Three rules for responding to his tyranny
By Robert Reich
March 17, 2025
Image by Robert Reich
The major weapon of the Trump-Vance-Musk regime is fear that causes people to be intimidated into silence and submission.
The regime is using fear — of being deported, job loss, loss of federal contracts, loss of access to sources of news, of arrest and imprisonment — to intimidate potential critics.
This is what all tyrants do, but we are unaccustomed to it in the United States.
I want to share with you three rules for fighting tyrannical fear and intimidation, gleaned from discussions I’ve had with a number of people who have lived in repressive regimes.
1. If at all possible, do not give into it.
Fear works only if people are intimidated. Intimidation is effective only if people surrender to it.
I cannot presume to tell anyone how to balance their personal well-being against their obligations to the nation or the world. I’m in no position to suggest that anyone sacrifice their livelihood or freedom to make a point.
So if you’re a civil servant in the U.S. government, especially an attorney in the Justice Department, I can understand your fear that speaking out or refusing to follow Trump’s orders will get you fired. If you’re a journalist or editor, you may be justifiably fearful that if you report the truth you’ll be barred from Trump press briefings or may even lose your job.
Likewise, if you’re in America on a student visa or even hold a green card, you may be understandably reluctant to speak your mind now. Trump has threatened that the recent arrest of Mahmoud Khalil, the Columbia University grad student who is a permanent resident of the United States and who peacefully spoke out against Netanyahu’s policies in Gaza, will be the first of “many to come.”
On the other hand, if you’re the president of Columbia University, you’re in a different position altogether. I can understand your concern that your institution will suffer loss of federal funds if you allow full freedom of speech on your campus, yet that doesn’t mean you should surrender to Trump’s tyranny. If you do not stand up to it, you and your institution and other American universities will sacrifice far more over the long term.
If you’re a Republican lawmaker, you have every reason to worry that if you vote against Trump, you’ll be primaried in the next election. But that doesn’t justify your silence in the face of Trump’s tyranny, either. What’s the point of being in politics if you have no principles?
If you’re a Democratic lawmaker, you might worry that if you speak out — as did Congressman Al Green during Trump’s address to Congress — you’ll be tagged by Trump as a radical “left-wing” troublemaker. Good! Make good trouble, as Congressman John Lewis used to say. Stand up and speak out! Americans want to know there’s a loud and vital Democratic opposition to Trump.
If you’re a partner in a law firm that Trump has targeted for punishment because your firm has represented clients he deems his enemy, you should not be intimidated from representing others he considers enemies. To the contrary, hold a press conference and announce that you will represent even more people Trump hates, and you’ll do it pro bono.
At a time like this, people who occupy positions of power and visibility — members of Congress, university presidents, top editors and CEOs of major media enterprises, senior partners in major law firms — must not cow to Trump’s threats. Now is the time for them and their institutions to stand up to his tyranny — and be seen and heard by the public as exemplars of democratic courage.
Giving in to intimidation only invites more intimidation.
If the Trump regime can “detain” a graduate student with a green card for peacefully protesting the policies of the Netanyahu government, what’s to stop the regime from “detaining” full citizens who engage in such protest or in any protest against the Trump regime?
If the regime can silence Republican lawmakers by threatening to finance opponents in primary contests, what’s to stop it from trying to silence Democratic lawmakers by threatening to finance opponents in Democratic primaries?
If Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer and other Democratic senators so easily surrender to Trump and Republicans on a continuing resolution to fund the government, how can they hold the line against Musk and Trump’s illegal impoundments and mass firings?
If the Trump regime can intimidate law firms that have helped Democrats or other clients Trump considers to be his enemies, what’s to stop the regime from trying to intimidate anyone who funds Democratic candidates?
If the Trump regime can remove money from New York City’s own bank account with Citibank, rescinding funds that Congress appropriated to house refugees (as has been recently reported), what’s to stop the regime from threatening to remove funds from your bank account if you criticize the regime?
The fear and intimidation must be stopped. The most direct way to stop it is not to give in to it.
2. Join with others who are similarly situated to sue the regime and speak out.
Sometimes there’s safety in numbers. When the Trump regime targets one institution or one group or one person, it may be difficult for that target to respond on its own. But when joined with others who are potentially threatened, the targets can fight back.
Rather than Columbia University fighting the Trump regime solely on its own, Columbia should also join with other universities that have been targeted and sue the regime for violating their rights and the rights of their students under the First Amendment to the Constitution. The group should also sound the alarm about the regime’s attack on higher education and freedom of speech. (The American Association of University Professors would be one obvious vehicle for this.)
Individually, public servants who lose their jobs or who are threatened with job loss have very little power. But when joined together under the auspices of, say, the American Federation of Government Employees, the UAW (which represents many public employees), or the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, they have considerable clout. Together, they should sue the regime for violating the law and mount a major campaign to alert the public to what is happening.
Individual law firms and individual attorneys are more likely to be intimidated than the American Bar Association, which should now be an active vehicle for uniting many firms and attorneys against the Trump regime’s threats.
Individual journalists or media companies are more easily threatened than the American Society of Journalists, the Society of Professional Journalists, or PEN America. Now is the time for these groups to be heard as well.
In sum, now is the time for a concerted and organized public response to the regime’s attempts to sow fear and intimidation. National organizations with the necessary breadth and status must stand up to the Trump regime — loudly and clearly rejecting his brazen attempts to sow fear and intimidate opposition.
3. The rest of us must support these efforts.
All of us have a stake in stopping the regime’s fearmongering and intimidation. All of us can help targeted individuals, institutions, and organizations take a stand.
To the extent we are able, for example, we can contribute to the legal defense of Columbia University graduate student Mahmoud Khalil, here. We can ensure that students and faculty know what to do if ICE comes to their campus, here.
We can contribute to other universities now under the Trump regime’s gun — and encourage these institutions to stand up to Trump’s tyranny rather than submit to it.
We can contribute to groups such as the PhD project, a nonprofit that helps students from underrepresented groups earn doctoral degrees in business — which the Trump regime absurdly claims violates the Civil Rights Act by discriminating against white students.
