Folks, my former PhD adviser and sometimes-collaborator, M. Steven Fish, has a new Substack out, which I highly recommend. Fish is a political scientist at Berkeley specializing in democracy and authoritarianism.

His most recent book, Comeback: Routing Trumpism, Reclaiming the Nation, and Restoring Democracy’s Edge (Rivertown Books, 2024), written with Laila M. Aghaie, dismantles the conventional wisdom that Trump’s rise was the result of economic discontent and conservative cultural backlash. He instead points to long-term trends in Democratic Party strategy. By forsaking nationalism and abandoning the high-dominance style of their midcentury predecessors, post-Vietnam Democrats created an opening for a rightwing authoritarian like Trump.

To get a sense of what you’d be signing up for, here’s Fish in his own words:

My mission is to end authoritarianism in America. How? By training Democrats to use dominance politics to win elections and crush the MAGA traitors who are tearing down our country.

This Substack—Democracy Hawk Dispatch—is a hub for every lover of democracy and America who’s ready to unleash the Democracy Hawk within and take back our country.

If you’re looking for comfort, consensus, or convention, you’re in the wrong place.

If you’re looking for confidence, conviction, and a way to win—welcome.

As you can see, Fish is an engaging writer with a razor-sharp mind. He is also full of smart, counterintuitive takes. So, please subscribe and support him!

Democracy Hawk Dispatch

UC Berkeley political scientist, specialist on beating autocrats and saving democracy, and author of Comeback: Routing Trumpism, Reclaiming the Nation, and Restoring Democracy's Edge.

By Steven Fish

Last week, the price of oil closed up 36 percent.

That ain’t good, folks. True, this is not 1979, when the economy was highly dependent on energy. But the price of gas still matters.

Not only that, but the Persian Gulf’s importance to the global economy is much greater than it was back then, and for reasons that have nothing to do with oil. The Gulf states have become key economic hubs, with Dubai, in particular, serving as one of the world’s major financial centers.

If the war continues to spread beyond Iran, the economic consequences will reverberate around the globe and come back to bite America in the ass. Are you familiar with the private credit market? If not, it might be time to google it.

And don’t forget that this is an election year. An unpopular, destructive war, if prolonged, will eventually cause opposition to spread to the GOP.

Trump can handle pushback from the Democrats (to the extent that they actually give any). But whenever it crops up in his own party, he starts running scared.

The pattern, by this late date, has repeated itself too many times for anyone to be surprised.

First, Trump does something crazy. He puffs himself up like a blowfish, hurling threats and executive orders without any awareness of the predictable consequences.

Then, when said consequences inevitably arise—in the form of civil resistance, media criticism, misgivings from prominent allies, or market volatility—he panics. At that point, he casts his humiliating defeat as a victory and goes back to yelling at the TV.

The current war is no different: He got into it because he’s a reckless dumbass and will get out of it because he’s a coward.

How much of a coward is he? Let us count the ways.

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Doing the Taco Dance

“I love the smell of deportations in the morning,” he posted in September 2025 as he announced the expansion of his ethnic cleansing campaign to Chicago. But after street protests, pushback from the governor, and a flurry of lawsuits, he withdrew his jackboots with his tail between his legs.

Remember “Liberation Day,” when he slapped arbitrary tariffs on every penguin-occupied rock in the cosmos? “MY POLICIES WILL NEVER CHANGE,” he thundered at the time.

Within a week, he reversed course, instituting a 90-day tariff freeze for most countries. The reason? The markets started to panic, and he became frightened.

For Trump, market volatility is a scary monster under the bed. Weeks after it forced his tariff climbdown, another market drop made him abandon his attempt to fire Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell.

Later, in November, Trump renewed his tariff nonsense, announcing rates exceeding 100 percent on Chinese imports. Beijing responded by restricting the export of rare earth metals.

Presumably, someone in his orbit proceeded to explain to him what “rare earth metals” are. At the ensuing trade talks, he all but capitulated.

The same month, a federal judge ruled that Lindsey Halligan, the interim U.S. Attorney leading the prosecutions of James Comey and Letitia James, had been unlawfully appointed. Instead of doing the reasonable thing by stepping aside, she continued to occupy her office like a child playing dress-up.

In January, another federal judge slammed Halligan for “masquerading as the United States Attorney for this District in direct defiance of binding court orders.”

Did Trump continue to fight? No, he simply gave up. Hours after the ruling came down, Attorney General Pam Bondi announced an end to the administration’s bid to keep Halligan in the role.

And remember the time he slapped a 50-percent tariff on Brazil? Not for any economic reason but because President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva had the temerity to refuse his demand to interfere in the prosecution of ex-president Jair Bolsonaro? (Bolsonaro was on trial for trying exactly what Trump failed to pull off at the end of his first term—that is, staying in office despite losing reelection. Unlike America, Brazil has a functioning criminal justice system.)

Soon afterward, Lula delivered a veritable smackdown to Trump during his opening address at the United Nations General Assembly.

A big tough guy like Trump would surely bristle at such insolence, right? Evidently not. Upon encountering Lula after the speech, the American president “insisted he had no hard feelings” toward the Brazilian leader. He even gave him a hug.

Then, of course, there was Greenland. Back in January, the world was holding its collective breath in anticipation of a U.S. invasion. But for once, America’s erstwhile European allies stood up to the president. deploying troops to the territory and forcing him into yet another retreat.

Since then, we have heard precisely nothing from Trump about annexing Greenland.

Last but not least was the aborted deportation surge in Minnesota. While not halted altogether, it was drastically scaled back following a brilliant civil resistance campaign. Not only did everyday Minnesotans impede the roundups, but the administration’s disproportionate response recoiled on itself.

The backlash to the murders of Renee Good and Alex Pretti quickly spread to the Republican Party. When it did, Trump freaked out and commenced one of his typically desperate searches for an offramp. He demoted Gestapo-enthusiast Greg Bovino, relieved Kristi Noem of operational responsibility, and announced a pull-out of federal law-enforcement.

Across the country, meanwhile, I.C.E. and Border Patrol have abandoned their indiscriminate sweeps, pivoting to more targeted enforcement operations and reducing their public visibility. Inevitably, the change is yielding fewer arrests.

Donny Little Hands

Who knew that a guy that spends his days pissing and moaning about how mistreated he is turns out to be less than a paragon of steely resolve?

Let’s face it: Trump can’t take the heat. When the going gets modestly taxing, he chickens out.

Over and over again, he barrels headlong into crises of his own making before realizing, “wait a minute, this might be bad.” Then, like George Costanza in a birthday party fire, he rushes for the exit, trampling every child and granny in his path.

When the markets keep tanking and the body bags start coming back, do you really think that Trump, of all people, will have the mettle stick it out?

At some point—certainly within the next three weeks—this war will come to an end. Expect the customary hollow victory declaration followed by a rapid force drawdown. “We’ve taught the Iranians a lesson and achieved our objectives,” he will insist.

This is not hard to do when you had no objectives in the first place aside from swinging your dick around.

Trump is a coward. That does not make him any less dangerous. But it does provide some mercy when his impulsive ineptitude threatens catastrophe.

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Follow Neil Abrams on Bluesky

“I do not ask that you place hands upon the tyrant to topple him over, but simply that you support him no longer; then you will behold him, like a great Colossus whose pedestal has been pulled away, fall of his own weight and break into pieces.”

—Étienne de La Boétie, Discourse on Voluntary Servitude, 1577

“The whole place is gonna go. It’s gonna pop like a cork.”

—TIME correspondent, Manila, August 21st, 1983

Forty years ago today, Filipinos came face to face with the machinery of death that once cowed and terrorized them.

Weeks earlier, Ferdinand Marcos, who for decades had ruled the country as his personal dominion, lost his bid for another presidential term. But he was determined as ever to remain in charge.

On February 23rd, 1986, a Sunday, he ordered his military to assault a band of renegade army officers holed up in a nearby base.

As his tanks rolled down Epifanio de los Santos Avenue in Manila, they came upon 20,000 Filipinos occupying the eight-lane boulevard, intent on stopping them from reaching their target. If previously, the people had trembled at the thought of resisting, now, they stood firm.

Amado Lacuesta Jr., a young screenwriter present near the front of the throng, described the encounter:

Panic sweeps over us all. Unthinking, I drop to my knees. Looking up I see only the general and his marines, disciplined, hard-eyed. … I shout and raise my hands, daring them: “Go on, kill us!” … The metal mountain jerks forward. Defiant, nervous shouts all around. The praying voices rise another key. I wonder what it is like to be crushed under tons of metal. Then the engine stops. There is an astounding split second of silence. The crowd erupts into wild cheers and applause.

Ordered to slaughter innocents, the troops had refused. “There were pregnant women and little children there that reminded us of our own families,” one soldier recounts. “I knew that if I didn’t clear the road and follow orders, I would be shot. But I also knew that if I did that, I would have to violate my conscience.”

The confrontation that Sunday was a critical moment, one of several which saw a bloody dictatorship dissolve in a matter of days.

In a test of wills, Filipinos had stared down a ruthless strongman—and won.

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The Fortress and the Temple

It might seem counterintuitive to see dictators as vulnerable to the fickle allegiances of others. It is certainly not how dictators see themselves.

Conventional wisdom views power as a fortress—strong, fixed, and durable. A ruler has police and soldiers, and he1 uses them to exert his will upon society. The only way to thwart his power is to destroy it with superior force or take control of it in an election or coup.

But this is not how power actually works. Recall the example of Vidkun Quisling, the wartime Nazi puppet leader of Norway, whom I discussed in a previous essay. For all the terror he employed, he was unable to bring a bunch of recalcitrant schoolteachers into line.

The Norwegian teachers’ resistance lays bare the misconception behind the fortress view. In the absence of voluntary compliance, no amount of force can make someone obey another’s command.

Power, in other words, is not something that rulers have; it is granted to them by others.

In this regard, power is more accurately viewed as a temple than a fortress. The Pantheon in Rome would not remain upright without the support of its columns, or pillars. Topple those pillars and watch it collapse.

The model of a temple on pillars is useful, for it highlights just how brittle power can be. “When we say of somebody that he is ‘in power,’” notes Hannah Arendt in On Violence,

we actually refer to his being empowered by a certain number of people to act in their name. The moment the group, from which the power originated to begin with…disappears, “his power” also vanishes.

This principle applies regardless of whether the ruler operates in a democracy or dictatorship. Of course, given the dystopian hellscape in which the United States now finds itself, it is the dictator that most concerns us here.

Like any powerholder, the dictator is just one person. To remain in power and enforce his directives, he needs the support of a whole range of elites. These elites are the pillars that prop up his regime.

The most obvious ones are the military and police. But other pillars can include prominent businesspeople, government officials, civil servants, pro-government parties, state media, religious authorities, and foreign allies.

Most dictators can withstand the loss of one or another pillar. Remove several, and he begins to sweat. Remove the army, police, and other armed elements, and he is finished.

The question, from the standpoint of his beleaguered subjects, is how to sweep those pillars away. There are several methods, not all of them desirable. For instance, a military coup removes a crucial pillar of support, but it might end up yielding a new dictator in place of the old.

If our goal is the return of democracy, then mass nonviolent action is the most effective way of dislodging an autocrat. Protests, strikes, boycotts, and other forms of nonviolent resistance, if waged on a sufficiently large scale, call into question a dictator’s survival. At that point, the elites who serve as pillars of his regime might decide that it is time to abandon him.

When they do defect, it is rarely because they experience a moral revelation about how bad the dictator is. More often, their motivations are selfish. Some elites defect because they fear being held accountable if the regime falls. Others foresee an opportunity for advantage.

Whatever their agenda, the outcome is the same. Few dictators can survive the mass desertion of their elite supporters—and the best means of driving those elites away is through popular nonviolent resistance.

Nonviolent action creates the opportunity—and, often, necessity—for the ruler’s supporting pillars to cut and run, leaving him bereft of the agents he depends on to wield control.

The question of which model to adopt is hardly theoretical. For those living under authoritarianism, the implications are very real.

If we accept the fortress view, then there is little point in opposing the regime. Unless resisters can mount their own army, the dictator remains secure.

Embracing the temple view, by contrast, opens up a more liberating possibility: control of the ruler by the “withdrawal of consent.” As Gene Sharp explains:

It is control, not by the infliction of superior violence from on top or outside, not by persuasion, nor by hopes of a change of heart in the ruler, but rather by the subjects’ declining to supply the power-holder with the sources of his power, by cutting off his power at the roots. This is resistance by noncooperation and disobedience.

In addition to being accurate, the temple model has the complementary advantage of putting the people in the driver’s seat. Popular resistance erodes the foundation of the ruler’s temple, destabilizing its supporting pillars. Shake those pillars enough, and his power collapses.

Few cases better illustrate this dynamic than the downfall of Philippine strongman Ferdinand Marcos in February 1986.

The Conjugal Dictatorship

In the years following his initial election as president in 1965, Marcos did not especially stand out from his predecessors.

It was his reelection campaign in 1969 which first showcased the tyranny that was to come. As the campaign heated up, Marcos dispatched his thugs to terrorize the opposition and strong-arm election officials, making the contest the bloodiest to date.

The election presaged a dark turn in his presidency. As popular unrest spiraled and his popularity tanked, Marcos became increasingly despotic.

In 1972, he ripped away all democratic pretense by declaring martial law. Officially aimed at containing the growing communist insurgency, it was a convenient excuse to cancel the election slated for the following year, in which he faced near-certain defeat.

With martial law in effect, there would be no election to lose and no parliament or supreme court to meddle in his affairs. From now on, Marcos would rule by decree. He shuttered independent media and unleashed the military on activists, journalists, professors, and political rivals, jailing thousands in a matter of weeks.

Still, he had to somehow justify the shift to one-man rule, and propaganda alone would not suffice. Nor were ordinary Filipinos the only ones who needed convincing. As the Philippines’ most important ally, the United States had to be brought on board.

But how? If there were an emergency, perhaps—a crisis so grave as to be immune to conventional remedies—that would certainly do.

There was a problem, however: No such emergency existed. And so, Marcos invented one.

In the months before the declaration of martial law, downtown Manila was rocked by a series of bombings. The regime blamed the communist rebels. In truth, Marcos’s own agents were responsible.

The charade was enough to convince Filipinos—and, critically, Americans—to accept the new order.

By the early 1980s, however, the country had plunged into crisis. The foreign borrowing spree which kept the Marcos regime afloat had become unsustainable, and the 1981 collapse of a major financial scam triggered a banking panic. The economy cratered. Poverty spiked.

Not everyone suffered, naturally. Marcos spent $3 billion on bailouts for his oligarch friends. For her part, Imelda Marcos, the first lady, was not about to skimp on her lavish shopping sprees in Paris and New York.

At a time of belt-tightening, such barefaced graft was sure to fuel resentment. But few Filipinos were prepared to brave the hazards of challenging the regime. As far as most were concerned, Marcos was protected by his army and police. Who, under the circumstances, would risk their necks by speaking out?

In this way, most of the public remained blinded by the fortress myth. “The regime lasted for twenty years,” observes Sterling Seagrave, a journalist, “only because

Filipinos allowed themselves to be convinced that the dictator was in firm control, that his secret police were everywhere, that his army was overwhelmingly powerful, and that Ferdinand Marcos himself was supernaturally endowed. These things were true up to a point. Beyond that, the impression of power and omniscience was exaggerated by showmanship and grotesque extremes of cruelty. Ordinary people were psyched out.

State intimidation was undoubtedly one of the keys to Marcos’s rule. During his twenty-year tenure, approximately 35,000 people were tortured and 70,000 arrested, historian Alfred W. McCoy estimates. Such was the barbarism of Marcos’s torture units that a new word was invented to describe it: “salvaging,” or the disposal of mutilated corpses along roadsides for the purpose of sowing terror.

But as Seagrave notes, force alone was not enough to keep the people down. Equally important, and more cost-effective, was the belief in the ruler’s invincibility.

The Marcoses wrapped their dominance in a shroud of performance and myth. Imelda hailed from one of the Philippines’ most noble houses. Ferdinand descended from great warriors. He was also an Olympic athlete. And he bravely led a band of guerillas against Japanese rule during the Second World War, in recognition of which he was awarded the Medal of Honor by Douglas MacArthur himself.

(In 1985, a rather inconvenient time for Marcos, a U.S. military investigation deemed his claim to have led a guerilla unit, much less receive a medal for it, as “fraudulent” and “absurd”).

Imelda claimed that General MacArthur had secretly adopted her as a young girl. That very same MacArthur carried on an illicit love affair with her aunt. (To a certain generation of Filipinos, MacArthur embodied a sort of hybrid between Alexander the Great and Taylor Swift.)

It was all bullshit, and most people knew it. But that was the point: Only those as omnipotent as the Marcoses could lie so brazenly without consequence.

The Marcos dictatorship was very much a family affair. Imelda represented the country on the international stage. Back home, she served as “minister of human settlements,” tasked with dispensing patronage to Ferdinand’s provincial allies.

For the ruling couple, the experience of martial law was like the “Push It to the Limit” montage in Scarface, if Florida were a nation-state ruled by Al Pacino and Michelle Pfeiffer. The misrule would have been comical if not for the human costs it entailed.

The Marcoses emptied an entire island of its inhabitants to make way for a private zoo complete with giraffes, zebras, and other wildlife imported from Kenya. Imelda lavished $31 million on a “grotesque guesthouse made entirely of coconuts.”

The presidential palace boasted an oversized painting featuring the ruling couple as the Filipino Adam and Eve, giving birth to the nation. According to Keith Dalton, a reporter who saw it first-hand, the portrait depicted a “muscular, bare chested, dagger-holding Marcos emerging from a bamboo jungle, and a half naked, long-haired, coy-looking Imelda modestly clutching a flowing white veil to her chest.”

But while the dictator believes he resides in Dragonstone, events have a way of revealing otherwise—that he is really standing on top of the Pantheon. The veil, godlike though it seems, can be pierced in an instant.

For the Marcoses, that moment came on August 21st, 1983.

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The Cork Pops

On the flight to Manila, Ninoy’s mood alternated between tense and serene.

That morning, he boarded a Boeing 767 en route from Taiwan. Clad in the same white suit he wore the day he left the Philippines three years earlier, he passed the time chatting amicably with his entourage and the retinue of journalists accompanying him.

One of those reporters was Sandra Burton, whose narrative of the event provides the basis for its retelling here.

Burton spoke extensively with Ninoy during the trip. “They say the guy is stupid to go home,” he told her, referring to himself in the third-person. “They don’t understand the value of self-sacrifice. Gandhi kneeling down and getting bashed. The vanquished is the victor. If you can get at the bad thing within your enemy, you unmask him.”

The plane begins its approach. Through the window, Ninoy catches sight of the verdant mountains of northern Luzon. “I’m home,” he declares elatedly.

A stewardess grabs the microphone. “At twelve-forty-five P.M., it is eighty-eight degrees Fahrenheit in Manila. We hope you have enjoyed your flight and will fly again soon with China Airlines.”

The cabin crew approaches to wish Ninoy well.

“1:04 P.M., touchdown,” Burton writes in her notebook. “Machine guns and tanks near the terminal.”

The plane rolls to a stop. The pilot comes on the loudspeaker. “Please remain in your seats for ten minutes.”

Through the window, a blue van can be seen backing up to the stairs leading from the jet bridge to the tarmac.

Three soldiers enter the plane and start down the aisle. After spotting Ninoy, they help him up, grab his bag, and escort him to the exit door.

As soon as they leave, the remaining passengers line up, waiting to disembark.

Voices can be heard from the jet bridge:

Person 1: I’ll do it!

Person 2: They can have it!

Person 3: Get down, get down!

Then, from just outside the service door to the tarmac, a loud pop.

TIME correspondent: What happened? What was that?

Three more shots. A female passenger screams. Another pop.

TIME correspondent: Wait. What happened? Oh no, he’s…

Female passenger: Oh no [wails]

ABC-TV correspondent: What happened?

TIME correspondent: The soldiers…they put about sixteen shots in him. They shot Ninoy. He’s dead out there. Christ, almighty…

A team of SWAT commandos stands on the tarmac, guns aimed at the passengers as they descend the stairs. A few of the soldiers approach Ninoy’s body as it lies lifeless on the ground. They pick it up and fling it into the blue van. Then, they jump in the back, and the van speeds off.

Left behind is a second man, dead in a pool of blood.

TIME correspondent: Does anybody know what those uniforms were?

Japanese reporter: They pretend that this guy killed him…Goddamn Philippines.

TIME correspondent: The whole place is gonna go. It’s gonna pop like a cork.

Fatal Delusion

Known affectionately as “Ninoy,” Benigno Aquino was outgoing and charismatic. He could “sway crowds like a snake charmer,” Burton recalls.

Though born into one of the Philippines’ most privileged families, he was taught from a young age to help those in need. The emphasis on charity was unusual for someone of his class. It would later serve him well as a politician, helping him cultivate a man-of-the-people image.

As governor of one of the only provinces not under Marcos’s control, Aquino was arrested soon after martial law was declared in 1972. He spent the rest of the decade languishing in prison. Under American pressure, he was released into exile in the U.S. in 1980. There, he remained for three years before returning that fateful day in August 1983, his mind set on a political comeback.

As Marcos gazed upon the image of Ninoy’s bullet-riddled corpse, he surely believed that his fortress of power had been strengthened. After all, he had just rid himself of his longtime nemesis and primary electoral threat. Unless somebody could destroy his fortress with a superior army or take control of it in a coup, he was protected.

Little did he know, he was living in a mirage.

Marcos did not reside in a fortress at all, it turns out. Instead, he was sitting on the roof of a temple. And the ground beneath had just begun to shake.

Tremors in the Temple

“I want people to see what they did to my son,” roared a furious Aurora Aquino.

Even in grief, her political savvy was evident. There would be no closed casket. The public would bear witness to her son’s disfigured corpse, dressed in the same blood-drenched suit he wore the day of his murder—a grisly testament to the crime, an accusation embodied in flesh.

The funeral, his mother declared, marked Ninoy’s “resurrection,” a fitting postscript to his “crucifixion” on the airport tarmac. Aurora instinctively grasped the sort of imagery which resonated in the devoutly Catholic Philippines.

As the coffin made its way through the streets of Manila, more than a million onlookers gathered to watch. The color yellow, long associated with the Aquino family, was visible everywhere—on clothing, banners, ribbons, flowers.

While no one knew it at the time, Ninoy’s procession marked the starting gun of a movement. For the next three years, Manila was the scene of strikes, demonstrations, and other forms of nonviolent resistance that would eventually force the Marcoses into exile.

Just as unexpected as the movement itself was the person who emerged at its head: Ninoy’s widow, Corazon.

Although the role had largely been thrust upon her, Cory, as she was known, turned out to be more than her husband’s equal when it came to moving a crowd. “It seemed,” writes Stanley Karnow, author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning In Our Image: America’s Empire in the Philippines, that she “was in direct communion with the people, projecting an aura of sanctity that almost mesmerized devout Filipinos.”

In time, most of the country’s fractious opposition would unite behind her.

Far from demoralizing Filipinos, the ruthless violence that Marcos meted out in response only emboldened them. The 1984 parliamentary elections drew a turnout of ninety percent. Parties backed by Cory surmounted colossal fraud and intimidation to win a third of the seats.

The following year, in February 1985, the assassination of a labor leader sparked a general strike. That same month saw thousands of farmers embark on a 200-mile trek from Luzon to Manila to hold a nine-day sit-in outside the agriculture ministry.

Further inflaming public anger was the sham verdict in the trial of Ninoy’s assassins. In December 1985, army chief Fabian Ver, a Marcos loyalist and the country’s second most powerful figure, was acquitted with his co-conspirators of planning and executing the murder.

