American Democracy Will Die in 100 Days
…Unless Americans Start Understanding How to Fight Nazism — Now
…Unless Americans Start Understanding How to Fight Nazism — Now
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Americans being abducted off the streets. A mayor being attacked with chemical agents. Secret Police, otherwise known as “Homeland Security,” occupying cities. And an aspiring dictator behind it all. Here’s a bitter truth, made of five smaller ones.
America now has 100 days to save its democracy.
Even if, at this late juncture, Americans begin to fight for their democracy, there’s no guarantee of success. Nonetheless. This upcoming election is
America’s last chance.
To those of us who lived through authoritarian collapses — and survived them — what’s going to happen in America over the next six months is as simple as it is predictable. That’s not to be a know-it-all blowhard. It’s to
warn you.
Fact one. Trump is going to try to steal the election. If this were any other President, I myself would dismiss such an idea as crackpot conspiratorialism. But Trumps not any other President. He’s a man who’s
checked every item off the list of Nazi politics, from camps to bans to raids to purges. He’s announced proudly that he doesn’t believe in democracy, or the Constitution, and wants to keep power for as long as he can.
When authoritarians tell you what they are going to do, believe them. They’re like mafiosi: they have to follow through on their threats or they lose all credibility. So
when Trump says he’s not going to accede to a peaceful transfer of power, believe him. Americans have spent too long
playing dumb, not believing Trump at any stage of collapse so far, from camps to bans to purges — and now it’s almost too late.
Fact two. Trump is still within striking distance of being able to steal the election. Don’t count him out yet, just because he’s sunk a little in the polls. He’s still got an Army of American Idiots behind him —
about 40% or so of Americans. That number, it seems, is a hard floor — it doesn’t budge, no matter what. The whys and wherefores — these are mentally broken people regressed to infantile psychologies, who regard Trump as
an unconscious omnipotent father figure — are now irrelevant. What is relevant is that thanks to the vagaries of America’s electoral college, Trump can
still squeeze out a narrow victory, especially with a little help from Zuck and the Kremlin. Or a narrow enough loss that it can be contested to high heaven — and then turned into a victory thanks to a stacked Supreme Court and a supine Senate.
Don’t count Trump out.
Fact three. This is how authoritarians steal elections: with creeping martial law. Those storm troopers on Portland’s streets,
abducting people, beating moms, gassing the mayor? That’s exactly — exactly — how authoritarians institute martial law. Not like in the movies — suddenly. But slowly, one step at a time.
One city, town, set of shock troops at a time. Their power are expanded. Your rights are eroded. And before anyone knows it — you’re living in a police state, a place where people feel afraid to express themselves, organize, protest, dissent, vote.
Trump is instituting martial law right before a crucial election that will decide the fate of democracy in America for at least a generation. Probably longer. That’s not a coincidence. It’s a culmination. Of what? Of Trump’s Nazi politics. Camps, bans, raids, purges, institutionalized hate, paramilitaries and secret police — all that’s a pattern. What does it culminate in?
The next step of the sequence of implosion. The final seizure of power.
That is what this pattern has been leading up to for four solid years now. It’s what those of us who’ve lived through authoritarian collapses have been trying to warn you of —
and failing, because we’ve been dismissed as “alarmists” by mainstream pundits. But by now, I’d bet, you’re pretty goddamned alarmed. You should be, because this is all very real. Those of us who know know because we’ve lived it, and what we know is that collapse proceeds according to
a predictable and time-honored pattern. In America, it couldn’t have been any clearer, which is why us survivors of authoritarianism have been trying to warn you as loudly as we can —
even if it cost us personally.
That brings me to fact four.
Fact four. Americans have been in denial about what Trumpism really is. What kind of people build…actual concentration camps? Put kids in them? Rip them from their mothers? Set up Gestapos to hunt them in the streets?
There’s only one word for such people. Nazis. That’s one of history’s great lessons — and Americans are the world’s laughingstocks at this point because they’re the only people left in the world who don’t get that this is Nazism reborn.
The only people. Like I say, every single person I know asks me why Americans don’t get it every single day now. I’m not exaggerating when I say that. What the? By now, you can see openly and in shocking, weird, and frightening ways that Trumpists really
are Nazis. For example,
they call slavery a “necessary evil.” For example,
they wear swastika masks to Walmart. For example, their Gestapo
destroys medical supplies during a pandemic — which is a literal war crime.
Trumpism is American Nazism. Maybe not all Trumpists think of themselves that way — but so what? If you’re happy with Gestapos beating moms and gassing mayors, and kids in concentration camps, guess what…
you’re a Nazi. The good American — the non-Trumpist, the one who still believes in democracy and freedom — now has just 100 days to emerge from their foxholes of denial, and begin acting like they finally
get that this is America’s final showdown with American Nazism.
If Americans really understood that —
and they don’t — what would they do?
That brings me to my fifth fact. Americans aren’t fighting authoritarianism yet — not the way it needs to be fought. And that is a consequence of four long, terrible,
painful years of denial.
