Here are links to the first 6 YouTube videos, transcriptions for each video, and the sources.
*
Part I: Our current politics and how we got here.
#1: A Progressive View of History
#3: Democrats and Republicans (a history)
#4: The Authoritarian Personality
*
#1: A Progressive View of History
Hi, and welcome. My name is Teri Kanefield, and I plan to do a series of short clips, about five minutes in length—which I guess is long by modern TikTok standards, but short by the old-fashioned standards I’m used to.
I plan to talk about how we got here, and how we can neutralize the dangers to democracy.
Basically, I’ll go back, and summarize and distill the things I’ve been writing about for the past several years. Instead of writing all out in a book, I’ll just tell it to you, in a series of small bites, which is quicker and easier (at least for me!)
I plan to start with the basics, and build.
Here we go.
So how did we get here?
By “here” I’m thinking of January 6, 2021 when the sitting president of the United States could incite an insurrection against Congress, and a major political party shields him. By here, I mean feeling we have that there are dangerous forces whose purpose is to undermine democracy.
When I say democracy, I mean a representative government in which all adults have an equal voice.
I’ll start with what we might call the progressive view of American history, which goes like this:
The founders started with some pretty good ideas. The idea of a government based on rule of law instead of the whim of a king.
The idea of an independent judiciary.
The idea of an independent prosecutor whose job it is to decide who should be charged instead of leaving it to the king, who might weaponize the judicial system to attack enemies, or perceived enemies.
The idea that all “men” are created equal.
These were good ideas. The problem was that the founders left out a lot of people out of “we the people.”
In fact, they included only white, well-educated, mostly landowning men.
The progressive view of American history is that as we’ve moved forward we have expanded who is included in the “we the people,” and as we did so, we’ve moved closer to the founding ideals and closer to a more perfect union.
We come to the Civil War, which expanded the electorate to include (in theory) Black men. I say in theory because even though the 15th Amendment gave Black men the right to vote, the reality is that Blacks were still not given anything like equal access.
Then we come to the 19th Amendment, which gave women the right to vote—in reality, white women—but even white women were still largely excluded from the professions and government.
So, we’re moving in the right direction.
Now, in the early part of the 20th century, there were no laws against fixing prices, or manipulating markets, or insider trading. If someone sold you rotten goods it was your problem. You should have inspected better. Men (well, white men) who were willing to cheat a little bit could get rich.
Another way we’ve expanded who is included in “we the people” is through regulations that create fairness and allow more people the means and ability to participate in public life.
So we come to the 1930s and President Franklin Roosevelt and his New Deal, which was a way to try to increase fairness. The New Deal was a series of programs, and projects, and legislation. This was when we got the minimum wage, 40-hour workweek, worker protections. This was when we got a number of our regulatory agencies. We got laws against fixing prices and manipulating markets.
A progressive tax code helped usher in, for the first time in American history, a strong middle class.
But Blacks were still left out.
Then we come to 1954 and Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board of Education. This is the case that held racial segregation in schools unconstitutional. This is the case that kicked off the modern Civil Rights movement, which in turn ignited the women’s rights movement.
As a result of these movements, for the past 60 or so years, for the first time in our nation’s history, we began moving toward a true representative democracy.
Liberals view American history as an upward slope.
This is often taught in schools as if it’s inevitable, or as if liberal heroes of the past fought and won the battle. So now like we’re in a boat and we don’t even have to paddle. The wave of history and what is right and good will carry us forward to better more inclusive tomorrow.
Then, what happened?
According to this view, all was going well, and then, over the past 50 or so years, the Republican Party went off the rails and here we are.
I’ll stop here, and in the next clip, I’ll talk about an opposing view of American history. Thanks for joining me, and I’ll see you next time. Well, I won’t see you, but you know what I mean.
Now I have to figure out how to turn this off, and then I can start a new one.
Source and inspirations:
- Most of the material comes from the research I did writing the last 6 biographies I published (Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Alexander Hamilton, Andrew Jackson, Abraham Lincoln, Susan B. Anthony, Franklin D. Roosevelt, and Thurgood Marshall).
- While researching Ruth Bader Ginsburg, I found a lecture in which she talked about expanding “we the people” to include more people. She said that the phrase “we the people” in the Constitutions preamble directly proceeds “more perfect union” because the closer we get to including everyone, the more perfect the union.