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The First Pillars Give Way

Marcos’s repression was clearly backfiring. With every arrest, beating, and killing, the resistance grew, and he was powerless to stop it.

The veil of invincibility had been lifted, revealing an embittered and impotent man lashing out in futility.

Now that the end of his rule seemed like a real possibility, his erstwhile allies began to reassess their support.

The Catholic Church had never backed the regime outright. But in a country as devout as the Philippines, the clergy held considerable sway. At the very least, it was imperative for Marcos that they remain acquiescent.

Yet, the routine torture and murder of clergy members did not exactly help his cause. As the abuses mounted, many became vocal opponents.

Chief among these critics was Cardinal Jaime Sin, the country’s highest ranking church figure. Sin would play a key role in Marcos’s downfall. A skilled organizer and communicator, he was more responsible than anyone save Cory Aquino for uniting the opposition. Under his leadership, the church trained thousands of volunteer election monitors as well.

In addition, the church-owned Radio Veritas was far and away the country’s most important independent media outlet. As the resistance gained force, Radio Veritas served as both a critical source of information and a coordinator of mass action.

More important still were the nuns. It was they who stood between the demonstrators and the soldiers, calming jittery nerves and keeping both sides peaceful. “When the tanks started to move, they didn’t budge,” recalls one observer. “They just kept praying.”

While the clergy acted on principle, others saw in the burgeoning movement a chance to gain advantage.

Marcos’s corrupt predation and economic mismanagement had already alienated most of the business elite. During martial law, he subjected scores of businesspeople to sham prosecutions, which he used as pretexts to seize their assets and gift them to his cronies in exchange for kickbacks.

Thanks to such schemes, Marcos amassed a fortune worth at least $10 billion dollars by the end of his presidency, which he stashed away in a maze of bank accounts and properties in Switzerland, Hong Kong, and the U.S.

Adding insult to injury were his multibillion-dollar bailouts of these same cronies once the economic crisis of the early 1980s hit, even as traditional business elites saw their fortunes crater.

In 1981, a collection of business executives formed the Makati Business Club, which would serve as an advocacy group to press for their interests. At the same time, most businesspeople steered clear of overt opposition to the regime.

Ninoy’s assassination was the breaking point. It not only showed that their own lives were expendable, but the resulting surge in popular resistance convinced them that Marcos could be defeated. From 1983 onwards, the Makati Business Club poured its resources into the opposition movement.

On their own, the clergy and business community lacked the heft to threaten the regime, whose weightier pillars remained standing. In February 1986, these other pillars would fall, too, taking Marcos with them.

A Forced Choice

Dictators would survive much longer but for one common flaw: Eventually, they start to believe their own bullshit.

At the same time that First Lady Imelda was lecturing her courtiers about a “cosmic vision of development,” she was raiding a typhoon relief fund to pay for her daughter’s wedding.

Ferdinand was equally oblivious. “His corrupt administration was totally discredited by late 1985,” Karnow writes, “yet his blind belief in his own invincibility prompted him to schedule the election against Cory Aquino that spelled his doom.”

High on his own supply, Marcos called the snap poll for February 7th, 1986, certain that he could fraud his way to victory just as he had in the past.

He failed to understand just how fundamentally the country’s politics had changed. Through the experience of civil resistance, a public that was once overawed by his intimidation and propaganda had become cognizant of its own power.

Filipinos were about to seize the future for themselves. In the process, they would drag down the remaining pillars that kept his temple standing.

With little time to lose, the opposition quickly united behind Cory Aquino. Marcos and his thugs, for their part, drew generously from their ratfucking repertoire, stuffing ballot boxes and unleashing wanton violence.

This time, it would not work. Two days after the voting ended, on February 9th, the computer technicians responsible for tallying the votes walked off the job in protest at the ongoing fraud. Another pillar had fallen.

Days later, on the fourteenth, over a hundred Catholic bishops denounced the “unparalleled” election violations, proclaiming Marcos’s bid to remain president as having “no moral basis.”

When the parliament, stacked with pro-government loyalists, declared Marcos the winner the next day, the opposition walked out.

The sixteenth brought one of the revolution’s pivotal events. Two million Filipinos gathered at Manila’s Luneta Park to hear Cory Aquino speak. The sheer size of the turnout was an unmistakable sign that Philippine society, or a massive part thereof, rejected Marcos’s legitimacy.

For the first time in twenty years, the prospect of his downfall went from distant possibility to imminent prospect.

In her address, Aquino called for a nationwide campaign of civil disobedience, to include mass demonstrations and boycotts of businesses, banks, and media outlets that supported the president.

Any allies who remained by Marcos’s side now had a choice to make. They could stay loyal to the president and risk facing accountability if he fell. Alternatively, they could switch their allegiance to Cory, the legitimate president-elect, and retain some chance of maintaining their influence and freedom once she took over.

Morality, for them, had nothing to do with it. This was about self-preservation. And it was thanks to the courage of everyday Filipinos that they faced this dilemma in the first place.

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Enrile’s Confession

“I’ll be dead in an hour,” said the voice on the other end of the line.

It was less a prediction than a plea. The man who issued it, defense minister Juan Ponce Enrile, was in a world of trouble.

On February 22nd, 1986, at around three o’clock in the afternoon, Enrile placed a frantic call to Villa San Miguel, the residence of Cardinal Sin.

“Your Eminence,” he implored, “please help us. The president’s men are coming to arrest us.”

In the weeks since the presidential election, the world’s attention had been fixated on which of the two candidates would emerge victorious.

But Enrile had other plans. Together with Lt. General Fidel Ramos, the army vice chief of staff, he led a renegade faction of army officers, the Reform the Armed Forces Movement, known as RAM for short.

If it were up to them, there would be no President Marcos and no President Aquino, but a President Enrile. And they were going to do something about it.

Everything was set. The coup would take place at dawn on Sunday, February 23rd. Attacking from four directions, a RAM contingent would place the presidential palace under siege. At that point, another group would storm the residence, make a beeline for the master bedroom, and arrest the president and first lady. Then, they would announce to the nation that a military-led junta had taken charge.

The officers claimed that they were driven by outrage over rampant criminality and corruption in the military.

Such grandstanding was rather precious given the unsavory reputations of RAM’S leading members.

Consider some examples:

• Lt. Vic Batac, who stood accused by an international commission of torturing a woman using “electric shock, water cure, sleep deprivation, sexual indignities, pistol whipping and threats to relatives.”

• Lt. Rodolfo Aguinaldo, a “persistent and systematic torturer,” according to a Philippine rights organization.

• Lt. Col. Gregorio Honasan, aka “Gringo,” implicated in “the brutal slaying of a dissident, Dr. Johnny Escandor, whose body was found dumped outside military headquarters in Manila, the brain removed from his skull and underpants stuffed in the cavity.”

• Lt. Gen. Ramos, who, as head of the notorious Constabulary, had overseen the horrific abuses just described.

Finally, there was Enrile, the prime orchestrator behind martial law. Aside from terror, his other specialty was graft. Enrile was rumored to be the country’s third wealthiest man. This would have made him a billionaire—not bad for a guy on a government salary.

Considering the sorts of characters who made up RAM, it strains credulity to believe that they were acting out of moral indignation. These men had lost the right to be offended by anything.

The truth was far more banal: The officers were resentful at having been pushed aside by Marcos’s cronies—and they would now take back what was rightfully theirs.

There was a problem, however: Marcos had been tipped off to their plan and moved quickly to thwart it. A marine battalion was brought in to reinforce the palace, making it a death trap for any attackers. Worse, some of the key plotters were arrested just before the coup was to go into effect.

Forced onto the back foot, Ramos, Enrile, and the remaining RAM officers retreated to Camp Aguinaldo, the headquarters of the defense ministry, and Camp Crame, the seat of the national police. Both stood opposite one another on the eight-lane Epifanio de los Santos Avenue in Manila.

Marcos, who still controlled the bulk of the armed forces, was widely expected to order an assault on the rebel officers.

With no chance of overthrowing the president by force, their only hope was to call on the rest of the army to join their ranks—and rely on the crowds to defend them.

If they could somehow bring thousands of Filipinos onto the boulevard, the human mass could serve as a buffer against the president’s forces.

Without that, the RAM officers would be crushed—and everyone knew it. “A half-dozen shells and a few good strafing runs and we’re all dead,” affirmed one of Enrile’s colonels.

But there was a hitch: How to convince the people to risk their necks for a bunch of military officers with blood on their hands?

There was only one thing to do: place the call to Cardinal Sin. And so, in the evening of February 22nd, that is exactly what Enrile did.

Sin, whose moral authority was matched by his political astuteness, immediately recognized the opportunity. The RAM officers would work their military networks to convince additional units to defect, while Sin would summon the faithful to their defense.

Even with Sin’s support, however, it would be a tall order to persuade Filipinos to rally behind their erstwhile torturers.

Hence, in an “act of contrition,” the two RAM leaders called a press conference for later that Saturday. There, seated beside Ramos, a visibly shaking Enrile announced his wish to atone for his crimes.

Well, maybe not all of them; now that he’s on the pyre, there’s no need to help pour the gasoline. But he did mention a few—his “participation in the declaration of martial law” and his more recent role in helping to rig the election in Marcos’s favor.

If only he’d known those sorts of things were frowned upon…

Ramos was somewhat less contrite, directing his fury at Marcos and his associates instead. The armed forces had become “immoral,” claimed the man who oversaw the use of electric shocks on the genitals of torture victims.

The performance was far from ideal. But the officers could still be useful to the revolution. For Cardinal Sin, that was enough.

Officers Schooled

Just hours before that fateful call, the RAM officers had been looking forward to a successful coup. Now, they were desperate, hoping against hope that their military colleagues would break ranks while ordinary Filipinos would come to their rescue.

In fact, the officers had just undergone a crash course in the nature of power. They had long been taught to see power as a fortress, insulated from the trivial concerns of everyday citizens. The only way to seize it, in this view, was to assemble a military force that could overwhelm the ruler’s—exactly what they had planned to do in their coup.

But as they discovered, a coup is not the only or even most reliable way to oust a dictator. So, when the plot failed, they underwent a conversion. Very quickly, they came to understand that power is not at all like a fortress. It is more akin to a temple, which cannot stand without the support of its massive pillars.

As we saw above, Marcos had already lost some of these pillars long before the election took place: the Catholic clergy, for one, and the business community, for another. After the polls closed, he lost a third: the state election experts responsible for tallying the votes, who were now in open revolt over the fraud they had been asked to perpetrate.

But the most crucial pillars remained in his grasp—the military, first and foremost. The RAM officers only comprised a tiny portion of the armed forces, whose ranks, at this point, remained overwhelmingly loyal to the president.

The question was how to convince the rest of the army to defect. It would take a lot more than promises and sweet-talking. Defying the president was an act of treason. For the soldiers who were still aligned with the regime, this was not a decision to take lightly.

For them, there was only one thing that could make the risk of defecting more tolerable. If the troops, commanders, and top brass could see that Marcos had lost his authority over the people, it would alter their calculus. Going against a ruler whose days were numbered was a different matter entirely than defying one who might remain in power indefinitely.

Under those circumstances, in fact, the incentives would be reversed. If Marcos really was on his way out, his troops would have every reason to switch sides at the earliest opportunity—if only to avoid being implicated in any further crackdowns. After all, a new regime was on the horizon—and with it, the prospect of accountability.

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Standing Down

Following Enrile and Ramos’s confession, Sin issued a public appeal to “support our two good friends.”

The effect was astounding. “By sunrise Sunday, the entire eight-lane width of Efran de Los Santos Street was choked with humanity,” reported Mark Fineman of the Los Angeles Times.

It was here, on the road to camps Crame and Aguinaldo, that masses of Filipinos confronted the regime’s armored columns. Epifanio de los Santos Avenue was now the key battleground in the struggle for the country’s future, and its acronym, EDSA, would become synonymous with the revolution.

For the next three days, EDSA was a giant festival grounds host to singing, dancing, and prayer vigils. At its peak, an estimated two million Filipinos—men and women, young and old, healthy and infirm—endured the threat of bloodshed to defend the rebel officers from Marcos’s troops.

Standing face-to-face with soldiers ordered to slaughter them, the demonstrators offered “flowers, chocolates, [and] prayers,” inviting them to switch sides and join the resistance.

“Stop! I am an old woman,” pleaded a wheelchair-bound protester in front of an armored personnel carrier. “​You can kill me but don’t kill the young people here.” A moment later, a soldier descended, and they embraced.

Another woman placed her young granddaughter on top of a tank. The child kissed the driver, “and that finished the tank forever,” a witness recalls. “No anti-tank gun ever invented was so effective as that little three-year-old girl.”

Commanded to murder innocents, the soldiers flinched, and the people remained steadfast. “The funny thing about the whole siege,” recounts one participant, “was that all those [troops who were] ordered to attack Camp Crame, even if they were able to get through, ended up defecting to our side before they reached their target.”

During the entire four-day saga, not a single soldier intentionally killed a civilian.

But the wily Marcos had an ace up his sleeve. As it turned out, his most loyal devotee was not in any military command center but an ocean away, in Washington D.C.

America Teeters

“Three centuries in a Catholic convent and fifty years in Hollywood,” goes a common quip about Philippine history.

For three hundred years, the Catholic monarchs of Spain lorded over the Pacific archipelago. When they were not exploiting the people, they were busy converting them, turning the Philippines into Asia’s sole majority-Christian country.

In 1898, after its victory in the Spanish-American War, the United States assumed direct control of the islands. Such outright colonialism was unusual for the U.S., which preferred more informal means of domination. But it explains why American power continued to loom large in the country even after its independence in 1946.

During the Marcos era, America’s overriding concern was to protect its local military bases from a growing communist insurgency. To be sure, Marcos’s pitiless tyranny was responsible for fueling the rebellion in the first place. But U.S. policymakers, as they are wont to do, adopted an ass-backward reading of the conflict, viewing Marcos as the ultimate safeguard against a communist victory.

At the same time, the U.S. needed its strongman to at least pay lip service to human rights so as to avoid breeding opposition to the relationship at home and abroad.

But with Marcos ramping up the repression against Cory’s resistance movement, the fiction had become impossible to maintain. Images of bound, stabbed corpses in shallow graves did not play well on the NBC Nightly News. Congressional investigations were launched. Diplomats and national security officials started to question Marcos’s usefulness.

In this way, mass nonviolent action had laid bare the savage brutality at the regime’s core, making it ever more apparent to both Americans and Filipinos.

Yet, there remained one holdout, and that holdout happened to be the president of the United States.

For Ronald Reagan, Marcos was an object of reverence, a State Department official explained. It was as if the Philippine leader were “a hero on a bubble gum card he had collected as a kid.” To Reagan, Marcos was the valiant rebel who had fought against the Japanese in the Second World War, and the gracious leader who had rolled out the red carpet to him and Nancy when he was dispatched to Manila during the Nixon administration.

On the one hand, Marcos’s crimes, by this late date, had become too obvious to ignore. A week after the polls closed, Reagan publicly blamed his Filippino counterpart for the “widespread fraud and violence” that had occurred.

Still, he lacked the stomach to abandon Marcos altogether, even as his advisers were pushing for that very move.

For now, the president stood by his man.

Back in Manila, however, the resistance was taking on a life of its own, and regime defections were mounting as a result. Eventually, it would force even Reagan’s hand.

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Downward Spiral

By Monday, February 24th, Marcos’s remaining allies had all but deserted him. His temple of power was on the verge of collapse, its supporting pillars in shambles.

And yet, he continued to play the part. In a nationally televised address, he vowed to “wipe out” his opponents. “If necessary, I will defend this position with all the force at my disposal.”

It was the last time he would speak before a national audience. Just as he announced a state of emergency, the rebels took control of the TV station, cutting him off mid-sentence. The feed switched over to Mel Lopez, an opposition deputy, who informed viewers that Marcos was “no longer the president of the Philippines.”

By this point, Marcos was a dictator in name only. He had lost the state media. He had lost his civil servants. He had even lost his airplane pilots, who, around three-o’clock am on the twenty-fourth, were seen speeding away from the presidential palace.

Most importantly of all, he had lost the military. Earlier that day, the crowds on EDSA beheld the terrifying sight of nine strike helicopters descending overhead. Only instead of assaulting Camp Crame, as they had been ordered to do, Burton writes, “the pilots jumped out, waving white handkerchiefs and flashing the Laban sign,” a symbol of resistance in which the thumb and index finger form an “L” for laban, or “fight.” “The anti-Marcos forces now controlled the skies.”

An attempt that same day to retake Channel Four, now in rebel hands, likewise disintegrated. When the soldiers arrived, they were met by protesters offering them coffee, donuts, and McDonald’s hamburgers. The commander promised to withdraw.

“The number of people still loyal to Marcos was shrinking with the passage of each second,” explain Jim Forest and Nancy Forest in Four Days in February, a book chronicling the regime’s demise. By Monday afternoon, 85 percent of the armed forces had defected to the rebels’ side.

When the day ended, Marcos stood alone. Even Reagan had to bow to the inevitable. “Attempts to prolong the life of the present regime by violence are futile,” read a White House statement. “A solution to this crisis can only be achieved through a peaceful transition to a new government.”

It was as good as an obituary.

When Marcos saw the announcement in the early morning of February 25th, Manila time, he phoned U.S. Senator Paul Laxalt, who had played a key role in the diplomacy surrounding the crisis. Marcos wanted to be sure that the statement reflected the position of the U.S. government. Karnow describes the exchange:

“Senator,” Marcos pressed, “what do you think? Should I step down?” Laxalt responded without hesitation: “I think you should cut and cut cleanly. I think the time has come.” There was a silence so long that Laxalt, wondering whether they had been disconnected, asked, “Mr. President, are you there?” “Yes,” responded Marcos in a thin voice. “I am so very, very disappointed.”

The next day, Cory Aquino had her swearing-in at the private Club Filipino. Instead of taking power themselves, as they had originally planned, Enrile and Ramos were seated among the attendees. Whatever the two powerbrokers’ ambitions, the Philippine people had their own plans.

An hour later, Marcos held an inauguration for himself behind the fortified walls of the presidential palace. It was a pathetic affair with sparse attendance. His prime minister, who earlier that day had been replaced by a member of the opposition, did not show up. Neither did his vice-presidential candidate.

After wrapping up, the Marcoses and their entourage boarded a small fleet of U.S. military helicopters, which took them to a nearby base. From there, they were flown to Hawaii, where they owned a mansion overlooking Honolulu, part of an extensive U.S. property portfolio unwittingly financed by the Philippine people.

In a final show of loyalty, Reagan had offered them asylum.

Into Pieces

“I do not ask that you place hands upon the tyrant to topple him over, but simply that you support him no longer,” wrote Étienne de La Boétie in 1577. “[T]hen you will behold him, like a great Colossus whose pedestal has been pulled away, fall of his own weight and break into pieces.”

Four centuries later, Filipinos took him up on that advice.

The anti-Marcos revolution introduced a new term to the global lexicon: “people power.” It was both a description of the events and a revelation on the part of everyday citizens—that they, not some self-appointed tyrant, were the ones who controlled their destiny.

Filipinos reminded the world that dictators do not reside in fortresses. They instead sit atop temples, whose pillars can be knocked away.

Gene Sharp explains the difference:

One can see the power of a government as emitted from the few who stand at the pinnacle of command. Or one can see that power, in all governments, as continually rising from many parts of the society.

One can also see power as self-perpetuating, durable, not easily or quickly controlled or destroyed. Or political power can be viewed as fragile, always dependent for its strength and existence upon a replenishment of its sources by the cooperation of…institutions and people—cooperation which may or may not continue.

In February 1986, Filipinos proved which one of these views is correct.

Through strikes, protests, and other methods of nonviolent resistance, the people withdrew their consent to be ruled. As a consequence, the elites who had once served as pillars of Marcos’s regime abandoned him.

Different elites acted for their own reasons—the Catholic clergy out of moral revulsion; the business community to protect its interests; military officers to gain political advantage; ordinary soldiers to avoid complicity; and the U.S. government to secure its bases.

In the final analysis, however, it was mass nonviolent resistance which pushed, pulled, moved, implored, threatened, and enabled those elites to act. By calling into question the regime’s survival, nonviolent action created the opportunity—and, very often, necessity—for the president’s allies to pull their support.

Marcos met his end not at the hands of a superior military force but a society that stopped obeying him. By the simple act of noncompliance, everyday resisters had consigned his regime to ashes.

Americans, pay heed.

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SOURCES

Amnesty International. 1976. Report of an Amnesty International Mission to the Republic of the Philippines: 22 November-5 December 1975. Amnesty International Publications.

Arendt, Hannah. 1970. On Violence. Harcourt.

Branigin, William. 1986. “Rebels, Marcos Contest Control of Philippines.” The Washington Post, February 23. https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1986/02/24/rebels-marcos-contest-control-of-philippines/2c18fa71-45dc-423f-a3e1-9cd187dec323/, accessed January 15, 2026.

Branigin, William and John Burgess. 1986. “Fraud Charges Multiply in Philippines.” The Washington Post, February 9. https://wapo.st/4qsMGU4, accessed February 10, 2026.

British Broadcasting Corporation. 2006. “From Dictatorship to Democracy.” BBC News, February 14. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/programmes/documentary_archive/4713466.stm, accessed February 3, 2026.

Burton, Sandra. 1989. Impossible Dream: The Marcoses, the Aquinos, and the Unfinished Revolution. Warner Books.

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

Dalton, Keith. 2025. Reinventing Marcos: From Dictator to Hero. Lightning Source Global, Amazon Publishing, and IngramSpark. Kindle.

de La Boétie, Étienne. 2016 [1577]. Discourse on Voluntary Servitude: Why People Enslave Themselves to Authority, edited by William Garner. Adagio. Kindle.

Fineman, Mark. 2026. “The 3-Day Revolution: How Marcos Was Toppled.” Los Angeles Times, February 27. https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1986-02-27-mn-12085-story.html, accessed January 26, 2026.

Forest, Jim and Nancy Forest. 1988. Four Days in February: The Story of the Nonviolent Overthrow of the Marcos Regime. Marshall Pickering.

Karnow, Stanley. 1989. In Our Image: America’s Empire in the Philippines, Ballantine Books and Random House. Kindle.

McCoy, Alfred W. 1990. “Philippine Military ‘Reformists’: Specialists in Torture.” Los Angeles Times, February 4. https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1990-02-04-op-202-story.html, accessed February 12, 2026.

McCoy, Alfred W. 1999. “Dark Legacy: Human Rights Under the Marcos Regime.” Paper presented at the Legacies of the Marcos Dictatorship Conference, Ateneo de Manila University, September 20. http://www.hartford-hwp.com/archives/54a/062.html, accessed January 9, 2026.

Nemenzo, Gemma. 2016. “30 Years Ago: Coup d’etat and People Power.” Positively Filipino, February 24. https://www.positivelyfilipino.com/magazine/30-years-ago-coup-detat#:~:text=What%20it%20was%20in%20unadorned,decent%20elements%20of%20the%20KBL, accessed February 12, 2026.

Nepstad, Sharon Erickson. 2011. Nonviolent Revolutions: Civil Resistance in the Late 20th Century. Oxford University Press.

Piatos, Tiziana Celine. 2024. “Flashback: Tide Turns at Revolt.” Daily Tribune, February 24. https://tribune.net.ph/2024/02/25/flashback-tide-turns-at-revolt, accessed February 5, 2026.

Rappler.com. 2025. “Listen: Cardinal Sin’s 1986 Appeal for Filipinos to Go to EDSA, Support Ramos and Enrile.” February 22. https://www.rappler.com/philippines/audio-jaime-cardinal-sin-1986-appeal-go-edsa-support-fidel-ramos-juan-ponce-enrile/, accessed February 3, 2026.

