Trump is moving faster to consolidate absolute power than almost anyone–including many experts on authoritarianism–ever imagined. We need to understand what’s going on, and how it compares to the trajectories of other recent and historical “strongmen” in other countries. And we need to act, despite the risks. We can’t depend on Trump’s stupidity and incompetence to defeat him.
So here are several recent articles that deftly put Trump into context among the fascists and authoritarians of the world, and remind us how urgent it is that we stand up to him now–while we still can. If you care about the future of this country–if you care about the future of you, personally–you need to read them, and take their lessons to heart.
How America Can Avoid Becoming Russia, by Garry Kasparov
Twenty years ago, Kasparov gave up chess (which he was rather good at) to fight against emerging Russian strongman Vladimir Putin.
People were slow to grasp what was happening there too: Putin’s bad, but surely he’ll stop short of—and you can fill in the blank with a dozen things he did to destroy Russia’s fragile democracy and civil society, many of which Trump is doing or attempting to do in America today.
Attacking the press as fake news and the enemy of the state? Check. Delegitimizing the judiciary, the last constitutional brake when the legislature is co-opted and feckless? Check. Expanding influence over the economy by threatening businesses and using tariffs to introduce a crisis and a spoils system? Check. Creating a culture of fear by persecuting unpopular individuals and groups? Been there, done all of that.
Not enough Russians saw the danger for what it was, and Putin won. Kasparov was ultimately forced to leave the country and settle in the US. He’s seen it all before, and knows better than anyone that it can happen here, too. Scratch “can,” it is happening here, and Kasparov helps us to understand how and why and where Trump is likely to go.
The Rise of End Times Fascism, by Naomi Klein
Klein deftly captures the apocalyptic nature of Trump’s particular brand of fascism–which is genuinely a new thing in the world.
If we are to meet our critical moment in history, we need to reckon with the reality that we are not up against adversaries we have seen before. We are up against end times fascism.
Reflecting on his childhood under Mussolini, the novelist and philosopher Umberto Eco observed in a celebrated essay that fascism typically has an “Armageddon complex” – a fixation on vanquishing enemies in a grand final battle. But European fascism of the 1930s and 1940s also had a horizon: a vision for a future golden age after the bloodbath that, for its in-group, would be peaceful, pastoral and purified. Not today.
Alive to our era of genuine existential danger – from climate breakdown to nuclear war to sky-rocketing inequality and unregulated AI – but financially and ideologically committed to deepening those threats, contemporary far-right movements lack any credible vision for a hopeful future. The average voter is offered only remixes of a bygone past, alongside the sadistic pleasures of dominance over an ever-expanding assemblage of dehumanized others.
Trump and his followers–especially his deeply devoted evangelical Christian fans–are gearing up for armageddon. They don’t care if they destroy the world trying to “save” it. We need to respond with a similar urgency.
A Ticking Clock on American Freedom, by Adrienne LaFrance
LaFrance, talking to those who’ve lived through authoritarian takeovers, makes clear that those of us who don’t want the same thing to happen need to act, and fast. Like RIGHT NOW.
Look around, take stock of where you are, and know this: Today, right now—and I mean right this second—you have the most power you’ll ever have in the current fight against authoritarianism in America. If this sounds dramatic to you, it should. Over the past five months, in many hours of many conversations with multiple people who have lived under dictators and autocrats, one message came through loud and clear: America, you are running out of time.
People sometimes call the descent into authoritarianism a “slide,” but that makes it sound gradual and gentle. Maria Ressa, the journalist who earned the Nobel Peace Prize for her attempts to save freedom of expression in the Philippines, told me that what she experienced during the presidency of Rodrigo Duterte is now, with startling speed and remarkable similarity, playing out in the United States under Donald Trump. Her country’s democratic struggles are highly instructive. And her message to me was this: Authoritarian leaders topple democracy faster than you can imagine. If you wait to speak out against them, you have already lost.
This is a message all decent Americans need to hear–and take to heart.
So You Want to Be a Dissident? by Julia Angwin and Ami Fields-Meyer
These two New Yorker writers describe the novel difficulties faced by American “dissidents” as they try to navigate a new world in which exercising your free speech is becoming increasingly dangerous. But still necessary.
