As I've written consistently, the regime most similar to that pursued today by the fascist GOP is Jim Crow, a national system that combined repressive laws & racist connivance under the veneer of Christian nationalism. Under this "democracy," legal means of generating change were made impossible.
I would just add that the slavocracy had more than a century to develop in predating the United States, and grew more virulent once the modest aspirations toward equality were articulated in founding documents.
Yes elections happened under Jim Crow, when the Second Klan rose to a *national* membership of several million & openly paraded down Pennsylvania Avenue. But, I know you'll be shocked to learn, these elections were neither free nor fair.
What broke the back of this national protofascist regime in Jim Crow was not meek deferentialism, but a defiance of existing laws, a rejection of the legitimacy of this system, & collaborative efforts to sabotage its operation.
Yes, sure, fine, please vote. I will. But we've got to stop living in this fantasy land where we pretend that the admittedly gerrymandered & repressive participatory system of a decade ago still exists. Or that we'll be safe in "blue state" havens. That's not how any of this works. It never was.
This question & those abt how to respond more broadly are important. As a historian, I tend to look for answers in prior movements & tactics as well as in analyses of systems. Tactically, the things that have worked best have 1) brought ppl together & 2) made existing systems inoperable.
Direct armed violence tends to fail both of those tests & indeed, the police state has already been built around the specter of armed rebellion going all the way back to the colonial era & the first race-making & "militia" laws.
I don't mean to say that armed self-defense is unjustified under the existing & escalating system of state & vigilante violence we face. It's just that other tactics—often alongside defiance, noncompliance, & direct physical resistance—have been historically more effective.
? a general strike
That meets the criteria for sure!
Our individual circumstances vary, but if you are 1) helping to bring people together in space & 2) working to make systems of power difficult to operate, your are maximizing the threat you pose to fascists.
Finally I see "state capture" somewhere about this mess. As a Hungarian, who witnessed Orbán's takeover, I missed this from the discourse for so long. This state capture is based on state level predecessors, in one party states, then it got back to national level through
people like Orbán or Netanyahu, who adapted those techniques, then inspired state level politicians like the Floridians who then went national. State capture is so important, the way Trump handles institutions is literally the same as what Orbán did.
Thank you for sharing this & yes, it’s no accident that Republicans have been hosting Orbán at their conferences & styling their own attacks on the rule of law after his own.
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