Schock, Kurt. 2005. Unarmed Insurrections: People Power Movements in Nondemocracies. University of Minnesota Press.

Seagrave, Sterling. 2018. The Marcos Dynasty. Lume Books. Kindle.

Sharp, Gene. 2005. Waging Nonviolent Struggle: 20^th Century Practice and 21^st Century Potential. Extending Horizons Books.

Sharp, Gene. 2006 [1973]. The Politics of Nonviolent Action. The Albert Einstein Institution. Kindle.

“Text of Filipino Bishops’ Statement on Vote.” 1986. New York Times, February 15. https://www.nytimes.com/1986/02/15/world/text-of-filipino-bishops-statement-on-vote.html?smid=url-share, accessed January 14, 2026.

Thompson, Mark R. 1995. The Anti-Marcos Struggle: Personalistic Rule and Democratic Transition in the Philippines. Yale University Press.

Tran, Mark and Nicholas Cumming-Bruce. 2014. “From the Archive, 17 February 1986: Protest at President Marcos’ Election Victory.” The Guardian, February 17. https://www.theguardian.com/theguardian/2014/feb/17/philippines-ferdinand-marcos-corazon-aquino, accessed February 11, 2026.

Zunes, Stephen. 1999. “The Origins of People Power in the Philippines.” In Nonviolent Social Movements: A Geographical Perspective, edited by Stephen Zunes, Lester Kurtz, and Sarah Beth Asher. Blackwell.

“I’ll be dead in an hour,” said the voice on the other end of the line.

It was less a prediction than a plea. The man who issued it, defense minister Juan Ponce Enrile, was in a world of trouble.

On February 22, 1986, at around three o’clock in the afternoon, Enrile placed a frantic call to Villa San Miguel, the residence of Cardinal Jaime Sin. Sin was the Philippines’ highest-ranking church official and a key player in the resistance.

“Your Eminence,” he implored, “please help us. The president’s men are coming to arrest us.”

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Weeks earlier, Ferdinand Marcos, the country’s longtime dictator, had rigged a presidential election, deploying fraud and violence in an effort to barrel his way into another presidential term.

It was clear to everyone that he had lost to his opponent, Corazon Aquino. But he would not give up without a fight.

In the weeks since the vote, the world’s attention had been fixated on which of the two candidates would emerge victorious.

But Enrile had other plans. Together with Lt. General Fidel Ramos, the army vice chief of staff, he led a renegade faction of army officers, the Reform the Armed Forces Movement, known as RAM for short.

If it were up to them, there would be no President Marcos and no President Aquino, but a President Enrile. And they were going to do something about it.

Everything was set. The coup would take place at dawn on Sunday, February 23^rd. Attacking from four directions, a RAM contingent would place the presidential palace under siege. At that point, another group would storm the residence, make a beeline for the master bedroom, and arrest the president and first lady. Then, they would announce to the nation that a military-led junta had taken charge.

The officers claimed that they were driven by outrage over rampant criminality and corruption in the military.

Such grandstanding was rather precious given the unsavory reputations of RAM’S leading members.

Consider some examples:

• Lt. Vic Batac, who stood accused by an international commission of torturing a woman using “electric shock, water cure, sleep deprivation, sexual indignities, pistol whipping and threats to relatives.”

• Lt. Rodolfo Aguinaldo, a “persistent and systematic torturer,” according to a Philippine rights organization.

• Lt. Col. Gregorio Honasan, aka “Gringo,” implicated in “the brutal slaying of a dissident, Dr. Johnny Escandor, whose body was found dumped outside military headquarters in Manila, the brain removed from his skull and underpants stuffed in the cavity.”

• Lt. Gen. Ramos, who, as head of the notorious Constabulary, had overseen the horrific abuses just described.

Finally, there was Enrile, the prime orchestrator behind martial law. Aside from terror, his other specialty was graft. Enrile was rumored to be the country’s third wealthiest man. This would have made him a billionaire—not bad for a guy on a government salary.

Considering the sorts of characters who made up RAM, it strains credulity to believe that they were acting out of moral indignation. These men had lost the right to be offended by anything.

The truth was far more banal: The officers were resentful at having been pushed aside by Marcos’s cronies—and they would now take back what was rightfully theirs.

There was a problem, however: Marcos had been tipped off to their plan and moved quickly to thwart it. A marine battalion was brought in to reinforce the palace, making it a death trap for any attackers. Worse, some of the key plotters were arrested just before the coup was to go into effect.

Forced onto the back foot, Ramos, Enrile, and the remaining RAM officers retreated to Camp Aguinaldo, the headquarters of the defense ministry, and Camp Crame, the seat of the national police. Both stood opposite one another on the eight-lane Epifanio de los Santos Avenue in Manila.

Marcos, who still controlled the bulk of the armed forces, was widely expected to order an assault on the rebel officers.

With no chance of overthrowing the president by force, their only hope was to call on the rest of the army to join their ranks—and rely on the crowds to defend them.

If they could somehow bring thousands of Filipinos onto the boulevard, the human mass could serve as a buffer against the president’s forces.

Without that, the RAM officers would be crushed—and everyone knew it. “A half-dozen shells and a few good strafing runs and we’re all dead,” affirmed one of Enrile’s colonels.

But there was a hitch: How to convince the people to risk their necks for a bunch of military officers with blood on their hands?

There was only one thing to do: place the call to Cardinal Sin. And so, in the evening of February 22^nd, that is exactly what Enrile did.

Sin, whose moral authority was matched by his political astuteness, immediately recognized the opportunity. The RAM officers would work their military networks to convince additional units to defect, while Sin would summon the faithful to their defense.

Even with Sin’s support, however, it would be a tall order to persuade Filipinos to rally behind their erstwhile torturers.

Hence, in an “act of contrition,” the two RAM leaders called a press conference for later that Saturday. There, seated beside Ramos, a visibly shaking Enrile announced his wish to atone for his crimes.

Well, maybe not all of them; now that he’s on the pyre, there’s no need to help pour the gasoline. But he did mention a few—his “participation in the declaration of martial law” and his more recent role in helping to rig the election in Marcos’s favor.

If only he’d known those sorts of things were frowned upon…

Ramos was somewhat less contrite, directing his fury at Marcos and his associates instead. The armed forces had become “immoral,” claimed the man who oversaw the use of electric shocks on the genitals of torture victims.

The performance was far from ideal. But the officers could still be useful to the revolution. For Cardinal Sin, that was enough.

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Officers Schooled

Just hours before that fateful call, the RAM officers had been looking forward to a successful coup. Now, they were desperate, hoping against hope that their military colleagues would break ranks while ordinary Filipinos would come to their rescue.

In fact, the officers had just undergone a crash course in the nature of power. They had long been taught to see power as a fortress, insulated from the trivial concerns of everyday citizens. The only way to seize it, in this view, was to mount a superior military force that could overwhelm the ruler’s—exactly what they had planned to do in their coup.

But as they discovered, a coup is not the only or even most reliable way to oust a dictator. So, when the plot failed, they underwent a conversion. Very quickly, they came to understand that power is not at all like a fortress. It is more akin to a temple.

Recall the Pantheon of Rome, which could not stand without the support of its massive pillars.

Similarly, a ruler—even a dictator like Marcos—depends for his power on a set of pillars. The military and police are the most obvious ones. But he relies on other pillars too, such as prominent businesspeople, government officials, civil servants, pro-government parties, state media, religious authorities, and foreign allies.

As we saw in part two, Marcos had already lost some of these pillars long before the election took place: the Catholic clergy, for one, and the business community, for another. After the polls closed, he lost a third: the state election experts responsible for tallying the votes, who were now in open revolt over the fraud they had been asked to perpetrate.

But the most crucial pillars remained in his grasp—the military, first and foremost. The RAM officers only comprised a tiny portion of the armed forces, whose ranks, at this point, remained overwhelmingly loyal to the president.

The question was how to convince the rest of the army to defect. It would take a lot more than promises and sweettalking. Defying the president was an act of treason. For the soldiers who were still aligned with the regime, this was not a decision to take lightly.

For them, there was only one thing that could make the risk of defecting more tolerable. If the troops, commanders, and top brass could see that Marcos had lost his authority over the people, it would alter their calculus. Going against a ruler whose days were numbered was a different matter entirely than defying one who might remain in power indefinitely.

Under those circumstances, in fact, the incentives would be reversed. If Marcos really was on his way out, his troops would have every reason to switch sides at the earliest opportunity—if only to avoid being implicated in any further crackdowns. After all, a new regime was on the horizon—and with it, the prospect of accountability.

Stand Down

Following Enrile and Ramos’s confessional, Sin issued a public appeal to “support our two good friends.”

The effect was astounding. “By sunrise Sunday, the entire eight-lane width of Efran de Los Santos Street was choked with humanity,” reported Mark Fineman of the Los Angeles Times.

It was here, on the road to camps Crame and Aguinaldo, that masses of Filipinos confronted the regime’s armored columns. Epifanio de los Santos Avenue was now the key battleground in the struggle for the country’s future, and its acronym, EDSA, would become synonymous with the revolution.

For the next three days, EDSA was a giant festival grounds host to singing, dancing, and prayer vigils. At its peak, an estimated two million Filipinos—men and women, young and old, healthy and infirm—endured the threat of bloodshed to defend the rebel officers from Marcos’s troops.

Standing face-to-face with soldiers ordered to slaughter them, the demonstrators offered “flowers, chocolates, [and] prayers,” inviting them to switch sides and join the resistance.

“Stop! I am an old woman,” pleaded a wheelchair-bound protester in front of an armored personnel carrier. “​You can kill me but don’t kill the young people here.” A moment later, a soldier descended, and they embraced.

Another woman placed her young granddaughter on top of a tank. The child kissed the driver, “and that finished the tank forever,” a witness recalls. “No anti-tank gun ever invented was so effective as that little three-year-old girl.”

Commanded to murder innocents, the soldiers flinched, and the people stood firm. “The funny thing about the whole siege,” recounts one participant, “was that all those [troops who were] ordered to attack Camp Crame, even if they were able to get through, ended up defecting to our side before they reached their target.”

During the entire four-day saga, not a single soldier intentionally killed a civilian.

But the wily Marcos had an ace up his sleeve. As it turned out, his most loyal devotee was not in any military command center but an ocean away, in Washington D.C.

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America Teeters

“Three centuries in a Catholic convent and fifty years in Hollywood,” goes a common quip about Philippine history.

For three hundred years, the Catholic monarchs of Spain lorded over the Pacific archipelago. When they were not exploiting the people, they were busy converting them, turning the Philippines into Asia’s sole majority-Christian country.

In 1898, after its victory in the Spanish-American War, the United States assumed direct control of the islands. Such outright colonialism was unusual for the U.S., which preferred more informal means of domination. But it explains why American power continued to loom large in the country even after its independence in 1946.

During the Marcos era, America’s overriding concern was to protect its local military bases from a growing communist insurgency. To be sure, Marcos’s pitiless tyranny was responsible for fueling the rebellion in the first place. But U.S. policymakers, as they are wont to do, adopted an ass-backward reading of the conflict, viewing Marcos as the ultimate safeguard against a communist victory.

At the same time, the U.S. needed its strongman to at least pay lip service to human rights so as to avoid breeding opposition to the relationship at home and abroad.

But with Marcos ramping up the repression against Cory’s resistance movement, the fiction had become impossible to maintain. Images of bound, stabbed corpses in shallow graves did not play well on the NBC Nightly News. Congressional investigations were launched. Diplomats and national security officials started to question Marcos’s usefulness.

In this way, mass nonviolent action had laid bare the savage brutality at the regime’s core, making it ever more apparent to both Americans and Filipinos.

Yet, there remained one holdout, and that holdout happened to be the president of the United States.

Ronald Reagan held Marcos in awe, a State Department official explained. It was as if the Philippine leader were “a hero on a bubble gum card he had collected as a kid.” To Reagan, Marcos was the valiant rebel who had fought against the Japanese in the Second World War, and the gracious leader who had rolled out the red carpet to him and Nancy when he was dispatched to Manila during the Nixon administration.

On the one hand, Marcos’s crimes, by this late date, had become too obvious to ignore. A week after the polls closed, Reagan publicly blamed his Filippino counterpart for the “widespread fraud and violence” that had occurred.

Still, he lacked the stomach to abandon Marcos altogether, even as his advisers were pushing for that very move.

For now, the president stood by his man.

Back in Manila, however, the resistance was taking on a life of its own, and regime defections were mounting as a result. Eventually, it would force even Reagan’s hand.

Downward Spiral

By Monday, February 24^th, Marcos’s remaining allies had all but deserted him. His temple of power was on the verge of collapse, its supporting pillars in shambles.

And yet, he continued to play the part. In a nationally televised address, he vowed to “wipe out” his opponents. “If necessary, I will defend this position with all the force at my disposal.”

It was the last time he would speak before a national audience. Just as he announced a state of emergency, the rebels took control of the TV station, cutting him off mid-sentence. The feed switched over to Mel Lopez, an opposition deputy, who informed viewers that Marcos was “no longer the president of the Philippines.”

By this point, Marcos was a dictator in name only. He had lost the state media. He had lost his civil servants. He had even lost his airplane pilots, who, around three-o’clock am on the twenty-fourth, were seen speeding away from the presidential palace.

Most importantly of all, he had lost the military. Earlier that day, the crowds on EDSA beheld the terrifying sight of nine strike helicopters descending overhead. Only instead of assaulting Camp Crame, as they had been ordered to do, Burton writes, “the pilots jumped out, waving white handkerchiefs and flashing the Laban sign,” a symbol of resistance in which the thumb and index finger form an “L” for laban, or “fight.” “The anti-Marcos forces now controlled the skies.”

An attempt that same day to retake Channel Four, now in rebel hands, likewise disintegrated. When the soldiers arrived, they were met by protesters offering them coffee, donuts, and McDonald’s hamburgers. The commander promised to withdraw.

“The number of people still loyal to Marcos was shrinking with the passage of each second,” explain Jim Forest and Nancy Forest in Four Days in February, a book chronicling the regime’s demise. By Monday afternoon, 85 percent of the armed forces had defected to the rebels’ side.

When the day ended, Marcos stood alone. Even Reagan had to bow to the inevitable. “Attempts to prolong the life of the present regime by violence are futile,” read a White House statement. “A solution to this crisis can only be achieved through a peaceful transition to a new government.”

It was as good as an obituary.

When Marcos saw the announcement in the early morning of February 25^th, Manila time, he phoned U.S. Senator Paul Laxalt, who had played a key role in the diplomacy surrounding the crisis. Marcos wanted to be sure that the statement reflected the position of the U.S. government. Karnow describes the exchange:

“Senator,” Marcos pressed, “what do you think? Should I step down?” Laxalt responded without hesitation: “I think you should cut and cut cleanly. I think the time has come.” There was a silence so long that Laxalt, wondering whether they had been disconnected, asked, “Mr. President, are you there?” “Yes,” responded Marcos in a thin voice. “I am so very, very disappointed.”

The next day, Cory Aquino had her swearing-in at the private Club Filipino. Instead of taking power themselves, as they had originally planned, Enrile and Ramos were seated among the attendees. Whatever the two powerbrokers’ ambitions, the Philippine people had their own plans.

An hour later, Marcos held an inauguration for himself behind the fortified walls of the presidential palace. It was a pathetic affair with sparse attendance. His prime minister, who earlier that day had been replaced by a member of the opposition, did not show up. Neither did his vice-presidential candidate.

It was time to say goodbye. But the ruling couple would not be denied one last performance. “Show biz to the end, Marcos and Imelda stepped out onto a palace balcony, peered at a crowd of supporters and hecklers, and sang a farewell duet: ‘Because of You.’”

One gets the impression that they would have relinquished power years earlier had they been offered the lead roles in Splash (1984).

After wrapping up, the Marcoses and their entourage boarded a small fleet of U.S. military helicopters, which took them to a nearby base. From there, they were flown to Hawaii, where they owned a mansion overlooking Honolulu, part of an extensive U.S. property portfolio unwittingly financed by the Philippine people.

In a final show of loyalty, Reagan had offered them asylum.

Into Pieces

“I do not ask that you place hands upon the tyrant to topple him over, but simply that you support him no longer,” wrote Étienne de La Boétie in 1577. “[T]hen you will behold him, like a great Colossus whose pedestal has been pulled away, fall of his own weight and break into pieces.”

Four centuries later, Filipinos took him up on that advice.

The anti-Marcos revolution introduced a new term to the global lexicon: “people power.” It was both a description of the events and a revelation on the part of everyday citizens—that they, not some self-appointed tyrant, were the ones who controlled their destiny.

Filipinos reminded the world that dictators do not reside in fortresses. They instead sit atop temples, whose pillars can be knocked away.

Gene Sharp explains the difference:

One can see the power of a government as emitted from the few who stand at the pinnacle of command. Or one can see that power, in all governments, as continually rising from many parts of the society.

One can also see power as self-perpetuating, durable, not easily or quickly controlled or destroyed. Or political power can be viewed as fragile, always dependent for its strength and existence upon a replenishment of its sources by the cooperation of…institutions and people—cooperation which may or may not continue.

In February 1986, Filipinos proved which one of these views is correct.

Through strikes, protests, and other forms of nonviolent resistance, the people withdrew their consent to be ruled. As a consequence, the elites who had once served as pillars of Marcos’s regime abandoned him.

Different elites acted for their own reasons—the Catholic clergy out of moral revulsion; the business community to protect its interests; military officers to gain political advantage; ordinary soldiers to avoid complicity; and the U.S. government to secure its bases.

In the final analysis, however, it was mass nonviolent resistance which pushed, pulled, moved, implored, threatened, and enabled those elites to act. By calling into question the regime’s survival, nonviolent action created the opportunity—and, very often, necessity—for the president’s allies to pull their support.

Marcos met his end not at the hands of a superior military force but a society that stopped obeying him. By the simple act of noncompliance, everyday resisters had consigned his regime to ashes.

Americans, pay heed.

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Other Entries in this Series

How to Overthrow a Dictator, Part 1

How to Overthrow a Dictator, Part 2

Sources

Amnesty International. 1976. Report of an Amnesty International Mission to the Republic of the Philippines: 22 November-5 December 1975. Amnesty International Publications.

Branigin, William. 1986. “Rebels, Marcos Contest Control of Philippines.” The Washington Post, February 23. https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1986/02/24/rebels-marcos-contest-control-of-philippines/2c18fa71-45dc-423f-a3e1-9cd187dec323/, accessed January 15, 2026

British Broadcasting Corporation. 2006. “From Dictatorship to Democracy.” BBC News, February 14. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/programmes/documentary_archive/4713466.stm, accessed February 3, 2026.

Burton, Sandra. 1989. Impossible Dream: The Marcoses, the Aquinos, and the Unfinished Revolution. Warner Books.

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

Dalton, Keith. 2025. Reinventing Marcos: From Dictator to Hero. Lightning Source Global, Amazon Publishing, and IngramSpark. Kindle.

de La Boétie, Étienne. 2016 [1577]. Discourse on Voluntary Servitude: Why People Enslave Themselves to Authority, edited by William Garner. Adagio. Kindle.

Fineman, Mark. 2026. “The 3-Day Revolution: How Marcos Was Toppled.” Los Angeles Times, February 27. https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1986-02-27-mn-12085-story.html, accessed January 26, 2026.

Forest, Jim and Nancy Forest. 1988. Four Days in February: The Story of the Nonviolent Overthrow of the Marcos Regime. Marshall Pickering.

Karnow, Stanley. 1989. In Our Image: America’s Empire in the Philippines, Ballantine Books and Random House. Kindle.

McCoy, Alfred W. 1990. “Philippine Military ‘Reformists’: Specialists in Torture.” Los Angeles Times, February 4. https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1990-02-04-op-202-story.html, accessed February 12, 2026.

McCoy, Alfred W. 1999. “Dark Legacy: Human Rights Under the Marcos Regime.” Paper presented at the Legacies of the Marcos Dictatorship Conference, Ateneo de Manila University, September 20. http://www.hartford-hwp.com/archives/54a/062.html, accessed January 9, 2026.

Nemenzo, Gemma. 2016. “30 Years Ago: Coup d’etat and People Power.” Positively Filipino, February 24. https://www.positivelyfilipino.com/magazine/30-years-ago-coup-detat#:~:text=What%20it%20was%20in%20unadorned,decent%20elements%20of%20the%20KBL, accessed February 12, 2026.

Rappler.com. 2025. “Listen: Cardinal Sin’s 1986 Appeal for Filipinos to Go to EDSA, Support Ramos and Enrile.” February 22. https://www.rappler.com/philippines/audio-jaime-cardinal-sin-1986-appeal-go-edsa-support-fidel-ramos-juan-ponce-enrile/, accessed February 3, 2026.

Seagrave, Sterling. 2018. The Marcos Dynasty. Lume Books. Kindle.

Sharp, Gene. 2006 [1973]. The Politics of Nonviolent Action. The Albert Einstein Institution. Kindle.

“The whole place is gonna go. It’s gonna pop like a cork.”

—TIME correspondent, Manila, August 21^st, 1983

On the flight to Manila, Ninoy’s mood alternated between tense and serene.

That morning, he boarded a Boeing 767 en route from Taiwan. Clad in the same white suit he wore the day he left the Philippines three years earlier, he passed the time chatting amicably with his entourage and the retinue of journalists accompanying him.

One of those reporters was Sandra Burton, whose narrative of the event provides the basis for its retelling here.

Burton spoke extensively to Ninoy during the trip. “They say the guy is stupid to go home,” he told her, referring to himself in the third-person. “They don’t understand the value of self-sacrifice. Gandhi kneeling down and getting bashed. The vanquished is the victor. If you can get at the bad thing within your enemy, you unmask him.”

The plane begins its approach. Through the window, Ninoy catches sight of the verdant mountains of northern Luzon. “I’m home,” he declares elatedly.

A stewardess grabs the microphone. “At twelve-forty-five P.M., it is eighty-eight degrees Fahrenheit in Manila. We hope you have enjoyed your flight and will fly again soon with China Airlines.”

The cabin crew approaches to wish Ninoy well.

“1:04 P.M., touchdown,” Burton writes in her notebook. “Machine guns and tanks near the terminal.”

The plane rolls to a stop. The pilot comes on the loudspeaker. “Please remain in your seats for ten minutes.”

Through the window, a blue van can be seen backing up to the stairs leading from the jet bridge to the tarmac.

Three soldiers enter the plane and start down the aisle. After spotting Ninoy, they help him up, grab his bag, and escort him to the exit door.

As soon as they leave, the remaining passengers line up, waiting to disembark.

Voices can be heard from the jet bridge:

Person 1: I’ll do it!

Person 2: They can have it!

Person 3: Get down, get down!

Then, from just outside the service door to the tarmac, a loud pop.

TIME correspondent: What happened? What was that?

Three more shots. A female passenger screams. Another pop.

TIME correspondent: Wait. What happened? Oh no, he’s…

Female passenger: Oh no [wails]

ABC-TV correspondent: What happened?

TIME correspondent: The soldiers…they put about sixteen shots in him. They shot Ninoy. He’s dead out there. Christ, almighty…

A team of SWAT commandos stands on the tarmac, guns aimed at the passengers as they descend the stairs. A few of the soldiers approach Ninoy’s body as it lies lifeless on the ground. They pick it up and fling it into the blue van. Then, they jump in the back, and the van speeds off.

Left behind is a second man, dead in a pool of blood.

TIME correspondent: Does anybody know what those uniforms were?

Japanese reporter: They pretend that this guy killed him…Goddamn Philippines.

TIME correspondent: The whole place is gonna go. It’s gonna pop like a cork.

