Breaking the Authoritarian Spell: Our Advantages, Their Disadvantages
Great articles, cool movies + mentorship opportunities
This issue marks one year since the founding of The Platypus! Thanks to all of you who have read, supported, and shared our work. If you have not already, please consider becoming a paid subscriber and help to spread the word.
In this issue:
We assess the threats to democracy and what’s to be done from a novel angle, arguing that democratic forces have more assets — and that the authoritarian insurgency has more weaknesses — than the current media dialogue suggests. This perspective provides not only an antidote to despair but also clues about strategies to win.
Deepak interviewed Heather McGhee about her brilliant book The Sum of Us: What Racism Costs Everyone and How We Can Prosper Together for an event hosted by CUNY’s School of Labor and Urban Studies, welcoming her to the faculty. She was fantastic and insightful — you can watch the event here.
Leadership for Democracy and Social Justice is looking for mentors willing to share their experience and expertise with Early Career Social Impact Leaders.
This is a paid opportunity to support a new generation of leaders with resources and guidance to build collective power and make a real impact in our communities. In return, you will get the chance to grow and learn from diverse emerging leaders and the opportunity to take part in developing strategic approaches to challenges our society faces. Learn more about this exciting opportunity here: Career Empowerment Mentor - (socialjusticeleadership.org)
What Can a Fighter Pilot Teach Us About Defeating Authoritarianism?
When Deepak was researching military strategy a few years ago, he came across a fascinating character. Colonel John Boyd was an American fighter pilot who argued that the U.S. Air Force was too preoccupied with power. Based on his experience as a fighter pilot in Vietnam, he contended that maneuverability and agility, not brute force, are what determines who wins a military contest. He coined the term “OODA loop” to describe the recurring stages of conflict: observation, orientation, decision, and action. Boyd described the way that all combatants take in information and respond to it through pre-existing biases, filters, and expectations — and how their actions in response to what they think is happening, in turn, shape the environment. Winning strategies in warfare, he thought, depended on being able to confuse the opponent by acting more quickly and by doing unexpected things.
He argued that victory belongs to those who can surprise and shock their enemies, create a sense of menace, and prevent them from accurately assessing reality. Eventually, with enough confusion and unpredictability, you break the opponent’s will to fight. In war, just as in single combat, the “primary objective” is to demoralize your opponent, to crush “the spirit and the will of the opposing high command by creating unexpected and unfavorable operational and strategic situations. . . The underlying purpose of every encounter with the enemy is to seize or retain independence of action. To do this we must make decisions and act more quickly than the enemy to disorganize his forces and to keep him off balance.” He wrote,
In order to win, we should operate at a faster tempo or rhythm than our adversaries—or, better yet, get inside [the] adversary's Observation-Orientation-Decision-Action time cycle or loop. . . . Such activity will make us appear ambiguous (unpredictable) thereby generate confusion and disorder among our adversaries—since our adversaries will be unable to generate mental images or pictures that agree with the menacing, as well as faster transient rhythm or patterns, they are competing against.
In addition to the “physical warfare” of tanks, guns, and bombs, Boyd advocated both “moral warfare,” designed to sap the opponent’s will to fight, and “mental warfare,” which creates a distorted sense of reality. The goal of combat is to get inside the opponent’s heads — inside their OODA loops. A classic example of this strategy was the German Blitzkrieg of France, which emphasized speed and surprise, defied conventions about how wars were fought, and caused mass panic.