We can support the American Civil Liberties Union, Common Cause, Indivisible, and other groups that are showing the leadership and courage needed these days to take on Trump.
We can buy subscriptions to media organizations that are helping to lead the charge against the tyranny of the Trump regime (such as the nonprofit I helped launch and continue to work with, Inequality Media Civic Action).
We can show up at town halls where our senators and representatives are appearing, tell them exactly what we think of the Trump-Vance-Musk regime, and ask them to join us in opposition.
Finally, we can — and must — protect people who are being targeted by the regime. In addition to university students, this includes hardworking members of our communities who are being hunted down for not having the right documents to prove citizenship; LGBTQ+ people who are being demeaned and discriminated against because of their sexual identities or orientations; and public servants — public prosecutors, judges, and government workers — who are being hounded because they have done their duty.
Tyranny is possible only if people submit to it. The Trump regime cannot control us through fear and intimidation if we’re energized, mobilized, and organized.
This is a time for all of us — and every institution in America — to stand up to Trump’s tyranny.
This article first appeared on Robert Reich’s Substack.
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Robert Reich
Robert Bernard Reich is an American professor, author, lawyer, and political commentator. He worked in the administrations of Presidents Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter, and served as Secretary of Labor from 1993 to 1997 in the cabinet of President Bill Clinton. He was also a member of President Barack Obama's economic transition advisory board. Reich has been the Chancellor's Professor of Public Policy at the Goldman School of Public Policy at UC Berkeley since January 2006. He was formerly a lecturer at Harvard University's John F. Kennedy School of Government and a professor of social and economic policy at the Heller School for Social Policy and Management of Brandeis University.
The State Operating System and Tyranny’s Backdoor
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Matilde Marcolli
Dr Matilde Marcolli is the Robert F. Christy Professor of Mathematics and Computing and Mathematical Sciences at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech). She received her PhD in mathematics from the University of Chicago, and subsequently worked at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the Max Planck Institute for Mathematics, the University of Toronto, the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics, and the California Institute of Technology. She is author of 7 books and over 150 research papers in mathematics, theoretical physics, cosmology, information theory, and linguistics. Her most recent work is the research monograph in mathematical linguistics: Matilde Marcolli, Noam Chomsky, Robert C. Berwick, “Mathematical Structure of Syntactic Merge”, MIT Press, 2025. This article is based on the author’s personal views and in no way represents any of the institutions listed here.
March 17, 2025
Source: Originally published by Z. Feel free to share widely.
Anti-fascists protesting against Trump in Tucson, Arizona, 15 January 2018 | Image by Johnny Silvercloud
On March 15, 2025, in a new executive order, Trump invoked the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 that endows the president with sweeping and unchecked authority to target and deport foreign nationals. According to the text of the law, it can be invoked only when “there is a declared war between the United States and any foreign nation or government, or any invasion or predatory incursion is perpetrated, attempted, or threatened against the territory of the United States by any foreign nation or government”. Is the US currently at war with or under a military invasion from another country? So far, that does not appear to be the case. Moreover, according to the text of the law, under such powers, those who can be “apprehended, restrained, secured, and removed as alien enemies” are exclusively “natives, citizens, denizens, or subjects of the hostile nation or government”, the country the US is allegedly at war with. Which foreign nation or government is this? Canada, Trump’s current most coveted target for invasion? Mexico? Ukraine? Iran? China? The EU? Palestine? All of the above? The official declared motivation is “the invasion of the United States by Tren de Aragua”, which is neither a nation nor a government, but rather a criminal gang with roots in Venezuelan prisons, that the Trump administration officially labeled on January 20, 2025, as a “foreign terrorist organization”. The current White House statement is explicitly implying an active involvement of the Venezuelan government (with which we aren’t at war either), although the rise of the gang is largely the result of mass incarceration policies enacted by that government, and a reaction against it.
Trump has also repeatedly mentioned the possibility of invoking the Insurrection Act of 1807, a series of statutes under Title 10 of the U.S. States Code, granting the president the power to use the military to put down a rebellion at the federal or state level, effectively a martial law granting the use of the military against citizens on national soil. Is there currently an ongoing armed rebellion at the federal or state level? Again, at a cursory look, it would seem not to be quite the case. Just days ago, another law was invoked, about which more below, that gives the Secretary of State complete discretionary power to order deportations based on a mere “reasonable ground to believe” that the mere presence of designated foreign nationals on US soil could adversely affect US foreign policy, free of the onus of supporting evidence in a court process. Each one of these events is, of course, but another move on a large boardgame staging the showdown between rising fascism and the democratic institutions.
It appears that the main attack strategy being followed by this government, in its attempt to turn a functioning democracy into a dictatorship, is to locate and exploit what I will call here “tyranny’s backdoors” in the State operating system. The analogy here is with the case of computer systems, where cryptographic algorithms used for encryption aimed at protecting users’ private data and guaranteeing safe transactions are altered by the NSA with the insertion of intentional flaws that allow them to bypass the security mechanism and enable mass surveillance. Such intentional flaws in cryptographic algorithms are called backdoors, as they effectively allow the circumvention of an otherwise well-designed protective mechanism, thus leaving the whole system vulnerable to attacks. The analogous political situation here involves the system of protections typical of a democratic constitution, based on the separation of powers and on a complex system of checks and balances. The State is the overall operating system, and the backdoors are the ways in which democracy can be and has been, through history, repeatedly subverted and turned into a fascist dictatorship, through the exploitation of these weaknesses.