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The Cork Pops

Known affectionately as “Ninoy,” Benigno Aquino was outgoing and charismatic. He could “sway crowds like a snake charmer,” Burton recalls.

Though born into one of the Philippines’ most privileged families, he was taught from a young age to help those in need. The emphasis on charity was unusual for someone of his class. It would later serve him well as a politician, helping him cultivate a man-of-the-people image.

As governor of one of the only provinces not under Marcos’s control, Aquino was arrested soon after martial law was declared in 1972. He spent the rest of the decade languishing in prison. Under American pressure, he was released into exile in the U.S. in 1980. There, he remained for three years before returning that fateful day in August 1983, his mind set on a political comeback.

By ordering Aquino’s assassination, Marcos had miscalculated—badly. True, he had rid himself of his longtime nemesis and primary electoral threat. But far from shoring up his regime, he had set in motion forces that would lead to its collapse.

Like most of us, Marcos subscribed to a common myth about power—that the ruler, protected by his army and police, can freely impose his will on society.

Power, in this conception, is like a fortress—strong, durable, and insulated against any foes. The only way to dislodge a leader like Marcos is by destroying his fortress with a superior army or taking control of it in a coup.

But the fortress view is misleading, we saw last time. The dictator, after all, is just one person. To remain in power and enforce his dictate, he needs the support of a whole range of elites. These include, first and foremost, the military and police. But he also depends on prominent businesspeople, government officials, civil servants, pro-government parties, state media, religious authorities, and foreign allies.

In this regard, power is more accurately viewed as a temple than a fortress. The Pantheon in Rome would not remain upright without the support of its columns, or pillars. Topple those pillars and watch it collapse.

The question, for those suffering under the dictator’s rule, is how to knock those pillars down. Nonviolent resistance is by far the most effective way.

Nonviolent action creates the opportunity—and, often, necessity—for the ruler’s supporting pillars to cut and run, leaving him bereft of the agents he depends on to wield control.

Some of these defectors act because they fear accountability if the regime falls. Others see opportunities for advancement. Either way, the removal of their support deprives the ruler of the very sources on which his power rests.

As Marcos gazed upon the image of Ninoy’s bullet-riddled corpse, he surely believed that his fortress had been strengthened.

Little did he know, he was living in a mirage.

Marcos did not reside in a fortress at all, it turns out. Instead, he was sitting on the roof of the Pantheon. And the ground beneath had just begun to shake.

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Tremors in the Temple

“I want people to see what they did to my son,” a furious Aurora Aquino roared.

Even in grief, her political savvy was evident. There would be no closed casket. The public would bear witness to her son’s disfigured corpse, dressed in the same blood-drenched suit he wore the day of his murder—a grisly testament to the crime, an accusation embodied in flesh.

The funeral, his mother declared, marked Ninoy’s “resurrection,” a fitting postscript to his “crucifixion” on the airport tarmac. Aurora instinctively grasped the sort of imagery which resonated in the devoutly Catholic Philippines.

As the coffin made its way through the streets of Manila, more than a million onlookers gathered to watch. The color yellow, long associated with the Aquino family, was visible everywhere—on clothing, banners, ribbons, flowers.

While no one knew it at the time, Ninoy’s procession marked the starting gun of a movement. For the next three years, Manila was the scene of strikes, demonstrations, and other forms of nonviolent resistance that would eventually force the Marcoses into exile.

Just as unexpected as the movement itself was the person who emerged at its head: Ninoy’s widow, Corazon.

Although the role had largely been thrust upon her, Cory, as she was known, turned out to be more than her husband’s equal when it came to moving a crowd. “It seemed,” writes Stanley Karnow, author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning In Our Image: America’s Empire in the Philippines, that she “was in direct communion with the people, projecting an aura of sanctity that almost mesmerized devout Filipinos.”

In time, most of the country’s fractious opposition would unite behind her.

Far from demoralizing Filipinos, the ruthless violence that Marcos meted out in response only emboldened them. The 1984 parliamentary elections drew a turnout of ninety percent. Parties backed by Cory surmounted colossal fraud and intimidation to win a third of the seats.

The following year, in February 1985, the assassination of a labor leader sparked a general strike. That same month saw thousands of farmers embark on a 200-mile trek from Luzon to Manila to hold a nine-day sit-in outside the agriculture ministry.

Further inflaming public anger was the sham verdict in the trial of Ninoy’s assassins. In December 1985, army chief Fabian Ver, a Marcos loyalist and the country’s second most powerful figure, was acquitted with his co-conspirators of planning and executing the murder.

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The First Pillars Give Way

Marcos’s repression was clearly backfiring. With every arrest, beating, and murder, the resistance grew, and he was powerless to stop it.

The veil of invincibility had been lifted, revealing an embittered and impotent man lashing out in futility.

Now that the end of his rule seemed like a real possibility, his erstwhile allies began to reassess their support.

The Catholic Church had never backed the regime outright. But in a country as devout as the Philippines, the clergy held considerable sway. At the very least, it was imperative for Marcos that they remain acquiescent.

Yet, the routine torture and murder of clergy members did not exactly help his cause. As the abuses mounted, many became vocal opponents.

Chief among these critics was Cardinal Jaime Sin, the country’s highest ranking church figure. Sin would play a key role in Marcos’s downfall. A skilled organizer and communicator, he was more responsible than anyone save Cory Aquino for uniting the opposition. Under his leadership, the church trained thousands of volunteer election monitors as well.

The church-owned Radio Veritas was far and away the country’s most important independent media outlet. As the resistance gained force, Radio Veritas served as both a critical source of information and a coordinator of mass action.

More important still were the nuns. It was they who stood between the demonstrators and the soldiers, calming jittery nerves and keeping both sides peaceful. “When the tanks started to move, they didn’t budge,” recalls one observer. “They just kept praying.”

While the clergy acted on principle, others saw in the burgeoning movement a chance to gain advantage.

Marcos’s corrupt predation and economic mismanagement had already alienated most of the business elite. During martial law, he subjected scores of businesspeople to sham prosecutions, which he used as pretexts to seize their assets and gift them to his cronies in exchange for kickbacks.

Thanks to such schemes, Marcos amassed a fortune worth at least $10 billion dollars by the end of his presidency, which he stashed away in a maze of bank accounts and properties in Switzerland, Hong Kong, and the U.S.

Adding insult to injury were his multibillion-dollar bailouts of these same cronies once the economic crisis of the early 1980s hit, even as traditional business elites saw their fortunes crater.

In 1981, a collection of business executives formed the Makati Business Club, which would serve as an advocacy group to press for their interests. At the same time, most businesspeople steered clear of overt opposition to the regime.

Ninoy’s assassination was the breaking point. It not only showed that their own lives were expendable, but the resulting surge in popular resistance convinced them that Marcos could be defeated. From 1983 onwards, the Makati Business Club poured its resources into the opposition movement.

On their own, the clergy and business community lacked the heft to threaten the regime, whose weightier pillars remained standing. In February 1986, these other pillars would fall, too, taking Marcos with them.

A Forced Choice

Dictators would survive much longer but for one common flaw: Eventually, they start to believe their own bullshit.

At the same time that First Lady Imelda Marcos was lecturing her courtiers about a “cosmic vision of development,” she was raiding a typhoon relief fund to pay for her daughter’s wedding.

Ferdinand was equally oblivious. “His corrupt administration was totally discredited by late 1985,” Karnow writes, “yet his blind belief in his own invincibility prompted him to schedule the election against Cory Aquino that spelled his doom.”

High on his own supply, Marcos called the snap poll for February 7^th, 1986, certain that he could fraud his way to victory just as he had in the past.

He failed to understand just how fundamentally the country’s politics had changed. Through the experience of civil resistance, a public that was once overawed by his intimidation and propaganda had become cognizant of its own power.

Filipinos were about to seize the future for themselves. In the process, they would drag down the remaining pillars that kept his temple standing.

With little time to lose, the opposition quickly united behind Cory Aquino. Marcos and his thugs, for their part, drew generously from their ratfucking repertoire, stuffing ballot boxes and unleashing wanton violence.

This time, it would not work. Two days after the voting ended, on February 9th, the computer technicians responsible for tallying the votes walked off the job in protest at the ongoing fraud. Another pillar had fallen.

Days later, on the fourteenth, over a hundred Catholic bishops denounced the “unparalleled” election violations, proclaiming Marcos’s bid to remain president as having “no moral basis.”

When the parliament, stacked with pro-government loyalists, declared Marcos the winner the next day, the opposition walked out.

The sixteenth brought one of the revolution’s pivotal events. Two million Filipinos gathered at Manila’s Luneta Park to hear Cory Aquino speak. The sheer size of the turnout was an unmistakable sign that Philippine society, or a massive part thereof, rejected Marcos’s legitimacy.

For the first time in twenty years, the prospect of his downfall went from distant possibility to imminent prospect.

In her address, Aquino called for a nationwide campaign of civil disobedience, to include mass demonstrations and boycotts of businesses, banks, and media outlets that supported the president.

Any allies who remained by Marcos’s side now had a choice to make. They could stay loyal to the president and risk facing accountability if he fell. Alternatively, they could switch their allegiance to Aquino, the legitimate president-elect, and retain some chance of maintaining their influence and freedom once she took over.

Morality, for them, had nothing to do with it. This was about self-preservation. And it was thanks to the courage of everyday Filipinos that they faced this dilemma in the first place.

Next time, the revolution reaches its crescendo, forcing the temple’s two most important pillars to give way.

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Sources

Branigin, William and John Burgess, “Fraud Charges Multiply in Philippines,” The Washington Post, February 9, 1986, https://wapo.st/4qsMGU4, accessed February 10, 2026

Burton, Sandra, Impossible Dream: The Marcoses, the Aquinos, and the Unfinished Revolution (New York, Warner Books, 1989)

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

Forest, Jim and Nancy Forest, Four Days in February: The Story of the Nonviolent Overthrow of the Marcos Regime (Hampshire, U.K.: Marshall Pickering, 1988)

Karnow, Stanley, In Our Image: America’s Empire in the Philippines, Kindle Edition (New York and Toronto: Ballantine Books and Random House, 1989)

Nepstad, Sharon Erickson, Nonviolent Revolutions: Civil Resistance in the Late 20th Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011)

Schock, Kurt, Unarmed Insurrections: People Power Movements in Nondemocracies (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005)

Sharp, Gene, The Politics of Nonviolent Action (Boston: The Albert Einstein Institution, 2006 [1973])

“Text of Filipino Bishops’ Statement on Vote,” New York Times, February 15, 1986, https://www.nytimes.com/1986/02/15/world/text-of-filipino-bishops-statement-on-vote.html?smid=url-share, accessed January 14, 2026

Thompson, Mark R., The Anti-Marcos Struggle: Personalistic Rule and Democratic Transition in the Philippines (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1995)

Tran, Mark and Nicholas Cumming-Bruce, “From the Archive, 17 February 1986: Protest at President Marcos’ Election Victory,” The Guardian, February 17, 2014, https://www.theguardian.com/theguardian/2014/feb/17/philippines-ferdinand-marcos-corazon-aquino, accessed February 11, 2026

Zunes, Stephen, “The Origins of People Power in the Philippines,” in Stephen Zunes, Lester Kurtz, and Sarah Beth Asher, eds., Nonviolent Social Movements: A Geographical Perspective (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 1999)

“I do not ask that you place hands upon the tyrant to topple him over, but simply that you support him no longer; then you will behold him, like a great Colossus whose pedestal has been pulled away, fall of his own weight and break into pieces.”

—Étienne de La Boétie, Discourse on Voluntary Servitude, 1577

Forty years ago this month, Filipinos came face to face with the machinery of death that once cowed and terrorized them.

Weeks earlier, Ferdinand Marcos, who for decades had ruled the country as his personal dominion, lost his bid for another presidential term. But he was determined as ever to remain in charge.

On February 23^rd, 1986, a Sunday, he ordered his military to assault a band of renegade army officers holed up in a nearby base.

As his tanks rolled down Epifanio de los Santos Avenue in Manila, they came upon 20,000 Filipinos occupying the eight-lane boulevard, intent on stopping them from reaching their target. If previously, the people had trembled at the thought of resisting, now, they stood firm.

Amado Lacuesta Jr., a young screenwriter present near the front of the throng, described the encounter:

Panic sweeps over us all. Unthinking, I drop to my knees. Looking up I see only the general and his marines, disciplined, hard-eyed. … I shout and raise my hands, daring them: “Go on, kill us!” … The metal mountain jerks forward. Defiant, nervous shouts all around. The praying voices rise another key. I wonder what it is like to be crushed under tons of metal. Then the engine stops. There is an astounding split second of silence. The crowd erupts into wild cheers and applause.

Ordered to slaughter innocents, the troops had refused. “There were pregnant women and little children there that reminded us of our own families,” one soldier recounts. “I knew that if I didn’t clear the road and follow orders, I would be shot. But I also knew that if I did that, I would have to violate my conscience.”

The confrontation that Sunday was a critical moment, one of several which saw a bloody dictatorship dissolve in a matter of days.

In a test of wills, Filipinos had stared down a ruthless strongman—and won.

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The Fortress and the Temple

It might seem counterintuitive to see dictators as vulnerable to the fickle allegiances of others. It is certainly not how dictators see themselves.

Conventional wisdom views power as a fortress—strong, fixed, and durable. A ruler has police and soldiers, and he1 uses them to exert his will upon society. The only way to thwart his power is to destroy it with superior force or take control of it in an election or coup.

But this is not how power actually works. Recall the example of Vidkun Quisling, the wartime Nazi puppet leader of Norway, whom I discussed in a previous essay. For all the terror he employed, he was unable to bring a bunch of recalcitrant schoolteachers into line.

The Norwegian teachers’ resistance lays bare the misconception behind the fortress view. In the absence of voluntary compliance, no amount of force can make someone obey another’s command.

Power, in other words, is not something that rulers have; it is granted to them by others.

In this regard, power is more accurately viewed as a temple than a fortress. The Pantheon in Rome would not remain upright without the support of its columns, or pillars. Topple those pillars and watch it collapse.

The model of a temple on pillars is useful, for it highlights just how brittle power can be. “When we say of somebody that he is ‘in power,’” notes Hannah Arendt in On Violence,

we actually refer to his being empowered by a certain number of people to act in their name. The moment the group, from which the power originated to begin with…disappears, “his power” also vanishes.

This principle applies regardless of whether the ruler operates in a democracy or dictatorship. Of course, given the dystopian hellscape in which the United States now finds itself, it is the dictator that most concerns us here.

Like any powerholder, a dictator requires the support of other elites. These elites serve as pillars that prop up his regime. The military and police are the most obvious ones. But other pillars can include prominent businesspeople, government officials, civil servants, pro-government parties, state media, religious authorities, and foreign allies.

Most dictators can withstand the loss of one or another pillar. Remove several, and he begins to sweat. Remove the army, police, and other armed elements, and he is finished.

The question, from the standpoint of his beleaguered subjects, is how to sweep those pillars away. There are several methods, not all of them desirable. For instance, a military coup removes a crucial pillar of support, but it might end up yielding a new dictator in place of the old.

If our goal is the return of democracy, then mass nonviolent action is the most effective means of getting it done. Protests, strikes, boycotts, and other forms of nonviolent resistance, if waged on a sufficiently large scale, call into question a dictator’s survival. At that point, the elites who serve as pillars of his regime might decide that it is time to abandon him.

When they do defect, it is rarely because they experience a moral revelation about how bad the dictator is. More often, their motivations are selfish. Some elites defect because they fear being held accountable if the regime falls. Others foresee an opportunity for advantage.

Whatever their agenda, the outcome is the same. Few dictators can survive the mass desertion of their elite supporters—and the best means of driving those elites away is through popular nonviolent resistance.

Nonviolent action creates the opportunity—and, often, necessity—for the ruler’s supporting pillars to cut and run, leaving him bereft of the agents he depends on to wield control.

The question of which model to adopt is hardly theoretical. For those living under authoritarianism, the implications are very real.

If we accept the fortress view, then there is little point in opposing the regime. Unless resisters can mount their own army, the dictator remains secure.

Embracing the temple view, by contrast, opens up a more liberating possibility: control of the ruler by the “withdrawal of consent.” As Gene Sharp explains:

It is control, not by the infliction of superior violence from on top or outside, not by persuasion, nor by hopes of a change of heart in the ruler, but rather by the subjects’ declining to supply the power-holder with the sources of his power, by cutting off his power at the roots. This is resistance by noncooperation and disobedience.

In addition to being accurate, the temple model has the complementary advantage of putting the people in the driver’s seat. Popular resistance erodes the foundation of the ruler’s temple, destabilizing its supporting pillars. Shake those pillars enough, and his power collapses.

Few cases better illustrate this dynamic than the downfall of Philippine strongman Ferdinand Marcos in February 1986.

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The Conjugal Dictatorship

In the years following his initial election as president in 1965, Marcos did not especially stand out from his predecessors.

It was his reelection campaign in 1969 which first showcased the tyranny that was to come. As the campaign heated up, Marcos dispatched his thugs to terrorize the opposition and strong-arm election officials, making the contest the bloodiest to date.

The election presaged a dark turn in his presidency. As popular unrest spiraled and his popularity tanked, Marcos became increasingly despotic.

In 1972, he ripped away all democratic pretense by declaring martial law. Officially aimed at containing the growing communist insurgency, it was a convenient excuse to cancel the election slated for the following year, in which he faced near-certain defeat.

With martial law in effect, there would be no election to lose and no parliament or supreme court to meddle in his affairs. From now on, Marcos would rule by decree. He shuttered independent media and unleashed the military on activists, journalists, professors, and political rivals, jailing thousands in a matter of weeks.

Still, he had to somehow justify the shift to one-man rule, and propaganda alone would not suffice. Nor were ordinary Filipinos the only ones who needed convincing. As the Philippines’ most important ally, the United States had to be brought on board.

But how? If there were an emergency, perhaps—a crisis so grave as to be immune to conventional remedies—that would certainly do.

There was a problem, however: No such emergency existed. And so, Marcos invented one.

In the months before the declaration of martial law, downtown Manila was rocked by a series of bombings. The regime blamed the communist rebels. In truth, Marcos’s own agents were responsible.

The charade was enough to convince Filipinos—and, critically, Americans—to accept the new order.

By the early 1980s, however, the country had plunged into crisis. The foreign borrowing spree which kept the Marcos regime afloat had suddenly collided with plunging global commodity prices. The economy cratered. Poverty spiked.

Not everyone suffered, naturally. Marcos spent $3 billion on bailouts for his oligarch friends. For her part, Imelda Marcos, the first lady, was not about to skimp on her lavish shopping sprees in Paris and New York.

At a time of belt-tightening, such barefaced graft was sure to fuel resentment. But few Filipinos were prepared to brave the hazards of challenging the regime. As far as most were concerned, Marcos was protected by his army and police. Who, under the circumstances, would risk their necks by speaking out?

In this way, most of the public remained blinded by the fortress myth. “The regime lasted for twenty years,” observes Sterling Seagrave, a journalist, “only because

Filipinos allowed themselves to be convinced that the dictator was in firm control, that his secret police were everywhere, that his army was overwhelmingly powerful, and that Ferdinand Marcos himself was supernaturally endowed. These things were true up to a point. Beyond that, the impression of power and omniscience was exaggerated by showmanship and grotesque extremes of cruelty. Ordinary people were psyched out.

State intimidation was undoubtedly one of the keys to Marcos’s rule. During his twenty-year tenure, approximately 35,000 people were tortured and 70,000 arrested, historian Alfred W. McCoy estimates. Such was the barbarism of Marcos’s torture units that a new word entered the national lexicon: “salvaging,” or the disposal of mutilated corpses along roadsides for the purpose of sowing terror.

But as Seagrave notes, force alone was not enough to keep the people down. Equally important, and more cost-effective, was the belief in the ruler’s invincibility.

The Marcoses wrapped their dominance in a shroud of performance and myth. Imelda hailed from one of the Philippines’ most noble houses. Ferdinand descended from great warriors. He was also an Olympic athlete. And he bravely led a band of guerillas against Japanese rule during the Second World War, in recognition of which he was awarded the Medal of Honor by Douglas MacArthur himself.

(In 1985, a rather inconvenient time for Marcos, a U.S. military investigation deemed his claim to have led a guerilla unit, much less receive a medal for it, as “fraudulent” and “absurd”).

Imelda claimed that General MacArthur had secretly adopted her as a young girl. That very same MacArthur carried on an illicit love affair with her aunt. (To a certain generation of Filipinos, MacArthur embodied a sort of hybrid between Alexander the Great and Taylor Swift.)

It was all bullshit, and most people knew it. But that was the point: Only those as omnipotent as the Marcoses could lie so brazenly without consequence.

The Marcos dictatorship was very much a family affair. Imelda represented the country on the international stage. Back home, she served as “minister of human settlements,” tasked with dispensing patronage to Ferdinand’s provincial allies.

For the ruling couple, the experience of martial law was like the “Push It to the Limit” montage in Scarface, if Florida were a nation-state ruled by Al Pacino and Michelle Pfeiffer. The misrule would have been comical if not for the human costs it entailed.

The Marcoses emptied an entire island of its inhabitants to make way for a private zoo complete with giraffes, zebras, and other wildlife imported from Kenya. Imelda lavished $31 million on a “grotesque guesthouse made entirely of coconuts.”

The presidential palace boasted an oversized painting featuring the ruling couple as the Filipino Adam and Eve, giving birth to the nation. According to Keith Dalton, a reporter who saw it first-hand, the portrait depicted a “muscular, bare chested, dagger-holding Marcos emerging from a bamboo jungle, and a half naked, long-haired, coy-looking Imelda modestly clutching a flowing white veil to her chest.”

While the dictator believes he resides in Dragonstone, events have a way of revealing otherwise—that he is really sitting on the roof of the Pantheon. The veil, godlike though it seems, can be pierced in an instant.

For the Marcoses, that moment came on August 21^st, 1983.

Next time, an ill-advised assassination and the revolution it birthed.

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SOURCES

Arendt, Hannah, On Violence (Orlando: Harcourt, 1970).

Burton, Sandra, Impossible Dream: The Marcoses, the Aquinos, and the Unfinished Revolution (New York, Warner Books, 1989).

Dalton, Keith, Reinventing Marcos: From Dictator to Hero, Revised Kindle Edition (Lightning Source Global, Amazon Publishing, and IngramSpark, 2025).

Forest, Jim and Nancy Forest, Four Days in February: The Story of the Nonviolent Overthrow of the Marcos Regime (Hampshire, U.K.: Marshall Pickering, 1988).

Karnow, Stanley, In Our Image: America’s Empire in the Philippines, Kindle Edition (New York and Toronto: Ballantine Books and Random House, 1989).

McCoy, Alfred W., “Dark Legacy: Human Rights Under the Marcos Regime,” (paper presented at the Legacies of the Marcos Dictatorship Conference, Ateneo de Manila University, September 20, 1999), http://www.hartford-hwp.com/archives/54a/062.html, accessed January 9, 2026.

Piatos, Tiziana Celine, “Flashback: Tide Turns at Revolt,” Daily Tribune, February 24, 2024, https://tribune.net.ph/2024/02/25/flashback-tide-turns-at-revolt, accessed February 5, 2026.

Seagrave, Sterling, The Marcos Dynasty, Kindle Edition (London: Lume Books, 2018 [1988]).

Sharp, Gene, The Politics of Nonviolent Action (Boston: The Albert Einstein Institution, 2006 [1973]).

Sharp, Gene, Waging Nonviolent Struggle: 20^th Century Practice and 21^st Century Potential (Boston: Extending Horizons Books, 2005).

A year ago, and into the first months of Trump’s presidency, the mood among pundits and experts was one of alarmed dismay. For many, America was entering an authoritarian hellscape from which it would be difficult, if not impossible, to recover.