- Yale history Professor Timothy Snyder, in his YouTube series “Snyder Speaks” talks about how people were lulled into complacency by thinking that history naturally moves toward a better tomorrow, and were thus shocked and rendered helpless when Trump came along and “broke” the story.
*
#2: A Zigzag View of History
It seems to me the only thing that makes this harder than writing it all out in a book is that I have to think about what I’m going to wear, and clear away the clutter in my office. Actually do miss footnotes, because I am getting all of this from somewhere, so I’ll attach bibliographies and sources.
Wait! What kind of nerd says I miss footnotes? All right, moving on.
In the last segment, I talked about the progressive view of America and American history. Now let’s look at a different view. Let’s look at America from a different perspective.
According to what we might call the reactionary or regressive view, when America was young it was a place of wide open opportunity. There was almost no federal government. There were almost no regulations. People (well, white men) could do what they wanted.
On the frontier, they could grab land.
Before regulatory agencies and most of the laws we have in place now, they could fix prices and manipulate markets. They could cheat. They could grab. They could sell you bad good and it was your problem.
According to this view, America started out good, pure, and free.
If white men were in control, it’s because they deserved it. According to this view, nature forms a hierarchy. A kind of natural order.
John Calhoun, who was vice president under Andrew Jackson, actually said slavery was a positive good based on inherent differences in the races. Women of course were seen as irrational and unsuited for a public life.
This is all a forerunner of the makers and takers theory, which says if you remove regulations and let nature take its course, those who are capable will produce enough abundance and create enough jobs for everyone.
If this sounds like myth, that’s because it is. White supremacy is a myth.
Historian Heather Cox Richardson, in her book, How the South Won the Civil War, talks about the cowboy myth: The white man on his horse with his gun making his own way on his own ingenuity without government help. This is also a myth, but it’s the ideal a lot of people hold.
According to this view, the Civil War infringed on liberty by taking power away from local governments and by upsetting the natural order of things: The Civil War—or government intrusion—interfered.
Under this view, taxes are a form of theft.
Under this view, the programs and regulatory agencies of the Franklin Delano Roosevelt era are the beginning of a controlling bureaucratic, administrative state spewing regulations that infringe on personal liberty.
According to this view, American history is on a downward slope. Regressives feel if they don’t act quickly, the slope will continue downward until all that is good about America will be destroyed and forever lost.
What I’ve discovered from studying American constitutional history is that there are no slopes. There’s an upwardly sloping zigzag. I drew a diagram. (You can see this is a sophisticated presentation, complete with a diagram.)
The way I think of history how is progressives push forward, and reactionaries push back. So we do do, sort of mostly progress because they have never been able to push us all the way back.
So take the Civil War Amendments, for example. After the Civil War, progressives added the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments to the Constitution.
The13th amendment prohibited slavery.
Reactionaries pushed back against this got by devising a criminal justice system that puts lots of Black men in jail and puts them into chain gangs.
The reactionaries pushed back against the 14th Amendment due process and equal protection requirements for all people by holding that, for example, women were not intended to be included in “we the people.” The reasoning was, well, “infants and lunatics” are also people, but you don’t let them vote. So women are technically people, but they’re more like “infants and lunatics.”
Of course, the reactionaries pushed back against the Fifteenth Amendment allowing black men to vote by creating voter restriction laws.
While the reactionaries pushed us back, they were not able to push us all the way back to 1850, so there was some progress.
Reactionaries have been trying to roll back the New Deal ever since the 1930s, and have somewhat succeeded which is why our current income inequality is approaching 1920s levels.
The modern Civil Rights movement happened because of federal court orders and federal legislation like the Civil Rights act and voting Right Act.
The backlash against the Civil Rights movement started immediately, and we’re still riding that backlash.
The lawbreaking you see in the Republican Party is a pushback against the laws that didn’t used to be there, by people who don’t think the laws should be there.
So the moral arc of the universe does bend toward justice, but much more slowly than we’d like and with constant setbacks.
Seeing history as a zigzag lifts us out of a feeling of helpless shock when there’s a pushback and puts us into the mindset of, “Here we go again. We made some progress, so now they’re trying to push it back.”
Next, I’m going to offer a brief history of the two major political parties.
I hope you are finding these clips helpful and thank you for joining me.
Sources:
- As with the first video, most the material came from research for the past five biographies I’ve published, in particular, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Susan B. Anthony, and Thurgood Marshall.
