Cambridge, UK — I just returned to this medieval English university town last week after a three-and-a-half week visit to the US where my harpsichordist spouse performed four concerts in Philadelphia and Portland, Oregon, and I must say that the feeling of coming “home” was much stronger when I began hearing British accents around me than when, after spending the last seven months in the UK, I had initially landed in Newark Liberty International Airport.

I’ve been following, and writing about, the dizzying wrecking-ball assault on democratic governance by the second-term Presidency off Donald Trump, watching in horror as my graduate school alma mater Columbia University prostrated itself to Trump and the Republican hyenas in Senate and House, left courageous student protesters against Israeli genocide to the not-so-tender mercies of New York’s Finest Tactical Thugs, and even helped the more brutal thugs of the federal Department of Homeland Security, on private university grounds and without court orders, arrest, detain and attempt to deport students who are Palestinian.

That outrage—which included summarily and without due process suspending foreign student activists for exercising their 1st Amendment rights and thus losing their student visas —ws reminiscent of the post-WWI Red Scare era and the post-WWII HUAC-McCarthyite nightmare combined was awful. But my horror was amplified when I tried to get my Columbia Journalism Class of 1975 classmates, many of whom had gathered at Columbia to celebrate our 50th anniversary reunion, to sign a letter composed and circulated by the Journalism class of 1969 (some of them veterans of the 1968 student takeover of several campus buildings). Addressed to J-School and University administrations and condemning their sell-out of the First Amendment so fundamental to our work as journalists, I could only find six classmates willing to add their names to it!

Later in my US stay, both in my home community in a suburb just north of Philadelphia, and during a cross-country side trip for another harpsichord concert engagement in Portland, Oregon, I was dismayed to find myself picking up a weird sense of almost enforced normalcy or fearful passivity among my fellow Americans. Given the endless evidence of a fascist regime in the process of consolidation in Washington, I had hoped and expected to see signs of resistance and rebellion—cars sporting outraged bumperstickers, demonstrators outside of Social Security buildings, threatened Post Offices, Congressional constituent-services offices, Tesla dealerships, etc. — but I saw nothing. Even during a jog across the sylvan campus of Reed College, a hotbed of anti-war protest during the days of America’s war on Indochina in the 1960s-70s, I saw students on their exam study week lolling on the lawns, but there were no protest signs in evidence, no anti-Trump T-shirts, or chalk graffiti denouncing White House predations, or even denunciations of his predatory attack on higher education.

I can’t say for certain, but I got the clear sense that there is a wide-spread fear among Americans these days of openly expressing opposition to the aspiring orange tyrant in the White House. Putting an anti-Trump bumper sticker on a car could lead to vandalizing of the vehicle, saying something critical of Trump could mean losing friend, a job, or ruining a family gathering. I even heard that one of my J-School alums didn’t want to sign the Class of ‘69 protest letter or even to have a copy of it sent to his email address, explaining to a mutual friend that “I still have a journalism job” and thus even being associated with such a document!

A common comment I heard from people when I expressed my outrage at Trump’s executive orders like the blocking of already-awarded federal research grants, the revoking of already-approved Green Cards and student visas for foreign students, the deportation of children who are US citizens, and the president’s ignoring of judicial and even Supreme Court orders, has been a dismissive and resigned “Yeah, that’s the new normal now.”

I cannot recall observing that sort of defeatism and fear during the dark years of American atrocities in Indochina. When we learned of massacres of civilians in Vietnam by US troops, or of the carpet bombing by B-52s of North Vietnam and later of Cambodia, the news fueled mass marches across the country and in the nation’s capital.

Even knowing that there could be arrests for such protests, and attacks by police or, during the Nixon administration, by organized thugs from right wing labor unions, like construction workers, people would come out onto the streets to make their outrage known.

Now I know that there are groups—climate activists, defenders of Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, protesters against the IDF’s genocidal war on Palestinians in Gaza and in the west Bank, including my own chosen organization Radical Elders,—which have organized many courageous people, but the numbers of protesters remain small compared to the scale of the Trumpist attacks.

