Just Look Up: 10 Strategies to Defeat Authoritarianism

+ The Rogues Gallery: Dan Bongino, Peter Thiel and Eric Zemmour

In this first issue of The Platypus in 2022, our feature essay explores what it will take to defeat the authoritarian movement in America, a theme we’ll return to over the year in a variety of ways.  While we hope to contribute to the discussion of the origins of authoritarianism in the US and around the world, our distinctive focus will be on concrete strategies to beat back the anti-democratic insurgency.  As organizers advise, “admiring the problem” and feeding despair will get us nowhere.  We take inspiration from our ancestors who have at various points in our history prevailed against what seemed to be unstoppable tides of racial fascism and from those around the world today who are engaged in a similar fight right now — and who are in some countries scoring astonishing victories.  

As we enter our second year, The Platypus will also explore themes related to subjects we’re working on, researching, and following: organizing campaigns and strategy, political economy and worker rights, leadership development, poverty and well-being, racial justice, immigration and climate change, and the intersection of spirituality and social justice.  And we’ll continue to offer eclectic readings and delights to lighten the heavy load we are all carrying.  We’ll continue to publish a few times a month, taking a pause in the summer months.  We hope you’ll become a paid subscriber and share The Platypus with colleagues and friends. We are encouraged by the growth in readership.

Also in this issue, we feature some important writing about authoritarianism, insightful profiles of three despicable characters who are driving authoritarian politics, and recommendations of a few things to read and watch.

Just Look Up: 10 Strategies to Defeat Authoritarianism 

In the Netflix hit movie Don’t Look Up, a planet-destroying comet hurtles towards Earth while the scientists who discover the threat try to persuade the president and mainstream media that this is a more important matter than the latest celebrity breakup. The movie provides an apt metaphor for the death-cult sensibility of our ruling political and corporate elites with respect to climate change.  But it works equally well as a metaphor for the threat to our democracy from the authoritarian insurgency that continues to accelerate a year after the January 6th insurrection — and has yet to be met with a strong enough response.

Mainstream media have shown an increasing sense of urgency, while investigations by journalists and the January 6th Congressional committee continue to unravel more and more threads of the conspiracy to overturn the 2020 election. As we discussed in the last issue of The Platypus, most establishment Democrats have been perilously slow to recognize the seriousness of the threat, and legislative measures to address it have largely taken a backseat in the first year of the Biden administration. 

Many Black leaders and organizations and some progressive groups, in contrast, have been crystal clear about the danger and have been rightly demanding that Democrats prioritize it for some time — see, for example, this remarkable open letter by pro-democracy groups in Georgia telling the President and Vice President to skip their planned visit to the state unless they bring a concrete plan to address voter suppression. The letter’s authors wrote,

Georgia voters made history and made their voices heard, overcoming obstacles, threats, and suppressive laws to deliver the White House and the US Senate,” the statement said. “In return, a visit has been forced on them, requiring them to accept political platitudes and repetitious, bland promises. Such an empty gesture, without concrete action, without signs of real, tangible work, is unacceptable.”

President Biden’s forceful speech on the anniversary of January 6th was overdue and welcome, but to be meaningful it must mark the beginning of an all-out campaign to preserve democracy.

One year after January 6th, the situation we face is sobering. A PBS NewsHour/NPR/Marist poll found that only 10% of Republicans believe the January 6th attack was an “insurrection,” compared to 43% of independents and 89% of Democrats. There is some debate about how many Americans support political violence, but whatever the exact number, it’s millions and growing. Local election officials have received “over 800 threatening or intimidating communications in more than a dozen states,” and school board members are being threatened and menaced right now all over the country. More political violence from the right seems inevitable.  Laws criminalizing protest, restricting the right to vote and undermining the fair administration and counting of votes are passing in states with Republican control, and we can expect more of that as state legislatures reconvene this month.