For others, the emerging system, while no less dystopian, would feature Trump as president in name only, a mere puppet of Elon Musk, the real power behind the throne (a concern I pushed back against at the time).

Such sentiments were understandable. In the early days of his presidency, Trump gave Musk the run of the house. He simultaneously undertook a furious authoritarian power grab with few precedents in post-Cold War history.

I agreed that America was transitioning to authoritarianism. In fact, about two months in, I concluded that we were already there.

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It was important to accept this reality, I argued. The shift to authoritarianism meant that the old ways of checking the abuse of power–that is, by relying on Congress, the courts, and bipartisan adherence to norms–were no longer sufficient. Massive civil resistance, I maintained, was the only path forward.

At the same time, and in contrast to most commentators, I saw reason for hope. While Trump would surely tip the country into authoritarianism, an assortment of obstacles would prevent him from consolidating it.

Far from some unstoppable authoritarian juggernaut, I argued, Trump’s regime, while autocratic, would be replete with vulnerabilities that Americans could exploit.

Small-Dictator Energy

In December 2024, weeks before his inauguration, I outlined this argument in a piece entitled, “Trump Can Be Stopped.”

It has held up pretty well, I think.

The essay drew on the experiences of other authoritarian leaders—some successful and others not—in order to identify the limits Trump would face in establishing one-man rule. It is worth reviewing them here.

First, whereas other autocrats cemented their power by changing the constitution, that option is off the table in Trump’s case.

Second, the American media environment is not amenable to total government control. To be sure, media owners have delivered their fair share of cravenness over the past year. They settled Trump’s bogus lawsuits, sold out to his cronies, and engaged in censorship. A few journalists have disgraced themselves in their own right (looking at you, Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski). But compared to other countries that have fallen into authoritarianism, the U.S. media landscape is too broad and well-resourced to be subjugated entirely.

Third, the business elite, much like the media, is too rich and too independent of state patronage to be reined in. Obviously, this point was not exactly borne out as I expected. More often than not, America’s leading business lights caved into Trump instead of resisting him.

Nevertheless, when taken as a whole, their collective economic heft is unparalleled. If and when enough of them defect—not an uncommon occurrence when a dictator is suddenly revealed as vulnerable—the withdrawal of support by the business community could prove devastating.

The fourth obstacle limiting Trump is federalism. Unlike many established autocracies, such as Hungary and Turkey, the American system devolves extensive powers to states and localities. This arrangement would hinder even a competent strongman, much less a bungling nitwit like Trump.

Elections, for instance, are administered by state and local governments. While this setup hardly excludes official manipulation, it poses major impediments to outright rigging.

Likewise, when it comes to arresting and deporting immigrants, federal agencies are very much dependent on cooperation from state and local law enforcement. The refusal by many of them to provide such assistance is one reason why total deportation numbers in Trump’s first year have failed to exceed either of Biden’s last two years.

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Overreach

The obstacles above, while significant, pale in importance to two others I discussed in my 2024 piece.

The first is Trump’s personality. Put simply, he is a moron. He is also impulsive and reckless. This equally applies to the people around him, by and large.

All three qualities have been on prominent display over the past year. They help account for Trump’s repeated failures to prosecute his enemies. They are also evident in his congenital need to attack—and, therefore, alienate—every conceivable constituency at once.

Skilled authoritarians like Hungary’s Viktor Orbán amassed power by picking off one opponent at a time. That is hard to do when you have the attention span of a flea.

It is Trump’s rashness and stupidity, and the decisions they engender, that is responsible for his cratering approval numbers. Unpopular dictators have a much tougher time consolidating power than popular ones do.

America Rising

This mishmash of defects would frustrate any authoritarian leader. For an American one, they can prove calamitous. That is because of the next and final obstacle Trump faces: American civil society.

Compared to other authoritarian regimes, the U.S. stands alone in the strength and density of its civil society. As I showed in my 2024 piece, the country’s plethora of non-governmental organizations and their capacity for grassroots organizing are unparalleled.

If Trump’s personality makes him especially prone to alienate the public, civil society is what enables the public to fight back.

The heroic and ingenious activism of Minneapolis residents exemplifies this dynamic. Ordinary citizens have come together and drawn upon multiple forms of nonviolent resistance to protect their neighbors from federal abduction. In the process, they are making the lives of Trump’s jackboots a living hell.

Eyes on 2028

One year later, much of the commentariat has shed its earlier pessimism. Observers are increasingly recognizing Trump’s insatiable drive for self-sabotage along with Americans’ incredible capacity to resist.

Make no mistake: Things are dark. They are going to get worse, too. But there is cause for optimism. In the conflict between the American people and their aspiring dictator, it is the people who hold the cards.

Unbridled tyranny is no match for a vigorous civil society. In December 2024, I wrote:

​​Rather than intimidate people into silence, repression tends to galvanize societal opposition and result in bigger, more radical protest movements.

Trump, of course, is too dense to understand that. He is also congenitally incapable of handling any problem in a measured and considered manner. When he inevitably overplays his hand, the reaction he provokes will likely far exceed his ability to control it.

We have not yet reached that point. We probably won’t until 2028, when Trump attempts to defy an election loss to keep himself or his chosen successor in charge.

Depending on how far he goes in manipulating the midterms, the moment could conceivably arrive this November. I am more skeptical of this scenario, however. People’s propensity to rise up tends to increase in proportion with the outrageousness of official abuses. The scope for such abuses will be much greater in 2028, when Trump or his successor is up for election, than it is in 2026.

Elections serve as focal points that can galvanize societal mobilization against authoritarian leaders. Georgia (2003), the Ivory Coast (2000), Kyrgyzstan (2005), Peru (2000), the Philippines (1986), Serbia (2000), Sudan (2019), and Ukraine (2005) are just some of the places where societies smacked down election-rigging autocrats.

When Trump attempts the same in 2028, it will pit a historically weak and inept dictator against one of the most powerful civil societies the world has ever seen.

A victory for democracy is hardly guaranteed. Trump’s flaws are irrelevant unless they are exploited. The unique advantages of American civil society are worthless if we do not use them.

But if we do, as I expect we will, Trump and his authoritarian project will be toast.

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“I bloody well didn’t sign!”

—An elderly detainee at Grini, a Norwegian concentration camp, on his refusal to join the official Nazi teachers’ union.

“You teachers have destroyed everything for me!”

—Vidkun Quisling, minister president of Nazi-occupied Norway, May 22, 1942.

I’m sitting in a room, alone. Soft lighting, comfortable chair. I’m immersed in a book and sipping on tea.

In walks a beefy man in a face mask and bulletproof vest. His baseball cap reads “I.C.E.” On his waist is a holster bearing a large gun.

We glare at each other for a moment. Then, he says it:

“Do the Trump dance.”

“What?” I reply incredulously. “Are you out of your mind?”

He walks over to the iPad. He swipes and taps twice. Y.M.C.A. starts blaring over the sound system.

“Do the Trump dance,” he repeats, jerking his bent arms upward in alternating thrusts in case I don’t know how it’s done.

The demonstration is hardly necessary. We’ve all seen Trump do it. You know, the one that looks like he’s pleasuring two guys simultaneously?

No, I was not about to do that. So, again, I refuse.

He removes his gun and raises it, giving me a direct view into the barrel. “Do the Trump dance,” he says a third time, a sweaty vein bulging through his forehead.

I think of my family. The prospect of never seeing them again stirs a deep sadness within me—enough to make me reconsider my obstinance. But it quickly gives way to the thought of humiliating myself at Agent McVein’s behest.

I can’t. I won’t.

McVein shoots. I collapse to the floor. The life force rushes out of me.

But for all that, his command went unheeded.

I didn’t do the dance.

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Force is Overrated

It is worth clarifying, not least for my wife’s sake, that, if presented with the aforementioned scenario, I actually would do the dance. But either way, I would be making a choice.

Let us return to the hypothetical above. Had Agent McVein wanted to, he could have physically grabbed my hands and started moving them in the requisite manner. He could then say, “Look, Mr. President, he’s doing the dance!”

But what if he wanted a whole stadium full of people to do it? And what if those people were just as stubborn as I was? He could never find enough ICE agents to stand behind each person and manipulate their arms accordingly. So, unless the subjects willingly complied, the order would go unheeded.

Unless the subjects willingly complied.

You see, it is impossible to compel large numbers of people to obey an order without first influencing their free will. You can round them up. You can put them in jail. You can threaten to nuke them. But unless they make an actual choice to comply, the desired behavior will not occur.

Of course, in the real world, most people obey most of the time. They obey their governments. They obey their bosses. They obey their teachers. They need not be threatened to do so, either. They instead obey from a belief that the person in question has the right to give commands.

If they do flout the order, the issuing authority—a dictator, let’s say—has a plethora of methods available to coerce them into reconsidering. Tear gas, batons, bullets, torture, extrajudicial killings, prison sentences—all are ways of raising the cost of defiance beyond that which most people are willing to bear. Make a brutal example of a few and the rest will fall into line.

Still, what overcomes their resistance is the state of mind that the repression instills—that is, fear. “It is not the sanctions themselves which produce obedience,” political scientist Gene Sharp, the dean of strategic nonviolent resistance, notes, “but the fear of them.”

Sharp’s insight carries major implications. For if people have the courage to push through their fear, or if they lose their fear altogether, then the dictator’s sanctions become impotent—and so, therefore, does the dictator himself.

After all, there are never enough agents to make them do the dance.

Don’t believe me? Ask the Nazis.

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The Teachers’ Resistance

Haakon Holmboe walked onto the train platform. Bracing the mid-afternoon cold, he scanned for his friend. Upon locating him, the friend handed him a small matchbox, stepped onto a train, and disappeared into the Norwegian winter.

In the matchbox was a slip of paper bearing the following words:

I declare that I cannot take part in the education of the youth of Norway along those lines which have been outlined for the National Samling Youth Service, this being against my conscience. According to what the Leader of the new teachers’ organization has said, membership of this organization will mean an obligation for me to assist in such education and would also force me to do other acts which are in conflict with the obligations of my profession. I find that I must declare that I cannot regard myself as a member of the new teachers’ organization.

Holmboe’s job was to deliver the message to the other teachers in his district. Secrecy was paramount; the authorities were busy rooting out dissidents, both real and imaginary.

Holmboe and his colleagues were part of a burgeoning resistance movement against the reforms of Vidkun Quisling, the Nazi puppet leader installed by Germany. In the ensuing days, upwards of 80 percent of the country’s teachers signed their names to the pledge and mailed them to the state education ministry.

Quisling was a committed ideologue who aimed to transform Norway along fascist lines. The linchpin of his program was the “corporate state.” Inspired by Mussolini’s Italian model, the arrangement would organize all sectors of society into official “corporations” under the regime’s control—one for accountants, another for veterinarians, a third for lawyers, and so on.

And where better to start than with the teachers, the all-important incubators of a new fascist youth? On February 5, 1942, Quisling, in his opening salvo, issued two decrees—one establishing a Teachers Corporation and the other a Youth Service. Together, the organizations would mold Norway’s children into the revolution’s loyal shock troops.

Foreign occupations often bring about affirmative action for weirdos and idiots—the kind of people who would never gain real influence but for their treasonous alignment with an occupying power.

While Quisling was no idiot, he certainly was a kook. He styled himself a philosopher-king whose destiny was to lead the Nordic people toward a racial utopia. A military officer by training, his puffy cheeks and neatly parted hair gave him the look of a middle-aged schoolboy.

In a 700-page tract completed in the 1920s, he laid out a “new world religion,” giving it the rather awkward name, “Universism.” Universism envisioned Quisling “at the helm of something which can best be described as a combination of the United Nations and the Catholic Church,” as one biographer put it.

A McCarthyite before McCarthy, Quisling achieved national fame—quite ironically given his future trajectory—by hurling spectacular accusations of foreign treachery against numerous high-ranking political figures, declaring them Soviet agents.

It was not long before his claims were exposed as baseless. After that, his star began to fade. Throughout the 1930s, his Nazi-style party never gained a single seat in parliament. He was fated, it seemed, to remain a peripheral oddity.

Then, in April 1940, the German army arrived. The event would catapult him to the summit of Norwegian politics. At Hitler’s behest, he was eventually installed as head of state.

With the Nazi empire at his back, the dearth of political acumen which had previously handicapped his grandiose ambitions suddenly became irrelevant.

Put simply, few people in history were better positioned to impose their will on a country than Quisling.

Yet, by taking on the teachers, he had picked the wrong fight.

Norway’s schoolteachers were a potent force in the country’s politics. Patriotic, leftwing, and fiercely democratic, many gained election to parliament. Some even became prime ministers. And they were not about to indoctrinate their pupils with fascist nonsense at the behest of some Nazi buffoon.

In response to Quisling’s decree, Oslo’s teachers formed a resistance hub in the capital. Others established independent cells across the country.

Einar Høigård, an educator nominally charged with inspecting high school teaching standards, now devoted his school visits to disseminating the “four points of resistance,” which called upon teachers to

• refuse to join the Teachers Corporation or pledge loyalty to the Nazi regime;

• refuse to teach official propaganda;

• refuse to obey orders from political authorities; and

• refuse to cooperate with the official Nazi youth movement.

In short order, the education ministry was besieged by thousands of teachers’ letters, each containing the pledge that Holmboe found in the matchbox.

This, needless to say, was not what Quisling had expected. “Bitter, furious, even uncontrolled” is how one biographer described his reaction. “It was as if he realized, as the revolt gained momentum, that his revolution from above was threatening to become a fiasco.”

Indeed, it was. In a show of support for the teachers, the country’s Lutheran bishops resigned en masse. Priests rallied the faithful. Among parents, meanwhile, “resistance spread…like an awakening,” with some 200,000 mailing their own letters of protest to the education ministry.

The authorities were at a loss over how to respond. Firing four-fifths of the nation’s teachers was hardly an option. Panicked, and desperate for a stopgap, they ordered the schools closed for a month, citing the ludicrous pretext of a heating fuel shortage (firewood is not exactly a scarce commodity in heavily-forested Norway).

If the goal was to minimize public knowledge of the resistance, closing the schools was the wrong way to do it. People could readily see the absurdity in the government’s rationale. This inevitably led them to inquire about the actual reason for the closures. It was not hard to figure out.

Having shuttered the schools, the government now warned that any teachers who failed to withdraw their protest letters by March 15 would be fired.

March 15 came and went. Few, if any, complied. The government did nothing.

Days later, the arrests began. Historian Hans Fredrik Dahl describes the spectacle that ensued. “Extraordinary scenes were played out when the police drove around to local communities arresting teachers and escorting them away, sometimes followed by the whole community.”

Nearly 1100 teachers, or approximately ten percent of the total, were rounded up during the sweep. About half relented; they were freed within the month.

The remainder were shipped off on a compulsory tour of Norway’s concentration camps. The journey would ultimately take them to Kirkenes, about 250 miles north of the Arctic Circle.

The detainees were now in the Gestapo’s hands, their daily regimens organized around inflicting maximal suffering. They were fed starvation rations. They performed pointless labor, like transporting snow without tools. They were given punishing tasks, such as crawling through the snow with their hands behind their backs—“torture gymnastics,” the prisoners called it.

All Quisling needed was for the teachers to renounce their defiance and agree to join the Teachers Corporation. That way, the rest of society would see that they had submitted, and he could proceed with his corporate state project. Those who complied would be free to return home.

Some yielded, but most did not.

One episode, at Grini, a camp west of Oslo, captures the failed intimidation efforts. The teachers

were all paraded outside the barracks occupied by the Germans in charge of the camp. The first man to be called up to sign the statement of apology was a sickly, rather elderly teacher in charge of a large flock of children. Others let him know that there would be no reproaches if he signed. He dragged himself up the steps in a state of collapse, which was painful to watch. Minutes passed, then he came out looking a new man . . . he clenched his fists and shouted: `I bloody well didn’t sign!’ Then he went back to his place, and after that it was not easy for anyone else to give way.

Word of the imprisoned teachers spread quickly. Their heroic defiance gripped the nation. Whenever they were transported to a different camp, crowds of onlookers would assemble along the tracks to show their support. Children sang for the passing detainees.

Such small displays of solidarity showed the teachers that the people stood behind them. It helped stiffen their resolve.

At one point, rumors began spreading of an imminent plan to start executing prisoners until the resistance abandoned the campaign. This triggered a crisis among the teachers back home. Some began to wonder whether they should relent.

As it turned out, the teachers whose husbands were detained were among the most determined to remain firm. It was enough to convince the others to stay the course.

Unable to break the resistance, the authorities decided to reopen the schools while automatically registering the teachers in the corporation.

If Quisling thought this would resolve the matter, he was mistaken. When classes resumed, the teachers spoke to their pupils about “conscience, the spirit of truth, and our responsibility to the children.”

In the end, it was Quisling, not the teachers, who capitulated. Declaring the whole episode a “misunderstanding,” the education ministry announced in April 1942 that the Teachers Corporation was never meant to be a political organization and would not operate as such.

It was an admission of defeat. The teachers would be free to carry on as always, managing their classrooms as they wished.

Over the ensuing months, the camp detainees returned home, the vast majority having never acquiesced.

In the meantime, news of the teachers’ resistance had spread across the globe. President Roosevelt mentioned them in a 1942 speech. British foreign secretary Anthony Eden, speaking in September of that year, declared:

The Nazis tried to thrust this system on Norway, but the Norwegian teachers would have none of it. Despite persecution and the prison camps, they have nobly fulfilled the task entrusted to them. This is a symbol of the right of a free people against a hateful oppressor, of the triumph of the spirit of man against brute force. Here is a shrine of Norwegian culture which no enemy can touch.

Quisling, for his part, could not contain his frustration. “You teachers have destroyed everything for me!” he raged during a school visit in Stabekk, west of Oslo. Soon, he abandoned the corporate state initiative altogether.

But he would not be denied his retribution. For the duration of the war, he continued to hound the leaders of the movement.

In October 1943, Høigård, the education official who spread the “four points of resistance,” was arrested. He was taken to the state police headquarters in Oslo, an infamous torture site. Escaping the guards’ attention, he managed his way onto a fourth-floor landing and jumped. With this one final act of courage, he ensured that any information he had on his compatriots would die with him.

Høigård paid the ultimate price for his defiance.

But he didn’t do the dance.

A Throne of Illusions

Today, you can find Quisling’s name in the dictionary. It is a synonym for “traitor.”

And yet, he never accomplished much in the role.

Brute force, it turns out, is overrated. This is a lesson that Quisling learned the hard way. As Gene Sharp, the political scientist we met earlier, observes, “only certain types of objectives can be achieved by direct physical compulsion of disobedient subjects.” These include “moving them physically, preventing them from moving physically, or seizing their money or property.”

Such narrow goals can sometimes yield horrific results. The Holocaust was in large part effected simply by moving people from one place to another. Even then, the perpetrators went to extreme lengths to make their victims willingly comply, staging elaborate deceptions to conceal their grisly ends. Few of the condemned would have boarded the cattle trains had they known they were headed to the death camps. Nor would they have walked into the gas chambers had they understood the facilities’ purpose. By the time they learned the truth, it was too late.

In that sense, the Holocaust is the exception that proves the rule: Almost never can we be forced to act, or not act, without our consent.

Withholding consent can entail unimaginable sacrifices, to be sure. Norway’s teachers, for their part, were threatened, tortured, and starved.

Yet, nothing, aside from their own volition, could have made them do what Quisling demanded of them.

“The overwhelming percentage of a ruler’s commands and objectives can only be achieved by inducing the subject to be willing for some reason to carry them out,” Sharp confirms. “Punishment of one who disobeys a command does not achieve the objective.”

This fundamental insight lies at the heart of strategic nonviolent resistance. Protesters cannot be forced to disperse, nor police be forced to disperse them. Strikers cannot be forced to work, nor their bosses forced to make them. Poll workers cannot be made to falsify election results, nor their supervisors forced to pressure them. Soldiers cannot be forced to shoot, nor commanders forced to give the order.

Everything dictators do—when they are not stealing, at least—is intended to convince us of their unassailable power. This power, they want us to believe, is something they possess—and which we do not.

It is a myth. And yet, this myth forms the very basis of their rule.

Without the people’s assent, the dictator is nothing. He has no power that the people do not willingly cede to him.

As the people giveth, however, the people can taketh away. Just how they accomplish that is the subject of our next installment.

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Sources

Nancy Bazilchuk and Martin Øystese, “1100 Teachers Defied Hitler—and Won!” 63 Degrees North, Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Season 3, Episode 18, October 18, 2023.

Hans Fredrik Dahl, Quisling: A Study in Treachery, trans. Anne-Marie Stanton-Ife (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999).

Tessa Dunseath, “Teachers at War: Norwegian Teachers During the German Occupation of Norway 1940-45,” History of Education vol. 31, no. 4 (2002).

Ø. Hetland, N. Karcher & K. B. Simonsen, “Navigating Troubled Waters: Collaboration and Resistance in State Institutions in Nazi-Occupied Norway,” Scandinavian Journal of History vol. 46, no. 1 (2021).

Nicola Karcher, “A National Socialist School for Norway: Concepts of Nazification During the German Occupation,” Paedagogica Historica: International Journal of the History of Education, vol. 56, no. 5 (2020).

Gene Sharp, The Politics of Nonviolent Action (Boston: Porter Sargent, 1973).

Gene Sharp, “Tyranny Could Not Quell Them!” Peace News: The International Pacifist Weekly, London, UK, 1958.

It began with a few friends. Though still in college at the time, they were already experienced activists, veterans of a successful movement to reverse election fraud in municipal contests a couple of years before.

Now, they faced a bigger fight. The dictator was poised to run for another term as president. By doing so, he would be circumventing the constitution.

Meeting in a smoke-filled apartment, the friends agreed that the country needed an organized resistance movement—and they resolved to lead it.

Soon enough, they announced its formation and laid out three demands: freedom for their university, an independent media, and new elections.

To wage the struggle, only nonviolent methods would suffice, they concluded. This was not a moral decision but a strategic one. Setting off bombs and shooting at the police would only serve to alienate potential supporters and legitimize the regime’s repression.

They also understood that a movement restricted to students in the capital would never gain nationwide traction. So, as one of their first major actions, they led a march through the provinces. This drew attention to their cause from a diverse cross section of society. It also helped them establish a critical foothold among the dictator’s provincial base.

After more than a year of diligent organizing, they held their founding congress. Attendees hailed from over 70 localities and represented all walks of life—students, laborers, business owners, and pensioners.

With the country in perpetual economic crisis, they had to look elsewhere for funding. To this end, they secured grants from the U.S. government as well as private foundations such as the Open Society Institute.

With foreign aid in hand, the movement could work around the regime’s virtual media monopoly and build a public presence of its own. Its slogan, “He’s cooked!” was soon visible everywhere. So was its logo, a drawing of clenched fist. As one leader recalled, it appeared “on everything—umbrellas, lighters, matchboxes. We branded the revolution.”

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Using Repression

Such insolence was bound to draw the dictator’s ire. This was by design, in fact. The regular arrests and beatings the activists endured were not written off as an unfortunate necessity; they were the movement’s best recruitment tool. Ordinary citizens, it turned out, were “appalled by scenes of fresh-faced students being arbitrarily arrested and bundled into police buses,” The Guardian reported.

“We fed on the repression of the regime,” explained one leader. Whenever the authorities rounded up activists, “immediately afterwards we were approached by new people, sometimes even pensioners, prepared to continue with resistance.”

“All power is absurd, and absolute power is absolutely absurd,” an observer noted, describing the movement’s approach. It was a key insight, and one that the activists put to good use. They ridiculed the dictator. They made him look small. They forced him into traps of his own making such that any conceivable response on his part would undermine his credibility.

