I have a new column this week on OnlySky. It’s about the war that the U.S. government is waging on its own people, and what we can do about it.
Trump’s second term is every bit as bad as progressives warned it would be. He’s flouting the law, trashing the Constitution, terrorizing and brutalizing immigrants and citizens alike, trying to subjugate cities under a reign of terror from masked Gestapo. It’s real and genuine authoritarianism, and it’s arrived in the United States.
How did we get here, and what should we do about it?
We’re not the first nation to go through this. Other countries, like South Korea and Brazil, have suffered through periods of dictatorship and eventually triumphed and restored democracy. Their experience gives us a guide on what to do next.
Read the excerpt below, then click through to see the full piece. This column is free to read, but members of OnlySky also get special benefits, like member-only posts and a subscriber newsletter:
It’s important to know that Trumpism didn’t come out of nowhere. Although a few conservative politicians have offered feeble protests, for the most part, Trump’s rise to power and subsequent abuse and subversion of democracy has happened with the full consent and approval of the Republican party.
There’s a reason for this, as Professor Steven Levitsky says. Republicans willingly acquiesced to authoritarian rule because they were facing what, for them, was an existential threat: a future where rich white Christian men no longer wield sole power.
Conservatives were terrified by this. They saw it not as the realization of a long-deferred promise, but as a zero-sum game they were losing. They tried to stop it by any means necessary.
They engaged in systematic gerrymandering, drawing jigsaw-puzzle-like congressional districts to thwart the will of the voters. In Congress, they abused the filibuster to stymie progressive legislation that had majority support. A conservative Supreme Court has repeatedly issued decisions that weakened unions, struck down civil rights-era voter protections, and removed restrictions on corporate funding of elections. Red-state legislatures have tried to ban books, outlaw DEI programs, and put a stop to anything else that promotes equality or diverse viewpoints.
When all their other power-grabs failed, Republican voters and politicians proved willing to junk democracy and install an autocrat rather than share power. This was always coming; if it hadn’t been Trump, it would have been someone like him.
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