Look around, take stock of where you are, and know this: Today, right now—and I mean right this second—you have the most power you’ll ever have in the current fight against authoritarianism in America. If this sounds dramatic to you, it should. Over the past five months, in many hours of many conversations with multiple people who have lived under dictators and autocrats, one message came through loud and clear: America, you are running out of time.
People sometimes call the descent into authoritarianism a “slide,” but that makes it sound gradual and gentle. Maria Ressa, the journalist who earned the Nobel Peace Prize for her attempts to save freedom of expression in the Philippines, told me that what she experienced during the presidency of Rodrigo Duterte is now, with startling speed and remarkable similarity, playing out in the United States under Donald Trump. Her country’s democratic struggles are highly instructive. And her message to me was this: Authoritarian leaders topple democracy faster than you can imagine. If you wait to speak out against them, you have already lost.
Shortly after Trump was reelected last fall, I called Ressa to ask her how she thought Americans should prepare for his return. She told me then that she worried about a failure of imagination. She knew that the speed of the destruction of institutions—one of the first steps an authoritarian takes to solidify and centralize power—would surprise people here, even those paying the closest attention. Ressa splits her time between Manila and New York, and she repeatedly warned me to be ready for everything to happen quickly. When we spoke again weeks after his inauguration, Ressa was shaken. President Trump was moving faster than even she had anticipated.
I heard something similar recently from Garry Kasparov, the Russian dissident and chess grand master. To him, the situation was obvious. America is running out of time, he told me. As Kasparov wrote recently in this magazine, “If this sounds alarmist, forgive me for not caring. Exactly 20 years ago, I retired from professional chess to help Russia resist Putin’s budding dictatorship. People were slow to grasp what was happening there too.”
The chorus of people who have lived through democratic ruin will all tell you the same thing: Do not make the mistake of assuming you still have time. Put another way: You think you can wait and see, and keep democracy intact? Wanna bet? Those who have seen democracy wrecked in their home country are sometimes derided as overly pessimistic—and it’s understandable that they’d have a sense of inevitability about the dangers of autocracy. But that gloomy worldview does not make their warnings any less credible: Unless Trump’s power is checked, and soon, things will get much worse very quickly. When people lose their freedoms, it can take a generation or more to claw them back—and that’s if you’re lucky.
The Trump administration’s breakneck pace is obviously no accident. While citizens are busy processing their shock over any one shattered norm or disregarded law, Trump is already on to the next one. This is the playbook authoritarians have used all over the world: First the leader removes those with expertise and independent thinking from the government and replaces them with leaders who are arrogant, ignorant, and extremely loyal. Next he takes steps to centralize his power and claim unprecedented authority. Along the way, he conducts an all-out assault on the truth so that the truth tellers are distrusted, corruption becomes the norm, and questioning him becomes impossible. The Constitution bends and then finally breaks. This is what tyrants do. Trump is doing it now in the United States.
In the Philippines, it took about six months under Duterte for democratic institutions to crumble. In the United States, the overreach in executive power and the destruction of federal agencies that Ressa told me she figured would have kept Trump busy through, say, the end of the summer were carried out in the first 30 days of his presidency. Even so, what people don’t always realize is that a dictator doesn’t seize control all at once. “The death of democracy happens by a thousand cuts,” Ressa told me recently. “And you don’t realize how badly you’re bleeding until it’s too late.” Another thing the people who have lived under authoritarian rule will tell you: It’s not just that it can get worse. It will.
Americans who are waiting for Trump to cross some imaginary red line neglect the fact that they have more leverage to defend American democracy today than they will tomorrow, or next week, or next month. While people are still debating whether to call it authoritarianism or fascism, Trump is seizing control of one independent agency after another. (And for what it’s worth, the smartest scholars I know have told me that what Trump is trying to do in America is now textbook facism—beyond the authoritarian impulses of his first term. Take, for example, his administration’s rigid ideological purity tests, or the extreme overreach of government into freedom of scientific and academic inquiry.)
Between the time I write this sentence and the moment when this story will be published, the federal government will lose hundreds more qualified, ethical civil servants. Soon, even higher numbers of principled people in positions of power will be fired or will resign. More positions will be left vacant or filled by people without standards or scruples. The government’s attacks against other checks on power—the press, the judiciary—will worsen. Enormous pressure will be exerted on people to stay silent. And silence is a form of consent.
The truth is, checks and balances work only when individuals are courageous enough to speak out. Many American citizens, though, have been conspicuously quiet in the early days of Trump’s second term. People like Kasparov and Ressa, who have lived through the flip to authoritarianism elsewhere, warn that this is a mistake, as do many scholars who have studied totalitarianism and dictatorships across history. At a time like this, hesitation can mean the difference between freedom and tyranny.
