"Don’t make things easier for brainless bandits”

As America becomes less free, what do we do?

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I bought a lottery ticket to dream what it would be like if I won, but by the time I got home I had made myself miserable. Normally a dollar buys me a ticket to a fantasy life, but this time I leapt too quickly from penthouses, an electric G Wagon, and a luxury box at Camden Yards to a multi-platform media network to halt our descent into whatever our democracy is turning into, and that’s before starting a Super PAC to get out the youth vote. The Mega Millions jackpot was $977 million on Friday, but almost a billion dollars wasn’t going to be enough. I felt dizzy.

I so desperately want things to get better, but even if I click my heels together and say “There’s no place like home,” I just end up in Kansas where an abortion doctor was assassinated in church and police raided a newspaper office. Reading the news induces the crazymaking normalization of events that would mark the falling of a democratic state if they happened elsewhere, like the assassination of a journalist in Mexico or the death of a political dissident in Russia.

But because they happen here, my brain grabs my understanding of events and flips them over, turning abhorrent into aberrant. As a boy, I was schooled on the horrors of Nazis demanding papers and neighbors turning in neighbors in the Soviet Union. Now, Texas law offers a bounty to snitch on anyone who helps someone cross state lines to terminate a pregnancy. Another Texas law² lets any police officer or sheriff force anyone who looks like they might be in the United States illegally produce documentation proving otherwise. At least the Nazis said, “Bitte.” These things all have a lot in common, but still my brain resorts our flirtations with fascism into a “This isn’t who we really are” bin.

Donald Trump is back in the news again as a current event, giving a focal point to the unmoored experience of being an American now. Two years ago, when Trump’s Chief of Staff John Kelly revealed³ that Trump wished his military leadership treated him like the Nazi generals treated Adolf Hitler, I felt the same about that as I did about a report of a near miss on the runway. Wow, that was close.

But now Trump is cosplaying Hitler, promising to rule like dictators he openly admires and saying immigrants are “poisoning the blood of our country.” The Heritage Foundation is planning a second Trump presidency with Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán, whom Trump hosted a Mar-a-Lago. They don’t even have the good manners to lie to us about what they’re up to. This places the burden of acceptance on us, but I look at this blood & soil reboot, and none of it seems real.

Because if it’s real, I have to do something. But what?

This week, a reader sent this:

So between you and Heather Cox Richardson and Timothy Snyder I am on full red alert. I want to post more stuff, rant at more people that this truly isn’t the time to stop paying attention because it “triggers” you or somehow ruffles your psyche. It’s time to notice that the canary is gasping for breath. So, my question is what besides Hope punk do you suggest your readers, your friends, do?

Grow wings and fly away? Go back to being a teenager when I had all the time and promise in the world and might have done something? More than the lottery ticket, more than the news, this question panicked me. I had zero earthly idea what to say.

That’s a picture of Leonid Volkov, a top aide to Aleksei Navalny, the Russian dissident who died in an Arctic prison in February. Volkov now lives in Vilnius, Lithuania, where he continues Navalny’s work. Earlier this month, he was attacked as he pulled up at his home by a person or persons with a hammer and tear gas. Volkov fought back with his legs and the car door. He ended up in the hospital, but he’s alive.

Christo Grozev, a Bulgarian journalist who exposed the Russian intelligence unit behind a 2020 poisoning of Mr. Navalny in an investigation featured in the Oscar-winning documentary “Navalny,” issued a warning in Russian on X after the attack on Mr. Volkov. “The great terror of a small dictator has begun,” Mr. Grozev said. “Activists, journalists and simply free-thinking people — be careful. Don’t be afraid, but be careful. Don’t make things easier for brainless bandits.”

Be careful.

Don’t be afraid.

Make things harder for them.

Kick.

Good advice, every word, but that wasn’t enough. I needed more answers, and possibly a hammer.

I emailed Charlie Bonner, a political organizer who has been trying to save this democracy longer than I knew it was in peril. He’d know what to do. “Thanks for thinking of me as I'm never not thinking about this,” he answered, offering a three-step process for each of us.

“We need to look back to look forward.” We’ve seen worse and done better before: the Freedom Rides, the farm workers unionizing, and rallying to win DACA for the Dreamers, just for starters. “For every act of evil, every slide towards authorianism, folks have joined together and met the moment with resistance,” writes Charlie. “We need to cozy up with our history of resistance and social movements, learn from their failures, and be rooted in the possibilities that their success inspires.”

“Find small actions to take that you can incorporate into your weekly routine.” Charlie calls this “micro-activism.” The problems of climate change and creeping fascism are so vast they induce inaction. Pick something you’re good at and make it a regular part of your weekly routine.⁴ “I often go back to the JFK quote ‘One person can make a difference and everyone should try,’ writes Charlie. “Now is our time to try.”  

“Democracy will not die in darkness, it will die in the disengagement.” Horror begets hopelessness; hopelessness begets inaction. Inaction begets horror. “We have to call out the bullshit when we see it and attempt to put some hope back into our system,” writes Charlie. “We need to apply our hope punk spirit to our democracy and drown out the chorus of anti-democracy voices with the belief that showing up can and will make a difference.”