So what is to be done?  For all the eloquent analysis in diagnosing the threat, there has been a shocking lack of discussion in the media about what to do about it, which, of course, feeds the sense of menace and inevitable defeat that is a crucial part of the repertoire of authoritarianism.  This is symptomatic of the unfortunate “truth will set you free” mode of liberal political discourse — the mistaken idea that presenting even more evidence of the extent of the perfidy and danger will overcome an implacable and powerful opposition.  In the world we live in, of course, what’s required are a clear analysis of the power relations that undergird the authoritarian bloc and a hard-nosed counter-strategy.  (There’s an excellent discussion between Steve Pitts and Bill Fletcher on the question of power and strategy in the Black Work Talk podcast here). Knowing the comet is approaching is a fine first step, and collecting data about its trajectory, size, and shape is worthwhile, but ultimately we require a strategy based on a clear-eyed power analysis to deflect or smash it.  We are not spectators but protagonists, so this and subsequent issues of The Platypus will explore not only the nature of the threat but concrete strategies to defeat authoritarianism.  

Because we believe that we’re in this struggle for a decade or more, we will consider strategies for the short term and the long term as well as strategies that could be pursued by civil society and by various levels of government.  Mobilizing for the 2022 and 2024 elections is essential but not sufficient.  Defeating the authoritarian insurgency is the work of a generation, and some of the longer-term strategies require a steady commitment, not just a short burst of attention.  

The gravity of the threat demands a reorientation of energy from organizations and individuals to prioritize the fight to preserve democracy.  Unless it is addressed, there is little prospect of progress on other issues in the years to come. The fate of each progressive issue and constituency is now bound together.  We might even imagine a practice of “tithing for democracy” — finding a way for all of us, whatever our role and work, to devote a significant portion of our time to address the democracy crisis, which has become the paramount issue of our time. We may each make different kinds of contributions, but there’s no way to honorably keep on with business as usual in the face of the current crisis. We’ll explore a wide variety of possible approaches with the understanding that there’s no silver bullet or quick fix for such a deep-rooted problem.  

Below, we discuss four vital short-term strategies and list six other medium and long-term ideas that we’ll explore in subsequent issues.

10 Strategies to Defeat Authoritarianism

Strategy #1: Pass pro-democracy legislation to ensure the right to vote

The most obvious and important thing that could be done right now is to pass the Freedom to Vote Act and the John Lewis Voting Rights Restoration Act.  Democracy legislation has already passed the House. The Senate has moved to consider the Freedom to Vote Act, a crucial bill that would address many of the threats to democracy.  But passage requires 60 votes in the Senate under current rules, and no Republican will vote for it, dooming it to failure despite unanimous Democratic support. Majority Leader Schumer has pledged to bring proposed changes to Senate rules to a vote by January 17th, Martin Luther King, Jr. Day.  The debate and vote about changes to the arcane filibuster rule will be a moment of truth for the Democratic party and for pro-democracy forces in the country.  All of us can signal — through our organizational affiliations and in our individual capacities as voters, leaders and donors — that we expect and demand Democrats make this their number-one priority for as long as it takes to get it done.  And we shouldn’t fall for Mitch McConnell’s wily effort to lure Democrats into a trap to pursue narrower goals. McConnell’s offer is intended to give Manchin and Sinema cover to vote against Senate rules changes.

Strategy #2: Mobilize voters in the 2022 midterms with the intensity of a Presidential year and rebuild power at the state and local level.

Another obvious step is a massive voter mobilization effort for 2022.  Ceding control of Congress to the current, Trump-dominated Republican Party will fuel the authoritarian fire.  And while a loss of seats in the midterms for the party holding the presidency is common, it is not inevitable.  Redistricting in the House has not been the disaster for Democrats that many expected — in fact, the playing field will be somewhat more favorable for Democrats this year than in previous years. Democrats could win Republican-held Senate seats in Wisconsin, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and Florida, while Democrats in Georgia, New Hampshire, Arizona, and Nevada have a strong chance of being re-elected.  There are also crucial races for governorships, state legislatures, and Secretaries of State around the country. Power at the state level has always been important, but in an era in which Republicans are laying plans to overrule the voters and award electoral votes to the Republican candidate in 2024, it is even more crucial.  And as the right has demonstrated through its hyper-local approach to politics, races for school boards and city councils are really important. We’ve advocated previously for evergreen GOTV strategies that are led by permanent, year-round, membership-based organizations with trust and roots in local communities, and for a focus of resources on work in communities of color with organizations led by people of color.  Labor and community organizations saved democracy in 2020, as Deepak argued in this piece, and they will be the best bulwark again in 2022 and 2024.  Given the stakes of this year’s election, it will be crucial to meet it with the kind of impressive intensity that a broad phalanx of progressive groups approached the 2020 elections.  Pandemic or not, door-to-door work needs to be embraced by the whole movement again.  And good targeting will also be critical, for example, focusing on “Biden surge voters” (new voters in 2020 who made the difference), and a focus on getting voters to turn in widely available mail-in ballots.

