Hope springs eternal: graffiti in Washington DC. CC-by-2.0: Mike Maguire / Flickr. Some rights reserved.Americans require a crash-course in authoritarianism if they are to develop effective opposition to our current government. Following our quick descent into absurdity under the Trump regime, the Soviet and Eastern European dissident experience provides demystifying insight into authoritarian tendencies. Americans speak more often with our wallets unlike Russians and their poetry, but the modern American opposition can still learn a lot from Russian dissidents and others.
Until Donald Trump’s election, white Americans in particular were deaf to wisdom born from life under authoritarian regimes unless it validated our checks and balances. Capitalism’s public relations victory in the Cold War only encouraged the neoconservative position that American institutions are for export. My generation was raised with the belief that for citizens of the world’s sole superpower other forms of governance were beneath us, unworthy of study except to find their faults.
Since the end of the second world war, the United States has milked The Constitution for global moral superiority, using it as an effective cover for our military and financial exploits. We fell for our own bullshit. That’s over now. Our president let the cat out of the bag on national television. When Bill O’Reilly called Putin a “killer,” Trump responded, “You think our country’s so innocent?”
