How to bring down a storied think-tank? Humiliation works.
On April Fool’s Day, which feels like a century ago, someone who answered to Elon Musk reportedly gave the CEO of the Washington-based Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars an ultimatum: quit or be fired.
A loyal Republican, the CEO had served several terms in Congress and as an American ambassador abroad before heading USAID in the first Trump administration.
Yet, in a moment, this man of considerable stature was reduced to ignominy.
Neither of us was a direct witness to the Wilson Center drama, but the emotions and the signals colleagues at the center took from this power play evoked communist Poland and resonated with our long combined experience in that country.
Authoritarian regimes use humiliation, intimidation and fear as a cudgel, tools of social control. The specific ways these blows are administered differ according to time and circumstances.
In this case, it sufficed to humiliate the most powerful person in the organization.
Wilson Center staff went proactively silent, even when approached by the press. This was not a lack of courage. Indeed, we believe it was a collective act of kindness.
No one wanted to put their more vulnerable colleagues at greater risk while sensitive negotiations were underway to secure severance and health care for people who needed to buy groceries and pay rent. Silence seemed to be a virtue.
And that is precisely what authoritarians count on. Uncertainty about the present and the future is what they exploit. Intimidation need not be explicit; indeed, it is often more powerful when victims must guess how far their tormentors are willing to go and are forced to act on limited knowledge.
Here is the Polish, 1980s version of how it happens, as one of us, then a Fulbright Scholar in martial law Poland, witnessed.
From the street sweeper to the head of a hospital, university, theater or government agency, everyone was forced to navigate a steady state of insecurity, uncertain what provocations could happen in the next day or hour. All of society was made aware that nothing was firmly guaranteed, neither jobs nor status, and especially not human dignity.
One day, university presidents were fired. The next day, the regime demanded that professors sign loyalty oaths or surrender their jobs. A respected journalist who dared, in guarded language, to report facts suddenly found himself a taxi driver to support his family.
The regime honored the law when it was convenient, flouted it when inconvenient. Poles called it “uncertain tomorrow.”
This is a lesson. Humiliation can be imposed in a variety of ways: required oaths, a shocking fall from grace and position, a strip search, a searched apartment, being forced to stand in line for hours for basic food staples or watching any of that happen to family, friends and colleagues.
Whole books have been written seeking to understand how human beings respond to such conditions, whether they accept dependence or take the tougher road of refusal.
We do not think our country is Poland under communism yet. At the moment, humiliation is not a feature of every contact with the formal organs of our government, as it was there.
On the other hand, this is a new phenomenon for Americans who have, until now, been spared these specific systematic cruelties, hurled from official positions.
Now, in a time that could be a turning point, we need to school ourselves to understand and resist techniques that Trump instinctively grasps, but most Americans may not. In this strange new world of unrecognizable features, societal slides can happen rapidly, facilitated by naivety born of inexperience and denial.
It took days to reduce the Wilson Center from an internationally respected think-tank that reveled in its independence and intellectual leadership to a smoldering wreck, soon to be nonexistent. The pace of repeated indignities meant that, within days of April 1, new outrages relegated the Wilson Center putsch to obscurity.
As we write, public attention has moved on. In this reality, what is at first unthinkable soon becomes routine.
The struggles of the Polish people also offer an alternative of resistance and hope. What Poles sought from the Solidarity movement that coalesced in 1980 and set the stage for the new democracy that began to emerge in 1989 was, first among others, dignity — the antithesis of humiliation.
The Poles had to dig themselves out of a deeper hole than is currently our challenge; first the Nazi, and then the Communist regime supported by a powerful, armed neighbor.
Even so, they took to the streets. They pursued every possible means of peaceful opposition to confront oppression.
At this momentous historical juncture, our assignment as Americans is to find ways to turn our humiliation into action, to reclaim our dignity.
Ruth Greenspan Bell, according to her dismissal letter, is, until May 31, a public policy scholar at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. Janine R. Wedel, a social anthropologist in the Schar School at George Mason University, is the author of “The Private Poland” and “UNACCOUNTABLE: How the Establishment Corrupted Our Finances, Freedom, and Politics and Created an Outsider Class.”