No, I haven’t … at least not in full. But I don’t think that the absolute fealty of a cult can be compared to feelings of love—a cult implies compulsion, not real decision making.
Thank you Ruth for your insightful analysis, however, I believe it's important to address the role of social media, especially Facebook, in deepening and fixating the ideological divide and giving Trump the popular support he used (along with the probably suppression of around 7 million mostly minority votes, according to Greg Palast) to take power. Social media do not check for accuracy and their presumed rejection of hate speech is mostly empty policy. According to an MIT study in 2018, cited in ex-Facebook operative Roger McNamee's brilliant book, "Zucked: Waking Up to the Facebook Catastrophe," "disinformation and fake news are shared 70% more often than factual stories and spread roughly six times faster" (p. 177). This contemporary phenomenon is utterly new in human history and has effectively undermined the benefits of a free and well-informed press. It's well-known that Fox News watchers harbor different beliefs than CNN and MSNBC fans. But the enraged certainties of the MAGA crowd that are nourished on Fox are seeded and hyper-fertilized via social media, thanks to their supremely profitable business model, in which targeted user attention is the commodity that they sell to advertisers. It's a deeply vicious cycle. The left has no such rigidly closed circle of ideological unity, but resistance is growing and hopefully will become better coordinated. Also, we can rely on Trump's stupidity and outrageous lack of self-control as well as the faltering economy his ridiculous policies have caused, to administer some doses of reality to the true believers. And once cowardly Republican office holders sense that his support is slipping among the faithful, I expect we'll see a rush to the door.
All well-stated. We should work to hasten his unpopularity in all the ways that we can.
If Americans believe a recession is coming or is here, they will buy less in preparation of a recession, which hurts us all, but also hurts trump. If he fires Jerome Powell, more countries will pull their investments out of America.
And as Ruth Ben Ghiat said on Katie Couric yesterday, as his incompetence starts to hurt average Americans daily life, it is a great time to have some calm conversations with our trump loving friends and family.
We should also write to our Senators and Congress people, call them and go to Town Halls or go to their offices and tell them to stand up to Trump. They are allowing him to steal their and our power. As his numbers dip, standing up to him will be easier for them to do.
Do you think that reasonably educated people fall for the targeted advertising on social media? I was on facebook for a while, but never encountered any of the stuff the people talk about that's so negative. I did quit facebook because it pretty much did nothing for me, and I had decided that I didn't trust Zuckerberg (good decision on my part, I haven't missed it at all).
Educated people will not be targeted by FB to receive the "news" and absurd conspiracy theories that MAGA people will receive. FB's whole model, that makes them so attractive to advertisers, involves tailoring links to people's interests and proclivities.
One of my worst fears has always been that some combination of Trump and his political allies and Musk and his fellow broligarch allies will collude (or already are colluding) to wreck our voting system via some combination of electronic/digital systems tampering and plain old voter suppression, such as we've already seen, both at present and in the past. IMO a lot more attention needs to be paid to this, and it's very useful for us to look at what other autocrats have similarly done. Ignorance is NOT bliss.
Amen! But with Bondi/Patel/Bongino in charge at DOJ, who will enforce the rule of law regarding such things? The moment they took power, we became, in essence and for all practical purposes, a police state.
Yeah. But if enough congressmen and senators get a spine we have a chance. Ditto the Supreme Court. If you'd told me a week ago if we'd have a 7-2 ruling in favor of the supremacy of the law I'd have scoffed. Today, I'm a lot more hopeful.
I heard an interview with Asha Rangappa and she said that at this point, the only recourse we have left is impeachment. I know it would probably not result in conviction but with all of the damage done to election laws at this point and disobeying the courts, it seems like we need to move ahead with the process at least to get something going to give people hope for a possible future. I think at the rate we're going, the 2026 and 2028 elections will not be legitimate so we need to be doing everything we can to try and stop the autocracy or at least slow it down
Yes agree. Timothy Snyder posted to beware of a possible emergency coming up in the US in the form of some kind of terrorist attack- could be from Iran, Russia or extremist US group. Our national security is wide open to attacks and Felon Frump would use this to declare martial law and empower himself as the only savior again. If and when this happens Snyder said to not panic. My instincts have been on high alert for an attack for a while now. I wouldn’t put it past Felon Frumpy’s Nazi Project to self create an attack on the US to take more advantages over citizen rights.
