Fascism and Bad Faith

Coups Aren’t What They Used To Be

There is no longer a singular bright line that countries cross between democracy and authoritarianism.

Maybe you, like me, sometimes stare out your kitchen window and wonder how the game can be played, how dinner can be made, how the recycling can go to the curb, how the kids can be shuttled back and forth from practice, how the newspaper can operate as it always has while the United States government is being conquered by a malicious foreign entity.

Toggling between the latest developments in competitive authoritarianism and football stats and horror movie reviews and four Supreme Court justices refusing to recognize Article I of the U.S. Constitution is not as fun as I thought it would be. America's Golden Age, so far, is not fun at all.

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Elon Musk’s coup of the federal government enters its sixth week with no end in sight beyond an incoherent social media post from the president about Musk’s evolving role in dismantling the country. Republican senators are asking Musk for permission to do their jobs, and for reasons known to someone out there, our egomaniacal president continues sharing the spotlight with the world’s richest man, even letting Musk and his mother, Cruella de Vil – who is accepting bribes from a range of autocratic governments – use Marine One, the president’s goddamn helicopter.

A grotesque image that should radicalize every American who has even a sliver of pride in their country.

(I fully planned on highlighting a heartening example of federal employees at the U.S. African Development Foundation outright refusing entry to Musk’s DOGE hackers as they continue their highly illegal assault on government agencies. I ditched those plans when the DOGE bros – who had scurried away after a simple “no” from the agency’s workers – came back with armed government agents. The explicit threat of violence allowed Musk’s technofascists to gain entry to the foundation, change its locks, and stop its funding of economic development in African nations.)

The best way to understand Musk’s DOGE apparatus is as a foreign invader that has worked its way into every crevice of the American government, defying court orders along the way. Their aim is to replace our government with artificial intelligence designed to offer policy solutions that favor the fascist cause and its corporate partners. That much is not a secret, yet you won’t read about it in the newspaper. The Washington Post has fallen to a roided-up businessman with no politics outside of making the line go up and the New York Times refuses to stop covering politics like it’s 1999.

Those engaged in some semblance of civic life understand what’s going on. Along with foreign leaders aghast at the inaction of our politicos and the total absence of an opposition party, these engaged, informed folks – thousands of whom gathered in D.C. on President’s Day to protest Musk's coup – are fully aware that we have exited our status as a democracy and entered a period of competitive authoritarianism. This, as you know, is not well understood and certainly not widely accepted among the American public because mainstream media outlets have not covered the transition with sufficient urgency, or really at all.

The game has changed. You wouldn’t know it if you opened the newspaper.

Salami Tactics And The Tricks Of Modern Authoritarianism

Fifty or a hundred years ago, a coup happened when an opposition party or the military or some combination of the two would storm into government buildings with lots of guns and bluster and inform the nation's rightful leaders that they were no longer in charge. Sometimes this would include killing a leader or two or fifty, or dragging the poor bastards to prison as a signal to the public that they too would get that treatment if they spoke out against these strongman tactics.

There was, back then, no question as to whether a coup had occurred. Before the widespread adoption of democratic norms, coups had a timestamp. Everyone knew when they had happened. The newspaper could print big, bold headlines saying in no uncertain terms that a government had been overthrown, that self governance had been halted. It was a simple exercise: Extra, extra! Guys with guns took power today in brazenly illegal fashion! (I hope you also did your best old timey newsboy voice)

It’s been way more fucking complicated over the past few decades for the press to identify if and when a coup has happened. Consider it an evolution of authoritarianism, which in its purest form was roundly rejected in the 20th century. Authoritarians had to learn to operate within the confines of a world that had (mostly) accepted democracy as the only viable governing system. That’s why Russian Dictator Vladimir Putin still runs for office and his conquered nation still holds unfair and unfree elections and Russia still has a constitution (that has been altered to allow Putin to remain in power until he falls from the mortal coil). It’s why Hungarian Dictator Viktor Orban, a longtime favorite of the American right, can still be called president.

In learning to navigate democratic systems and norms to achieve their vile anti-democratic goals, authoritarians have also learned to trick the media into operating as usual even as authoritarian coups happen in broad fucking daylight, as we’re seeing with Musk’s anti-American digital army. Coups over the past thirty years or so have been of the slow motion variety. There was no timestamp on Russia’s or Hungary’s fall into all-out authoritarianism, just as there will be no timestamp for Germany’s fall if our fascist government keeps supporting dangerous far-right parties there.

What we are seeing in the US today are classic so-called salami tactics used by authoritarian regimes the world over in the postwar era. These tactics are a big reason why major media outlets are not grasping the threat Musk and Trump pose to American self governance (in that they have ended it, perhaps temporarily).

Researchers from Protect Democracy, an nonpartisan anti-authoritarian organization seeking to build more resilient democratic institutions across the world, have long urged journalists – especially those in countries for which authoritarianism is new – to better comprehend how anti-democracy forces take over in the modern age.

