You Might Be OK

Guest Opinion

Assuming you’re white, a U.S. citizen, not gay, trans, disabled, or autistic, not a liberal activist or critical journalist, not a judge who’s issued a ruling unfavorable to Trump, not a migrant, legal or otherwise, not the child of a migrant, not a tourist, not on Trump’s enemies list, not a political rival, don’t have the wrong tattoo, and you’ve never protested against the war in Gaza, the odds are you’ll be alright.

You probably won’t be grabbed by men in masks, handcuffed, whisked away in an unmarked van, and sent to a concentration camp in another country, and you probably won’t need to hire a lawyer to find out where the masked men have taken your spouse or child. No guarantees, though.

If you’re a female of child-bearing age, your odds are lower. If you have a miscarriage, you could be arrested if someone thinks it was due to something you did, or that you didn’t give the fetal remains a proper burial. Getting or seeking an abortion, or assisting someone else in doing so, will probably be out of the question if you want to stay out of trouble.

There will be inconveniences. The circle of friends in whose presence you’re willing to say something critical of the government will shrink. That knot you get in your stomach when you see a police car in your rearview mirror will get worse. Your heart may race when someone knocks on your door. You might start carrying your passport, if you have one, so you can prove citizenship (assuming the men in masks care). You may stop watching the news, purposely choosing not to know what’s going on. History teachers will have to scrub their lesson plans of forbidden topics.

You may be further inconvenienced if you work for or rely on a government department or program that has been or will be eliminated or cut back: DEI programs of course, and FEMA, the VA, FAA, CDC, National Weather Service, Department of Education, Social Security Administration, and National Park Service, plus medical research, Medicaid, Medicare, SNAP, etc.

Economically, it doesn’t look great if you’re not a one percenter. Economists say prices will rise, many shelves will be empty, and lots of businesses will be hurt by the tariffs and the chaos as Trump changes direction every other day. Businesses that export products to foreign countries (including many farms and factories) will be hurt if the trade wars continue and retaliatory tariffs destroy their overseas markets. Those that rely on migrant labor may face a labor shortage. Your 401(k), if you have one, may or may not be OK.

For most folks, though, daily life will continue to consist of going to work, raising the kids, paying the bills, running errands, indulging in a bit of recreation on the weekends, and so on. As Ernst Fraenkel explained decades ago in The Dual State, (and as Aziz Huq recounts in “A Warning Out of Time” in the May issue of The Atlantic) authoritarians usually don’t totally dismantle the existing system of laws and norms.

Instead, they build what Fraenkel called a “prerogative state,” a space in which the leader “exercises unlimited arbitrariness and violence unchecked by any legal guarantees,” next to the “normative state” in which the usual procedures and rules apply, allowing life to hum along pretty much as before for most citizens.

Many good people tolerate that situation since they believe that neither they nor their loved ones will be denied due process or subjected to state sponsored violence, and that in any case the risks of speaking out are too high. So they keep their heads down, their mouths shut, and their eyes closed.

What ultimately brings down many authoritarian regimes, other than gross executive overreach, is that they value loyalty to the leader over competence and honesty, and the knuckleheads and grifters they put in charge eventually drive the country into a ditch. In other words, we’re all human; we tend to get involved only when we’re personally and seriously affected. If others are mistreated, those capable of empathy feel bad about it, but they hope someone else will come along to fix it.

But hope isn’t a strategy. Ultimately, the fate of a nation rests in the hands of its citizens, provided they have the inclination and courage to act. In the words of Ece Temelkuran, author of How to Lose a Country, The 7 Steps from Democracy to Dictatorship about the rise of Recep Erdoğan in Turkey: “There is no hope. There is us. That’s it.”

That ought to be enough. According to research done by Erica Chenoweth at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard, nonviolent anti-authoritarian movements usually succeed when the number of folks actively participating reaches 3.5 percent of the population. In the US that’s around 12 million people.

Considering the burgeoning network of pro-democracy grassroots organizations, the growing turnout for rallies and demonstrations, the latest poll numbers, and the roastings congressmen have gotten at town hall meetings, it’s looking like “we the people” are up to the task.

Tom Gutowski holds a BA in Economics and a PhD in History.

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