When news surfaced that the dictator planned to award himself the title of “national hero,” activists began handing out pins to street pedestrians that read, “I’m a national hero.” Their ensuing arrests made the regime look ridiculous.

Such antics were not just about having fun, although they certainly were that. Their larger purpose was strategic: to erode the dictator’s ability to intimidate. The activists’ relentless mockery helped strip away his omnipotent veneer, exposing him for the brittle coward that he was. As one leader explained, fear “disappears far faster than you can recreate it.”

The security forces, while prepared for violent resistance, were clueless when it came to the nonviolent sort. “The movement spread very quickly,” an officer recalled, “and its courage caused panic in the police.”

For the activists, spending a few days in jail went from a source of dread to a badge of honor. “Getting arrested was now the coolest thing you could do for your social life,” a movement leader affirmed.

The Election

In a bid to shore up his flagging support, the dictator announced early presidential elections.

Even in authoritarian regimes, elections still tend to matter. Autocrats need election victories to maintain the appearance of legitimacy. Yet, it defeats the purpose if the contest is an obvious sham with a predetermined winner. Typically, then, the elections are just free enough to leave the outcome uncertain—and this means that the autocrat might lose.

Of course, when they do lose, they seldom go quietly into the night.

And so it was with our dictator. Removing him in the election’s wake would require massive nonviolent resistance, a fact that the movement well understood. But to even get to that point, the opposition had to actually win.

The first task was to unite the country’s feckless and bitterly divided opposition parties. With that in mind, movement representatives convened a conference. Once assembled, they (literally) locked the party leaders in a room until they agreed on a common candidate.

When election day arrived, the opposition was prepared. Armed with an independent data feed connected to every polling station in the country, they were able to announce the result even before the government did. It turned out that the opposition candidate had won—decisively so.

The official results, to precisely no one’s surprise, skewed heavily in the dictator’s favor; it turned out that the government had simply made up its own numbers out of thin air.

The dictator had clearly lost. But he was not about to relinquish power. The question was whether he would get away with it.

When it came to guns and money, the dictator had the advantage. But the resistance had something better: people power.

Protests were called throughout the country. Coal miners went on strike. The resistance would not let up until the dictator was gone.

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Wobbly Pillars

At this point, the dictator still had allies. The high court, for its part, issued a convoluted ruling validating his bid to remain in office.

But other supporters were beginning to waver. The head of the national church called on the dictator to concede. State media outlets refused to air government propaganda. In a show of support for striking employees, the manager of a coal mine which powered half the country resigned.

Few of these defectors acted from a sense of moral obligation. Instead, they saw the writing on the wall and wanted to save their skin. Put simply, they had a choice to make. They could stick with the boss and risk facing accountability in the event that he fell. Or they could switch sides while they had the chance and maybe—just maybe—keep their jobs and freedom under the new regime.

The logic was not lost on the dictator’s enforcers—and the resistance knew it. Speaking before throngs of his supporters, the opposition candidate extended an olive branch, proclaiming, “our message to the army and the police is that we are one.”

Cracks in the security apparatus were indeed beginning to show. Many police officers stood aside rather than follow orders to violently disperse the crowds. Others openly declared their refusal to obey.

The Strike

Mass demonstrations are great for broadcasting demands and forging solidarity. But their effects are mostly symbolic. To really destabilize a regime requires methods of noncooperation, especially strikes and boycotts.

To that end, and with the momentum squarely on its side, the opposition called a general strike. Workers stayed home. Schools and businesses closed. Protesters occupied the major highways, rendering them impassable. The country effectively shut down.

Betraying his growing vulnerability, the dictator responded by banning independent media, strikes, and highway closures. Arrest warrants were issued for opposition leaders and strike organizers. The head of the transport union was detained. An assassination list was drawn up that contained the names of 40 regime opponents.

If the goal was to scare off the resisters, it had the opposite effect.

At the dictator’s behest, a top general showed up at the country’s largest mine and threatened the employees to return to work. They laughed in his face. “We can either stay here four more days or four more years. It’s really a very simple choice,” one of them explained.

The next day, a special police unit tried to occupy the mine and expel the striking employees. But the workers refused to budge. Instead, they summoned help from their neighbors. Within hours, over 20,000 area residents descended on the mine. The hapless police, it turned out, were the ones who had to disperse.

The problem, from the dictator’s standpoint, was that fear had vanished. The whole point of having your own security force is to make a brutal example out of a few and thereby intimidate everyone else into submission. Now that nobody was intimidated, what was he going he do? Lock up half the country?

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Endgame

A massive demonstration was called for what would turn out to be the regime’s penultimate day. Hundreds of thousands gathered in the capital. Thousands more blocked the roads leading into and out of the city. The objective was to mount a peaceful occupation of the parliament building and the state media outlet.

While the police guarding the parliament appeared imposing at first glance, they proved anything but. In negotiations during the preceding days, the opposition had secured their agreement to stand aside and let the protesters enter.

Over at the state media outlet, the police had not gotten the memo. Officers fired live ammunition into the crowd. This provoked a rare instance of violence by some of the protesters. A short-lived clash followed. A police station was set on fire.

Nevertheless, the dictator’s support continued to crumble. The next morning, the Russian foreign minister informed him that the Kremlin—until now, his key foreign backer—would not intervene on his behalf.

The same day, the high court reversed its earlier decision allowing the dictator to remain in office and instead declared the opposition candidate the rightful winner.

That evening, the army chief of staff, together with the dictator himself, met with the candidate and congratulated him on his victory. Just before midnight, the dictator appeared before the nation in a televised address, explaining that he had “just got official information” that the opposition candidate had won after all.

It was a futile and pathetic attempt to save face—and avoid future criminal prosecution.

In truth, a choice he portrayed as his own had been made for him—by his civil servants, his generals, his soldiers, his security forces, his state media, and other key allies who had once stood as pillars of his regime.

Forcing their hand, in turn, was a popular movement fueled by righteous anger over repression and election fraud.

Far from avoiding repression, the resisters invited it, knowing that they could harness the resulting public outrage to bring pressure to bear on the dictator’s key supporters.

They did so, moreover, without firing a single shot or persuading those supporters of the rightness of their cause. Using only nonviolent resistance, the movement coerced them to defect and, in turn, forced the dictator to step down.

To rid themselves of the ruler, in other words, the people withdrew their consent to be ruled.

From Practice to Theory

The events I just described are not made up. They took place in Serbia. The movement in question was called Otpor! (“Resistance!”). In October 2000, it brought Slobodan Milošević’s thirteen-year dictatorship to a fittingly undignified end.

There is a reason why I withheld their identities until now. The methods that Otpor! employed, and the dynamics they unleashed, are universal. They have been used to spectacular effect in countries rich and poor and on every continent—often under far harsher and more restrictive conditions than those detailed above.

In short, there is nothing special about Serbia, Milošević, or Otpor! As such, there is no reason why a similar movement could not achieve the same result in the United States.

Donald Trump already tried to steal one election. By all indications, he will try again in 2028. Thanks to the personal control he wields over key federal agencies, the military, and his own party, he might well succeed this time.

Neither Congress, the courts, nor the federal government will save us—unless, that is, they are pushed. And only one thing can do the pushing: a nonviolent resistance movement.

Next time, we will dive into the theory of how these movements work. We will also meet its author. That author is not Gandhi; it is a political scientist who, despite his obscurity, is arguably the most important scholar the field has ever produced.

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Sources

Roger Cohen, “Who Really Brought Down Milosevic?” The New York Times, November 26, 2000.

Steven Erlanger, “Student Group Emerges as Major Milosevic Foe,” The New York Times, May 22, 2000.

David Holley, “Student Muckrakers Ready to Bulldoze Corrupt Politicians Yugoslavia,” Los Angeles Times, November 19, 2000.

Andrew Mueller, “Guerrillas Without Guns,” The Independent, August 13, 2005.

Joshua Paulson, “Removing the Dictator in Serbia—1996-2000,” in Gene Sharp, Waging Nonviolent Struggle: 20^th Century Practice and 21^st Century Potential (Boston: Porter Sargent, 2005), 315-40.

Srdja Popovic with Matthew Miller, Blueprint for Revolution: How to Use Rice Pudding, Lego Men, and Other Nonviolent Techniques to Galvanize Communities, Overthrow Dictators, or Simply Change the World (New York: Random House, 2015).

Eve-Ann Prentice, “Yugoslavia’s Youth Unite,” The Times, September 19, 2000.

Gillian Sandford, “Children of the Revolution,” The World Today 56, nos. 8/9 (August 2000).

Helena Smith, “Otpor: Rage of Innocents,” The Guardian, May 30, 2000.

Alessio Vinci and Jonathan Mann, “Student Movements Past and Present,” CNN International: Insight, May 29, 2000.

Sharon L. Wolchik and Valerie J. Bunce, Defeating Authoritarian Leaders in Postcommunist Countries (New York: Cambridge, 2011), 85-113.

*With the exceptions of Paulson, “Removing…” and Wolchik and Bunce, Defeating…, all sources were accessed through the Factiva database, November 6, 2025.

To those who have been wondering where I have been—and to the presumably greater number for whom my absence never occurred to them—I am writing with an update.

First, the reason I have been out of touch is that I am hard at work on a book project on how to bring Trump’s authoritarian regime to a fitting end. Tentatively entitled How to Overthrow a Dictator: A Self-Help Guide for Americans, it draws on cutting-edge research in political science to explain why some countries managed to oust their authoritarian leaders, why other countries failed, and what, specifically, it will take to do the same in the US.

With Trump in the midst of one of the most rapid authoritarian power-grabs in recent decades—which only yesterday saw him declare war on the “enemy within” before the entire army brass—the question of how to kick this shithead out of power is as pressing as ever.

If he (or his successor) loses in 2028, he will not leave office voluntarily. If and when it comes to that, the only effective means of removing him will be a massive civil resistance campaign complete with protests, strikes, boycotts, and other forms of nonviolent action.

Scores of other societies have ousted authoritarian leaders through their own people-power movements. Armenia, Bangladesh, Bolivia, Brazil, Burkina Faso, Fiji, Malawi, the Maldives, Moldova, Nepal, Niger, North Macedonia, Pakistan, Poland, Slovenia, South Korea, Sri Lanka, Ukraine, and Zambia are among those which have successfully mounted such campaigns since the turn of the century.

What’s more, most if not all of them did so under far less favorable conditions than those Americans face.

In short, if they could do it, we most certainly can.

On the other hand, overthrowing a committed autocrat is not exactly straightforward. The process is replete with pitfalls as well as opportunities. Americans would do well to understand what these are and prepare accordingly. Hence, my decision to write this book.

At the moment, I am knee-deep in research learning everything political scientists know about the problem. It is turning out to be quite a revelation. In the near future, I will be ready to pass on some of my findings to you. Until then, I ask for your patience.

This brings me to my second item: For the time being, I am suspending The Fix, my biweekly installment for paid subscribers.

For starters, not enough people signed up for the paid option to justify the time and effort required to sustain it. Moreover, given the need to get the book published with enough time to spare before the 2028 election, I cannot afford to spend several workdays every two weeks to producing The Fix.

Considering that I am breaking my promise to paid subscribers, I am offering a prorated refund to anyone who wants it. If that is you, please reply to this email or message me on Substack. Otherwise, many thanks for sticking with me. I am grateful for your support.

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Over the past few years, I have spent a lot of time countering pro-Kremlin propaganda designed to exonerate Russia for its genocidal war on Ukraine.

It is not Russia's fault, we are told; the West provoked it to invade. Later, those same Western powers pressured Kyiv to reject Moscow’s peace overtures and keep fighting. And so on and so forth.

It is all bullshit. But it can be hard to see through it without having prior knowledge of the subject. As someone who has studied Ukrainian politics for nearly three decades, I have done my best to expose the lies.

At its worst, such propaganda veers into atrocity denial. I have repeatedly had to debunk conspiracy theories that attempt to blame Ukraine for Russia’s crimes. Whether it is the execution of non-combatants, the bombing of civilian targets, or the mass-abduction of Ukrainian children to Russian “reeducation” camps, none of these things happened, insist Russia's apologists. Or, if they did, they were staged by Ukraine to frame Russia.

Nowadays, one sees a similar surge in atrocity denial on Israel’s behalf. While hardly new, it has reached a fever pitch over revelations of an Israeli-engineered famine in Gaza.

The whitewashing bears striking resemblance to the sort that tries to absolve Russia of its own crimes. There is no starvation, we are told. To the extent that there is, it is the doing of Hamas and the United Nations—anyone but Israel, really. And if it was caused by Israel, it was not part of a deliberate plan.

As we will see, these claims are demonstrably false.

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While certain actors—namely, the Israeli government—are intentionally lying, I do not believe that most of those spreading the misinformation are doing so knowingly.

Either way, there is a need to correct the record. We cannot blind ourselves to human suffering or the criminals responsible for it.

Yes, Hamas has also committed atrocities—above all, its massacre of innocents on October 7^th and its mistreatment of the hostages it continues to detain.

Still, Hamas’s crimes, evil as they are, do not grant Israel a free pass to commit its own. But this is exactly what Israel is doing, as a mountain of evidence confirms. The violations include mass-executions; the rampant, arbitrary, and intentional killing and maiming of civilians, including preteen children; and the rape, torture, and starvation of detainees, many of whom are held without charge.

There is a reason why collective punishment is banned under international law. Inflicting harm on children and the elderly for other people’s misdeeds is reprehensible no matter which side is doing it.

The Fourth Geneva Convention and the UN Genocide Convention, which together form the core of international humanitarian law, were adopted largely in response to the Holocaust. But here we are, 75 years later, as Israel trashes those agreements in the name of the Jews.

How Israel Implicates Itself

Maybe you doubt the World Food Program when it says that starvation in Gaza is “unlike anything we have seen in this century,” on par with the Ethiopian famine of the 1980s.1

Maybe you distrust the more than one hundred doctors and health professionals who say that “our Palestinian colleagues—doctors, nurses, and first responders—are all rapidly losing weight due to forced starvation at the hands of the Israeli government.”

Maybe you are skeptical of the hundred-odd international organizations who contend that “the UN-led humanitarian system…has been prevented from functioning” due to “Israel’s restrictions, delays, and fragmentation.”

To be clear, there is no valid reason to dismiss these findings. But even if you do, it just so happens that Israel’s leaders, officials, and soldiers affirm them.

Let's take a look.

Yes, there is a famine, and Israel is to blame.

On July 25^th, news outlets around the world published a photo of a skeletal Palestinian child as evidence of the severe hunger afflicting Gaza. It later emerged that the boy had congenital health problems which might have partially accounted for his appearance.

Pro-Israel commentators seized on the revelation, arguing that claims of famine were exaggerated or false. (In truth, children with certain preexisting conditions are more vulnerable than others to malnutrition, and the boy in the picture was indeed malnourished.)

Contested photos aside, Gaza is indeed experiencing acute hunger, and Israeli policies are the cause.

To avoid widespread malnutrition, the UN estimates that Gaza needs a minimum of 62,000 tons of food per month. But Israel decides whether and how much food can enter Gaza, and in ten of the 22 months since the war began, deliveries fell below that minimum level.

The data behind this claim comes not from the UN but from Israel itself—in particular, COGAT, the defense ministry unit that oversees the territory. Each month, COGAT calculates the amount of food that is brought into Gaza.

As you can see, in October 2023 (far left), almost no food at all was allowed to enter. The reason was the total blockade that Israel imposed that month in response to Hamas’s attack. The restrictions were eventually relaxed, but only under American pressure.

By the start of 2024, food deliveries began to pick up. Still, in February, September, and October of that year, they failed to meet the minimum UN threshold. Later, during the ceasefire of January and February 2025, supplies increased dramatically.

It would not last, however. In early March 2025, Israel initiated another blockade. “Prime Minister Netanyahu has decided that, as of this morning, all entry of goods and supplies into the Gaza Strip will cease,” read a March 2^nd press release from his office.

For the next 78 days, Israel prevented all humanitarian assistance, including foodstuffs, from entering Gaza.

Predictably, the blockade led to a crisis. By mid-May, COGAT, the defense ministry agency, was warning the government that Gaza was on the brink of famine.

According to officials interviewed by the New York Times,

Israeli military officers who monitor humanitarian conditions in Gaza have warned their commanders in recent days that unless the blockade is lifted quickly, many areas of the enclave will likely run out of enough food to meet minimum daily nutritional needs.

…The officers…privately briefed senior commanders on the worsening situation, warning with increasing urgency that many in the territory were just a few weeks away from starvation. An Israeli general briefed the cabinet on the humanitarian situation in Gaza last week, saying that supplies in the territory would run out within a few weeks, according to an Israeli defense official and a senior government official.

It was in response to the briefing, the officials confirmed, that the government lifted the blockade.

Problem solved, right? With no more blockade, the impending emergency which defense officials warned about would be avoided, would it not?

Nope.

Far from it, in fact, because even after lifting the blockade, Israel continued to maintain severe restrictions on the food entering Gaza.

As the table above shows, food deliveries in May, June, and July remained well below the level required to prevent malnutrition.

According to COGAT, the government allowed only 19,900 metric tons of food to enter in May and another 37,800 tons in June. This, combined with the zero tons it authorized in the two preceding months, adds up to 57,700 metric tons of food over a four-month period.

Compare that to the 62,000 tons the UN defines as the minimum amount needed each month to stave off malnutrition.

In other words, in the four months between March and June, Israel allowed in less than the bare-minimum amount required for a single month.

That is why the crisis became as severe as it did, and that is what explains the ubiquitous photos of walking skeletons desperate for food.

So, yes, of course Gaza is suffering an acute malnutrition crisis, and of course Israel is responsible. How could it not be? The defense ministry’s own data proves it! Simply put, Israel is not letting nearly enough food to come in.

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But don’t Hamas and the UN bear most of the responsibility?

Israel blames the crisis on other actors—in particular, the UN, which is ineffective and does not prevent Hamas from stealing the aid. But, it says, they then turn around and pin the blame on Israel.

This is bullshit. For one thing, we already saw that Israel’s restrictions alone were more than sufficient to cause the crisis.

Still, is it not possible that Hamas and the UN are making it worse?

The answer is no—and, once again, it is Israeli officials who confirm it.2 At a cabinet meeting in March, the New York Times reports, the military presented evidence that it

never found proof that the Palestinian militant group had systematically stolen aid from the United Nations, the biggest supplier of emergency assistance to Gaza for most of the war, according to two senior Israeli military officials and two other Israelis involved in the matter.

In fact, the Israeli military officials said, the U.N. aid delivery system, which Israel derided and undermined, was largely effective in providing food to Gaza’s desperate and hungry population.

Not only did the UN system work, but it was set up in a way that prevented Hamas from diverting the aid:

The military officials who spoke to The New York Times said that the original U.N. aid operation was relatively reliable and less vulnerable to Hamas interference than the operations of many of the other groups bringing aid into Gaza. That’s largely because the United Nations managed its own supply chain and handled distribution directly inside Gaza.

Hamas did steal from some of the smaller organizations that donated aid, as those groups were not always on the ground to oversee distribution, according to the senior Israeli officials and others involved in the matter. But, they say, there was no evidence that Hamas regularly stole from the United Nations, which provided the largest chunk of the aid.

In sum, Israel’s policies are exclusively responsible for the hunger crisis. Contrary to Israel’s official stance, moreover, neither Hamas nor the UN are making it worse; Israeli military officials said so themselves.

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No, Israel does not merit special praise for feeding Gaza.

“Israel is the only country that has ever fed an enemy population in a time of war.” So goes a common refrain by Israel and its supporters. In fact, they argue, far from condemning Israel, we should applaud it for allowing in any food at all.

This is nonsense. Imagine if the US government laid siege to Detroit and established tight control over the city’s land, sea, and air access. Under these conditions, nobody would be able to bring anything, including food, into the city absent the express authorization of the federal government. Unless Washington allowed food to come in, Detroit would starve.

That is the situation in which Gaza finds itself. Given its small size—it has about the same area as Detroit, only with a higher population density—there is no way that Gaza can support the agricultural base required to feed its two million inhabitants. As a consequence, it is almost entirely dependent on the import of food and other essential supplies.

But without Israel's approval, it cannot import anything.

While Israel formally withdrew from Gaza in 2005, it continued to exercise extraordinary control over anything and anyone moving across its borders.

Israel has long controlled access to Gaza by land, sea, and air. This includes Gaza’s border with Egypt. Past agreements with Cairo granted Israel indirect control over the movement of goods and people through the Rafah crossing that connects the territory with Egypt. In the wake of Israel’s May 2024 Rafah offensive, its control became direct and absolute.

For this reason, even after the 2005 withdrawal, the International Court of Justice (ICJ) continued to regard Israel as an occupying power under international law. An ICJ advisory opinion from July 19^th, 2024, states that

Israel’s withdrawal from the Gaza Strip [in 2005] has not entirely released it of its obligations under the law of occupation. Israel’s obligations have remained commensurate with the degree of its effective control.

When it comes to food, specifically, the court ruled that Israel’s status as an occupying power gives it “the continuing duty to ensure that the local population has an adequate supply of foodstuffs, including water.”

It is very simple: Unless Israel allows food to come in, Gaza starves. To the extent that Israel does permit food to enter, this is not an example of its benevolence; it is its minimum obligation under international humanitarian law. Israel does not deserve special credit for that.

Not that it complied with its obligations in the first place. Even before October 2023, it intentionally kept food imports to a minimum. “The idea is to put the Palestinians on a diet,” a government advisor wryly remarked in 2006, “but not to make them die of hunger.”

Official documents released under court order in 2012 show the meticulous calculations Israel used to determine the least amount of food needed to keep Gaza’s inhabitants from falling below international malnutrition thresholds. COGAT, the Israeli defense agency cited above, referred to these minimum requirements as “red lines.” In practice, actual food deliveries fell far short of these levels, according to UN data.

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Intent to Starve

As we saw earlier, the restrictions became even more severe after October 7^th.

But not only did Israel limit the amount of food that entered; in recent months, it started sabotaging the distribution of the food that did arrive.

After lifting its blockade in May of this year, Israel drastically scaled back the UN’s role in allocating food aid. Under the new plan, the UN and its partners would receive only half the food entering the territory. The other half would be distributed by the now-infamous Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF).

Explaining its decision, Israel claimed that the UN network was ineffective and that it failed to stop Hamas from stealing the aid.

But that was a lie. The Israeli military admitted it, as we saw earlier.

Recall what a group of military officials told the New York Times. At a March meeting, they informed Netanyahu's cabinet that the UN was “largely effective” at handing out food and that there was no evidence that Hamas had stolen from the UN on any significant scale. That is because the system was set up in a way that minimized the possibility of Hamas’s interference.

The government nevertheless rejected those findings and proceeded with its plan. From now on, the GHF, an Israeli- and USbacked outfit run by American evangelists and private equity executives, few of whom had any prior experience in the aid realm, would take over much of the UN’s role.

Not only was the new arrangement unnecessary; the Israeli government knew it would fail. At the same March meeting, military officials expressed serious doubts about the GHF’s capabilities. But the government dismissed their concerns.

In place of the hundreds of aid distribution points operated by the UN, the GHF established four—yes, four—all of which were located in the middle of active combat zones.

The result was chaos, hunger, and death.

Starting in late-May, thousands of desperate Palestinians would regularly descend on the handful of GHF distribution sites.

Crowd control was achieved by launching artillery shells into crowds of hungry civilians—a fact confirmed by officers at a meeting of the IDF Southern Command. According to one attendee,

[IDF commanders] talk about using artillery on a junction full of civilians as if it's normal. … What concerns everyone [at the meeting] is whether [the use of these weapons] would hurt our legitimacy to keep operating in Gaza. The moral aspect is practically nonexistent. No one stops to ask why dozens of civilians looking for food are being killed every day.

