✷ if history is a cycle
This is a darker post than usual, because it is about the authoritarian regime in the United States.
One of my closest friends came out to me recently as trans. I've been thinking about her a great deal, particularly in the regime we both live under, where the trans community is vulnerable and will only become more so. I myself am not trans, but I need two hands to count the number of trans and nonbinary friends in my life.
I recently wrote about Lili Elbe, a Danish woman who transitioned in the early twentieth century. She was a patient of Magnus Hirschfeld, and died in 1931 of complications following surgery. The facts of her life — that she was able to medically transition, that these surgeries were available to her in 1930 and 1931 — is something I find so amazing.
I've also been reading the biography of Voltairine de Cleyre, an American anarchist of the late nineteenth to early twentieth century. She was one of the foremost anarchists in her day: when Emma Goldman, scheduled to speak before a large crowd, was arrested before she could give her speech, Voltairine de Cleyre took her place. To earn an income, she taught English to thousands of Jewish immigrants or refugees in America, and (even though she was a Gentile) published her own work in the Fraye Arbeter Shtime, a Yiddish-language anarchist newspaper.
The world was really experiencing a flowering of liberal intellectual thought in the early twentieth century. That Lili Elbe could transition, that she could legally change her name and sex and get a passport as Lili, is incredible. That Voltairine de Cleyre existed (she was named that at birth!), that there was a vibrant Yiddish anarchist newspaper with such large readership, is amazing. Most recently, I learned about the 1918 socialist republic in Bavaria, a short-lived communist-anarchist government in Bavaria, but which lacked stable infrastructure, and whose very existence provoked enough backlash and divided the left enough to weaken resistance to the rise of Nazism.
And then 1933 happened. Fascism overtook everything. Millions of Jews were murdered. Magnus Hirschfeld's clinic was destroyed. Gay people were sent to concentration camps along with communists and ethnic minorities. All of these communities were very nearly snuffed out.
History isn't a straight line. It's more like a cycle. We build a beautiful world where people can be safe and free, and it is destroyed by a regime that murders those who don't conform. It's horrifying. There can be no promise that it will be okay in the end, that we will one day arrive at utopia, because no utopia can last forever.
In the summer of 2024 I visited the NS-Dokumentationszentrum, a museum marking the history of National Socialism, and on the wall there was a timeline charting Hitler's 1933 rise to power. January 30 – Hitler became chancellor. February 1 – declaration of a state of emergency so that the Nazi party could rule with emergency powers. February 4 – restrictions on the freedom of the press, freedom of speech, freedom to assemble. Later in February, the paramilitary organizations of the SS and SA would be formed, the Reichstag (parliament) in Berlin would be burned, and fundamental rights would be suspended "for the protection of the people and the state." March 5 – opposing political parties were annulled. By March 22 political opponents were being sent to the Dachau concentration camp. It would only get worse from there.
It all happened so fast. You have to wonder, what was it like watching this unfold in real time? When was the point where it became obvious to any ordinary German what was going on? How many people could see what was happening and got out before it was too late?
In July 2024 the Supreme Court declared immunity from prosecution for all 'official acts' a president committed while in office, whether former or sitting. In Sonia Sotomayor's dissent, she wrote that this effectively made the president into a king. This was my moment of, holy shit. This belonged on a museum wall just like that one. I started compiling a document, entitled "timeline of the fall of american democracy," which I could not bring myself to keep current as more and more things came to pass. A roiling feeling, of fear and of dread, took hold.
I worry for the future. I worry about persecution of LGBTQ people in this country, about what sort of things will become state-sanctioned and what sort of violence we will see. There have already been efforts by a red state towards undoing the legalization of gay marriage. A pro-Gaza student activist, Mahmoud Khalil, has been abducted by ICE. The United States is now a nation that will illegally detain people that it doesn't like who are exercising their freedom of speech. A prominent scholar of authoritarianism, Timothy Snyder, has used the phrase "concentration camps" to describe the deportation of large numbers of immigrants — without a trial, and in violation of a court order — by the United States government to facilities in El Salvador. The alarm is sounding as loudly as it can.
It's deeply scary living in these times. When I go to protests, I leave my phone at home, and wear a mask. I've switched much of my private communications to Signal and migrated my trans friend there too, where I believe she will be safer. I write under a pseudonym already, and I'm going to keep doing that. I'm going to get louder on this blog though.
It is hard to have any kind of hope. But let us return to the broad strokes of history. If history is cyclical — and I want to shout NIE WIEDER here, and say how horrifying it is if fascism is part of a cycle — then that means there is an Other Side. That on a large scale — disregarding the specific fate of America — the global trend toward right-wing populism that we saw take off in the 2010s, with the AfD, National Rally, Brexit, Bolsonaro, and the MAGA movement which spedrun itself into fascism, will not last forever. There will be an other side that we will get to.
That is not an excuse to wait. Regimes only end when people actually resist them. All of the Americans sticking their heads in the sand, saying "it's only four years" — it won't be, if we do nothing. Resist the authoritarian takeover. Go to protests. Support the people who are under attack from this regime — whether that's immigrants, queer people, or a woman seeking a lifesaving abortion. Solidarity is the only way we can be strong.