Resisting Rule by Fea

Lessons from Past Struggles on How to Confront Authoritarian Power in America

Some people already speak as if the takeover is complete. They say the patterns of authoritarianism are set, that nothing can turn them back. I don’t share that view. History and anthropology both teach us that power is never as solid as it looks from a podium. It rests in daily life—in the way food, labor, care, and money circulate through a society. When rulers govern by fear, they seize those flows and try to choke them. Resistance begins when people take them back.

I learned this first not from books but from communities living under pressure. Families under threat don’t wait for permission. They build what they need to endure: meals shared across kitchens, rides arranged when buses are unsafe, neighbors taking in children, a spare room offered to someone in trouble. These practices may seem ordinary, but they are the front line against despair. Under Reconstruction, Black communities built schools and mutual aid societies despite constant violence. In the Depression, strike kitchens kept families alive so workers could hold the line. During the Civil Rights era, carpools kept the Montgomery boycott running for more than a year. Survival work is political work, because it denies fear the chance to scatter people.

But survival is not enough. Authoritarian projects depend on more than a single man in office; they are fastened into contracts, finance, and logistics. Trump’s agenda leans on detention companies, data brokers, construction firms, financiers, and the flow of labor through ports, warehouses, and hospitals. Anthropology reminds us that these are not abstractions—they are the channels through which power moves. Political economy shows us how vulnerable they are. Strikes in 1877 spread along the railroads and froze an industrial economy. The Seattle General Strike in 1919 shut down a city. The Montgomery boycott bled bus companies dry. South African miners striking in the 1980s joined with international sanctions to push apartheid to the breaking point. Each case showed the same truth: power relies on circulation, and resistance gains leverage wherever those circuits can be slowed, redirected, or cut off.

Numbers in the street matter too, not as theater but as turning points. Authoritarian movements thrive on the appearance of permanence. Mass nonviolent action shatters that illusion. Selma in 1965 was not improvisation—it carried forward a long American tradition of disciplined, visible defiance, just as the shipyard strikes in Poland and the crowds in Manila did later. What made these moments powerful was not just the size of the crowd but the clarity of the line being drawn: a bridge, a ballot, a courthouse, a square. Protest untethered from institutions can fade. Protest anchored to them forces decisions in real time.

Repression, of course, is the standard reply. But repression does not always strengthen a regime. When people hold their ground and remain disciplined, violence can backfire. Bloody Sunday in Selma, the Sharpeville massacre in South Africa, and photographs of fire hoses and police dogs unleashed on children did not produce obedience—they discredited the state. Anthropology teaches us that violence is symbolic as much as it is physical. The image of a government attacking its own citizens corrodes legitimacy. That is why training in nonviolence and de-escalation matters. It turns repression into evidence against the regime rather than proof of its strength.

No authoritarian project runs on a single man’s will. It is carried out by bureaucrats, contractors, financiers, judges, sheriffs, and local officials who choose to cooperate. When enough of them refuse, the system cracks. In Eastern Europe in 1989, police and soldiers refused to kill their neighbors. In the Philippines in 1986, key generals switched sides and Marcos fell. In the United States, Watergate ended not only because of public outrage but because officials chose resignation over unlawful orders. Authoritarian regimes weaken when insiders see the costs rising and are offered safe ways out. That means whistleblower channels, legal defense, and public pledges from professionals who commit not to participate in illegal orders. Defections don’t come from nowhere; they have to be prepared for.

Culture holds movements together in the long stretches when victories are distant. Under Pinochet, Chileans banged pots from their windows. Under Jim Crow, Black churches were not just spiritual centers but organizing hubs. In Poland, underground newspapers and clandestine theater reminded people that truth still circulated even under censorship. Cultural resistance may look symbolic, but it is what keeps fear from isolating people. It sustains morale, signals solidarity, and creates a memory that repression cannot erase.

The thread running through all these examples is that resistance works when it is both diffuse and organized. Too centralized, and a single arrest or assassination can stall a movement. Too scattered, and momentum dissolves into noise. The strongest model is federated: local groups that act autonomously but share tools, training, and communication channels. This is as true for Reconstruction mutual aid societies as it was for Solidarity’s underground press in Poland or the neighborhood committees that carried the Montgomery boycott. What survives decapitation is not a leader but an ecosystem.

Applied here, that means local pods providing legal aid, sanctuary, and rapid response. State hubs that train poll workers, coordinate legal observers, and protect digital security. National clearinghouses that share templates, track contracts, and keep a watchful eye on federal rules. Each layer reinforces the others. Street protests feed lawsuits with evidence. Strikes amplify consumer boycotts and divestment campaigns. Mutual aid reduces burnout so people can keep showing up. Blue states, with their economic weight, act as firewalls by passing shield laws, protecting data, and refusing unlawful federal demands. None of these by themselves can halt an authoritarian project. Together, they make governing by fear too costly to maintain.

That combination—survival networks, economic disruption, mass visibility, cultural defiance, insider defections—has beaten stronger regimes than this one. South Africa fell when local boycotts and strikes joined with international sanctions and business defections. The British empire lost India when economic boycotts, nonviolent mass action, and parallel institutions made the cost of holding on too high. Civil Rights victories here at home came from boycotts, marches, lawsuits, and freedom schools reinforcing one another until even reluctant politicians had to yield. These were not miracles. They were strategies, learned and repeated.

Anthropology tells us that authoritarianism is not just about politics; it is about the control of life itself—food, labor, care, and information. Political economy tells us that those controls run through contracts, supply chains, and capital. History tells us that when people resist together—caring for one another, slowing the flows of money and labor, showing up in disciplined numbers, and offering insiders a way out—authoritarian projects lose their grip.

That is where we are now. We do not need to invent new tools. We need to put proven ones into practice where we live: aid networks that blunt fear, boycotts and strikes that hit where leverage is real, marches that defend institutions in plain sight, lawsuits that hold the line in court, professional codes that set limits, and a thousand small refusals that never make the news but make it harder to govern by threat.

Some insist it is already too late. I think the opposite. The end of the story is not written because politics is not measured only in decrees and offices. It is measured in actions that change what tomorrow looks like—who is sheltered, who is defended, who refuses, who defects. Authoritarianism feeds on the belief that nothing matters. Resistance grows when people make many things matter at once. That is how societies outlast repression. And it is how this country can still outlast the project now before us.

Suggested Readings

Arendt, Hannah. The Origins of Totalitarianism. New York: Harcourt, 1951.

Chavez, Leo R. The Latino Threat: Constructing Immigrants, Citizens, and the Nation. 2nd ed. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2013.

Chenoweth, Erica, and Maria J. Stephan. Why Civil Resistance Works: The Strategic Logic of Nonviolent Conflict. New York: Columbia University Press, 2011.

Frost, Amanda. You Are Not American: Citizenship Stripping from Dred Scott to Donald Trump. Boston: Beacon Press, 2021.

Golash-Boza, Tanya Maria. Deported: Immigrant Policing, Disposable Labor, and Global Capitalism. New York: New York University Press, 2015.

Scott, James C. Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985.

Snyder, Timothy. On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century. New York: Tim Duggan Books, 2017.

Vélez-Ibáñez, Carlos G. The Rise of Necro/Narco-Citizenship: Belonging and Dying in the Southwest North American Region. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2025.