Erosion Has Become Assertion

In July of ’24, I wrote about Mussolini’s rise to power and what it might teach us about protecting democratic institutions. I traced the gradual erosion of Italian democracy through electoral manipulation, the assassination of opposition leaders, and the slow co-optation of the press and the courts. I warned about voter apathy, the fragmentation of opposition, and the danger of assuming that democratic norms would hold simply because they always had.

I will link it here. 

I was writing about erosion. I need to write now about what comes after.

On January 7th, 2026, Renee Nicole Good, a 37-year-old poet and mother of three, was shot and killed by an ICE agent in Minneapolis. She was in her car. She was a United States citizen. Video shows her vehicle moving slowly forward and to the right, away from the agent, when he fired three shots through her windshield.

On January 24th, Alex Pretti, a 37-year-old ICU nurse who cared for veterans, was shot and killed by federal agents in Minneapolis. He had stepped forward to help a woman who had been shoved by a masked officer. He was holding his phone. Video from multiple angles shows that agents removed his legally carried firearm from its holster before the first shot was fired. They shot him ten times. Six of those shots were fired into his motionless body. A witness, a doctor, reported that instead of checking for a pulse or administering CPR, the agents appeared to be counting his bullet wounds.

We all know this. Not all of have accepted the facts around this. 

In both cases, the federal government blocked state investigators from accessing the scene. In both cases, administration officials immediately labeled the victims as aggressors and terrorists. Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem called Pretti a domestic terrorist. Stephen Miller called him a would-be assassin. These characterizations are refuted by the video evidence that millions of Americans have now watched.

I need to update my historical framework. Mussolini is no longer sufficient.

The Shift from Erosion to Assertion

My original essay focused on how democracies die slowly. The Acerbo Law. The manipulation of electoral systems. The gradual capture of institutions that continue to exist in name while serving authoritarian ends. This is the boiling frog. This is the long slide. And for some time, I would say that this was an appropriate lens.

What happened in Minneapolis is something different. This is not erosion. This is assertion.

There is a distinction between a government that slowly undermines the rule of law and a government that kills citizens in broad daylight, on camera, and then lies about what everyone can see. The first is about capturing institutions. The second is about demonstrating that institutions no longer matter. The first says: we will use the system against you. The second says: there is no system. There is only power.

This is why I find myself reaching for different historical parallels. Not the Italy of 1922, but the American South of 1890. Not the Weimar Republic’s slow collapse, but the Germany of 1933 and after.

The Function of Public Violence

During Jim Crow, lynching was not simply murder. It was spectacle. White communities gathered to watch. Photographs were taken and distributed as postcards. Local newspapers announced the events in advance. The violence was public because publicity was the point. The message was not merely that Black Americans could be killed. The message was that they could be killed openly, that everyone would see, and that nothing would happen to the killers.

Ida B. Wells documented this with painful precision in the 1890s. She showed that the supposed justifications for lynching, the claims of self-defense and the protection of white womanhood, were lies. She proved it with evidence. And the lynchings continued, because the lies were never meant to be believed. They were meant to be repeated. The function of the lie was not persuasion but domination. To make everyone repeat what everyone knew to be false was itself an exercise of power.

I watch the videos from Minneapolis. I read the statements from federal officials. I see the pattern.

An agent removes a man’s gun from his holster, then shoots him ten times, then the government calls him an armed terrorist. A woman drives slowly away from officers, and she becomes someone who weaponized her vehicle. The lies are not subtle. They are not crafted to withstand scrutiny. They are contradicted by footage that has been viewed millions of times. And yet they are repeated, officially, from podiums and press briefings and social media accounts.

This is not propaganda designed to deceive. This is propaganda designed to demonstrate that truth does not matter. The power to say what happened, regardless of what happened, is the power being asserted.

What Post-Weimar Adds

Nazi Germany offers another lens, one my original essay did not require. In the years immediately following Hitler’s consolidation of power, violence against Jews and political opponents was not hidden. Brownshirts beat people in the streets. Shops were vandalized with official sanction. The Nuremberg Laws did not emerge from shadows. They were announced, celebrated, codified.

