For many observers, the situation in the United States during the first year of the new Trump Administration appears as a single, apparently unstoppable, descent toward dictatorship. The once respectable Republican party has been captured by a MAGA ideology of neofascist loyalty to a single person (Donald Trump), and any departure from absolute obedience (with a corresponding silence about any and all crimes) is considered traitorous to the movement and to the absolute supremacy of the Leader (I call him Il Duce), who “leads” only a few million MAGA fanatics. The Legislature, under the US Constitution, given the role of oversight of the Executive Branch, remains paralyzed, with MAGA loyalists refusing to check the President’s relentless power grab.

The federal government, with its constitutional separation of powers, by law includes a number of institutions operating independently of presidential power. These major agencies have been taken over by Trump, and loyalists to the Constitution have been fired and replaced by MAGA loyalists to the President. The FBI, long a respected institution largely above politics and devoted to the law, justice, and the Constitution, has had a makeover into the President’s personal police force, complicit in upending the Constitution and projecting presidential power. ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) has been militarized, neo-fascist style, to ignore the Constitutional requirement of due process of law for all residents of the country and to use systematic racial discrimination and needless violence to wreak havoc among immigrant communities around the nation.

Even the country’s National Guard and the military, once institutionally above politics and dedicated to serving the Constitution and the law, have been colonized to the personal whims of Il Duce, and deployed on false pretexts in American cities as part of a step by step militarization of the government—against both designated “external enemies” and “internal enemies” (those who disagree with MAGA) who, Trump declares, are “traitors to be eliminated.” The military itself, renamed the “Department of War,” has been commanded to blow up small civilian boats in Caribbean waters in direct violation of International Law.

Trump has assumed personal rule of the country through the use of Executive Orders. The Federal Register has recorded more than 210 of these since January 2025. The arbitrary rule of Il Duce supersedes both internal and international laws, legislative processes, and due process of law. The Federal Court System has to this point been mounting a valiant resistance, with hundreds of lawsuits filed against Trump’s illegal actions, with judges ruling against Trump more than 90% of the time, but the Supreme Court appears already captured by the neofascist ideology and has given a carte blanche to Trump’s lawless Executive Orders.

With Il Duce’s approval rating at a historic low of just 39%, massive “No Kings” public protests have been mounted nationwide since January, along with thousands of weekly and daily protests. The first coordinated nationwide protests on June 14th included 5 to 6 million people from more than 2000 locations around the nation. The second, on October 18, included 7 million people from more than 2700 locations nationwide. However, these massive peaceful protests appear to have had little impact on the trajectory toward dictatorship.

Alarm bells have been sounded by leading Democrats and others that Il Duce intends to subvert the 2026 midterm elections, in which Democrats have very good chances of retaking the House and the Senate, and therefore begin serving as a real counterweight to the rise of authoritarianism. Trump has commanded his MAGA controlled states to unconstitutionally gerrymander their voting districts to produce more MAGA controlled districts in the midterm elections, and has planted federal “observers” for elections in key states who could scream “election fraud!” at his command potentially allowing him to take over the election process in these areas, perhaps calling out the National Guard to take control of the voting apparatus.

One very prominent conservative former judge who has spoken out about this desperate state of affairs is J. Michael Luttig, in an article entitled “President for Life” in The Atlantic Magazine, December 2025 issue. In an interview about this article with Michael Popok on Legal AF, Luttig painted a very dire picture of what is happening. He concluded that if the judiciary were to fail in the resistance to Trump, then the last line of defense remains “We the People,” for the US Constitution locates the ultimate authority in “We the People.”

While this is true in most theoretical models of democracy (ultimate sovereignty resides with the people), in the real world, many, such as Il Duce, believe with Chairman Mao that “political power comes out of the barrel of a gun.” What power do unarmed peaceful protesters really have? What have these massive “No Kings” protests really accomplished? Before the US invasion of Iraq in 2003, there were also massive protests in every major city on Earth, including here in the United States. What difference did this make? But the situation is not as hopeless as it might seem. There is a compelling answer and solution to this horrific US problem that has thus far received very little attention: the option of massive nonviolent civil disobedience.