Look, in any sane nation, Trump would not be the head of state anymore. If Justin Trudeau had gassed mayors…he’d have had to resign tomorrow. If Emanuel Macron had let 150,000 people die of Covid — he’d have been thrown out of office swiftly. If Angela Merkel had ripped kids from their parents and put them in concentration camps, she’d have been tried in German courts
for fascism.
People would have lined the streets of Paris, Berlin, and Toronto, day after day — until these leaders resigned.
If Americans really understood that this was their final showdown with Nazism — they’d demand scalps. That Trump resign. That all his white supremacist advisors be thrown out of office — and never find work or friends in society again.
They’d line the streets of every major American city. There would be a mass movement calling for the end of American Nazism — politically, culturally, and socially.
Millions would park themselves in front of the White House, and not leave until the job was done.
There are stirrings of that, in protest growing across the nation. But so far, they aren’t calling for Trump to resign. What the? Why not? But that’s the point.
The best way to defeat Trump in the upcoming election is to checkmate him — not to have him in one.
That’s how you play this game — because it’s the precise opposite of what he wants, after all. What does he really want?
Not to have an election at all, or to postpone it. Maybe Covid will be the pretext. Or maybe it’s the way he’s amping up tensions with China. Maybe it will just be
“law and order.” Would you be surprised if Trump tried to
cancel the election? Of course not. Nobody sane would be. He’s said he doesn’t want one, more or less, over and over again. That’s how authoritarians usually make their final seizure of power — they don’t win elections,
they steal them, thwart them, or destroy them.
Trump is trying to checkmate American democracy. Why else is he sending storm troopers nationwide just before a crucial election? So that — if he can get away with it — there isn’t one, and if he can’t get away with that, so he can
terrorize people into not voting.
What’s the best way to deal with that? One way is to encourage people to vote and so forth — to mobilize. But that’s a weak strategy at best, because Trump holds all the cards. He’s the one with the storm troopers and the terror tactics.
The best strategy Americans have right now is to make it impossible for Trump to contest the next election at all, by calling for his resignation — now. That should have happened long ago. Like I said, no other rich nation, and not even most poor ones, would have tolerated what Trump’s gotten away with to date, and I don’t mean the small abuses of power,
like bribery and playing golf while the nation burns, I mean the big ones, like camps, Gestapos, storm troopers,
and mass death.
“How is this lunatic still in power?!,” the entire world asks, baffled. “Why don’t Americans remove him?” What the world doesn’t understand about Americans is that they’ve been abused by their leaders so long they’ve forgotten how to take power back from failed elites. You don’t have to wait for an election that’s going to be rigged, manipulated, terrorized, and hijacked. You can demand a failed President resign
now.
Maybe I’m being optimistic. Still, don’t imagine that I’m telling Americans what to do. Rather, I’m pointing out what a saner nation would have
already done. And I’m pointing out the best way to save a democracy that’s in deep, deep peril.
If Americans don’t begin calling for Trump to resign, in a powerful mass movement, then the next six months, after all, are eminently predictable. Those storm troopers being abducting people and beating moms and gassing mayors across the nation. Opponents and critics and dissidents begin getting disappeared to God-knows-where, under the pretext of “homeland security.” Meanwhile, Trump’s buddies in the Kremlin flood social media with disinformation — while Zuck grins and
checks his bank account. The Trumpists — the American Nazis — simmer with rage, anticipating the sweet taste of total power.
In the lead-up to election day, the nation’s on fire. Beatings and disappearances and abductions and gassings are now everyday events. Nobody knows what to do, and an atmosphere of
frustration, bewilderment, and anger reign. Trump’s tricks have worked. People have been terrorized. Trumpists join storm troopers in intimidating and frightening everyone else. It’s open season, and “law and order” now means the right to abuse and terrorize anyone who’s not part of
America’s Nazi movement.
America’s spirit has been broken.
And when election day finally comes, Trump knows his storm troopers, his propagandists, his Idiot Army — all that can eke out enough of a margin for him to steal the election, if not win it outright.
Bang! And then there is no more American democracy for a generation. Trump is America’s Saddam, it’s Gaddafi, and after him come a long retinue of kids and advisors, even more demented and bloodthirsty than him.
That’s how it works.
That’s what us survivors of authoritarian collapse have to warn you of. If any of that sounds outlandish, to you, still, then let me ask you. Did you think, five years ago, that America would be here? That Donald Trump would be sending his…shock troops…to gas American mayors…
while mass death surged? What the?
Your rational side is not your ally right now, because you haven’t lived through this. It’s not helping you to overthink what’s about to happen — because Trump and his army of American Nazis aren’t exactly logical. Your rational side has
underestimated American Nazism over the last four years for exactly that reason.
But there is no more room for mistakes now.
Those of us who’ve survived all this before — we are trying to share our experience with you. Because we need to, because it’s what decent and sane people must do. And that experience can be summed up in three short principles. It’s always worse — much worse — than your rational side thinks. It’s always as bad as — or worse than — your worst, hidden fears. And when you put those two things together, the only conclusion is: you’d better act like this is your last chance to remain a functioning and free society.
Because it is.
The Suffocation of Democracy
