How progressive communities can fight back

Today’s post contains a checklist for progressive Americans to use in fighting back against the authoritarian actions coming from the Trump administration. These tasks are the result of my two decades reporting on American violence, decline and extremism. If you support this work and insight, please consider a paid subscription or contribution to help fund my reporting.

After a few days last week digging back into the epidemic of election denialism that has roiled the nation over the last four years, I was struck by just how difficult the task that lies ahead seems.

And I’m not just talking about how to combat the scourge of efforts to interfere with — or completely suspend — next year’s mid-term elections and maybe even elections after that.

I’m talking about the bigger task, the one that begs the question, How do we get out of this? The path forward seems impossible at times. After all, Republicans have it easy: completely detached from fact and truth, all they have to do is convince what appears to be an increasingly uneducated electorate that the scandalous lies they tell about liberals and Democrats are somehow true.

I’ll provide some evidence of what this demonization of non-authoritarian Americans looks like, then offer an initial checklist of things we can do to protect our values and communities. That checklist is based on my reporting on myriad issues related to American decline over the course of my career, from everyday street crime, to police brutality, online radicalization, immigration, right-wing extremism and election denialism.

You can skip straight to the checklist or keep reading to learn a bit about how we got here. This checklist is incomplete, but can be considered a partial antidote to the authoritarian checklist that Trump and Republicans have had great success in working on these last eight months.

To skip straight to this list, scroll down. But first, some evidence of how challenging this will be.

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As I combed through election data for Pennsylvania’s 67 counties last week, Doug Burgum was on CNN, repeating what the White House clearly believes is a winning talking point — one of those salacious lies the Trump administration constantly tells. Burgum told CNN’s Kaitlin Collins that he just couldn’t understand why any Democratic mayor or governor wouldn’t welcome Trump’s twisted “offer” to send National Guard troops into the nation’s largest cities. Considering that such deployments would virtually eliminate crime in the country, Burgum concluded that Democrats must simply be “pro-crime.”

Now, any reasonable person would understand this is not true. The only people who are “pro-crime” are criminals. But just in case there was any ambiguity in Burgum’s messaging, senior White House advisor Stephen Miller helpfully offered his take on why Democratic leaders don’t want troops on their streets.

The entirety of the Democratic Party — including everyday Americans who don’t support the president — are “domestic extremists,” Miller said last week. I’m not sure what’s more depressing: the fact that grown adults have resorted to this pathetic behavior in service of their party’s leader, or that something like one-third of Americans actually believe such obvious nonsense.

But the number of Americans who apparently support straight-up authoritarianism is stunning.

Ten months after the election, I finally took some time this week to go through county-level election results from important states like Pennsylvania, Nevada, and North Carolina. The data is troubling, to say the least. I’ll have more on my findings in a future post, but for now I’ll just say that the data shows that these three supposedly “swing” states are becoming redder. Perhaps worse: blue counties have voted less and less for Democrats over the last 16 years. Meantime, stable Republican counties have voted at higher and higher percentages for their candidates.

The bottom line is, I found no evidence that even progressive areas of the small sample of states I analyzed were becoming more progressive. I did, however, find substantial evidence that the Republican areas of those states are becoming more Republican. This means that — having seen exactly who Trump is, knowing full well what the plans were for his second term — Americans have voted in greater numbers for Republicans.

I saw someone the other day posit that the reason that Democrats largely can’t combat Trump’s increasing authoritarianism is that, as relatively well-educated people, they simply can’t believe it’s actually happening. That time is well past. Y’all better start believing it, or we’re double-fucked.

Democrats and progressive Americans must start coming to terms with the fact that many of their friends and neighbors — either through ignorance or abject support — back a political party that cannot be thought of as anything but mostly-authoritarian. In the starkest terms, this means that Americans who don’t want to live in an authoritarian society must prepare for the worst. Whatever bad thing you can imagine happening, it probably will.

The upside here is that if you prepare for the worst and it doesn’t happen, you’ll be pleasantly surprised.

I think that part of this inability or unwillingness to accept the simple fact that our government is now led by an openly authoritarian political party lies in the widespread belief that the United States was sort of post-history. At least, that’s the perception that I had growing up. All that bad shit was behind us — fascism, racism, sexism, tyrannical government oppression. We had figured it out. America wasn’t perfect; there were disagreements, but we had evolved beyond the extremism, the wars, and the ignorance of societies that preceded us. We had a messy but functioning democracy that, through the long arc of history, always seemed to get better. Until it didn’t. That time is now.

