by John Ambrosio
In a recent speech at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Mark Carney, the prime minister of Canada, drew on a paper written by the renowned Czech dissident, and later president, Václav Havel that discussed how totalitarian regimes, like the former Soviet Union, seek to control the population by providing individuals with an “ideological excuse” that enables them to conceal from themselves their silent capitulation, in the face of real and threatened state repression, in order to avoid the shame and indignity of having their obedience to the regime exposed.
In The Power of the Powerless, Havel used the example of a greengrocer who put a sign with an official slogan in his shop window to illustrate how totalitarian regimes seek to control and manipulate the population. Havel wrote that “the sign helps the greengrocer to conceal from himself the low foundations of his obedience, at the same time concealing the low foundations of power. It hides them behind the façade of something high. And that something high is ideology. It is a veil behind which human beings can hide their own fallen existence, their trivialization, and their adaptation to the status quo,” an “excuse that everyone can use” to maintain an “illusory identity, dignity, and morality,” to “live within a lie.”
As the Italian Marxist theorist Antonio Gramsci argued, in capitalist systems with highly developed civil societies the ruling class exercises power through a combination of force and consent. That is, it achieves hegemony through coercion and state violence, and by obtaining the passive or active consent of the masses of people by exercising moral and intellectual leadership. Hegemony is never complete or final and must be continually reproduced, which is why authoritarian regimes strenuously repress criticism of their ideological excuses, of the official stories people tell themselves about themselves, one another, and the nation that enable them to conceal from themselves their obedience to the regime. For most people, avoiding the shame of having their accommodation to the regime exposed is a powerful motivational force.
I would argue that Trump and his MAGA allies are experiencing a kind of legitimation crisis that has weakened their political power, given the complete absence, or even the pretense, of needing to provide people who are not his core supporters with “something high” to conceal their adaptation to the administration’s lawlessness and sadistic cruelty.
In place of ideological excuses, such as the meritocracy to justify extreme inequality at home, and American exceptionalism to legitimize military interventionism abroad, Trumpism substitutes a constant stream of lies, disinformation, and conspiracy theories. While these false narratives are uncritically absorbed by his base, they leave others, who do not inhabit Trump’s alternate reality and whose political support is more tenuous, without a way to conceal “their own fallen existence” from themselves.
As Masha Gessen and others have pointed out, individuals need not believe the lies and mystifications, only act as if they do, or simply tolerate them in silence. While individuals need not accept the lie, they are nonetheless expected to publicly perform their adherence to it. What is different today is Trump’s view that the exercise of state power is no longer in need of ideological excuses, that he possesses a king-like divine right to do as he pleases, unconstrained by norms or law, which people must simply accept as legitimate. While Trump’s staunchest supporters in the MAGA movement do not need the false justifications, those in the outer rings of his political universe, many of whom are young, racially diverse, low information, and low propensity voters, are left without a way to rationalize their support or indifference to his gangster authoritarianism, which relies on thinly veiled and coded threats, bullying, extortion, and extreme violence to achieve its political objectives.
In this sense, Trump’s remarkable openness and transparency about his illegal, unconstitutional, and corrupt practices, his penchant for saying the quiet part out loud, makes it more difficult for less partisan Republicans and Republican-leaning independents to hide their adaptation to the regime from themselves. What is a source of political strength in relation to his most ardent supporters can be a significant weakness for voters who are not securely on board the MAGA train, as the recent gubernatorial elections in Virginia and New Jersey demonstrate. Being open and unapologetic about his bigotry and lawbreaking, and offering only implausible and easily refutable narratives to justify his actions, makes it exceedingly difficult for Trump to assemble a stable political coalition.
Some might argue that it’s better that Trump dispenses with the need to provide ideological excuses that give people a way to accommodate themselves to his lawlessness, to carry on with their everyday lives. Telegraphing his thinking and intentions gives Trump’s political opponents a heads-up and an opportunity to prepare for what’s coming. But by not seeking to obscure or hide his crimes, Trump normalizes his criminal behavior, makes it appear as if his lawlessness is just business as usual, no big deal. If they were crimes, why would Trump repeatedly talk about them in public?
The failure to provide individuals with a means to avoid the shame of having their complicity with Trump’s crimes exposed means he must increasingly rely on fear and intimidation, on the use of coercion and force, which will lead to a further weakening of his political support, as was made clear by Trump’s declining approval ratings on immigration in the wake of the murders of Renee Good and Alex Pretti by ICE and CBP agents in Minneapolis after videos of the shootings that circulated widely on social media and elsewhere contradicted the official story.