For years, I was Chair of the Program in Peace Studies at my university, in which we studied “non-violent direct action.” “Peace Studies” does not mean letting the bad guys walk all over you. It studies methods for achieving the victory of democracy, freedom, and human dignity without sinking into the endless “cycle of violence” that characterizes most of history. Civil Disobedience (CD) is an intentional breaking of the law in the name of the law. It is not an act of so-called “traitorous” rebellion against government, nor is it a criminal act that tries to escape detection and prosecution. It repudiates the use of violence to achieve political power.

It is faithful to a higher law, the moral law upon which the entire theory of democracy is founded, a moral law which, as Martin Luther King, Jr., put it, “the arc of the universe bends toward justice.” Civil Disobedience strictly repudiates the use of violence and, in doing so, achieves a moral ascendency in the struggle for the just rule of democratic law. This alone appears to be where the effective power of the people lives. When democratic theory locates ultimate sovereignty with the people, this is a moral principle: all government is responsible to the common good as well as the protection of individual freedom and dignity. Nonviolent civil resistance is the method by which this moral ascendency of the people is maintained.

Henry David Thoreau famously allowed himself to be arrested for refusing to pay the poll tax supporting slavery and published his famous essay “On the Duty of Civil Disobedience” in 1848. To this day, many Quakers refuse to pay federal taxes, 50% of which are used for war purposes. The Suffragist Movement voted illegally and in Britain chained themselves to the gates of Parliament. During the Vietnam War in the USA, many young men publicly burned their draft cards. Mahatma Gandhi led the people of India in massive civil disobedience, the most famous event of which was perhaps the 1930 Salt March, in which he activated the people of India to defy the British monopoly on the making of salt. He did this ultimately because “noncooperation with evil is a duty.”

From the same motivation, M. L. King, Jr. and his coworkers repeatedly violated segregation laws. They would illegally sit-in at “whiles only” lunch counters, waiting to be arrested. These actions are distinguished from criminal behavior precisely by the fact that those engaging in CD are willing to accept the legal consequences and be arrested and prosecuted. Despite their willingness to suffer from such prosecutions and possible jail sentences, court trials often give the defendants the opportunity to speak publicly about their reasons for their disobedience. During my college years, many of the anti-Vietnam War protests were carried on in these ways, not only by burning draft cards. Students would occupy the Administration Buildings of their universities and wait for the police to come and arrest them. Issues about that brutal and illegal war were hence voiced in courtrooms throughout the land.

US historian and peace activist, Howard Zinn (best known for his book A Peoples’ History of the United States, 1980), in his 1990 book Declarations of Independence, wrote about the power of the people as reflected in “jury nullification.” Juries confer in private, without judge, prosecution, or defense present. In that space, they have to power to decide “not guilty” no matter what the law may say or what the facts may be. This year, juries in Washington, DC, have already used that power, as did some juries during the Vietnam War protests. Even if the defendants clearly “broke the law,” juries have to power to find them not guilty. The jury system gives great power to the people if they are willing to use that power for justice rather than through blind obedience.

Political Scientist Gene Sharp is well known for founding the Albert Einstein Institution for the study of nonviolence in Massachusetts. He is also known for his extensive writings on the theory and practice of nonviolence, including The Politics of Nonviolent Action (1973), which includes some 198 methods of nonviolent action. His works have been published in many languages and have been influential in political struggles in countries from Egypt to Iran to Burma. There are dozens of ways that people can organize to throw monkey-wrenches into “business as usual,” which is the overwhelming force of the business-friendly status quo that dictators prefer.

