This is dictatorship: US today

Arguably, it started in 2010. Denny Carter, I Take No Pleasure In Having Predicted The Future Of American Politics (Oct 22, 2025):

"Just now, a decade and a half into this thing, American liberals are finally starting to understand they are up against a political party that would not be allowed to exist in any other developed nation. I don't think my 2010 short story is destined to be prophetic. I think there's a good chance it looks silly in the coming years, the ravings of an Obama-era millennial doomer who felt the wind shift in a decidedly autocratic direction and decided the country's fate had been sealed."

We've been "deep in" for years. These assessments from 2020 have proven correct.

You can't sneak through your own survival by being moderate and unobtrusive. That's not how totalitarianism works. You don't defeat it that way.

Timothy Snyder has five recommendations today in "How to Stop Fascism." They are: Regular people have to vote and help others to vote. Left-leaning people need to form and hold coalitions with others who are relatively similarly minded (e.g., stop infighting) even if we don't see eye-to-eye on certain things. Right-leaning people need to realize that the fascists, not the left, are the real and most threatening radicals in terms of most profoundly disrupting the existing order. Businesses should likewise realize that their true long-term economic health is in a democratic country, not a totalitarian one. And, as always, regular people should not obey in advance.

It isn't entirely up to the president:

“In the ’60s, expectations exploded,” says Sidney Milkis, a political scientist and Miller Center fellow at the University of Virginia. “We’ve become a presidency-obsessed democracy.” A key question, Milkis says, is “whether 300 million people can expect so much from one individual and still consider themselves involved in something that can be described as self-government.”
— “The Hardest Job in the World.” John Dickerson. The Atlantic. May 2018.

It takes work:

"Democracy is ancient, but it doesn’t arise or thrive naturally or survive effortlessly."
— Brian Klaas. The Despot's Apprentice: Donald Trump's Attack on Democracy. Hot Books, 2017.

We need the right to be complex:

"And the true function of politics is not to make people more affluent, safe, or powerful, but to let as many as possible enjoy an increasingly complex existence. — Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience (1990). Harper Perennial Modern Classics. p. 191.

Our nostalgia is often for

"a time when we didn’t have to think so much about who was missing in the room, who wasn’t at the table.

* * *

"Broadening access doesn’t mean that everybody has the experience that I, privileged person, had in the discourse. Broadening it means that we are all equally uncomfortable, right? That’s actually what pluralism and plurality is. It isn’t that everybody is going to come in and have the same comforts that privilege and exclusion had extended to a small group of people. It’s that now everybody sits at the table, and nobody knows the exact right thing to say about the other people.

Well, that’s fair. That means we all now have to be thoughtful. We all have to consider, oh, wait a minute. Is that what we say in this room? We all have to reconsider what the norms are, and that was the promise of like expanding the discourse, and that’s exactly what we’ve gotten. And if that means that I’m not sure about letting it rip on a joke, that’s probably a pretty good thing."

— Tressie McMillan Cottom, interviewed by Ezra Klein, New York Times, April 13, 2021. Klein pointed out that the psychologist Jennifer Richardson "once called this a 'democratization of discomfort'."

Make sure everyone's psychological needs are met:

"According to Abraham Maslow’s theory of a 'hierarchy of needs,' people will not participate in politics until they have sufficient safety, welfare, and love."
— Peter Levine. We Are the Ones We Have Been Waiting For: The Promise of Civic Renewal in America. Oxford University Press, 2013. See this sentence on his website too.

In July 2024, John Wahl, Alabama's state Republican Party chair, said: "The mainstream media wants us to think of ourselves as a democracy because that leads to socialism...Even our Republican elected officials call us a democracy far too often, and we are not." (AL.com)

the editor of the New York Times reacting to a potential Trump second term with “fasten your seatbelts” is so deeply vile i can’t wrap my mind around it. these people have detached themselves so completely from the things they cover that the rise of fascism becomes just something exciting to watch

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— Peter (@notalawyer.bsky.social) Jul 11, 2024 at 12:09 PM

It's insane that the state of the world includes an unfurling genocide our nation is funding and abetting, climate catastrophe, and ALSO a failing representative democracy, such that the threat of totalitarianism is just ONE of the cataclysms demanding our attention now.

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— Maggie Tokuda-Hall (@maggietokudahall.bsky.social) October 16, 2024 at 5:12 PM

Presidential Historian Spells Out What U.S. May Be Under Trump Only Next Year: Michael Beschloss sounded the alarm on “what’s at stake” in the 2024 election. Lee Moran, HuffPost, Mar 8, 2024

Remember:

"Life is political, not because the world cares about how you feel, but because the world reacts to what you do. The minor choices we make are themselves a kind of vote, making it more or less likely that free and fair elections will be held in the future. In the politics of the everyday, our words and gestures, or their absence, count very much."
— Timothy Snyder. On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century. New York: Tim Duggan Books, 2017. p. 33.