You are not pessimistic. You're being realistic based on history and based on just the sheer calamity that's happened so quickly around us. I hope your inner circle is able to catch up before it's too late :)
Precisely. Poland when still within the soviet pale had three parties participating in general elections. Only one ever won. With over 90 percent participation time over time, even though I never voted and knew few who did. For the purpose of always precarious forecasting, there were not many fanatics in Polish government in those days. Pragmatics- yes. Another, perhaps more troubling difference between Poland back when and the States today is that the majority of Poles were opposed to the soviet-imposed authoritarianism, if to a varying degree, making work of those of us who actively opposed that system well grounded. As of 04/01/25, Trump's approval rating was 44 percent, according to Gallup.
A call to action. A truly sick, angry, delusional person has been given the reigns of power in world's most powerful country. He must be stopped. While Trump is replaying old tactics from his Central Park Five days, and enabling his entire MAGA government to jump into the mud with him, WE, the 70% or so Americans who do not see this country as a "weak, failed state" need to go on STRIKE, literally, until the craziness stops. Could anyone really have imagined Trump would create false evidence to justify his paranoid rants on Truth Social? We must stop Trump, not only to our fellow Americans, but to our fellow world citizens.
Trump? The entire GOP, with a few exceptions, supports him! The GOP is now made up of three different neofascist groups, who all share the goal of installing fascism in the US. Trump is merely their clown in chief.
There is first of all neofascist Steve Bannon, who met Putin's palace ideologue Alexander Dugin years ago already, and who basically agrees with Dugin (and Viktor Orban) that democracy is bad and dictatorship good. He represents the populist branch of the neofascist GOP coalition.
Then there are the tech billionaire neofascists, starting with Peter Thiel (who bankrolls Vance's career) and Musk, Andreessen, Sachs etc (all playing an important role in the WH today).
And then there is the theocratic neofascist Heritage Foundation. They want a "Christian" nationalist form of dictatorship.
They all see Trump as the perfect clown to entertain the people while they do their thing in DC.
So yes, we need to show MAGA voters that Trump is an emperor without any clothes, but that's only the beginning. We need to get them gradually out of their alternative facts bubble altogether, so that they can finally see what the GOP is truly doing to them and how far the betrayal of its voter base and America as a whole is actually going.
I agree with you. The MAGA promoters and acolytes around Trump are a big part of the problem. But Trump is the "head of the snake". Eliminate him and the evil influence of MAGA will be significantly diminished. I don't see anyone in the wings. Ron DeSantis is my case in point. Same agenda but he has about as much national charisma as a prison warden.
I hope you're right, but I think that Vance would be an almost better "MAGA Leader" than Trump. He will have experience by then, he was trained by the theocrated Theobros and ideologically agrees with the Heritage foundation, AND as hedge fund manager and Peter Thiel protégé he has the support and shares the ideology of the neofascist tech billionaires. And he's smarter and "smoother" than Trump, so he could take off the raw edges and become even better in betraying the GOP base and lying while ripping them off... . He probably wouldn't be so erratic and more calculated than Trump, so even Wall Street may like him more. And with their propaganda machine now SO well-oiled, AND so many MAGA voters not really liking Trump as a person... I'm afraid he may quickly become MORE popular than Trump himself...
If I could afford to leave I would have gone many months ago. If you have $600,000 $800,000 cash or more to buy your visa to emigrate to Portugal or another country still accepting US citizens. It’s beyond my budget but I wish I could leave as a senior with 2 kitties.
Oh, to live in MAGA fantasy land where science, facts & law don’t matter.
Trump took over a Biden economy that according to the Wall Street Journal was "the envy of the world", & he's driving the economy into the toilet…
Gulags for profit...Trump & El Salvador Bukele's idea of "economic development". Trump corruptly targets critics, & adversaries for baseless prosecutions & retribution. We allow the Trump administration to abandon the constitution & the rule of law at our peril. #Resist
Professor Ruth Ben-Ghiat: First a tribute: Everyone should read the good professor's works on Italian culture, where, even during the oppressive times of Mussolini -- the oppression and repression of which Professor Ruth Ben-Ghiat reports in detail -- the irrepressible Italian culture itself could not be totally repressed for its inner beauty, a beauty that reflects in its art, its music, and in its musical language and good people.