- The “Infants and lunatics” argument I ran across while researching Susan B. Anthony.
- John Calhoun, “positive good.” The full text of the speech is here: https://teachingamericanhistory.org/library/document/slavery-a-positive-good/ You will find Confederate defenders saying that he didn’t actually say slavery is a positive good.
- The Cowboy Myth, from Heather Cox Richardson’s book, How the South Won the Civil War.
*
#3: Democrats and Republicans (a history)
In this segment, I’ll offer a brief history of the political parties in America. One subtitle could be, “How the Party of Lincoln became the party of the Proud Boys.” Another subtitle could be, “How the Party of the Confederacy came to embrace Civil Rights.”
The Democratic Party formed while George Washington was still president. Initially it was called the Democratic Republicans. But you probably know that because you saw Hamilton. If you saw Hamilton, you also know Hamilton’s party was the liberal Federalist Party, and Jefferson’s party was the slave-owning Democratic Republican Party.
What you don’t know from the musical because it ends after Hamilton dies, is that after Hamilton died, his federalist party imploded. I won’t go into why because I promised to keep these short. But if you really want to know, I’ll tell you later. In a nutshell, the slaveowners won out here.
I’ll skip to the Civil War. The Democratic Republican Party was by then called simply the Democratic Party. It was the pro-slavery party of the Confederacy and agricultural America.
The Democrats wanted a limited federal government because they knew the North, if given the chance, would end slavery.
So Democrats vetoed federal funds for canals and highways and other infrastructure because they understood such infrastructure would strengthen the industrial north.
In 1855 the Republican Party, all called the “Freedom Party,” was born as an anti-slavery, pro-industry, pro-federal government party. It’s anti-slavery stance made it pro-labor and pro-Civil Rights. Well, as pro-labor as anyone was back then.
After the Civil War and the crushing defeat of the South, the Republicans had the power to pass pro-industry legislation including the building of infrastructure. Republicans, by the way, gave us our first income tax. As a result of the building of infrastructure, the industrial revolution boomed. Now the nation’s wealthiest and most powerful people were no longer plantation owners. Now they were railroad and business tycoons.
At the beginning of the 20th century, the Republican Party split into two factions: The conservative pro-industry part and liberal civil rights part. By the 1920s, the pro-industry part took control. The Republicans dropped racial equality and labor issues from its platform and became the party of business.
Democratic Party base at the time consisted of Southern whites, agricultural America, and also factory workers.
Neither party championed racial equality.
This ushered in a long period of relative harmony between the parties—they respected each other’s “differences” because they weren’t that different. Both parties were basically ruled by white men.
President Harding (a Republican) in the 1920s deregulated business and repealed taxes. Money flowed into the pockets of business tycoons. Unregulated banks freely lent too much money. It was the age of business.
Meanwhile, laborers worked long hours in dangerous jobs at poverty wages.
Then, in 1929, it all came crashing down. First the market crashed and then came the Great Depression.
Enter, stage left, Franklin Delano Roosevelt and his pro-labor New Deal.
Roosevelt drew blacks into the Democratic coalition, because they liked his pro-labor stance.
Republican, who used to want a strong federal government, now pushed back against FDR’s expansion of the federal government through the New Deal. They had the infrastructure they needed. Now they didn’t want labor rights.
The modern Civil Rights movement radically expanded the Federal government giving us the Voter Rights Act and the Civil Rights Act.
Libertarians, who don’t want any government regulations, the White supremacists, and the party of business found themselves with a common goal: Dismantle the federal government. For some, the ideal is to return to the 1920s, the age of business. Others want to go back even farther.
White Evangelicals, who used to be mostly Democratic, had their own reasons for opposing strong federal government. They think that problem solving should be left to the church. White Evangelicals were also now drawn into the Republican Party.
Nixon and Reagan actively lured White Southerners and rural Democrats to the Republican Party. Nixon talked about being “tough on crime” (which was code for putting Black men in jail). Reagan talked about “welfare queens,” cynically playing into ugly stereotypes of Black women.
The divide stopped being North v. South and became urban v. rural.
And here we are.
Here’s the question.
Is America, for the first time our history, on the cusp of a true representative democracy with all adults included in “we the people?”
Or, are we on the verge of an autocratic takeover?
The answer is both, because one caused the other.
Because the modern Civil Rights movement and modern women’s rights movement brought us to the threshold of a true representative democracy, the reactionaries are pushing back hard.