The State, in its manifestation in modern democracies, functions on an uneasy balance between two very different mechanisms. On the one hand there is the State as a complex system of distribution of services, operating simultaneously on many closely intertwined levels. Services are indispensable parts of the good functioning of society, which are by their very nature not profit-making. The gain they confer to the population is huge, but it is entirely measured in indirect effects: in the overall growth of quality of life, wellbeing, and advancement of society. Appreciating the importance of services requires thinking beyond the immediate and simple causality that the logic of profit relies on. Services of this kind include complex structures like health care, education, transportation, scientific research, the monitoring and interventions toward maintaining a good functioning of the supply chain, and other such fundamental needs. All the examples listed here are clearly closely interconnected: for example, both health care and education are very deeply intertwined with scientific research. Other services include facilitating the production of culture and the arts, which have always been an essential part of human civilization: they also strongly contribute to the quality of life and the wellbeing of societies. In the logic of market capitalism, many aspects of these services are left to the vagaries of profit-making private enterprise, with the State primarily functioning as a regulator, limiting via legislative means the damage caused by the clash between profit and fundamental needs. Regulation aimed at consumer protection, funds that subsidize and support the costs of services deemed essential when they would be dumped by private enterprise as non-profitable. Depending on the level of ideological adherence to a market-capitalist doctrine, the balance between the role of the State and the role of private enterprise in running societal services can vary.
The horrifying experiences many people encounter with the current health care system in the US are an example of why largely relegating the handling of crucial services to a profit-making machine results in a disastrous mismatching of goals. More tempered forms of management of services are displayed in some of the European social democracies, where the State has a more extensive role in handling the essential systems that maintain the basic and crucial infrastructures modern human life relies on. Modern democracies have projected a generally benevolent if often inefficient image of the “State as system of distribution of services”. There is, however, another, less benevolent, face of the State, which is inextricably entangled with this service provider aspect. The other face of Janus, the one that looks backward, is the State as the exclusive provider of organized violence, externally, in the form of the military machine of war, and internally in the form of armed policing and law enforcement. The main reason why these two aspects are essentially entangled is because running distributions of services (or intervening to ensure the reliable running of distributions of services) require collecting the necessary funding and allocating it where needed. In the modern nation states, this collection of funds happens through taxation. The collection and allocation of tax money has a legislative aspect that establishes the planning and an enforcement aspect that implements it and that is ultimately coercive in nature. The justification that the State provides for its monopoly on the exercise of violence is law enforcement, and this enforcement includes adherence to regulations pertaining to the collection of funds that the State administers. Of course, the true historical developments that led to the creation of police forces involved other, more violent, aspects of law enforcement, such as the slave patrols in US history that are the origin of US police. In some European countries, the democratic state that emerged after the war inherited its law enforcement agencies from the per-war dictatorships and hardly expurgated them of their antidemocratic elements. This type of historical backgrounds in turn influences the likely behavior that these parts of the State will exhibit when situations arise in which different manifestations of the State find themselves in conflict with each other.
Over modern history, criticism of the State has correspondingly taken two very different forms: which one can roughly distinguish as the anarchist criticism of the state and the libertarian criticism, where the term “libertarian” is used here in a specific American-centric meaning, that does not correspond to its connotations elsewhere. (In Europe, the term “libertarian” is often just a synonym of “anarchist” and does not have the distinctly right-wing connotation it carries in North and Latin America.) The divide between these two critical traditions closely follows the fault line between the two different faces of the State as provider of services and as provider of institutionalized violence. While the anarchist criticism focuses against the State as provider of legalized violence and its repressive role, and the dangers of intertwining services crucial to the population with this inherently oppressive role, the right-wing libertarian criticism would like to see the State as operating system maintaining large scale distribution of services completely dismantled, while it is much less critical, if at all, of the State as provider of violence. In fact, the abandonment of criticism of the violent repressive aspects of the State by right-wing libertarians in the US is largely responsible for the massive libertarian-to-fascist pipeline that we have witnessed in recent years. In this political milieu, the very concept of “services” is discounted. The idea of structures that are simultaneously non-profitable but essential for the well-being of individuals and society is anathema to capitalist free-market absolutism, where the only conceivable large-scale structure is the global flow of capital.
Where does the current fascist takeover of the US government fit in this landscape? It is worth looking back at the relation of historical fascisms to the State, which is more complex than it seems at first. I want to focus first on one specific historical event: the “Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service” (“Gesetz zur Wiederherstellung des Berufsbeamtentums”) issued by Wilhelm Frick’s Reich Ministry of the Interior during Hitler’s first year in power, on April 7, 1933. This law was meant to purge the entire and vast government employees (civil servants) sector of political enemies and racially undesirables (which primarily targeted Jews in that case). The text of the law starts by stating that “civil servants may be discharged from office in accordance with the following regulations, even when there are no grounds for such action under existing law”. If anyone is thinking of the ongoing arbitrary and massive terminations of government employees in the US, that is indeed a good comparison, with the sole difference that Hitler’s Reich bothered to formalize this into a law before implementing it. Hitler’s law then (Section 2) dismisses from service all the recent hires (see the current termination of all probatory employees in the US government agencies): this clearly ensures a dragnet purge of hires made under the previous administration, on suspicion of harboring undesirable political views. Next in the list of dismissed employees in the 1933 law (Section 3) are “civil servants of non-Aryan descent” (which in modern days would be called “DEI hires”) and “civil servants whose former political activities afford no guarantee that they will act in the interest of the nation state at all” (see the current witch hunt for disloyal elements, including the use of polygraph tests on federal employees (already being enacted by the Department of Homeland Security).
This should also be compared with the ongoing attempts to deport Columbia University graduate student and US permanent resident Mahmoud Khalil for participation in campus protests, with the invocation of 8 USC 1227 4.C.i: “An alien whose presence or activities in the United States the Secretary of State has reasonable ground to believe would have potentially serious adverse foreign policy consequences for the United States is deportable.”
This is as clear an example as any can be of the concept of “tyranny’s backdoors”: a law in a democratic state that effectively grants unchecked power on the basis of a vaguely defined concept of “reasonable ground to believe” (reasonable to whom? believe? with no burden of proof?) to a single individual, the current Secretary of State.
Most noticeably, Hitler’s 1933 law also includes a justification for all these measures in terms of the goal of simplifying and making administration more efficient (where did I hear that recently?): for example, in Section 6 it is stated: “To simplify administration, civil servants can be retired even if they are not yet unfit for service. If civil servants are retired for this reason, their places may not be filled again”.