More recently, Russian disinformation campaigns have fit this pattern. In a discussion with David Remnick about the current crisis over Ukraine, Timothy Snyder says of Putin’s regime, “They push buttons. What button of ours are they pushing here? What are they trying to get us to do?” In his 2016 film Hypernormalization, BBC filmmaker Adam Curtis points to the strategic influence of one of Putin’s main advisors, Vladislav Surkov:
Surkov came originally from the theatre world, and those who have studied his career say that what he did was take avant-garde ideas from the theatre and bring them into the heart of politics. Surkov's aim was not just to manipulate people but to go deeper and play with and undermine their very perception of the world so they are never sure what is really happening. Surkov turned Russian politics into a bewildering, constantly changing piece of theatre. He used Kremlin money to sponsor all kinds of groups — from mass anti-fascist youth organisations, to the very opposite — neo-Nazi skinheads. And liberal human rights groups who then attacked the government. Surkov even backed whole political parties that were opposed to President Putin. But the key thing was that Surkov then let it be known that this was what he was doing, which meant that no-one was sure what was real or what was fake in modern Russia. As one journalist put it, "It's a strategy of power that keeps any opposition constantly confused, a ceaseless shape-shifting that is unstoppable because it is indefinable. Meanwhile, real power was elsewhere - hidden away behind the stage, exercised without anyone seeing it.
Social justice movement leaders have frequently used such arts of guile and misdirection to take on more powerful opponents. Although he was probably unaware of Boyd and OODA loops, Wyatt Tee Walker, the mastermind strategist of the Birmingham Children’s Crusade, got inside the head of the white establishment and provoked the notorious Bull Connor into violent actions that backfired.
Since the 2016 election, many of us have suffered at times from “Trump Derangement Syndrome,” what Fareed Zakaria defined as “hatred of President Trump so intense that it impairs people's judgment.” (The term “Trump Derangement Syndrome” was itself a provocation — designed to be deeply insulting. Nevertheless, we confess to having had plenty of moments of something like it ourselves, times when reactivity to Trump’s outrages made it impossible to see straight or act strategically.) In the beginning, Trump’s behavior broke so many norms and so confounded expectations of what politics was “supposed” to be like, that it made it hard to figure out how to effectively fight back. Trump got in our “OODA loop” — behaving in seemingly wild and irrational ways calculated to elicit specific reactions from his opponents that would simultaneously feed intensity in his base.
This problem has continued to bedevil the response to authoritarianism. We keep expecting the familiar patterns, rules, and norms of multiracial democratic politics to reappear. When they don’t, we are tempted to replay the same tactics because they are familiar and we know how to execute them.
Nowhere is this more of a problem than with respect to the unwarranted sense of despair and fatalism that has set in among some progressives. The obsessive focus on advantages that the authoritarians possess has obscured the fundamental reality that democratic forces possess far greater assets. The manufactured perception of the authoritarians’ inevitable victory (amplified in a never-ending shock cycle by the media) does the work of demoralization and disorientation that Boyd argued was fundamental to victory. We are the victims of mental and moral warfare on an epic scale — a giant con. So, in this edition of The Platypus, we look at the current situation, dangerous to be sure, assessing our strengths and their weaknesses. (You might think of this issue as an antidote for much of MSNBC.) Viewed this way, the very ferocity of the authoritarian insurgency masks underlying fragility. They are overperforming relative to their underlying assets, in part by making us underperform relative to ours.
Our strengths include:
1. Political math. A majority of Americans are not authoritarians. Biden got 7 million more votes than Trump. And long-term demographic trends confer a potential advantage, too. The core of Trump’s social base is shrinking in each election, while the New American Majority is growing. As Stacey Abrams put it in Our Time Is Now, “Demography is not destiny; it is opportunity.” (Steve Phillips of Democracy in Color makes this point powerfully in his debate with Lanae Erickson on the New York Times podcast The Argument). We just had a vivid experience of what sustained, decade-long grassroots organizing, focused at the state and local rather than the federal level, can accomplish when Arizona and Georgia turned blue in 2020. Despite the doomsayers, we can win the 2022 midterms. The unprecedented surge of Democratic voters in the 2018 midterm elections provides a roadmap. And the 2020 elections demonstrate what can happen when the progressive movement rallies with singular focus.
2. Democrats still control Congress and the executive branch. There are many policies that can be implemented without Congressional action that would strengthen democratic forces, weaken authoritarians, clamp down on political violence, and challenge disinformation. Moreover, they still have some power to set the narrative — defining the stakes of the elections clearly for people by “putting democracy on the ballot,” as E.J. Dionne argues they must.
