This is dictatorship: US today

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

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.