I particularly noticed in this telling who the MAGAs with guns seem to be: angry, hurt, middle-aged and older white men who live in proximity with growing populations of neighbors of color. Sure sounds like too many of the men I used to work adjacent to when I worked in construction.
It's not easy to see what most individuals can do beyond the obvious: help win fair elections for candidates who support democracy and combine with like-minded others to defend them. Before the 2020 vote, organized labor and community groups developed a plan to defend the vote. Good. We can be there as needed.
But there are more angles to understanding our danger than Gellman's alert reaches. I want to highlight two such.
In the Washington Monthly (no pay wall), David Atkins reminds democracy defenders that we are the majority.
Democracy’s defenders have an advantage: They do, in fact, represent the majority of America and are also the main drivers of the country’s culture and economy. Blue counties produce more than 70 percent of America’s GDP. U.S. cities—overwhelmingly blue—are responsible for the vast majority of the country’s cultural and economic output. Blue states are overwhelmingly donors to the states that despise them and seek to disenfranchise them. The nation’s most successful companies are typically located in ultra-liberal areas. And the country is becoming more diverse and more urban every day. Americans under 40 are overwhelmingly progressive. This is the present and future of America.
Successful fascist movements and authoritarian coups generally require not only a fervent base of cruel, fundamentalist backers. They also need the support, cooperation, and acquiescence of social elites. Most of all, they need the public to roll over and go along with it.
If the Republican Party decides to declare victory by selecting conservative electors even when they lose, change the rules to ensure that they never lose again per the Hungarian model, and allow a Republican president unchecked dictatorial powers—all of which are not only possible but, in fact, likely outcomes within just the next few years—it will actually be doing so from a position of weakness.
That intuition of their own weakness is part of what the MAGAs are so mad about.
And wisewoman Rebecca Solnit reminds at least half the population that, in a sense which is heightened by the Supreme Court's assault on legal abortions, we've been here before if we choose to notice.
Appeasement didn’t work in the 1930s and it won’t work now. That doesn’t mean that people have to be angry or hate back or hostile, but it does mean they have to stand on principle and defend what’s under attack. There are situations in which there is no common ground worth standing on, let alone hiking over to. If Nazis wanted to reach out and find common ground and understand us, they probably would not have had that tiki-torch parade full of white men bellowing “Jews will not replace us” and, also, they would not be Nazis. Being Nazis, white supremacists, misogynists, transphobes is all part of a project of refusing to understand as part of refusing to respect. ...
... What do you do with people who think they matter more than other people? Catering to them reinforces that belief, that they are central to the nation’s life, they are more important, and their views must prevail. Deference to intolerance feeds intolerance.
... This is what marriages were before feminism, with the abused wife urged to placate and soothe the furious husband. Feminism is good for everything, and it’s a good model for seeing that this is both outrageous and a recipe for failure. It didn’t work in marriages, and it never was the abused partner’s job to prevent the abuse by surrendering ground and rights and voice. It is not working as national policy either. Now is an excellent time to stand on principle and defend what we value, and I believe it’s a winning strategy too, or at least brings us closer to winning than surrender does. Also, it’s worth repeating, we won, and being gracious in victory is still being victorious.
"Being gracious in victory" is indeed of required of us should that option be available. How wearing, but true.
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