These are not uncertain times, not really. The trick of aspiring dictators is they tell you exactly what they’re going to do ahead of time. There’s a famous saying about propagandists—that they repeat the lie until it becomes true. But corrupt leaders use repetition effectively in other ways, too. An authoritarian repeats lies, yes, but he also repeats outrageous truths until they no longer sound outrageous, at least to some. Tell people again and again that you’re going to imprison political enemies or journalists, or otherwise take away basic freedoms, and the public becomes primed to accept the attack when it finally happens. The role of technology in the rise of authoritarianism cannot be overstated: Social platforms built for scale—and designed to reward anger, hate, and snap reactions over truth—helped Trump win the presidency, serve as networks for anti-freedom propaganda, and have assisted others like him in gaining power around the world. Technologies that could be used for democratic expression are instead used to warp public opinion and suppress dissent.
Back in 2017, Duterte’s propagandists made the hashtag #ArrestMariaRessa go viral—that was two years before he finally used a pretense to arrest her. By declaring his intent so far in advance, the president ensured that when he had his perceived enemies arrested, it would be shocking but not surprising. This is how dictators lead people to believe that something abnormal is normal, or that something illegal is permissible. This is how people come to find themselves “just following orders.” Sometimes, when you know what’s coming, that can be enough to let it happen.
Months before Duterte was elected in 2016, Ressa interviewed him for Rappler, the news organization she’d co-founded in the Philippines in 2012. Like Trump, who has sworn to root out “the enemy from within,” Duterte had taken aim at his own government. “I will stop corruption, I will stop criminality, I will fix government,” he told her at the time. He went on: “When I said I’ll stop criminality, I’ll stop criminality. And if I have to kill you, I’ll kill you. Personally.” When an authoritarian tells you he’s going to do something, believe him. Each outlandish statement is a trial balloon, one step closer to action. And when people don’t push back—or, worse, when supporters cheer him on—the boundaries for acceptable behavior permanently shift.
This is why Trump calls journalists purveyors of “fake news” and the “enemy of the people.” It’s why he floats the idea of executing his perceived political foes, and doing away with the First Amendment. It’s why he has moved beyond simply wanting to deport people who are in this country illegally and now says “homegrowns are next” when he talks about his desire to send Americans to a gulag in El Salvador. And it’s why he is trying to take over universities and other once-independent institutions. In his first month back in office, Trump banned the Associated Press from the White House because it wouldn’t agree to use only the words he liked. He seized control of the White House press pool, which previously operated independently, run by members of the press. And his Pentagon told journalists that it would end long-standing tradition and do away with the press pool that has the chance to travel with—and ask questions of—the secretary of defense. Trump continues to muse, as he has done before, about crushing the press and anyone who leaks information to reporters. Trump ranted in a social-media post about anonymous sources, saying that “a big price should be paid for this blatant dishonesty” and threatening to sue reporters and news outlets. He went on: “I’ll do it as a service to our Country. Who knows, maybe we will create some NICE NEW LAW!!!”
Trump keeps moving the goalposts this way. Remember when he mused publicly that he could shoot someone on Fifth Avenue and get away with it? He wants people to believe that they deserve to be punished, and that he deserves to do whatever he wants, with impunity. More recently, Trump put it this way: “He who saves his Country does not violate any Law.”
One key difference between Trump and Duterte, at least so far, is violence. Duterte started carrying out the extrajudicial murder of citizens within hours of taking the oath of office. He was, he said, making good on his promise to crack down on crime. (He’d previously done the same when he was a mayor, with the help of vigilantes and even police officers.) His administration, human-rights groups say, ultimately killed tens of thousands of civilians. “I’m not really a bad guy,” one of Duterte’s supporters told Patricia Evangelista, one of the reporters who worked in Ressa’s newsroom. To this man it was simple: “Some people need killing.” Ressa remembers it as a surreal time. She learned quickly that once a dictator takes power, dehumanizing forces are suddenly all around. This is how an authoritarian changes a culture: by getting supporters to cheer on grotesqueries of all manner, including the cessation of the freedoms he’s telling you he is about to seize. This is why so many Americans are horrified by Trump’s indifference to due process. Due process is important on principle—it’s a constitutional right. But doing away with it also signals that the state believes it can do whatever it wants to people.
Ressa has some advice for Americans: If you’re in a leadership position, she says, you must demonstrate that you understand the seriousness of the situation, and that you’re there to protect the people who are depending on you. But also, you have to know that not everyone is brave. Not everyone is ready to stand up for their freedom; those who are fearful are easily manipulated, and can put others at risk. When the stakes are this high, she advises, there’s no time for weakness. Remember that a weak link—be it an individual, a university, or a law firm—is a point of danger for those who need to hold the line. As I’ve written before, capitulation is contagious. But so, too, is courage.
