TODAY: Join us live with Ruth Ben-Ghiat

At 12:30 Eastern, we talk to the historian of fascism about resistance, resilience, and the way forward in the Trump era. Join us!

Join us today at 12:30 p.m. Eastern for a Substack Live conversation with Ruth Ben-Ghiat, the historian of fascism (and please check out and subscribe to her newsletter, Lucid).

To watch, download the Substack app and turn on notifications.

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Following the election, we had a series of conversations with leading writers and thinkers about how the results upended expectations about American politics and forced a reevaluation of old strategies. Now, following the inauguration, we’re checking in live with historian of fascism Ruth Ben-Ghiat, whose analysis of authoritarianism has helped so much to shape our thinking about Trump and the MAGA movement over the past eight years.

If you want to brush up on your Ruth, check out the excerpt below — or look back on our full two-part post-election talk with Ben-Ghiat about what Democratic opposition to the Trump regime might look like, the difference between resistance and resilience, the failure of media, what labor’s role might look like going forward, and whether the groundswell of support for the Harris-Walz campaign has the potential to grow into the pro-democracy movement the United States needs in the coming years. We’ll touch on these issues and more today, so bring your questions and we hope to see you there.

To read our full post-election conversation with Ben-Ghiat, visit the links below:

The Musk-Trump endgame

Ruth Ben-Ghiat on resistance versus resilience

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So what does Democratic Party opposition to Trumpism look like?

Each day seems like 10 days right now. And this is a time for reflection, and I'm not defending their silence, but we in America want instant reactions, instant solutions.

And as I've been writing in Lucid, that's not going to be the most fruitful. Everybody is burned out and not in the best shape. And it doesn't mean we're not going to hear from the Democrats in the future. That said, there is indeed a problem of growing distance between the elite democratic machine and voters. 

And this was encapsulated in the issue of Biden’s age.

Yes, and so, yes, some kind of flexibility, some kind of innovation within the party in terms of leadership. Spokespeople are very important nowadays. Who are the faces you're putting out there? And what are they saying? What language are they speaking? That's another thing about this. We have to reevaluate how we're communicating, where we're communicating, who is our audience.

And it's not just within the party. How do we reach these tens of millions of people who don't vote now? I'm very preoccupied with this. How do we get to them?

We had talked about this back in January. How do you make the case to get back constituencies the Democratic Party is losing, people who voted Democrat and now are voting, many would say, against their interests in general?

That's what authoritarians want you to vote against your interests. So if the party is not going to be open to some kind of reevaluation.

A reckoning, really. 

A reckoning. And in a way, that's a microcosm of things that have been going on globally, especially in Europe with democratic parties.

The next elections are two years away. You've written — and I thought this was very well put — that it's pragmatic to be prepared as long as the fear of the future does not prove paralyzing to activities in the present. But what do you do as a person who does not want to live in that world?

I think there are stages to these things. And I think all the people, the wise people — and I think of Sherrilyn Ifill’s writing — have said that you have to take care of yourself and your loved ones and your communities. As I put it, you have to embed right now more into the community that you already have and make sure that you're not burning out because we will be needed as individuals.

I'm not sure that there will be mass nonviolent protests, which are a proven successful way of drawing attention to autocratic abuses. But because we can't right now count on the Democratic Party to solve these things for us, we have to be models individually and collectively in our communities of the values that we want America to embody. It has to start from the ground up, from perhaps the person up.

You also have to choose your battles. And the problem with living in a Trumpian world is that there's constant outrage. It's like there's so many targets, there’s firing in all areas, that the idea is to make you unable to react at all. So you have to choose your battles. And you have to be smart about it. There's going to be much more suing. These are litigious people. And Berlusconi was too. People will be sued for defamation, for libel. So depending on your level of exposure, you have to be smart. It doesn't mean you are backing away. It means you're being smart because if you're silenced or you're financially exhausted and psychologically exhausted, you're not going to be good in the long run because this is a long-term struggle. Not only because at the end of his four years, he likely has no incentive to leave because each day and each week seems longer when you're absorbing all of the hits.

It took the Republicans 60 years of work to get to this point. I think people tend to look at politics in two and four-year cycles, but that's really not what it takes. 

That's the other thing. We need to learn from some of the things the Republicans have done. And I don't mean the content. I mean the strategy. They have played a long-term game, Leonard Leo, and he was able to be mostly in the shadows, the Kochs. Now, these are people with huge resources. So of course, we're not in the same position. But they have played a long game, and they have played it like a chess game. And we've been thinking in terms of elections, and as you said, in this two- to four-year cycle. We have to go beyond that because a pro-democracy movement has to be something that's bigger than elections. Because what we need is to shift the political culture in our country. And there we go back to the values. 

