While America’s elites rushed to enable this administration’s excesses, ordinary people mobilized to protect the thing that is most sacred to all of us—American democracy.
One of the best, most important, American books ever is, "The First New Nation," by the late, great Marty Lipset. Lipset notes several important characteristics. We're nontraditional, no titles of nobility. We have a comparatively weak, limited state. In principle, we're egalitarian. Most important for that lying coward, draft dodging sex criminal, would-be dictator Trump, the US was born in revolution. Screw that ignorant clown Trump.
Every one of these portraits is familiar to me, and not in the abstract.
I grew up under apartheid. The regime had its versions of all six of these people — the soldier who wouldn't stay quiet, the scientist who refused to disengage, the ones who'd lived under tyranny before and recognized the early signs, the officer who saw what deploying force against your own people really meant. They existed. They spoke. And here's the part worth saying plainly to anyone heartened by these stories: it works, but not quickly, and not for free.
The people who stood up in South Africa were detained, surveilled, fired, banned, some of them killed. I was beaten for saying no. But vindication came years later, when apartheid was overthrown. So when Navratilova says she's seeing the same signs, believe her. She's not being dramatic. She's reading the room with the only instrument that actually calibrates it: having been in the room before.
The hopeful truth and the hard truth are the same truth. Standing up is what breaks the machine — Matthews is right that the silence of cowardice is a choice. But it's a choice that costs the brave first and rewards them last. That these people are making it anyway, before the vindication, is exactly why it matters.
You've named the actual mechanism here, and it's the one most people miss: authoritarianism doesn't advance mainly through force. It advances through the quiet capitulation of the institutions that should have held the line: the law firms, the universities, the press, the corporations, each one calculating that compliance buys safety.
I grew up under apartheid. The thing I watched, up close, was exactly this: the regime never had to coerce most of the establishment, because the establishment volunteered. The newspapers that softened their coverage, the professions that looked away, the businesses that decided principle was a luxury they couldn't afford—they weren't forced. They chose expediency, and that choice was the machinery. The state could never have done it alone.
So when you say the participation of those who "put fear or expediency over principle" is how power consolidates. Yes, agreed. That's not a side effect. That's the method. And the corollary, the hopeful one, is the one you're acting on: the moment enough people decline to comply, the machine loses the thing it actually runs on.
I wrote about this parallel, and concluded the same thing about the need for people to stand up. If it's useful, "America, the Bell Tolls for Thee," is my ex-South African's perspective on the new American apartheid: https://erictelltales.substack.com/p/america-the-bell-tolls-for-thee
One of the best, most important, American books ever is, "The First New Nation," by the late, great Marty Lipset. Lipset notes several important characteristics. We're nontraditional, no titles of nobility. We have a comparatively weak, limited state. In principle, we're egalitarian. Most important for that lying coward, draft dodging sex criminal, would-be dictator Trump, the US was born in revolution. Screw that ignorant clown Trump.
Every one of these portraits is familiar to me, and not in the abstract.
I grew up under apartheid. The regime had its versions of all six of these people — the soldier who wouldn't stay quiet, the scientist who refused to disengage, the ones who'd lived under tyranny before and recognized the early signs, the officer who saw what deploying force against your own people really meant. They existed. They spoke. And here's the part worth saying plainly to anyone heartened by these stories: it works, but not quickly, and not for free.
The people who stood up in South Africa were detained, surveilled, fired, banned, some of them killed. I was beaten for saying no. But vindication came years later, when apartheid was overthrown. So when Navratilova says she's seeing the same signs, believe her. She's not being dramatic. She's reading the room with the only instrument that actually calibrates it: having been in the room before.
The hopeful truth and the hard truth are the same truth. Standing up is what breaks the machine — Matthews is right that the silence of cowardice is a choice. But it's a choice that costs the brave first and rewards them last. That these people are making it anyway, before the vindication, is exactly why it matters.
I wrote about watching this pattern arrive in America — "America, the Bell Tolls for Thee," an ex-South African's perspective on the new American apartheid, if it's useful: https://erictelltales.substack.com/p/america-the-bell-tolls-for-thee
Sarah, not enough of us have fought back.
You've named the actual mechanism here, and it's the one most people miss: authoritarianism doesn't advance mainly through force. It advances through the quiet capitulation of the institutions that should have held the line: the law firms, the universities, the press, the corporations, each one calculating that compliance buys safety.
I grew up under apartheid. The thing I watched, up close, was exactly this: the regime never had to coerce most of the establishment, because the establishment volunteered. The newspapers that softened their coverage, the professions that looked away, the businesses that decided principle was a luxury they couldn't afford—they weren't forced. They chose expediency, and that choice was the machinery. The state could never have done it alone.
So when you say the participation of those who "put fear or expediency over principle" is how power consolidates. Yes, agreed. That's not a side effect. That's the method. And the corollary, the hopeful one, is the one you're acting on: the moment enough people decline to comply, the machine loses the thing it actually runs on.
I wrote about this parallel, and concluded the same thing about the need for people to stand up. If it's useful, "America, the Bell Tolls for Thee," is my ex-South African's perspective on the new American apartheid: https://erictelltales.substack.com/p/america-the-bell-tolls-for-thee
The parallels are scary.