Notes form the Circus

09/14/2025

We are falling now. Deeper and deeper. More people can feel it—the vertigo of watching institutions collapse, the nausea of systematic lies becoming official truth, the dread of violence becoming the language of political discourse. A siege mentality is taking hold across the country. People want to know: how does this end?

The truth is, it never ends. Civilization is a process, and it has no conclusion unless we end it. That is a possibility. But nobody should act like it’s inevitable.

The question consuming every conversation, every worried text exchange, every family dinner where politics used to be forbidden: what comes next? The answer depends entirely on choices being made right now, by real people, about whether to maintain democratic culture or surrender it to forces that promise order through domination.

I’m not sure what my right-leaning friends want to have happen now. If I take their rhetoric at face value, it seems they want this big, amorphous group they call “the left” to culturally surrender and accept the return of some form of “traditional values” and power hierarchies in society. That LGBTQ people stop being LGBTQ. That people like me stop calling what Trump is doing—sending military into cities, snatching people off the streets without due process, cancelling visas and green cards for political opinions—fascistic. And that if I don’t stop characterizing those things that way, I am complicit in any left-wing violence.

For me to concede this would be, as far as I can tell, to abandon the truth. To accept guilt for things I do not support and would never endorse—political violence. They want me to pretend that systematic constitutional destruction is normal governance, that authoritarian consolidation is just effective leadership, that the elimination of democratic constraints serves democratic principles.

But calling fascism “fascism” isn’t incitement to violence—it’s accurate description of systematic behavior that needs accurate description to be resisted through democratic means. When you eliminate the vocabulary necessary to describe authoritarianism, you eliminate the cognitive tools necessary to oppose authoritarianism. When truth-telling becomes dangerous, democracy becomes impossible.

This is a dangerous moment. A lot of people are afraid. And fear will be the end of us if we let it drive us toward the false comfort of submission rather than the difficult work of resistance. Fear makes people accept unacceptable compromises, embrace authoritarian solutions to complex problems, and surrender principles that seemed unshakeable when maintaining them didn’t require courage.