To say ‘Trump is an idiot’ misses that he has only ever fallen up, retaking the White House to become golfing doorman for Project 2025. It misses Musk’s Techbros Youth and the looting every American citizen’s personal data. It does not take account of denying women abortions though they’ve been raped, or the suppression of votes or a free press. It ignores the dismantling of the Department of Education, the cutting of aid to starving people, and the deporting without due process people to El Salvadoran megaprisons because they have tattoos (of what?!). It similarly overlooks threatening Canada, selling out Ukraine, or selling up Gaza, pulling the rug from NATO and starting trade wars. It even glosses over the snatching of a Turkish PhD student by unidentified ICE agents for writing an op-ed. This isn’t idiocy but the culmination of a hideous hydra of ideologies concocted by JD Vance, Steve Bannon, Ben Shapiro, Peter Thiel, Russell Vought, and Curtis Yarvin, to name but a few, to kill and revive America as some Christo-nationalist Frankenstein creation with crypto for blood.
We must not only unite, cooperate to defend ourselves and our allies – including the overwhelming majority of Americans who are as much victim to all this – and fast, like yesterday – we must grieve for this giant of democracy and prosperity of our times.
And yet. And yet. We see hope elsewhere. Democracy is not dead.
Turkey
Hundreds of thousands of protesters in Turkey have turned out against the increasingly government of President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan in response to the arrest of Istanbul mayor Ekrem İmamoğlu, seen as best placed to challenge Erdoğan for the presidency. As the FT reported, even while previously poor relations with Europe were improving as Turkey’s importance to NATO rebooted as the US’ undermines it, the economy was improving, the Kurdish insurgency was ending, even so Erdoğan’s government was attacking his political opponents amid what he called an “opposition problem that poisons democracy”. Looks like the locals strongly disagree.
Romania
Romania’s constitutional court last December annulled the shock first-round victory by far-right rank-outsider Călin Georgescu in the country’s presidential election, due to he having “illegally benefited” from a “sophisticated” and “massive” social media campaign run by Russia. Georgescu has been banned from standing in the election rerun set for May, to the understandable rage of Romanians for, even by dubious means, their man took 27 percent of the vote having preyed and played upon legitimate disaffection of falling living standards and being ignored by the mainstream parties. With the existential hazards of democracy being denied – everything the UK has encountered and endured with Brexit – and the outcome yet to play out, nonetheless, whereas British sovereignty let foreign meddling and lies stand vis-à-vis Brexit, Romania has applied the rule of law and said no.
Serbia
Long embedded suspicions of corruption and a lack of transparency under Serbia’s increasingly authoritarian government were unleashed to become mass protests in November 2024 when the roof of Novi Sad train station collapsed. Protests have only grown since, with farmers and taxi drivers uniting with students leading 100s of thousands of Serbians onto the streets in over 400 cities, bolstered by rebuke for populist President Aleksandar Vučić’s government from the EU’s leadership. The response of has extended to the suspected illegal use of an illegal sonic weapon being used against peaceful protesters.
Georgia
Georgia seems to have gone from being a liberal, democratic post-Soviet state to be hauled back towards something much more aligned with, molded on and manipulated by Russia. Russia scotched its bid to join NATO by bombing and invading in 2008, and backing autonomy in the regions of South Ossetia and Abkhazia. It more recently meddled in the 2024 election to oust the pro-EU president Salome Zourabichvili for the pro-Russian Georgian Dream party, which has swiftly suspended all EU accession efforts and taken up a slew of Russian-esque laws of oppression, including pushing to have opposition groups unconstitutional – and why? Because the locals refuse to give in.
South Korea
Last December South Korea’s president Yoon Suk Yeol went on TV to declare martial law to override the National Assembly’s rebuffing of his People Power Party agenda, then sent special forces there to prevent MPs voting on annulling the declaration – only for people to turn out en masse to protect their representatives and democracy. The order was rescinded and Yoon impeached, as was his replacement – then arrested and put in custody, and now he’s out proper. The crisis is far from over in a country where long-embedded authoritarianism lingers beneath a democracy only existent since 1987 – but opponents and supporters of Yoon still pack the streets, as the Australian Institute of International Affairs wrote: “There is a strong tendency to take to the streets in South Korean political life, a belief that political decision-making cannot be left to established politicians alone and that change has to come from below.”
