In Reply to: Keep in mind that between a third and a half of Americans posted by HasBen on July 03, 2025 at 14:59:52
So I think we are on the same page on the assessment. Nothing of substance will change in 2026 and 2028 *even if* Democrats win the congress by a clear mandate, and I don't see even a remote possibility that a Democratic candidate will run a fair election and beat the third term of Trump in 2028, assuming he's still alive at that point (if he somehow dies between now and 2028, that's about the only way I can see tide turning, but counting on a freak heart attack or a stroke is not my concept of a future plan).
Yes, I think we need to look at other people's experiences with autocracy, but I don't think we need to go as far as Russia. Putin has been at it for decades now. He has a very well-oiled engine at this point. I think we need to look at other democratically backsliding countries like Poland and Hungary, as well as other places who have been working off of Putin's playbook, the same one Trump's brain trust seems to have adopted in Project 2025.
So when I look around, what I see as possible next steps are:
1. We all take care of ourselves and our families first, and our friends and neighbors. Personal networks we create are essential for resource sharing and most importantly, to keep our mental health and moral compass intact, and maintain ideological hygiene (avoiding the so-called "Stockholm Syndrome", and starting to sympathize with MAGA -- that will be the trickiest part, as we get long term exposure to normalization).
2. Avoid unnecessarily risky behavior. What's coming is not like what happened in Trump 1. Bravely declaring yourself as anti-Trump without reading the room first, or putting yourself out there on minor demonstrations to out yourself as opposition and get photographed and cataloged by state security forces are dubious acts with little upside and plenty of downside. Keep in mind that they will pick us one by one.
That said, we need to protect one another as much as possible from the onslaught of ICE and concentration camp roundups that are about to begin. Those of us who are lawyers would need to especially be aware that their expertise will be needed by a bunch of people who can't afford to pay big bucks to remain free or at least with their families.
3. Develop subtle social signals so that we can recognize each other in a crowd. We already have plenty of signifiers from hats and t-shirts we wear to the vocabulary we use. As autocracy starts getting its hooks into society and ordinary citizens are encouraged to mark potential dissent among the populace, we will need unobvious signals to recognize one another and see who's safe who's not before we open our mouths.
4. We need to begin to shift to alternative media for our news sources and move our social media activities (if we're still engaged with them) into distributive, open source networks. Mastodon is the classic example, and there is a whole range of fediverse alternatives to already established platforms, like Pixelfed for Instagram. Bluesky also seems relatively safe at this point, and Bluesky's equivalent of Instagram is called Flashes ... and to be fair, we *will* need social platforms to stay connected to one another, and perhaps one day to start campaigning for things.
5. We also need to form a cultural pushback in very rudimentary ways. We live under a regime that looks at basic human empathy as a pathology. And I insist that a big reason we ended up where we ended up because we did not stand up for basic morality through clear terms. Back in the day we did not argue against torture as a moral question but framed our objections on the basis of efficacy, which, in a way, was how we ceded the moral ground on that debate. We need to start a pushback on basic morality of life in a society and basic humane values in our day to day personal connections. People need to be exposed to what's right, what's wrong as much as the question of what works and what doesn't.
6. We cannot cheapen resistance by reducing it to a hashtag. Resistance comes through actions, not public posturing. Rebuilding happens because we set up connections to mend the social fabric, rather than staying focused on the "look at me" aspect of modern society. You and I are old, so having been exposed to a world before socials, we know this instinctively. We need to teach this to younger generations in our lives.
7. Understand the generational, cultural, and political part we played in how we got here and personally have an honest re-assessment about where we've been naive, and where we fell short. I may have a whole rant on this but it doesn't matter. This is something we'll all need to do privately, to ourselves, I believe.
8. Ask ourselves the bigger questions we should have asked long ago as a society: what kind of America do we really want, and what do we need to excise out of the first draft of America (1789-2025) to build a better Second Republic. Or perhaps should we even insist on being a single country? These are big questions, but they are essential for us to internalize to get some sense of what we would be (godwilling) fighting for.
Off the top of my head, that is. I've been thinking about this question since the November election results and I still am.