All of which began in Ancient Rome, which I mention for the grand work of Professor Harriet I. Flower (Classics Professor, Princeton), namely her "Roman Republics" (2009, Princeton University Press, ISBN: 9780691152585):
Professor Flower's scholarship posits that Rome underwent about 8 republics following the expulsion of Tarquinus Superbus.
Each Republic was characterized differently.
Think of the Five Republics in France.
Some of the Roman Republics were at war with Carthage. Some had civil wars.
Now come to American History.
We enslaved.
We committed genocide against First-Nation Peoples.
After Reconstruction came the evil "Restoration."
We had epidemic lynchings, poignantly memorialized by Billie Holiday in "Strange Fruit."
We had the Communist, Joe McCarthy, HUAC scares, memorialized in Arthur Miller's "The Crucible."
We have Texas Governor Greg Abbott set DEATH TRAPS with barbed wire that entangled an innocent young mother with her little toddlers, so they DROWNED barb-entangled in the Rio Grande on GREG ABBOTT's CONSCIENCE!
But we also had the Transcendentalists --Emerson, Thoreau.
We had Emily Dickinson.
We had Reconstruction and the end of slavery (as such).
We had the NAACP -- WEB Du Bois; the ACLU.
We had Eugene Debs and Robert Marion La Follette.
We had the Great Moral Movement of Our Time -- the Civil Rights Movement.
Even recently, we had the Honorable John Lewis, who started his moral convictions as a cute little five-year-old boy who would practice preaching on the farm to his chickens. We MISS that dear, gentle and good man. We will make GOOD TROUBLE.
So we have a lot to stand on.
But America has gone through many republics, like France and Rome.
We did not have freedom during periods of epidemic lynching. So let us not be nostalgic for 250 years of freedom or some such notion.
We have had republics with freedom for some, and deep oppression for the many, the majority.
Not for the majority: The coalmine worker. The Black. The Native American. The Hispanic. The Asian. The Jew. The Arab.
We have had various forms of autocracy, some much worse than today.
But it is a form of grave oppression when America sends ANY PERSON WHOMSOEVER to a foreign torture cell, as Trump did with so many. I don't care WHO these were, it was a crime to send them there, irrespective. It is a torture cell.
The worse that ANY PERSON EVER should receive is, with due process of law, after conviction of a crime that severely threatens the safety of another person or the public, imprisonment under HUMANE CONDITIONS in a facility that protects the public from the convict's future crimes.
When we resist, we are not fighting to save THE republic.
We resist to SECURE A MORE PERFECT UNION OF WE THE PEOPLE.
We had Abolitionists, especially, Frederick Douglass.
Thanks Ruth Ben ghiat thanks for reminding us about what's going on hopefully you can continue to help us it's scary but at my age I can't do much but I will keep on saying something i won't back down from this nonsense
Yes. America is an autocracy now. We are subjects of an extreme and deranged psychopath PLUS the massive emotional contagion he creates with his gaslighting propaganda, intimidation, “deals”, coercion, and now real actions everyday to perpetuate cruelty and trauma. He’s fighting to be able to disappear any person, group, or institution he wants to erase. Anything not in his image. The damage already inflicted is immeasurably deeper than we can know. Even if he was stopped today we would be sifting through the devastation for a generation. Many of the Americans damaged by his emotional pandemic will never recover. Trump is itching and aching to unleash his MAGA citizen militia. I doubt he was kidding when he said America needed “a purge, just for one night”. Only the “one night” part was a lie.
We are experiencing some kind of psychopathic autocracy. Like living through a massive Jonestown-like catastrophe.
Because turning a democracy into a dictatorship always takes years (unless there is a violent coup), saying that "there is democratic backsliding" or that we are in "authoritarian territory" seems to be too vague/weak to me to be entirely clear. Fascism is being installed, right now, 24/7. The process is ongoing, at a very high pace. It will take years before American neofascists will have finished the job and turned the US into a totalitarian state, in which ALL aspects of life are "totally" controlled by the government, but this is indeed a PROCESS, idea that the notion of a "territory" IMHO doesn't fully capture. And "backsliding" suggests that the US would have been here before, whereas this is entirely new. Since the very beginning, the US was a constitutional democracy. Plus "backsliding" has the disadvantage of not clearly naming what is being actively installed, namely fascism.