I’ll wrap this one.
Next I plan to talk about what political psychologists call the authoritarian personality. I hope you’ll join me.
Sources:
- How Democracies Die, by Steven Levitsky and Daniel Zblatt (2018)
- To Make Men Free, by Heather Cox Richardson (2014)
- Grand Old Party, by Lewis L. Gould (2003)
- The Democrats, from Jefferson to Clinton, by Robert Allen Rutland (1995)
- The bibliographies from the books in my Making of America series.
*
#4: The Authoritarian Personality
Hello, and welcome to segment on the authoritarian personality.
I’m not a political psychologist. So everything you’re about to hear comes my reading. I’ll attach bibliography and sources to this video so you don’t think I’m just making things up.
These videos are meant to be viewed in order. But if you go out of order, the “go in order police” will not come knocking on your door. No worries.
Political psychologists tell us that about a third of the population has what they call an authoritarian disposition. That 1/3 number is important and appears across cultures. The Nazis came to power with 33% of the vote. Le Pen won 35% of the vote in France.
Authoritarians exist on both edges of the political spectrum, but I’ll focus on right-wing authoritarianism because it has distinct features and it’s the danger we’re facing right now.
Political psychologists started studying the authoritarian personality after World War II to try to understand the rise of fascism in Europe in the 1930s.
The authoritarian personality describes the followers, the rows of people dressed alike raising their hand in salute, not the demagogic leader. I’ll talk about that separately.
The authoritarian personality is marked by deference to established authorities. Traits of the authoritarian personality include rigidity and cynicism. It’s also been called an anti-democratic personality. Those with an authoritarian disposition are averse to complexity. In the words of one political psychologist, they prefer sameness and uniformity and have cognitive limitations. They are, to use her phrase, “simpleminded avoiders of complexity.”
Remember, diversity is a form of complexity.
When they are not riled those with authoritarian personalities can be good citizens. They’ll embrace institutions and they’ll follow rules. They will support traditional values when those values are endorsed by the authority figure.
When they are riled, they can become cruel and tolerate cruelty in others. They can show aggression toward out-groups when authorities sanction that aggression.
What riles them is what psychologists call a normative threat, which is something that threatens sameness and order.
If you want an example of a normative threat, watch some of those Fox News programs. Trump governed by creating normative threats. He talked about invaders and criminals coming over the Southern border take what belongs to real Americans and upset the order. Authoritarians want order.
Order often manifests itself in a hierarchy.
Americans in the 19th century lived in a particular kind of hierarchy, which scholars call a patriarchy. It was a well ordered society with white men at the top and Black women at the bottom. The laws all supported this patriarchy.
Authoritarians were very comfortable in this ordered society.
Slavery was authoritarian.
Jim Crow was authoritarian.
Certain Evangelical churches are very authoritarian, with a rigid culture and a strict patriarchy.
Conspiracy theories appeal to those who are averse to complexity. Globalism gets complicated. Our federal government has grown complicated. People who are afraid of complexity are eager and able to see evil in it. A conspiracy theory a belief that some covert but influential organization is responsible for a circumstance or event. Conspiracy theories seem complicated, but in fact, they reduce complicated situations down to a simple explanation that fits the world view that enemies are attacking us from within. How Trump lost the election is complicated and may not make sense if everyone you know supported him. It’s easier to believe that the election was stolen from him.
I talked about the zigzag view of American history in the second segment.. I still have my diagram right here.
Political psychologists Karen Stenner and Jon Haight talk about the Authoritarian Dynamic, which is another way of talking about this zigzag.
The authoritarian dynamic works like this: Democracy naturally expands. People who are not included want to be included, and progressives (those who are not afraid of diversity) want to include them. For example, as voting rights expands, the electorate becomes more diverse. As the electorate becomes more diverse, and society becomes more complex, It then becomes easy for a demagogic leader to create a normative threat and rile those with authoritarian dispositions.
So as democracy expands, those with authoritarian dispositions react.
The authoritarian dynamic creates an ever present dynamic. Liberal democracy naturally wants to expand. Liberals want to keep pushing the slope upward. A certain segment of the population—those with an anti-democratic personality—will never be completely comfortable in a representative democracy. They will naturally push back against the a growing diversity.
This is why, in the last video, I said that coming to the brink of a true representative democracy will unleash a powerful reaction in those with anti-democratic dispositions.