There is bad chaos magic in this moment. Let's see what we can do to fight it.

On TV/lit fans identifying with the fictional villain

Spotted this on fictional villains:

"Traditionally, the majority of our cherished sociopathic antiheroes in TV and film have been men. Think Tony Soprano, Walter White, Patrick Bateman, Dexter Morgan, Don Draper. I’ve always found it difficult to love mob movies and series: Despite being ostensibly about the horrors of brute violence, “The Sopranos” and “Goodfellas” and all the rest have a singularly passionate fanbase that seems to really have fallen in love with their central villains.

This is a notion the New Yorker’s Emily Nussbaum has labeled the “bad fan,” a viewer who misses the critical lens through which a character is presented and instead goes all-in on identifying with them. She traces this dissonance back to Norman Lear’s “All in the Family,” the groundbreaking satirical sitcom of the 1970s whose bigoted lead character Archie Bunker, played by Carroll O’Connor, spawned, despite Lear’s intentions, genuine fans of the character’s behavior, those “who shared Archie’s frustrations with the culture around him, a ‘silent majority’ who got off on hearing taboo thoughts said aloud.”

"Opinion: It’s time to change the way we think about sociopaths," Sara Stewart, CNN, April 20, 2024

The idea is, you're not necessarily supposed to identify with the villain. The author might be trying to show you something about the villain, but even if that information is delivered from the villain's perspective, that doesn't mean the author hopes you'll identify with the villain's personality or choices.

I wrote a book about fictional eunuch villains called Painting Dragons.

See also my old blog post: How literature teaches us to be better people

More About 'How Evil Works' — or, more precisely, how a right-wing guy says it does

In this article on Medium, "What Transphobia Sounded Like in 2010," (a 7-minute read), I unpacked some statements in the book How Evil Works by David Kupelian, an editor of WorldNetDaily.

Go check out that article if you like, but here's more stuff about that book that was less directly relevant to my central point in that short article.

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How the Left Machinates with Fake Crises

He also says the left manufactures crises to serve its socialist agenda.

Specifically: "The environmental movement has become one of the most powerful, modern battering rams of the left." In particular, he says, "man-caused global warming is a fake crisis." Children who are "forced to sit in classrooms" (otherwise known as going to school?) have been "brainwashed" by activities like watching Al Gore's documentary on global warming.

So, too, he says, "the false accusation of racism remains a powerful weapon of the left." (He says nothing, of course, about the weapon of actual racism itself.)

God, Though, Loves a Good Crisis

God, he says, "'creates a crisis' - or perhaps more accurately, allows a crisis to develop in our lives" so that "we end up growing in His direction."

Jesus and Capitalism

He likes Christianity and Judaism but not witchcraft and atheism. U.S. culture, in his view, is based on "Judeo-Christian, free market values." (I can't offhand think of any value I'd call both religious and capitalist, but I let that be.)

His complaint against "Marxism, communism, socialism" is two-pronged. First, he says, people don't follow the moral rules he says they're supposed to follow, so they set up a false god. People who are "estranged from the laws of God now need the 'god' of socialist government." That will be a demagogue. Second, this behavior is animated by people feeling sour grapes ("hate, dissatisfaction, greed, and especially envy") about not being rich, so they turn to a socialist demagogue who "demoniz[es] 'the rich'."

How Do We Know that God Exists? That Evil Exists?

Because sometimes people make "principled" and "self-sacrificial" choices. And how could there be any other explanation for that, other than that God is the source of Choice A and evil the source of Choice B?

A rudimentary and universal moral conscience, which people have regardless of their belief in God, is, he says, "the very evidence of God." The Bible just tells us stuff we already know is true: "the Bible says stealing and murder and lying are wrong because they are wrong." (Great.)

He compares atheistic "freedom from God" to the sickly effect of "those green Christmas-tree-shaped air fresheners" that make the air smell worse.

Evil is out there, actively trying to invade and persuade us, he assures us, citing the New Testament and "the blockbuster film Spider-Man 3."

Theology of Lying

• "We elect liars as leaders because we actually need lies if we're avoiding inner Truth."
• "Lies do a great job of excusing their failings and validating their illusions."
• "Conflicting emotions cause you to be unable to think straight, and can easily result in your compulsively believing the lie."
• "When you're upset, the lie takes on a mysterious quality of attraction and believability, as though a protective force field has temporarily been disabled, allowing the lie to enter your mental inner sanctum."
• "If we assume that what feels good is good, and what feels bad is bad, we have a huge problem, because lies often make us feel good..."