Trump’s political strategy, which depends primarily on the unflinching support of a cultish base of loyal voters is unlikely to succeed, although he will have done a lot of long-term damage to the country in the meantime. As Gramsci argues, like other liberal democracies in the West, the U.S. developed “a sturdy structure of civil society” that constitutes “a powerful system of fortresses and earthworks”, a kind of firewall, that makes it exceedingly difficult for Trump and his MAGA allies to consolidate an authoritarian takeover of the country. This is the case, despite the fact that much of the mass media is controlled by a few oligarchs and large corporations, the judiciary is dominated by a rouge MAGA-friendly Supreme Court, and elites in some major law, firms, universities, and media organizations capitulated to Trump’s threats and extortion.
Nearly half of the U.S. electorate identify as independents. While the overwhelming majority of them lean toward one of the major parties, about 9% of these unaffiliated voters demonstrate a pattern of voting behavior that is unstable and inconsistent, and are potentially up for grabs. In a nearly evenly divided electorate, these potential swing voters can determine the outcome of a close national election, along with anti-Trump and establishment Republicans.
The point is not that Trump’s inherent political weakness will necessarily lead to his electoral defeat, given the Republican Party’s success in limiting access to the ballot and controlling the administration of elections in many Republican-led states, but that his attempt to control the country through fear, intimidation, and the random use of force has become increasingly necessary and politically problematic.
Absent significant popular support or widely accepted ideological excuses, which white Christian Nationalism does not provide for the majority of voters, Trump’s gangster authoritarianism will require a continual ratcheting up of threats of violence and actual violence. The purpose of engaging in extreme and unaccountable violence is not only to shock and terrorize the population, but to normalize the brutality, to condition people to accept state violence as an ordinary aspect of everyday life.
Despite the growing unpopularity of how immigration laws are being enforced, and public revulsion at the brutality and murderous violence of Homeland Security agents, Trump will likely respond to declining public support by doubling down on intimidation and state repression to advance his political agenda, since there is no other plausible path open to him. His abject indifference to acknowledging, much less seriously addressing, the concerns of people who did not support him, leaves Trump little choice but to push ahead, despite the negative electoral consequences for the Republican Party.
While Trump ostensibly cares little about public opinion, it turns out that the forces of political gravity have not been completely suspended, that elections still matter, which is why Trump and his MAGA allies have pursued numerous strategies in Republican-led states to disenfranchise potential Democratic voters by limiting access to the ballot and putting loyalists in control of who counts and verifies election results. If necessary, they are prepared to steal the election through bogus claims of voter fraud and foreign interference, and by manipulating the vote.
In an effort to further tilt the political playing field in their favor, the Republican majority in the House recently passed the Save America Act which would mandate in-person voter registration and require a birth certificate, passport, or certain state-issued forms of identification that match your current name, so that people without access to these documents, including married women who took their husband’s name, would be unable to register to vote. It would also allow the Department of Homeland Security to seize state voter rolls in order to challenge and preemptively remove potential Democratic voters. Although the bill is unlikely to pass the Senate, and will have the unintended effect of disenfranchising many Republican voters as well, the political motivation of the legislation is clear.
Trump might also seek to instill fear and terror, and scare off potential Democratic voters by stationing ICE and CBP agents near polling stations in some blue cities and states, by flooding the zone with his paramilitary force of Brownshirts, and by deploying National Guard troops or other military units in highly contested congressional districts. Trump is still obsessed with overturning the results of the 2020 presidential election, which is why he had the FBI seize ballots in Fulton County, Georgia and Maricopa County, Arizona. But he may also be previewing another strategy to overturn the midterm elections, if Republicans lose. Although Trump was persuaded against it in 2020, he wanted the military to seize voting machines after the election based on false claims of widespread fraud, foreign interference, and software tampering.
Like European fascism, Trump’s mafia-state authoritarianism celebrates the naked exercise of state power by an omnipotent strongman, the unapologetic use of violence against its perceived enemies, and the triumph of emotion and action over reason and deliberation. But in the absence of significant popular support for his Project 2025-inspired political agenda, his unconstitutional war of choice against Iran, and his increasing reliance on fear, intimidation, and state violence to control the population, the MAGA movement may have reached its political limits.
In the end, MAGA Republicans simply cannot conceive of ceding power to their perceived enemies, who they do not see as legitimate, as having the right to exercise power. They will do everything possible, whether or not it violates the law, to ensure that they are not defeated in the midterm elections. Trump has repeatedly signaled his intention to strenuously contest the results in the courts, if Republicans lose, with spurious claims of nonexistent voter fraud and may petition Republican-led states, as he did in 2020, to delay certification of election results in order to create chaos and confusion, and to further undermine public confidence in elections.
A blue wave of significant strength, of at least five percent of the electorate, would make it much more difficult for Republicans to steal the election by claiming fraud and could nullify some of the electoral advantages they gained through midterm partisan gerrymandering. By assuming that people who voted Republican in the previous election cycle are likely do so again, and moving some of them from more solidly Republican seats to newly created congressional districts, especially in heavily Hispanic areas, their redistricting strategy could wind up backfiring. It remains to be seen how consistent and reliable these Republican voters are.