Next, I’ll talk about the leaders which brings us to fascism.
Sources:
- Karen Stenner and Jon Haidt, “The Authoritarian Dynamic,” in Authoritarianism in America: Can it Happen Here?” (2018)
- Benjamin Saunders and Josephine Ngo, “The Right-Wing Authoritarianism Scale” (2017)
- Karen Stenner, The Authoritarian Dynamic (2010)
- Theodor W.Adorno, The Authoritarian Personality (1950)
*
#5: Fascism v. Democracy
Welcome to the segment on democracy v. fascism.
This will build on what I’ve talked about in the first four clips.
I talked about the liberal view of history, which that we’re on an upward slope and society will naturally become more inclusive. And I talked about the push back we can expect.
I talked about authoritarians and non-authoritarians.
All this leads to two different forms of government that appeal to different kinds of people.
By coincidence (or not) the form of government that appeals to authoritarians, also to appeals the Republican Party (for various reasons.)
German sociologist Max Weber, in his classic essay, Politics as a Vocation, written in 1919, outlined three sources of authority for government.
The first is traditional. This is the authority underlying monarchies. This says that we look to this family as an authority because that’s how we’ve always done it. This form of government has obvious problems and is exactly what the drafters of our constitution didn’t want.
The second form of government is Legal-rational or rule of law. This is where the underlying authority for the government is the law. This kind of government strives for fairness and it’s the form of authority we have in democracies. This one too has intrinsic problems. For example, it strives for fairness but it can never be completely fair. Why? Because there is always pushback and because the institutions of democracy are carried out by mere mortals.
What do I mean by the institutions of democracy?
I mean all those good ideas the founders had that I talked about in the first clip: An independent judiciary. Prosecutorial independence.
The third is form of government is what Weber calls personal charisma, which the source of authority underlying dictatorships and fascist regimes. Today we might say demagogue, or cult leader, or strongman.
One of the first scholars to study fascism was Robert O. Paxton. He called fascism a cult of leadership. He described characteristics of fascists. He said they tend to fall in line behind a leader, they move in lockstep and like to have sort of uniform or identifying clothing. (MAGA hats, anyone?)
That sounds a lot like the authoritarian personality.
So it’s obvious who a leadership cult appeals to. It appeals to people who look to an authority figure and who want to fall in line behind an authority figure.
Paxton also said the world’s first fascist regime was not actually born in Italy. He said the world’s first fascist group was the Ku Klux Klan. He said look, they even a uniform, th9se white sheets.
Yale professor Jason Stanley also studies fascism, and he talks about the leadership principle. This is the idea is that the leader is infallible, that his intuition is better than the academics and experts, and he embodies the mystic destiny of the nation.
Trump is classic. He made no secret that he believes his authority draws from his own instincts. Remember, he knows more about military matters than the generals.
Fascism is based on the myth. Remember, white supremacy is a myth.
One of the myths that we see across fascist regimes is the “we were once pure and good, and outsiders are defiling our nation.” That’s what White Supremacy is based on. That’s what “Make America Great Again” is based on. It’s a desire to loop backwards to a mythic time when all was good.
The first thing a fascist leader has to do according to Yale professor Timothy Snyder is to away factuality so that myth can take hold.
If fascism rests on myth, rule of law, in contrast, requires a shared factuality.
A court of law doesn’t work if half the jury believes alternate facts.
So fascism and democracy can’t exist together. To exist, fascism must destroy truth. To exist rule of law must uphold truth.
The fascist leader comes to power through legal means. After he is in power, he begins assaulting and taking apart rule of law and democratic institutions.
This is why fascism didn’t appear on the world stage until the old monarchies broke down and democracy begin trying to take hold in Europe. A lot of people don’t like democracy. I’ll expand on that later.
The charismatic leader offers an appealing alternative.
I said that fascism appeals to people who prefer an authority figure to rule of law. It also appeals to people who want to dismantle the American federal government because fascism destroys democracy.
I’m going to wrap this one up because I promised to keep these short. I’ll hope you’ll join me for next video installment of How we Got Here and How We Get Out.
Sources:
- Jason Stanley, How Fascism Works (2020)
- Timothy Snyder, The Road to Unfreedom (2019)
- Timothy Snyder YouTube “Snyder Speaks” series.