The Mussolini government, democratically elected in 1924 and morphing into a dictatorship by 1925, pursued the same path during its fast-paced dismantling of democracy. Law 24 December 1925, N.2300 “Dismissal of State Functionaries” gives the executive branch of the government unchecked power “even in cases not covered by current legislation, to dismiss functionaries, employees and civilian and military personnel of any grade and rank employed in any branch of state administration who, because of their behavior at work or outside work, are unable to fully guarantee the faithful fulfilment of their duties, or who display incompatibility with the general political directives of the government.”
There is a consistent pattern with elected governments transitioning to fascist dictatorships: their first act toward dismantling democratic institutions is an assault on the structure of civil servants and government employees. Why? This has a lot to do with the dual role of the State discussed above: all modern democracies, including those like the Weimar Republic and the constitutional monarchy that was the Reign of Italy, prior to the rise to power of fascism, had a large apparatus of government agencies and civil servants, often organized in a complex network of overlapping jurisdictions, by definition bureaucratic and not generally very efficient, based on many layers of career employees, mostly selected on the basis of specific technical competence (political favor only playing a role through unofficial channels and personal connections). This large machinery, slow, grey, unlikable for the most part, has nonetheless embodied a direct reflection of the steady growth in complexity of the modern world. Like an organism, it slowly adapts to growing complexity by adjusting older structures, stretching their functioning. This is the case with the Social Security in our government, for example, whose entire system runs on the 60-year-old programming language COBOL, with which the current computer science undergraduates that form the DOGE vanguard troops are utterly unfamiliar. (This caused the hilarious misunderstanding by Musk’s horde of “genius” college dropouts of the lack of date type in COBOL, and the consequent coding of all dates to the arbitrarily chosen reference point of May 20, 1875, as “proof” of widespread fraud, claiming the presence of 150-year-old people in the Social Security system.) The venomous hatred and the destructive violence directed at the civil service system by the Trump government (and by its historical predecessors, the Mussolini and Hitler governments in the process of transitioning to dictatorships) appear massively disproportionate to the extent of the actual inefficiencies of the system (about which more below). What is taking place looks much more like an open war waged by the part of the State, centered in the executive power, that embodies the legalized exercise of violence, against the other part of the State that accounts for the organization and distribution of services.
Fascism is based on a magical and mystical worship of power in its raw form. The State is seen primarily through a Hobbesian lens, as the Leviathan of absolute power. The exercise of violence, externally through wars of imperial expansion, and internally through a complete repression of dissent, is the unique and cherished goal of the fascist’s conquest of the State. Any other function of the State, anything that may actually be conceived as useful to society, especially in mitigating the ravaging consequences of capitalism, is despised and targeted for destruction. Checks and balances of power only generate hatred, as obstacles on the path to the deployment of unconstrained violence.
Here is also where the myth of “efficiency” comes to play a role. The civil service apparatus of the modern State is certainly riddled with inefficiencies and rests upon an ill adjusted and far from optimal structure that evolved slowly against the fast-moving pace of modernity. On the other hand, inefficiencies can sometimes be a feature rather than a bug in the system, much like in the theory of communication it is well known that redundancies (inefficiencies of communication) are necessary in order to achieve an overall safer and more reliable communication. Inefficiencies are sometimes not just a historical accident: they are often intentionally built-in for a purpose. For example, the modern democratic constitution of Italy, promulgated in 1948 after the end of fascism, makes the government extremely inefficient by design! So much so that the “first republic period” (1948-1994) saw the rapid alternation of 66 governments, none able to complete their term in office. The cost of making the whole country essentially ungovernable was considered a reasonable price to pay for making the system of checks and balances of power as strong as possible and the process of subverting the democratic order into a dictatorship, reproducing the path that Mussolini had taken, essentially impossible. Even after some changes to the constitution were introduced by the political right (second republic period) and an openly fascist government was inaugurated in 2022, the attempts at dismantling the democratic order have effectively ground to a halt, showing that inefficiency can be a very effective protective measure. This may seem counterintuitive to many, but inefficiency in government is a safety valve against authoritarian takeover.
This is also related to the fact that the two faces of the State follow very different modes of behavior: the apparatus that pertains to services is bound to transparency rules. The need for accountability adds inefficiency, through the burden of documentation, and of a system of controls and inspections. By contrast, the violent face of the State is shrouded in secrecy: military secrecy, special operations, agencies whose actions are unaccountable to any direct public scrutiny (NSA, CIA, FBI), the turbid waters of Homeland Security with its multiple forces. Custom and Border Protection (CBP police) with its Border Patrol and the infamous Immigration and Custom Enforcement (ICE) are leaving behind a trail of human rights violations, including denying the constitutional right to fair hearings in court and access to legal representation, violations of the 4th Amendment protection against unreasonable searches, racial profiling, excessive use of force and violent behavior, deaths in custody, and complete lack of oversight. This pattern extends to all levels of the State, from the federal to the local, where qualified immunity of police forces severely limits the reach of accountability and legal remedies for misconduct. These two dual modes of operation of the State are intrinsically irreconcilable. The eruptive force of the ongoing clash shows how fascism rapidly progresses to the goal of dismantling all the parts of the State whose structure relies on a transparency and accountability paradigm while simultaneously supercharging the other, unaccountable, secretive, and violent machine of governance.
Among the very first acts of the Trump government, during the first week in office, was the firing of Inspectors General of 17 different government agencies: a direct and immediate attack against the very concepts of transparency and accountability. The subsequent attempt, being thwarted in the courts, to shield the DOGE operations from freedom of information requests quickly followed in this anti-transparency crusade.
Democracies maintain themselves into existence as such (or at least try to) through the notion of separation of powers, the so-called checks and balances. In a typical democratic state, the legislative power is exercised by a Parliament of representatives elected by popular vote, the executive is headed by either an elected president or prime minister. The judiciary is a separate body, often a mixture of elected and appointed roles, performed by professional judges, in various nested levels of courts, handling a hierarchical system of appeals and decision-making processes.
