Authoritarians don’t get the last word

That's why we are fighting back on every front.

(G. Edward Johnson via Wikimedia Commons)

The bulldozed White House East Wing is an all-too-obvious metaphor. The president of the United States is taking a wrecking ball to our democratic institutions and using the trappings of democracy to glorify and enrich himself.

In place of the historic East Wing, we’re told, will be a grand ballroom more befitting our powerful nation and funded by corporate donors. Authoritarians always need bigger stages.

I’ve studied and helped activists on ground fight against authoritarian regimes around the world. The playbook is unoriginal. They destroy the symbols of democracy and shared governance, replace them with monuments to the autocrat, and demand that the public get used to it. They also use their power to intimidate and silence critics. We are witnessing this playbook in action every day.

In late summer, the Bureau of Labor Statistics published jobs data that President Donald Trump didn’t like, so he fired the head of the agency. He has fired Department of Justice prosecutors who refused to do his bidding and replaced them with loyalists and forced prosecutions of his perceived political enemies, including New York Attorney General Letitia James. That’s just a microdose of his autocratic actions from the past two months.

The media and the public move on from the onslaught of outrages because it’s one thing after another—every single day.

In late September, the White House used a low-income South Shore, Chicago apartment building as a proving ground for what militarized community raids will look like. Black Hawk helicopters circled a residential neighborhood as ICE agents stormed an apartment complex, some literally rappelling from helicopters in the middle of the night. It was part of Operation Midway Blitz, an apt name for ongoing enforcement, including this raid deliberately staged as a military assault. Residents, primarily immigrants and Black U.S. citizens, were dragged from their homes, zip-tied, and detained. ICE agents’ body cams and videographers recorded the raid, later edited into a propaganda video by the administration.

Whether it’s taking a bulldozer to the East Wing or invading a residential building, these assaults are two sides of the same coin. One side targets the symbols of our democratic strength; the other targets our people.

We shouldn’t treat any of these acts as a sideshow. It would be easy to give in to fatigue and believe institutions will right themselves or that someone else will intervene. But ambivalence and exhaustion are how autocracy wins.

That’s why Democracy Defenders Action and a broad coalition of nonprofit organizations and activists are fighting back in the court of law and in the court of public opinion to expose what this administration is doing, who it’s harming, and how we can still resist authoritarianism through truth, justice, and civic action.

The East Wing once stood as the entrance through which millions of ordinary Americans took tours of the White House and gained a glimpse of their government. Its demolition—with no input from the public or the legislative branch—is a physical and symbolic loss. History is unambiguous about what comes next. When authoritarian leaders destroy the symbols of democracy, they are preparing to destroy its substance. Their goal is to raise doubts about who this country belongs to, and make us believe that it doesn’t belong to us. They want to take us back to before the Civil Rights movement and erase the hard-fought progress we made toward an inclusive democracy. But we won’t let them.

That’s the story Democracy Defenders Action and Public Citizen tell in The Last Word, and it’s the story we’ll keep writing together as we fight for our democracy in the courts, in our communities, and in the streets.

Susan Corke is the executive director of Democracy Defenders Action.

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