Standing on the tracks waiting for a train

With the next Trump administration less than a week away, the U.S. faces a new version of the trolley problem. In the classic form of that hypothetical dilemma, wheeled death is barreling toward a bunch of people tied down in its path. By diverting it to another track, you might—at the cost of some soul-searching—kill a smaller group of people in similar peril.

But in our case, groups of people are already tied to tracks all over the country. And at this point, we can’t be sure of the location of the starting point for the mayhem, which is less likely to be a trolley and far more likely to be a runaway train.

We can argue over whether it’s going to hit immigrants or trans people first—or maybe the homeless, black protesters, or teachers who share banned books. But there’s little doubt the train is out there.

You might have imagined a different train was coming, one that might bring useful supplies or one you could ride to a better place. But we’ve ended up with something else. We are where we are.

And for some reason, a lot of the people who aren’t tied down are lamenting this crisis while standing on the tracks and waiting for the train. Lawmakers waffle on collaborating with the next administration, while armchair politicos excavate Joe Biden’s or Kamala Harris’ failures—all of them bemoaning the state we’re in.

I don’t want to be needlessly critical. Shouting can be helpful if, for instance, you can yell at the right people to throw the brakes on the train. So go ahead and shout if you want.

But in the meantime, don’t just stand there waiting to get hit. We need to get ourselves and as many people as possible off the tracks, whether it’s immigrants, protesters, or civil servants. A lot of people have been working to get free already and just need a little backup. Others are still in deep danger or have fewer options. In each case, we need to act now.

What’s a nation to do? We need to realize that we might have to get where we’re going on foot for a while, which means progress will be slower.

Now that I’m mostly done torturing the train metaphor, I’m going to cover how countries have tried to save themselves in more recent years, the newer dangers that twenty-first century presents to those facing authoritarianism, and what I think will be some of the most effective ways to confront the threat barreling down on us.

The couch game

There are previous times when the world has been led by incompetents and worse. In 1905, when Russia faced revolutionary instability and the Grand Duke Sergei had just been assassinated earlier that day, Tsar Nicholas II received the news, and then spent the evening in a contest with his brother-in-law in which they tried to shove each other off a couch. We’re now faced with a legion of people in the new administration who will be trying to push one another off White House couches, with no concern for the welfare of anyone but themselves.

The leaders who reigned in the first decades of our century wound up miring it in the first global conflict. They were not up to the challenges of their era, and a whole generation paid a price for it. We should demand more accountability from our elected officials. At the same time, we can’t leave it to those who rule over us to make sure it will all work out.

In that spirit, I want to consider stories from the opposite end of the spectrum—times when the train of authoritarianism was pulling out of the station and got derailed. Every country is bound by its own history, and the current politics of other places are often very different than the U.S. But I want to offer some examples in which stability was restored, the possibilities for a better future were preserved, or at least the lineage of public resistance was established.

These cases show how taking action against aspiring dictators or repressive parties is possible. And in each of these examples, the majority of the U.S. population has as much or more freedom and greater resources with which to respond than people who actually did so.

Sometimes I show up with history from a hundred years ago that you might never have heard about. Today, I’ll focus on more recent events.

Defying the generals

Two weeks after the February 2021 military coup in Myanmar, a new law made it a crime to publish anything that spreads fear or promotes false news. Nearly a year after the coup, the junta had brutalized more than 140 journalists through detention, torture, and outright murder.

In this setting, Oway Magazine, a university literary journal, published what it listed as “volume 1, issue 1,” bravely covering the effects of the military regime and resistance to it. Myanmar wound up competing with Iran and China that year for the global title in most reporters and editors detained. But those writing for little Oway Magazine kept at it, some of the last journalists standing at a brutal time.

Though they listed their August 2021 edition as volume 1 issue 1, they were standing on the shoulders of a prior Oway Magazine. That earlier version had been founded a century ago by students at their university to fight for Burmese independence from the British. It had continued publishing after independence was achieved, right into the brief era in which Myanmar (then Burma) existed as a fledgling democracy before a military coup brought that experiment to a halt in 1962.

About that clampdown, U Hla Shwe, then an editor with the magazine, said in an interview, “When the military staged a coup in March of that year, all the political parties in the country were silent. Only the student unions spoke out… Students did not organize to take political power. We only demanded peace, fundamental human rights and democracy.”

