What Does It Say About A Society In How It Deals With Its Most Pernicious Domestic Villains?
- Howie Klein
- Mar 31
- 8 min read
Last week, Jonathan Last copped a plea— he never imagined “that most American institutions— the media, the legal world, big business, universities, the tech sector— would immediately capitulate to Trump. In 2016 I believed the Republican party’s submission was the result of the GOP’s particular failings. That was incorrect. The Republican party was merely the first institution to accept authoritarianism because it was the first institution Trump targeted. We now see that most institutions are weak in the face of authoritarianism.”
Last advocates fighting back and suggests that “We must stop viewing political life through the lens of American politics as we have known it, and adopt the viewpoint of dissident movements in autocratic states. The Democratic party has more to learn from Alexei Navalny or the protesters in Serbia than it does from Chuck Schumer or strategists obsessing over message-testing crosstabs. This battle is half mass mobilization and half asymmetric warfare. Over the next year those tactics will matter more than traditional political messaging as it has been practiced here in living memory… The rough roadmap for how to proceed goes like this:
Demonstrate popular power in the provinces through large-scale rallies.
Use these events to organize the resistance into a mass movement that can be called into action.
Direct the mass movement into targeted political strikes: Getting blowout wins in special elections; boycotts of Tesla; etc.
Politicize everything: Attack the authoritarians for every bad thing that happens, anywhere in the world. Flood the zone.
Elevate the corruption/graft in a way that pits the billionaire insiders against the “forgotten man.”
When the moment is right, bring this movement to the Capital for a show of strength.
Use this demonstration as a slingshot to take back legislative power in the 2026 elections.
More importantly, use it to send a message to the institutional actors that people will have their back if they show courage.
Winning in 2026 will not be sufficient to stop the authoritarian push; but it is necessary.
And the only way to win is people power. That’s it. No institutions are going to save us. The courts won’t stop the authoritarians. Corporate interests won’t stop them. The Democratic party won’t stop them, either. If the authoritarians can be stopped then the Democratic party will be the vehicle through which people wield power. But the Democratic party, as an institution, is too weak [filled with corrupt careerists] and desiccated to stage a real fight against Trumpism. It will have to be pushed into fighting by a mass popular movement.
AOC’s public events over the last week have been exactly what the opposition needs.
She is making herself a rally point and telling everyone who wants to resist that they have a place to go. She should do these rallies, over and over, across the country. But not in Washington or New York. Not yet.
When you look at the history of dissident movements, they almost always begin in the outer provinces.
The autocrats’ power is greatest near the literal center of the government they control. The further you get from their power center, the weaker their hold and the more risks they have to take if they want to put down demonstrations.
AOC went to Denver and Phoenix last week. She needs to go to Nashua and Nashville. Houston and Chicago. Oakland and Oklahoma City.
… This movement should have millions of highly activated people attached to it by the end of 2025, building to a show of strength in the summer of 2026. The goal should be a day when 2 million people show up in either New York or Washington and demonstrate that there is an unprecedented mass movement opposing the authoritarians running the federal government.
That’s the moment you force the rest of America to take a side. And the moment you dare Trump to do what he’s always wanted: To take the mask all the way off and use force against American citizens.
The more people you bring out, the greater the provocation and also, the safer the opposition will be. If you put 2 million people in the streets Trump will look weak if he doesn’t respond, but will look like a tyrant if he does.
And everything is about making him unpopular and weak in the final stretch before November 2026.
Yesterday, CNN reported about how Trump is basking in the glory of intimidating his weak, cowardly enemies, “using the power of the federal government to intimidate or neuter potential sources of opposition to him: The legal establishment, academia and prominent cultural institutions, the media, the judiciary, the Democratic Party, Congress and independent government oversight. The unprecedented breadth of the actions Trump and his allies inside the government have taken against his perceived political and ideological opponents in his first two months back in office is stunning— both in the president’s willingness to test the limits of his powers and the extent to which his foes have struggled to respond or even bent to his will. Through executive orders, his bully pulpit and lieutenants in charge of the Justice Department and other Cabinet agencies, Trump’s actions are paralyzing institutions that stand as pillars of America’s independent civic society. Within the legal establishment, at least two law firms Trump has a political vendetta against have chosen to cut a deal with him to avert his threats. In academia, universities like Columbia have agreed to sweeping demands that encroach on principles of academic freedom that date back centuries... The legislative branch has in many ways ceded its constitutional role as a check on the executive. Republicans in Congress have mostly been willing to give up control of federal spending to the Department of Government Efficiency— which has shut down agencies and programs mandated by Congress. And Democrats have flailed amid infighting over how they should oppose Trump.”
And Miss Piggy said, “You see what we’re doing with the colleges, and they’re all bending and saying, ‘Sir thank you very much we appreciate it.’ And nobody can believe it— including law firms that have been so horrible, law firms that nobody would believe and they’re just saying, ‘Where do I sign where do I sign?’ Nobody can believe it. And there’s more coming.”