3. Prosecute authoritarian and racist violence vigorously.

It is striking that a year after January 6th, some (though far from all) of the perpetrators of the insurrection have been prosecuted, but that the apex predators — members of Congress, administration officials, and of course Trump himself — have essentially emerged unscathed and emboldened.  We should be gravely concerned about the impact of efforts to intimidate local election officials and school board officials.  We may have missed it, but we’ve yet to see any large-scale federal law enforcement initiative to prosecute the perpetrators of this ongoing violence.  

Historian Manisha Sinha, writing soon after Biden’s inauguration, made a compelling case in the New York Review of Books (“The Case for A Third Reconstruction”) for very aggressive use of federal power to break the back of authoritarianism.  

The history of Reconstruction reveals that moments of crisis can also provide opportunities to strengthen our experiment in democracy. With a Democratic-controlled Congress, the new administration has just such a chance to inaugurate a much needed “third reconstruction” of American democracy. …

Reconstruction also provides us with a roadmap for how to deal with racist domestic terrorism, which now looms as the greatest danger to American democracy. …

Above all, the history of Reconstruction demonstrates the imperative to bring the full weight of the law to bear upon those attempting to overthrow democratic government by terrorist means. Initially, President Ulysses S. Grant and Congress acted forcefully, establishing the Department of Justice and passing the three Enforcement Acts of 1870 and 1871 that contained the first Ku Klux Klan. The law was initially designed to protect Southern black voters from violent intimidation. Hundreds of African Americans testified before a congressional committee to the white supremacist violence to which they were subjected in the South. The second Enforcement Act of 1871 (also known as the Ku Klux Klan Act) eventually activated federal legal intervention targeting the Klan in areas like upcountry South Carolina, which Grant declared to be in a state of insurrection and subject to martial law. Under a plan devised by Attorney General Amos Akerman, hundreds of Klan members confessed and were arrested, putting an end to Klan violence in that state.

4. Deliver Build Back Better (BBB) AND do a huge campaign to communicate to its beneficiaries.

Deepak had a telling moment in one of his classes last year, the week after the refundable child tax credit first landed in people’s bank accounts ($300 per child per month — real money!), thanks to the American Rescue Plan Act. One of his students, capturing a broader sentiment, asked, “What’s the catch?”  She wasn’t enthusiastic — she was puzzled and suspicious, and this was to be expected. Working-class communities of color do not experience the government as a friendly, beneficent force in their lives. Liberal policymakers and politicians tend to assume a simple causal chain: we give people stuff, and they will vote for us. But that’s bad logic.  If people don’t know about a benefit, if they don’t know why it came about or who made it happen, if it feels like capricious charity or a con rather than something they are entitled to or helped to bring about, if they are shamed or harassed in the process of getting it (not the case with the child tax credit, but true of many public programs), and if they are not invited to be part of an organized effort to defend and expand it, the will have little lasting political effect.  (A good example of this trap can be seen in Jamila Michener’s research on expansions of Medicaid, which have had a very short-term positive political impact, precisely because the design of the programs sends negative messages to beneficiaries).

Build Back Better is crucial to pass on its own terms, but from a political point of view, what would be even more valuable would be a massive organizing campaign that solved some of the problems discussed above.  Imagine a campaign to reach millions of people door to door to tell the story of the benefits, engender a sense of entitlement and ownership rather than passive consumption, make sure people have easy access, explain who was on their side and who fought against it, and invite them into the fight to preserve and expand those gains.  A well-executed effort to do this — which is neither issue advocacy nor electoral mobilization in a narrow sense — could pay huge dividends both for good policy and for good electoral outcomes by connecting the dots.  That all requires passing BBB, and we think some substantial version of it is still possible to enact.