That century-long fight against oppression is still underway in Myanmar, and has turned into a civil war. Nevertheless, countless people continue to try to secure basic rights and self-determination.

Democracy under siege

Other places around the globe had more options available to fight back in recent years and were lucky enough to halt the march toward authoritarianism or prevent a coup in their countries.

In Polish elections last year, the center and the left built a governing coalition, checking the eight-year run of the nationalist Law and Justice Party. Still, those eight years have done tremendous damage to Polish law and the judiciary as a whole, some of which will be very difficult to undo.

The Civic Coalition opposed the ruling party by calling on the country to uphold the ideals of liberalism and prevailed, though the Law and Justice Party still won more voters than any other single party. Elections lie ahead in 2025 that are likely to spell a more definitive end of this authoritarian party or to cement its return to power. In many ways, much of the developed world is at a similar crossroads.

In Brazil, the extent of Jair Bolsonaro’s January 2023 coup attempt—details of which became even more apparent in a report published last week—continues to shock the nation. The investigation revealed plots to use the country’s elite military forces to assassinate Bolsonaro’s opponent (Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, now president of Brazil) and a Supreme Court Justice prone to investigating the far right.

Similarly, in South Korea late last year, an attempt by President Yoon Suk Yeol to improperly declare martial law in order to eliminate political opposition failed. Legislators faced down guns, the public took to the streets, and the judiciary moved into action quickly. Yoon was impeached and, just last night, arrested. With a much shorter history of democracy and much younger institutions on which to rely, South Korea, too, has so far dealt more quickly and effectively with illegitimate acts and corruption than we’ve managed to in the U.S.

But the danger of democratic collapse in Poland, South Korea, and Brazil is not over. Though these actions to defy aspiring authoritarians represent progress, none of these stories has a clear happy ending yet.

Closer to home

Here in the U.S., too, we can draw on past examples of effective resistance to inhuman governance. Some people have made public challenges to unjust power, while others acted quietly, even illegally, but with profound results. I’ll offer just a few instances.

Most people have heard of the Korematsu case, in which the U.S. Supreme Court rubber-stamped Japanese American detention during World War II. But they ruled on other related cases, too, one of them brought by Mitsuye Endo.

Endo was a Christian woman who spoke no Japanese, and her brother was serving in the U.S. military. Even a court sympathetic to race-based internment could find no fig-leaf justification for the discrimination against her. Nine months ahead of the victory over Japan, the government ruled in her favor, a decision which began to undo the mechanisms of Japanese American detention.

Another great example of acting against inhumane government happened in 1862 in my hometown of Parkersburg, West Virginia—though these events took place before West Virginia split off from the state of Virginia. Several counties had already seceded to stay with the Union, but the direction everything would go in that moment was very unclear.

My high school classmate Dr. Michael Rice has written about how a group of Black men met at Robert Simmons’ barbershop and planned to give their children an education—one that was technically illegal in that moment under the laws of the state. Educating a black person at that time could be punished officially with twenty lashes, though much worse unofficial reprisals remained available.

The Sumner Seven, as they came to be known, met in secret but managed to recruit students and collect funds for a teacher. By the time the Confederacy was defeated, that teacher had nearly fifty students. The Sumner Seven managed to keep instruction going until public funding became available for educating all area children.

In time, Sumner School would be formally established and would host such dignitaries as Jesse Owens, Booker T. Washington, and W.C. Handy. But the whole enterprise had started when Virginia was a slave state.

Working under less-than-ideal conditions, you may not be able to save everyone, but you can save some people. You can make a clear difference. You can invent the future country you want to see.

And people have done it before. On the night of the Ali-Frazier fight in 1971, activists broke into an FBI office in Media, Pennsylvania and stole records. Those files revealed the details of massive surveillance against U.S. citizens, and eventually exposed COINTELPRO, an illegal and reprehensible operation undertaken by the U.S. government ostensibly to hunt for Communists. The operation wound up targeting leftists and African American activists, with widespread violation of civil liberties.

The activists delivered the stolen files to reporters at the Washington Post, which revealed the extent of the operation. The public and political outcry led to investigations and some of the last major reforms in America. Everyone involved kept the names of those who committed the break-in anonymous for more than three decades.

No one is asking you to break into an FBI office to reveal malfeasance or risk twenty lashes to teach future generations to read. Much smaller, safer actions can still have an effect. It’s up to you what you do, but you can do something.

