When Good People Do Nothing

The Price of Loyalty?

Have you been in a situation where the boss asks you to shade the facts, look for stats to support their case or conduct research that is meant to support a predetermined assumption? Yeah, I've been there in public broadcasting. Nothing I did for my bosses rose anywhere near the level we've experienced in the last four years.

The text below is from an op-ed piece in the NYTimes. Erica Newland worked in the Office of Legal Counsel at the Justice Department from 2016-18. Her job was to make Trump's attacks on the justice system and democracy more palatable to the courts. Her posting is a Mea culpa for not doing more to push back. She regrets enabling Trump. Her efforts the last two years in the justice department to mollify Trump have led to guilt. They weren't worth it.

Before the 2020 election, I was haunted by what I didn’t do. By all the ways I failed to push back enough. Now, after the 2020 election, I’m haunted by what I did. The trade-off wasn’t worth it.

In giving voice to those trying to destroy the rule of law and dignifying their efforts with our talents and even our basic competence, we enabled that destruction. Were we doing enough good elsewhere to counterbalance the harm we facilitated, the way a public health official might accommodate the president on the margins to push forward on vaccine development? No.

No matter our intentions, we were complicit. We collectively perpetuated an anti-democratic leader by conforming to his assault on reality. We may have been victims of the system, but we were also its instruments. No matter how much any one of us pushed back from within, we did so as members of a professional class of government lawyers who enabled an assault on our democracy — an assault that nearly ended it.

We owe the country our honesty about that and about what we saw. We owe apologies. I offer mine here.

Perhaps hope for the future lies in part with people like Erica Newman's willing to step forward and take responsibility for their actions. A lot of damage has been done. There are many who will never believe the facts. They've fallen down the rabbit hole of an alternate reality.

Where do we go from here?

If you do nothing in a difficult time,

your strength is limited.

Rescue those being taken off to death,

and save those stumbling toward slaughter.

If you say, “But we didn’t know about this,”

won’t He who weighs hearts consider it?

Won’t He who protects your life know?

Won’t He repay a person according to his work?

-Proverbs 24

 John Stuart Mill said in 1867: “Bad men need nothing more to compass their ends, than that good men should look on and do nothing.” 

The consequence of doing nothing is all around us. So many have died unnecessarily from our 21st century plague. Discrimination, racism and hatred is rampant. Children are separated from their families. People legally seeking asylum from violence are made to wait in squalid camps outside our borders.  The fouling of our air and water. Voter suppression. Attempts at subverting the election. There's so much more. The list of wrong doing seems daunting. 

It is not time to shrug our shoulders and say, "Oh well." Our system has worked because of checks and balances, That system has been under attack for quite some time now. The fruits of that strategy have come to a head under Trump. Pushing back, ensuring the checks and balances, needs to be applied against the abuses of the past and into the future.