In January 2018, Rappler received its first shutdown order from the government. Ressa and her co-founder, Chay Hofilena, immediately held a press conference to make sure that people understood that Duterte was trying to intimidate their newsroom and silence its reporting, and that it would not work. Years later, Duterte would again try to shut down Rappler’s website. But the goal was always to keep publishing no matter what—and Ressa succeeded. Preparation was everything. Her leadership team had a shutdown plan. She and her colleagues ran drills on how to bring their website back online within 24 hours, relying on servers in other countries, if the government of the Philippines shut them down. (Funnily enough, she had already positioned Rappler’s servers in the United States as a safeguard—she figured that America, home of the free, would protect the right to free press. Today, she advises American news organizations to move their servers elsewhere.)
Rappler also created a buddy system for the newsroom. “We knew that our journalists might be framed for crimes, and we warned them about that,” she told me. “We reminded them that if any altercation took place with the government, the first thing they should do is to pick up their phone and start live-broadcasting what was happening.” They did drills so that “going live” would be muscle memory for them, so that when the time came, they could be frightened and flooded with adrenaline, and start broadcasting anyway.
This practice paid off. At one point, one of Ressa’s journalists, Pia Ranada, arrived at the presidential palace for a press briefing only to be told that she couldn’t enter. She wasn’t given a reason. But she remembered her training: Ressa recalled to me that you can see in Ranada’s footage that her hand was shaking as she turned on her camera and asked why she was being kept out. The president’s security team indicated that the order had come from above, but wouldn’t say why. Even then, Ressa recalled, she and her colleagues did not know how bad it would get. “I always knew Duterte would come after the press—he told us he would!—but I failed to imagine the worst of it,” she said. “I never thought I would actually be arrested. I was wrong.” Corrupt governments use lawfare to punish people. Legal battles are expensive, and can destroy people’s reputations and livelihoods. Not everyone has the financial resources to go up against the government.
Ressa was arrested the day before Valentine’s Day in 2019, charged with “cyberlibel” over a story published before a cyberlibel law had even taken effect. In a little over a year, Duterte’s government filed 10 arrest warrants against her with a cumulative maximum prison sentence of 103 years. (Every time Ressa got arrested, Rappler’s audience and friends would step up and donate generously. “I liked to joke that this was not a sustainable business model,” Ressa told me.) Now, nearly a decade later, Ressa has defeated eight of those criminal charges in court—and Duterte is in prison at The Hague.
You find out very quickly who your true friends are when the government tries to break you. But it’s lonely, too. When Duterte was coming after Ressa, she worried that any friends who stood up for her were placing themselves at risk. There came a time when she felt she couldn’t even go out to lunch with a friend, in case that friend’s business or family would then be targeted by the government. For a time, she wore a flak jacket on her commute—roads were a favorite hunting ground for death squads, who would shoot people from their motorcycles; getting to and from places was the most dangerous part of her day. Others knew this too: At one point, a good samaritan offered an armored car. But Ressa eventually drew the line. As a former war-zone correspondent, she had a high risk tolerance. She also had a sense of mission: No one could stop her from telling the truth.
Dangerous times call for high levels of both calm and courage. You need to assume the worst is going to happen, and work backwards from there. People like to join the pack, and that’s not always a bad thing. Strength in numbers is real. You need to create a community around you. Not just for your own protection, but for everyone else’s. Remember that facts still matter. Every individual who speaks out, every person who calls a lie a lie, demonstrates fealty to the truth. Do not assume that your voice does not matter. It does. You also choose truth by what you read, how you choose to spend your time. If people no longer care about reality, authoritarians learn that they can do whatever they want. Put another way: If you lose reality, you lose the rule of law. You lose democracy. You are no longer free.
All you can do is hold the line. Hold the line to the standards of your industry’s ethics. Hold the line to what the Constitution says. The minute you step back, or voluntarily give up freedom, it is gone for good. Dissidents do not always win. Garry Kasparov spoke out against Putin and ultimately fled his country for America because he faced persecution at home. In the Philippines, the people were able to beat back Duterte democratically—but democracy is still extremely fragile there, certainly more so than when Duterte first won the presidency.
Basic American freedoms are already far more vulnerable today than even one month ago, even a week ago. The United States has long been a bulwark for democracies everywhere. Not so at the moment. But it is not too late. Find your people. Fight for your values. Collaborate with those who still believe in truth, and humanity, and the inalienable rights of the people.
“When I hear people ask if they should flee to some other country, some faraway land, I want to shake them. You want an escape plan? To where?” Ressa said to me recently. “If the United States of America falls, it’s the ball game.”
It is easy to dismiss warnings about the demise of American freedoms as hyperbole, or the darkest pessimism. But there’s a paradox here. Those who have the greatest sense of urgency about the need to protect democracy in the United States, those who have seen firsthand how bad it can get and how quickly freedom can be snuffed out—they are optimists in their own way. We should listen to them not only because they may be right, but because they recognize what Americans know in their bones to be true: This nation, these freedoms, they are sacred. They are ours. And it is not too late. Not yet, anyway.
The post A Ticking Clock on American Freedom appeared first on The Atlantic.
