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The Science of Defeating an Authoritarian [1]
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Date: 2025-02-09
You used to know me. We met in Vegas, Chicago, Austin, Pittsburgh, and (later) in Minneapolis. I’m not writing under my own name. Or email. Or IP address. I’m anonymous because I’ve read this book before. There’s no authoritarian regime where academics fare well. I’m who Trump thinks is a pushing “transgenderism, Marxism, wokeness, and the Green New Deal” on the kiddos.
Time to put my skillset as a social scientist to use. How do you defeat an authoritarian? This will be a series. Please share widely. Today I am going to start with the psychology of it all: Why didn’t we see it coming? How did it happen? Why can’t the left get its effing act together and fight effectively?
Yale authoritarianism expert Timothy Snyder says it’s a coup, and our best chance of stopping it is figuring it out now and fighting it off immediately. We can’t do that without addressing the psychology.
Here are a few liberals I know right now who aren’t fighting very effectively:
My mom: She’s still angry about the election. She hasn’t watched the news since November 5 because she doesn’t want to see his fucking face. She’s mad at the Democrats. Biden shouldn’t have run. There should have been a primary. Those jerks did this to us. Then people who should have voted against Trump didn’t vote or voted third party. She has nothing nice to say about Dearborn, MI right now. “Why can’t people understand you vote for the lesser of the evils???” she keeps saying.
Two colleagues: Panicking. Both of them. We’re done. It’s over. We’re screwed.
Person on Blue Sky in response to a comment about the need for a big pro-democracy tent: I hate the Cheneys. Dick Cheney is a war criminal. Liz Cheney didn’t help Kamala win.
Each of these people is so overwhelmed with emotions, they are stuck. My mom can’t stop ranting about how angry is. Both colleagues repeatedly cut off everything I said with more expressions of fear and despair. The person on Blue Sky — I’m glad I never had to meet them. They repeatedly replied to any remark about the need to get everyone who likes the constitution on the same side and we can fight about policy again when we have the luxury of doing so later with more nasty comments about the Cheneys.
If You Are Stuck in Your Emotions, Get Unstuck and Take Action
My mom needs to get over her anger so she can start acting. I asked her if she would make 6 calls to her Congresscritters each day (2 Senate + 1 House x 2 offices — DC and local) if I sent her the numbers and talking points. She said yes. Every day I send her a different assignment.
She still needed to rant at me for an hour today. I was part therapist and part social scientist. I validated her anger — YES all those Democrats who didn’t vote suck — and explained what I could about what’s going on. She is pissed that Dems refuse to vote for any candidate unless they are perfect and they cost us elections that way. I validated her by sharing what Adam Jentleson said on The Focus Group podcast this week. (By the way — PLEASE listen to The Focus Group episode from this week!) I told her she was right. I agree.
I’m trying to move her toward action. She’s too mad to fight. When you get afraid or angry, you go into fight, flight, or freeze. Fight or flight makes you irrational. Your amygdala (emotional brain) takes over from your prefrontal cortex (rational brain). You can’t be effective when you are here. I nudged her by asking if she can take a small action every day. She’s doing it. That’s a move toward action. She’s also listening to what I explain to her from the news (since she isn’t watching it). Today I explained NIH indirect funding to her.
I also moved my colleagues toward action. Both are paralyzed because they are afraid. Here, I shared what I knew that was hopeful and action-oriented. Harvard sociologist and political scientist Theda Skocpol wrote up what worked to resist Trump last time. She found you need to find out how Trump’s policies specifically impact your community and TELL THEM. Get with a local group to do this. Indivisible is your best bet. They have a resistance guide and a network of chapters around the country. AOC said phone calls to Congress really work and they are starting to have an effect. She said keep it up. The Senate is receiving 1600 calls per minute lately. Keep going.
The Democrats have leverage: the budget and the debt ceiling. The budget expires March 14. A certain number of Republicans won’t ever vote for a budget because they are so opposed to spending government money. They always need Democratic votes. This year, Dems need to set a very high price for their votes. Let Republicans shut down the government. They have the votes not to, so let them find the votes themselves. Or they can come to us begging. (That’s your message to your Democratic reps, btw.)
