The slippery slope: ‘If today...’

“If today you can take a thing like evo­lu­tion and make it a crime to teach it in the pub­lic school, tomor­row you can make it a crime to teach it in the pri­vate schools, and the next year you can make it a crime to teach it to the hus­tings or in the church. At the next ses­sion you may ban books and the news­pa­pers. Soon you may set Catholic against Protestant and Protestant against Protestant, and try to foist your own reli­gion upon the minds of men. If you can do one you can do the oth­er. Ignorance and fanati­cism is ever busy and needs feed­ing. Always it is feed­ing and gloat­ing for more. Today it is the pub­lic school teach­ers, tomor­row the pri­vate. The next day the preach­ers and the lec­tures, the mag­a­zines, the books, the news­pa­pers. After a while, your hon­or, it is the set­ting of man against man and creed against creed until with fly­ing ban­ners and beat­ing drums we are march­ing back­ward to the glo­ri­ous ages of the six­teenth cen­tu­ry when big­ots light­ed fagots to burn the men who dared to bring any intel­li­gence and enlight­en­ment and cul­ture to the human mind.”

The above is one of my favorite quotes by Clarence Darrow from the Scopes tri­al of 1925 (and repeat­ed by Spencer Tracy in the movie Inherit the Wind.) Darrow was direct­ing his com­ments against the sin­gle issue of cen­sor­ship of the idea of evo­lu­tion, but the same prin­ci­ples apply to much of what is hap­pen­ing today.

If today you can send masked gov­ern­ment offi­cials to abduct a sin­gle for­eign student—lawfully in this country—from the street and deport her for alleged­ly utter­ing words or fos­ter­ing anti-Semitic atti­tudes, tomor­row you can abduct an American stu­dent in the same way and incar­cer­ate him or her with­out legal recourse.

(The CCTV record­ing of this abduc­tion was shock­ing­ly sim­i­lar to films from the mid-30s when German police, under the Hitler régime, rou­tine­ly assault­ed Jews on the streets or hauled them off to incar­cer­a­tion or sum­ma­ry execution.)

If you can take away fund­ing from a uni­ver­si­ty today because it may have pro­grams or cours­es that dis­cuss diver­si­ty, equi­ty, and inclu­sion, tomor­row you can impose pre­scrip­tions on what that uni­ver­si­ty can teach or who they can hire as professors.

If today you can count on a Supreme Court to rou­tine­ly issue dec­la­ra­tions sup­port­ing your per­son­al agen­da, tomor­row you may have such com­plete con­trol over that Court that noth­ing you do will ever come to ques­tion before the law or that Court will abro­gate all low­er court opin­ions against you.

If today you can uni­lat­er­al­ly impose usu­ri­ous tar­iffs on oth­er coun­tries by declar­ing a nation­al emer­gency, tomor­row you may declare the same and mil­i­tar­i­ly attack anoth­er coun­try with­out redress from Congress.

If today you can arbi­trar­i­ly fire and dis­charge fed­er­al work­ers with­out pro­vid­ing evi­dence that they have com­mit­ted some egre­gious error or failed in their duties, tomor­row you can replace those same work­ers and assure that the replace­ments will accede to all your per­son­al direc­tives and con­tin­ue to fire those who are felt to har­bor atti­tudes not in sup­port of your principles.

If today you can fire the top mil­i­tary com­man­ders with­out cause, tomor­row you can replace them with syco­phants who will mind­less­ly fol­low your demands even if vio­lat­ing Constitutional rights when they pos­sess feal­ty to an indi­vid­ual rather than to the Constitution.

(Stalin went even fur­ther in the 1930s when he ordered the impris­on­ment and exe­cu­tion of hun­dreds of top-lev­el mil­i­tary com­man­ders, many of whom he hasti­ly recalled when the Nazis invad­ed Russia in June of 1941 and he real­ized that his mil­i­tary was woe­ful­ly unprepared.)

If today you can place incom­pe­tent and ill-pre­pared indi­vid­u­als in impor­tant fed­er­al lead­er­ship posi­tions, tomor­row you may have so dec­i­mat­ed those agen­cies that they can nev­er be recon­sti­tut­ed with­out tremen­dous expense or find peo­ple unwill­ing to work in the fed­er­al sys­tem again for fear of the same thing hap­pen­ing to them.

If today you can par­don hun­dreds of con­vict­ed crim­i­nals who have been adju­di­cat­ed guilty of insur­rec­tion against the basic insti­tu­tions of the United States, tomor­row you may call on those same indi­vid­u­als to rise up and cre­ate hav­oc among the civil­ian pop­u­la­tion in your favor with­out fear of ret­ri­bu­tion and char­ac­ter­ize them as “good peo­ple, peace­ful­ly demonstrating.”

If today you can excuse top-lev­el admin­is­tra­tors for seri­ous­ly expos­ing mil­i­tary per­son­nel to danger—and allow them to lie about it—tomorrow you can encour­age them to act in sim­i­lar irre­spon­si­ble ways and not wor­ry about consequences.

If today many of your com­ments are sim­ply lies (Obama was not born in America, the 2020 elec­tion was rigged, ille­gal Haitians are eat­ing people’s pets in Ohio, the major­i­ty of immi­grants are rapists and crim­i­nals), tomor­row lying will become a stan­dard part of your reper­toire no mat­ter how seri­ous the sub­ject matter.

If today you can act as though you are pro­tect­ing reli­gion by cur­tail­ing free speech, tomor­row you may use that pow­er to con­demn and per­se­cute all non-reli­gion as well, or reli­gions oth­er than Christianity.

If today you can freely con­sort with dic­ta­tors with­out ques­tion­ing their deeds against human­i­ty, tomor­row you may demand those same dic­ta­tors insti­tute actions that you would not dare take on yourself.

If today, you can sub­ju­gate a huge seg­ment of Congress by threats of with­hold­ing sup­port in their elec­tions, tomor­row they will become your min­ions in what­ev­er you choose to do, no mat­ter how egregious.

As Darrow so accu­rate­ly point­ed out, “Ignorance and fanati­cism is ever busy and needs feeding.”

Today, they are per­fer­vid­ly feasting.