State of the Degenerate union

One year ago, I launched Degenerate Art. A spinoff podcast, “Next Comes What,” followed weeks later, just after the election. A first anniversary seems like a good moment to stop and consider the most important parts of what I’ve tried to cover in the last twelve months and look at the current trajectory of the country and the world.

A pile of new subscribers have come aboard in recent weeks, which probably offers another good reason to round up the most useful parts of what’s been covered so far. I usually link out to news sources, but for most of this post, I’ll link to the relevant essays I’ve written on this site about the topics I’m mentioning today (and the original news links will be in those essays).

Last October, I started out with a lot of historical analysis, trying to illustrate the crises that were already tripping up the country and the specific kind of threats the U.S. would face from a second Trump administration. After inauguration day, it became less necessary to clarify the threat—because the administration moved from threat to direct harm. While still incorporating history, I began to focus more on what kinds of action are possible in our current historical moment to break the momentum of the administration or even just push back on it in useful ways.

Today, the federal government has been deliberately wrecked by Trump and his allies, in an ongoing project to extract wealth for the richest Americans and deny benefits to the poorest. Trump is using federal law enforcement against cities run by his political opponents and working to expand his power to use the U.S. military against civilians.

Today I want to talk about some of the most important history I’ve laid out in this newsletter across the last year. I want to address where exactly we are now and what we’re likely to face in the coming months. And I’ll make specific suggestions about the most effective things you can do to halt or reverse Trumpism in America.

Given that several years of my work around the world centered on the global rise of concentration camps and their persistence in the world, many of my historical examples rise out of that universe. That corner of authoritarianism has only become more relevant with the massive increase in funding for civilian detention without due process and the ongoing construction of a massive national and even international detention network.

One side note here up top, before I dive in: paying subscribers will have a chance to ask questions for a Q&A we’re doing to celebrate our anniversary, the answers to which will go first to those subscribers and eventually be posted for everyone. So if you’re a paid subscriber who wants to ask a question about anything at all, send it to [email protected], and I’ll do my best to answer it. We’ll gather them for a bonus post and bonus episode of “Next Comes What” later this month.

The year in review

In the newsletter, I usually write Tuesday and Friday posts. To try to provide some relief and distraction from everything that’s happening, the end-of-week posts include stories from my strange childhood, my time teaching karate and self defense, doing Arctic research, and running a record store. 

The Tuesday essays focus on politics and history, and provide the basis for the podcast episodes. They focus on what’s happening to the country and how to stop it, and have been the cornerstone of both the newsletter and the podcast.

Before the election, I wrote about events in Gaza one year after the October 7, 2023 massacre, tracing how the Israeli government was in danger of repeating nineteenth-century concentration-camp history from Cuba. Forcibly demanding relocation of whole populations on short notice and moving them into increasingly worse conditions while declaring open season on anyone who remained would become a genocide.

I covered how journalism in the United States was in trouble, describing a situation that would only get worse in 2025: “Billionaire investors have created propaganda channels in the private sector, which abet the interests of authoritarian types. Other non-Murdoch national media may lack overt complicity but tilt heavily corporate and are not inclined to unsettle advertisers. Meanwhile, journalism is starving—especially at state and local levels—shedding workers in ways that begin to echo the kind of silence and blackouts that arise due to repression in police states.”

I wrote about the backyard fascism of Trump’s and Vance’s attacks on Haitians in Springfield, Ohio, and how he was threatening to unleash law enforcement violence on civilians his first day in office: “That Trump understands so clearly he cannot yet get atomized local groups to do this work for him and must direct the police to do it shows his hand and underlines his precarious position.”

Even if Trump had lost in 2024, the country was in deep trouble. But Trump didn’t lose, and the violence he’d been threatening was soon unleashed. 

Swept into the flood

In the essay I wrote four days after the election, I took a look down the barrel of a second Trump administration to detail what it would likely bring. I discussed Vladimir Putin’s return to the presidency after a performative period away, and how his second act institutionalized repression and the creation of a massive military force directly under his control that has made it almost impossible for domestic opposition to his rule to survive in Russia.

In that same post, I noted that Trump was coming into office with more power than Adolf Hitler possessed in Nazi Germany on arrival in 1933, after being appointed chancellor through a similarly legal process that was nonetheless dodgy in that he never should have been admitted as a candidate for any post. I noted that even back then, it took more than a year for him to establish unquestioned authoritarian power, and five years before the first mass roundups of German Jews happened. So as Americans, I felt that we would have some window in which to act to save the country, but that it would be much shorter.

