The obituary for American democracy ...

... while there's still time to rewrite the ending.

What's Coming and What It Will Take

This is only tangentially about politics. It’s more about our longterm outlook and what it will take to change the inevitable outcome, provided we’re willing to take chances, abandoning that which got us here.

First, though, to get there, we need to name the symptoms and the causes that are killing us.

Trump is a bobblehead. A useful symptom of our social decay. His antics, media dominance, outrageous behavior, illegal conduct, and racist DNA are the carnival barker's costume draped over something far more evil. Behind the orange makeup and Twitter tantrums operates a well-oiled machine of Christofascists who've been planning a takeover since their inception in 1973. Since then, they’ve been scheming alongside Jerry Falwell’s “Moral Majority”, causing us Reagan, and since then, far worse. They’ve had decades of preparation, and with each year and each election, the Heritage Foundation, a domestic terrorist organization, has only become more dangerous.

Thus, to date, 40+ years later, getting rid of Trump won't solve shit. It's like treating lung cancer with cough drops.

Even if Democrats magically grew spines and Republicans discovered consciences, neither of which will happen, removing Trump only gives more power to the real monster lurking behind the curtain: J.D. Vance, formerly James Donald Bowman, is an evil bastard, whose education is rivaled only by his capacity for calculated cruelty.

While Trump commands headlines, Vance is the operator who’s mostly outside of the spotlight, whereas behind him is the Heritage Foundation, and its operatives, who are almost completely unnoticed.

Ultimately, they want Trump to be exactly where he is. At the helm, messiah status, recently positioned as Superman by the official White House account on “X”.

The Pathology

The death certificate may note Christofascism as the terminal diagnosis, and the cause of death will be explained as “too complacent to acknowledge the disease”.

Vance isn’t Trump's lapdog. In fact, he never made sense as Trump’s running mate. Was he even Trump’s choice, or is he the Heritage Foundation's golden boy, and Kevin Roberts' handpicked project manager of Project 2025 embedded in the administration? While Trump stumbles through word salads, cognitively as sharp as molten butter, Vance writes forewords to books about the "Dawn's Early Light" of Christian nationalism. While Trump tweets, Vance chaperones the Heritage Foundation’s infrastructure of authoritarianism.

Those who paid attention already know that Project 2025 is more than a policy paper; it's always been a blueprint for dismantling democracy, enforcing evangelicalism as the lens through which to persecute. The architects are not fringe lunatics shouting from street corners. They're highly educated, legally versed, well-funded extremists who happen to also be former Trump administration officials who've been quietly building the machinery of oppression:

Russ Vought, Trump's Office of Management and Budget director, authored the chapter on seizing executive power. Christopher Miller, former Secretary of Defense, wrote the military strategy. Ken Cuccinelli designed the immigration crackdown. Kiron Skinner crafted the foreign policy of isolation. Even those names represent only a fraction of those who have signed on to Project 2025. They all have a common denominator, though.

These aren't amateurs. They're professionals who've studied every historical fascist playbook and updated it for the digital age. They know exactly what they're doing, and they're executing their plans with calmness and precision while they keep Americans captivated with gas prices, hunting illegals, and tariff games.

Although many have tried, including household journalists, the majority of Americans still haven’t received the message: The enemy you cannot name is the enemy you cannot fight.

Let’s try one more time to get the name across: The Heritage Foundation, its supporting organizations, MAGA politicians, and fanatic Americans are Christofascists who believe their god has given them dominion over your body, your family, and your future. They don't see you as fellow Americans; they see you as obstacles to their divine manifest destiny. They see you as infidel mosquitoes, and they cannot wait to end your flight.

Reality Check

We cannot vote our way out of this. We cannot impeach our way out of this. We cannot lawyer our way out of this.

Why? Because they've already proven they don't give a damn about laws, elections, or constitutional norms. They organized a coup on January 6th, and half the country shrugged. Meanwhile, most of the J6 domestic terrorists were pardoned, and the country shrugged again. They've packed courts, gerrymandered districts, and passed voter suppression laws while Democrats clutched their pearls and cited parliamentary procedure.

Yet, somehow, we still think that the people who orchestrated January 6th care about the ballot. We still think the Heritage Foundation will respect election results that don't go their way. We still seem to believe that the administration will accept SCOTUS’s rulings. They’ve already shown us they won’t, and they won’t change that in the future. On the contrary. Simultaneously, they’re banking on our complacency. Thus far, their bets are paying off.