The judiciary is often regarded as democracy’s last line of defense, the idea being that, if the executive oversteps its power and violates the constitution, the courts will rule against it. There is a clear loophole in this idea, though. Namely, enforcement of the courts’ ruling again circles back to the executive, in its internal policing aspects, and the executive has zero motivation to enforce rulings against itself. Yes, various law enforcement agencies maintain some semblance of mutual independence and of independence from direct manipulation, but those safety mechanisms can themselves easily crumble, as we have witnessed in the current purging of FBI, CIA, and the Pentagon, by the Trump-Musk junta.
As of this year, the World Justice Project’s measurement of the “Rule of Law Index” across different countries saw a significant decline in all aspects except “order and security” (aka the exercise of violence). In other words, with the worst drop pertaining to “improper government influences in judicial decision-making” and “constraints on government power”, the judiciary is now seen as being itself severely threatened, in the massive breakdowns that are affecting the separation of powers enshrined in the US constitution.
In 1933 Germany, the key turning point in the dismantling of democracy was the Enabling Act (Ermächtigungsgesetz) of March 23, 1933, also known as the “Law to Remove the Distress of the People and the State”, which crucially stated that, for a period of four years, “National laws can be enacted by the Reich Cabinet” (without going through the legislative branch of power) and that “The national laws enacted by the Reich Cabinet may deviate from the Constitution”, effectively removing any power of the judiciary to block such rulings as unconstitutional. Despite Hitler’s NSDAP nazi party not obtaining the majority in the March 5, 1933, election, a strategy of intimidation and violent threats obtained the passing of the Enabling Act in the Reichtag with 444 votes in favor and only 94 against. That was effectively the final act that marked the end of democracy in Germany.
In the current situation in the US, another scenario is possible, and in fact likely, in which the executive simply defies court orders entirely. The Trump, Musk, Vance triumvirate has repeatedly and openly challenged the authority of the courts and already embraced the possibility of ignoring court deliberations. Courts can, in response, hold them in contempt, and contempt proceedings can result in sanctions, fines, and jail time. However, the president has the power to pardon anyone, including himself, convicted of criminal contempt. The courts can sanction Trump’s attorneys, but Trump would likely not care. And even if judges can order sanctions that cannot be dodged by self-pardoning maneuvers, it would ultimately be up to law enforcement and federal prosecutors to enforce such penalties, with the US Marshals as the primary enforcement agency. Yes, the same US Marshals that just carried out the first act of violence of the executive government against the civil service system, by forcing their way into the US African Development Foundation escorting Musk staffers inside after the agency refused to allow them access to sensitive data. They would have to be the ones in charge of enforcing court issued sanctions against Trump, Musk, and Vance: color me skeptical. Mass organizing and resistance are effectively the sole force that can counter the rise of fascism and defend the institutions of democracy.
There is a fundamental flaw in the idea that fascism can simply be legislated out of existence. In both Italy and Germany fascism is officially illegal under the constitution. In Italy, it is currently at the head of the government (the prime minister Meloni is officially and openly fascist), and in Germany the direct descendant of the Hitler’s NSDAP, the AfD (Alternative für Deutschland), Musk’s favorite political party, became Germany’s second largest political force in the 2025 elections. The problem with legislative action against fascism is that the so-called “rule of law” applies only for as long as all the involved parties agree on its validity. When such consensus breaks down, especially in combination with the executive power grabbing hold of the full force of the institutionalized violence that the State provides, ruling and sanctions issued by the judiciary may well become meaningless by themselves.
On the other hand, the so-called “world order” is also a matter of consensus among nations. Those who witnessed the rapid and catastrophic collapse of the Soviet Union will remember well how a world superpower can vanish within an incredibly short amount of time. The US is not immune to the possibility of a rapidly changing world order in which the prominence and oversized influence that this nation maintains through aggressive foreign politics and a host of supportive allies may reach the tipping point of collapse, accelerated by its open embrace of fascism.
Anti-fascists protesting against Trump in Tucson, Arizona, 15 January 2018 | Image by Johnny Silvercloud
On March 15, 2025, in a new executive order, Trump invoked the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 that endows the president with sweeping and unchecked authority to target and deport foreign nationals. According to the text of the law, it can be invoked only when “there is a declared war between the United States and any foreign nation or government, or any invasion or predatory incursion is perpetrated, attempted, or threatened against the territory of the United States by any foreign nation or government”. Is the US currently at war with or under a military invasion from another country? So far, that does not appear to be the case. Moreover, according to the text of the law, under such powers, those who can be “apprehended, restrained, secured, and removed as alien enemies” are exclusively “natives, citizens, denizens, or subjects of the hostile nation or government”, the country the US is allegedly at war with. Which foreign nation or government is this? Canada, Trump’s current most coveted target for invasion? Mexico? Ukraine? Iran? China? The EU? Palestine? All of the above? The official declared motivation is “the invasion of the United States by Tren de Aragua”, which is neither a nation nor a government, but rather a criminal gang with roots in Venezuelan prisons, that the Trump administration officially labeled on January 20, 2025, as a “foreign terrorist organization”. The current White House statement is explicitly implying an active involvement of the Venezuelan government (with which we aren’t at war either), although the rise of the gang is largely the result of mass incarceration policies enacted by that government, and a reaction against it.
Trump has also repeatedly mentioned the possibility of invoking the Insurrection Act of 1807, a series of statutes under Title 10 of the U.S. States Code, granting the president the power to use the military to put down a rebellion at the federal or state level, effectively a martial law granting the use of the military against citizens on national soil. Is there currently an ongoing armed rebellion at the federal or state level? Again, at a cursory look, it would seem not to be quite the case. Just days ago, another law was invoked, about which more below, that gives the Secretary of State complete discretionary power to order deportations based on a mere “reasonable ground to believe” that the mere presence of designated foreign nationals on US soil could adversely affect US foreign policy, free of the onus of supporting evidence in a court process. Each one of these events is, of course, but another move on a large boardgame staging the showdown between rising fascism and the democratic institutions.
