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Almost everything the Trump administration has done since coming into office on 20 January has ticked every box for the growth of an authoritarian state.
The politicisation of the civil service, judiciary, military and academia; the appointment of ideologically-compliant individuals to senior positions; threats against neighbouring countries; the destabilising of international treaties and relationships; attacks on targeted communities and the press, even the banning of lists of words, have been the stuff of weeks – weeks, note; it is not yet two months – since Donald Trump re-entered the White House.
On top of all this, there has been the introduction of the idea into the public domain of classifying opposition to Trump and his agenda as a mental illness. Five Republican Minnesota state senators recently introduced a bill on “Trump Derangement Syndrome” – defined as an acute onset of paranoia regarding the presidencies of Donald Trump.
Psikhushka is coming to America.
It is a Russian slang term from the Soviet era describing psychiatric hospitals used as prisons for political dissenters.
After all, who would be mad enough to oppose the Party? For either you were mad to disagree with the obvious truths and purities of the Party line, or you were mad to oppose the behemoth of state oppression that could crush you by incarcerating you under the made-up diagnostic category of ‘sluggish schizophrenia’ – defined as ‘delusions of reformism’ about ‘a struggle for truth and justice formed by personalities with a paranoid structure’, in the words of the KGB-dominated Serbsky Institute.
The ‘cure’ for ‘sluggish schizophrenics’ included electric shocks, restraint, administration of insulin, tranquilisers, narcotics, and beatings.
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One of the symptoms of insanity, Soviet-style, was ‘philosophical intoxication’ – displayed by anyone who expressed opinions in opposition to Party dogma. ‘Dissemination of fabrications, agitation and propaganda which defame the Soviet system’ (to paraphrase the various iterations of the relevant articles of the Soviet Criminal Code from Stalin’s time onwards) was the catch-all for dissent.
There were prisons and labour camps for sequestering ‘ideological criminals’, along with all other kinds of criminals. But to discredit the lunatic ideas of dissenters – justice, democracy, human rights – the dissenters had to be broken physically and mentally; forced to recant; and to confess to incorrect thoughts. And for this ‘psychiatric treatment’ was the method of choice.
How limited and shallow is historical memory.
Not only do we have accounts by people who experienced Psikhushka – such as Valery Tarsis’s Ward 7; Joseph Brodsky’s Gorbunov and Gorchakov; Tom Stoppard’s play Every Good Boy Deserves Favour, based on the experiences of Russian human rights campaigner Vladimir Bukovsky who spent 12 years in Psikhushka and labour camps – but official public condemnations of the system by the World Psychiatric Association and a US Senate Committee on Foreign Relations 1984 report among many others.
And yet there in ‘the land of the free and the home of the brave’, how nauseatingly hollow these words now sound – as the very same thing is being proposed. How has the US fallen so far, so rapidly?
It is true that one is driven mad by the encephalitic horrors of Trumpism, and it is because Trump and Trumpism are themselves paradigms of derangement, and busy deranging not just the US, but the world. ‘Trump Derangement Syndrome’ applies to Trump and his epigones, not to those who oppose him.
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But wait a moment – Trump is not quite having everything to go his way.
There are judges and courts in his path, and they are holding the line on some fronts. And it remains to be seen whether ‘the free and the brave’ will organise themselves and stand up to the precipitous collapse of the US into Soviet America.
Trump has exposed the need for some major reform in the US system: urgent necessities are the electoral system (first-past-the-post for the House of Representatives, embedding a deep two-party divide occupying all of the political space; the unrepresentative, conservatism-perpetuating Senate), and Very, Very Big Money in politics – to say nothing of ending political appointment of the Supreme Court.
For sanity in all our affairs, there has indeed to be a cure for the current madness – not in the form of Trump Derangement Syndrome but of Deranged Trump Syndrome. History has vividly and painfully shown too many times over what happens if this kind of disease is left untreated.
AC Grayling’s new book ‘For the People’ will be published in November