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Required Reading for the Resistance [1]

['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.']

Date: 2025-02-25

What goes around comes around. As it was in 1776. so it is today:

THESE are the times that try men's souls. The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of their country; but he that stands by it now, deserves the love and thanks of man and woman. Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered; yet we have this consolation with us, that the harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph. What we obtain too cheap, we esteem too lightly: it is dearness only that gives every thing its value. Heaven knows how to put a proper price upon its goods; and it would be strange indeed if so celestial an article as FREEDOM should not be highly rated.

Every day brings more horrifying news. Our opposition leaders seem to be at a loss. Our institutions are proving far less robust than we had assumed. The Trump/Musk regime is fronting for an agenda that the rich have been pushing for decades. They have a plan and they are running with it. We are scrambling to catch up to their OODA loop even though their execution is flawed and bumbling. The sheer volume of the shit flooding the zone is a force multiplier.

Opposition is growing, and it is starting to have some effect. Calling your congressional delegation, posting on social media, showing up for demonstrations, getting loud and visible — all of that is a start but it’s going to take a sustained effort for the long haul. Effective action requires an understanding of how we got here and what we are dealing with. To that end I’ve put together a list of resources which answer three critical questions.

There is a lot of material here, so I’d suggest bookmarking it or better yet copying and pasting it into a document so you can pull it up at leisure. I’ve made sure the full links appear.

Disclaimer: The suggested reading list below is offered as a starting point for further discussion and debate. It is by no means the last word. It also should be considered in the context of what is a rapidly deteriorating situation. Readers are free to disagree with the assertions and opinions offered here – your mileage may vary. Helpful suggestions are welcome, as are better ideas.

Suggested Readings to Understand Why/How American Democracy is on the Brink

What is happening in America since Donald Trump began his second term has left many people struggling to understand what is going on. There’s no single explanation, no simple answer. That being said, there IS material that, when taken together, goes a long way towards making sense of what is happening and why. A way to start is to look at three big questions:

How did the Republican Party become the party of Donald Trump, a man manifestly unfit for any office, let alone president? How did it become a party that embraces racists, Christian nationalists, homophobes, misogynists, xenophobes, con men, and worse? Why does it now align with Russia and turn on our allies? Why is it openly the tool of the rich? How is it millions of Americans blindly follow Donald Trump, and reject what is in their own best interests? Why are they eager to see government crippled and destroyed? Why do they regard Democrats/Liberals as the source of all evil and government as the enemy? Why were so many people unhappy with an economy which (until January 20, 2025) was the strongest in the world? Why did record low levels of unemployment and falling inflation not ease economic fears? Why were people convinced the country was on the wrong track? Why are quality of life measures declining in America?

There are answers to those questions, but they are not easily reduced to soundbites. They are also uncomfortable to look at in a country that believes it is exceptional. (It can’t happen here!) It’s also a matter that these ideas are threatening to the people who have brought America to this point. They’ve put decades of effort and money into narratives that serve their interests while suppressing these ideas that could counter them.

What follows is a selection of articles, books, and online resources that address the 3 questions above. While individually compelling, they complement each other when taken together in a way that multiplies their significance. They provide a broad framework for getting at the underlying truths of this moment of great peril.

This is not new information. Some of it goes back decades. If these works were more widely known and had been acted on, America would not be where it is today. It’s a lot of material. Where possible I’ve included links to resources that provide an introduction in a shorter version. This is not a set of immediate prescriptions for action; instead they provide a framework to develop those actions.

QUESTION ONE:

The answer to how the Republican Party became what it is today has been extensively documented by David Corn in his book American Psychosis: A Historical Investigation of How the Republican Party Went Crazy. It traces the decades-long march of the GOP to where it is today. A 2022 summarized version appeared in Mother Jones Magazine : It Didn’t Start with Trump: The Decades-Long Saga of How the GOP Went Crazy.

