Tim Stevenson ([email protected]) is a community organizer with Post Oil Solutions and is the author of Resilience and Resistance: Building Sustainable Communities for a Post Oil Age (Green Writers Press) and Transformative Activism: A Values Revolution in Everyday Life in a Time of Societal Collapse (Apocryphile Press). He is working on a book about mutual care associations.
ATHENS-By any definition, we are rapidly becoming a police state. The U.S. is sliding toward fascism faster than ever.
Consider all that has happened over the past seven months: the Gestapo-ization of ICE (U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement) and the criminalization of brown migrants; cutting health care and food benefits to pay for billionaires' tax cuts; weaponizing the Department of Justice to serve as a personal vendetta agency for the president; the comprehensive assault upon diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI), education, and cultural institutions; and the multi-prong effort to eliminate free elections.
These are only the most notorious examples of the authoritarian acts that the Trump regime has committed during its first seven months in office.
Such acts have been dramatically accelerated recently by what has taken place in Washington D.C. While not entirely surprising, it was shocking nevertheless to see Trump send National Guard troops, first into Los Angeles, and then his performative show of force in his takeover of Washington, D.C. with the lie that the city is awash in crime, a claim that is belied by the facts.
In part, this is an attempt to distract us from the continuing refusal of his Justice Department to release the Epstein files as well as such failures as inflation, Ukraine, poll ratings in the toilet, opposition to migrant policy, and so on.
More to the point, however, the D.C. occupation revealed his real totalitarian ambition to militarize American cities. As New Jersey Sen. Andy Kim observed, "Trump's federalization of the D.C. Metro Police Department and deployment of the National Guard is an attempt to gaslight the American people so he can seize more power."
That this was a trial effort at normalizing the invasion of a U.S. city to see how far he could go using our military against its citizens is evident in his promise to invade our other cities (which, not coincidentally, are also led by Black mayors), such as Chicago, New York, and Baltimore.
Most alarming, with the military expropriation of several Democrat-led cities, Trump would be in a position to order his Defense Department to seize voting equipment and ballots in the November 2026 election.
As Boston College historian Heather Cox Richardson observed, "On the road to authoritarianism, this is a whole factory of red flags."
One could continue listing, almost ad infinitum, the outrageous daily actions of this administration. The much more critical matter, however, is what are we, the people, doing about this nightmare that we are increasingly being engulfed by?
More specifically, is what we're doing adequate, even relevant, to the task of stopping Trump?
* * *
Don't get me wrong - I totally support the rallies and demonstrations we have held to voice our opposition to Trump. These have provided many of us who are new to activism to become involved in a community-friendly venue to express our outrage, as well as a way for millions to come together in acts of solidarity.
But are they effective in slowing down, much less stopping, the relentless fascists?
We routinely see another hard-working, migrant citizen, a community asset with no criminal record, accosted and thrown into an ICE prison with wretched facilities, or flown to a country other than their original one without due process.
We bring out thousands, even millions, of folks with our clever signs and chants. Yet these "little" outrages, as well as many others, are happening every day, seemingly unresponsive to our big, beautiful demonstrations that oppose such acts.
We need to up the ante. Before it's too late, we need to act in ways that are commensurate to the emergency.
We cannot afford to continue with our protests alone. To limit our response to that which is demonstrably ineffective against the expansion of Trump's regime of terror is to enable the latter to grow and expand; to do so only makes us complicit, however unintentionally.
We need to say "Enough," and act like we mean it.
What is to be done?
* * *
First and foremost, we need to develop a strategic understanding that it is not Trump alone, whom we need to direct our resistance at. Rather, we need to get the attention of the oligarchy behind Trump, to demonstrate to this critical group that he has seriously and dangerously lost the support of the American people, and that this loss of support threatens their financial interests.
To do so means to consider such actions as boycotts of major corporations and national strikes. More realistically, however, it involves a well-disciplined, nonviolent, civil disobedience mass mobilization in D.C., directed at those MAGA agents and agencies that are executing Trump's directives.
This requires weeks of planning. We obviously need to get such national organizations as Indivisible and 350.org involved, for their leadership, their resources, and especially their connections with many other national groups that represent varied constituencies and interests who see the danger of the growing fascist state.
In addition to advocating for this strategy through our local and regional representatives of these national groups, there is much for us to do on a local level.
Most importantly, we need to organize ourselves into affinity groups that, through preparation and nonviolent direct action training, are able to perform acts of nonviolent civil disobedience that require a variety of arrest and non-arrest actors.
There is no question that such an action involves personal inconvenience, at the least, and more likely risk and danger that will cause at least some of us to understandably pause.
Most of all, it will require the courage that arises when a people believe that only a society predicated upon democratic values is worth living in.
And standing up for it.
This Voices Viewpoint was submitted to The Commons.
This piece, published in print in the Voices section or as a column in the news sections, represents the opinion of the writer. In the newspaper and on this website, we strive to ensure that opinions are based on fair expression of established fact. In the spirit of transparency and accountability, The Commons is reviewing and developing more precise policies about editing of opinions and our role and our responsibility and standards in fact-checking our own work and the contributions to the newspaper. In the meantime, we heartily encourage civil and productive responses at [email protected].