Hatred

For young jihadists, he says, "the core of their being" is "a smoldering fireball of suppressed rage." He goes on:

"Intense hatred has a way of morphing inexorably into full-blown, epic madness. Indeed, hate is like spiritual plutonium, possessing bizarre, explosive, and transformative qualities of which we are largely unaware. It is the means by which evil itself blooms on this earth, especially when rage is focused and magnified by a malignant worldview."

Similarly, "many people who 'dislike' or 'are uncomfortable around' guns are actually afraid of what they might do if they had a loaded firearm in their hand," and they "project" these ideas onto the gun, classifying the gun itself as evil.

War

He complains that the government uses tax dollars to "fund evil," in which he includes "obscene, perverse, and blasphemous 'art,'" and not, say, the war in Iraq, about which he speaks positively. He says that President George W. Bush "amazingly" protected the US post-9/11 from further attacks on home soil by launching combat operations overseas (thereby conflating the rationales for war in Afghanistan and Iraq) and describes the war in Iraq as "giving the Iraqi people a chance to choose another destiny."

Similarly, this on the incineration of civilians at Hiroshima and Nagasaki:

"It broke Japan. It confronted the 'evil spirit' that had possessed that nation…and violently exorcized it. Having neutralized the evil that had captivated Japan, America became that nation's friend and helped massively reconstruct it, ultimately turning Japan into the civilized, successful, First World economic power it is today. Think how utterly amazing that is."

Anything other than war, it seems, is "moral weakness" and "appeasement."

Who's the Real You?

There are evil "forces working through you," and "if deep down you really don't agree with those feelings [schadenfreude or envy, then in a very real sense those feelings are not you. You could say there are two of you: with the real you being the observer who is chagrined over the dark thoughts and feelings rising from the deep." People ought to reflect and seek "repentance and real change."

Also, people's "entire sense of self-worth" shouldn't be "based on what others say to them and about them." That approval should come from following the godly impulse inside us, so that God rewards us with "direction, purpose, energy, and genuine and lasting happiness."

Guns

He believes that "more guns in the hands of law-abiding citizens results in less crime," citing a 1998 book that preceded the Columbine High School massacre and was already 12 years old when he cited it.

Definitionally, a law-abiding person will not commit, is not committing, and/or has not committed a crime, so their gun doesn't increase crime. And some use of guns — chiefly, suicide and accidents — might not be categorized as "crime." But we don't have predictive knowledge of exactly who is law-abiding, non-suicidal, and won't experience an accident, so the real question is not about certain types of people but about whether more guns in a society overall increases the use of those guns, and the answer is yes.

J. K. Rowling, creator of monsters

From a new article:

"Trans-rights advocates say Rowling, a self-professed expert at monster creation, is using those skills to whip up a false narrative that casts trans people as a threat to women and their rights.

* * *

Even as she wages battle online, Rowling has generally declined to allow herself to be meaningfully challenged. She thrust Forstater into the spotlight with a tweet and promoted the work of Bindel and Moore — all of whom agreed to interviews — but she has personally refused to engage when she doesn’t have full control over the text. 'JKR isn’t doing interviews on this subject,' her publicist said."

— "The Metamorphosis of J. K. Rowling," by Sarah Wheaton, POLITICO Europe, June 30, 2022

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Rowling is in the same camp with Baroness Emma Nicholson who continues to vote against gay marriage.

In 2015, @jk_rowling said she was vicariously "proud" that Ireland had voted for marriage equality.

In 2022, she is blowing kisses to those who vehemently opposed it.

She's either had her principles radicalised away by gender criticism, or her 2015 tweets were performative. pic.twitter.com/0rLEkRZOPt

— Aidan Comerford (@AidanCTweets) April 24, 2022

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JK Rowling has fully morphed from a vocal and outward danger to children to a vocal and outward danger to all LGBTQ people. She's RTing articles naming trans as homophobia while welcoming folks back to twitter banned for saying they preferred AIDS to orgs supporting trans people.

— take it e zje ✨🌘 (@emmy_zje) April 23, 2022

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See also: "The Misrepresentation of Compassion and Solidarity". It's a 9-minute read on Medium.

My book: Painting Dragons: What Storytellers Need to Know About Writing Eunuch Villains

What evil looks like

People who perpetrate cruelty do not look any different outwardly than anyone else. "We can all become beasts," said Chris Hedges.

Deborah Feldman:

"'Hitler had chicken feet, you know,' Bubby remarks. 'That's why he never took off his shoes. So they wouldn't see he was a sheid, a ghost.' She scrubs at the burned remains of chicken fricassee on the bottom of a cast-iron skillet, her calloused fingers marked by years of housework. I don't think this world is such a simple place, in which bad people have deformities that mark them as evil. That's not how it works. Evil people look just like us. You can't take off their shoes and know the truth."

Their problems are inside. They may be immature, naïve, not in possession of knowledge of any civil way to deal with their traumas. If they run the state, the state will be cruel.

