Just a few minutes ago I wrote:
👉🏼 The same fools who enabled this catastrophe with their
interminable arendtsplaining and pedantic denialism expect us to attend
to their interminable babbling about how wrong they were. They should
step aside and give their bully pulpits to people who were right when it
mattered. 👈🏼
These *postmature antifascists*, as I like to call them, are a dime a
dozen and best ignored. Francine Prose is a reasonably distinguished
person, deeply intelligent and clearly of good faith — she plays on
our team, so to speak. But anyone who’d write *now* that the US
“feels like a country on the brink of an authoritarian takeover”
should be read with some skepticism, because the US is far past that
brink.
We’ve watched the prestigious institutions of one sector after another
— national governments abroad and government entities at home,
national and even transnational corporations, mighty universities, major
media outlets, pillars of civil society, and on and on — quailing
before Trump & Co. It’s perfectly understandable why they’d do so,
and even a *rational choice*; I’m not one of those left-identified
bombasts who naively believes the president of Harvard should risk the
entire university’s existence for the fleeting glory of “speaking
truth to power.” But even so, to spend the last year watching this
happen and *then* argue the US is “on the brink”? WTF criteria would
the country need for even the most prudent person to say we’ve gone
over the brink?!
Prose’s own words are “our country *is* on the brink,” but The
Guardian’s editors changed that to “feels like” for their headline
because out of journalistic caution. But that subtle shift, from fact to
subjective impression, is in keeping with Prose’s own piece. It spends
more time on the space cynical sysadmins used call PEBKAC, for Problem
Exists Between Keyboard and Chair. If you read her essay, most of it‘s
concerned with phones screens, snow, media, robins, etc — novelistic
detail that puts us in the shoes, and chair, of a Serious Person.
My comment above about pedantic denialists was prompted by a piece by
Jonathan Rauch in The Atlantic — “Yes, It’s Fascism,” with the
subhead “Until recently, I thought it a term best avoided. But now,
the resemblances are too many and too strong to deny.” He too spends
much of his time maundering on about his subjective process, then he
conjures up one of those ‘best practice’-style lists cribbed from a
melange of Authorities on Authoritarianism — Snyder, Eco, Paxton, etc
— of criteria needed for anointing something Officially Fascist. He
introduces the list with a choice bit of rhetoric that doffs its hat to
some sort of ‘methodology’ but ultimately affirms his own capricious
authority: “Fascism is not a territory with clearly marked boundaries
but a constellation of characteristics. When you view the stars
together, the constellation plainly appears.” A decade too late, but
who’s counting?
Well, I am, actually. Not so much the exact number of years have passes
since I argued that Trump would need be forcibly removed from the White
House (ten), but more the qualitative sense of time that permeates
people’s thinking and enables their passivity. When you say we’re
*on the brink°, you’re saying it hasn’t “really” happened yet,
which justifies passivity. Arguing it isn’t “really” fascism
achieves the same effect by slightly different means, by focusing on
discernment. Saying of something evil that “this is what _______ looks
like” — fascism, authoritarianism, whatever, it doesn’t matter
because it’s all just content for a mad lib — does it as well, but
with a semiotic twist: it may or may not not actually *be* _____, but it
“looks like” it. And, of course, protestation like “this isn’t
who we are” and “we’re better than this” do the same, but in
still other ways. The list of these rhetorical sleights of hand could go
on and on.
I have to make clear that the people saying these things should be
assumed to be acting in good faith, caring for the public interest, and
all those other warm-fuzzy things. I don’t mean to speak poorly of
them as individuals. But as a *class* they’re pretty problematic,
because the sum total of their efforts is to postpone the venerable
question *what is to be done?* And in much the same way that they are,
by their own admission, postmature antifascists, we should assume that,
given the chance, they’d be among the first to prematurely declare
victory over the fascists — because that’s when liberals would have
to ask the much rougher question what is to be done *with these
fascists?*
Cheers,
Ted
On 26 Jan 2026, at 8:56, Patrice Riemens via nettime-l wrote:
Original to:
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2026/jan/25/america-feels-like-a-country-on-the-brink-of-an-authoritarian-takeover
America feels like a country on the brink of an authoritarian takeover
Francine Prose
This is the news we should be paying attention to. At least for the
moment, everything else is a distraction
Mon 26 Jan 2026
When we talk about our inability to pay attention, to concentrate, we
often mean and blame our phones. It’s easy, it’s meant to be easy.