Once upon a time—say, several weeks ago—Americans tended to think of dissidents as of another place, perhaps, and another time. They were overseas heroes—names like Alexei Navalny and Jamal Khashoggi, or Nelson Mandela and Mahatma Gandhi before them—who spoke up against repressive regimes and paid a steep price for their bravery.
But sometime in the past two months the United States crossed into a new and unfamiliar realm—one in which the consequences of challenging the state seem to increasingly carry real danger. …
More people who never aspired to be activists but oppose the new order are finding that they must traverse a labyrinth of novel choices, calculations, and personal risks. Ours is a time of lists—of “deep state” figures to be prosecuted, media outlets to be exiled, and gender identities to be outlawed.
While the essays I’ve linked to above help to explain our dire situation and inspire resistance to it, this piece offers useful advice on how to carry out this resistance as safely as possible.
Hundreds of Scholars Say U.S. is Swiftly Heading Toward Authoritarianism, by Frank Langfitt
This is a reported piece from NPR, not a call to action. But what it reports is quite instructive:
A survey of more than 500 political scientists finds that the vast majority think the United States is moving swiftly from liberal democracy toward some form of authoritarianism.
The author of How Democracies Die tells NPR that “we’ve slid into some form of authoritarianism … we are no longer living in a liberal democracy.” A Princeton sociologist says “we are on a very fast slide into what’s called competitive authoritarianism,” by which she means we’re turning into a country like Hungary or Turkey.
Langfitt notes that one of the academics he talked to refused to go on the record against Trump, fearing retribution. That’s how it begins.
I realize that most of these articles are behind paywalls, and that this is a pain. I urge you to pay for content if you can, but jump over the paywalls if you must. There are ways to do that.
—
Follow me on Bluesky or Mastodon.
Send tips to dfutrelle at gmail dot com.
We Hunted the Mammoth relies on support from you to survive. So please donate here if you can, or on Venmo.
Given Trump’s accelerating mental decline, odds of him getting very far with his second term agenda are slim at best.
That said, I agree we need to confront him at every opportunity.
Well, there’s a definite difference; 20 years ago, Putin was 52, but today, Trump is 78. That’s a lot less time to establish near-absolute power and do something with it. Though one thing which is the same is that neither has any obvious heirs being groomed to take over after their deaths, so if nothing else I wouldn’t expect a dynasty to emerge in either the US or Russia.
Absolutely gobsmacking, how frail the guardrails turned out to be. But maybe I’m just naive.
Trump has still laid a lot of the groundwork for a successor to build upon. Even if he carks it tomorrow that will leave Vance, much younger and healthier and a really creepy committed ideologue rather than merely a grifter, to take over that machinery and continue to carry Project 2025 forward.
How far down the line of succession is the first Democrat, or even a non-MAGA traditional business Republican?
Frankly I don’t see any way out of this short of a counter-coup. The alternatives to that being, in order of worseness, a full-on Civil War II and a full-on World War III.
The rump old-guard in Germany in the 30s were unwilling to risk a civil war, and in the end that meant they got a world war. That was before the invention of the hydrogen bomb. The world cannot afford for America to make that same mistake.
Riots. Do that.
@Sol Chrom:
There are a number of reasons for that, of course. In rough chronological order:
I’ve been saying for years that this all only reallymakes sense once you see it as generational. Reagan and the Moral Majority started agitating for ‘Christian America’ and getting the ‘Laws of God’ to overrule the Laws of Man, but most of them knew they were running a con to get people to vote for them, and had no intentions of actually, say, overturning Roe v. Wade since they would lose one of their levers to get people out to the polls.
But by the time you got to the Tea Party, you were seeing the people who had grown up being told that American was falling to Satan actually get old enough to run for office themselves, and they sounded a lot more like the preachers of hellfire, so they got support. But they didn’t understand that it was all a con, they expected to actually be able to do the things they had promised to do, and got upset when they couldn’t, and so doubled-down on the ‘government is the problem’ and ‘falling to Satan’ rhetoric.
And today we’re another generation after that, and the people who were children listening to people ranting and raving about how the government wouldn’t let them implement God’s Law are the ones voting people into power. They’re three generations disconnected from reality, digging deeper into the fight against the Civil Rights Era.