And yes, the first forms of fascism ended up being "uniparty" regimes. This is why Kevin Roberts, Heritage Foundation president, tries to present Project 2025 as the END of the "uniparty"... but by "uniparty" he actually refers to all pro-democracy liberals and conservatives, Democrats and Republicans.
Imho, it's not whether or not there is more than one political party that defines fascism. It's whether or not the three branches of government are independent and co-equal, with Congress (the legislative branch) being the beating heart of government. A fascist regime "bundles" ("fasces" = "bundle" in Latin) the power of the legislative branch and the judicial branch into the power of the executive branch, which becomes the beating heart of government instead. And that is exactly what is de facto the case in the US.
You can call it "neofascism", with "neo" referring to the fact that the "outer characteristics" of a democracy are still intact (the existence of a legislative branch, and elections). But Vance already tweeted that the GOP today considers Congress and the courts to play a merely "advisory" role, and Trump signed an executive order making HIM rather than the courts the interpreter of the law. That IS fascism, literally.
Steve Bannon, representing MAGA 1.0 neofascism, declared in a WSJ interview recently (you can find it on YouTube) that the GOP now sees the role of Congress as that of lawyers hired by the CEOs of two companies after the CEOs directly negotiated a merger: it's their job to put the result of the negotiations in legal fineprint. Nothing more. They have NO decision power whatsoever. That is 100% fascist.
And as Hitler has shown, you don't have to change the Constitution (contrary to what Mussolini did) to install fascism. You can just... ignore it. That's clearly what today's GOP intends to do too - and already started doing when it comes to the arbitrary kidnapping of legal residents.
A wise old law professor was known to intone, somberly, and with a heavy European accent, "There is the law or there is not the law."
He might well have added, "And if there is not the law, there is not the civilization."
Trump & Co. are, as Anne Applebaum has so aptly written, a recent addition to the worldwide conglomerate she calls "Autocracy Inc.," which is bent on making the world safe for autocrats, kleptocrats, mafioso, and random other "strongmen," and demonstrating to the world that governments founded on principles of democracy and noble human ideals are unworkable and unstable. Let's all prove them badly wrong!
"The other, a private citizen, has been given license to unleash digital shock troops to re-engineer government to benefit himself and his private companies, and wreck America understood as a democratic power. This new kind of coup can also be described as a hostile takeover of government via DOGE, which was created as an instrument for Musk to infiltrate and control a sovereign power".
Digital shock troops will be added to the nommenclature in the study of autocracys.
Can we stand 3 1/2 years of this? Our elections are in a distance and people may lose their patience-ignoring the fact that everybody will be touched by this chaos and destruction. No one will escape! Will WE the People have the strength to go on? We are suffering from Trump exhaustion!
This clarity is needed for people to truly understand the situation we are in.
Since Jan 21st, I've been saying the coup is over. We are now in an autocracy where Congress is a rubber stamp and the courts are either complicit or ignored. Trump's basic nature is dictatorial and his lack of self-control means we can expect dictatorial behavior.
Yes, we must protest - although they will be ignored and suppressed. We must vote - although they will be suppressed/engineered. But we also must start thinking about resistance. To me, a General Strike is the best tool as it may cause a break between Trump and the oligarchs.
I am curious about whether tyrants can also be divided into beloved and bullies?
After all, Hitler, Stalin, Putin were/is beloved by many; and Mussolini, in the beginning at least.
But Trump is unloved, a bully. I would compare: Idi Amin Papa Doc, Saddam Hussein, Gaddafi, Pol Pot …?
Haven't you watched any MAGA Trump rallies? OMG.
No, I haven’t … at least not in full. But I don’t think that the absolute fealty of a cult can be compared to feelings of love—a cult implies compulsion, not real decision making.