What we can expect from Trump

For many people, if they’re willing to just let everything happen and ignore it, they can get by without major disruptions under the new administration. The malicious will flow seamlessly into the ridiculous. Any widespread tariffs will likely damage the economy. Corruption will further degrade civic functioning. Life may get markedly worse, but they themselves will not be in danger. The temptation for those people will be to do nothing.

In the meantime, we should expect attempts to roll back everything sensible that has happened in the public sphere in the last 50 years. Christopher Rufo targeted American Sign Language this week. I fully expect someone to try to roll back seat belt rules. If you don’t think gay marriage is on the menu, you aren’t paying attention.

If Pete Hegseth is appointed Secretary of Defense, how long before any stricture against drunkenness or sexual assault collapses in executive suites everywhere? Don’t feel that you have to keep up with every part of it—the whole point of every new outrageous action is to exhaust you.

I also fully expect further complicity, which we’re already seeing so much of on a corporate and political level, from oligarchs’ interventions at the Washington Post and the New York Times to donations from social media executives for Trump’s inauguration kitty.

I’d like to promise that there will be accountability, but we know that in many cases, there’s not. There’s a long list of collaborating companies from Nazi Germany which are still operating today, including Volkswagen, which used forced labor, including that of Jews from concentration camps, during World War II. Corporations in democracies often manage to skate on atrocities or to make minimal amends.

But even minimal accountability has value, and sometimes effects. After decades of allegations, just months ago, banana company Chiquita Brands International was found liable for financing a paramilitary group that murdered workers and their families between 1997 and 2004. The company was ordered to pay $38.3 million in compensation. As we enter this new era, we can remind both corporations and public officials that their deeds will not be secret and will be a central part of their legacy.

How to stay human

We must hang onto the understanding that whatever all-too-awful flaws there have been in prior administrations, the incoming one is actively bent on doing physical harm and putting millions at risk of violence in order to accrue more power. The best parts of our ability to demand accountability are at risk, and our very ability to govern ourselves is at stake.

As events unfold, it will be easy to ignore these harms if they don’t touch you directly at first. It will be easy to let it seem as if it’s just another president you don’t like. But it’s critical to hold fast to reality.

The next thing you have to do is stay human. Don’t take every piece of outrage bait. Don’t headline surf! Read the damn story to make sure you know what’s being said and what’s actually happening.

Check out for a while when you’re overwhelmed. But don’t hide. Buying into nihilism is giving up, turning your back on everyone who will be harmed.

One of the great assets to Trump and his allies is the alienation from reality that so many have in modern life. Less than two-thirds of eligible voters show up at the ballot box. It’s possible to follow politics more intensively than at any time in history—every hearing, every news appearance and vote—while actually doing nothing at all.

Another huge issue is that one third of the electorate has entirely checked out. Meanwhile, one third is supporting someone using all the language of authoritarianism and abuse. The last third is following what’s happening but sometimes mistaking knowledge for action.

Knowledge is necessary, but knowledge is not the same thing as action. And spectatorship is not participation—it is not even historical witnessing.

Due to long-term processes of alienation and consumerism, as well as deliberate attempts to manipulate the public sphere, a lot of people who care don’t actually engage with anyone else. Knowing what you think about the issues is not the same as actually building a democracy.

Even if everyone involved rejects bigotry and scapegoating, the political process is messy and requires negotiating conflicting desires. We need more than to touch grass; we need to dig dirt and plant seeds.

Yet instead of engaging, my pet theory since long before the pandemic is that most people are living more and more derivative lives. We have an incoming president who exists only as a believable figure on television. Algorithms deliver advertising instead of information in response to our searches for knowledge. People watch the eleventh in a series of movies based on a comic book or novel from decades ago, surrounded by politicians leftover from the last century.

Sampling and remixing is fabulous and can be highly creative. But a lot of our most visible modern productions—commercial products of mainstream culture—seem like they’re circling the drain.

Meta glasses and virtual reality are jokes. We’re surrounded by incel-adjacent oligarchs interested only in making the dumbest version of the world they grew up imagining, one based entirely on novels and comics they misread half a century ago. And they hope to force everyone else to live in it. 