IDF soldiers interviewed by Israeli news outlet Haaretz describe how they were ordered to fire on unarmed civilians lined up to receive food and who posed no danger. As one soldier recounts,

When we asked why [soldiers at an aid distribution point] opened fire, we were told it was an order from above and that the civilians had posed a threat to the troops. I can say with certainty that the people were not close to the forces and did not endanger them. It was pointless—they were just killed, for nothing. This thing called killing innocent people—it's been normalized. We were constantly told there are no noncombatants in Gaza, and apparently that message sank in among the troops.

Sorry, but you do not lie your way into depriving millions of people of food, while also putting them in mortal, unnecessary danger, unless you intend to starve and kill them.

Going by the public statements of Israel's leaders, in fact, this would appear to have been the plan. Consider just a few of the many examples:

Heritage Minister Amichay Eliyahu, July 24^th, 2025:

No nation feeds its enemies. Have we gone crazy? Should we bother with this? They should return the captives, they should return the hostages, they should stop fighting us. Should we bother with their hunger? This discourse is simply crazy.

Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, May 6^th, 2025:

[The Palestinians] will be totally despairing, understanding that there is no hope and nothing to look for in Gaza, and will be looking for relocation to begin a new life in other places.

Former Military Intelligence Directorate chief Aharon Haliva, who stepped down in April 2024:

For every victim of October 7^th, 50 Palestinians had to die. No matter if they are children.

Israeli security cabinet member and Agriculture Minister Avi Dichter, November 12^th, 2023:

We are now rolling out the Gaza Nakba [Nakba is the word Palestinians use to describe Israel’s ethnic cleansing policies since 1948]. From an operational point of view, there is no way to wage a war—as the IDF seeks to do in Gaza—with masses between the tanks and the soldiers.

Galit Distel Atbaryan, a lawmaker from Netanyahu’s ruling Likud Party, November 1^st, 2023:

Erase Gaza from the face of the earth. Let the Gazan monsters rush to the southern border and flee into Egypt, or die. And let them die badly.

Netanyahu, January 13^th, 2024:

We provide minimal humanitarian aid. … If we want to achieve our war goals, we give the minimal aid.

These sentiments, it is worth noting, are not those of a rogue government that is out of step with mainstream opinion. As a recent poll by the Israel Democracy Institute reveals, 79 percent of Jewish Israelis are “not so troubled” or “not troubled at all” by “reports of famine and suffering” in Gaza.

Other surveys find that anywhere from 53 to 82 percent of Jewish Israelis support the forced expulsion of Palestinians from Gaza. According to a February poll, 64 percent agree that "there are no innocent people in Gaza.”

In sum, one need not rely on the UN, foreign NGOs, or anyone else to tell us that Israel is deliberately starving Palestinians. Israelis admit it themselves:

• Yes, there is a famine, and Israeli policies are to blame. The defense ministry’s own data proves it, and military officials confirm it.

• Neither Hamas nor the UN have been systematically withholding aid from Gaza’s inhabitants, Israeli officials acknowledged to the New York Times.

• The UN-led food distribution system was mostly effective before Israel replaced it, those same officials admit.

• Israel’s leaders knew that the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation would fail its stated mission of feeding Gaza’s inhabitants; the Israeli military warned the government about it.

• Israeli soldiers were ordered to shoot civilians at GHF distribution sites despite the fact that they posed no threat, as the soldiers themselves attest.

• The Israeli government is deliberately imposing mass-suffering on Gaza’s civilian population. It says so publicly.

• A majority of Jewish Israelis either support these policies or are unbothered by them, opinion polls show.

  ---

These are the facts.

Make of them what you will.

But do not deny them.

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Last week, New York Times columnist Bret Stephens wrote a piece entitled, “No, Israel is not committing genocide in Gaza.” In it, he offers one fatuous claim after another to absolve Israel of a charge that is increasingly leveled against it.

The amount of bad faith, intellectual laziness, and sheer incompetence on display is hard to overstate. But as we will see, there is a reason why Stephens decided to write this column now. It is a reason that he did not wish to reveal, since doing so would have raised uncomfortable questions about his credibility and agenda.

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But first, let us go through his argument point by point, if only to show the nonsense of it.

Consider his opening salvo:

The first question the anti-Israel genocide chorus needs to answer is: Why isn’t the death count higher? The answer, of course, is that Israel is manifestly not committing genocide.

This is a silly and misleading statement. As anyone familiar with the subject can explain, a finding of genocide has nothing to do with the number of victims affected but rather hinges on the intent of the perpetrator.

Under the terms of the 1948 United Nations Genocide Convention, genocide refers to any of five acts “committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such.” The five acts include (1) killing members of the group; (2) inflicting serious harm, whether mental or physical, on members of the group; (3) imposing conditions of life intended to destroy the group in whole or in part; (4) attempting to prevent births within the group; and (5) forcibly transferring the group’s children to another group.

Acts such as killing and inflicting bodily harm do not by themselves imply genocide. Only if they are undertaken with the intent to destroy one of the designated types of groups do they qualify.

Stephens, it turns out, is well aware of this fact. After spending the first 30 percent of his essay arguing—erroneously—that Israel has not killed enough people to warrant the charge of genocide, he then proceeds to explain—correctly—that “genocide does not mean simply ‘too many civilian deaths’…[but instead] means seeking to exterminate a category of people for no other reason than that they belong to that category.”

Doing It Half-Assed

Things do not get much better from there. In the remainder of the piece, we are treated to a mix of facile excuses, fallacious assertions, and more frivolous “gotchas” in a hollow effort to exonerate Israel.

If it really were genocide, Stephens asks, why does Israel offer evacuation warnings before bombing a given area? (It frequently does not, and many of the warnings it does provide are impossible to heed).

If it were really genocide, he continues, why would Israel put its own ground forces at risk instead of obliterating Gaza from a safe distance? (The use of ground troops does not somehow rule out the possibility of genocide.)

In any event, Stephens reminds us, all wars are destructive, so why single out Israel? (No, not all wars are this destructive).

As for all the genocidal statements of top Israeli leaders, we are told, these were but “furious comments in the wake of Hamas's Oct. 7 atrocities.” Were they not allowed to blow off a little steam?

And let us not forget Hamas's refusal to release the hostages, he says, not to mention its other war crimes (as if either of these things grant Israel a free pass to violate International Humanitarian Law).

Besides, he concludes, we should be more cautious about employing so incendiary a term as genocide lest it be “used by anti-Zionists and antisemites…to license a new wave of Jew hatred.”

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The Third Man

Amidst all the evasions and non sequiturs, Stephens was too busy to mention the elephant in the room. That elephant is Omer Bartov, an Israeli-American historian who serves as the Dean's Professor of Holocaust and Genocide Studies at Brown University.

One week to the day before Stephens wrote his Times column, Bartov penned a 3500-word essay in the very same paper accusing Israel of genocide. This explains why Stephens published his apologia in the first place and chose to do so now.

“My inescapable conclusion,” Bartov writes,

has become that Israel is committing genocide against the Palestinian people. Having grown up in a Zionist home, lived the first half of my life in Israel, served in the I.D.F. as a soldier and officer and spent most of my career researching and writing on war crimes and the Holocaust, this was a painful conclusion to reach, and one that I resisted as long as I could. But I have been teaching classes on genocide for a quarter of a century. I can recognize one when I see one.

In making his case, Bartov cites the steady stream of eliminationist rhetoric from top Israeli leaders, the systematic destruction of Gaza’s civilian infrastructure (“a policy aimed,” he says, “at making the revival of Palestinian life in the territory highly unlikely”), and the infliction of death, starvation, and other forms of deprivation on a massive scale.

He also takes Holocaust experts to task for their conspicuous silence, arguing that it has caused a rift with the “wider community of genocide scholars” that is coming “ever closer toward a consensus over describing events in Gaza as a genocide.”

Still, despite transparently responding to Bartov, Stephens does not dare mention his name. The reason why is obvious. Had Stephens acknowledged the essay’s existence, he might have caused readers to wonder what qualifies him, of all people, to contradict a leading genocide expert. He might have also run the risk of inadvertently prompting people to go and read it, thereby enabling them to contrast Bartov’s reasoned judgment with Stephens’s frivolous deflections.

As Bartov notes, he is hardly alone among human rights experts in accusing Israel of genocide. The ranks of those who have joined him include international organizations such as Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International, Israeli organizations like B’Tselem and Physicians for Human Rights Israel, and official bodies such as the International Court of Justice and the United Nations Special Rapporteur.

Dozens of individual specialists agree, including Melanie O'Brien, president of the International Association of Genocide Scholars; Amos Goldberg, a professor of Holocaust and genocide studies at Hebrew University; Daniel Blatman, a professor in the same department as Goldberg; William A. Schabas, a professor of international human rights law at Middlesex University; Luis Moreno Ocampo, the former chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court; Aryeh Neier, the former executive director of Human Rights Watch; Shmuel Lederman, a research fellow at the Weiss-Livnat International Center for Holocaust Research and Education at the University of Haifa; Martin Shaw, a sociologist and genocide expert at the Institut Barcelona d’Estudis Internacionals; and Raz Segal, a professor of Holocaust and genocide studies at Stockton University.

On the one hand, then, there are legions of human rights specialists, organizations, and agencies that contend that Israel is at least plausibly guilty of genocide. On the other hand, you have Bret Stephens—someone who, notably, is not a human rights expert and who for some reason chose to “examine” the issue without acknowledging, much less engaging with, the dozens of actual experts who have made the claim.

If you want your readers to take you seriously on an issue, it might help if you take it seriously yourself.

It may well be possible to dispute Israel's culpability for genocide in a way that is evidence-based and intellectually honest. But this ain’t it.

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Equality For Some

Thought experiment: How would Stephens respond if somebody treated Hamas's terrorist attack on October 7^th, 2023 with the same glaring omissions and lazy excuse-making that he applies to Israel's crimes? What if they took his words and turned them around to describe Hamas?

Consider the following statements, all of which are adapted from Stephens’s own:

• “There are important questions to be asked about the tactics Hamas has used…[but] hardly any movement in history has pursued decolonization without at least some of its soldiers committing war crimes.”

• “Trigger-happy militants or strikes that hit the wrong target or movement leaders reaching for vengeful soundbites do not come close to adding up to genocide. They are decolonization in its usual tragic dimensions.”

• “Israel’s tactics, which are war crimes in themselves, make it difficult for Hamas to achieve its military aims: a Palestinian state and the elimination of the Israeli state so that Palestinians may never again be threatened with more indiscriminate attacks.”

• “While some pundits and scholars may sincerely believe the genocide charge against Hamas, it is also used by racists to equate Palestine with Nazi Germany.”

Leaving aside the factual inaccuracies and selective omissions they contain, such statements are morally reprehensible. They excuse Hamas’s crimes, obscure its eliminationist goals, and discount the lives of its victims—just as Stephens does when using those very same words to defend Israel.

It would be one thing if Israel, unlike Hamas, were not intentionally targeting civilians. But Israel clearly is targeting civilians and doing so on an enormous scale—by its own admission, too. As such, it would be wrong to describe the above as an exercise in false equivalence.

There is a term for the failure to afford others the same dignity one demands for one’s own community. That term is dehumanization, and it is exactly what Stephens is doing in his column. His strained rationalizations derive from the same impulse behind the genocide itself, one which carves out exceptions in the granting of basic humanity to certain groups for the sake of bestowing eternal innocence on others.

In this respect, Stephens’s evidence-free whitewashing of Israel’s genocide is indistinguishable from that of the ostensible leftists who excuse Russia's genocide against Ukrainians. Both suspend the privilege of humanity for whole groups of people whose only crime is to be victimized by the wrong offender.

For Stephens, as for his pro-Russian counterparts, the obligation to exonerate a favored perpetrator outweighs his professed commitment to universal equality.

Stephens would never accept such doltish apologias on Hamas’s behalf, which begs the question of why he finds it acceptable to do the same for Israel. The inescapable conclusion is that he assigns less value to the Palestinians than he does to other communities.

Either we are to recognize the universal equality of human dignity or instead maintain that some people have less dignity than others. It is clear where Stephens stands. It is high time that the rest of us made our choice.

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Last week, we looked at the Supreme Court under Chief Justice John Roberts and, in particular, its relentless assault on prevailing Constitutional law. At nearly every turn, he and his fellow rightwing jurists have sought to beat back the cause of equality and fairness—original intent, past precedent, and statutory text be damned.

And that was before the start of Donald Trump’s second term. In the months since, the Court has enthusiastically enabled his authoritarian project.

However flagrant the egregious distortions and motivated reasoning behind the Court’s illiberal turn, one would be mistaken to see it as an anomaly. Except for a brief period in the mid-20th century, the Supreme Court has always been reactionary, attacking America’s vulnerable and debasing the ideals of its founding documents.

Even when more expansive interpretations were available, the Court has time and again adopted a maximally restrictive view of the Constitution, one which benefits the rich, the white, and the powerful at the expense of everyone else.

Nowhere was this more evident than in the post-Civil War era. This period, known as Reconstruction, saw three Constitutional amendments adopted that, for the first time, applied the Bill of Rights to all citizens regardless of race.

Permitting such extraordinary change was the combination of the Union victory and the awarding of the franchise to the newly-emancipated Black freedmen. During Reconstruction, African-Americans allied with radical Republicans in Congress—some of whom were Black themselves—to transform the republic into something approaching a multiracial democracy, at least for men (women of all races would have to wait until the 20th century).

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Still, it would not be long before aggrieved Southern whites, with the acquiescence of their Northern counterparts, returned power to themselves through a campaign of ruthless lawfare and violent intimidation. For decades thereafter, African-Americans in the South and beyond were relegated to a system of apartheid which rendered them second-class citizens.

Although the sordid history of racial segregation is widely known, less understood is the pivotal role the Supreme Court played in bringing it about. The partisan tactics and strained, self-serving rationales it employed bore striking similarities to the ones the Court uses to strip away rights today.

The story of the Reconstruction Court lays bare just how unexceptional its modern counterpart is. As it bolsters Trump's authoritarianism and eviscerates long-established rights, the Roberts majority borrows from an old playbook, one conceived by the white supremacists who presided over the same body in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries.

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As another Supreme Court term comes to an end, it is hard to decide which of its abominable decisions was the worst. Which entailed the most egregious assault on rights? Which involved the most dishonest reading of the law? Which displayed the most contempt for the separation of powers?

Was it Trump v. Wilcox, in which the Court blessed President Donald Trump's dismissal of two senior officials without cause in blatant disregard of past precedent and statutory law?

Was it United States v. Skrmetti, in which the conservative majority pretended that explicit discrimination on the basis of sex is not, in fact, discrimination on the basis of sex?

Maybe it was Department of Homeland Security v. D.V.D. which authorizes the administration to deport noncitizens to violent, repressive countries without any opportunity to contest the decision before a judge?

Fortunately, D.V.D. does not permit the deportation of just anyone; it only applies to people whom a judge has already deemed eligible for removal.

Nevertheless, judges often decide that deportable persons cannot be transferred to their countries-of-origin due to the threat that they might face torture.

According to the Supreme Court’s ruling in D.V.D., however, the government can still deport such individuals to a third country—without allowing them to challenge that decision. It can do so even if the country in question is one where the defendant might conceivably endure mistreatment and was chosen for that purpose to fulfill Stephen Miller’s weird psychosexual fantasy.

Deporting people to places where they are likely to endure human rights abuses violates the Convention Against Torture, an international treaty which Congress ratified decades ago and whose implementation it passed numerous laws to facilitate. Thanks to the Supreme Court, the Trump administration is now free to ignore it.

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Suspending the Constitution

But perhaps the Court’s most reprehensible decision of late was Trump v. CASA. In this case, the Roberts majority looked at the birthright citizenship clause of the Fourteenth Amendment and decided, “nah.”

The Fourteenth Amendment guarantees citizenship to anyone born in the US. Its language could not possibly be clearer. It states: “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.”

Enacted after the Civil War, the amendment’s immediate purpose was to grant automatic citizenship to the formerly enslaved. Nevertheless, its framers were explicit that the right applies to anyone born in the US, African-American or not.

In line with his aim to remake America as a white nation, Trump signed an executive order the very day he was inaugurated that declared the birthright citizenship clause null and void.

Given the order’s blatant unconstitutionality, three different federal judges subsequently issued nationwide injunctions barring it from taking force.

The administration then appealed to the Supreme Court, where it can expect a sympathetic hearing on any action, however illegal, which shits on the rights of Brown people.

To be clear, there was nothing stopping the Court from ruling on the legality of Trump's order. Still, it chose not to. For that would have put the Republican justices in a bind: Either affirm the Fourteenth Amendment, which they have long endeavored to undermine, or pretend that it does not say what it plainly does, thereby debasing themselves before the entire legal community.

To avoid this tradeoff, the majority decided that it would say nothing about the order’s constitutionality, at least for now. Instead, it would rule only on whether federal judges have the authority to enact nationwide injunctions of the kind that had prevented the order from going into effect.

One could make a valid case that such injunctions should be disallowed. But as Sherrilyn Ifill explains, the Court chose a hell of a time to do it.

Ifill, a civil rights attorney who heads the Fourteenth Amendment Center for Law and Democracy at the Howard University School of Law, cannot see any legitimate basis for

this majority’s extension of the executive’s power to allow the President to flagrantly violate express guarantees of citizenship under the Constitution. I say “this” President, because the Court’s hands-off approach to nationwide injunctions issued against Biden Administration initiatives (student loan forgiveness, moratorium on new oil and gas leases) makes clear that it is only Republican Presidents—or maybe only President Trump— who the conservative justices believe must [be] free from the constraints of district court orders.

In other words, the same justices who were fine with nationwide injunctions under President Biden suddenly discovered they were unconstitutional the minute they constrained Trump from doing a racism.

Fancy that.

The CASA ruling permits the Trump administration to disregard a fundamental Constitutional right. To be sure, it cannot deny birthright citizenship throughout the land. It can only do so to noncitizens who have not filed suit against the administration and to the residents of states whose (Democratic) governments have not challenged the executive order in court. For all other noncitizens, however, birthright citizenship no longer exists.

Are you a baby born to a noncitizen family in California? You are in luck, as you will receive automatic US citizenship just as the Fourteenth Amendment requires. That is because the State of California has already sued to stop the order from taking effect.

Were you instead born in Texas, whose attorney general is a Republican prick who endorses Trump's vile bigotry? If that is you, I am sorry to tell you that you are fated to grow up stateless, without any of the privileges that the Constitution affords to citizens. You can even be deported, at least until the Roberts majority gets around to deciding that Trump's unconstitutional order actually is unconstitutional.

As you might imagine, the Court’s liberal justices pulled no punches in condemning the decision. “No right is safe in the new legal regime the Court creates,” proclaimed Sonia Sotomayor in a withering dissent. CASA, she wrote, “renders Constitutional guarantees meaningful in name only.”

Ketanji Brown Jackson was equally unsparing, warning that the ruling “is an existential threat to the rule of law.”

Ifill, of Howard University, concurs, while also highlighting how the Roberts majority is facilitating Trump's lawless, authoritarian behavior. The administration, she observes, “is pretty flagrantly playing in the face of district court judges, defying orders, subverting the district court, and lying to district courts. The Supreme Court is aware of all this and they seem not to be bothered by it.”

“Time and time again,” notes Madiba K. Dennie of Balls & Strikes, “a district court judge orders the Trump administration to follow the law, the administration asks the Court to let it keep breaking the law, and the Court grants the administration’s request.”

In sum, at the same time that it has ignored the Constitution and disregarded statutory law, the Roberts majority has selectively hobbled Democrats while enabling Trump and his party to destroy the republic.

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No Confidence

Legal scholars are having a tough time explaining to their law students why they should lend the Supreme Court any credibility at all. This is not a new development. In 2008, Larry Kramer resigned as Dean of Stanford Law School in response to the Court’s decision in District of Columbia v. Heller.

Heller amounted to a wholesale rewriting of the Second Amendment. The amendment grants the right to bear arms not to anyone who wants a gun but only to the members of a “well regulated Militia.” Heller ignores this text, along with decades of judicial precedent, and grants the right of gun ownership to anyone who meets the regulatory requirements of their state.

“I couldn’t stand up in front of the class and pretend the students should take the court seriously,” Kramer said of the decision.

But that was almost twenty years ago. Now, a growing number of scholars are at their wits’ end. “While I was working on my syllabus for this course, I literally burst into tears,” Rebecca Brown of the University of Southern California recounted. Brown, who has been teaching law for 35 years, “couldn’t figure out how any of this makes sense. Why do we respect it? Why do we do any of it?”

“Flat-out bonkers,” Sandy Levinson, a professor at the University of Texas law school, remarked on Clarence Thomas’s 2022 decision in New York State Rifle & Pistol Association Inc. v. Bruen. Bruen went even further than Heller by effectively banning all laws restricting gun ownership. “I try to imagine, what if this were a seminar paper?” he said of Thomas’s distorted reasoning.

Lee Epstein, of the University of Southern California, agrees. “It sounds almost crazy when you put it that way, doesn’t it?” he said of Bruen. He was referring to Justice Thomas’s historically illiterate effort to identify a precedent for the decision in English common law. “It’s made-up history. No sense of judicial humility.”

The general public might lack these scholars’ expertise. But it can still recognize the Court’s unapologetic hypocrisy, glaring dishonesty, and shameless corruption for what it is.

Over the past few decades, Gallup has surveyed respondents in more than 160 countries on their views of their judicial systems. A December poll found a stunning drop in public confidence in America’s judiciary, which declined a full 24 percentage points from 2020 to 2024, down from 59 to 35 percent.

Only nine other countries in the entire history of the poll have experienced sharper falls than the US.

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Annals of Disgrace

The shameful record of the Court in its most recent term is consistent with its equally ignominious decisions in previous years.

One of many such examples was its evisceration of the Voting Rights Act, the most important legislative act in American history. Its passage in 1965 marked the fulfillment of the Constitution’s century-old promise of multiracial democracy.

Alternatively, consider the Court’s decision in Trump v. United States (2024). By granting Trump a get-out-of-jail-free card for his many crimes in his first term, it repudiated the core principle underpinning the American experiment: that the people shall not be subject to elected kings.

Or take Dobbs v. Jackson (2022), which ruled that people who become pregnant do not enjoy the rights that the Constitution plainly affords them.

It is evil enough to force those who consented to have sex give birth against their will. But consigning them to die preventable deaths by bleeding out in hospital parking lots? Or making child rape victims carry their assailants’ offspring to term? That is downright barbaric.

The extraordinary burden pregnancy imposes on a person, much less that involved in raising a child, makes abortion bans impossible to defend—at least if one accepts that women are actual people as opposed to “incubators with mouthparts,” to borrow Elie Mystal’s eloquent framing.

In Allow Me to Retort: A Black Guy's Guide to the Constitution, Mystal, the justice correspondent for The Nation magazine, argues compellingly that forced birth is indefensible under any circumstances. It is indefensible on moral grounds. It is indefensible on “originalist” grounds, meaning as a doctrine that the Founders would have endorsed. And it is indefensible on Constitutional grounds.

Contrary to the conceit of Republican Supreme Court justices, Mystal says, one cannot possibly argue that the Constitution’s drafters somehow valued the lives of the unborn:

Don’t you dare fix your lying mouth to tell me that these people who condemned their own progeny to bondage and torment, for the sin of being conceived in the womb of a colored woman—a woman they would continue to work and rape while she was pregnant with their child—gave one damn about the health and safety of “the unborn.”