In the Senate, filibuster. Use the Mitch McConnell obstruction playbook. (My mom’s assignment was call her Democratic Senator and thank him for helping to hold the floor for 30 hours to oppose Russ Vought.)
Show the Republicans they will lose Congress. Republicans have a slim House majority. They don’t want to lose House seats. There are some vulnerable Republicans. Keep the pressure up on ALL of them so they know it will cost them those seats and the majority. AOC says put everything you’ve got into the two FL seats coming up in a special election and Elise Stefanik’s seat in New York. Even if they win by 10 points less than expected, it will scare the pants off of them. It will help us pick off Republican votes. We can canvass, phone bank, and donate.
I made my mom laugh by telling her about my calls to my Republican Senators: “Hi, I was reading Christianity Today, and I don’t support an unelected South African stopping Christians from doing good work in other countries with USAID...” I also told them I support President Trump’s initiative to ban bumpstocks. I’m going to keep calling them daily.
What’s more, Hannah Arendt found that massive resistance worked against the Nazis. It actually slowed down or prevented their ability to murder Jews — especially in Denmark. My friends who are afraid are right. It’s bad. It’s really bad. But it’s not over. If we don’t want the worst to happen, we have to fight. And if we lose, we also have to fight for as long as it takes. It won’t be forever. But we have to fight and keep fighting.
I also tried to steer these friends toward action. We can post Know Your Rights flyers in our departments at school and coffee shops with bulletin boards. People knowing their rights is really slowing down the immigrant raids. It’s making them (very slightly) less of a propaganda tool because they can’t show live video of kicking ass and taking names the way they want. Without warrants, people aren’t opening their doors. And the calling is working, but we have to keep it up.
These friends also need to protect themselves from getting overwhelmed again. One was asking MAGA relatives and reading their social media feeds to get the unvarnished point of view from the other side. She was despondent over it. The fix here is limiting your exposure to that and learn about the other side in ways that are more manageable. I prefer to have experts explain it to me in podcasts. I don’t need to scroll through Truth Social to see the real thing. When I’m really upset, I can only take the news in the form of late night comedy. I also unfollow friends who post things on Facebook that upset me (even if I like the friends and agree with their opinions). I find very angry Facebook posts upsetting, so I unfollow people who routinely post very angry posts. I want to be able to choose when I engage with things I find difficult, not have them fed to me unexpectedly by an algorithm. If I unfollow a friend, I can still check their page when I feel up to it.
I convinced another person that Trump really lost in 2020 and Trump got nothing useful from his recent tariff adventures. Colombia wouldn’t have had a problem in the first place if he hadn’t used military planes — which by the way, cost us much more — and they solved the problem by sending their own planes. So, they got their way about no more military planes going to Colombia. And Trump is still wasting our money on military planes everywhere else. And Biden also got 10,000 Mexican troops at the border without threatening tariffs. He’d been thinking maybe Trump was effective. Nope.
I convinced the woman on Blue Sky of nothing. Sometimes you can’t change people. Especially on social media when talking to people you disagree with. As Maria Ressa wrote in How to Stand Up to a Dictator (yes, I recommend reading it), social media is a real problem. That said, if you are someone who couldn’t get on board with Kamala because she wasn’t perfect. You do see how Kamala, imperfect as she is, would be a better option than this, right? None of us can be precious about our candidates. We need a winner. We need to be united. Everyone who is for democracy and the constitution is on our side. We can go back to hating Liz Cheney later.
In any case, after we all get moving — we need convince the rest of the country this is really happening.
How To Convince People It’s Happening
Chile had always been a stable democracy, until it wasn’t. Pinochet was a brutal dictator for 17 years. Political scientist Barbara Walter (whose book How Civil Wars Start I recommend) said civil war always comes out of the blue. We’ve got all of the risk factors in the U.S. right now, but that doesn’t mean it’s inevitable. It will feel like it can’t happen, and then it’s happening. We need to tank people’s approval of Republicans and wake them up to how serious this is.
That will be my next diary.
In the meantime, deal with whatever emotion issues you are having and start taking action. Even an action as small as hanging up Know Your Rights flyers and making a few phone calls a day is doing your part. When you don’t get through on the phone, send an email. Phone calls are better than emails, so keep calling if you can.
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