Thank you Ruth for your insightful analysis, however, I believe it's important to address the role of social media, especially Facebook, in deepening and fixating the ideological divide and giving Trump the popular support he used (along with the probably suppression of around 7 million mostly minority votes, according to Greg Palast) to take power. Social media do not check for accuracy and their presumed rejection of hate speech is mostly empty policy. According to an MIT study in 2018, cited in ex-Facebook operative Roger McNamee's brilliant book, "Zucked: Waking Up to the Facebook Catastrophe," "disinformation and fake news are shared 70% more often than factual stories and spread roughly six times faster" (p. 177). This contemporary phenomenon is utterly new in human history and has effectively undermined the benefits of a free and well-informed press. It's well-known that Fox News watchers harbor different beliefs than CNN and MSNBC fans. But the enraged certainties of the MAGA crowd that are nourished on Fox are seeded and hyper-fertilized via social media, thanks to their supremely profitable business model, in which targeted user attention is the commodity that they sell to advertisers. It's a deeply vicious cycle. The left has no such rigidly closed circle of ideological unity, but resistance is growing and hopefully will become better coordinated. Also, we can rely on Trump's stupidity and outrageous lack of self-control as well as the faltering economy his ridiculous policies have caused, to administer some doses of reality to the true believers. And once cowardly Republican office holders sense that his support is slipping among the faithful, I expect we'll see a rush to the door.
All well-stated. We should work to hasten his unpopularity in all the ways that we can.
If Americans believe a recession is coming or is here, they will buy less in preparation of a recession, which hurts us all, but also hurts trump. If he fires Jerome Powell, more countries will pull their investments out of America.
And as Ruth Ben Ghiat said on Katie Couric yesterday, as his incompetence starts to hurt average Americans daily life, it is a great time to have some calm conversations with our trump loving friends and family.
We should also write to our Senators and Congress people, call them and go to Town Halls or go to their offices and tell them to stand up to Trump. They are allowing him to steal their and our power. As his numbers dip, standing up to him will be easier for them to do.
Do you think that reasonably educated people fall for the targeted advertising on social media? I was on facebook for a while, but never encountered any of the stuff the people talk about that's so negative. I did quit facebook because it pretty much did nothing for me, and I had decided that I didn't trust Zuckerberg (good decision on my part, I haven't missed it at all).
Educated people will not be targeted by FB to receive the "news" and absurd conspiracy theories that MAGA people will receive. FB's whole model, that makes them so attractive to advertisers, involves tailoring links to people's interests and proclivities.
I guess I must not have shown any interests or proclivities. Actually, I don't think I ever saw advertising on Facebook.
Fox is well aware that if you control the message, you control the people.
One of my worst fears has always been that some combination of Trump and his political allies and Musk and his fellow broligarch allies will collude (or already are colluding) to wreck our voting system via some combination of electronic/digital systems tampering and plain old voter suppression, such as we've already seen, both at present and in the past. IMO a lot more attention needs to be paid to this, and it's very useful for us to look at what other autocrats have similarly done. Ignorance is NOT bliss.
Amen! But with Bondi/Patel/Bongino in charge at DOJ, who will enforce the rule of law regarding such things? The moment they took power, we became, in essence and for all practical purposes, a police state.
Yeah. But if enough congressmen and senators get a spine we have a chance. Ditto the Supreme Court. If you'd told me a week ago if we'd have a 7-2 ruling in favor of the supremacy of the law I'd have scoffed. Today, I'm a lot more hopeful.
I heard an interview with Asha Rangappa and she said that at this point, the only recourse we have left is impeachment. I know it would probably not result in conviction but with all of the damage done to election laws at this point and disobeying the courts, it seems like we need to move ahead with the process at least to get something going to give people hope for a possible future. I think at the rate we're going, the 2026 and 2028 elections will not be legitimate so we need to be doing everything we can to try and stop the autocracy or at least slow it down
Yes agree. Timothy Snyder posted to beware of a possible emergency coming up in the US in the form of some kind of terrorist attack- could be from Iran, Russia or extremist US group. Our national security is wide open to attacks and Felon Frump would use this to declare martial law and empower himself as the only savior again. If and when this happens Snyder said to not panic. My instincts have been on high alert for an attack for a while now. I wouldn’t put it past Felon Frumpy’s Nazi Project to self create an attack on the US to take more advantages over citizen rights.
It’s easy for Snyder to say “don’t panic” from Canada.
Agree
You are not pessimistic. You're being realistic based on history and based on just the sheer calamity that's happened so quickly around us. I hope your inner circle is able to catch up before it's too late :)
We have another option; it's known as the 3.5% rule: https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20190513-it-only-takes-35-of-people-to-change-the-world . Groups such as Indivisible and Move On are working toward making this another option within our reach.