There is less and less a sense of being moored to anything tangible, anything that isn’t experienced second-hand. Any unusual experience in the real world is a chance to refract your life through a screen. For a lot of people that kind of virtual validation from strangers is more powerful than the validation they get from being present in their own lives. Seeing their own lives refracted through a social media platform can be more real than when they’re living it.

Generative AI is another example of how this derivative life can misrepresent reality. Warped by the overrepresentation of women in porn, to give just one culture-curdling example, it’s fed material that bends back to us in a way that deeply distorts humanity and boxes women into one facet of existence. It’s retrograde by definition, churning the body of historical material made available to it into a flat, dead present that lacks context. The dangers inherent in living in that derivate reality aren’t just linked to what we’re checking out of, but also the world we replace it with.

Trump takes advantage of this vulnerable moment we’re in as a species, telling such untruths that it allows people to enter an alternate world. They know the universe on offer from him is unreliable, so they can tell themselves the most reprehensible parts of his agenda aren’t real or likely to happen, even if the most retrograde parts of their minds sometimes want it to. Giving up the attachment to reality is a way for people to evade real-life responsibility for empowering someone like Trump.

But their support has real consequences. And in this case, the harm being done comes directly from the right.

"We find that radical right populism is the strongest determinant for the propensity to spread misinformation,” Petter Törnberg and Juliana Chueri explain in the conclusions of a study out this week in The International Journal of Press and Politics. As they show, “Populism, left-wing populism, and right-wing politics are not linked to the spread of misinformation. These results suggest that political misinformation should be understood as part and parcel of the current wave of radical right populism, and its opposition to liberal democratic institution."

As Charlie Warzel writes in the Atlantic, “A durable ecosystem exists to ensconce citizens in an alternate reality... The people consuming and amplifying those lies are not helpless dupes but willing participants.”

Did Trump cause all this? No. But these are trends that have helped to make his success possible, and they are conditions he can take advantage of.

If political misinformation is a feature for the right, there’s a related harm that’s a growing phenomenon on the left. The more we narrow our existences to what we see on screens, to insulting Trump or his followers on social media, and the less contact we have with humans that involve changing something in the actual world, the more we’re participating in a dreamworld parallel to that created in Trumpworld. It’s less malevolent, perhaps, but no less delusional. And living inside it is a way to evade the real-life results of doing nothing.

Doomcasting is futile

One of the questions I get asked a lot is “How bad will it all get?” After a few years spent researching concentration-camp history around the world for my book, I could definitely list a lot of potential worst-case outcomes. But the real answer, given the resources and freedoms available to most American citizens is, “How bad are we willing to let it get?” It’s really up to us as a country.

I don’t say that flippantly. Genocides, totalitarian states, and often even authoritarians have similar goals. They want to flatten history to make the future into a hallucinated version of a past that never happened. They can only do that if we let them.

There’s a lot of talk about “Do not obey in advance.” I want to address what that means. On an individual level, it’s important to separate yourself and try to not be swept into any mainstreaming of hatred and corruption. Because they’re already everywhere around us, we have to pay attention.

In addition, Alexander Solzhenitsyn—who always had a reactionary streak but was also tremendously brave in surviving and documenting the Soviet Gulag—wrote a phrase that has long stuck with me. The first step to freedom in an oppressive culture, he declared, is to “Live not by lies.”

We have been so hopelessly dehumanized,” he wrote while still in the Soviet Union, “that for today’s modest ration of food we are willing to abandon all our principles, our souls, and all the efforts of our predecessors and all the opportunities for our descendants—but just don’t disturb our fragile existence.”

Solzhenitsyn suggests that we should refuse to participate in or support in any way public events, private conversations, and professional interactions based on government that perverts and obscures our humanity. Refusing to lie is at least a step above abetting harm.

Even better is when you take action. You can teach someone to read, you can make something happen in your community, you can call your representative. Almost any action in the real world can safeguard you from falling deeper and deeper into the online delusion that you’re making a difference. (This is not to criticize those who do real organizing and outreach online—I’m talking about people who post outrage bait or get consumed by it.)

For most—but not all—of us, a secret online existence that has no effect on what you actually do in real life is unlikely to matter much in terms of political change. How are you actually standing against Trump at all? You are effectively obeying in advance.

And whatever you can imagine as the worst of what might happen under Trump, it isn’t acceptable to go along with it. As Hannah Arendt said in 1964 paraphrasing philosopher Immanuel Kant, “No one has the right to obey.”

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