Show Notes
Most people who recognize what is happening in their country right now share one thing in common. They don’t know what to do about it. They vote. They post. They argue at Thanksgiving. And then they go back to their lives and hope someone else figures it out. This is not cowardice. It is the absence of a plan. And the absence of a plan is one of the most studied problems in the history of political science. For the better part of a century, researchers across psychology, political science, and conflict studies have been asking the same question: what actually stops authoritarian movements? Not in theory. Not in a seminar. In practice, in the real world, with real dictators and real populations. The answers they found are remarkably consistent, remarkably specific, and remarkably underused. This piece walks through six researchers whose work, taken together, forms a blueprint for how ordinary people defeat fascism. Not with armies. Not with violence. With behavior.
The Playbook That Toppled Dictatorships Gene Sharp never held public office, never led a protest, and never ran an organization with more than three employees. For the last fourteen years of his life, he ran the Albert Einstein Institution out of two rooms in a brick townhouse in East Boston, near Logan Airport, where he also grew rare orchids. He was, by almost every account, the most consequential political scientist of the twentieth century that most people have never heard of. Sharp was born in 1928, the son of a traveling minister in Ohio. As a young man, he refused the draft during the Korean War and spent nine months in federal prison in Danbury, Connecticut. While preparing for his sentence, he wrote a letter to Albert Einstein at Princeton asking if the physicist would contribute an introduction to his book on Gandhi. Einstein, a pacifist, agreed. Sharp later named his institution after him. Over the next five decades, Sharp produced an enormous body of work on a single subject: the mechanics of political power. His central insight was deceptively simple. All political power, including the power of dictators, depends on the obedience and cooperation of the population. No regime can function when enough of its people withdraw that cooperation. The military can’t deploy if soldiers refuse. The economy can’t run if workers stop. The government can’t govern if citizens stop complying. In 1973, Sharp published his three-volume masterwork, The Politics of Nonviolent Action, in which he catalogued 198 specific methods of nonviolent resistance. Boycotts. Strikes. Sit-ins. Tax refusal. Slow compliance. Deliberate inefficiency. Each method was documented from real historical examples. Twenty years later, in 1993, a Burmese exile asked Sharp to write something shorter. Something that ordinary people could read and use in the field. The result was From Dictatorship to Democracy, a 93-page manual that compressed four decades of research into a step-by-step framework for dismantling authoritarian regimes without firing a single shot. The Burmese military junta sentenced anyone caught with the book to seven years in prison. That did not stop it from spreading. The book was translated into more than 30 languages. It was smuggled into Serbia, where the student resistance movement Otpor used it as a field manual to organize the campaign that brought down Slobodan Milosevic in 2000. Oleh Kryenko, one of the leaders of Ukraine’s Orange Revolution, said publicly that Sharp’s book was “the bible” of the resistance. In Egypt, copies circulated in Tahrir Square during the 2011 revolution. Sharp died in January 2018, at ninety years old, in the same East Boston townhouse where he had worked for decades. His obituary in the Washington Post called him a “preacher’s son whose own gospel of nonviolent struggle inspired velvet revolutions that toppled dictators on four continents.” A Scottish journalist who made a documentary about him summed it up differently: “In South America, they’r
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There’s a familiar ritual that happens every time an authoritarian movement begins to collapse. The supporters disappear. Not physically. Psychologically. They scrub the evidence, rewrite the timeline, and emerge on the other side with a story they’ve rehearsed just enough to almost believe. “I never really supported him.” “I just voted against the Democrats.” “I don’t talk about politics anymore.” This is happening right now across America. The yard signs are coming down. The hats are going into drawers. The Facebook posts are being deleted. And millions of people who spent a decade loudly and publicly cheering for cruelty are quietly trying to exit the building before someone turns the lights on. The companion video to this piece says what needs to be said plainly: they’re not confused. They’re lying. They know what they did. They know what they defended. And they’re trying to erase the evidence before accountability arrives. This Substack examines why that matters, why it won’t work this time, and what history tells us about populations that try to pretend they were never part of the thing they spent years supporting.
