Tag: fascism

“Holding powerful people accountable for complicity in the overthrow of democracy is not just a matter of justice, it’s a crucial mechanism for self-defense.”


Gil Durán, writing in The Nerd Reich: Silicon Valley Fascism and the War on Democracy (2026):

Holding powerful people accountable for complicity in the overthrow of democracy is not just a matter of justice, it’s a crucial mechanism for self-defense. If we do shake loose from the grip of fascism, we must harden our systems to ensure nothing like this ever happens again. Our system failed to hold Trump accountable for his crimes the first time around, and we are reaping the consequences. Meanwhile, Brazil’s former president, Trump ally Jair Bolsonaro, is serving a twenty-seven-year prison sentence for his attempted coup. In South Korea, a former president who tried to impose martial law was impeached, removed from office, and sentenced to life in prison. Why can’t we have such robust consequences in a country that markets itself as the greatest in the world? We must follow the examples of these other nations and seek relentless accountability.

We must never forget what these people tried to do. Because, given the chance, they will keep trying.

To prevent this, we need investigations, hearings, prosecutions, and likely some kind of truth and reconciliation commission. We need a full postmortem of our brush with national death, as well as prison sentences and severe financial penalties for those who participated in, or profited from, the defiling of our government. If we fail to pursue accountability and justice, we know exactly what will happen.

These men will get emboldened. They will try even harder. They will do even worse things. They will win.

Accountability goes beyond simple punishment and penalty. The villains must be enshrined in our national memory forever. Their rise must become a cautionary tale that future children learn about in history class. The cruelty, cowardice, and/or complicity of individuals, corporations, and organizations should be immortalized, perhaps (as some have proposed) in a Museum of American Fascism, which can stand as a permanent testament to our close call with downfall.

“One of the worst mistakes the opposition can make is extending contempt for the tyrant into contempt for the tyrant’s supporters.”


Danny Hillis:

One of the worst mistakes the opposition can make is extending contempt for the tyrant into contempt for the tyrant’s supporters. Most of these supporters sincerely believed that the tyrant would be more likely to solve their problems — often real grievances that the opposition had failed to address. Blaming the supporters denies the reality of the failures and reinforces their support for the tyrant.

As Napoleon consolidated his power, his critics described the farmers who supported him as “a sack of potatoes” and Parisian workers as having “their minds crammed with vain theories and visionary hopes.” This attitude of condescension made it easier for Napoleon to position his opposition as arrogant elites and himself as the champion of ordinary people.

When the opposition makes it socially acceptable to show contempt for anyone who disagrees, they cooperate with the tyrant in creating a cycle of divisiveness that distracts from reality. That cycle sustains the tyrant’s hold on power.

“Americans today are no wiser than the Europeans who saw democracy yield to fascism, Nazism, or communism in the twentieth century. Our one advantage is that we might learn from their experience.”


Timothy Snyder, writing in On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century (2017):

Americans today are no wiser than the Europeans who saw democracy yield to fascism, Nazism, or communism in the twentieth century. Our one advantage is that we might learn from their experience.

Does the history of tyranny apply to the United States? Certainly the early Americans who spoke of “eternal vigilance” would have thought so. The logic of the system they devised was to mitigate the consequences of our real imperfections, not to celebrate our imaginary perfection. We certainly face, as did the ancient Greeks, the problem of oligarchy—ever more threatening as globalization increases differences in wealth. The odd American idea that giving money to political campaigns is free speech means that the very rich have far more speech, and so in effect far more voting power, than other citizens. We believe that we have checks and balances, but have rarely faced a situation like the present: when the less popular of the two parties suppresses voting, claims fraud when it loses elections, and controls the majority of statehouses.

Another early American proverb held that “where annual elections end, tyranny begins.” Will we come to see the elections of 2024 much as Russians see the elections of 1990, or Czechs the elections of 1946, or Germans the elections of 1932? This, for now, depends upon us. Much needs to be done to fix the gerrymandered system so that each citizen has one equal vote, and so that each vote can be simply counted by a fellow citizen. We need paper ballots, because they cannot be tampered with remotely and can always be recounted. We need to remove private funding from what should be public campaigns for office. We will have to take seriously our own Constitution, which forbids oath-breaking insurrectionists from running for office. This sort of work can be done at the local and state levels. Any future elections will be a test of American traditions.

On believing in truth:

You submit to tyranny when you renounce the difference between what you want to hear and what is actually the case. This renunciation of reality can feel natural and pleasant, but the result is your demise as an individual—and thus the collapse of any political system that depends upon individualism.

Fascists despised the small truths of daily existence, loved slogans that resonated like a new religion, and preferred creative myths to history or journalism. They used new media, which at the time was radio, to create a drumbeat of propaganda that aroused feelings before people had time to ascertain facts. And now, as then, many people confused faith in a hugely flawed leader with the truth about the world we all share.

“What is truth?” Sometimes people ask this question because they wish to do nothing. Generic cynicism makes us feel hip and alternative even as we slip along with our fellow citizens into a morass of indifference. It is your ability to discern facts that makes you an individual, and our collective trust in common knowledge that makes us a society. The individual who investigates is also the citizen who builds. The leader who dislikes the investigators is a potential tyrant.