The fragility of authoritarianism

Donald Trump and his minions are itching to unleash military violence on anti-ICE protestors:

Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth will be on Capitol Hill for a series of congressional hearings this week. It’s his first time testifying since his confirmation hearings in January.

The administration will be watching how Hegseth defends President Donald Trump’s use of the military domestically — both in California, where Trump activated the California National Guard over the will of state and local officials in response to the LA protests, and at the border, where nearly 10,000 active duty troops have been deployed to help deter migrants from crossing into the US.

On Saturday night, Hegseth posted on X that “the@DeptofDefense is mobilizing the National Guard IMMEDIATELY to support federal law enforcement in Los Angeles. And, if violence continues, active duty Marines at Camp Pendleton will also be mobilized – they are on high alert.”

That comment raised eyebrows both at the Pentagon and the Department of Homeland Security, where officials wondered why Marines would need to be deployed in addition to National Guard troops and what their tasks would be. Lawmakers will likely have similar questions about how the troops have been trained, what their mission is in LA, and what their instructions are for the use of force.

Meanwhile, protests are spreading:

Protests against immigration enforcement action are popping up around the country.

Here’s where else they’re taking place across California:

• Santa Ana — just southeast of LA
• San Francisco, further up the coast, where about 150 people were arrested.

Elsewhere in the country, anti-immigration protests took place in:

• New York City, where police said they arrested “multiple people” at anti-ICE protests, who had blocked vehicles in front of federal buildings.
• In Atlanta, a crowd gathered outside the ICE building to demand the release of detainees, according to video from CNN affiliate WSB.
• Louisville
• Kentucky
• Dallas

Separately, labor leaders in various locations have called for the release of David Huerta, an influential union leader who was detained in the LA protests and later released on bond. The demonstrations for his release took place in cities including:

• Boston
• Pittsburgh
• Charlotte
• Seattle
• Washington, DC
• Connecticut
• New York

Trumpism faces the problem, both symbolic and practical, that, as varieties of authoritarian populism go, it’s very unpopular. Thugs like Orban and Duerete have gotten away with as much as they have because they really did achieve high levels of mass support. Trump never has: his approval ratings as president have been negative, often sharply so, for his entire four and a half years in office.

All his rhetoric depends on lying about this constantly, which of course his administration does as naturally as breathing. This is from my forthcoming book The Triumph of Stupidity:

Another essential part of the authoritarian mindset is a willingness on the part of the authorities to utter the most extreme and easily refuted lies, as a kind of public flexing of their ability to simply ignore reality in the most brazen way.  Thus the Attorney General of the United States, Pam Bondi – Bondi is, as licensed attorney, an officer of the court, and is at least in theory subject to professional discipline for public mendacity – responded to lawsuits filed to try to slow down the administration’s rampant lawlessness by claiming that her boss “was overwhelmingly elected by an overwhelming majority of the United States citizens to be our commander in chief and that’s what he’s been doing.  Just since January 20, we’ve had over 170 lawsuits filed against us.  That should be the constitutional crisis right there.”

Donald Trump, it’s apparently necessary to remind the nation’s chief law enforcement officer — this is a rhetorical phrase; Bondi is well aware of the grotesqueness of her lies — was not even elected by a majority of voters, let alone overwhelmingly elected by an overwhelming majority.  He won one of the closest presidential elections in history, by less than two percentage points of the popular vote, and indeed less than half of it, which in a world not overwhelmed by fascist lies is still recognized as less than a majority.  (He was also elected to be commander in chief of the armed forces, not the American people, who are not supposed to be in a military dictatorship).

All of this is powerfully reminiscent of Hannah Arendt’s fundamental insight, so germane to our own Trumpist moment, that “the ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced Communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction (i.e., the reality of experience) and the distinction between true and false (i.e., the standards of thought) no longer exist.”

But in a nation that still has a free press, despite the fact that so much of it has been bought up by plutocratic propagandists, the distinction between true and false is difficult to destroy as completely as Donald Trump needs it to be destroyed, if he is not to suffer continual narcissistic injury, which is what these protests are inflicting on him, which is why they need to be stopped with maximum violence if at all possible.

This is the actual political context in this country at this moment, which is why every single one of these people needs to be primaried:

In the battle against authoritarianism and fascism there are exactly two sides, and not choosing to resist it means choosing to support it.