Web Link: https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2022/09/it-didnt-start-with-trump-the-decades-long-saga-of-how-the-gop-went-crazy/

Bonus Reading: Rick Perlstein in 2012 wrote an article The Long Con – Mail-order Conservatism It’s a discussion of how the GOP has a long history of scams and other rip-offs of their base – again it didn’t start with Trump. Web Link: https://thebaffler.com/salvos/the-long-con

Bill Moyers in 2012 discussed how the Powell Memo laid out a campaign for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce to bend government to the will of corporations; Lewis Powell would go on to sit on the Supreme Court. Web link: https://billmoyers.com/content/the-powell-memo-a-call-to-arms-for-corporations/

Kevin Drum – from 2018, has the best short summary of what the modern Republican Party is today and what should be done about it: GOPus delendus est Web link: https://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2018/08/nos-victi-reipublicae/

Extra Bonus Reading – Charles Pierce wrote a 2009 book detailing how America became a land of alternative facts, conspiracy theories, and militant ignorance: Idiot America: How Stupidity Became a Virtue in the Land of the Free

QUESTION TWO:

One of the great puzzles of World War II was how did Germany become a land of horrors. The late Professor Bob Altemeyer did extensive research into authoritarian movements following up on investigations of what led to the Holocaust. Once you read his description of the characteristics of High SDO authoritarian leaders and authoritarian followers, much becomes clear about the dynamics of the MAGA phenomenon. The 2006 book summarizing his work is available as a free download, and in book format. Web link: https://theauthoritarians.org Altemeyer’s work was the basis of much of John W. Dean ’s 2006 book Conservatives Without Conscience.

Sara Robinson writing at Orcinus (https://dneiwert.blogspot.com) in 2006 drew on the research as well to summarize how authoritarian movements work in three articles. Reading the first one is a good primer on authoritarian movements.

Cracks In The Wall, Part I: Defining the Authoritarian Personality https://dneiwert.blogspot.com/2006/08/cracks-in-wall-part-i-defining.html

Cracks In The Wall, Part II: Listening to the Leavers https://dneiwert.blogspot.com/2006/08/cracks-in-wall-part-ii-listening-to.html

Cracks in the Wall, Part III: Escape Ladders https://dneiwert.blogspot.com/2006/08/cracks-in-wall-part-iii-escape-ladders.html

Once you understand how the minds of authoritarian followers work, you will see that attempts to persuade them are wasted effort. Until they are ready on their own to change their minds, they will rationalize away every argument that challenges their views. (Robinson goes into this in detail in parts 2 and 3.) This article in Huffington Post demonstrates how MAGA minds refuse to acknowledge the contradictions in their beliefs. https://www.huffpost.com/entry/donald-trump-voter-cnn_n_67bd7023e4b088756003b3ab

Bonus Reading: Orcinus is a website set up by David Neiwert. Although it has not been updated recently, it contains links to Neiwert’s investigations of right wing extremist movements in the United States as well as articles exploring the nature of Fascism. (The left margin of the website has the links.)

Web Link: https://dneiwert.blogspot.com

QUESTION THREE:

Why is there so much economic angst in America? Why are people dissatisfied with life in what should be a country with a high standard of living? Obvious answers are concerns over inflation, the high cost of buying a house, student debt, etc. – but why did so many voters reject policies that were actually doing something about those issues? The answers to Questions One and Two explain a lot of ‘vibe’ economy angst – but it’s far from the whole story.

In 2009 Richard G. Wilkinson and Kate Pickett published a book: The Spirit Level: Why More Equal Societies Almost Always Do Better. It has gone through several subsequent editions but the basic concept remains the same. Wilkinson and Pickett are social epidemiologists who sifted through social statistics from around the world, and they discovered a relationship that has profound implications. In comparing developed countries, those with lower levels of inequality do better than those with more inequality across a range of quality of life measures. America is currently suffering from record levels of inequality and the gap continues to increase.

https://www.cfr.org/backgrounder/us-inequality-debate

From the Equality Trust website (https://equalitytrust.org.uk/the-spirit-level/)

“The Spirit Level: Why Equality is Better for Everyone was published in 2009. Written by Kate Pickett and Richard Wilkinson, the book highlights the “pernicious effects that inequality has on societies: eroding trust, increasing anxiety and illness, (and) encouraging excessive consumption”. It shows that for each of eleven different health and social problems: physical health, mental health, drug abuse, education, imprisonment, obesity, social mobility, trust and community life, violence, teenage pregnancies, and child well-being, outcomes are significantly worse in more unequal rich countries.”

