It still seems odd to be talking about a fascist coup in America. On the other hand, just as with the climate crisis denied, it would have been a lot easier and cheaper if we had faced it head on at a much earlier stage. Plenty of history provides clear understanding of how it all unfolds. Once the contagion of an authoritarian movement is in full swing, it is far more difficult to prevent its culmination in the form of a ruthless dictatorship.
Anyone who has read my Hopeful Realist blogs or newsletters, or my new Substack space, Illusions Transformed, has probably read my praise for the public service performed by Timothy Snyder by writing his small but powerful book, On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century, which captures the essence of how things went wrong and how to stave off the forces of autocratic attempts to dominate a nation. Political scientist Jason Stanley provides a clear outline of the elements of fascism in his How Fascism Work: The Politics of Them and Us.
How a Fascist Coup Happens
The best way to understand the risks and workings of an autocratic takeover of a nation is to read the books I mentioned above. But it is important to understand the urgency of the present threat to the American political system, with all its imperfections, successes, and failures, now. The biggest threat are not our failings, but the fascist coup they may allow. We face an immediate danger of an autocratic coup of a particularly American style right now and the longer we wait, passively assuming that “It Can’t Happen Here,” (Sinclair Lewis, original publication 1935. Stricking parallel to now) the greater the risk of falling under what could become the most oppressive regime in history.
The fascist dictators of the past did not have the technocratic power currently wielded by those Muskist techno-bro-bully marauders currently laying waste to the core institutions that hold the nation together, however imperfectly, today. The assault on the courts, along with all the executive departments and agencies, and with the insertion of so called “loyalists” into the Department of Justice, which was intended from its beginning to be an independent source for determining the need for any indictment for criminal prosecution, now used as a political weapon, are all classic moves of an autocratic attempt.
These tactics add up to a strategy intended to break down the hierarchies of authority in government institutions in order to take them over and crush their ability to execute the laws passed by the Congress, thereby breaking the power of the legislative branch to make law. By aggressively taking all these steps in multiples across agencies, programs, and departments, indiscriminately, breaking many laws along the way, the goal is to overwhelm the whole system. By such an inundation of illegal, unethical, and abusive acts, they intend to institute a political ‘shock and awe” of a kind that is very difficult to keep up with, no less counter in legal ways.
How to Resist Tyranny
For several years now, I have occasionally quoted or paraphrased Bill Moyers who said that the only way to counter organized money is with organized people. I have also referred to the famous quote by Margaret Mead, stating that “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has.” Despite the fact that Moyer attributes agency to large numbers of people and Mead attributes it to a few, I strongly believe that both assertions are true. Here’s why.
In the last few years, I have done a lot of research into the progress of social network science. There I have found major confirmation of what I found many years ago when I did a small study of a social network in a large bureaucracy. Back then, there were no personal computers or smart phones, only giant mainframe computers that filled large rooms. Those big IBM mainframes were far less powerful than the Apple watch on your wrist. Moore’s law (that the number of transistors on a microchip doubles about every two years) led to huge increases in computing power over a couple of decades) eventually allowed computational analysis of group interactions not possible until the last decade or so. (Even a relatively small group has huge numbers of possible interactions among members.)
Well, now some clear results, especially as reported by Damon Centola, show that powerful change can occur when strong networks connected to other strong networks work to effectuate societal change. These findings are a considerable extension of Mead’s assertion while validating it. Moreover, recent research on popular protests and revolutions confirm Moyers’ assertion.
Erica Chenoweth studied uprisings all over the world from 1900 to 2006 and found that non-violent resistance movements were far more successful than violent movements were, and required only 3.5% of the population to succeed in a majority of cases. So, my conclusion from the best available research is that organization, mobilization, and non-violence are the keys to achieving the societal transformation we so desperately need.
Yet, the organized movement we need first is one that must be focused on stopping the current on-going autocratic attempt. We cannot achieve the survival that requires a wellbeing ecological society to replace the extraction and domination focused industrial-consumer political economy without first stopping the current fascist coup. Authoritarian regimes epitomize the dominator culture the origins and consequences of which Raine Eisler explained in her 1987 book, The Chalice and the Blade, and seek maximum extraction of materials and energy from planet and people to enrich themselves. These extremes eventually lead to their fall, but we cannot afford to go through a cycle of chaos like that as the planet burns. We need our ecological revolution now.
The Transformation
Stopping the autocratic attempt is absolutely necessary on its own account, but also because it is a necessary precursor to the transformation of society itself, if we are to have any hope for establishing a new social order capable of living ‘within our means,’ by which I mean within a relationship of harmony with the Earth System that sustains us. Enough with all this “sustainable [this]” or “sustainable [that]”.
Our failing industrial-consumer political economy (which is really not an actual society, but a constructed political-economic machine that dominates all social relations as it extracts from and destabilizes ecosystems) is itself not sustainable as we move further into the Anthropocene Epoch of the Earth System. We must transform ourselves, our communities, our so-called “lifestyles.” (Life is not really about style, it is about living with each other among our fellow sentient beings within our habitats, which must be stable ecosystems). We must transform our larger institutions, so that they may evolve in ecological harmony with the Earth System itself—or we must replace them with institutions that can. Much hard work lies ahead, and it is mostly unrelated to the techno-system we are accustomed to dominate every aspect of our lives. Our freedom will be found in ecological communities.
Robert MacNeil Christie, Author 