The public nature of this violence served multiple functions. It identified enemies. It created complicity among those who watched and did nothing, or who participated. It tested the boundaries of what would be tolerated. And it sorted the population into those who would resist, those who would comply, and those who would collaborate.

I am watching a similar sorting happen now.

Some Americans are in the streets of Minneapolis, facing tear gas and federal agents. Some are donating to funds for the families of the dead. Some are calling their representatives. And some are donating to funds for the shooter, as happened after Renee Good’s death, when a fundraiser explicitly blamed “anti-American traitors” and referenced the Minneapolis mayor’s Jewish faith.

The sorting is the point. Authoritarian consolidation requires knowing who will go along.

The Limits of My Original Prescription

In July 2024, I wrote about civic engagement, media literacy, the importance of local elections, the need for coalition-building. I stand by all of it. These things matter. They are necessary.

I am less certain they are sufficient.

My original essay assumed a context in which democratic institutions, however weakened, still functioned as arenas of contestation. Vote, and your vote might matter. Organize, and your organization might shift outcomes. Hold leaders accountable through the mechanisms of democracy, flawed as they are.

What happens when federal agents kill citizens and block state authorities from investigating? What happens when video evidence is met not with accountability but with coordinated lying? What happens when the response to public outrage is not retreat but the assertion that the dead deserved what they got?

I do not have clean, digestible answers. I am not sure anyone does.

What I know is this: the strategies appropriate to democratic erosion may not be adequate to authoritarian assertion. When the state kills openly and lies about it openly, the fight is no longer primarily about preserving norms. It is about something more fundamental.

What I Still Believe

I still believe that despair is not an option. History shows us that authoritarian regimes fall. The Italian Resistance eventually prevailed. Jim Crow, for all its horrors, was dismantled by ordinary people who refused to accept it. The Soviet Union collapsed. The arc is long, and it does not bend on its own, but it has bent before.

I still believe in the power of bearing witness. The videos from Minneapolis matter. The documentation matters. The work of journalists and citizens who record and preserve and share what is happening matters. Regimes that rely on lies are vulnerable to truth, even when they pretend otherwise. The historical record is being written now, and those who write it honestly are doing essential work.

I still believe in solidarity. The protests in Minneapolis, the mutual aid networks forming across the country, the state and local officials who are refusing to cooperate with federal overreach, these are not nothing. They are the infrastructure of resistance. They may not stop what is happening today, but they are building something that will matter tomorrow.

I still believe in the lessons of my original essay, even as I recognize their limits. Vote. Engage locally. Build coalitions. Support independent journalism. Fight misinformation. All of this remains necessary. It is simply no longer the whole picture.

What I Now Understand

I understand now that I was writing from within a particular phase of democratic decline, and that phases change. The playbook for 1922 is not the playbook for 1933. The strategies for fighting erosion are not identical to the strategies for surviving assertion.

I understand that the next months and years will require things of us that we may not feel prepared to give. Courage we are not sure we have. Sacrifices we would rather not make. Solidarity with people we do not know. Persistence in the face of what may feel like futility.

I understand that Renee Good went out that morning to care for her neighbors, as she had done before. I understand that Alex Pretti stepped forward to help a woman being shoved by a masked man with a gun. They were doing what my original essay asked of citizens. They were engaged. They were present. They were not apathetic.

And they were killed for it.

I do not know how to end this essay the way I ended my last one, with a call to engagement and a reminder that democracy requires our participation. That remains true. But it feels insufficient to the moment.

What I will say instead is this: we are being sorted. Every one of us is being asked, in ways large and small, what we will tolerate. What we will look away from. What we will repeat even though we know it to be false. Who we will stand with and who we will abandon.

The answers we give, collectively, will determine what comes next. I do not know what is coming. But I know that the people who built the movements that eventually defeated Jim Crow, and fascism, and Soviet totalitarianism did not know either. They acted anyway. They resisted anyway. They documented and organized and persisted anyway.

That is what I am asking of myself. It is what I am asking of you.

Our democracy may or may not survive this. But our integrity can. Our humanity can. Our refusal to look away, to repeat lies, to abandon one another, that can survive. And it is from that refusal, historically, that the rebuilding eventually begins.

I am not optimistic. But I am not giving up. I hope you will join me in that.