It will become part of 21st Century Authoritarian Era scholarship (that’s my bet on what historians will call the whole field of study) that those who most benefited from the advances of communication technology in the aughts and the teens completely misunderstood its ineffectualness in this moment.
In a distant future, historians will chart how the real resistance to fascism and other forms of authoritarianism around the world in these decades began when foot soldiers of those resistance movements returned to first principles: their bodies, their comfort, their livelihoods, had to be risked in order to win.
In this moment, no kind of email, or FB inspired postcard campaign, or petition, or phone call list will make any difference whatsoever. We have moved past the point where any kind of virtual pressure from constituents is useful. The whole point is that those who will be leading Trump’s new America simultaneously glorify American political institutions while completely disregarding their expressed function. There is no appeal to a sense of duty. Reality itself is up for debate. And that debate cannot take place in virtual space.
Historians will recognize and study at length which historical actors were most able to adapt to the new political violence. It will be noted that the brutality that began to proliferate under Trump was paralyzingly shocking to those for whom physical and even verbal violence had long been avoided. Enclosed in a physical and intellectual circle of like-mindedness, the impact of actual conflict was only a distant reality for many people. For them, the return of violence was initially disabling. But for others, it wasn’t a big deal. Those who had never escaped its immediacy and those who shifted back into concrete engagement the fastest, were the ones who emerged most resilient and most useful.
Researchers will unearth evidence that there were far more people for whom social media provided little or no improvement to their lives before the Trumpian Reaction than was believed at the time. Many people didn’t really use it much, or at least not in the ways imagined. They lived in local relationships and used the internet, if at all, to augment their sense of the world, not build it. They texted their friends, but just to arrange to meet at the bar or to organize a bake sale; they used Facebook primarily to let friends and family see pictures of the kids; they shopped online but still thumbed through the catalog they got in the mail before making a decision.
It will become apparent that many of these people were quickest to embrace the satisfying physicality of the new post-democratic era. Verbal intimidation was a good start. It was a very short journey from there to physical confrontation with strangers because it wasn’t alien for these late-or-minimal adopters to actually engage with real, live, present human beings. And they were already used to interactions that weren’t prescribed, curated, or controlled.
On a global scale, authoritarian actors had already made this point. The cosmopolitan West just hadn’t really been paying attention. Everyone celebrated how the new social media had leveled the playing field. Look at Tahrir Square! they said. But when it started to become very apparent that Facebook was no match for good, old-fashioned physical pain, people stopped clicking on that link.
Early defeats elsewhere made many in the West turn away, full of judgement, but also full of a nagging dread. Like the woman on a jury who unconsciously blames the rape victim because she has to imagine her story would be different or she’ll be paralyzed with fear.
Luckily, future historians will say, many useful people didn’t embrace the new autocratic regime and they didn’t turn away. They understood that technology could be used to organize protest and resistance, but it couldn’t replace people actually inconveniencing themselves, risking discomfort and disruption, pain and death. The “flat earth” promise was always ridiculous to them (if they had even ever heard of it) — whether they were in Ankara, Juarez, or Delhi.
And so leadership of the resistance emerged from among those for whom violence already permeated their world — people like anti-Putin activists in Russia, First Nations leaders in Canada and the US, Black Lives Matter organizers, gay rights advocates in east Africa, and others. They had already lived the consequences of demanding the right to speak and act.
Or they had a revelatory experience that undermined their sense that the world was becoming more transparent, fair and reasonable. Women, in particular, who had asserted themselves and become the target of subreddit trolls, or put their faith in a college conduct board, or realized after the test came back positive that the last clinic for 500 miles had already been closed, became braver once they realized that the violence that was already all around them wasn’t going away.
As with every moment in history that played out like the 21st Century Authoritarian Era, it took a while for early resistance leaders to get others to recognize just how serious the situation was. They only gathered substantial followers after 2024, when the Trumpian Reaction had given way to something much worse. The censorship, restricted movement, and voter suppression laws finally convinced enough educated, affluent, urban citizens that they had already lost all the things they hadn’t wanted to risk in the fight. And then they began to get real.
Martini Wisdom 