Six other ideas we’ll explore in subsequent issues:

Strategy 5: Purging military and law enforcement agencies of anti-democratic forces and members of hate organizations and reducing the size of the carceral and national security state, which feed the authoritarian culture constituency

Strategy 6: A massive worker organizing campaign is needed on its own terms but could also have massive pro-democracy implications.

Strategy 7: Disrupting the Trump coalition by, for example, targeting companies that support authoritarian politicians, and by recruiting key constituency pillars of support, such as some small business owners, away from the death cult.  We’ll also assess efforts to deradicalize Trump voters, both the extremist core and the wavering periphery, through education, outreach, and community building.

Strategy 8: Strengthening progressive readiness to meet the threat of authoritarianism by building a “united front” culture, refocusing on recruitment of people who are not already self-identified progressives over the mobilization of existing activists, and reinvigorating the tradition and practice of nonviolent civil resistance.

Strategy 9: Challenging the disinformation machine, by weakening the power of the big social media companies and right-wing media outlets and building alternatives.

Strategy 10: More aggressive use of federal executive power and symbolic politics to alter the terrain of struggle and rouse energy in the pro-democracy coalition.

We think of this list of strategies as a tentative draft subject to revision. We hope it inspires new and better ideas, and stimulates reflection on how we can all find a way to contribute to the fight for multi-racial democracy.

Readings

Evan Osnos, one of the country’s best ethnographers of the right, has a sharp profile in The New Yorker, “Dan Bongino and the Big Business of Returning Trump to Power,” that offers important insights about the right-wing media ecosystem, the importance of conservative talk radio, and efforts to build new right-wing platforms that are immune to public pressure.

Spend several months immersed in American talk radio and you’ll come away with the sense that the violence of January 6th was not the end of something but the beginning. A year after Trump supporters laid siege to the U.S. Capitol, some of his most influential champions are preparing the ground for his return, and they dominate a media terrain that attracts little attention from their opponents. As liberals argue over the algorithm at Facebook and ponder the disruptive influence of TikTok, radio remains a colossus; for every hour that Americans listened to podcasts in 2021, they listened to six and a half hours of AM/FM radio, according to Edison Research, a market-research and polling firm. Talk radio has often provided more reliable hints of the political future than think tanks and elected officials have. . . .

No one in American media has profited more from the Trump era and its aftermath than Bongino. Since 2015, he has gone from hosting a fledgling podcast in his basement to addressing audiences of millions. Pete Hegseth, a fellow Fox News host who served in the National Guard, told me, “I carried a rifle in the military, and now I get to serve in information warfare.” Bongino, he added, “is one of our generals.” This vision of cultural combat is prominent in Trumpworld. Alex Jones, who named his conspiratorial media brand Infowars, uses the motto “There’s a war on for your mind!” . . .

In the long run, Bongino’s most significant impact may not come from what he says on his broadcasts. “My goal is for my content to be the least interesting thing I did,” he told me. He has used his money and his influence to foster technology startups, such as Parler, Rumble, and AlignPay, that are friendly to right-wing views. These companies are intended to withstand traditional pressure campaigns, including advertising boycotts like the one that Media Matters prompted in 2019, based on old radio interviews in which the Fox host Tucker Carlson described women as “extremely primitive” and Iraqis as “monkeys.” Carusone said, “What scares me about Bongino is that this guy could end up owning or controlling or directly building the infrastructure that operationalizes a whole range of extremism.” He continued, “There used to be lines. You could say, ‘O.K., PayPal, don’t let the January 6th people recruit money to pay for buses.’ This new alternative infrastructure is not going to stop that.” If another uprising organizes online, he said, “there will be a whiplash effect. Everyone will say, ‘How did that happen?’ Well, it’s been happening.” . . .

In the stories that Bongino reveals about himself, there are some of the usual private frequencies: status, grit, yearning, humiliation. But nothing rings louder than his awareness of fear—how it arises and subsides, what it does to the body and the mind. In his punditry, Bongino talks about fear all the time. “Fear has always been the Democrats’ coin of the realm,” he told podcast listeners in June. “How else are they going to coax you into delivering them your civil liberties and freedom? They do it through things like coronavirus.” In a mock orator’s voice, he said, “Give up your right to assemble!”