Part of the reason this can feel so hopeless is because all of us who aren’t on the side of authoritarianism simply cannot compete with the lies. By the time journalists publish their stories fact-checking the false claims and lies, they’ve already rocketed around the Internet, flooding the minds of millions, thanks to an army not of right-wing journalists, but full-on propagandists. People who have come of age as young adults in the last 10 years don’t remember a time when, between the hours of 9-5, Fox News was a relatively normal news network. Now, even as news breaks, the personalities on Fox run cover for Trump and Republicans, credulously sharing their claims as objective fact. This is the most watched news apparatus in the nation. The speed of this cycle has become faster over the last decade, making it so that news no longer holds attention in the way that it once did. As a result, we quickly forget things that have already happened — hastening what I think is a growing perception among younger generations that what is now is what has always been.

But those of us who haven’t been swindled by the false promises of authoritarianism remember the lessons of the past. It’s incumbent upon us, then, to ensure that each of our little portions of this society reflect our values.

As such, here are some suggested areas of focus for progressive Americans to consider when organizing in their communities. I hope to expand on these more in future coverage here at Doom, in addition to my ongoing investigations of the election denial movement, and other adversarial reporting on the authoritarianism that is increasingly surrounding us.

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Government

School boards, boards of elections, county commissions, city councils, state legislative offices, metropolitan planning organizations, sheriffs, prosecutors, and judgeships should all be the focus of progressive organizing and get-out-the-vote efforts. The American right has made incredible progress over the course of the last decade in taking over these government bodies, while the left has fallen short.

Healthcare and social services

Progressive communities should partner with hospital systems and universities to continue providing research for and access to vaccines, as well as general healthcare, elder care, and access to abortion and gender-affirming care throughout communities. Local governments should work with allies in business and activist communities to ensure that social services are properly funded as the federal government reduces funding and perverts the missions of agencies like FEMA, HHS, HUD, the FHFA and more.

Law enforcement

Progressive communities should work with local law enforcement agencies to institute a broad variety of policies that reflect progressive values. At the top of the list is ensuring that local law enforcement in our communities do not participate with ICE on immigration enforcement. Further, cities and states can and should pass rules and laws that prohibit the hiring of ex-ICE agents as police, as well require more robust education qualifications to become a member of law enforcement. Cities and states should create citizen review boards to hold law enforcement agencies accountable for improper use of force and other abuses of power. Finally, cities, counties and states must immediately stop the practice of encrypting police radio frequencies in order to allow the continued monitoring of day-to-day police activity by journalists, community members and activists. Localities that have already encrypted their police communications should, at the very least, provide access to those frequencies to responsible media outlets and activist groups.

Investigation and prosecution

Progressive areas of the country should utilize aggressive enforcement of all administrative licensing, taxation, code and ethics rules to pressure Republican elected officials and community leaders. Government agencies, advocacy groups and citizens should aggressively investigate compliance with professional licensing rules and regulations, and tax and code compliance for all businesses, organizations and prominent community members who provide financial or other aid to Republican and conservative causes and officials. Additionally, all Republican elected officials should be aggressively investigated by the press, Democrats and allied law enforcement for compliance with municipal, state and federal rules and regulations regarding their personal and business interests, as well as their compliance with campaign finance laws and financial disclosure rules.

Media

Progressive citizens, businesses and activist groups should monitor local press for uncritical, supportive or simply lazy coverage of Republican-authoritarian policies and statements by elected officials. Advertising boycotts, public pressure on editors and news directors, and relationship-building with local reporters, influencers, and media personalities should all be utilized to ensure that local press is accurately and responsibly reporting on authoritarian threats to communities.

Activist training

Lawyers, military veterans, first responders, retired law enforcement and others with knowledge of civil disobedience, civil unrest, and conflict zones should offer training and education for citizens and activist groups. Progressive communities should provide regular training opportunities and education regarding individual rights during interactions with local law enforcement, federal authorities and the military. Safety training for civil unrest, mass casualty events and military or law enforcement incursion into communities should also be a part of ongoing education and training within communities.

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