We Will Not Comply

Donald Trump, Kevin Roberts and their fascistic Project 2025 gang want to scare you into submission. Don't let them.

As a Trump motorcade passes by. (Photo by Yuri Gripas/AFP via Getty Images)

Kevin D. Roberts, president of the increasingly far-right Heritage Foundation and a central advocate for Project 2025, wants you to be scared. More than that, Roberts wants you to feel resigned, overwhelmed, unable to withstand the extremist onslaught and unwilling to fight back against it. He also wants you to believe that—if you refuse to accept what he, Donald Trump and the rest of the rogue’s gallery of anti-democratic extremists are shoving down the throats of the American people—it will be your fault if it leads to extreme force and bloodshed.

Roberts—who speaks in a smooth and pleasing tone that masks the viciousness that is at the heart of his purpose, much like House Speaker Mike Johnson—articulated his thinking during an interview last Tuesday on The War Room. That show is usually hosted by convicted felon Steve Bannon, but Bannon was unavailable to conduct the interview because he went to prison the previous day for contempt of Congress.

The dangerously self-important Roberts insisted that the country is “in the process of the second American Revolution” and further noted that this so-called revolution “will remain bloodless if the left allows it to be.”

Get the point? It’s up to “the left”—which I think includes essentially every Democrat and every other American who rejects their authoritarian agenda—to shut up, lay down and let them do what they want. And if there’s pushback? Well, don’t blame them if the sick menagerie of domestic terrorist groups like the Proud Boys, other paramilitary organizations or even triggered stochastic terrorists feel duty-bound to respond.

I highlight this not to alarm you, rather to remind you that Roberts and his operatives are determined to intimidate all of us before they have any control over the levers of power. I urge you to keep in mind the wise words of Yale professor Timothy Snyder from his bestselling book, On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century. In the first chapter, titled “Do Not Obey in Advance,” Snyder writes:

Most of the power of authoritarianism is freely given. In times like these, individuals think ahead about what a more repressive government will want, and then offer themselves without being asked. A citizen who adapts in this way is teaching power what it can do.

This is surely the ugly game Trump is playing. Year after year he’s pushed the boundaries of the law to see what he can get away with—not just in defiance of the courts and the rule of law, but with a public that may raise its voices in protest but fail to effectively push back. It’s why the failure of leading media organizations to focus aggressively on his lying, his scapegoating and his promise to take office as a dictator—in other words, normalizing what he says, as if it’s not really news anymore—is so dangerous for the survival of democracy.

It’s also why Trump’s huge new lie—that he knows nothing about Project 2025 or the people involved, in order to create deniability right up to and through the election—should be a leading story of every news broadcast and on page one of every newspaper and digital outlet. Despite the fact that a numbers of the project’s authors, organizers and promoters are past or current Trump officials, he wants us to believe that he would not do those terrible things—that is, until we are no longer in the position to successfully thwart him.

Snyder’s sage counsel also brings to mind the similar wisdom of Frederick Douglass in an address, entitled “No Progress Without Struggle,” delivered on August 4, 1857. “Find out just what a people will submit to,” he said, “and you have found out the exact amount of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them; and these will continue till they are resisted with either words or blows, or with both. The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress.”

Do not obey in advance, Snyder says. Do not submit to a tyrant’s injustice, Douglass says. Both warn us that if we do, the tyrants will feel unfettered, free to keep going.

Douglass, an enslaved man who endured unimaginable torture and yet refused to be broken, deserves our devoted attention. He did back then, before the terrible bloodshed of the Civil War, and he surely does now.

Douglass also warns us what we face if we fail to deny Trump and his fellow tyrants the reins of power in November. “Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never has and it never will,” he said. And in those few years before Lincoln’s determination to bring slavery to an end, Douglass foreshadowed the violent future that was coming to make progress possible:

Those who profess to favor freedom and yet deprecate agitation are men who want crops without plowing the ground. They want rain without thunder and lightning. They want the ocean without the roar of its mighty waters. The struggle may be a moral one or it may be a physical one, or it may both moral and physical, but it must be a struggle.

In these days, as the media frenzy over President Biden’s mental acuity continues, let’s keep in mind that the Trumpist tyrants are gleefully plotting their takeover while their beloved leader yearns for carnage and revenge. It remains to be seen who will be prosecuting the case against this danger—although I’m increasingly expecting that Kamala Harris (a former top prosecutor) will be central to that effort, be that as Biden’s vice president or as the presidential nominee.

The task could not be more urgent or more existential in nature for the American democratic project and any version of progress in the years ahead. If Kevin Roberts and Donald Trump have their way and begin their Project 2025 onslaught from the White House—assisted by a rogue and radical Supreme Court—we can expect they will pursue their dictatorial goals shamelessly and cruelly, convinced of their righteous mission.

That includes rounding up and deporting millions of migrants without due process. Loading the civil service with Trump loyalists. Seeking to enact total abortion bans and contraception bans. Cutting Social Security and Medicare. Ending the Affordable Care Act. Ending climate protections. Ending marriage equality. Expanding trillions in tax breaks for the richest Americans. Pushing a hostile interpretation of Christianity in our public schools and government. The Project 2025 list, covered in a 920-page document, goes on and on.

But this is not inevitable. We are not obliged to submit to their injustice or their dark, regressive plan for America. They cannot force us to comply in advance. We still have an election to win to secure the democratic future that we want.

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