None of this is to say that things are great politically herein the UK. The Labour government last July delivered thumping defeat to the governing Conservative Party, virtually decimating it and paving the way for the right-wing anti-immigrant Reform Party to become the main opposition party. Even though Labour has a solid majority of parliamentary seats that should virtually guarantee the Labour Party another five years to control Parliament, PRIME minister Keir Starmer just this week appallingly cribbed lines from the notorious Tory Party anti-immigrant racist Enoch Powell, who notoriously in the 1950s gave a “River of Blood” speech condemning the immigration of brown-skinned citizens from Commonwealth nations in Asia, Africa and the Caribbean.

In criticizing the Conservative Party’s record of allowing immigration to rise from 224,0000 in 2019 to 906,000 in 2023, Starmer used such Powell phrases as the Island country becoming a “nation of strangers” who are “pulling our nation apart,” and even vowing to take back control of the borders to put an end a “squalid chapter” of rising immigration.

Such deliberate racist rhetoric, which drew immediate condemnation from leftist Labour Party members in Parliament, was drawn directly from Powell’s speeches, a point that some were quick to point out.

At this rate it will become difficult to distinguish between Labour and Reform, which sadly must be Starmer’s objective.

Still, at least at this point, there is nothing going on with immigration in the UK that is remotely like the terror being visited in the US upon politically active immigrants and even simply against immigrant mothers with babies or brown-skinned citizens picked up for being in the wrong place at the wrong time during an immigrant raid. People with no criminal records are being grabbed off the street, off the job, or even out of seemingly routine meetings at ICE offices deliberately set up to lure victims in for capture and deportation. Such captures are typically perpetrated by unnamed, masked Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) personnel to enhance the sense of fear among immigrants.

My feeling, based upon my short visit back to the US is that a pervasive sense of fear has infected US citizens too, no just immigrants. I’m not the only one who feels it either. As I was composing this article, I stumbled on a May 12 piece by former NY Times correspondent David Shipler, who in his blog, The Shipler Report, wrote yesterday of a “new divide” which he says is, “Plaguing America: sharp disagreements over how to resist the authoritarian juggernaut in Washington. Speak and fight forcefully? Thread your way between principle and pragmatism? Capitulate to the rising autocracy? Or keep your head down to present less of a target?”

I understand the fear. Back in 2019 I found myself suddenly included on the FBI’s Terrorist Watch List, which meant I was subjected to intensive searches when I would try to fly internationally. At first I thought it was a foolish threat designed to punish me with harassment by the Pentagon, which was angered by a cover story I had published in the Nation magazine a month earlier, but then I learned it was no joking matter: that list was from the start and remains instantly available to any cop with a computer, meaning that a simple traffic stop for failure to signal a turn or even a broken tail light could quickly become a brutal arrest or worse.

Since the FBI doesn’t say whether one is on the list or not (that is only revealed by how one is treated on trying to obtain a boarding pass on-line the day before a flight (you can’’t do it if you’re on the list), and how one is treated when trying to fly back into the US.

So, after arriving in the UK on Oct, and after Trump won a second term, knowing I would be returning briefly to the US briefly in May, my wife and I wondered how I would be treated when I tried to re-enter the US. After all, this Trump administration is far more draconian than the one in power in 2019-2020 when I knew I was on that list. I even found myself wondering about certain highly critical and derogatory articles I was writing about Trump while in the UK. But I decided I was not going to self-censor my journalism out of fear.

This is the only way to stop what Shipler and I are noticing: a withdrawal from protest. That cannot be allowed to happen. As Shipler writes, “History is still in the hands of the people, for a time. Whether this enters American history as a passing phase or a fundamental turning point will depend on whether Americans mobilize. To make courage contagious. ‘In a free society,’ said Abraham Joshua Heschel during the civil rights movement, ‘some are guilty, but all are responsible.”

Right on!

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