I considered the case of Chile, in which Pinochet came to power through a coup, and noted that though Trump wouldn’t take power in 2025 due to a coup, the election victory was in many ways the fruition of the January 6, 2021 coup that was put down, but which Congress and the Supreme Court in the end failed to treat as the threat to democracy that it had obviously been. It was clear even then that Trump’s rhetoric and planning for his second administration were framed as overthrowing the existing limits on the presidency and the destruction of democratic government itself. He aimed to establish a dictatorship.

The biggest mistake I made in my predictions in the days after the election was about Congress. In the settings I’d looked at around the world where authoritarianism was on the rise, I wrote that legislators often ended up too weak or complicit, and that our senators and Congressional representatives were unlikely to stop Trump’s ascent—all of which was correct.

But I also said that Trump’s immigration plans would take enormous amounts of money to inflict on the country. I predicted that neither the Senate nor the House would have enough of a comfortable majority to slash the vital programs that would need to be cut “to make mass deportations happen on a vast scale for an extended period.” I failed to see just how completely elected representatives would cave to Trump, refusing to stand up in any way for their own constituents.

Ways to resist

I’ve talked repeatedly in the last year about how in my concentration camp research, the two key elements in being able to resist or reverse authoritarian rule were keeping at least a semi-independent judiciary and holding onto the ability to dissent, particularly the right to public protest.

Across this year, I’ve focused a lot on different forms of everyday resistance (something we also dove into at the very end of this conversation for Harvard’s Ash Center over the summer). An essay on the role of humor in authoritarian states looked at groups like Otpor in Serbia, and individuals like Franca Rame and Dario Fo in Italy, who mocked corruption and authoritarianism. Linking comedy with social change at the smallest and most mundane levels, George Orwell noted, “A thing is funny when—in some way that is not actually offensive or frightening—it upsets the established order. Every joke is a tiny revolution.”

Study says

For those who want to be sure that engagement and protest are somehow more than just feel-good tactics, I’ve written about several useful studies to keep in mind. No single research result should ever be seen as definitive, but as a whole, they seem to indicate that the value of protest and the possibility of a return to healthy democracy are real.

Many people have cited Erica Chenoweth’s work suggesting getting at least 3.5% of a country’s population engaged in an opposition movement is generally sufficient to demand significant change. A study by Teeselink and Melios on the much-vilified Black Lives Matter protests in the wake of George Floyd’s murder indicates that those protests played a measurable part in Joe Biden’s 2020 victory. The amazing part of that research was that the protests’ largest effects seemed to be in counties with populations that were relatively small, white, and had low levels of education.

More recently, we also looked at the U-turn study that catalogued massive political changes in the direction of a government across more than a century. Researchers at Sweden’s University of Gothenburg and the University of Liverpool found that more than half of all authoritarian shifts were followed by democratization shifts. And in the last 30 years, that number was nearly three-fourths. What’s more, they found that some 90% of U-turns led to greater democratization in the end.

All around the world

Elsewhere, I’ve tried to address why international and domestic examples of oppression and resistance can offer useful models for both diagnosis and action. To pretend that the blight afflicting America today can only be understood through European fascism or Russian autocracy would be foolish—heinous acts of oppression have been part of US history since the country’s founding. But a broader pool of examples of how events might go is helpful in pondering what to expect and what to do next.

On the international front, Australian outsourcing of migrant detention to Manus Processing Centre in Papua New Guinea and on Nauru at the beginning of this century led to horrific outcomes. With the help of the U.S., South American dictatorships collaborated with one another on torture and extrajudicial detention in the 1970s and ‘80s via Operation Condor. That operation very much foreshadowed Trump’s partnership with President Bukele for the deportation of immigrants in the U.S. to brutal detention at CECOT in El Salvador this year. The past in these cases predicted the path America would take toward international expansion of deeply punitive refugee and migrant policies.

Positive examples of overseas change exist, too. In the last year, we’ve highlighted the actions of Brazil’s Supreme Court and protest movements there. We’ve looked at the role of protest and legislators’ bravery in South Korea. France has likewise shown us how to hold former leaders accountable through legal channels. Poland is mired in a struggle paralleling that in the U.S., with a lot of danger, some victories, and some defeats for democratic governance.