Even Chief Justice Roberts acknowledged it, describing the rule of law as “endangered” and warned against “trashing the justices,” per Politico.

The impeachment fantasy is just like the “overturning the election” fantasy. Both are highly unlikely to happen. Trump was impeached twice and removed zero times. The GOP doesn't have the spine, and the Democrats don't have the votes. Even if they did, impeaching Trump just promotes Vance, and behind Vance stands an entire army of true believers who make Trump look like a moderate. Even if Vance were to “vanish”, there’d be a replacement, whether it be Johnson or another disciple of the Heritage Foundation. Politicians are just executors of the Heritage Foundation's will. To change the trajectory, the Heritage Foundation, as the cause of the disease, must be destroyed.

What’s Actually Required

The only way out requires something Americans are congenitally incapable of: Unity. Collectivism. Organized resistance that scares their corporate donors, making their police forces think twice.

This is not a call for violence, unless it’s the last resort, but it's a call for the kind of mass civil disobedience that has historically been the only thing that stops fascism. The kind of collective action that shuts down their economy, disrupts their infrastructure, and makes their system of oppression too expensive to maintain.

• Mass strikes that withhold labor and production

• Civil disobedience that fills their jails beyond capacity, even when they just beefed up the prison industrial complex

• Economic boycotts that hit their donors where it hurts

• Organized non-compliance that makes their laws unenforceable

We have to become ungovernable.

The Montgomery Bus Boycott didn't work because the black community asked nicely. The suffragettes didn't get the vote by writing letters to the editor. The labor movement didn't get the eight-hour workday by voting harder.

They got results by making the status quo more expensive than change.

This requires Americans to discover that "rugged individualism" is a suicide mission. It requires putting collective action above personal comfort. It requires the kind of sustained sacrifice that our consumer culture has trained us to avoid, and the absence of PTO and healthcare doesn’t allow us to consider.

On the account that this may offend you, merely participating in “No Kings” protests is performative at best. Realistically, it encourages the administration, letting them know that what they’re doing is working. They also know that you’re going home after the protest, and that you’ll be back at work on Monday.

The antidote to organized fascism is organized resistance. Not hope. Not another strongly worded editorial, including this one.

The Binary Choice

I'm not pessimistic. I'm not optimistic. I'm a realist. I'm Austrian. I've talked with holocaust survivors. I've walked through the camps in Austria and Germany. I’ve seen the artifacts and the graves in Prague. I know what this machinery looks like when it's finished building.

The choice is binary: organized resistance or systematic elimination. There is no middle ground with fascism. There never has been. The Germans thought they could moderate the Nazis. The Italians who thought Mussolini was just a strongman who'd eventually calm down. Both were fundamentally wrong. Both paid unimaginable consequences. Their consequences will be dwarfed by the outcomes in the United States.

Right now, too many Americans still believe what every other democracy before them believed: that it is immune to authoritarianism right up until the moment it wasn't. Perhaps worse is that, in the USA, millions desire authoritarianism, thinking that they’re personally immune to the impacts. The latter is true for some, but not the majority. In that, we are traveling on the same type of railway as the Germans did, except ours has 12 lanes, and the GOP, by demand of the Heritage Foundation, has increased the speed limit to 300mph. And while the people argue about the direction of travel, the Heritage Foundation is going at maximum speed toward America’s first concentration camp: Alligator Alcatraz.

Their machinery has been in construction for decades. It took them a long time to get all their operators in place. They stacked the benches, they stacked politics, they gerrymandered, and they claimed control over every facet of American lives. Perhaps there are too many Americans who do not feel the squeeze quite yet. Suffice it to say, it will come, as it has before. The only question is whether we'll organize collectively to stop it or continue our individual march toward collective destruction.

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Someone has to have the testicular fortitude to name it, to identify them, and to also speak about what it will take to stop it. After that, we can only hope that we collectively awaken before the bodies hit the floor.

I know for certain: They're not going to stop. They're not going to switch to moderate style. They're not going to suddenly discover decency or respect for democratic norms. They are invested. They are committed. They are willing to murder you and your family to get their ideal State of the Union.

The only thing that stops organized fascism is organized resistance. Everything else is just wishful thinking wrapped in patriotic and hopeful rhetoric.

The question isn't whether this is coming. The question is whether we'll wake up in time to do what democracy requires, or whether we'll accept that walking into the camps may happen only to everyone else, but when you’re walking down that path yourself, wondering how it all went so wrong.

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~Z.