When Bongino talks about his early life, he also lingers on fear. 

James McAuley’s article “Who Does Eric Zemmour Speak For?” in The New York Review of Books assesses the far-right candidate for President of France who has managed to find a lane to the right of the National Front and brought even more radical and racist ideas into the mainstream discourse.  McAuley makes the crucial point that Zemmour is not something alien to the French elite, but rather the logical apotheosis of its racism.  Some echoes and analogies to our own experience.

Central to Zemmour’s discourse is the decidedly French anxiety of le grand remplacement (the great replacement), the conspiracy theory elaborated by the French writer Renaud Camus, portending that the white Christian majority of France and Europe is being “replaced” by hordes of nonwhite, and especially Muslim, migrants from North and West Africa. That theory, of course, has reverberated elsewhere, including in the US. Behind the demographic and existential nightmare of the great replacement, there is an obvious nostalgia for a world that never quite existed. . . .

But there is an obvious violence too. Fear of the great replacement has generated deadly attacks around the globe—most notably in Christchurch, New Zealand, in March 2019, when fifty-one Muslims were shot dead by a gunman in two different mosques. During his appearance in Bordeaux Zemmour condoned more violence to stop “ethnic substitution.” “We should be free to denounce those who attack us…those who want us to disappear!” he said. Yet he panders to those who might well prefer the ethnic substitution of his own Jewishness—a great replacement of himself. . . .

the decidedly unironic name of his newly established political party is “Reconquête” (Reconquer), which harkens back to the Reconquista, the centuries-long military campaign by which Christians rid medieval Iberia of its Muslim conquerors. But that campaign ultimately expelled the Jews of Spain as well. . . .

Macron’s hard-liner on these issues is his education minister, Jean-Michel Blanquer, who in October established a think tank, Le Laboratoire de la République, designed to stop the spread of the allegedly “woke” ideas that, he told Le Monde, are at the “antipodes” of the republic. In that interview, Blanquer said that there is a 

republican vision opposed to this doctrine that fragments and divides, and has conquered certain political, media, and academic milieux by proposing a logic of victimhood to the detriment of the democratic foundations of our society.

I had this exchange in mind when I heard Zemmour respond to a question about “le wokeisme” in Bordeaux. “You are absolutely right,” he told the man who asked him.

This woke ideology, which is to say the people who pretend to have awakened to inequalities, suffering real or imagined in terms of skin color or gender, is a threat to freedom of thought, intellectual health, and to our schools and universities.

Although their respective motives are different, there was no significant difference between Blanquer’s comments and Zemmour’s: the former legitimizes, and even cedes ground to, the latter.

Finally, there is the problem of the veil, the eternal blindspot of the self-professed French “universalist.” Unsurprisingly, Zemmour reserves a particular vehemence for veiled Muslim women, but what is truly surprising is how many others who purport to loathe his histrionics do not necessarily disagree with him on this issue, however they justify their opinion. The veil is banned in schools along with other religious signs and symbols, but it is perfectly legal to wear elsewhere in public. Many of Macron’s mandarins, however, seem to relish telling France’s Muslim citizens that wearing the veil makes them less welcome in public life and, in a sense, less French. In 2019 France’s former health minister Agnès Buzyn complained about a runner’s hijab introduced by the French sportswear brand Decathlon. “I would have preferred a French brand not to promote the veil,” she said. Blanquer has also commented that although it was technically legal for Muslim mothers to wear headscarves while chaperoning school field trips, he wanted to avoid them “as much as possible.”

