Cowardice and chickenshit

Adam Serwer’s superb piece about widespread elite capitulation and collaboration during Trump 2.0 makes an important distinction:

ABC and its parent company, Disney, had been menaced into suspending Kimmel by Brendan Carr, the head of the Federal Communications Commission. “We can do this the easy way or the hard way,” Carr said on a right-wing podcast.

He later attempted to walk back what he’d said—despite what your lying ears may have heard, and despite his gloating on social media. As it turns out, you can’t sell your soul to Trump and keep your spine; they’re a package deal. Nonetheless, the bullying was effective. Kimmel may have returned to ABC, but two of the network’s biggest broadcasters, Sinclair and Nexstar, are still refusing to air him on their stations.

If Trump has been right about anything, it is that there is a deep rot in the upper echelons of American society, among people who have been put in positions of power and leadership. Trump understands that many of these people are weak, that their public commitment to civic principles can crumble under sustained pressure. In many cases, those folding have had ample resources to resist Trump’s shakedowns but haven’t been brave enough to do so. They are, in a word, chickenshit.

I want to distinguish between chickenshit and cowardice. Fear is part of human existence. Bravery is the overcoming of fear, not its absence. Acts of cowardice can be provoked by genuine danger—think of a deserting soldier fleeing the peril of the battlefield. When you’re chickenshit, you capitulate to avoid the mere possibility of discomfort, let alone something resembling real risk. Disney is one of the largest companies in the world, with a devoted following and a market cap bigger than many countries’ stock markets. It did not have to cave.

Big companies and their CEOs have cowered before Trumpist intimidation, trying to ease his temper by settling frivolous lawsuits over “bias” or slathering the president in juche-style flattery. Media companies have settled First Amendment cases they were likely to win in order to curry favor or protect their parent company’s commercial interests. Newspaper owners have compromised the integrity of their own publications. Elite academic institutions have sacrificed their independence to try to preserve their federal funding. At least one has turned the names of its own students over to the government for potential political persecution. Major law firms with deep pockets and armies of lawyers have shrunk from defending the rule of law because they fear Trump’s wrath.

Elite law firms and corporations and universities capitulating to Trump are not in the same position as, say, the Atlantic City contractors that he stiffed. A blocked merger or frivolous lawsuit is not any kind of existential crisis for a deep-pocketed corporation. They aren’t caving because they have to — they’re caving because of whatever combination of ideological agreement and narrow self-interest that makes them want to. “Chickenshit” is precisely the right phrase.