Trump, like Joe McCarthy before him, is a weak many who wants to be perceived as a strong man. The two of them shared the counsel of fascist worm Roy Cohn, who was made by McCarthy and who made Trumpanzyy. Yesterday Kenan Malik observed that Just like McCarthy, Trump spreads fear everywhere before picking off his targets. In McCarthy’s case, “Sackings and legal sanctions created such fear that, in the words of the political philosopher Corey Robin, society was put ‘on lockdown,’ with people so ‘petrified of being punished for their political beliefs’ that ‘they drew in their political limbs.’ It was not just communists who were silenced. ‘If someone insists that there is discrimination against Negroes in this country, or that there is an inequality of wealth,’ claimed the chair of one state committee on un-American activities, ‘there is every reason to believe that person is a communist.’ This at a time when Jim Crow still held the south in its grip. The red scare paused the civil rights movement for more than a decade and drew the teeth of union radicalism.”
I was just a child during the McCarthy era and not really too aware of what was going on. My grandfather hated him and his approach and there was fluctuating levels of public support. Initially, McCarthy garnered significant popularity, particularly after his 1950 Wheeling speech, where he claimed to have a list of communists in the State Department. This tapped into widespread Cold War fears of Soviet infiltration, and many Americans saw him as a defender against an internal threat. Polling from that period reflects this. A Gallup poll in January 1954 showed that 50% of Americans had a favorable opinion of McCarthy, with only 29% unfavorable. His support peaked when anti-communist sentiment was high and before the excesses of his methods— baseless accusations and public smear campaigns— became widely apparent. However, his popularity eroded as his tactics grew more erratic and were televised during the Army-McCarthy hearings in 1954. By December 1954, after the Senate censured him, Gallup found his favorable rating had dropped to 34%, with 46% unfavorable.
By the time he finally died in 1957, a morphine addict and an alcoholic (age 48), he was pretty widely seen as a national villain… but, none-the-less, 70 senators attended his funeral. No one is reported to have spit on his casket or pissed on his grave.
Malik reminded his readers that “Fear has always been a means of enforcing social order, most obviously in authoritarian states, from China to Saudi Arabia, Turkey to Russia, where repression becomes the foundation of political rule. In liberal democracies, order rests more on consensus than overt brutality. But here, too, fear plays its role. The worker’s fear of being sacked, the claimant’s of being sanctioned, the renter’s of being made homeless, the fear of the working-class mother facing a social worker or of the black teenager walking past a policeman— relations of power are also relations of fear, but fears usually so sublimated that we simply accept that that’s the way the system works. It is when consensus ruptures, when social conflict erupts, or when the authorities need to assert their power, that liberal democracies begin wielding fear more overtly as a political tool to quieten dissent or impose authority…
Seventy years on from McCarthyism, America seems to be entering such a moment. Over the past month, we have seen the mass deportation to a notorious foreign jail of hundreds of people declared to be illegal immigrants and gang members, without evidence or due process; the arrest, detention and threatened deportation of foreign students… for protesting about the war in Gaza; the blacklisting of law firms representing clients of whom Trump does not approve; the mass sackings of federal workers.
Fear works here in two ways. The targets of repression are groups about whom it is easier to create fear, and so easier to deprive of rights and due process. Doing so then creates a wider climate of fear in which people become less willing to speak out, and not just about Palestine. Already, “whole segments of American society [are] running scared.”
Institutions such as universities, [historian Ellen] Schrecker concluded about the 1950s, “did not fight McCarthyism” but “contributed to it,” not only through dismissals and blacklists but also through accepting “the legitimacy of what the congressional committees and other official investigators were doing,” thereby conferring “respectability upon the most repressive elements” of the process.
It’s a process repeating itself today. Earlier this month, after cancelling $400 million in federal grants and contracts, Trump made a series of demands on Columbia University, including that it change its disciplinary rules, place the Middle Eastern, South Asian and African Studies department under “academic receivership” and adopt the contested International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance definition of antisemitism that its own lead drafter, Kenneth Stern, condemns as having been “weaponized” into “a blunt instrument to label anyone an antisemite” and to “go after pro-Palestinian speech.” Last week, Columbia capitulated.
Michael Roth, the president of Wesleyan University, one of the few academic leaders willing to speak out, decries “the greatest pressure put on intellectual life since the McCarthy sear,” describing “anticipatory obedience” as “a form of cowardice.” Cowardice, though, has become the defining trait, most university leaders “just happy that Columbia is the whipping boy.” Columbia may be the first university in Trump’s crosshairs, but it won’t be the last. Keeping silent won’t save them.
In his incendiary speech in Munich in February… JD Vance harangued European leaders to worry less about Russia than “the threat from within, the retreat of Europe from some of its most fundamental values”, especially free speech. The same, it would seem, applies to America, too. Many of those who previously so vigorously upheld the importance of free speech have suddenly lost their voice or now believe that speech should be free only for those with the right kinds of views. The brazen hypocrisy of Vance, and of the fair-weather supporters of free speech, should nevertheless not lead us to ignore the fact that, from more intrusive policing of social media to greater restrictions on our ability to protest to the disciplining, even sacking, of workers holding “gender-critical views”, these are issues to which we urgently need to attend.
“I live in an age of fear,” lamented the essayist and author EB White in 1947, after the New York Herald had suggested that all employees be forced to declare their political beliefs to retain their jobs. He was, he insisted, less worried “that there were communists in Hollywood” than to “read your editorial in praise of loyalty testing and thought control.” It is a perspective as vital now as it was then...
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