Lois Beckett, The Guardian; ‘Anticipatory obedience’: newspapers’ refusal to endorse shines light on billionaire owners’ motives
"When two American billionaires blocked the newspapers they own from endorsing Kamala Harris this month, they tried to frame the decision as an act of civic responsibility.
“I think my fear is, if we chose either one, that it would just add to the division,” Patrick Soon-Shiong, the biotech billionaire who owns the Los Angeles Times, said. He emphasised that though some might assume his family is “ultra-progressive”, he is a registered “independent”.
At the Washington Post, which reported that its billionaire owner, Jeff Bezos, was behind the decision, publisher William Lewis described the retreat from making presidential endorsements as “a statement in support of our readers’ ability to make up their own minds”.
Veteran journalists and media critics are using a very different phrase to describe Soon-Shiong’s and Bezos’s choice: they’re saying the two billionaires, among the richest men on the entire globe, are performing “anticipatory obedience” to Donald Trump.
Yes, “cowardice” has also been a popular way to describe the choice by the billionaire owners of two of the country’s major newspapers to not to risk angering Trump by allowing their papers to endorse his opponent.
But “anticipatory obedience” is more specific. The term comes from On Tyranny, the bestselling guide to authoritarianism by Timothy Snyder, a historian of eastern and central Europe. The phrase describes, in Snyder’s words, “the major lesson of the Nazi takeover, and what was supposed to be one of the major lessons of the twentieth century: don’t hand over the power you have before you have to. Don’t protect yourself too early.” It’s a way of describing what Europeans did wrong as totalitarians came to power: by “mentally and physically conceding, you’re already giving over your power to the aspiring authoritarian”, Snyder explains."