Most political analysis starts with policy. Voters chose this candidate because of the economy, immigration, healthcare, taxes. And for most voters in most elections, that’s probably true. But Donald Trump is not most candidates. And the question that keeps surfacing isn’t why people agree with him. It’s why they love him more every time he does something cruel. The mockery. The insults. The attacks on disabled reporters, Gold Star families, and women. Behavior that would end any other political career has somehow become the foundation of his. In 2021, psychologist Matthew Yalch at Palo Alto University published a study in PLOS ONE titled “Dimensions of pathological narcissism and intention to vote for Donald Trump.” And what he found should make everyone uncomfortable, including the people it describes.
In February 2025, researchers at the University of Amsterdam published a study in Social Science & Medicine that should have rewritten every conversation about why people join the far right. They tracked over 40,000 people across nine countries, with data spanning fifteen years. They controlled for income, education, immigration attitudes, and political ideology. They wanted to know what actually predicts whether someone will support the populist radical right. The answer wasn’t immigration. It wasn’t economics. It wasn’t religion. It was loneliness. Lonelier individuals were consistently more likely to support radical right movements, with the association holding across all fifteen years of Dutch data and appearing across multiple European countries. The researchers noted that the effect sizes were comparable to the known health correlates of loneliness, meaning that the connection between loneliness and far-right support was statistically as meaningful as the connection between loneliness and heart disease, high blood pressure, and depression. A 2021 RAND Corporation study of former extremists and their families confirmed this from the other direction. Half of the former extremists surveyed said feelings of marginalization drove them toward radicalization, with most citing isolation and loneliness specifically. Individuals reported that the social benefits of joining extremist organizations, the friendship, the camaraderie, the sense of finally belonging somewhere, were among the most powerful forces keeping them in. These people didn’t join a movement because they were convinced by policy arguments. They joined because someone finally made them feel like they weren’t alone. And that tells us more about what MAGA actually is than any analysis of tariffs or border policy ever could.
A woman stood up at a political rally and asked a sitting congressman to create a federal law that would force her adult daughter to let her see her grandchildren. Not a therapy session. Not a family mediator. Not a phone call to her daughter asking what went wrong. A federal law. That single moment contains more psychology than most textbooks. Because what she revealed, in front of cameras and a cheering crowd, wasn’t a grandmother’s heartbreak. It was a narcissist’s playbook when someone finally tells them no. How a boundary becomes a theft. In 2002, psychologist Roy Baumeister at Case Western Reserve University published a theory that combined two existing psychological frameworks into something new. The first was narcissism, the personality structure built around an inflated self-image that requires constant validation. The second was psychological reactance, a concept developed by Jack Brehm at the University of Kansas in 1966, which describes the motivational state people enter when they perceive their freedom as restricted. Brehm found that when people believe a choice or behavior has been taken from them, they experience an intense drive to restore it, often wanting the restricted option more than they did before it was restricted. Baumeister’s insight was that narcissism supercharges reactance. When an ordinary person encounters a boundary, they may be disappointed, but they can process it. When a narcissist encounters a boundary, they don’t experience disappointment. They experience theft. The boundary isn’t perceived as another person’s valid choice. It’s perceived as something that belongs to them being taken away. And they feel entitled to take it back by whatever means necessary. Baumeister called it narcissistic reactance. This grandmother didn’t process her daughter’s boundary as a painful but legitimate decision by an autonomous adult. She processed it as her property being stolen. Those grandchildren aren’t people her daughter is protecting. In her mind, they are hers. Access to them is her right. And no one, not even their own mother, gets to take what’s hers.
There is a specific kind of frustration that comes from watching something fall apart in exactly the way someone told you it would. Not vaguely. Not in broad metaphorical strokes. In order. Step by step. With the stages so clearly defined that anyone paying attention can call the next one before it happens. Plato had that frustration 2,400 years ago. He lived through it. He watched the Athenian democracy, the most advanced political experiment in the ancient world, turn on itself. He watched it execute Socrates, his teacher, arguably the sharpest mind in the city, for the crime of asking uncomfortable questions. And instead of moving on, Plato spent the rest of his life trying to explain how a society capable of producing genius could also be stupid enough to kill it. The result was The Republic. And while most of the book covers justice, education, and the nature of reality, Book Eight is something different entirely. Book Eight is a manual. It is Plato at his most concrete, walking through the specific sequence of events that takes a functioning democracy and turns it into a dictatorship. Not in abstract terms. In stages. With causes, mechanisms, and outcomes laid out in an order that has repeated across civilizations for two millennia.