Precisely. Poland when still within the soviet pale had three parties participating in general elections. Only one ever won. With over 90 percent participation time over time, even though I never voted and knew few who did. For the purpose of always precarious forecasting, there were not many fanatics in Polish government in those days. Pragmatics- yes. Another, perhaps more troubling difference between Poland back when and the States today is that the majority of Poles were opposed to the soviet-imposed authoritarianism, if to a varying degree, making work of those of us who actively opposed that system well grounded. As of 04/01/25, Trump's approval rating was 44 percent, according to Gallup.
A call to action. A truly sick, angry, delusional person has been given the reigns of power in world's most powerful country. He must be stopped. While Trump is replaying old tactics from his Central Park Five days, and enabling his entire MAGA government to jump into the mud with him, WE, the 70% or so Americans who do not see this country as a "weak, failed state" need to go on STRIKE, literally, until the craziness stops. Could anyone really have imagined Trump would create false evidence to justify his paranoid rants on Truth Social? We must stop Trump, not only to our fellow Americans, but to our fellow world citizens.
Trump? The entire GOP, with a few exceptions, supports him! The GOP is now made up of three different neofascist groups, who all share the goal of installing fascism in the US. Trump is merely their clown in chief.
There is first of all neofascist Steve Bannon, who met Putin's palace ideologue Alexander Dugin years ago already, and who basically agrees with Dugin (and Viktor Orban) that democracy is bad and dictatorship good. He represents the populist branch of the neofascist GOP coalition.
Then there are the tech billionaire neofascists, starting with Peter Thiel (who bankrolls Vance's career) and Musk, Andreessen, Sachs etc (all playing an important role in the WH today).
And then there is the theocratic neofascist Heritage Foundation. They want a "Christian" nationalist form of dictatorship.
They all see Trump as the perfect clown to entertain the people while they do their thing in DC.
So yes, we need to show MAGA voters that Trump is an emperor without any clothes, but that's only the beginning. We need to get them gradually out of their alternative facts bubble altogether, so that they can finally see what the GOP is truly doing to them and how far the betrayal of its voter base and America as a whole is actually going.
I didn't know that and just checked: you're right. One of the 28 investors (he doesn't own it though). Hm... . Good to know, thanks!
I agree with you. The MAGA promoters and acolytes around Trump are a big part of the problem. But Trump is the "head of the snake". Eliminate him and the evil influence of MAGA will be significantly diminished. I don't see anyone in the wings. Ron DeSantis is my case in point. Same agenda but he has about as much national charisma as a prison warden.
I hope you're right, but I think that Vance would be an almost better "MAGA Leader" than Trump. He will have experience by then, he was trained by the theocrated Theobros and ideologically agrees with the Heritage foundation, AND as hedge fund manager and Peter Thiel protégé he has the support and shares the ideology of the neofascist tech billionaires. And he's smarter and "smoother" than Trump, so he could take off the raw edges and become even better in betraying the GOP base and lying while ripping them off... . He probably wouldn't be so erratic and more calculated than Trump, so even Wall Street may like him more. And with their propaganda machine now SO well-oiled, AND so many MAGA voters not really liking Trump as a person... I'm afraid he may quickly become MORE popular than Trump himself...
What is the best way to fight back?
A nationwide, general strike is a good start.
What is the best way to fight back? How do we know when it’s time to leave America?
If I could afford to leave I would have gone many months ago. If you have $600,000 $800,000 cash or more to buy your visa to emigrate to Portugal or another country still accepting US citizens. It’s beyond my budget but I wish I could leave as a senior with 2 kitties.
Oh, to live in MAGA fantasy land where science, facts & law don’t matter.
Trump took over a Biden economy that according to the Wall Street Journal was "the envy of the world", & he's driving the economy into the toilet…
Gulags for profit...Trump & El Salvador Bukele's idea of "economic development". Trump corruptly targets critics, & adversaries for baseless prosecutions & retribution. We allow the Trump administration to abandon the constitution & the rule of law at our peril. #Resist
Trump, who's now posting fabricated evidence of crime to justify obviously illegal deportations to a foreign gulag, is immune as part of his official duties? https://open.substack.com/pub/deanobeidallah/p/trump-fabricating-evidence-to-imprison?r=aexlz&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=email
Professor Ruth Ben-Ghiat: First a tribute: Everyone should read the good professor's works on Italian culture, where, even during the oppressive times of Mussolini -- the oppression and repression of which Professor Ruth Ben-Ghiat reports in detail -- the irrepressible Italian culture itself could not be totally repressed for its inner beauty, a beauty that reflects in its art, its music, and in its musical language and good people.