Pushback across the world
The junta in Myanmar has been on the backfoot against rebel forces in the south east Asian country’s civil war and now only controls a quarter of the country’s land area. Israelis still block roads against Netanyahu’s attempts to subvert the country’s courts. Governments in France, Germany, and Austria, are all refusing to work with the far-right. Trump has revitalized Canada’s Liberal Party and support in Mexico for Claudia Sheinbaum. Putin’s barbarously violent feats against his opponents continue his opponents continue – but still staggeringly brave people like Alexei Navalny (assassinated) stand up to him, and his widow Yulia Navalnaya fights on. In the UK anti-racists are literally standing up to Reform’s racist lies. Europe is galvanising to defend itself – sorrowful though that be regarding funds being diverted from the poor for war.
And on Saturday millions of Americans took to the streets in protest against Trump and Musk. They’re not taking it, either – like Hell they ever would!
It could all be too much crisis – truly a global one as democracy is under threat as the world’s most powerful democracy, for sure often very flawed in its application though it be, is being cratered in on itself by a vicious cabal of revolutionaries.
But we’re not done yet. And when we’ve done grieving we muster, reconvene, and fight back and defeat these people – we have to, for ourselves, our children, the world, our lives, our freedoms depend on it.
What are we up against?
Some hideous hydra of holy anti-democratic ideologies – oftentimes contradictory, but so was the Pact of Steel – fed into by Steve Bannon, Ben Shapiro, Peter Thiel, Russell Vought, and Curtis Yarvin, the Heritage Foundation, to name but a very few from the US alone, that are working to kill America then revive it as some Frankensteinian Gilead with crypto for blood that sees destroying global trade as that morning’s blithe adventure.
What is to be done?
‘How to’ guides describing what we are all facing, its features and how to fight it are emerging all the time, and readers are very welcome to send in their own lists. A seminal work for our time came in 2017 when Twitter was a positive thing and not Musk’s personal far-right gloryhole, on which was published The Authoritarian Regime Survival Guide – Verfassungsblog, based on Europe’s experiences under fascists and communists. Each of its four parts signed off by “- With love, your Eastern European friends”, it lists what to expect in year one, 6 rules on surviving authoritarianism – including don’t be indifferent, don’t be divided, do not patronise your opponents or dismiss their news outlets – instead retrace your common ground – and “Don’t give up … Don’t hope it will pass. It WON’T. They will manipulate the people, control the media to sway public opinion, fix the electoral system and STAY FOR GOOD.”
Truly battle-hardened British journalist Carole Cadwalldr’s How to Survive the Broligarchy lists 20 points to the ‘new age of political witch-hunts, where burning at the stake meets data harvesting and online mobs’ known as ‘McMuskism, McCarthyism on steroids, political persecution + Trump + Musk + Silicon Valley + surveillance tools’.
She cites the writer and historian, Tim Snyder, whose book On Tyranny framed Trump 1.0., his key lessons being: ‘Do not obey in advance’, and ‘Know who you are’ – your values, your beliefs, and stick by them – and his own updated version of How to Stop Fascism; American writer Rebecca Solnit, who demands, ‘If they try to normalise, let us try to denormalize’ – hold onto to your norms, values, facts; and historian Jason Stanley, who notes: ‘The most important thing for ordinary people to do is do their jobs with competence. This kind of authoritarianism replaces competence with loyalty, so resisting that is vital.’ Also see the works of Hannah Arendt.
Ian Dunt’s philosophical perspective How to resist the tech overlords surmises ‘Tech is the most intimate product in our lives outside of our underwear,’ summing up the insidious intimacy of our relationship with tech – and Tech’s relationship with the far-right. Avoiding mindlessly handing your soul and future to Bezos and his friends by mindless scrolling is remove your go-to apps (Dunt’s was Instagram) from your browser or homepage – this will slow you down enough for productive privacy to ensue.
The following may be American in orientation but also contain good ideas. Democracy Docket covers the legal scraps and battle over rights and policy shaping America’s elections and democratic institutions for years to come, with 10 Things We Can All Do to Protect Democracy. See also, the New Republic’s Fighting Back: A Citizen’s Guide to Resistance; renowned political analyst and writer Robert Reich’s What you can do; themaskedcowpotato’s list – Help to Protest, Persist, and Resist Dictatorship; and Global Extinction has 15 Examples of Civil Disobedience (Which Have Made a Difference).
There are countless efforts to rally and push back against this onslaught. They’re not done yet, not are we. We can’t be. We simply can’t.
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