Photo: Trish Nelson
Andrea Pitzer is the author of One Long Night: A Global History of Concentration Camps, Icebound: Shipwrecked at the Edge of the World, and The Secret History of Vladimir Nabokov.
Times being what they are, lately when I read I want to be able to see the practical application, not just take in more bad news. I want it to be hopeful and applicable to moving forward, not just doomsday forecasting. I think this writer does a good, balanced job of that.
You can follow her on YouTube, Degenerate Art by Andrea Pitzer or subscribe to her newsletter, at Beehiv.com
Today I would like to share an excerpt from a (very long) piece in her October 7 newsletter. Link to it here.
Two sections stood out for me as particularly useful. But you should follow the link and read the rest if you are interested because there is a lot there.
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For those who want to be sure that engagement and protest are somehow more than just feel-good tactics, I’ve written about several useful studies to keep in mind. No single research result should ever be seen as definitive, but as a whole, they seem to indicate that the value of protest and the possibility of a return to healthy democracy are real.
Many people have cited Erica Chenoweth’s work suggesting getting at least 3.5% of a country’s population engaged in an opposition movement is generally sufficient to demand significant change. A study by Teeselink and Melios on the much-vilified Black Lives Matter protests in the wake of George Floyd’s murder indicates that those protests played a measurable part in Joe Biden’s 2020 victory. The amazing part of that research was that the protests’ largest effects seemed to be in counties with populations that were relatively small, white, and had low levels of education.
More recently, we also looked at the U-turn study that catalogued massive political changes in the direction of a government across more than a century. Researchers at Sweden’s University of Gothenburg and the University of Liverpool found that more than half of all authoritarian shifts were followed by democratization shifts. And in the last 30 years, that number was nearly three-fourths. What’s more, they found that some 90% of U-turns led to greater democratization in the end.
All around the world
Elsewhere, I’ve tried to address why international and domestic examples of oppression and resistance can offer useful models for both diagnosis and action. To pretend that the blight afflicting America today can only be understood through European fascism or Russian autocracy would be foolish—heinous acts of oppression have been part of US history since the country’s founding. But a broader pool of examples of how events might go is helpful in pondering what to expect and what to do next.
Where we stand today
Nearly a year after Trump’s reelection, we are in fact facing an expanding network of domestic and international concentration camps, creating the first global network of camps run by a superpower created through bribery and coercion. I’ve been writing for more than a decade now about the ways in which America was leaning into camps, and despite the apparent win (for now) in the Everglades, we can expect this particular crisis to get worse in other parts of the country during the rest of Trump’s time in office.
It doesn’t help that, with few exceptions, the U.S. Supreme Court has been rubber stamping much of what the administration has demanded. As I (and many others) have noted before, these actions are largely being carried out via the shadow docket, which doesn’t demand legal theory or accountability from the justices, and makes it nearly impossible for lower courts to have a sense of any body of consistent law they can use to rule going forward. Yet I’ve written about case after case in which lower-court judges are trying to uphold the best aspects of constitutional law and democracy.
Congress, as mentioned above, has caved completely to Trump, failing to fulfill even the constitutional framers’ expectation that they could be relied on, if nothing else, to fight to protect their own power in a branch of government. The elected opposition has a few members who have found productive ways to engage. But Democratic party leadership is flailing in the face of relentless overreach by the executive branch.
From the beginning, we’ve seen governors like J.B. Pritzker and Maura Healey defying Trump on immigration. Others have stepped up intermittently. We’ve watched heroic local pushback by protesters in Chicago and in L.A. Some of the biggest collective demonstrations in American history have been building slowly toward civic engagement that could soon be sustained enough to help force to end the current nightmare.
What comes next
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