All of which began in Ancient Rome, which I mention for the grand work of Professor Harriet I. Flower (Classics Professor, Princeton), namely her "Roman Republics" (2009, Princeton University Press, ISBN: 9780691152585):
https://press.princeton.edu/books/paperback/9780691152585/roman-republics
Professor Flower's scholarship posits that Rome underwent about 8 republics following the expulsion of Tarquinus Superbus.
Each Republic was characterized differently.
Think of the Five Republics in France.
Some of the Roman Republics were at war with Carthage. Some had civil wars.
Now come to American History.
We enslaved.
We committed genocide against First-Nation Peoples.
After Reconstruction came the evil "Restoration."
We had epidemic lynchings, poignantly memorialized by Billie Holiday in "Strange Fruit."
We had the Communist, Joe McCarthy, HUAC scares, memorialized in Arthur Miller's "The Crucible."
We have Texas Governor Greg Abbott set DEATH TRAPS with barbed wire that entangled an innocent young mother with her little toddlers, so they DROWNED barb-entangled in the Rio Grande on GREG ABBOTT's CONSCIENCE!
But we also had the Transcendentalists --Emerson, Thoreau.
We had Emily Dickinson.
We had Reconstruction and the end of slavery (as such).
We had the NAACP -- WEB Du Bois; the ACLU.
We had Eugene Debs and Robert Marion La Follette.
We had the Great Moral Movement of Our Time -- the Civil Rights Movement.
Even recently, we had the Honorable John Lewis, who started his moral convictions as a cute little five-year-old boy who would practice preaching on the farm to his chickens. We MISS that dear, gentle and good man. We will make GOOD TROUBLE.
So we have a lot to stand on.
But America has gone through many republics, like France and Rome.
We did not have freedom during periods of epidemic lynching. So let us not be nostalgic for 250 years of freedom or some such notion.
We have had republics with freedom for some, and deep oppression for the many, the majority.
Not for the majority: The coalmine worker. The Black. The Native American. The Hispanic. The Asian. The Jew. The Arab.
We have had various forms of autocracy, some much worse than today.
But it is a form of grave oppression when America sends ANY PERSON WHOMSOEVER to a foreign torture cell, as Trump did with so many. I don't care WHO these were, it was a crime to send them there, irrespective. It is a torture cell.
The worse that ANY PERSON EVER should receive is, with due process of law, after conviction of a crime that severely threatens the safety of another person or the public, imprisonment under HUMANE CONDITIONS in a facility that protects the public from the convict's future crimes.
When we resist, we are not fighting to save THE republic.
We resist to SECURE A MORE PERFECT UNION OF WE THE PEOPLE.
We had Abolitionists, especially, Frederick Douglass.
We had the Underground Railroad: Harriet Tubman.
You are correct; the USA has never lived up to its promises.
One error: Arthur Miller wrote The Crucible. That ghoul Stephen Miller can only wish he had that kind of talent.
Whitney Holiday! My Goodness, How on earth did I give credit to "that ghoul, Stephen Miller," as you so accurately put it.
Thank you so very, very much.
I corrected it!
Thank you!
I share your views entirely.
Must have been a Freudian slip, because I believe Stephen Miller is part of the current witch-trials on Immigrants.
Thanks Ruth Ben ghiat thanks for reminding us about what's going on hopefully you can continue to help us it's scary but at my age I can't do much but I will keep on saying something i won't back down from this nonsense
Yes. America is an autocracy now. We are subjects of an extreme and deranged psychopath PLUS the massive emotional contagion he creates with his gaslighting propaganda, intimidation, “deals”, coercion, and now real actions everyday to perpetuate cruelty and trauma. He’s fighting to be able to disappear any person, group, or institution he wants to erase. Anything not in his image. The damage already inflicted is immeasurably deeper than we can know. Even if he was stopped today we would be sifting through the devastation for a generation. Many of the Americans damaged by his emotional pandemic will never recover. Trump is itching and aching to unleash his MAGA citizen militia. I doubt he was kidding when he said America needed “a purge, just for one night”. Only the “one night” part was a lie.