Thus to see Zemmour merely as a fascist avatar is to misunderstand his significance: he is the natural extension of the French elite and its xenophobic provincialism. One of the more absurd recent spectacles on French television took place when CNews followed Zemmour to Drancy, the Paris suburb where he spent part of his childhood and where Jews were interned before their deportation to Auschwitz. He stood facing a Muslim woman wearing a headscarf, who turned out to be someone who is rarely veiled but who was brought onto CNews for the purposes of this exchange. “France is laïcité,” said Zemmour, referencing the country’s cherished value of secularism. “We are not in an Arabo-Muslim country…. In public life we, we say ‘I am French.’” The woman took off her headscarf, which was probably meant to show her coming to her senses on live television. As strange as this scene was, Zemmour said nothing that is not a fundamental conviction of so many traditional French feminists and mainstream republicans who genuinely believe that no Muslim woman can ever freely choose to wear the veil. I often wonder what these people see when they watch Zemmour, and whether they can discern their reflection in his image.

Recently Clément Beaune, Macron’s secretary of state for European affairs and one of the government’s most eloquent representatives, said, “Éric Zemmour is bad news for France. He is the opposite of France, the hatred of France.” He is certainly bad news, but he is not the opposite of France. In revealing and disconcerting ways, Éric Zemmour is France. 

In another New York Review piece, “The Justice of Simone Weil,” Jacqueline Rose offers a fresh take on the French philosopher and highly original thinker — including some of the key psychological mechanisms of authoritarianism

“As soon as any category of humans is placed outside the pale of those whose life has value, nothing is more natural than to kill them.”

She is describing what psychoanalysis subsequently theorized as the process of projection, a way of ridding oneself of anguish that makes it more or less impossible for people, regardless of what they may have done or what might have been enacted in their name, to shoulder the burden of guilt, whether historical or personal. These lines from her 1942 essay “Forms of the Implicit Love of God,” written on the eve of leaving France, read almost as if they were lifted from the famous Austrian-British psychoanalyst Melanie Klein:

In so far as we register the evil and ugliness within us, it horrifies us and we reject it like vomit. Through the operation of transference, we transport this discomfort into the things that surround us. But these same things, which turn ugly and sullied in turn, send back to us, increased, the ill we have lodged inside them. In this process of exchange, the evil within us expands and we start to feel that the very milieu in which we are living is a prison.

Delights and Provocations

We were mesmerized by the Netflix film Passing, based on the novel by Nella Larsen, about a woman in 1920s New York who passes as white and longs to rejoin the Black world of her childhood.

This review by David Runciman of a new book, Competition is for Losers, about Peter Thiel, the Trump-supporting tech billionaire, captures something of the sociopathy of the 1% in America.  It also includes this gem

Like several other tech titans, Thiel is interested in trying to defy the ageing process, and ideally to defeat it altogether. He is particularly associated with the novel field of biology known as parabiosis, which involves experiments in blood transfusion from the young to the old. Asked about this at a New York Times event in 2018, Thiel responded: ‘I’m not even sure what I’m supposed to say. I want to publicly tell you I’m not a vampire.’

Why do we not find that reassuring?

The last issue of The Platypus compared the hapless Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer to Sen. Harry Reid, a ruthless (in the best sense of the word!) tactician who Deepak got to know.  This tweet thread by Cecilia Munoz provides a window into what made Reid a unique figure in American politics – his capacity for growth.

“Start With the Map,” a beautiful New Yorker essay by David Mitchell describes how he got interested in writing stories.  It begins this way

The book that first set me on my way was “Watership Down,” by Richard Adams. I was nine years old when I read it. Basking in its afterglow, I plotted an epic novel about a small group of fugitive otters—one of whom was clairvoyant—who get driven from their home by the ravages of building work, and swim up the River Severn to its source, in Wales, where they establish an egalitarian community called Ottertopia.

As any child author can testify, you can’t begin until you’ve got the map right. So I traced the course of the River Severn from my dad’s road atlas onto Sellotaped-together sheets of A4. Along the looping river, I drew woods, hills, and marshes in the style of the maps in “The Lord of the Rings”: blobs with sticks for trees, bumps for hills, and tufts for marshes. What about toponyms, though? Should I use existing human names, or make up Otterese words for places like Worcester or Upton-upon-Severn? Would otters have words for motorways or factories or bridges? Why would they? Why wouldn’t they? Never mind, I’ll sort that out later. I spent hours on that map, plotting the otters’ progress with a dotted red line and enjoying how nonchalant I’d be at school the day after my unprecedented Booker Prize victory. I’m sure I managed at least half a page of the novel before I got distracted.