UPDATED: "Anticipatory Obedience"

Anticipatory obedience is a term I was unfamiliar with until reading an article in The Guardian.

[I]n On Tyranny, Tim Snyder’s bestselling guide to authoritarianism. Snyder defines the term as “giving over your power to the aspiring authoritarian” before the authoritarian is in position to compel that handover.

It appears that is precisely what has happened at The Washington Post. The newspaper's editorial board had drafted its endorsement of Kamala Harris for U.S. president, but then its owner, Jeff Bezos, intervened and forbade it. It appears that Bezos, who also owns Amazon and Blue Origin, wants to make sure that if Don Trump wins the race, his businesseses, which compete for government contracts, will thrive.

Within hours of making that decision, 

high-ranking officials of [Blue Origin] briefly met with Trump after a campaign speech in Austin, Texas, as the Republican nominee seeks a second presidency.

Trump met with Blue Origin chief executive officer David Limp and vice-president of government relations Megan Mitchell, the Associated Press reported.

Meanwhile, CNN reported that the Amazon CEO, Andy Jassy, had also recently reached out to speak with the former president by phone. 

Those reported overtures were eviscerated by Washington Post editor-at-large and longtime columnist Robert Kagan, who resigned on Friday. On Saturday, he argued that the meeting Blue Origin executives had with Trump would not have taken place if the Post had endorsed the Democratic vice-president as it planned.

The was additional fallout.

 In their criticism of the Post’s decision on Friday, former and current employees cite the dangers to democracy posed by Trump, who has openly expressed his admiration for authoritarian rule amid his appeals for voters to return him to office.

The former Washington Post journalists Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward, who broke the Watergate story, called the decision “disappointing, especially this late in the electoral process”.

The former Washington Post executive editor Marty Baron said in a post on X, “This is cowardice with democracy as its casualty”.

The cartoon team at the paper published a dark formless image protesting against the non-endorsement decision, playing on the “democracy dies in darkness” slogan that the Post adopted in 2017, five years after its purchase by Bezos. 

The Post was actually the second major paper to veto a presidential endorsement. 

The Post’s non-endorsement came shortly after the billionaire owner of the Los Angeles Times, Patrick Soon-Shiong, refused to allow the editorial board publish an endorsement of Harris.

Unfettered and fearless journalism has always been crucial to stable, well-functioning democracies. With the craven, self-serving sycophancy of people like Bezos and Soon-Shiong, it is clear that America's drift toward authoritarianism is no longer limited to the unhinged MAGA  crowd. As a consequence, all are diminished and endangered.

UPDATE: In today's (Oct.29) Star, Andrew Phillips writes:

The point is that by ordering their papers to stop short of endorsing Trump’s opponent the owners are showing weakness in the face of a candidate who has made clear he’s prepared to violate every norm of democracy. Make no mistake: Trump will take advantage. “If Trump sees a sign of weakness,” former Post editor Martin Baron told the New Yorker over the weekend, “he’s going to pounce even harder in the future.”