This is Why We Fight
The murder of Alexi Navalny and his subsequent funeral in Moscow are more than reminders of what can happen when an authoritarian neo-Stalinist regime erases freedom, reality, and humanity. The images we saw last week provide a preview of America’s future if Donald Trump is reelected this November. We fight for American democracy not just to preserve and improve our way of life, but to prevent a darker future that resembles today’s Russia, Saudi Arabia, China, or Hungary.
Now, it would be reasonable for you to say, “But Reed, Putin has been a dictator for 20 years. It took him a long time to create the Russian police state. That can’t happen here.”
Yes, dear reader, it can. It will look different, but it certainly can happen here.
Newly installed dictators work on an accelerated timeline. From the moment he was installed as chancellor in 1933, it took Adolf Hitler less than two months (39 days) to wrap Germany in the bloody flag of Nazism.
There’s a reason why, following a takeover, regimes round up dissidents, opposition leaders, intellectual leaders, and bureaucrats. They want a clean slate with which to re-create the nation and society in their twisted image. This erasure includes leaders in culture, media, education, labor, and any other organized group to wield power or deliver broad (independent) messages to the body politic.
“I just want to be a dictator for one day,” Donald Trump infamously boasted last year. We have an idea of what Day One would look like. He could fulfill his dream by following Project 2025, a Heritage Foundation-birthed blueprint designed for Trump and his accomplices to implement the re-ordering of American government and society.
It is tinged with nativism, racism, and Christian nationalism. It calls for the president to invoke the 1807 Insurrection Act on his first day in office to put down any demonstrations (there would be many) that arise. The images we see from Moscow or other totatlitarian countries are closer than any of us would like to imagine.
In the wake of the Insurrection Act, state security forces would be turned on American citizens beating and arresting thousands as a show of unremitting force specifically designed to scare both would-be agitators and everyday citizens. Don’t say anything. Don’t see anything. Don’t do anything.
The next rounded up will be those deemed impure by MAGA and those who betrayed the leader and the movement. He’ll quickly move on to others, those whom he believes have wronged him most. In MAGA’s mind, Democrats are supposed to be the opponents. It’s expected of them. Regimes need legitimate ‘opposition’ to create the fiction that democracy lives on.
It won’t stop on the streets, of course.
Trump has long made clear his disdain for the free press and those that criticize him. It’s bears repeating that calling the media “the enemy of the people” is a thoroughly un-democratic and un-American act. There is plenty to complain about how outlets have covered Trump (I’ve done plenty myself) but democracy is impossible without a free and open press.
It’s not hard to imagine a White House Briefing Room populated not by the Associated Press, the Washington Post, and ABC News, but only by Fox News, One America News Network, and Breitbart. They’ll sit in their seats not to ask questions, but to receive their instructions.
Like that memory-eraser from Men-in-Black, tyrants must wipe clean the minds of their subjects, quickly and completely, and if necessary, brutally. There can only be one reality, and its dictated not by events, but by propaganda chiefs, their minions, and their house organs.
After he’s thrown thousands in jail, Trump will move on to another one of Project 2025’s pillars: The invocation of so-called “Schedule F” federal employees.
Its implementation would allow for the wholesale dismissal of career civil servants in favor of political lackeys who would run the government not based on merit, science, honesty, or legality, but on whatever ideological spectrum MAGA is operating that day. (Trump attempted to implement the plan prior to leaving office (legally, but not peacefully) but the Biden Administration rescinded it immediately upon taking office.)
To make this simpler: A second Trump administration will destroy the parts of government that help people to bolster and weaponize the parts of government that can control people.
Now you might say, “Reed, can’t someone ask a federal court to order Trump to stop all this?”
Someone could, but what are the chances that it would do any good. Federal courts don’t have enforcement authority, and given what we’ve seen of Trump’s Supreme Court, we shouldn’t expect they’d step in even if asked. No, dear reader, the Court is not coming to save us.
Why do we fight? To avoid all of the dystopian outcomes I’ve outlined above. Tyrants take away the voice and the spirit of their subjects. They replace the individual with the state. They take away (relative) certainty in favor of the arbitrary. (Why am I in trouble? What did I say? What did I do? Why me?)
This idea, this American Experiment, is predicated on the idea that citizens get to make decisions in their own best interests. As imperfect as the experiment might be, the alternative is a country, and subsequently a world, where only might makes right.
There are two tomorrows ahead. The first is one in which we can start the long process of rebuilding America into a 21st century, pluralistic society. The second is that which I’ve described above.
So why do we fight? Because tens of millions of us, like those brave souls in Moscow, refuse to go quietly into that bad night.
News and Notes:
Please check out the latest Lincoln Project podcast with my guest Jacob Heilbrunn. We discuss his book, America Last.
To learn more about the Lincoln Project, please visit us! Lincolnproject.us
39 Days it took Hitler. We have 249 days left 'till the Election. It's going to take every single one of us doing every single thing we can to stop this menace. Never thought I'd see this happen in my very own backyard. But the threat is very real and we need to wake up as many people as we can before it's too late. The country and entire world is counting on us!!! Great piece. Let Freedom ring. ❤️🇺🇸💙
You have no idea how many people around the world are willing you on. More than a third of the world's population will vote in national elections this year (or has already done so) and what happens in the States affects them too. Here in the UK, the vast majority of people are with you.
Don't fret about the opinion polls, so few people are willing to talk to pollsters these days that they've become poor indicators of anything. Instead, look at exit polls and actual election results: the Dems overperform by 6-8%, and the Republicans underperform by a similar amount.
And try to filter out the journalistic bias against Biden. There are many reasons for this, not the least of which are that reporters and their editors fear for both their jobs and the chilling effect of the MAGA hate mob when a story is published that they don't like. Very few of us are tough enough to cope with pressure like that when considering what to report on.
The people posting here are so impressive. Every little thing you do helps preserve democracy. Just make sure you keep doing those things. If you're short of ideas go to Simon Rosenberg's Hopium Chronicles (https://www.hopiumchronicles.com). The comments are full of suggestions.
Keep calm and carry on.