In this extremely interesting post, Anchor Light Publications consults artificial Intelligence about the origins and plans for the current US authoritarian takeover, and what to do about it. This is my reaction.
It's interesting that the AI said "This has been actively underway for about 50 years." As Heather Cox Richardson often writes, the quest for minority rule in the US is as old as our country, and in the larger context is as old as "civilization." The Confederates suffered a setback when they lost the civil war. They suffered another with the New Deal, and others with the Civil Rights and Voting Rights acts and the Clean Air, Clean Water, and National Environmental Policy acts. Since then, throughout my adult life they have been gaining ascendancy, but once again their overreach, cruelty, infighting, unpopularity, and competitive weakness versus a more democratic and egalitarian society contain the seeds of their undoing. There is no guarantee those seeds will flourish and bear fruit, and if they do the oligarchs will try again. But it is clear that "this" is only the most recent cycle of a perpetual class struggle. That said, the exposition (or maybe hallucination?) of this cycle's players and tactics is very interesting. So few key players! Architects and funders. Plans now in the open. "Ideas design it. Money sustains it. Courts lock it in. Media protects it. Politicians perform it. Figureheads distract from it" sounds about right, as does the warning to a Supreme Court "trading long-term institutional survival for short-term ideological entrenchment."
Understanding what's happening is necessary but not sufficient, so I focus on the more actionable parts of the essay/dialog:
Only three things ever work this late:
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Raising the cost of authoritarian participation. When judges fear legitimacy collapse, politicians fear electoral wipeout, donors fear financial and reputational loss, and corporations fear consumer and labor backlash, behavior changes. Not morals. Incentives.
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Mass alignment outside elite control. Sustained civic pressure, electoral turnout at overwhelming scale, labor and institutional resistance, and refusal to normalize illegal or illegitimate acts. Authoritarianism fails when it cannot function smoothly.
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Elite defection under duress. Elites defect only when the alternative becomes worse; when legitimacy erodes faster than control grows, economic consequences appear, international isolation increases, and internal fractures widen. They don’t defect early. They defect when staying becomes dangerous.
Mass protest alone is not sufficient. It only works when institutions respond to it.
If democracy survives in the United States, it will not be because powerful people decided to save it, but because enough Americans made authoritarianism too costly to complete.
Then the author goes off the rails, in my opinion. Instead of asking more about how to save democracy, they ask how individuals can "survive" "competitive authoritarianism." This is not completely wrong, in the same way that it's not wrong to ask what we must do to adapt to climate change. But I hear McKibben in my head, responding to the question "What can I, as an individual, do to combat climate change?" with the answer "Be less of an individual!" I think it's premature to act now as if an authoritarian takeover is (like climate change) a given. I do not "assume competitive authoritarianism becomes the norm!" Some of the preparations and behaviors for individual "survival" largely constitute obedience in advance and are incompatible with the actions (i.e. "sustained civic pressure" and "labor and institutional resistance") required to prevent authoritarianism from becoming the norm.
I don't suggest that everyone set themselves up for martyrdom. It's reasonable that there be a Plan B for an underground resistance in case our worst fears are realized. Younger people with families, in particular, may want to plan for that. But for my part, as a privileged "white" man, without dependents, living off retirement savings, I shall act from curiosity, not fear, to improve life for all. I sat out past struggles for equality. I had a comfortable life full of self-gratification. I'm going to die -- ultimately, there is no safety or security to be had in any system, locale, or time. There is no "survival." Secrecy does not suit me. Besides, it's probably already too late for me to fly under the radar.
There is some overlap between resistance and "survival," so perhaps it's not entirely either/or. Local collective action, community resilience, and bringing our networks into "mass alignment" seem like elements of both strategies, perhaps with different levels of visibility and exposure for differently-participating individuals.
I note in passing the irony of consulting an oracle about how to resist or survive its creators! How much longer before it becomes purely a tool for the systematic propaganda that its current iteration warns of? Probably not very, given how Grok speaks of Musk!
Finally, the author leaves unasked more fundamental philosophical and metaphysical questions about what makes individuals and populations susceptible to the kinds of manipulations being employed by these elite conspirators, and how to immunize ourselves. If we are fearful instead of curious, if we hold shame instead of self-compassion, if we adhere to a sense of separate "self" confined inside a human skin, if our trauma outweighs our healing -- then we are likely to capitulate and cooperate with a ruling minority or dictator. "Cruelty is the point" in perpetrating trauma to fragment us. Healing and awakening to our true connected nature are ultimately what it will take to gain immunity from these cycles of oppression and revolution.
