POWER

How It Works and Why It Fails

There are two fundamental kinds of power: The power to harm; and the power to observe and protest. Neither is absolute. Even among chimpanzees, the alpha males do not entirely run the show even though they can win pretty much any physical confrontation. Alphas can be countered by a group of subordinates that act together despite lacking the benefits of language. The emergence of what primatologist Richard Wrangham calls the male coalition in our evolutionary past allowed for a rough form of social justice to help keep groups intact. Cohesive groups are more likely to survive than fractured ones, and consensus thus became an important part of our evolution.

Consequently, history is full of rulers who might have wanted to unleash their military on the populace but didn’t dare because they knew that doing so could precipitate their own downfall. The power to open fire on civilians is an awesome and terrifying one but, in the long run, might topple as many regimes as it props up. In the United States, the misuse of the state monopoly on violence rarely works out for the party in charge. The murders at Kent State in 1970 and in Minneapolis in 2026 resulted in significant tactical constraints for federal law enforcement and political consequences for Republicans. In Minneapolis, Border Patrol chief Greg Bovino was fired, ICE was forced to greatly reduce its presence, and Democrats tied up Homeland Security funding in a way that generated enormous political costs for Donald Trump. Head of Homeland Security Kristi Noem eventually lost her position as well. ICE and the USBP easily had enough firepower to tactically control the streets of Minneapolis but chose not to because a massacre of protestors, with dozens dead, would have immediately brought down the Trump administration. (Many federal agents are also fine and moral people who wouldn’t want anything to do with such a crime.) Public opinion has the force of floodwaters coursing down a riverbed that you can ordinarily jump across. Public opinion, once unleashed, is almost impossible to counter without becoming completely murderous. And that, thank God, is a choice that even sociopaths hesitate to make.

The U.S. military has a name for public opinion: Human terrain. Soldiers move across hills and valleys and rivers as well as a social environment that can affect them deeply. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth has made no secret of the fact that he considers rules of engagement to be a waste of time, but the ultimate argument for protecting civilian life in war zones may be practical rather than moral. When I was with US forces in eastern Afghanistan in 2008, a young man from a nearby village contacted the base commander to tell him that a bomb had been dug into the one road that went through the valley. The company had already been hit by another such bomb that destroyed a Humvee and tore the legs off an American soldier. That young Afghan would never have ratted out the Taliban if US forces had killed his family or abused him at a checkpoint. There is a simple and reliable rule for the human terrain in which insurgencies are fought: The more civilians you kill, the more of your own soldiers will die as well.

The political struggle against Trump can feel like an insurgency - both he and his adversaries have described the conflict in military terms - but it’s not. Trump came to power by increasing his vote among women, minorities and young people in a completely fair and open election. Now many of those swing voters seem to be regretting their choice, and Trump’s net approval rating is negative twenty. That puts him on a par with Joe Biden, George Bush and Richard Nixon in their darkest days. Furthermore, virtually every political front that Trump has opened - the border wall, immigration, the economy, tariffs, DOGE, the White House ballroom and, finally, war with Iran - has failed on his own terms and sunk his popularity. There is every indication that the midterms will be a bloodbath for Republicans and that they are at real risk of losing one or both houses of Congress. At that point, almost anything is possible.

This kind of turn-around demonstrates the terrific power of public opinion even in a country that - according to many liberals - has slipped into fascism. Obviously, it has not. Trump has reduced or withdrawn federal agents from every blue-voting city he has tried to dominate. He was forced by the courts to bring deported immigrant Kilmar Abrego Garcia back from El Salvador and recently suffered a legal defeat regarding the government’s right to re-detain him. Concurrently, DHS spokeswoman Tricia McLoughlin was forced out despite her vigorous defense of Trump’s immigration policies. Those are not the setbacks of a fascist country; they are the setbacks of a democracy whose leaders are greatly constrained by both law and politics.

My republican friends are largely silent on these matters because, I suspect, they find Trump’s overreach and unforced errors embarrassing. My liberal friends, on the other hand, often refuse to acknowledge legal and political victories because - again, I suspect - they don’t want to undermine a fascism narrative that has galvanized millions of people across the country. Understood on both counts - and not entirely unreasonable. But in the long term, the proper counter to conservative hyperbole isn’t liberal hyperbole; it’s an implacable dedication to accuracy and truth. You simply can’t use the term fascism to describe both the Holocaust and the firing of Jimmy Kimmel, even if you think doing so will help you win the next election. First of all, it won’t. Second, you are engaging in the same exaggeration-for-effect that Donald Trump does - and that you claim to hate.

Faced with these points, the liberal fallback position is often: Okay, maybe we’re not in a state of fascism now, but our transition out of democracy is one of the fastest on record. Really? Trump rose to prominence and established MAGA over a decade ago and is still struggling to implement basic elements of his agenda. By comparison, the Nazi party was formed in 1930 and by 1934 had suspended civil liberties, arrested and executed hundreds of rivals and announced Adolf Hitler as Furer. In Italy, four years sufficed for Benito Mussolini to go from becoming a member of parliament to declaring himself dictator. Francisco Franco of Spain had them all beat, however, by declaring himself caudillo less than three months after taking command of insurrectionist elements in the Spanish military. At that point, Spain was already engulfed in a country-wide civil war.

The other liberal fallback position is to claim that the United States has never been as authoritarian and nationalistic as it is now. Let’s leave aside the Cherokee Trail of Tears, the eradication of most of the native inhabitants of this continent, slavery, Jim Crow and the Gilded Age of the 1890s - when ten percent of the population controlled three quarters of the wealth. We’ll confine ourselves to the Twentieth Century, which falls within the lifetimes of many of our grandparents. Colorado National Guard troops opened fire and killed 21 civilians - mostly women and children - during a coal miner’s strike in 1914. Eugene Debs was forced to run for president from a prison cell in 1920 because he’d been convicted of “praising draft resistors.” A year later, several thousand West Virginia coal miners dug themselves into a mountaintop and prepared to fight off an army of hired strikebreakers. Unable to dislodge the miners, the U.S. Air Force bombed the mountaintop by airplane and used machine guns and poison gas left over from World War One. In 1968, state troopers opened fire on black protestors at Orangeburg State College in South Carolina, killing three and wounding 28. Most were shot in the back. And in 1970, four students were killed and nine wounded when National Guard troops opened fire at Kent State University in Ohio. The students were protesting President Nixon’s decision to widen the Vietnam war to Cambodia.

This litany of government abuse shows enough of a pattern to be concerned that history may be repeating itself. But it’s important to also remember that the era represented by these crimes resulted less repression, not more. Suffrage, labor rights, civil rights and increasingly robust protections for the First Amendment were the results of these struggles. I have a friend who has served as an officer in some of the most intense combat of the last twenty years. He is from a military family of the finest pedigree and a lifelong republican (like almost two-thirds of U.S. military personnel.) I’m confident that this patriotic and principled man would rather get thrown into the brig than obey an illegal order to open fire on the streets of his own country. It’s entirely possible that the reason Donald Trump has not invoked the Insurrection Act - as liberals love to claim he will - is that he has been told that illegal orders will be refused. It may be that our military is now the most diverse, principled and democratic of all our national institutions. Ironically - given its controversial history - the U.S. military may be our ultimate backstop against the rise of fascism that so many Americans now fear.