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GELFAND’S WORLD - It’s obvious that weird and ugly things have been going on for the past year – the ICE attacks on American freedom, the attempt by Texas to steal the next House of Representatives election through redistricting, Donald Trump’s attempted usurpation of the congressional right to set tariffs – they are all damaging to our country and to ourselves. But do they form some coordinated whole, are are they just a bunch of random actions by a reactionary movement that has become a little too full of itself? Stacey Abrams has an answer, and we’re not going to like it. On the other hand, she has an answer to that problem which we will like eventually.
An aside: Abrams spoke at Writers Bloc last week about what I am going to describe here. In person, she is pretty overwhelming because she speaks in a low key manner but gives clear answers. One example should suffice: One of the audience asked how to respond to the conservative demand that voters show identification. Most of us will remember that Democrats (particularly in the deep South) have opposed this requirement because of its connection to the old Jim Crow rules that were intended to make it impossible for people to vote. Abrams took an unexpected approach to the answer. She pointed out that we have always had to demonstrate who we are – but usually it meant that somebody at the polling place knew who we were or recognized the home address, or some such. She drew a clear distinction between good faith efforts to keep the election system running smoothly, vs extreme efforts to disenfranchise some particular ethnicity. She gave as an example a rule passed by a northern state that requires its Native Americans who live on reservations to provide a specific street address, a requirement that would be impossible for some people.
Abrams was there to present a program that starts with an analysis of how the right wing is, right now, trying to take over the country by destroying democracy, and offers a set of remedies – each designed to match and undermine one of the right wing techniques.
The whole thing is called the 10 Steps Campaign (or, if you want to save words, simply 10 Steps). This program was created in response to an analysis by a Princeton professor on how authoritarians and modern fascists have a playbook for taking control of the modern state. That right wing playbook involves 10 processes and procedures that, working together, are capable of wrenching control from a democracy and placing it in the hands of one person or a small group.
In the 10 Steps Campaign, which you can find here, the 10 tactics are listed. As the authors remind us, they are not a sequence that happens one step after the other, but things that are dropped on us all at once.
Let’s consider. I’m simply going to list those authoritarian tactics here, because when you hear them, you will immediately recognize a recent example of their use:
1) Win the last fair election: This is a description of how fascists gain power most often. They don’t just move in with an army, they manage to win one election. The problem for the rest of us is that they then do their best to make sure that it was the last fair election. Trump has made this clear by pushing the state of Texas to redistrict now, (just a couple of years into the usual 10 year period) in order to steal control in the House of Representatives that will otherwise switch over to Democratic Party control after this year. There have been similar pushes in other red states, and the outcome of this battle is not yet clear.
2) Expand executive power: This couldn’t be more clear. Trump continues to expand presidential power through his use of executive orders along with other, even uglier approaches (like murder in the streets of Minneapolis). We don’t need to belabor this point.
3) Capture the other branches: No surprise here. The Republicans won control over the congress by normal, legal elections. Trump uses threats and electoral blackmail to keep House Republicans in line. Trump’s appointments to the Supreme Court were designed to concentrate power in the presidency and have been effective. Together, the old system of checks and balances has been seriously weakened.
4) Break government: Let’s just quote the program’s description: “Gut agencies, fire civil servants, and replace expertise with chaos and incompetence so the people lose trust.” This one is also pretty obvious. In this administration, we saw Elon Musk and his Doge organization run rampant through well established federal agencies, firing hundreds of people on one day and sometimes hiring a few back the next week. We might also point out (and cringe) at the selection of so many truly bad appointees to cabinet positions, including Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as the official anti-vaccination head of the government’s health services, Bondi as Attorney General, the laughable Kash Patel as head of the FBI, and so on. Together, they have worked to attack the president’s political opponents by improper criminal complaints, by demolishing the previously competent functioning of important agencies, and by simply running things in a way that supports Trump’s political angles rather than what is best for the people of the United States.
5) Install loyalists: Not even a question. It is the central, most embarrassing part of Trump’s rule.