When I was registering voters, one of the things that I often tried to remind myself is that every person we help register to vote matters beyond who they vote for. Helping someone vote is more than about the points on the score board at the end of an election cycle. When we help someone vote, we are helping them take autonomy over their own lives. We are helping them buy into the future of their community for themselves and for their family. We are helping people get a sense of place and purpose. That work will always matter. Win, lose, or draw - that work of helping people recognize their own power will matter. It is critical that we never let our burnout or our partisanship blind us from that reality and the purpose of our democracy. 

Be careful.

Don’t be afraid.

Make things harder for them.

Kick.

Remember when we’ve won before.

Do something small regularly.

And shove hope back into the system.

Better, but still not enough. Something’s still missing.

I emailed Stoic philosopher Ryan Holiday, who replied, “Oh man, I really don't know. Tyler Cowen's joke is how we all claim things are about to get really bad but none of us are shorting the market.”

But will the market crash along with our democracy? For most of us, unless we’re pregnant, brown-skinned, or otherwise marked for persecution, won’t the temptations to lower our eyes and carry on come with commensurate rewards for doing so? I think often how easy it will be to accommodate worsened conditions in the name of survival only to one day find myself collaborating. I’d make an excuse, telling myself I was only going through the motions, but inside where it counted I was staying true to myself.

“The thing about collaborators is that you don’t know you are one whereas as a member of the resistance, you do,” wrote the late Paul Virilio. “[In WWII,] the worst cases of collaboration weren’t among the real collaborators, that official militia, but among the people at large, who were collaborators without knowing it, by a sort of laxity, an apathy.”

Virilio wrote that in a book called Pure War, which he said humanity is fighting against technology, but that rings true for our current political situation, as does this: “All of us are already civilian soldiers, without knowing it.”  

I ran across a scrap of a poem called “There It Is” by Jayne Cortez this week:

And if we don't fight
if we don't resist
if we don't organize and unify 
and get the power to control our own lives
Then we will wear
the exaggerated look of captivity
the stylized look of submission
the bizarre look of suicide 
the dehumanized look of fear
and the decomposed look of repression
forever and ever and ever
And there it is

Be careful.

Don’t be afraid.

Make things harder for them.

Kick.

Remember when we’ve won before.

Do something small regularly.

And shove hope back into the system.

Choose not to collaborate.

Choose to fight.

Remember that you’re part of an army.

OK, I feel like we’re getting really close, and if we stopped here we’d be fine. But fine isn’t what we’re looking for, is it? And there’s still something missing. Something important. Maybe it’ll come to me.

On Friday night, S and I had a disappointing dinner at a try-hard speakeasy in an upscale strip mall, followed by a perfect visit to a Baskin Robbins in an upscale neighborhood. When we walked in, a small blonde girl holding an ice cream cone was dancing and laughing with her reflection in the mirrored surface below the glassed-in rows of cartons of ice cream. Reader, I’m telling you that when I saw her I stopped in my tracks and gasped. No one on the world was enjoying their life more than she at that moment.

Her grandmother, worried about her car’s upholstery, offered her a dish for her cone. “Don’t,” I said, stupidly not minding my own business but understandably transfixed by this child. “She’s perfect.” I meant that she was obviously displaying mastery of cone mechanics while wiggling about, but the same went for her. She was perfect.

I woke up the next day without having been magically transformed by fortune. I continue now in my stubbornly ordinary way, worrying over bathroom scales and bank accounts. Tomorrow I get to draft players for my fantasy baseball team, the Merrick Garlands, and starting next week I get to root for my Baltimore Orioles, loving on them like my own sons. Even as bad as things are likely get this year, there will still be baseball. There will be date nights. There will still be adorable little children dancing with their ice cream cones.

Be careful.

Don’t be afraid.

Make things harder for them.

Kick.

Remember when we’ve won before.

Do something small regularly.

And shove hope back into the system.

Choose not to collaborate.

Choose to fight.

Remember that you’re part of an army.

Keep doing what brings you joy.

The Mega Millions jackpot is up to $1.1 billion. The drawing is on Tuesday night, which means if I buy a ticket today, then I can spend the whole weekend dreaming.

This time, I’ll do it right. This time, I will choose to be happy.

Jason Stanford is a co-author of NYT-best selling Forget the Alamo: The Rise and Fall of an American Myth. His bylines have appeared in the Washington Post, Time, and Texas Monthly, among others. Follow him on Threads at @jasonstanford, or email him at jason31170@gmail.com.

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1. But isn’t any group of people technically a Sarah Bird Fan Club, like a group of baboons is a congress and any group of college-educated white men is a podcast?

2. SB 4 is going to be reviewed by the Supreme Court and is currently not in effect pending a ruling.

3. https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2022/08/donald-trump-military-generals-adolf-hitler

One day, irate that his generals weren’t treating him with the level of respect he thought he deserved, Trump complained to his then chief of staff, John Kelly: “You fucking generals, why can’t you be like the German generals?” Curious, perhaps given the president’s disdain for Berlin and Europe in general, Kelly probed further. “Which generals?” he asked. “The German generals in World War II,” Trump reportedly responded. “You do know that they tried to kill Hitler three times and almost pulled it off?” Kelly told him.

4. I am going to handwrite notes to non-voters in blue neighborhoods, I think. Who can get me a list?