I hope this thread doesn’t get locked, but I want to divide this into legal, illegal and useless. I’m not endorsing the illegal ones, I’m just trying to have a discussion.
So assume the public democratically elect an authoritarian party and leader. What tools actually work to resist this by people who do not want to be part of it?
Off the top of my head I can think of:
Legal
Massive labor strikes
Voting in every election (state, federal, local, primary and general)
Electing politicians on the state and local level who refuse to cooperate with authoritarianism
Lawsuits
Jury nullification for people arrested for sabotage
Electing sheriffs and prosecutors who refuse to enforce the authoritarian laws
Legal sabotage
Illegal (please don’t lock this, this is just a discussion):
Assassinations
Illegal sabotage
Useless:
Protests (IMO, they don’t do much and are meant as an impotent release valve)
Signing petitions
I’m not sure where contacting your representatives falls in this. If you live in a deeply polarized state or district it probably doesn’t matter. But if you live in a very competitive state or district, the contacting your representatives or senators probably makes somewhat of a difference.
If your representative won 65% of the vote they don’t care about your opinion either way. If they won with 50.1% of the vote they might care if you show up at their office, call them or write them a hand written letter.
Where does encouraging foreign nations to stand up to your government come in? Like if the leader of an opposition party asks a foreign nation to sanction the government, does that work? I mean it only works if someone with influence does it though, its not something an average person can do.
To me this is the only one that might end up working. Voting put the authoritarians in power, so if things haven’t gone on too long it might get them out. I vote every single elections and have no respect for those who don’t participate by voting. After all, you can’t bitch about things if you didn’t vote about them.
Because a million people march in the streets, and politicians ignore them. If the protesters go out of their government sanctioned protest zones, then violent cops beat the hell out of them.
Those protests seems useless. In what situations have short term, legal protests done with government permits, overseen by violent cops resulted in meaningful change?
Storming the leaders house is not the same thing as protesting in a park and then going home.
All politics is local.
Politics at the local level is always the least democratic, and the easiest and cheapest to change.
Win the mayoral races, the county/shire councils, the school boards, the hospital boards, the pasture protection boards, the primaries, the pre-selections.
So this all takes place after the election, or after the horse has bolted and the geni has been unbottled? The better question to have asked much earlier would have been how do you strengthen the democratic system to prevent it being hijacked from the margins, and we can look to towering democracies like Australia who have elections on Saturdays, so more people can vote, a centralised and non-partisan electoral commission creating electorate boundaries that are not gerrymandered, and compulsory voting, so that anyone with a hope of winning has to appeal to the middle ground rather than whipping their extremes to outvote other extremes. Too late for that, and possibly too dangerously normal to ever be supported by American political interests.
The main thing you’ve missed is to bolster the free press and building news sources that can be trusted. What that means in the age of the Great Newspaper Die-off is not clear to me, but reliable news is essential to countering propaganda, and challenging self-serving lies. Perhaps if it gets too scary, a pirate radio station on a boat or in a Canadian cabin?
My limited understanding is that the only time protests work is when they get so large that the police and military are either unable or unwilling to stop them from overrunning the capitol and home of the government leader. In those situations, the leader may flee the country.
But protests as we do them in the US where we get permits, march for a few hours and violent cops watch for any signs of breaking the rules don’t seem to accomplish much.
the protests in the Philippines against Marcos is an example of an effective protest. My impression is protests are effective when they get extremely large and the government knows the military are not going to suppress the protests.
Is there a list of example years and nations that apply to the thread question?
The one I am thinking about now is Poland, with the right wing populist Law and Justice Party in control from 2017 to 2023 but not out of power.
As for what works – united opposition. Because of our two party system, a mostly united opposition already exists, in the U.S., in the form of the Democratic Party. But somewhat more needs to be done, and will be. I hope that Catholics who are liberal on almost everything except abortion will notice that abortion seems to have become more common since Dobbs. And I hope that Democrats will be open to centrist party changers and allied independents.
I would like to see blue states start to unite in their resistance by withholding federal taxes and refusing to send national guard troops on illegal military actions. I’d like to see blue states start to obstruct federal operations. For example, if Trump does pursue military action against Canada, I’d like to see blue states openly defy the operation.
The last post prevents an interesting idea, but I question the relevance to the thread title. IMHO, the proposed idea would assist consolidation of the dictatorship rather than resist it.
Trump would just federalize the errant national guard units, something which is, unlike most of his recent actions, legal.
As for withholding income tax payments, without cooperation from TurboTax and similar, I fail to see how this would work at the state level. One already has the ability to withhold federal income tax payments (look up the Sovereign Citizen Movement) as an act civil disobedience – if you are willing to accept the penalties. Since Musk has control of the Treasury, my joining in would almost surely result in withholding of my Social Security benefits, and that comes to a lot more than my income tax. So I am going to pay my federal income tax regardless of what my state government might advise…
More than that, I’d like to see blue state national guards stand up to federal agents enforcing Trump’s agenda. State national guards, city police, county police and state police (who all answer to state and local government) blocking the federal governments agents.
We are basically in the buildup to the civil war with resistance to the fugitive slave act.
Yeah, Schumer, get out there and start yelling. It might work. Musk got less than what had been reported. Cause and effect? Well, no. But maybe someday.
What state do you live in? I’m curious why your experience is different than a lot of others are experiencing. Can you share some of their detailed responses? They are public servants so it would be awesome to get some copy & paste info!