar Republic, I am not saying that the United States is Chile and that Trump is Pinochet. Although he orchestrated an attempted coup on January 6, 2021, Trump was democratically elected last November. The thousands of murders and throwing people from airplanes that occurred in the early days of the Pinochet regime have not happened in our country.
But meaningful parallels between the two countries do exist. The demonizing of political opponents as radical leftists with an accompanying crackdown on an independent press and systematic attacks on truth. The dismantling of democratic structures and an underpinning collective orientation that opens the door for a small sliver of society to have greater and greater levels of wealth. The lower levels of public accountability and increased privatization in the name of unfettered choice and economic freedom.
So, too, are the multiple levels of fear.
Public officials like Lisa Murkowski experience the first type. One of a handful of Republican senators who have shown even a modicum of political independence, Murkowski declared last month that “We are all afraid.” Politico reported that the Alaska senator went on to say that she is often “very anxious” to speak up out of fear of recrimination.
This group also includes federal judges who have endured an onslaught of online attacks and threats from some Trump supporters egged on by his frequently invoked “radical left lunatic” rhetoric that surges whenever they make a decision against the administration. The Global Project Against Hate and Extremism (GPAHE) found that violent threats and calls for impeachment on social media platforms had more than tripled since last year.
These actions have had an impact. Reuters reported earlier this month that they had spoken with a dozen federal judges who raised concerns about the security of their own families or of the relatives of colleagues handling Trump-related cases. The group included jurists appointed by both Republican and Democratic presidents, Reuters said, adding that most of the judges requested anonymity, citing the potential for further inflaming security fears or raising questions about their impartiality.
There is the fear that appears to have driven the capitulation by the leaders of elite educational institutions like Columbia University in the face of threats of arguably dubious legality and the overlapping circles of journalism owners and tech billionaires like Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos and Meta founder Mark Zuckerberg. Between them the pair has blunted the storied paper’s editorial pages, adopted Trumpian language about bias in removing fact checking on Meta and each given $1 million to Trump’s inauguration in a blatant attempt to curry favor with the president. For both Bezos and Zuckerberg this behavior is a radical departure from how they acted during the first Trump Administration.
Less discussed is the fear that exists for many Americans in their private choices that are no less consequential for their lack of visibility. I’m talking here about decisions by citizens like the self-censorship of potentially offensive language, the swallowing of public opposition, and not traveling out of the country due to the uncertainty about what might happen when they return. Along with the full-throated backing of many Trump supporters, these quiet choices contribute to our government’s continued gutting and the tolerance of Trump’s organizing his business interests to facilitate receiving foreign gifts-acts that would otherwise be utterly scandalous but are increasingly treated as unremarkable.
Steven Levitsky, Lucan Way and Daniel Ziblatt recently wrote in The New York Times that we are no longer a democracy, but instead have slid into a state they call competitive authoritarianism. How long we stay there depends in part on next year’s mid-term elections, but also, perhaps in equal measure, to the degree we are able to overcome that same temor I witnessed nearly a dozen years ago from the aging Chilean vendor outside the metro station that bore his name.
By Jeff Kelly Lowenstein
The author is the founder and executive director of the Center for Collaborative Investigative Journalism (CCIJ) and an Associate Professor of Journalism at Grand Valley State University. In 2013 he was a Fulbright Scholar at the University Diego Portales in Santiago, Chile.
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