3. The drivers of the economy are largely in blue America. According to an analysis by the Brookings Institution, the counties Biden won in 2020 represent 71% of GDP, compared to Trump counties, which represent just 29%. That gulf has widened since 2016 when counties that voted for Hillary Clinton accounted for 64% of GDP versus 36% for Trump counties.
In The Sum of Us: What Racism Costs Everyone and How We Can Prosper Together, Heather McGhee makes a powerful case that the racial bribe offered for centuries to white Americans has led to deprivation not just of blacks but of whites as well. She cites Hinton Rowan Helper’s 1857 report The Impending Crisis of the South and How to Meet It, which argued that slavery had impoverished the South and left it with fewer “schools, libraries, and public institutions” than the North. It simply wasn’t in the interests of the planter class to support such things — and the legacy can still be seen today.
. . . according to the U.S. Census Bureau, nine of the ten poorest states in the nation are in the South. So are seven of the ten states with the least educational attainment. In 2007, economist Nathan Nunn, a soft-spoken Harvard professor then in his mid-thirties, made waves with a piece of research showing the reach of slavery into the modern southern economy. Nunn found that the well-known story of deprivation in the American South was not uniform and, in fact, followed a historical logic: counties that relied more on slave labor in 1860 had lower per capita incomes in 2000. (p. 19)
The disparities in economic might described by the Brookings report and McGhee mean that at the national level progressive constituencies have potential power with respect to the corporate titans and the 1% who wield enormous influence over our politics. If authoritarianism becomes bad for business and the bottom line, some parts of the corporate class can be expected to rouse themselves from their stupor to intervene. (See this piece about how the Chamber of Commerce acted after the 2020 election to intervene on the side of democracy.)
The activism targeting corporate support of insurrectionists in Congress has made a difference, though there’s more work to do. On January 4, the newsletter Popular Information released its latest analysis of FEC filings, assessing the commitments of corporations that had promised to cut off funding for the 147 Republican members of Congress who voted to overturn the election.
To date, 79 major corporations — including Allstate, Nike, and Walgreens — have kept the commitments they made after January 6. These companies have not donated directly to Republican objectors or to multi-candidate committees that support Republican objectors, like the National Republican Campaign Committee (NRCC) and the National Republican Senatorial Committee (NRSC).
Another 26 companies — including Comcast, Dell, and Google — have not donated to individual Republican objectors but have donated to committees like the NRCC and NRSC. 58 companies — including Eli Lilly, PriceWaterhouseCoopers, and American Airlines — have directly violated their pledge by donating directly to Republican objectors. Overall, as yesterday's Popular Information revealed, corporate PAC donations to GOP objectors were down about 60% in 2021 as compared to 2019.
The “Defend Black Voters Coalition” is doing similarly creative work to pressure corporate America, advancing the principle that “Michigan Companies Can’t Say that Black Lives Matter and then support an attack on Black Voters.”
4. Unlike in the Obama years, the progressive movement is on the move. We are winning the long term-war of ideas and changing what’s considered “common sense” in the country. Social movements around racial justice and climate justice have energized millions of people, and there’s roiling anger about plutocracy. We have abundant and diverse talent, intellectual energy, and superb leaders at the grassroots. For all the frustration about legislative setbacks in DC, the fundamentals are still sound.
5. We do know how to do this. The country has been a multiracial democracy only since 1965. There is a lineage of sophisticated practitioners who successfully defeated racial authoritarianism that we can learn from. We can also learn from movements around the world that have prevailed more recently. For a brilliant distillation of the principles of non-violent resistance to authoritarianism, we highly recommend “Combatting Authoritarianism: The Skills and Infrastructure Needed to Organize Across Difference,” by Maria J. Stephan and Julia Roig, as well as the organization they just launched, The Horizon Project.
The authoritarians’ weaknesses are many.
1. Trump’s support is eroding, and there are independents and Republicans who can be recruited. The Washington Post’s Dan Balz asked recently, “Do Republicans love Donald Trump as they once did?” He concludes that the loyalty of Trump’s base “might be all he needs if he seeks the GOP nomination in 2024.” But the trends are not encouraging for him.
