Hell No, It's Not Over
We still have rights. Time to use them.
Monika Bauerlein
"We already live in a fascist state." I've been hearing that so often these last few months, fro friends, pundits, Mother Jones readers. And who can blame them? People have been disappeared to torture prisons overseas and ICE is terrorizing day care centers. The federal workforce is being gutted, the economy is on a razor's edge, America's global credibility is in tatters, and kids are going hungry while billionaires cash in. A conspiracy theorist is in charge of our health agencies. Universities, law firms, and nonprofits live in fear of the Eye of Sauron fixing on them. Midterm elections? Will we even have them?
To feel grim in the face of all this is to be realistic. But to throw in the towel and declare game over - that's something else. Call it anticipatory defeat, the cousin of anticipatory obedience: settling into the worst-case scenario, because it seems hard to imagine getting to somewhere better. But we need to be able to imagine getting to somewhere better.
My parents lived at a time when lots of people settled into the worst-case scenario. They were children in Germany when Hitler was in power, and their memories were those of people lucky enough not to have suffered the true brutality of the regime - but still fully within its totalitarian reach. An uncle who said some stuff about the Führer was hauled off. My dad and his friends dodged the police, who would grab you if you grew your hair longer than the prescribed style.
These were just the tiny, banal manifestations of a regime that had subdued virtually all political, economic, and cultural institutions within a year of taking power in 1933. The Nazis called it Gleichschaltung - one of those German words that has no translation, but maybe is close to "synchronization." Within months, virtually every university, trade union, political party, hobby club, and soccer team had been Nazified or outlawed. Storm troopers showed up at union offices and beat up their leaders. State legislatures were dissolved. Political parties other than the Nazi Party were outlawed, and dissidents were killed. All this was the requisite foundation for the institutionalized hate, cruelty, and violence that would follow.
If we were living under fascism right now, the words I'm writing would be a death sentence. Mother Jones would be outlawed, as would the New York Times. There would be no Democratic Party, no independent judiciary, no No Kings marches. If my grandparents had so much as held a sign at an intersection, they would never have made it home.
The seeds of fascism and authoritarianism have always been present in America, and they are sprouting. But we also still have rights that people in 1930s Germany (or contemporary Russia or China) would have died for. It's time to use them.
Back before the 2016 election, Mother Jones reported on how white supremacists and new-Nazis viewed Donald Trump: as a leader of their movement, a not-so-secret ally committed to mainstreaming their ideas. His desire to rule as an authoritarian was also not terribly hidden. But for most in the media, that was not the story. Years into his first presidency, traditional newsrooms resisted the word "lie," let alone "fascism."
In 2020, we learned that Trump was following the autocrat's playbook to a T. No election could be valid unless he won. Violence was okay, even heroic, to reinstate him. By 2024, the F-word was finally out in the open when Joe Biden ran against "semi-fascism." But semi-fascism won, and the country's most powerful people and institutions seemed to accept it. No wonder, perhaps, that a lot of people concluded that to do justice to the moment meant to say all was lost.
Since then, social media has been overrun with Cassandras: Le me tell you how bad it is. Worse than you thought. What's coming next is so much worse than that. No one is telling the truth about what we're in for.
It's all genuine, but like anything on social media, it can also become a pose. And more than that, it is paralyzing, and to let ourselves be paralyzed is to give in before we have to.
So keep in mind that all the grim stuff is true - but here is some of what's also true: The lower courts have largely held as a bulwark against lawlessness (and many important cases never reach the far too complicit Supreme Court). Some universities caved to the administration, but many more have resisted. Some law firms folded, but others committed themselves to fighting for the rule of law. Media corporations have bent the knee, but independent newsrooms are standing up. And most of all, millions of people have been marching, voting, and creatively organizing to protect their neighbors. It's going to be hard to shut all that down.
Indeed, we have plenty of historical precedent for the government trying, and failing, to shut down dissent. A century ago, Woodrow Wilson's administration censored newspapers and imprisoned dissenters. Lynch mobs ran rampant. Many Americans were unable to exercise their right to vote. Within the lifetime of some folks reading this column, civil rights workers were murdered in Mississippi, student protestors at Kent State and Jackson State were gunned down, peaceful marchers were beaten on the Edmund Pettus Bridge. Yet in the end, the goons and guns did not prevail.
None of us chose to be in a moment that calls on us to defend freedom, yet here we are. If we lose, we'll find out soon enough. But there's only one way to find out if we can win.
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