Timothy Snyder: Look on my works, ye Mighty -- Labors of Destruction and Creation

"...For the last couple of decades I have been thinking and writing about the alternatives to democracy, the failures of democracy, about where modern politics can take us and where it might yet take us. ...
In the present circumstances, the future of the United States cannot be taken for granted...

One kind of regime goes, another comes, and the country remains. But that is not what history teaches. Attempts to change the form of government at the center can lead to dissent in the center, stress on the periphery, and change calculations about the sense of the entire endeavor. This is always true, regardless of what kind of alteration in the center we are talking about, or what country we have in mind. The integrity of a political system rests on certain foundations, and an attempt to change everything from the center, especially a heedless, ignorant attempt, can undermine those foundations.

Trump takes his example from Orbán in Hungary and Putin in Russia. But Hungary is a small country with an economy about a third the size of that of Boston, Massachusetts. Russia is a large country, but its power base rests in two cities and in control of the hydrocarbon industry. Both of these countries are very poor compared to the United States, and neither of them has a meaningful tradition of federalism, neither of them has any decentralization of wealth and power. The Putin regime survives on endless war, the Orbán regime on EU transfers of money...

What holds the United States together? Let me ...stay focused on those flows of wealth. It is the money, as transferred by institutions, as justified by political convictions...

It is one thing, as a blue state voter, to know that your taxes are being spent elsewhere in the country. But it is quite another to worry that they will simply disappear into a sinkhole of corruption, such as that which is now being created in the White House. It is one thing to believe that federal taxes are worthwhile because they are being spent to redress inequalities in health care or education. It is another to watch the federal government spread disease and ignorance. It is one thing to pay taxes every year, in the knowledge that eventually the power in the White House will change every four or eight. It is another to be confronted with a president who talks about third terms. It is one thing to believe that the Constitution will ultimately preserve the country. It is another to recognize that those in power scorn it.

Trump and Vance can destroy what others have built. They can push the Constitutional regime of the United States past the breaking point. But they lack an alternative to replace it. They want fascism, and they don’t mind death of others, but they do not want to take responsibility for the death. To get what they want, on the fascist model, they will have to, at some point, fight a major foreign war in which they manage to send off young people who oppose them to die, or they will have to use government forces to kill Americans...

I also don’t think, though I could be wrong, that Trump and Vance would try this; since they themselves believe in nothing, it will be hard for them to take that next step of direct killing to generate political meaning. Historical fascists believed that their nations should be subjected to a bloody competition for world superiority. Trump and Vance just think that Americans are idiots. That is not the same thing. It is also not clear that the armed forces would go along with such a major undertaking: think of the military parade.

The death that Trump and Vance prefer, and cause, and need is indirect and passive-aggressive: by destroying government functionality, the generate unnecessary suffering, which they then blame on migrants and African Americans. They have funded ICE and deployed the National Guard to deter those of us who see the logic. That is their sadopopulism, their safe space.

This can work for a while, but can it work forever? One of the reasons for concern about the future of the country is that Trump and Vance seem to believe that it can.

If you are a successful grifter, you do not really see beyond the boundaries of the grift. Why would Trump think that he needs to anything besides grift on indefinitely? He has parlayed a set of entertainment skills into the presidency. Why would Vance think that he needs to go beyond grift? He rose to his easy life as angry-straight-rich-white-male-almost-in-chief thanks to a book which women of color helped him to write, and thanks to political donations from a gay billionaire. No wonder he thinks that we can be fooled endlessly.

But at the bottom of apparently bottomless cynicism always rests a certain naiveté. Grifts can only work by consuming resources that are created from outside the grift. The better the grift works, the fewer resources remain. The United States exists thanks to material exchanges grounded in institutional arrangements based in political faith. Trump and Vance create none of this; their grifts consume it all. But from inside the grift they cannot see this. And so they will push on, with ever greater boastfulness and vanity, until they get to the end.

Every country can come to an end. The 250 years of the American Republic, for which Trump takes credit on those banners, is an impressive figure, longer than most states, no doubt. But it is a far cry from forever, and believing in forever, acting is if forever belongs to you, is a certain way to summon doom. Trump and Vance will not learn from Ozymandias or from history.

But for the rest of us there are two important lessons.

One is that resistance is patriotic. Everything that we do to oppose American authoritarianism we do not just in the name of defending freedom, but in the name of preserving America as such. In the swirl of destruction that is underway, it is impossible to know what will crack first, and how the collapse will begin. But what we do know is that the thing that comes next, the better America, can rest only on the labor that we perform now, on the good that we do now.

The other lesson is that resistance is constructive. It can seem difficult to resist merchants of calamity such as Trump and Vance. No one action seems to stop them. But every act of resistance creates the possibility that the country itself can survive, and every moment of hope creates the foundation for a better republic. The actions we take have to be actions against, against what is being done to us now. But by their nature every strike, every protest, every act of organization, every act of kindness and solidarity are also actions for, for a future in which the United States continues to exist, and in which the learning from resistance becomes the politics of freedom."


A long but important (substack) read on the possible outcomes of our labor right now

https://archive.ph/d3g7M