This relationship can be seen across developed countries with different languages, different primary religions, etc. It can be seen across the 50 states of America. The greater the inequality, the less well they do. Conversely, policies that reduce inequality should produce improvements in quality of life measures across the board, more effectively than tackling them individually.

Although it predates the Spirit Level, this approach has actually been tested and preliminary results were promising. In 1974 a Canadian town was the subject of a program that evaluated what happened when people were given enough money to bring them above the poverty line.

https://www.bbc.com/worklife/article/20200624-canadas-forgotten-universal-basic-income-experiment

At the time it was the most ambitious social science experiment ever to take place in Canada, and saw rates of hospitalisations fall, improvements in mental health, and a rise in the number of children completing high school

There is more recent evidence that directly addressing inequality can have real effects. The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities described how Covid relief payments in the American Rescue Plan had a dramatic effect on child poverty: Government’s Pandemic Response Turned a Would-Be Poverty Surge Into a Record Poverty Decline. There is a lot of material at the link demonstrating the impact such aid had.

https://www.cbpp.org/research/poverty-and-inequality/governments-pandemic-response-turned-a-would-be-poverty-surge-into

From the conclusion:

Some temporary policies put in place during the pandemic proved effective at combatting problems that long predated the pandemic and point the way to policy advances the nation should adopt permanently. The most notable examples are policies to better support children in families with low incomes: an expanded Child Tax Credit that provides the full credit to children in the lowest-income families, increased support for child care and housing, and summer food benefits to prevent an increase in food insecurity when school is out. Congress took a modest step in December 2022 when it created a permanent summer food assistance program in the year-end funding bill; but action in these other areas is needed to make a sizable dent in child poverty.

There’s much more at the Equality Trust website on how reducing inequality works better for everyone, from those at the bottom of the economic scale all the way to the top:

https://equalitytrust.org.uk/the-spirit-level/

Stay Tuned For More

I expect this is quite a lot to assimilate, so I’m going to wrap this up with a short summary and a followup post discussing the implications of these three points taken together depending on how people react to this. Here’s some takeaways for now.

1) The Republican Party is now an unholy amalgam of an organized crime syndicate, a con game, and an authoritarian cult. It is no longer a legitimate participant in our democracy; it’s like a baby cuckoo in a bird’s nest shoving all the other nestlings out. It can’t be trusted, it can’t be worked with, and it can’t be saved.

Today, the Republican Party exists for one and only one purpose: to pass tax cuts for the rich and regulatory rollbacks for corporations. They accomplish this using one and only method: unapologetically racist and bigoted appeals to win the votes of the heartland riff-raff they otherwise treat as mere money machines for their endless mail-order cons.

2) We are experiencing what it is like when High SDO personalities gain power over us.

High-SDO people are characterized by four core traits: they are dominating, opposed to equality, committed to expanding their own personal power, and amoral. These are usually accompanied by other unsavory traits, many of which render them patently unsuitable for leadership roles in a democracy:

The Republican Party is infested with them — and they dominate too many other parts of our society, as in corporations, media, and religion. They’ve assembled an army of true believers.

3) In times of stress, people will abandon democracy for authoritarian leaders — and great inequality creates great levels of stress. Obscene levels of wealth are driving points one and two, and making the country ungovernable. Add in natural disasters, pandemics, etc. and it’s like pouring gasoline on a burning Tesla. Add calculated disinformation, outright lies, and conspiracy theories coming from points one and two, and is it any wonder the country is angry and divided?

Taken together, we have a trifecta of chaos. Business as usual will not cut it. Reaching across the aisle will not fix this. Waiting for them to overreach is whistling past the graveyard.

Step One is accepting this, and planning accordingly.

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