You said going into the election, in the last month, that one thing you could look at regardless of what happens in November, was that Harris had built the beginnings of a pro-democracy movement. Maybe you could talk a little bit more about that and how that relates to how regular people, even without party leadership, can start to think about it.

So many people worked so hard to elect Harris and Walz and felt they were working to save democracy, to save rights for themselves and their children. And so they're very demoralized now. 

But my message is the campaign itself, both the things that Harris and Walz were saying and the way they were saying it, and above all, the grassroots mobilization on their behalf, I saw the enthusiasm as something new, the joy and hope, the reactions it elicited, not just people cheering in the stadium, but going out and canvassing. All the effort that was expended, that is not in vain. The networks that were created, the connections, and the knowledge that we all gained during this campaign — that stays with us, stays in us. And I really think that when we look back later, this campaign, although it was not successful electorally, laid the foundations for a pro-democracy movement in terms of acting from the grassroots up.

Another thing that you have talked about, is that last time around, after the 2016 election, there was a real rhetoric of resistance, which I think loops into thinking about this short-term cycle. That we're going to get out there and fight in the streets and get the country right back. And what you’ve said is that “resilience” is really a better frame for looking at what needs to be done than “resistance,” and for people to think about how to align their personal lives with pro-democracy efforts.

Yeah. For effective resistance, you need to be resilient. And I've interviewed or read about the experiences of many dissidents who are in long games. These regimes that many people are fighting, they don't go away overnight. You have to be resilient, and you have to think in the longer term, not just getting out for this protest. You have to think about how this one protest is going to be connected to a future election or to a cause or to discrediting this or that person internationally or, in my case, to how you can expose the horrible outcomes of authoritarianism that are unknown.

Each of us has a skill we can use, but we have to be resilient and absorb some failure. And this does come up against a challenge for Americans; we don't have experience in this nationally. 

Certainly, African Americans, especially those living in the South, have lots of experience in the struggle for civil rights. In a lot of ways the frame we’re speaking in is a white perspective.

I do think it's really important to look at that because in a lot of the country, up until the mid-60s, this was the character of experience. This is their lives. So the part of it is trying to educate white people that wanting to do something now, immediately is laudable, but these are longer struggles because we're talking about trying to shift not just behaviors before an election or voting behavior, but a whole political culture, a whole set of values connected, as was Jim Crow.

Jim Crow was a whole political culture. And a set of institutions. I think people who don't have experience of the American South — I realize this is nationwide, I'm using it as a shorthand — don't necessarily have an understanding of how to think politically when the institutions are set against everything they believe. 

That's right. I think we've been in this position before.

Though I think that's the thing that might be new, or seem new, for a lot of Americans. 

Resilience is necessary for what will happen under Trump 2.0, it's called “hollowing out” when an autocrat takes control of an institution and perverts or inverts its stated goals. So the Department of Health and Human Services is not going to be protecting the public. It's going to be spreading disease if they ban vaccines and stop funding for research. So the institutions become hollowed out of their original purpose, and you can't count on them anymore. And that's very upsetting to people, but recognizing that this can happen is part of being resilient.

So being squarely informed, not shying away from unpleasant realities, and yet taking care of yourself, which is why you have to not be isolated. That's why I say you embed yourself now more in your communities. You get in touch with your loved ones with friends. You do all of that work because you will benefit from that when you feel the institutions aren't serving you. The government's a total clown show. And maybe the media isn't stepping up. You have to have your own networks of solidarity and comfort. I keep coming back to that right now because these are the lessons of dissidents, too. Your networks are everything. And there are also information networks, and political networks, that are based on real human relations.

And that's why one of the classic scenes out of authoritarianism is some form of state authority knocking on your door. And sometimes they want to arrest you, but they always want your address book. They want your contacts. They want to break up the whole network. 

They don't need that now because we're all on social media. They already know.

Yes. And in 2019, there was a guy in Russia who was being targeted because he was part of the Navalny opposition. And there were huge protests in Moscow and other cities in 2019. And so the police came to his door and he put his hard drive on a drone, and he flew it out the window, and he filmed it.

And I always talk about that and think about that because that's the 21st-century version of frantically burning your papers. But networks and contacts, this is the time to shore those up, to get back in touch with people who you maybe just fell out of touch with, who are important to you, either personally or politically. That we can do now.

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Photo by Tayfun Coskun/Anadolu via Getty Images; Ruth Ben-Ghiat photo courtesy Beowulf Sheehan