A violent season of "self-terrorism" ahead?

It's easy to dismiss Timothy Snyder as some kind of windy crank. But if you go beyond reading his Substack and attend to his enormous body of legitimate academic work (in particular Thinking the Twentieth Century with the late lamented Tony Judt; Bloodlands, a survey of the fraught tale of Central Europe; Black Earth, a survey of the Holocaust across European lands; his Yale University introductory course on Ukraine which he made publicly available) you are encountering someone who knows whereof he speaks.

In this time of Trump's attempted consolidation of power over these United States, Snyder uses his understanding of history to assess our possible trajectories. He sees rising MAGA violence as Trump's power is thwarted by its own stupidity and is visibly reduced by his infirmities. He is worth listening to: 

... If we follow the logic of 1938 to 1939, Trump needs a victorious land war to complete authoritarian regime change at home. But if he tried to fight such a war he would very likely experience a series of humiliations. If he talked about why he was fighting such a war he would get lost in a tangle: supporting democracy in Venezuela by force while opposing it in America by force is not a position that makes sense or would generate popularity. It is certainly possible that American pressure will serve as an element of a campaign that will cause Maduro to leave. But that outcome, desirable in itself, will have zero political effect in the United States.
 
In short, whatever actually happens in Venezuela, it will not bring Trump the political magic of a quick land war, like Hitler’s in Poland in 1939 or France in 1940. So as we hover amidst the striking similarities to autumn 1938, we might see a difference. The Trump people might be stuck. The Nazis saw the limitations of violence within their own country, and advanced their atrocities by fighting a foreign war.

Without that option, this administration will likely fall back into a cycle of needing (and therefore generating) violence at home. The autumn of 1938, or the autumn of 2025, must be conjured up over and over again. The sequence of weakness, provocation and violence must continue until it works.

Snyder insists we need a novel label for what we are likely to experience:

Its way forward to regime change is what we might call self-terrorism. By this I have in mind a new path to authoritarian regime change, one in which incompetence and dysfunctionality are retooled as a weird and bloody political opportunity. In other words, some of the factors that make a successful foreign war unlikely push towards the strategy of inviting turmoil into the United States and then seeking to use it.

Self-terrorism means dropping one’s guard, provoking others inside and outside one’s own country, waiting for the act of terror, and then exploiting it. The Trump administration has indeed removed barriers to terrorism, thereby creating the conditions for attacks on and within the United States. The resulting violence against one’s own people, can then be used as a pretext to further oppress them. The FBI is gutted and demoralised, its agents away on irrelevant border missions, its counterterrorism capacity diminished. Homeland Security no longer keeps up its database on domestic terrorism. The Department of Defense has disbanded its relevant digital service. Cyber defense as such has essentially been abandoned. The US has been made vulnerable.

If the idea of self-terrorism seems far-fetched, consider some simple tests.

How does the Trump administration react to political killings and domestic terrorism? Does it revive the agencies meant to stop it? No, it does not. Does it speak of fictional conspiracies and blame whole groups, thereby provoking further turmoil and creating a pretext for oppressing Americans? Yes, it does. Does it invite violent responses by escalating the militarization of cities --deploying more troops to DC and also deploying new troops to another city, New Orleans? Yes, it does. 

As the Trump administration uses the horrible attack on troops in Washington to accelerate creeping authoritarianism, we have a terrible confirmation as to why those men and women were deployed in the first place.

Trump and his ghoulish acolytes -- Miller, Vought, Noem, Gabbard, JFK Jr. -- want violence against Americans to justify their seizure of unconstitutional power.

Self-terrorism need not work. We can be alert to the use of the undocumented as an emotional key to a politics of us and them. We can be aware that special forces initially tasked with deportation can evolve into a racial police organization on a national scale. We can see that the opportunistic exploitation of violence is a predictable part of this brand of politics.

The past never repeats, but it does instruct -- and it instructs everyone. The people who want authoritarianism in America know that seizing on the emotions around political belonging can lead to turmoil and regime change. And the people who want democracy in America can see the pattern and halt. Simply being aware of all this is a big part of success. ...

Aspiring American authoritarians will only win if they are allowed to do so. None of this has to happen. Both of these terrible possibilities, land war and self-terrorism, are signs of weakness rather than strength. They can be prevented, but only if we name them, and use their horror as the first step to describe something much better. 

Snyder is attempting to name the assault the Trumpians are mounting on our country. He prescribes mass, non-violent resistance which asserts our rejection of bloody fantasies. For most of us, this is still a country which is capable of being good.

We don't have to go where they want us to go..