It appears that the main attack strategy being followed by this government, in its attempt to turn a functioning democracy into a dictatorship, is to locate and exploit what I will call here “tyranny’s backdoors” in the State operating system. The analogy here is with the case of computer systems, where cryptographic algorithms used for encryption aimed at protecting users’ private data and guaranteeing safe transactions are altered by the NSA with the insertion of intentional flaws that allow them to bypass the security mechanism and enable mass surveillance. Such intentional flaws in cryptographic algorithms are called backdoors, as they effectively allow the circumvention of an otherwise well-designed protective mechanism, thus leaving the whole system vulnerable to attacks. The analogous political situation here involves the system of protections typical of a democratic constitution, based on the separation of powers and on a complex system of checks and balances. The State is the overall operating system, and the backdoors are the ways in which democracy can be and has been, through history, repeatedly subverted and turned into a fascist dictatorship, through the exploitation of these weaknesses.
The State, in its manifestation in modern democracies, functions on an uneasy balance between two very different mechanisms. On the one hand there is the State as a complex system of distribution of services, operating simultaneously on many closely intertwined levels. Services are indispensable parts of the good functioning of society, which are by their very nature not profit-making. The gain they confer to the population is huge, but it is entirely measured in indirect effects: in the overall growth of quality of life, wellbeing, and advancement of society. Appreciating the importance of services requires thinking beyond the immediate and simple causality that the logic of profit relies on. Services of this kind include complex structures like health care, education, transportation, scientific research, the monitoring and interventions toward maintaining a good functioning of the supply chain, and other such fundamental needs. All the examples listed here are clearly closely interconnected: for example, both health care and education are very deeply intertwined with scientific research. Other services include facilitating the production of culture and the arts, which have always been an essential part of human civilization: they also strongly contribute to the quality of life and the wellbeing of societies. In the logic of market capitalism, many aspects of these services are left to the vagaries of profit-making private enterprise, with the State primarily functioning as a regulator, limiting via legislative means the damage caused by the clash between profit and fundamental needs. Regulation aimed at consumer protection, funds that subsidize and support the costs of services deemed essential when they would be dumped by private enterprise as non-profitable. Depending on the level of ideological adherence to a market-capitalist doctrine, the balance between the role of the State and the role of private enterprise in running societal services can vary.
The horrifying experiences many people encounter with the current health care system in the US are an example of why largely relegating the handling of crucial services to a profit-making machine results in a disastrous mismatching of goals. More tempered forms of management of services are displayed in some of the European social democracies, where the State has a more extensive role in handling the essential systems that maintain the basic and crucial infrastructures modern human life relies on. Modern democracies have projected a generally benevolent if often inefficient image of the “State as system of distribution of services”. There is, however, another, less benevolent, face of the State, which is inextricably entangled with this service provider aspect. The other face of Janus, the one that looks backward, is the State as the exclusive provider of organized violence, externally, in the form of the military machine of war, and internally in the form of armed policing and law enforcement. The main reason why these two aspects are essentially entangled is because running distributions of services (or intervening to ensure the reliable running of distributions of services) require collecting the necessary funding and allocating it where needed. In the modern nation states, this collection of funds happens through taxation. The collection and allocation of tax money has a legislative aspect that establishes the planning and an enforcement aspect that implements it and that is ultimately coercive in nature. The justification that the State provides for its monopoly on the exercise of violence is law enforcement, and this enforcement includes adherence to regulations pertaining to the collection of funds that the State administers. Of course, the true historical developments that led to the creation of police forces involved other, more violent, aspects of law enforcement, such as the slave patrols in US history that are the origin of US police. In some European countries, the democratic state that emerged after the war inherited its law enforcement agencies from the per-war dictatorships and hardly expurgated them of their antidemocratic elements. This type of historical backgrounds in turn influences the likely behavior that these parts of the State will exhibit when situations arise in which different manifestations of the State find themselves in conflict with each other.
Over modern history, criticism of the State has correspondingly taken two very different forms: which one can roughly distinguish as the anarchist criticism of the state and the libertarian criticism, where the term “libertarian” is used here in a specific American-centric meaning, that does not correspond to its connotations elsewhere. (In Europe, the term “libertarian” is often just a synonym of “anarchist” and does not have the distinctly right-wing connotation it carries in North and Latin America.) The divide between these two critical traditions closely follows the fault line between the two different faces of the State as provider of services and as provider of institutionalized violence. While the anarchist criticism focuses against the State as provider of legalized violence and its repressive role, and the dangers of intertwining services crucial to the population with this inherently oppressive role, the right-wing libertarian criticism would like to see the State as operating system maintaining large scale distribution of services completely dismantled, while it is much less critical, if at all, of the State as provider of violence. In fact, the abandonment of criticism of the violent repressive aspects of the State by right-wing libertarians in the US is largely responsible for the massive libertarian-to-fascist pipeline that we have witnessed in recent years. In this political milieu, the very concept of “services” is discounted. The idea of structures that are simultaneously non-profitable but essential for the well-being of individuals and society is anathema to capitalist free-market absolutism, where the only conceivable large-scale structure is the global flow of capital.
Where does the current fascist takeover of the US government fit in this landscape? It is worth looking back at the relation of historical fascisms to the State, which is more complex than it seems at first. I want to focus first on one specific historical event: the “Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service” (“Gesetz zur Wiederherstellung des Berufsbeamtentums”) issued by Wilhelm Frick’s Reich Ministry of the Interior during Hitler’s first year in power, on April 7, 1933. This law was meant to purge the entire and vast government employees (civil servants) sector of political enemies and racially undesirables (which primarily targeted Jews in that case). The text of the law starts by stating that “civil servants may be discharged from office in accordance with the following regulations, even when there are no grounds for such action under existing law”. If anyone is thinking of the ongoing arbitrary and massive terminations of government employees in the US, that is indeed a good comparison, with the sole difference that Hitler’s Reich bothered to formalize this into a law before implementing it. Hitler’s law then (Section 2) dismisses from service all the recent hires (see the current termination of all probatory employees in the US government agencies): this clearly ensures a dragnet purge of hires made under the previous administration, on suspicion of harboring undesirable political views. Next in the list of dismissed employees in the 1933 law (Section 3) are “civil servants of non-Aryan descent” (which in modern days would be called “DEI hires”) and “civil servants whose former political activities afford no guarantee that they will act in the interest of the nation state at all” (see the current witch hunt for disloyal elements, including the use of polygraph tests on federal employees (already being enacted by the Department of Homeland Security).
