Where in the steaming pile dumped on our democracy do you stick in the shovel and begin?

I know that not every Scene4 reader will see things this way, but regardless of one's political seasonings, I think we can all agree that what is happening is a coup, a continuation by other means of what happened on Jan. 6, 2021. This time, the stormers of the building are Elon Musk and Donald Trump, but the goal is the same: the replacement of an American democracy with a Hungarian democracy, the replacement of governance by the people with participatory fascism.

The language available these days to talk about what is going on is not sufficient to the purpose of understanding this. We can see this with the minimal efforts at resistance by the Democrats, whose ideological vocabulary does not have words for tyranny, tyrant, putsch, Bolsheviks, and so on. They're limited by their institutional courtesies and boilerplate and thus will not man the barricades.

What is the language we need? Something of an older language, from older political regimes with starker power differentials: not president but tyrant (or at least king); not "friends" but vassals; not political appointees but myrmidons; not advisers but courtiers; not the electorate but the plebians; not broligarchs but patricians; not the Republican party but sycophants.

This, I think, makes the power dynamics of the groups in play, and thus what losses are at stake, clearer: The king wants all of his myrmidons and courtiers to strip away the rights and privileges won by the plebians so that his vassals and patricians can prosper in ways heretofore unimagined.

There are only two morally legitimate responses to this situation: you go with the king or you go against the king. The choice is where you place the shovel.

The really immediate resistance needed is delay, to give the courts time to exercise their powers. (Zack Beauchamp at Vox had an excellent piece about this.) Delay can come from civil servants refusing to be railroaded, delay can come from organizations fighting the freezes on funding, delay can come from a fusillade of litigation.

But let's understand that these acts will not give enough delay to save us. The only resistance that will get the king to blink is mass demonstrations by the plebians – multitudinous, constant, and rude. Americans can be good at ginning these up – there is a long history of us doing so – but I also fear that many Americans have forgotten how to do this, have lost the taste for doing this – but it really is the only solution to delaying things long enough for institutional powers to come to bear.

This is as far as I can go at the moment. I can't say that if we can build massive shows of resistance to the king and manage to claw back what he has stolen from us that this will somehow be the savior of American democracy. If there is any good that has come from Trump, his feckless egotism has shown how much farther American democracy needs to go to be a real, functioning governance by the people rather than whatever Potemkin thing we have going on today.

The resistance is only the beginning – hopefully the beginning of the end of Trump and his court but also hopefully the beginning of continuing the American experiment of creating a multiethnic, multiracial society which affords a prosperous and healthy life to all its citizens in a state of freedom and camaraderie guided by governance that is competent and civic-minded and infused with a sense of the commonwealth. That has always been the north star of the better American angels of our nature. Be a shame to see it pass away.