The conflict between pro-democracy forces and Trumpian authoritarianism will likely continue for the foreseeable future, given the extreme political polarization of the country. Every national election will teeter on a political knife’s edge, given the nearly evenly divided electorate, with the potential to swing sharply between two opposing conceptions of American society in which each side views the other as an existential threat to their core values, beliefs, and way of life. This situation will likely persist until a new political order emerges from the ashes of neoliberalism, which is not yet on the horizon.
Until then, we are in for an extended period of political upheaval and instability. The random and brutal use of force in Minneapolis, Los Angeles, Chicago and elsewhere is not a bug, but a central feature of how Trump intends to rule the country, by punishing people who did not vote for him, to make them feel alone, helpless, and unprotected in the context of an increasingly lawless federal government.
Without the political cover of an ideological excuse, and no desire to persuade his political opponents, Trump has little choice but to continually dial up the cruelty and violence with the expectation that his perceived enemies will eventually capitulate, as have some tech elites in Silicon Valley, and major law firms, universities, and media organizations, with CBS and the Washington Post most recently bending the knee. CNN, which was purchased by David Ellison, the same Trump ally who acquired CBS, will likely follow suit.
While human beings have an extraordinary capacity for denial and self-delusion, for “living within a lie,” especially when their economic and physical security are at stake, there are always people who are less susceptible to threats and intimidation, who are less willing or able to lead an inauthentic life. Such people always pose a threat to authoritarian regimes that rely on obedience and ideological conformity to control the population. As the unprecedented No Kings protests and the fierce resistance of people in Los Angeles, Chicago, and Minneapolis and elsewhere to the violent invasion and occupation of their cities demonstrates, such people constitute a significant and growing portion of the U.S. population and electorate.
People who refuse to capitulate to Trump’s gangster authoritarianism do not have to constitute a majority of the population to succeed. According to Erica Chenoweth, a political scientist at Harvard University, a relatively small percentage of the population, as little as about 3.5%, that actively participates in nonviolent resistance can bring about significant political change. This is not an iron law of history but a tendency that depends on other factors, such as “momentum, organization, strategic leadership, and sustainability.” There are no guarantees. Although peaceful resistance is twice as likely as armed conflict to succeed, it still fails around 47% of the time. Meeting the threshold for significant political change in the U.S. would require about 12 million people to become actively engaged in nonviolent resistance.
Trump demands that people repeatedly perform their loyalty to him without the cover of an ideological excuse, to accept his unrestrained and lawless exercise of political, economic, and military power as inherently justifiable, as the natural order of things, as the rightful domination of the weak by the strong. Stephen Miller, Trump’s deputy White House chief of staff, summed up this view in an interview with Jake Tapper on CNN: “We live in the real world, Jake, that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power. These are the iron laws of the world since the beginning of time.”
As others have pointed out, a key flaw and political weakness of the purveyors of Trumpism is their belief that everyone is more or less like them, corrupt, mendacious, and transactional, but only pretend to be otherwise. This false assumption relies on the belief that everyone has a price and can be bribed, bought off, or bullied, that liberal notions of fairness and social justice are just ideological cover for exercising the baser instincts that drive all human behavior. They simply cannot imagine a world in which truth, virtue, ethics, and ideals motivate people, in which people are willing to risk their lives for the benefit of others.
The “morally depraved” Homeland Security agents in Minneapolis and elsewhere are finding out otherwise, that there are many people who refuse to “live within a lie” and perform loyalty rituals, who will not succumb to threats and murderous state repression, and who will put their lives at risk to protect their neighbors. It turns out that the “suckers and losers” who refuse to be like them are the real heroes in America.
Is the rest of the country like Minneapolis? Clearly not. But pro-democracy forces do not need the entire country to respond to violent state repression as the courageous people of Minneapolis have, only enough to bring the gears of repression to a grinding halt. As Mario Savio said at a sit-in at Sproul Hall on the Berkeley campus of the University of California in 1964 during the Free Speech Movement:
“There’s a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart that you can’t take part. You can’t even passively take part. And you’ve got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus — and you’ve got to make it stop. And you’ve got to indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it — that unless you’re free the machine will be prevented from working at all.”
That time has arrived. It’s our turn to put our bodies on the gears, on the wheels, of this brutalizing and murderous MAGA machine. Trump’s authoritarian blitzkrieg, his attempt to overwhelm the institutions of American society with a shock and awe campaign, to remake the nation in his own grotesque image, is running out of time. As Jamelle Bouie wrote, to succeed Trump “had to consolidate the new authoritarian regime before the opposition could get its footing and before the broader public could react to the transformation.” While it took some time, the public has awakened to the reality of the Trump presidency. In what at first appeared to be a potential rout of pro-democracy forces, has now become an existential fight for the future of the country as Trump’s mafia-state authoritarianism crashes up against “the powerful system of fortresses and earthworks” of U.S. civil society.
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