Recommended Reading: On Fascism, Authoritarianism, and Cruelty
This Week's Recommended Reading on Substack: Parker Molloy, Anand Giridharadas, Ari Drennen, Scot Nakagawa, Ruth Ben-Ghiat, and David Neiwert
This Week's Recommended Reading on Substack:
writes that “this is what the mainstreaming of hate looks like in Trump's America — not as some grand ideological project, but as something closer to a fashion trend. It becomes cool to be cruel, trendy to be transgressive. The actual humans harmed by this behavior become abstract concepts, their pain dismissed as oversensitivity.”
writes that “if we’re going to get through another four years of this — and what choice is there? — we need to get better at this. That starts by acknowledging — Democrats acknowledging and media folks acknowledging — that they are not very good at this. But they can get better! The first rule is not to leave the void. Don’t wait for meaning to make itself. It won’t. The second rule: find ways of reacting that don’t end up being unconscious hyping.”
writes that “again and again, regimes that assume their grip on power is unshakable discover—too late—that their own overreach is what brings them down. Authoritarian regimes don’t collapse because of one bad decision. They collapse because of a pattern of miscalculations—each one widening the gap between the government and the people until the state is too hollow to stand.”
writes that “the U.S. is not experiencing fascism in its purest form but rather a convergence of authoritarian actors using fascistic tactics. Recognizing this distinction empowers activists to develop targeted, informed strategies to resist authoritarianism and protect democratic institutions, while avoiding the pitfalls of oversimplification and mischaracterization, and, importantly, it suggests that there are divisions that can be exploited among the authoritarians.”
Ruth Ben-Ghiat writes that “Trump is sometimes seen as an isolationist, but there is nothing neutral about his apparent antipathy to democracies, starting with his announcement of a potential expansion of the United States at the expense of Canada and Denmark. Nor is there anything neutral about a potential United States withdrawal from NATO, which Trump’s former White House national security advisor John Bolton sees as likely. Such a move would leave European democracies far less defended against autocratic aggressions.”
writes that “the people promoting mass deportation say they’ll make the economy better, when in fact they are going to drive it over a cliff and into the abyss. They claim they’ll prevent crime, when in fact they’re papering over the higher crime rates of the white population. They’ll only have some cruel, short-lived satisfaction from seeing people they hate get hurt. The rest of us will pay the price. As always.”
https://search.app/CQ3spuo6NAKXtuWp6. The Pentagon’s intelligence arm has barred any celebrations related to MLK Jr. Day, Women’s History Month and other such observances to comply with Trump’s exec