They Think They Are Free — But For How Long?

How authoritarian regimes fool their supporters — until the cost comes due…

A new poll from CBS News finds that most Americans agree with Trump’s policies of gutting protections for women and Black people while arresting and deporting Brown people here without documentation. Roughly two-thirds of respondents called him “tough,” “energetic,” “focused” and “effective.”

They think they are free.

White people approving of Trump’s actions believe marginalizing minorities, gutting the federal government, and attacking (and suing) media outlets and reporters will help them, and some of them probably will. A return of white supremacy and the marginalization of women in the workplace and politics, for example, may produce some small benefits for a few white men.

But there’s a price to be paid in what Americans like to refer to as freedom.

For Trump to continue to reverse over 100 years of progress on civil, women’s, and workers’ rights, he’s eventually going to confront pushback from those very groups. He’s going to have to deny working people their right to organize into unions. He’s going to have to restrict the ability of poor and middle-class people to rise above their economic stations through education.

All of these things will eventually harm the middle class, and he’s already started on every one of them.

But it’s even worse than that: as our freedoms are taken away, and our government is turned into a one-party state, governance that assists the majority of the people begins to vanish. The freedom to speak out goes away. Eventually, society turns cold, as Trump’s authoritarianism hardens the national Zeitgeist.

— Politicians can only advance or even hold onto their offices if they unceasingly praise Dear Leader Trump. FBI agents reportedly won’t get hired unless they assert that the January 6th attack on our government was “an inside job,” that the 2020 election was “stolen” from Trump, and that the “real patriots” on January 6th were the rioters, not the police or politicians.

— Members of the media face life-destroying lawsuits if they criticize Trump or point out his successful prosecution for sexually assaulting E. Jean Carroll. Those who support Trump no matter what get elevated in the press stations at the White House and Pentagon; legitimate mainstream media that persists in occasionally telling the truth are marginalized or even kicked out of routine press conferences.

— Wealthy oligarchs who support Dear Leader get tax breaks, government contracts, special legislation giving them immunities, and see the federal agencies that once regulated them gutted. Working people and consumers lose their protections through the Labor Department, the EPA, and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.

— Judges, prosecutors, and reporters who challenge or expose Dear Leader’s criminality are doxed, threatened, and attacked in social media, making their lives both miserable and dangerous. People who assault police and lawmakers on behalf of Dear Leader are lionized and given special status and pardons for their crimes.

We know how this usually turns out because the world has seen this movie before. In recent years, we watched it happen in Putin’s Russia, Orbán’s Hungary, Duterte’s Philippines, Pinochet’s Chile, Bukele’s El Salvador, El Sisi’s Egypt, Erdoğan’s Turkey, Chávez’s Venezuela, Lukashenko’s Belarus, Ortega’s Nicaragua, Prayuth’s Thailand, Saied’s Tunisia, and Modi’s India.

Almost a century ago, we saw it played out for the first time in modern history in Spain, Japan, Italy, and Germany.

An American Jew of German ancestry and a brilliant writer, Chicago newspaper reporter Milton Mayer went to Germany seven years after Hitler’s fall and befriended 10 “average Germans,” asking each how the Nazis rose to power in an otherwise civilized nation.

His book, They Thought They Were Free, is his story of that experience. Intertwined throughout it — first published in 1955 — are repeated overt and subtle warnings to future generations of Americans: to us, today.

Doesn’t the nation rise up and protest the destruction of its own democracy, Mayer wondered. Don’t the people pour into the streets?

A college professor he interviewed gave us the answer:

“You see, one doesn’t see exactly where or how to move. Believe me, this is true. Each act, each occasion, is worse than the last, but only a little worse. You wait for the next and the next. You wait for the one great shocking occasion, thinking that others, when such a shock comes, will join with you in resisting somehow.

“You don’t want to act, or even to talk, alone; you don’t want to ‘go out of your way to make trouble.’ Why not? — Well, you are not in the habit of doing it. And it is not just fear, fear of standing alone, that restrains you; it is also genuine uncertainty.”

We can’t say we weren’t warned by our own people, our own politicians, the most senior members of our own institutional power structure. But, still, how do we know? Is there a sudden proclamation by Dear Leader that the nation is now “officially fascist”?

Back to Mayer’s German friend in 1954:

“But of course this isn’t the way it happens. In between come all the hundreds of little steps, some of them imperceptible, each of them preparing you not to be shocked by the next. Step C is not so much worse than Step B, and, if you did not make a stand at Step B, why should you at Step C? And so on to Step D.

“And one day, too late, your principles, if you were ever sensible of them, all rush in upon you. The burden of self-deception has grown too heavy, and some minor incident, in my case my little boy, hardly more than a baby, saying ‘Jew swine,’ collapses it all at once, and you see that everything, everything, has changed and changed completely under your nose.”

And yet everything seems “normal.” After all, Dear Leader isn’t coming after people who don’t challenge him or his ruling clique. If you work your job, watch football, listen to music, ignore the news, and don’t speak out, everything seems fine.

Dear Leader even attains high levels of popularity, so long as his main victims are not straight white men. By 1938, Adolf Hitler was the most popular politician in the world, as documented by TIME magazine, which put him on the cover that year.

As Mayer’s professor friend told him, when Dear Leader finally seizes control of all the levers of power from political to economic to spiritual, everything changes but everything also stays the same:

“The world you live in — your nation, your people — is not the world you were in at all. The forms are all there, all untouched, all reassuring, the houses, the shops, the jobs, the mealtimes, the visits, the concerts, the cinema, the holidays.

“But the spirit, which you never noticed because you made the lifelong mistake of identifying it with the forms, is changed.

“Now you live in a world of hate and fear, and the people who hate and fear do not even know it themselves; when everyone is transformed, no one is transformed. Now you live in a system which rules without responsibility even to God.”

We’re already quite a ways down this road, which is why our democracy has been rated by numerous international groups as being “at risk” or similar designations.

Voter suppression, gerrymandering, the proliferation of phony media selling rightwing propaganda as “news,” armed militias on our streets (and the GOP recruiting them for “election monitors”), the media bending its collective knee to Trump; these are the visible tip of the proverbial iceberg.

“How is this to be avoided, among ordinary men, even highly educated ordinary men?” Mayer’s friend asked rhetorically.

And, without the benefit of a previous and recent and well-remembered fascistic regime to refer to, Mayer had to candidly answer:

“Frankly, I do not know.”

That was 1954, however; this is 2025. We now know.

Fascism, with its promises of efficiency, order, and privileges for the racial majority is often popular in its early stages; by the time people figure out the scam, it’s usually too late to stop.

Trump’s followers think they are free; they’re not. Eventually they’ll discover the high price they’ll pay for supporting his growing authoritarianism.

Unlike Mayer’s German friends who realized too late the direction things were going, there are things we can do now.

Reach out to your elected representatives and demand resistance, join movements like indivisible.org, subscribe to independent media, make a donation (if you can; if you can’t, call them with thanks) to politicians whenever they publicly challenge the regime.

Raise hell on social media. Show up in the streets. Talk with relatives, neighbors, friends, coworkers, and acquaintances. Speak out. Be bold and brave.

Tragically, a series of missteps by Democrats and our media have failed our democracy. As a result, the question for today is, “Will we stop this assault on our democracy before it’s too late?”

To a large extent, that’s up to you and me…

The song that was inspired by this article is here.
My reading this article as an audio podcast is here.
My new book, The Hidden History of the American Dream, is now available.
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