Time To Dust Off The Authoritarian Regime Survival Guide
In 2017, Polish activist Martin Mycielski offered advice on Twitter—hashtagged #LearnFromEurope—that eventually became a guide for dealing with fascism.
To paraphrase a common saying, those who don't learn history are doomed to repeat it. Perhaps it's time—or past time—to pull The Authoritarian Regime Survival Guide off the shelf.
A rise in fascism and authoritarian governments in the so-called bastions of freedom and democracy has been on a lot of people's minds lately.
It's occurring in settler-colonial countries like the United States, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. It's also happening in colonized countries like those of Central and South America and South Africa. And it's also being observed in the home countries of the colonizers throughout Europe.
FYI: A settler-colonial country is one where the invading population eliminates or drastically reduces the population of the Indigenous inhabitants and replaces them through colonization and special privileges for settlers that share the same identity as the colonizers to create a new, transplanted racial or ethnic majority.
A colonized country is one where the Indigenous population retains the majority, but are subjugated and exploited by invading colonizers. Many such countries gained independence, but were forever altered by the colonizers, such as most of the Americas, most of Africa, and countries like India and Pakistan.
A shift away from the global minority—White people—holding most of the world's wealth and power had been underway before the rise of fascist movements in these countries, which were once solely controlled by a White majority or minority. These movements toward authoritarian governments are largely a function of the backlash against the loss of that White privilege.
As I and others have said many times, for a person who has always known unearned privilege, equality can feel like oppression.
At one time, as glib sayings like “free, White, and 21” attest to, being White and especially being White and male was a free pass through doors firmly closed to others. The height of unearned privilege was held by White, Christian, heteronormative, cisgender men of wealth.
So it should surprise no one that this is the exact demographic leading the charge in modern fascist groups and movements like MAGA in the United States, the People's Party of Canada, the Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) in Germany, the National Socialist Network in Australia, AfriForum in South Africa, and the British Nationalist Party and the Patriotic Alternative in the United Kingdom.
The ringleaders are usually rich, White, toxically masculine guys—with most getting their bootstraps pulled up by their parents’ or grandparents’ money—but the majority of their followers are their socioeconomic opposites. The under-educated working poor swell the ranks to support the people who have oppressed them for generations as those oppressors promise to hold the line against the scapegoats for the masses’ dissatisfaction with life.
In most countries, these far-right, fascist, White supremacist, Christian nationalist political movements have been rejected by the populace, with some suffering particularly humiliating defeats.
But in the United States, thanks to the MAGA faithful, along with disengaged voters coupled with voter apathy, the White House, Senate, and House of Representatives are now in the hands of the people who wrote a whole book—as detailed by Jay Kuo in Breaking Down Project 2025—about their plans to oppress women, the LGBTQ+ community, immigrants, and racial, ethnic, and religious minorities.
So when is the time to leave the United States and when is the time to hunker down and start hiding neighbors in the attic?
Is the United States there yet?
And what if there is nowhere for people to go or no way to get there?