One flick of our index finger transports us from disaster to disaster,
from crisis to crisis, from maddening lie to maddening lie. Each new
unauthorized attack and threatened invasion grabs the headlines, until
something else takes its place, and meanwhile the government’s
attempts to terrorize and silence the people of our country continue.
So let me break it down. There is one story: our country is on the
brink of an authoritarian takeover. In Minneapolis an innocent poet
and an ER nurse at a VA hospital were both killed in cold blood by
federal agents. It is happening now. Toddlers are being sent to
detention centers; videos of their gyms for kids recall the youth
choruses that the Nazis so proudly showed off at the Terezín
concentration camp. Intimidation and violence are being weaponized
against the citizens of Minneapolis, some of whom are afraid to leave
their houses for fear of being beaten, arrested and shackled,
regardless of whether they are US citizens or asylum seekers or people
from another country peacefully living and working here for decades.
That is the news we should be paying attention to. At least for the
moment, everything else is a distraction. I’m glad to have been
informed about the heavy snow outside my window today and the local
weather-travel advisory, but frankly, it’s snowed here before – so
why is it leading the news?
Donald Trump’s inability to tell Greenland from Iceland during his
speech at Davos is embarrassing, awful, sort of funny – but it’s
hardly the first time he’s made a mortifying mistake. I too want the
Epstein files released, I want to know who is guilty, I want justice
and respect for the survivors. But unless those revelations bring down
the perpetrators, it’s not – for the moment – the story.
The story is what’s happening in Minneapolis. And even that requires
focus. Already the killing of Alex Pretti has partly diverted our
attention from the killing of Renee Good.
The story – masked agents, arrests, violence, kidnappings,
deportations without due process – is happening all over the
country, but in smaller increments, without as much pushback, and so
far without the death of two innocent, middle-class, white bystanders.
The story is about how decent and unselfish Renee Good and Alex Pretti
were and about the falsehoods being told about them.
The story is not letting ourselves be distracted from the real and
present threat to our democracy. That threat is the story which our
print, electronic and social media should be bannering at the top of
every feed and every front page, every day. To consistently run that
below the weather report is, quite frankly, to betray the struggles of
the people of Minneapolis.
The story is what we do now to support our fellow Americans in the
midwest and to keep the violence and repression from spreading even
further into our own streets and backyards. The story is avoiding the
future that Stephen Miller and his minions are planning for us.
The story is how we do it: not long after the 2017 inauguration of
Donald Trump, I wrote, in these pages, about our need to stage a
national strike. I know now that I underestimated the difficulties –
the amount of organization required, the need to strategize, the
necessity to support and provide for people who will lose their
livelihoods if they walk off the job. But many people are already
scared to go to work or send their kids to school.
Such a shutdown would be an enormous undertaking, to say the least.
But it’s been done. Gandhi and Martin Luther King achieved at least
some of their goals without resorting to violence. The people of
Minneapolis have stopped business as usual in the city. That energy
can – and needs - to spread. Not to be alarmist, but unless we stay
focused, it may soon be too late.
This morning I went off – I apologize! – on a college classmate
who sent an email link to a video of birds that others might want to
watch as “relief from the weather and the news”. I wasn’t saying
we should stop enjoying the birds. I’m thrilled that so many robins
elected to stick around this winter. I even like watching the crows
and turkey vultures pick the roadkill clean.
But I don’t really want “a relief” from the loss of Renee Good
and Alex Pretti or from the resistance beginning in Minneapolis. To
crudely paraphrase Ecclesiastes, there is a time for everything. And
this may not be the time to distract ourselves with the latest scandal
or diplomatic blunder or with amusing images of the creatures who
don’t much care if the humans beneath the snow-covered rooftops are
living under a cruel and authoritarian regime.
Francine Prose is a former president of PEN American Center and a
member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the American
Academy of Arts and Sciences
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