This should also be compared with the ongoing attempts to deport Columbia University graduate student and US permanent resident Mahmoud Khalil for participation in campus protests, with the invocation of 8 USC 1227 4.C.i: “An alien whose presence or activities in the United States the Secretary of State has reasonable ground to believe would have potentially serious adverse foreign policy consequences for the United States is deportable.”
This is as clear an example as any can be of the concept of “tyranny’s backdoors”: a law in a democratic state that effectively grants unchecked power on the basis of a vaguely defined concept of “reasonable ground to believe” (reasonable to whom? believe? with no burden of proof?) to a single individual, the current Secretary of State.
Most noticeably, Hitler’s 1933 law also includes a justification for all these measures in terms of the goal of simplifying and making administration more efficient (where did I hear that recently?): for example, in Section 6 it is stated: “To simplify administration, civil servants can be retired even if they are not yet unfit for service. If civil servants are retired for this reason, their places may not be filled again”.
The Mussolini government, democratically elected in 1924 and morphing into a dictatorship by 1925, pursued the same path during its fast-paced dismantling of democracy. Law 24 December 1925, N.2300 “Dismissal of State Functionaries” gives the executive branch of the government unchecked power “even in cases not covered by current legislation, to dismiss functionaries, employees and civilian and military personnel of any grade and rank employed in any branch of state administration who, because of their behavior at work or outside work, are unable to fully guarantee the faithful fulfilment of their duties, or who display incompatibility with the general political directives of the government.”
There is a consistent pattern with elected governments transitioning to fascist dictatorships: their first act toward dismantling democratic institutions is an assault on the structure of civil servants and government employees. Why? This has a lot to do with the dual role of the State discussed above: all modern democracies, including those like the Weimar Republic and the constitutional monarchy that was the Reign of Italy, prior to the rise to power of fascism, had a large apparatus of government agencies and civil servants, often organized in a complex network of overlapping jurisdictions, by definition bureaucratic and not generally very efficient, based on many layers of career employees, mostly selected on the basis of specific technical competence (political favor only playing a role through unofficial channels and personal connections). This large machinery, slow, grey, unlikable for the most part, has nonetheless embodied a direct reflection of the steady growth in complexity of the modern world. Like an organism, it slowly adapts to growing complexity by adjusting older structures, stretching their functioning. This is the case with the Social Security in our government, for example, whose entire system runs on the 60-year-old programming language COBOL, with which the current computer science undergraduates that form the DOGE vanguard troops are utterly unfamiliar. (This caused the hilarious misunderstanding by Musk’s horde of “genius” college dropouts of the lack of date type in COBOL, and the consequent coding of all dates to the arbitrarily chosen reference point of May 20, 1875, as “proof” of widespread fraud, claiming the presence of 150-year-old people in the Social Security system.) The venomous hatred and the destructive violence directed at the civil service system by the Trump government (and by its historical predecessors, the Mussolini and Hitler governments in the process of transitioning to dictatorships) appear massively disproportionate to the extent of the actual inefficiencies of the system (about which more below). What is taking place looks much more like an open war waged by the part of the State, centered in the executive power, that embodies the legalized exercise of violence, against the other part of the State that accounts for the organization and distribution of services.
Fascism is based on a magical and mystical worship of power in its raw form. The State is seen primarily through a Hobbesian lens, as the Leviathan of absolute power. The exercise of violence, externally through wars of imperial expansion, and internally through a complete repression of dissent, is the unique and cherished goal of the fascist’s conquest of the State. Any other function of the State, anything that may actually be conceived as useful to society, especially in mitigating the ravaging consequences of capitalism, is despised and targeted for destruction. Checks and balances of power only generate hatred, as obstacles on the path to the deployment of unconstrained violence.
Here is also where the myth of “efficiency” comes to play a role. The civil service apparatus of the modern State is certainly riddled with inefficiencies and rests upon an ill adjusted and far from optimal structure that evolved slowly against the fast-moving pace of modernity. On the other hand, inefficiencies can sometimes be a feature rather than a bug in the system, much like in the theory of communication it is well known that redundancies (inefficiencies of communication) are necessary in order to achieve an overall safer and more reliable communication. Inefficiencies are sometimes not just a historical accident: they are often intentionally built-in for a purpose. For example, the modern democratic constitution of Italy, promulgated in 1948 after the end of fascism, makes the government extremely inefficient by design! So much so that the “first republic period” (1948-1994) saw the rapid alternation of 66 governments, none able to complete their term in office. The cost of making the whole country essentially ungovernable was considered a reasonable price to pay for making the system of checks and balances of power as strong as possible and the process of subverting the democratic order into a dictatorship, reproducing the path that Mussolini had taken, essentially impossible. Even after some changes to the constitution were introduced by the political right (second republic period) and an openly fascist government was inaugurated in 2022, the attempts at dismantling the democratic order have effectively ground to a halt, showing that inefficiency can be a very effective protective measure. This may seem counterintuitive to many, but inefficiency in government is a safety valve against authoritarian takeover.