Clive James:

"In the long run, the Banality of Evil interpretation of human frightfulness is not quite as useful as it looks. It helps us appreciate the desirability of not placing ourselves in a position where the rule of justice depends on natural human goodness, which might prove to be in short supply. But it tends to shield us from the intractable facts about human propensities. * * * Educated in a hard school of bombed refugee camps, the Arab torturer was trying to show his clueless American victim what it felt like to be helpless. It is possible that all torturers are attempting to teach their own version of the same lesson. But in that case we are bound to consider the further possibility that anyone might be a torturer. The historical evidence suggests that on the rare occasions when a state begins again in what a fond humanitarian might think of as a condition of innocence, a supply of young torturers is the first thing it produces. Certainly this was true of Pol Pot's Cambodia."

Yet their crimes may be unusual and elaborate, "interesting" in the cursed sense.

Norman Mailer:

"Eichmann, superficially speaking, was a little man, an ordinary man in appearance, and vulgar and dull, but to assume therefore that evil itself is banal strikes me as exhibiting a prodigious poverty of imagination."

Sources

Chris Hedges. I Don't Believe in Atheists, Chapter 4.

Deborah Feldman. Unorthodox: The Scandalous Rejection of My Hasidic Roots. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2012. pp. 95-96.

Clive James. Cultural Amnesia: Necessary Memories from History and the Arts. (2007) New York: Norton, 2008. p. 277-278.

Norman Mailer. The Spooky Art: Thoughts on Writing. New York: Random House, 2004. p. 150.

Evil is the shadow: Spotting evil within us and without

When we do not recognize evil as our own shadow and see it only as an external enemy, we cannot defeat it. It grows within us. James Weldon Johnson said, "We light upon one evil and hit it with all the might of our civilization, but only succeed in scattering it into a dozen of other forms."

Sometimes we present evil as complex, yet still mostly external to ourselves, as Barry Holstun Lopez wrote of the wolf:

The human mind entertains itself with such symbols and metaphors, sorting out the universe in an internal monologue, and I think it delights in wolves. The wolf is a sometime symbol of evil, and the mind dotes on distinctions between good and evil. He is a symbol of the warrior, and we are privately concerned with our own courage and nobility. The wolf's is also a terrifying image, and the human mind likes to frighten itself.

That evil is in ourselves, too, is probably one reason why self-sacrifice seems to be an effective form of transformation. When we allow ourselves, as M. Scott Peck put it, "to be pierced by the evil of others," we may "survive and not succumb." Their evil kills our evil. By identifying it in them and letting it in, we identify it in ourselves and let it out. Peck:

The healing of evil – scientifically or otherwise – can be accomplished only by the love of individuals. A willing sacrifice is required. The individual healer must allow his or her own soul to become the battleground. He or she must sacrificially absorb the evil.

Then what prevents the destruction of that soul? If one takes the evil itself into one's heart, like a spear, how can one's goodness still survive? Even if the evil is vanquished thereby, will not the good be also? What will have been achieved beyond some meaningless trade-off?

I cannot answer this in language other than mystical. I can say only that there is a mysterious alchemy whereby the victim becomes the victor. As C. S. Lewis wrote: "When a willing victim who had committed no treachery was killed in a traitor's stead, the Table would crack and Death itself would start working backwards."

I do not know how this occurs. But I know that it does. I know that good people can deliberately allow themselves to be pierced by the evil of others – to be broken thereby yet somehow not broken – to even be killed in some sense and yet still survive and not succumb. Whenever this happens there is a slight shift in the balance of power in the world.

James Densley, interviewed in 2022:

If we explain this problem as pure evil or other labels like terrorist attack or hate crime, we feel better because it makes it seem like we’ve found the motive and solved the puzzle. But we haven’t solved anything. We’ve just explained the problem away. What this really problematic terminology does is prevent us from recognizing that mass shooters are us. This is hard for people to relate to because these individuals have done horrific, monstrous things. But three days earlier, that school shooter was somebody’s son, grandson, neighbor, colleague or classmate. We have to recognize them as the troubled human being earlier if we want to intervene before they become the monster.

Sources

Author and activist James Weldon Johnson, quoted in The Wall Street Journal. The Week, March 21, 2014. p. 17.

Barry Holstun Lopez. Of Wolves and Men. New York, Simon and Shuster, 1978; first Touchstone edition, 1995. p 226.

M. Scott Peck, M.D. People of the Lie: The Hope for Healing Human Evil. (1983) New York: Touchstone, 1998. p. 269. Quoting C. S. Lewis. The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. (Collier/Macmillan, 1970), p. 160.

"Two Professors Found What Creates a Mass Shooter. Will Politicians Pay Attention?" Melanie Warner, interviewing Jillian Peterson and James Densley. Politico. May 27, 2022.