I am going to (against my better judgment) make a high-effort post.
All of us now live under an authoritarian government. Not an authoritarian state (yet) but the authoritarian government is here, and that has implications for how you should comport yourself and arrange your own private life. There is still time to turn off the authoritarian path, but that time is growing short and the way back rather harder than it was.
Donald Trump fired the board of the Kennedy Center and replaced it with a new one who then elected Donald Trump chair of the Center. This is pretty stupid, and clearly the act of a petty and vain narcissist and most people will never go to the Kennedy Center. However, it’s clearly important to the Trump regime that Trump be seen as a leading, shaping figure in American cultural life in a way no president has ever been. Stalin created a union of writers in the Soviet Union despite a clear lack of interest in fiction. It was important to him. A smart citizen should ask why— why does the President also need to be a cultural luminary?
The AP was ejected from the White House press pool for refusing to call the Gulf of Mexico by its new, Trump assigned name. Google and Apple, notably, have updated their maps. This is a stupid and small thing, clearly a fit of idiocy by Trump that has no real impact on your life. But it was important to the White House that the AP use the White House’s words. In 2017, neither Google or Apple would have changed their maps, in 2025 they will. An observant citizen will ask: if Google will not defy the White House in a trifling manner, what will they for a serious matter?
Trump’s firings of independent boards, IGs, commissioners, and others is patently illegal. That needs no comment. No other president tried to do it or needed to. The White House claims that no president has faced the opposition Trump faces. An observant citizen will note: the White House wants you to know Trump is special and different.
Trump has a nebulous, undefined, set of people he works for (with Musk): “the people” and he exercise “their will.” “The will of the people” is a phrase very much en vogue. But the enemies are very defined and specific: federal employees, immigrants, transgender people, NGOs, disfavored politicians. They all deserve what is coming to them; they fleece, rob, humiliate, and get fat off of “the American people.” The citizen should ask: once defeated, what specific enemy will be found next?
We are picking fights with all our friends, making enemies of Allies, and rapidly turning an American passport into a liability. At the same time we are dismantling the structures we used to make America attractive and exchanging soft power for a better uppercut. We will be very successful at using our latent power to get cringing acceptance and concessions. The Chinese do, too. The Chinese are also welcome nowhere on earth, their expat communities are universally loathed. One should ask— where would I go if America was no longer a safe home? Who might want me and who might want to help my country?
My prediction is fairly boring. The end state here is somewhere between today’s Hungary and China as experienced by Han Chinese. No massive internment camps, no executions. America is very rich, very powerful, and can coast for a very long time by consuming itself and returning rewards to select beneficiaries. The Great Terror is not coming; there will be no Full Self Drive Black Marias.
But some people you don’t know will go to jail for nothing. Some inconvenient people will go into exile. And, if we don’t take the hard road, we will find that we will go through the forms of democracy to no end, that our world will be grayer, our dreams dimmer, our choices constrained, our voices subdued.
So what to do? First, realize that all who are not openly against this are for it. Do not trust them. You may not need to cut them out, you may not be advised to confront them. But, realize that you need to be as cagey as a Soviet. They may be invited to your home, but never to your kitchen table. Remember, they want to destroy your home.
Read. Read Bulgakov, and Havel, and Orwell, and Huxley and Akhmatova and do not take them as warnings. Read them to understand where you live now. Cowardice is the gravest of vices. Put cowards and collaborators on ignore, here and in your life.