And of course, our own history offers countless examples on which to model our actions today. I’ve recounted events here in the U.S. stretching all the way back to the colonial era to show examples of successful defiance of oppression from enslaved people, Latino families, queer communities, Native Americans, and others.

Where we stand today

Nearly a year after Trump’s reelection, we are in fact facing an expanding network of domestic and international concentration camps, creating the first global network of camps run by a superpower created through bribery and coercion. I’ve been writing for more than a decade now about the ways in which America was leaning into camps, and despite the apparent win (for now) in the Everglades, we can expect this particular crisis to get worse in other parts of the country during the rest of Trump’s time in office.

It doesn’t help that, with few exceptions, the U.S. Supreme Court has been rubber stamping much of what the administration has demanded. As I (and many others) have noted before, these actions are largely being carried out via the shadow docket, which doesn’t demand legal theory or accountability from the justices, and makes it nearly impossible for lower courts to have a sense of any body of consistent law they can use to rule going forward. Yet I’ve written about case after case in which lower-court judges are trying to uphold the best aspects of constitutional law and democracy.

Congress, as mentioned above, has caved completely to Trump, failing to fulfill even the constitutional framers’ expectation that they could be relied on, if nothing else, to fight to protect their own power in a branch of government. The elected opposition has a few members who have found productive ways to engage. But Democratic party leadership is flailing in the face of relentless overreach by the executive branch.

From the beginning, we’ve seen governors like J.B. Pritzker and Maura Healey defying Trump on immigration. Others have stepped up intermittently. We’ve watched heroic local pushback by protesters in Chicago and in L.A. Some of the biggest collective demonstrations in American history have been building slowly toward civic engagement that could soon be sustained enough to help force to end the current nightmare.

What comes next

In terms of what to look for in the coming months, expect increased tension in the judiciary, as the lower courts hold the line and the Supreme Court tries to allocate more and more discretionary power over state violence and punishment to the executive branch. The judiciary will become more mired in a power struggle going forward, with little prospect of relief from what appears to be a compromised higher court.

A parallel power struggle has likely likewise already begun in the executive branch, though we only get glimpses of it. A country that builds concentration camps, as we can clearly label the Everglades camp (official name: Alligator Alcatraz), is a country that has embraced extrajudicial methods. Using extrajudicial approaches reveals that Trump administration officials can’t quite get what they want from the law as it stands. The current legal framework is often bad enough; in my experience with authoritarianism, the extrajudicial path tends to be much worse.

The good news is that the legal and extrajudicial programs will be—and likely are already—in conflict with each other. There will be infighting. Defense secretary Pete Hegseth is a puppet of a cohort that will want to use traditional tools of violence, because that’s what they have under their control.

Stephen Miller’s power resides with the expanding extrajudicial forces of ICE, which have been part of the system for some time but have become rogue forces operating far outside the bounds of legality. Miller appears to have the upper hand right now, in part because Hegseth is incompetent. But as a minister without a truly high-ranking post, any number of situations could leave him very exposed.

They won’t be the only ones fighting. Trump is in decline, so the knives are probably already out even more than they normally are in any authoritarian enterprise. As a former senator with past experience actually governing, Secretary of State Marco Rubio is likely envisioning a larger role for himself. And JD Vance, though hapless as Hegseth, is the actual next person in line for the presidency.

Every one of these men has surrendered their scruples long ago, and will be jockeying for position. These battles will lead to some worse things for America, but also to many opportunities to derail the larger Trump agenda.

Long-term polarization

When I talked to survivors of torture and political repression in Argentina and other South American countries, I found that decades after dictatorship had ended, a permanent fissure in the political landscape remained between the left and right. Unlike countries that were defeated in war, such as Germany and Japan, there was no full reset on the government. The side that embraced dictatorship still, by and large, believes that the country was in danger from leftist terrorist and extremists, and that they were right to back the generals.

While no two historical settings are ever the same, my sense is that we have to assume that even if democracy survives, this is the future we can expect in the U.S. for decades to come. We can appeal to a broad range of voters with a positive vision, but there is no simple way to convince people who have accepted authoritarianism to return to democracy.

Expanding those in the democratic camp will have to come through recruiting those very weakly attached to Trump or those who haven’t engaged politically before. We can do that by offering a better vision for a future for everyone, with concrete policies that will improve their lives.