We are experiencing some kind of psychopathic autocracy. Like living through a massive Jonestown-like catastrophe.
Because turning a democracy into a dictatorship always takes years (unless there is a violent coup), saying that "there is democratic backsliding" or that we are in "authoritarian territory" seems to be too vague/weak to me to be entirely clear. Fascism is being installed, right now, 24/7. The process is ongoing, at a very high pace. It will take years before American neofascists will have finished the job and turned the US into a totalitarian state, in which ALL aspects of life are "totally" controlled by the government, but this is indeed a PROCESS, idea that the notion of a "territory" IMHO doesn't fully capture. And "backsliding" suggests that the US would have been here before, whereas this is entirely new. Since the very beginning, the US was a constitutional democracy. Plus "backsliding" has the disadvantage of not clearly naming what is being actively installed, namely fascism.
And yes, the first forms of fascism ended up being "uniparty" regimes. This is why Kevin Roberts, Heritage Foundation president, tries to present Project 2025 as the END of the "uniparty"... but by "uniparty" he actually refers to all pro-democracy liberals and conservatives, Democrats and Republicans.
Imho, it's not whether or not there is more than one political party that defines fascism. It's whether or not the three branches of government are independent and co-equal, with Congress (the legislative branch) being the beating heart of government. A fascist regime "bundles" ("fasces" = "bundle" in Latin) the power of the legislative branch and the judicial branch into the power of the executive branch, which becomes the beating heart of government instead. And that is exactly what is de facto the case in the US.
You can call it "neofascism", with "neo" referring to the fact that the "outer characteristics" of a democracy are still intact (the existence of a legislative branch, and elections). But Vance already tweeted that the GOP today considers Congress and the courts to play a merely "advisory" role, and Trump signed an executive order making HIM rather than the courts the interpreter of the law. That IS fascism, literally.
Steve Bannon, representing MAGA 1.0 neofascism, declared in a WSJ interview recently (you can find it on YouTube) that the GOP now sees the role of Congress as that of lawyers hired by the CEOs of two companies after the CEOs directly negotiated a merger: it's their job to put the result of the negotiations in legal fineprint. Nothing more. They have NO decision power whatsoever. That is 100% fascist.
And as Hitler has shown, you don't have to change the Constitution (contrary to what Mussolini did) to install fascism. You can just... ignore it. That's clearly what today's GOP intends to do too - and already started doing when it comes to the arbitrary kidnapping of legal residents.
A wise old law professor was known to intone, somberly, and with a heavy European accent, "There is the law or there is not the law."
He might well have added, "And if there is not the law, there is not the civilization."
Trump & Co. are, as Anne Applebaum has so aptly written, a recent addition to the worldwide conglomerate she calls "Autocracy Inc.," which is bent on making the world safe for autocrats, kleptocrats, mafioso, and random other "strongmen," and demonstrating to the world that governments founded on principles of democracy and noble human ideals are unworkable and unstable. Let's all prove them badly wrong!
The last paragraph is chilling:
"The other, a private citizen, has been given license to unleash digital shock troops to re-engineer government to benefit himself and his private companies, and wreck America understood as a democratic power. This new kind of coup can also be described as a hostile takeover of government via DOGE, which was created as an instrument for Musk to infiltrate and control a sovereign power".
Digital shock troops will be added to the nommenclature in the study of autocracys.
Ruth,
Very informative message, and a great job!
Can we stand 3 1/2 years of this? Our elections are in a distance and people may lose their patience-ignoring the fact that everybody will be touched by this chaos and destruction. No one will escape! Will WE the People have the strength to go on? We are suffering from Trump exhaustion!
Thank you for stating the answer clearly.
This clarity is needed for people to truly understand the situation we are in.
Since Jan 21st, I've been saying the coup is over. We are now in an autocracy where Congress is a rubber stamp and the courts are either complicit or ignored. Trump's basic nature is dictatorial and his lack of self-control means we can expect dictatorial behavior.
Yes, we must protest - although they will be ignored and suppressed. We must vote - although they will be suppressed/engineered. But we also must start thinking about resistance. To me, a General Strike is the best tool as it may cause a break between Trump and the oligarchs.