This is also related to the fact that the two faces of the State follow very different modes of behavior: the apparatus that pertains to services is bound to transparency rules. The need for accountability adds inefficiency, through the burden of documentation, and of a system of controls and inspections. By contrast, the violent face of the State is shrouded in secrecy: military secrecy, special operations, agencies whose actions are unaccountable to any direct public scrutiny (NSA, CIA, FBI), the turbid waters of Homeland Security with its multiple forces. Custom and Border Protection (CBP police) with its Border Patrol and the infamous Immigration and Custom Enforcement (ICE) are leaving behind a trail of human rights violations, including denying the constitutional right to fair hearings in court and access to legal representation, violations of the 4th Amendment protection against unreasonable searches, racial profiling, excessive use of force and violent behavior, deaths in custody, and complete lack of oversight. This pattern extends to all levels of the State, from the federal to the local, where qualified immunity of police forces severely limits the reach of accountability and legal remedies for misconduct. These two dual modes of operation of the State are intrinsically irreconcilable. The eruptive force of the ongoing clash shows how fascism rapidly progresses to the goal of dismantling all the parts of the State whose structure relies on a transparency and accountability paradigm while simultaneously supercharging the other, unaccountable, secretive, and violent machine of governance.
Among the very first acts of the Trump government, during the first week in office, was the firing of Inspectors General of 17 different government agencies: a direct and immediate attack against the very concepts of transparency and accountability. The subsequent attempt, being thwarted in the courts, to shield the DOGE operations from freedom of information requests quickly followed in this anti-transparency crusade.
Democracies maintain themselves into existence as such (or at least try to) through the notion of separation of powers, the so-called checks and balances. In a typical democratic state, the legislative power is exercised by a Parliament of representatives elected by popular vote, the executive is headed by either an elected president or prime minister. The judiciary is a separate body, often a mixture of elected and appointed roles, performed by professional judges, in various nested levels of courts, handling a hierarchical system of appeals and decision-making processes.
The judiciary is often regarded as democracy’s last line of defense, the idea being that, if the executive oversteps its power and violates the constitution, the courts will rule against it. There is a clear loophole in this idea, though. Namely, enforcement of the courts’ ruling again circles back to the executive, in its internal policing aspects, and the executive has zero motivation to enforce rulings against itself. Yes, various law enforcement agencies maintain some semblance of mutual independence and of independence from direct manipulation, but those safety mechanisms can themselves easily crumble, as we have witnessed in the current purging of FBI, CIA, and the Pentagon, by the Trump-Musk junta.
As of this year, the World Justice Project’s measurement of the “Rule of Law Index” across different countries saw a significant decline in all aspects except “order and security” (aka the exercise of violence). In other words, with the worst drop pertaining to “improper government influences in judicial decision-making” and “constraints on government power”, the judiciary is now seen as being itself severely threatened, in the massive breakdowns that are affecting the separation of powers enshrined in the US constitution.
In 1933 Germany, the key turning point in the dismantling of democracy was the Enabling Act (Ermächtigungsgesetz) of March 23, 1933, also known as the “Law to Remove the Distress of the People and the State”, which crucially stated that, for a period of four years, “National laws can be enacted by the Reich Cabinet” (without going through the legislative branch of power) and that “The national laws enacted by the Reich Cabinet may deviate from the Constitution”, effectively removing any power of the judiciary to block such rulings as unconstitutional. Despite Hitler’s NSDAP nazi party not obtaining the majority in the March 5, 1933, election, a strategy of intimidation and violent threats obtained the passing of the Enabling Act in the Reichtag with 444 votes in favor and only 94 against. That was effectively the final act that marked the end of democracy in Germany.
In the current situation in the US, another scenario is possible, and in fact likely, in which the executive simply defies court orders entirely. The Trump, Musk, Vance triumvirate has repeatedly and openly challenged the authority of the courts and already embraced the possibility of ignoring court deliberations. Courts can, in response, hold them in contempt, and contempt proceedings can result in sanctions, fines, and jail time. However, the president has the power to pardon anyone, including himself, convicted of criminal contempt. The courts can sanction Trump’s attorneys, but Trump would likely not care. And even if judges can order sanctions that cannot be dodged by self-pardoning maneuvers, it would ultimately be up to law enforcement and federal prosecutors to enforce such penalties, with the US Marshals as the primary enforcement agency. Yes, the same US Marshals that just carried out the first act of violence of the executive government against the civil service system, by forcing their way into the US African Development Foundation escorting Musk staffers inside after the agency refused to allow them access to sensitive data. They would have to be the ones in charge of enforcing court issued sanctions against Trump, Musk, and Vance: color me skeptical. Mass organizing and resistance are effectively the sole force that can counter the rise of fascism and defend the institutions of democracy.
There is a fundamental flaw in the idea that fascism can simply be legislated out of existence. In both Italy and Germany fascism is officially illegal under the constitution. In Italy, it is currently at the head of the government (the prime minister Meloni is officially and openly fascist), and in Germany the direct descendant of the Hitler’s NSDAP, the AfD (Alternative für Deutschland), Musk’s favorite political party, became Germany’s second largest political force in the 2025 elections. The problem with legislative action against fascism is that the so-called “rule of law” applies only for as long as all the involved parties agree on its validity. When such consensus breaks down, especially in combination with the executive power grabbing hold of the full force of the institutionalized violence that the State provides, ruling and sanctions issued by the judiciary may well become meaningless by themselves.
On the other hand, the so-called “world order” is also a matter of consensus among nations. Those who witnessed the rapid and catastrophic collapse of the Soviet Union will remember well how a world superpower can vanish within an incredibly short amount of time. The US is not immune to the possibility of a rapidly changing world order in which the prominence and oversized influence that this nation maintains through aggressive foreign politics and a host of supportive allies may reach the tipping point of collapse, accelerated by its open embrace of fascism.
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Matilde Marcolli
Dr Matilde Marcolli is the Robert F. Christy Professor of Mathematics and Computing and Mathematical Sciences at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech). She received her PhD in mathematics from the University of Chicago, and subsequently worked at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the Max Planck Institute for Mathematics, the University of Toronto, the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics, and the California Institute of Technology. She is author of 7 books and over 150 research papers in mathematics, theoretical physics, cosmology, information theory, and linguistics. Her most recent work is the research monograph in mathematical linguistics: Matilde Marcolli, Noam Chomsky, Robert C. Berwick, “Mathematical Structure of Syntactic Merge”, MIT Press, 2025. This article is based on the author’s personal views and in no way represents any of the institutions listed here.