What to do

On a broader level, we have to root out what I’ve framed as “the concentration camp tendency” in society—the attempt by government to isolate and remove targeted groups from the general population, typically to subject them to deliberate harm. I’ve covered this in the last year by looking at the administration’s actions when it comes to homeless people, the literal physical assault on cities with large Black and Latino populations, and the active harassment of, demonization of, denial of care to, and even attempts to erase the existence of trans folks.

This concentration camp tendency is larger than the current Trump era, with politicians across the board having ganged up on immigrants for decades, using their mistreatment as a political football for personal gain. We see it too in mayors and governors going out to performatively dismantle homeless encampments without consideration for the serious policies and approaches that have been shown to be successful in reducing homelessness and its accompanying issues.

But whatever our long-term problems, the immediate crisis is Trump. With what appears to be increasing physical incapacity, from mobility challenges to bruises and swelling, at 79 years of age, Trump has decent odds of dying in office. In a post about what will come after Trump, I encouraged people to think about and work toward something in the world that they’d like to have in place when Trump is gone. We can work on building that world now.

Support those who are doing work you can’t to shore up democracy. We especially need to make sure that every immigrant charged has legal representation. Many other existing organizations can take public positions, and you may already belong to one. Just this week, Heather Cox Richardson noted the New York Bar Association’s condemnation of the illegal targeting of civilians in international waters.

Act locally

Local organizations and actors can take on more active roles, too—and you can help. Yesterday, Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson banned the use of city property for immigration enforcement. You can tackle the exact same project close to home. I’ve written at length before and talked to organizer Oliver Merino about how to get ICE out of your neighborhood and support immigrant families who are in jeopardy.

Talk to your city council, talk to your mayor’s office and ask what they’re doing on these fronts. Organize meetings with officials to address to local harms to vulnerable populations in your community. If you’re a veteran or military-adjacent, you can take a role in helping stop the normalization of war actions inside U.S. borders, through peer-to-peer education or simply by tying servicemembers more deeply into a civilian community. You don’t have to do everything on a nationwide basis; you can make incremental changes right where you live.

We already see grand juries refusing to indict. We witnessed sandwich guy in D.C. taking a simple public action that heartened millions, inspiring flags and t-shirts. A man in a frog costume in Portland went toe-to-toe with ICE and made them back up.

Not every story is one of pain-free defiance. Frogman appears to have been deliberately pepper-sprayed by agents. Marimar Martinez, 30, was shot repeatedly while directly protesting immigration operations in Chicago. Not everyone will want to take those kinds of risks, but the rest of us can spread word of how ICE and other law enforcement lie about encounters, which in turn reinforces jury skepticism and judges’ decisions going forward. Spread the word not just online, but face to face in your communities.

Most gatherings are still more rallies than confrontations. On October 18, you can join what is likely to be millions of Americans who will turn out for No Kings events. At the same link, you can find some foreign-language support, as well as virtual training sessions to be held in the days prior to the weekend demonstrations.

It’s critical that we continue to build a politically engaged country and create a visible, dynamic opposition to Trump. Plug in at your kids’ school to teach civics and the Constitution. Work with your local library and school boards. Outside of the groups directly targeted with violence right now (and they are many), public apathy is a greater danger to the country in this moment than actual oppression. Too many people feel they can just go about their lives and wait out the dangers that Trump represents.

I’ve said at least a dozen times in the last year that one of the biggest differences between the U.S. and the countries that I’ve studied that fell to authoritarianism is how free most of us still are for now. Which is not to say there are no risks to acting. But on a day-to-day basis, most of us are able to speak without fear of arrest or detention. We can gather without likelihood of bodily harm.

My sense is that we can’t afford to wait for the 2026 elections. We need to speak out as loudly and as often as possible to check the power that the president is trying to exert over the country. He’s unpopular, so every time we do so, we throw more sand in the gears of his machine. We can absolutely do this, but in order to salvage the best of what America has been and create a new and better country, we’re going to have to overcome seeing democracy as a spectator sport.

A final word

One year into this newsletter, I’d like to thank Jason Sattler, also known on social media as LOLGOP, who’s partnered with me since the election to produce the podcast. Thank you to the many people who have talked to me for the newsletter or appeared on the podcast. And thank you especially to the paying subscribers who make it possible for me to let everyone have access to the posts and episodes, even if they don’t have the money to subscribe. I hope you’ll continue to support my work going forward.

And if you are one of those subscribers, don’t forget to send in your questions to [email protected]. We’ll answer as many as we can.

Your paid subscriptions support my work.