“By using ‘salami tactics,’ slicing away at democracy a sliver at a time, modern authoritarians still cement themselves in power, but they do so incrementally and gradually. Sometimes their actions are deliberate and calculated, but sometimes they are opportunistic, myopic, or even bumbling,” Protect Democracy researchers wrote back in 2022. “There is no longer a singular bright line that countries cross between democracy and authoritarianism. But the outcome is still the same.”

Contemporary democratic breakdowns are far more difficult to identify because — in snapshots — they can mimic the typical acts of political jockeying to gain advantage that are routine even in healthy democracies. But especially as these acts accumulate and intensify, hard-nosed politics can cross a line into authoritarian threats. Unfortunately, there is no simple bright-line answer or mechanical test to distinguish between the two. … Covering the authoritarian danger requires that the press do two things: understand the interlocking components of the authoritarian playbook itself, and distinguish between normal political jockeying and genuine authoritarian moves.

Nobel-prize winning economist Thomas Schelling has pointed to anti-democracy salami tactics as the strategy of a kid who wants to test their boundaries. With every violation of a supposed boundary, the child is emboldened to go further, to see if any boundaries exist, and if anyone is willing to enforce them.

Salami tactics, we can be sure, were invented by a child. Tell a child not to go in the water and he’ll sit on the bank and submerge his bare feet; he is not yet ‘in’ the water. Acquiesce, and he’ll stand up; no more of him is in the water than before. Think it over, and he’ll start wading, not going any deeper; take a moment to decide whether this is different and he’ll go a little deeper, arguing that since he goes back and forth it all averages out. Pretty soon we are calling to him not to swim put of sight, wondering whatever happened to all our discipline.

American journalists as a whole do not understand the aforementioned authoritarian playbook. This becomes agonizingly clear when you peruse mainstream outlets and see pundits and columnists casually opining about the political consequences and reconfiguration of an American military takeover of Canada, a concept that did not even exist six weeks ago. For so many journalists brought up in the safety and existential comfort of a democratic republic with guardrails we believed to be strong (invincible?), this is but a game, a fun little mental exercise and grist for a whirring conveyer belt of nonstop content to be mindlessly produced and consumed by a public inured to the dangers that now surround it from every angle.

It could not happen here, these journalists still somehow think. Meanwhile, almost seven in ten Americans as of two years ago believed democracy was “at risk of falling.”

Organizations like Protect Democracy have all but begged American news outlets during the Trump era to educate themselves about how and why democracies falter and cease to exist (I say this with the important caveat that no democracy that has existed for at least 50 years has ever fallen into outright authoritarian rule). They have pointed to the politicization of independent institutions, the scapegoating of vulnerable people, the nonstop spread of disinformation – made all the easier when your ally, the richest man on earth, controls the political discourse via algorithm – and the overt aggrandizing of executive power as critical parts of the postwar authoritarian playbook. All of these tactics are being rubbed in our faces every waking moment of every fucking day and there is still no concrete dot connecting among major American media outlets.

Protect Democracy scholars have for years warned U.S. journalists that the inherent vulnerabilities of the First Amendment would make the authoritarian spread of disinformation nearly impossible to contain. Despite these warnings – and despite bad-faith free speech warriors ensuring free speech consumes itself – the far right’s hostile takeover of the information ecosystem has become part of the background, nothing to be alarmed about. All speech is equally good and bad, for there is no difference between good and bad things, you moron.

American media’s total failure to comprehend our current emergency was not for lack of warning. Pro-democracy groups that have documented how other nations have been taken over, piece by piece, have offered journalistic best practices for how an independent media can inform that public that they are being well and truly fucked by people who hate them and their country. This advice includes:

-Beware of the illusory truth effect, wherein disinformation can be inadvertently spread by stories that aim to debunk it. Impressions of truth come from hearing repeated claims, regardless of context. Strictly avoid headlines that repeat false claims, even if contextualized, as disinformation spreads best through momentary impressions.

Instead we get headline after headline repeating exactly what Trump and Musk say, cementing their proclamations as reality for tens of millions of Americans. There is zero understanding of the power of repetition in forging reality itself.

-Cover disinformation as a story, not just a statement. Investigate and illuminate the systems, motives, funding, mechanisms, and actors spreading lies.

We get some of this from Pro Publica and Wired and intrepid independent journalists and sometimes NYT, but not nearly enough to expose the intentionally incorrect information being poured into the public consciousness.

That no American journalist has ever had the displeasure of covering a coup of the U.S. government probably means we're in for years of failing to properly inform the voting public of what has happened to their country. The salami tactics, in other words, will continue until morale improves.

I would plead with Bad Faith Times readers to not be gaslighted about what is happening all around you right now. I know how it is: You're staring blankly out that kitchen window, not seeing the squirrel dashing away with its precious nut, not seeing the leafless tree swaying in the merciless ice wind, but wondering if you are in fact crazy. This is me ensuring you that you are not crazy, because I'm not crazy either. It's the undocumented, mostly unacknowledged ongoing coup of your government that makes you feel this way. Our country, for now, is unequipped to handle this overthrow institutionally, psychologically, and in all ways.

Follow Denny Carter on BlueSky at @dennycarter.bsky.social.