- Robert O. Paxton, The Anatomy of Fascism (2004)
- Max Weber, “Politics as a Vocation,” (1919)
*
#6: Crisis and Spectacle
Hello, and welcome back.
In the last few videos, I compared and contrasted two different ways of seeing the world, and two corresponding forms of government. We can call these two views the hierarchical view and the fairness view.
For fairness people, the purpose of government is to increase fairness, which happens through regulations, rule of law that treats all people equally and gives all people equal access.
Hierarchy people don’t believe fairness and equality are possible. Mussolini said democracy is beautiful in theory, but in practice it’s a fallacy.
If you don’t believe equality is possible, the winner is the person who gains power.
Professor Jason Stanley, who studies fascism, says fascism is a set of tactics for gaining power. Franklin Delano Roosevelt defined fascism as the ownership of government by an individual, a group, or any other controlling private power—which is basically what happens you privatize government to the point where the government is essentially owned by private individuals.
Oligarchy, to define our terms, is when government is in the hands of a few people who own the government.
So oligarchy is a form of government that happens when a few people gain power and solidify their place at the top of the hierarchy and come to essentially own the government.
When fairness presidents go to work, they do things like create healthcare for everyone, expand voting rights, create progressive tax code. Things that help everybody, including people at the bottom.
Fascists and would-be oligarchs can’t do that because if everyone has equal access you don’t have a hierarchy anymore.
So how do they govern?
Russian philosopher Ivan Illyin explains how to do it. Timothy Snyder writes about Illyin in his book the Road to Unfreedom. llyin was a Russian nobleman who went into exile after the communist revolution. He admired Hitler and Mussolini. He admired order. The nation, for Ilyin, was like a body. The citizens are the cells. Each remains in its place. The foot cell doesn’t try to be a brain cell, and the brain cell doesn’t want to be a foot cell and wouldn’t even try.
He believed in a natural order. He also for this reason believed fascism would eventually replace both communism and democracy.
Illyin disliked the middle class, which was always striving for social advancement. He believed that this fractured society and created chaos. He thought the rulers at the top should rule, everyone else should be at the bottom.
He wrote guidelines for Russian leaders who would come to power after the fall of communism so they would know how to be good fascist. Putin followed these guidelines, and people like Trump have imitated Putin.
For Illyin, the task of the oligarch is to preserve the status quo, which means preserving their own wealth and power, and keeping others in their places.
But you can’t tell the people THAT. So you tell them a good story.
You tell them the oligarchs are “redeemers” with a mythic connection to the destiny of the nation, and that they will do battle with the nation’s enemies.
The fascist leader distracts everyone with these battle so they don’t have time to think about why they don’t have health care. They create crises.
Made up enemies are safest. We know that from George Orwell.
Twentieth century fascist really went war, and that was their undoing.
21st century fascists prefer harmless or made up enemies. That way the fascist leader doesn’t have to worry about getting hurt or having his property damaged. Trump preferred harmless enemies—those homeless migrant families at the border.
The followers are so busy cheering on their leader (the strongman) who is doing battle with their enemies that they don’t have time to wonder why they don’t have better healthcare or why they’re getting sick or and don’t have the same quality health care as people at the top, There is something they want more.
They want safety and order restored. They want their enemies vanquished. Now the enemy is Antifa.
No matter how low you are in the hierarchy, there are people lower trying to take what’s yours. The migrants at the border are perfect. They’re very low on the hierarchy trying to come up and take what belongs to “real” Americans.
What Trump did is basically what would-be oligarch do. He gave tax breaks to himself and his pals, and riled up his followers against Black Lives Matters implying that Blacks are trying to upset the natural order take over the top of the hierarchy.
There are so many things wrong with that, but the point is that hierarchy people see a desire for equality as a threat to order.
Crisis and spectacle is how fascists and would-be oligarchs govern.
The main way they gain and solidify power is through lies.
That’s a big a big topic, so I’ll probably break it into a few parts in the next few videos.
I hope you’re finding these helpful.
Sources:
- Jason Stanley, How Fascism Works (2020)
- Timothy Snyder, The Road to Unfreedom (2019)
- Timothy Snyder YouTube “Snyder Speaks” series
- Emilio Iodice, “Lessons from History: The Startling Rise to Power of Benito Mussolini” (2018)
*
So if you’re looking for an organization you can get involved with and support, consider supporting Run for Something. We need to get good people into local offices to help combat disinformation and to help secure our public education. Thank you.