On the eve of the 2020 election, 54 percent of Republicans and independents who lean Republican said they considered themselves more a supporter of Trump than of the Republican Party, compared with 38 percent who said they considered themselves more a supporter of the Republican Party. By January 2021, views were evenly divided, with 46 percent saying Trump and 46 percent saying the GOP.
The latest poll, released last weekend, shows a reversal in attitudes, compared with the pre-election 2020 survey, and a further decline from last January. Today, 56 percent of Republicans say they are more supporters of the party than of Trump, while 36 percent say they are more supporters of Trump than the party.
Since October 2020, he has lost 26 points among White Republicans without college degrees and 21 points among conservative Republicans. He has lost 18 points among Republican men and 17 points among Republican women. He has lost 23 points among Republicans ages 65 and older and 19 points among White evangelical Republicans. . . .
The latest Economist/YouGov poll finds that 82 percent of Republicans have a favorable impression of Trump, including 59 percent who view him very favorably. In December 2020, 91 percent viewed him favorably, including 74 percent who viewed him very favorably.
And all that was before Trump’s speech in Conroe, Texas, which led Robert Kuttner to entitle a recent article, “Trump May Yet Save the Democrats.” He writes, “The idea of pardoning January 6 insurrectionists will split Republicans, [and] scare off voters.” Thanks to the work of the January 6 Committee,
the coup will become more and more headline news. No polls are out yet on public support for Trump’s pardon offer, but I will eat my shirt if voters don’t oppose it by at least 2-to-1.
What exactly will Republicans say when their Democratic opponents keep raising all this in the fall campaign? Will they go down to defeat defending Trump? One certainly hopes so. And we can count on Trump to keep providing more such ammunition.
2. There is warfare inside the Republican Party, including in primaries, and Trump’s continued prominence may hurt them.
Trump has endorsed hundreds of Republicans across the country, setting up potentially bruising primaries for some key races, including the Georgia Governor’s race. And as the January 6th Committee and other investigations continue, it seems likely that more and more revelations will remind voters of ongoing threats to democracy making his embrace toxic.
3. There are divisions in the business class and within the authoritarian coalition that can be better exploited. We tend to think of the authoritarian insurgency as a monolith, but it is actually a sprawling coalition of interests, some of whose allegiance is weak. We’ll explore this in future issues, but pressure skillfully applied could break parts of this coalition or dampen their enthusiasm for autocracy. For example:
The Republican political establishment (Mitch McConnell is emblematic) — The GOP as a whole has been captured by authoritarians, but there are important exceptions, like Kinzinger and Cheney (recently censured by the RNC) and in the right circumstances, others could break with them too.
Active corporate supporters (for example, the Mercers, the Publix heiress who financed January 6th, the My Pillow Guy, and Peter Thiel) — This group is unlikely to ever defect, but pressure and scrutiny might dampen their ardor for financing the insurgency.
Corporate enablers of authoritarianism — They are not especially invested in authoritarianism but also are not fervently opposed to it if they can continue to make money. This group will make decisions based solely on profits, and as discussed above, we have significant potential leverage over them. In the short term, this is the weak link in the coalition.
Fox News and the right-wing media machine — There was a brief period after the election during which Fox turned against Trump (in fact Fox was the first network to call the election for Biden), and erosion in mass support for Trump could affect their coverage.
Trump’s mass base consists largely, though not exclusively, of white voters across classes: particularly evangelical white Christians, rural voters, and small businesses. This is a broad social coalition and savvy work could produce some defections, although it will take patience and sustained organizing rather than thinking in electoral cycles to produce results.
White supremacist groups and paramilitaries — This is obviously the hardcore base of authoritarian politics, and while there may be individual converts, there won’t be mass defections. However, aggressive prosecutions can reduce political violence and members of hate groups can be systematically purged from law enforcement and the military (we can learn from the recent German experience).