6) Attack the truth: Once again, let’s quote: “Discredit journalism, intimidate public voices, and replace the news with state propaganda by consolidating or manufacturing media outlets.” Donald Trump has made a career out of attacking the media, using the term “fake news” to refer to any fact that is uncomfortable to him. In his second term, the federal government has taken things a very large step further by using otherwise legitimate processes to illegitimately attack those who are not expressly on his side. The arrest of journalist Don Lemon is a particularly nasty example. But there is an equally bad side, which is the use of presidential power to make some of our previously respected news organizations into mouthpieces for Trump. CBS is a particularly bad loss. CBS (through its owner Paramount) not only paid a huge sum to Trump – ostensibly in settlement of a lawsuit, but effectively as a giant bribe – but has cancelled the Colbert show and placed a right winger in charge of the news. We don’t need to explain how Fox News and Trump have had a symbiotic relationship for decades. The damage to American freedom is substantial.
7) Scapegoat vulnerable communities: Well, that’s what these ICE raids are all about, right? And who can forget Trump’s debate remark that one immigrant community is “eating the cats, eating the dogs.” We should continue to remind ourselves that early in this second term, Trump and his lackeys purged the Department of Defense of high ranking women and minorities.
8) Destroy support systems: This is a description of the attacks on all sorts of organizations – public and private – that have the ability to speak out against right wing nonsense and to educate our people about why there is a better way. Universities obviously fit in this category, as they have been able to explain to young people that there are different ways of thinking about society, racial bias, or even economic policy. The right wing fears and hates this because education undermines their more single-minded approaches. At a different level, we have seen attacks on everything from Planned Parenthood to the ACLU orchestrated by conservative voices. At an almost comical level, we have watched as this administration removes signs at national parks (!) while doing everything it can to pretend that slavery and racism never existed.
9) Normalize state violence: The use of ICE as Trump’s private domestic terrorist organization has woken up a few people who are conservatives but have managed to hold onto traditional ideas about the Bill of Rights and about keeping the peace on our nation’s streets. We need to be careful about throwing around terms like “gestapo” but the cold blooded assassinations of two people in Minneapolis in just a few days have caught the nation’s (and the world’s) attention.
10) End democracy itself: “Disrupt election systems, redraw the lines, undermine voting systems and restrict who can vote so no meaningful opposition ever wins again.” Well, we watched and listened as Donald Trump tried to extract enough extra votes (the ones he didn’t get) in Georgia back in 2020 in an attempt to steal that election. We’ve seen attacks on the voting procedures (and machinery) in multiple states, not to mention 60 plus unmerited lawsuits over the 2020 election results. If enough highly partisan and amoral individuals gain control over our election procedures, we would really have a problem. At a more prosaic level, we have to continue to make sure that all citizens have the opportunity to vote. Texas has become famous for making it difficult for people in its bluer counties to cast their ballots. The attempt by Texas to steal control over the House of Representatives by redistricting was only countered because California voters were willing to support Prop 50. We can look forward to continuing battles over redistricting both now and after the next census.
So you are invited to visit the 10 Steps Campaign online, where the right wing tactics are laid out and, in addition, a remedy for each of these tactics is described. They are summarized using words such as Litigate, Disrupt, Deny, Elect. I’d like to mention one of my favorites, which is listed as number 10 and is titled Demand. Here it is:
“It’s not enough to just reclaim what we had. We must demand more and build a better government. Be clear about what we deserve-- from our allies and from those who would destroy democracy. Don’t meekly ask for what we think we can get. Declare what kind of country we intend to build. Then get to work.”
(I think this is a pretty good description of what is going wrong in our local politics, and I will be commenting on that problem in a later article.)
Back to the 10 Steps as a national movement: We’ve been provided a diagnosis for what the right wing is trying to accomplish, and a prescription for how to cure our nation of their wrongs. We’ve heard partial variations on this approach (litigate, demonstrate) in other places, but this program represents a synthesis of all the strong points. This program, I think, depends on the rest of us to fill in the blanks by figuring out what cases need to be litigated, what national marches need to be organized, which politicians to defeat in the next elections, and so on. But it helps to have an overview of the entire process. The right wing is using every one of its vile tactics even as we speak. We need to respond in kind.
(Bob Gelfand writes on science, culture, and politics for CityWatch. He can be reached at [email protected])