During the 1990s and the first decade of this century, I worked with the School of the Americas Watch (SOA Watch), which was founded by Father Roy Bourgeois. The School of the Americas (the name of which was later changed by Washington because of its bad reputation), was a top-secret school based at Fort Hood in Georgia where Latin American military personnel were trained in “counter-insurgency warfare” that often included brutal “interrogation techniques,” how to run “death squads,” etc. (What counter-insurgency warfare often means is warfare by a government against its own civilian population, such as the US was supporting in El Salvador, Honduras, Guatemala, and elsewhere in Latin America.)

SOA Watch protesters would walk onto the campus of Fort Hood in Georgia, where the SOA was located, lay down, and refuse to stand when police were called in to arrest them. They had to be physically carried off the base by police. The Catholic Church, never the best friend of democracy, eventually defrocked Roy. I co-sponsored an event at my university with Roy in which we honored those (from Virginia alone) who had been arrested and spent jail time for these protests (some 23 persons). The only way to stop tyranny and its “business as usual” dehumanization of human beings that get in its way is by putting our bodies on the line.

Il Duce has zero respect for human rights or dignity, and many of his policies are intentionally cruel. To stop those of such elemental and puerile violence (such as his ICE troops) is no easy task. Mature people have to put themselves in the way of these locomotives of violence and injustice. The only way to end the cycle of violence is to move the institutions and the discourse to a higher moral level through nonviolent civil disobedience. And such actions are never risk-free. To go to the next No Kings protest is likely to be mostly risk-free, but, just as now, little will change. The time has come to engage in massive civil resistance.

What is necessary is massive nonviolent civil disobedience in which millions of people face arrest, in which tens of thousands of arrested people face prosecution across the nation, in which court dockets are hopelessly clogged, and in which delays grind the system to a halt. Interrupting business as usual— interrupting traffic, business as usual meetings, public events, bureaucratic procedures, sporting events, and all the trappings of normalcy. These are not normal times, and to restore real, healthy normalcy and democratic life, it will require that these not-normal times be brought to a standstill. As Gene Sharp reminds us, there are at least 198 methods of making this happen.

When M. L. King, Jr. and his coworkers faced beatings by the police in Montgomery, Alabama, they were not alone. There were millions in the civil rights movement behind them. There were lawyers ready for their defense, public interest groups, church groups, media spokesperson groups, all forming the network of civil resistance behind those putting their bodies on the line. Civil groups around the US must organize to support those on the front lines of the resistance in a massive, nationwide “conspiracy” for democracy, freedom, and dignity. The job of the “democracy conspiracy” is not merely support for those resisting, important as this is, but to express the vision, the goal, the dream of a better future and a decent nation-wide and world-wide system. (I have described elsewhere, in many venues, why the “world-wide system” aspect is fundamental.)

The hidden difficulty here is that many who profess to believe in democracy, freedom, and human dignity are, in truth, infected by the same nihilism and lack of vision as the MAGA fascists. To really resist tyranny, there must be genuine insight into freedom and dignity, not the corruption of the “mainstream” Democrat Party that catered all long to money, the super-rich, and an empire of globalization and imperialism. Our moral vision must be clear, and it must be universal (global freedom, dignity, and authentic democracy) if we are to unite against this terrible momentum toward the destruction of our freedom and dignity.

Public officials like Zohran Mamdani, Bernie Sanders, and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez can organize their constituencies to resist the federal assault on liberties. Newly elected as Mayor of New York, Mamdani has declared his aim to “Trump-proof” the city. Civic organizations must prepare alert networks, practice responses to federal incursions, and serve as support networks for the thousands engaging in nonviolent civil disobedience. All together, the people will respond with solidarity and vision.

Justice Luttig is correct, the bottom line must be “We the People,” but to make this happen requires more than showing up at a weekend “No Kings” protest. To assert the authority of “We the People” and reestablish a free society will require massive nonviolent civil disobedience. A people committed to noncooperation with evil cannot be defeated. Trump is evil, MAGA is evil, because both fascism and authoritarianism are evil. Mahatma Gandhi clearly hit the nail on the head when he declared that “noncooperation with evil is a duty.”