What I learned from her research is that the best way to fight tyranny is to become part of group that provides for the concrete benefit of your local community. How do we know this. It has been historically proven by research. The Soviets went after all these organizations in both the Russian Revolution and the take over of Eastern Europe. Your membership in a religious community or service organization, (ie. Lions or Rotary) or charity brings what economists call social capital to your community. Tyrannies seek to destroy social capital so people can only have one place to go to, them. Thus they maintain control. So basically if you sit on your ass the tyrants win.
Both MAGA and the Radical Left want you despondent so you won't take part, volunteer or pitch in, but just sit back and click while our social capital withers. They promote the lie that only bold action from the top down can really change things. Both not only employ an army of knuckleheads, cooks and misfits, to show up at demonstrations, but more importantly a vast movement of online trolls who reflexively roast anyone not on board with their narrow agenda. Thus a virus of cynicism continues to spread so people are less motivated to take part in civil society. So a vacuum is formed ready to be filled by well funded top down organizations from the extremes.
But they are peddling a lie, in reality the daily actions of people who actively participate in organizations such as churches, service clubs, charities and volunteer groups do more good for people on a daily basis than most people realize. The biggest thing they do is help create networks that can support the people of the community in times of personal and communal crises. Would be tyrants try to create artificial crises or exacerbate existing ones to break down society to they can sweep in and take over. The stronger the social capital of a community the stronger the resistance to these tactics. Better still is when groups that provide social capital are independent from the government or political parties, so that all no matter who they are can cared for and have their needs addressed.
The actions that build social capital are old fashioned and well, quite boring. They involve things like distributing food to neighbors in need, collecting money for people who undergo a personal crisis. They are addressing a basic needs of community locally and on the ground. Something as simple as making sure kids have safe playground, or making sure that the refugee family moving into your neighborhood has enough stuff to get their home up and running, or that single parents have a safe place to bring their kids, can improve a community just as much or more than some initiative from the government in Washington DC.
If there are enough of these groups and they are strong enough then a community can hold the line against the extremes because people will have a number of options to turn to in their need. Thus crises are shorter and people better off. Tyrannies seek to gain power by exploiting the desperate or coddling the lazy. Therefore the fewer desperate and lazy people a society has, the smaller the chance to fall prey to extremest politics.
Applebaum in a 2017 brilliantly written opinion piece describes the people using these tactics to gain control as neo-Bosheviks. (full text here) She maintains that while both ends of the extremist spectrum may wish to employ these tactics, the greater danger these days is from the right. She writes:
By contrast, the neo-Bolsheviks of the new right or alt-right do not want to conserve or to preserve what exists. They are not Burkeans but radicals who want to overthrow existing institutions. Instead of the false and misleading vision of the future offered by Lenin and Trotsky, they offer a false and misleading vision of the past. They conjure up worlds made up of ethnically or racially pure nations, old-fashioned factories, traditional male-female hierarchies and impenetrable borders. Their enemies are homosexuals, racial and religious minorities, advocates of human rights, the media, and the courts. They are often not real Christians but rather cynics who use "Christianity" as a tribal identifier, a way of distinguishing themselves from their enemies: they are "Christians" fighting against "Muslims" — or against "liberals" if there are no "Muslims" available.
However even if Applebaum is wrong and the danger from the left, the prescription is the same: be an active citizen, who works through some independent community group to help others. A equally important prescription is to be tolerant of your neighbor's decisions. An insidious way that groups like MAGA and the Radial Left seek to break down social capital is by making everyday innocuous decisions seem political. If you drink the wrong beer, or eat the wrong food you become identified with a political group. Your music taste becomes political, your car choice, your fashion selections, the shows you watch on TV etc. In reality this is rarely the case, most decisions are not and should not be political. They should be personal. This is a benchmark of a free society.
The political radicals looking for power don't want you to accept that people have the ability to make decisions for non-political reasons. They want you to see everything through their lens, so you will pick a side in their quarrel. (Even if is not really your quarrel!) A public culture of shaming those who don't fit in is part of this. Phrases in posts and conversations like "owning liberals" to "trashing conservatives" in someone's language demonstrate a drift toward this kind of thinking. The long term goal is to make one callous toward their neighbor so that society breaks down.
It is clearly evident that one of the crucial reasons that neither communism or fascism took hold in the Anglo-Saxon world was that existing institutions were able to handle the problems of the mid-twentieth century. Since the late 1960's however, volunteerism, institutional loyalty and social capital have all declined greatly as demonstrated in Robert Putnam's Bowling Alone, so perhaps our current situation is a result of chickens coming home to roost. As I write this the government shutdown impasse continues with no end in sight. MAGA is OK with this happening. In fact the longer the crisis continues the stronger they believe their chances to gain more power and control. In these times when our neighbors may begin to feel the pinch of the shutdown it will be imperative for us to come to their aid so that they are able to get through the crisis. Not only will you be acting out of the best place of moral compassion, you will be helping maintain our democracy.
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