The right has spent decades disrupting the progressive coalition, for example by systematically weakening the right to vote for people of color and undermining the ability of workers to organize a union. We should think in similar terms now about how to disrupt the anti-democratic coalition.
We are not naive. Of course, the structural disadvantages we face are real, including the filibuster, anti-majoritarian institutions like the Senate and the Electoral College, a right-wing media ecosystem, the capture of the Republican Party by an anti-democratic faction, and an entrenched hyper-conservative majority on the Supreme Court. But obsessive focus on those things, some of which may not be changeable in the short term, can feed a sense of inevitable defeat. A focus on our assets and their weaknesses might enable and stimulate better strategy for the years to come. The authoritarians can be beaten.
The first step is to get them out of our OODA loop — and then we can begin to mess with theirs.
Delights and Provocations
Danny Martinez HoSang, LeeAnn Hall, and Libero Della Piana have a must-read new piece in The Forge, “To Tackle Racial Justice, Organizing Must Change”
. . . many groups find themselves paralyzed in painful internal conflicts, with staff directing their energy and frustration at one another rather than forging cultures of growth and solidarity or developing strategies that enable them to make change externally. To be sure, attending to differences in politics, experience, and strategy are a crucial part of social justice work. But when they are divorced from member-driven campaigns to build power, they leave us ill-prepared to address the growing conditions of racial violence and inequality that shape our world. . . .
A few lessons emerge from these examples: 1) when members and leaders are fully informed and involved it keeps staff from getting way out ahead of the base; 2) long-term commitment to education and leadership development pays dividends; 3) having clear racial politics and analysis before a crisis is important to weather the storm; and 4) it is crucial for organizations to take action externally on their racial justice politics and win change that improves people’s lives.
Gary Delgado’s warning that organizing must change still holds true today. Racial justice is increasingly embraced across our movements, but the strategic work to live up to that vision is still all too lacking.
Again, there’s no magic bullet or formula. But taking on systemic racism requires more than declaring our opposition to racism or accusing one another of white supremacy. It requires social movements to move from principle to practice and to develop the organizational capacity to wield coherent and powerful racial justice politics.
Gara LaMarche has a great piece in HistPhil, “Why Popularist Attacks On Progressive Philanthropy Miss The Mark.” LaMarche responds skillfully to the perverse critiques of liberal philanthropy that blame it for funding radical groups that have allegedly pushed the Democrats too far left.
Dylan Matthews’s Vox article “Can giving parents cash help with babies’ brain development” cited important new research:
What does the expanded child tax credit mean for children?
A new study suggests that direct cash payments like the tax credit might meaningfully alter the neurological development of newborns in families that receive the money. The paper, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), examines an experiment called Baby’s First Years that has been giving one group of hundreds of low-income mothers $20 per month for several years, and has been giving another group $333 per month over that same period. The experiment hopes to explore the neurological effects of large-scale cash transfers on the development of young children, akin to those conducted in 2021 through the child tax credit.
The PNAS paper, the first to come out of the Baby’s First Years experiment, compares brain wave activity in infants in households receiving $20 per month to infants in households receiving $333 per month. What they find is striking: Babies in houses getting more money show more high-frequency or “fast” brain activity than babies in houses getting less money. That’s a sign that the cash gifts directly changed brain development, according to Kimberly Noble, a professor of neuroscience and education at Teachers College, Columbia University, and a co-author of the new study. “As kids get older, they tend to have more fast brain activity,” Noble said. “And kids who have more of that fast brain activity tend to score higher” in subsequent tests of cognitive ability.
And, finally, because you shouldn’t let yourself think about our current political crisis all the time, we offer a few viewing recommendations . . .
Kenneth Branagh’s Belfast, a portrait of a family and community torn apart during The Troubles in Northern Ireland — especially timely given the rising threat of political violence in the U.S.;
the hilarious and terrifying South Korean monster movie The Host (directed by Bong Joon-ho of Parasite fame); and
the post-apocalyptic HBO series Station 11, a strangely inspiring parable about a post-pandemic world.