But that is not all. For not only are abortion bans inconsistent with the Founders’ priorities; they violate the Constitution itself. Forced birth, by any reasonable standard, flouts the Eighth Amendment’s prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment. It likewise contravenes the Thirteenth Amendment’s ban on forced labor.

And let us not forget the Fourteenth Amendment, which guarantees equality under the law. If, again, we accept the principle that women are people, as men are, Mystal contends, then we can hardly deny reproductive freedom to one of those categories while affording it to the other.

We Don’t Need the Supreme Court

Most Americans, especially those who came of age during the late twentieth century, view the Supreme Court as an important, if flawed, guarantor of individual rights. But this perception stems from a relatively brief period in the middle of the century when the Court, under Chief Justice Earl Warren, actually fulfilled its liberal, egalitarian potential.

This era, which lasted from 1953 to 1969 and also encompassed a handful of years that followed, was the one that gave us such hallowed decisions as Brown v. Board of Education (1954), which ended racial segregation; Loving v. Virginia (1967), which legalized interracial marriage; and Roe v. Wade (1973), which made abortion the law of the land.

But as we will see next time, the Supreme Court did not advance freedom and inequality during the rest of its history. Far from it, in fact; it enabled the powerful and abetted their assault on human dignity.

In this regard, the Roberts Court has further—and radically—brought the judiciary back into line with its sordid past. It has taken the promise set forth in America’s founding documents and made a mockery of it.

Those of us who take this promise seriously are under no obligation to respect a reactionary judicial cabal that pisses on it year after year. By enabling Trump’s bid for dictatorship, the Court’s rightwing majority has relinquished any legitimate claim to rule over us.

Fortunately, there are remedies that can check its excesses—ones that will not only prove effective but, in a post-Trump world, become increasingly realistic. Next time, we will consider what these remedies are.

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Timothy Snyder, for Thinking About…, on how concentration camps and slave labor might be coming to America.

John Ganz, for Unpopular Front, on the implications of Trump's attack on birthright citizenship.

Anne Applebaum, for The Atlantic, on what happens when Trump's revolution runs into obstacles.

Spencer Ackerman, for Zeteo, on the racist moral panic over New York mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdami.

Robert McCoy, for The New Republic, on the astounding expansion of ICE that is in store now that Trump's budget bill has passed.

When an incumbent leader is unpopular, the opposition usually reaps the dividends. This is not happening for the Democratic Party, however. The reason is obvious: In the face of an unprecedented authoritarian power-grab, the party is widely—and correctly—perceived as not putting up a fight.

The stunning victory of Zohran Mamdani, a democratic socialist, in New York City’s mayoral primary last week is just the latest example. The significance of his triumph is hard to overstate.

Despite suffering an extreme disadvantage in funding and an all-out assault from the party establishment, wealthy donors, and prominent news outlets, he still won—and won decisively. He did so on the back of a multiracial, cross-class coalition that extended to places where one would not expect a far-left politician to succeed, such as Manhattan’s posh Upper East Side and working-class neighborhoods in Queens.

Mamdani’s victory is not an outlier. From the start of Donald Trump’s second term, the Democratic rank-and-file has been in open rebellion against a feckless party establishment that is seemingly oblivious to America’s new authoritarian reality.

When an opposition party suddenly faces a would-be dictator who is upending the constitutional order, it can take a while to find its bearings. Having studied similar situations in other countries, however, I do understand how it works.

To be sure, authoritarianism poses serious obstacles for the opposition. But it also creates opportunities—especially when the authoritarian leader in question is an incompetent, self-aggrandizing nitwit with no impulse control.

At the same time, if the opposition is too slow to adapt, it can find itself overtaken by events. This, unfortunately, is the path the Democrats are currently on. Absent a fundamental rethinking of their approach, they run the risk of being left behind by the movement they are supposed to lead.

The warning signs are everywhere. But so are the solutions.

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And so it happened. On Saturday evening, President Donald Trump announced that American forces bombed several Iranian nuclear sites.

For the past week, Israel has been carrying out its own airstrikes in the country, targeting nuclear facilities, assassinating regime figures, and destroying apartment buildings.

The ostensible purpose of Israel’s attacks was to damage Iran’s nuclear program and enlist America's help in doing so. It might well have succeeded, too.

But a closer look suggests that this was not the intention after all. If the goal was to undermine Tehran’s nuclear capabilities, for example, why the need to obliterate civilian apartment complexes?

Not only that, but there is no evidence that Iran was any closer to developing a nuclear weapon yesterday than it was one year, two years, or three years ago. In fact, it has been on the cusp of acquiring such a weapon for the past sixteen years—which is another way of saying that it was not on the cusp of doing anything.

Iran could build a nuclear weapon if it wanted to. It could have built one as far back as 2009 had it been so inclined. And yet, it did not.

Note the date on the following headline:

So ludicrous are the rationales put forth by the war’s proponents, and so disastrous the potential consequences, that two things are clear.

First, the people who have been urging a US attack are full of shit.

Second, the only ones who stand to benefit are Benjamin Netanyahu, for whom the war serves as a personal vanity project and legal defense tactic, and the various warlords who would emerge in the wake of the Iranian regime's collapse.

How do I know this, you ask? Let's take a look.

To start with the obvious, nobody, including the United States, is going to invade and conquer Iran.

An invasion from the east is impossible, as it would have to be launched from Afghanistan and in turn require the cooperation of the Taliban. Even then, the US would have to move an army across the eastern mountains and then through the vast deserts of Dasht-e Lut and Dasht-e Kavir.

Invading from the west is just as implausible, as it would mean traversing the towering Zagros mountain range. Those mountains, along with others, protect Iran’s Persian Gulf Coast stretching southeast toward the Gulf of Oman.

Meanwhile, the one part of the country that is not buffeted by mountains is comprised of impenetrable swampland.

Even if American forces somehow made it through Iran's imposing exterior, they would find an interior dominated by uninhabitable desert plateaus.

That is not to mention the challenges of invading and pacifying a country three times as populous as Iraq and with a territory larger than France, Germany, Spain, Portugal, Belgium, and the Netherlands combined.

All in all, it would necessitate a force of 1.6 million troops. By comparison, the highest number of US troops that were ever present in Iraq was 180,000.

In other words, an invasion is not happening.

Nuclear Resilience

If a ground invasion is out, that leaves an aerial assault like the one we just witnessed as the only option. But no such attack could permanently eliminate Iran's nuclear capability. While American bombs might have destroyed its existing nuclear infrastructure, the country still possesses the technological know-how to revive the program within a few years.

“Even if there was a complete destruction of all of Iran's enrichment capability,” explains Joe Cirincione, an expert on the country’s nuclear program, “when the war was over, Iran could start building it back up again.”

In fact, Trump's military intervention makes it more, not less, likely that Iran will develop nuclear weapons. The only reason the regime has not done so already is that it decided that the costs outweighed the benefits. Its goal all along was not to acquire a weapon but to be perpetually in the process of acquiring a weapon. This, as far as the regime was concerned, gave it the most leverage to compel America to remove sanctions while minimizing the possibility of a US attack.

But now that America has (supposedly) destroyed its nuclear facilities—a move which, again, only amounts to a temporary setback—the regime’s calculus will likely change. Since the US would not make a deal, Iran’s leadership might decide that the way forward is to obtain actual nukes.

This fact should be obvious to any reasonably intelligent and informed observer—someone, in particular, like Benjamin Netanyahu. And it probably is. Yet, he nonetheless went ahead with a plan that undermines his country’s national interests.

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Collapse and Civil War

Another potential outcome of the war, especially if Trump launches more attacks, is the end of the Iranian regime. This would appear to be Netanyahu’s real aim.

But contrary to what Israeli and American officials would like you to believe, bringing down the regime would not benefit either country. While Trump might be too stupid to understand this, Netanyahu is not.

After all, we have a recent example of an American war that successfully brought about regime change in a Middle Eastern country. The 2003 invasion of Iraq did not produce a new and stable US ally but instead resulted in its violent collapse and the eventual rise of ISIS.

There is no reason to think that the attack on Iran will turn out any better. Far from it, in fact; the consequences might be orders of magnitude worse. The toppling of Saddam Hussein resulted in prolonged and violent conflict among Iraq’s Sunni, Shia, and Kurdish communities. Iran is divided along similar lines, with a Shia majority concentrated in the country’s center, a Sunni minority in the north, west, and southeast, and a Kurdish minority in the west and northeast.

But it gets even more complicated than that. In addition to those three groups, Iran is host to a number of others as well, including Azeris in the northwest, Arabs in the southwest, and Baloch in the southeast, to name a few.

Many of these minorities are resentful toward regime policies which have long favored the Shia Muslim and ethnic Persian majority at the expense of the others. Hence, if the regime does collapse, expect a complex and brutally violent civil war to break out as most if not all of these groups have a go at independence.

In a society as divided as Iran's, the collapse of the state can result in staggering levels of death and destruction. The reason is that rival communities start operating according to a “kill them before they kill us” logic.

That is not all, however. Aside from sectarian and ethnic violence, the country could witness a separate war between rival elite factions from the old regime.

Nor would the effects of a civil war be limited to Iran. Such conflicts tend to destabilize neighboring countries, too. For one thing, they trigger the large-scale exodus of refugees. For example, as Shia refugees pour into Iraq, it would upset that country’s own sectarian balance and tip it back into civil war. The same could happen if masses of ethnic Kurds take refuge in Turkey and Iranian Azeris move into Armenia and Azerbaijan.

But refugee crises are not the only way in which an Iranian civil war would affect its neighbors. The sight of ethnic and sectarian bloodshed in Iran would cause dangerous tensions between the same groups in other places.

If Kurds and Azeris start killing each other in Iran, it could lead to revenge killings between Turkey’s Kurdish and Turkish communities, the latter of whom regard Azeris as their own. Violence among Iran’s Sunnis and Shias could have the same effect in Iraq, Syria, and Lebanon, all of which feature sectarian conflicts of their own.

Moreover, if the collapse of Iraq gave us ISIS, what new barbaric terrorist organization would Iran’s disintegration produce?

Oh, and let us not forget the hundreds of pounds of highly enriched uranium that could be sold on the black market in the event of a regime collapse and civil war.

Nice, huh?

What makes America's intervention even more destabilizing is its likely impact on the global supply of oil. One reason the US never attacked Iran before is the likelihood that the regime would retaliate by shutting down the flow of oil through the Strait of Hormuz— the 34-kilometer-wide waterway that connects the Persian Gulf to the Gulf of Oman and through which travels fully one-quarter of the world’s oil supply.

Which of these myriad disasters are you most looking forward to? An emboldened regime that doubles down on its quest for nuclear weapons? A collapsed regime that unleashes war, instability, and black-market uranium on the rest of the region? The oil shock that ensues either way?

Finally, would any of these things somehow further the national interests of America or Israel?

The question answers itself.

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Damsel In Distress

There is only one person who will actually benefit from Trump's attack, and that is Benjamin Netanyahu.

You see, Netanyahu is in trouble. He has two problems, in particular. The first is his ongoing corruption trial, the outcome of which he wants to delay for as long as possible. The best way to do that is by staying in power, and to stay in power, he must keep initiating new crises and new wars—wars like the one he started with Iran.

Netanyahu's dependence on new wars stems from his second problem: October 7^th, 2023. That day, as Hamas militants stormed out of Gaza and massacred scores of Israelis, the entire security paradigm he had painstakingly built throughout his time in power collapsed.

In the years leading up to the attack, he and his allies shifted their focus to annexing the West Bank, having convinced themselves that they had successfully pacified Gaza. This was a grave miscalculation on Netanyahu's part, one which put his legacy in jeopardy and raised the question of why he should remain prime minister at all.

To save himself, he needed redemption. His genocidal assault on Gaza’s Palestinians was one way of achieving this. More than a year and a half later, however, he is no longer getting the same mileage out of it that he once did.

In the meantime, he faces sagging approval ratings and rising opposition from within his ruling coalition. As a result, he stands on the precipice of losing power once again—or at least he did before he attacked Iran. Now, with his approval picking back up and his opponents rallying behind him, he might yet survive.

If the US intervention succeeded in destroying Iran’s nuclear assets and ends up bringing down its regime, Netanyahu might finally redeem his earlier mistakes and salvage his reputation.

This, after all, is the only reason we even got to this point—well, that and a weak American president who can be easily manipulated into doing stupid things. Let us hope that the worst fails to happen.

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Share The Detox with Neil Abrams

President Donald Trump’s decision to deploy National Guard troops against peaceful protesters in Los Angeles last week marks a further step in a months-long power grab which has been stunning in its speed and breadth.

His administration is “much more aggressively authoritarian than almost any other comparable case I know of democratic backsliding,” notes Harvard political scientist Steven Levitsky. “The long-term implications of the second Trump administration are sobering,” warns Thomas Pepinsky, a professor of government at Cornell. “Even critical observers underestimated the speed and scope of the Trumpist assault and overestimated [America’s] democratic resilience,” Thomas Zimmer, a historian at Georgetown, confirms.

Assessments like these could easily lend themselves to despair; if even the experts are shocked, is there any hope that America might emerge from its authoritarian abyss?

Lost amidst the gloom is a critical point: If no other modern-day autocrat has attacked so many democratic institutions so quickly, there is a good reason for that: It is stupid.

Dismantling democracy in one fell swoop runs the risk of backlash. This would be true anywhere. Trying it in the United States, of all places, is downright reckless. Compared to other countries that succumbed to authoritarianism, America’s civil society is unmatched in its capacity to resist.

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Civil society refers to the various groups which represent the people in relation to the state. The labor unions, political parties, non-governmental organizations, and social movements that comprise civil society often act as a bulwark against authoritarianism by organizing resistance to executive overreach.

As a result, most aspiring autocrats tread carefully when forging their regimes. Leaders such as Venezuela’s Hugo Chávez, Hungary’s Viktor Orbán, India’s Narendra Modi, and Turkey’s Recep Erdoğan tended to attack opposing centers of power incrementally instead of all at once. This enabled them to keep their opponents divided while avoiding the brutal crackdowns that might galvanize civil society against them.

Trump has thrown such caution to the wind. He has seized Congressional authority, treated judicial rulings as if they are optional, and weaponized the state against businesses, universities, media outlets, state governments, Democratic officeholders, Democratic fundraising organs, former officials who investigated him, and law firms that worked for his opponents.

Trump and his allies have also intimidated and arrested judges, threatened critics with prosecution, subjected the LGBTQ+ community to administrative harassment, lawlessly deported people without due process, and detained immigrants, green card holders, citizens, and the lawyers representing them on speech grounds.

Now, in a sign of further escalation, he has unleashed troops against protesters in America's streets.

Other authoritarian leaders have undertaken similar measures. But few have attempted them all within a year of taking office, much less the first three months. This is not the 1930s, when leaders such as Hitler could suspend the constitution and abolish civil liberties in their first one hundred days. Today, there is a widespread expectation, supported by a global network of international law, organizations, and states, that governments will adhere to certain minimum democratic standards.

Trump pays such norms little heed. What’s more, because the institutionalists who reined him in during his first administration are gone, there are few internal constraints that can stop him from escalating his repression. But as his abuses mount, so will the potential for backlash.

The question, then, is not whether America can withstand this onslaught; it is whether Trump can sustain it. His rash authoritarianism will prove dangerous to the rest of us. But it will also create opportunities.

Consider Ukraine, where demonstrations erupted in November 2013 against the pro-Russian foreign policy of President Viktor Yanukovych. Instead of letting the protests fizzle out over the approaching winter, Yanukovych responded with indiscriminate violence. This turned what had been a limited movement in the capital into a nationwide revolt against his regime. Within months, he would abandon the country and flee to Russia.

Now, Trump seems poised to undertake a crackdown of his own. But it will likely backfire. As Yanukovych learned, unbridled repression often has the opposite of its intended effect, causing protests to spiral beyond the government’s control.

Civil society mobilization has helped spur the demise of autocrats the world over. In contexts as diverse as Bolivia, Brazil, the Maldives, Poland, Slovenia, South Korea, and Zambia, protest movements either directly ousted authoritarian strongmen or precipitated huge election victories by the opposition.

For Trump, the problem is especially dire. This is because the civil society he is up against is far stronger, denser, and well-resourced than that faced by any other modern-day autocrat. The Civil Society Participation Index compiled by the V-Dem Institute measures the robustness of civil society in every country in the world. Each country is rated on a scale from 0 to 1, with higher scores indicating a more vigorous civil society.

The year before their respective autocrats came to power, Russia, Belarus, and Turkey rated comparably low, in the range of 0.58 to 0.65. Others ranked higher, including Hungary (0.77), Venezuela (0.82), and India (0.84). Still, none came close to the U.S., which boasts a near-perfect score of 0.98.

The combination of Trump’s recklessness and civil society’s strength will eventually lead to a showdown, one that he is unlikely to win.

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America’s civil society does have its skeptics. Some experts point to the readiness of its elite members, such as media owners, universities, and big corporations, to shrink in the face of Trump’s threats.

Among the grassroots, however, anger is mounting—and with it, resistance. The early months of Trump’s second term have featured nearly three times the number of protest events compared to the same period of his first, according to Harvard’s Crowd Consortium Project.

And that was before the “No Kings” demonstrations last weekend. According to an analysis by Strength In Numbers, Saturday’s protests were the largest in US history, with 4-6 million people, or 1.2-1.8 percent of the population, coming out. And yet, we are only a few months into Trump's term.

If “No Kings” proved anything, it is that there is a real potential for a sustained, nonviolent uprising.

But in order to succeed, this movement will require leadership. Fortunately, civil society elites are beginning to show some mettle. While many have tried to appease Trump, a growing number of universities, religious leaders, and law firms are banding together and fighting back.

Still, the ones best positioned to lead the resistance are the Democrats. With some notable exceptions, however, they have failed to meet the moment. As Trump’s assault on democracy gains steam, much of the party continues to prioritize pocketbook issues like healthcare and inflation in hopes of appealing to the broadest possible cross-section of voters.

This approach is predicated on the assumption that democracy will continue to function as always. It will not. America has transitioned to an authoritarian regime. This means that elections, while critical, are no longer enough to remove an incumbent GOP president—not unless they are accompanied by nonviolent, nationwide civil resistance.

From now on, the influence of the median voter will be outstripped by that of the median protester, an individual more likely to be motivated by the attack on rights than the price of eggs. The Democrats must tailor their strategy accordingly.

As Trump ratchets up the repression, the movement against his regime will grow. One way or another, it will find leaders. The Democrats can either get on board or get booed off the stage.

Countries like Bolivia, Brazil, Poland, and South Korea show how opposition parties that take charge of anti-authoritarian movements can make all the difference in defeating such regimes. Right now, America’s civil society is rising even in the absence of robust Democratic leadership. Imagine what it could do if the Democrats step up.

Far from despairing, we should see Trump for what he is: a weak, vulnerable autocrat who is hopelessly outmatched by the society he is trying to subdue. Americans have more than enough might to defeat him. The only question is whether they have the will.

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Share The Detox with Neil Abrams

Yesterday, the New York Times reported on an ICE raid in Montebello, California which appeared to target Latino citizens solely because of the color of their skin.

The raid took place last Thursday, when ICE agents descended on the predominantly Latino working-class suburb of Los Angeles. Their target was a car lot which hosts a number of auto body shops and tow-truck businesses. Video footage shows the agents bracing employees against the wall and, in one case, tackling someone to the ground. The questions they asked suggest that they were not searching for anyone in particular and were instead trying to ascertain the citizenship status of the people who work there.

In other words, the agents saw a bunch of Brown people in a particular place and presumed that at least some of them would be undocumented.

Commenting about the article on Bluesky, Ami Fields-Meyer, a senior fellow at Harvard’s Kennedy School, addressed “my Jewish community,” asking why he could find so little opposition to the Trump administration's racist policies:

The US government is rounding people up based on their skin color, and many of the old guard Jewish organizations that have been most vocal about feelings of abandonment from other ethnic minority groups are nowhere to be found. Total silence.

He makes a valid point. Since Hamas's terrorist attacks on October 7^th, 2023, some Jewish organizations have expressed dismay at the lack of sympathy for Jews on the part of Black and Brown people. But the organizations can themselves be accused of ignoring racism against others, a trend which began well before October 7^th.

It gets worse than that, however. Organizations like the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) have not only turned away from combating racism against other groups; they have increasingly allied with the very forces doing the racism—namely, Donald Trump and the Republican Party.

Earlier this month, The Forward reported on a particularly unhinged speech by ADL chief Jonathan Greenblatt to an audience of Republican attorneys general. “You have people hiding their faces behind scarves and keffiyehs like they’re in ISIS,” he complained in a reference to pro-Palestine college protesters, adding that they have been “storming libraries, vandalizing buildings and literally—I’m not exaggerating—terrorizing their classmates.”

Doubling down on the comparison of protesters to terrorists, he described the students as “frothing at the mouth, looking like they just came out of Mosul” (the site of a battle against the Islamic State in Iraq). Lest anyone mistake the implication, he declared that “the Founding Fathers didn’t want al-Qaida right running rampant on our streets.”

While he did acknowledge antisemitism on the right, he scorned the notion that it is “a problem on all sides.” Instead, he maintained, the “real deal threat” was “this convergence of what I call the radical left and, like, Islamist groups here in the U.S.”

Last year's campus protests witnessed far too many antisemitic incidents, as I have written in the past. But the notion that a majority of the protesters were motivated by anti-Jewish sentiment cannot be defended—not least because a substantial number of the participants were Jewish themselves.

Despite what Greenblatt claims and many others believe, college students are no more antisemitic than the broader population, according to the two most systematic surveys that have addressed the subject. Both studies were carried out after the October 7^th, 2023 attacks.

Prejudicial antisemitism, or the holding of negative stereotypes toward Jews (e.g. “Jews have too much power in the United States today”), finds no more support among college students than the general public and is a distinctly minority attitude among both groups.

Violent antisemitism, or the belief that Jews deserve to be violently attacked, finds even less agreement and displays no notable differences between students and the public at large.

Anti-Zionism, on the other hand, is far more prevalent among university students than the general public. But the surveys also found very little overlap between those who hold antisemitic views and those with anti-Zionist ones. This suggests that the two sentiments are not, in fact, equivalent—which makes sense, given that support for a single state in Palestine that affords equal rights to Jews and Palestinians can hardly be said to reflect any anti-Jewish animus.

The same surveys find that the vast majority of college students—between 70 and 77 percent—believe that advocating genocide against Jews is unacceptable. Granted, the fact that the other 23 to 30 percent would at least tolerate such calls is concerning. But contrary to Greenblatt, the notion that college campuses are hotbeds of antisemitism is just plain wrong.

As for where the biggest threat to Jews lies today, the evidence points squarely to the political right—the very group with whom Greenblatt and the ADL find such common cause. Another survey of predominantly young Americans does identify “evidence of prejudice on the ideological left and among racial minority groups.” At the same time, it concludes, “the data clearly show the epicenter of antisemitic attitudes is young adults on the far right.”

Indeed, for all its Zionist window dressing, the Republican Party is home to a shocking number of antisemites, including Donald Trump himself. They are not the type who valorize Hamas, of course. Instead, they are the old-school, blood-and-soil variety—the kind that thinks the government is controlled by a secret Jewish cabal bent on destroying the volk.

Yet, these are precisely the forces with whom the ADL seeks to align us.

But there is a reason why Greenblatt and the ADL work so hard to form alliances on the antisemitic right—and why like-minded Jewish organizations find a welcome home there: Both have committed themselves to the oppression of Brown people. The ADL offers unflinching support to Israel and what scores of human rights experts and organizations have determined to be its genocidal assault on Gaza. Meanwhile, the Republican Party and its activist base are trying to remake America in the name of white power.

It makes sense, therefore, that the two sides find so much common ground.

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