A democracy does not collapse in a single moment. It erodes, frays, and then one day, the mechanisms it relies upon fail all at once. Weimar Germany, brittle from the start, was riddled with weaknesses—economic chaos, political factionalism, and elites who believed they could control the radicals they empowered. Each emergency decree handed the chancellor more authority. Each court decision upheld an erosion of rights. Then, the Reichstag burned, and the last legal defenses folded overnight. The constitution still existed on paper. But the regime had no need for it anymore.
Madrid held out longer than expected, but the end was inevitable. The Francoists advanced methodically, city by city, town by town, until the last embattled districts fell. What came next was not just repression—it was extermination. Lists of suspected leftists and regional leaders were prepared in advance. Judges, professors, unionists, even poets—lined up and shot. The courts did not even need to be subverted; they became instruments of vengeance, stamping legal approval onto mass killings. When the dust settled, Franco’s regime ruled for nearly forty years. The lesson was clear: authoritarianism, once entrenched, does not loosen its grip willingly.
It was a sunny Tuesday when La Moneda burned. Pinochet’s tanks shelled the presidential palace, his soldiers flooded the streets. The military junta had already prepared its next moves: mass arrests, concentration camps in the national stadium, death squads in the night. Civil society evaporated in an instant. The courts, designed to uphold democracy, became the executioners’ rubber stamp. The media fell silent or became mouthpieces for the new order. What was once one of Latin America’s most stable democracies was now a dictatorship backed by the machinery of terror.
The crowds in Belgrade swelled past anything the regime could control. For years, Milošević had fueled ethnic hatred, launched wars, crushed opposition, and defied international law. But on October 5, 2000, the weight of his crimes crashed down upon him. The police refused to fire on the people. Parliament burned. The dictator fled, only to be arrested months later.
The apartheid state had power, but it had lost the world. The boycotts, the diplomatic pressure, the internal resistance—by the early 1990s, even the most die-hard defenders of white rule saw the inevitable. Apartheid ended not with fire and blood, but with a negotiation. It was, in many ways, a triumph. Nelson Mandela walked free. South Africa held its first free elections. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) gave victims the chance to tell their stories, to demand accountability.
And yet, even in victory, justice faltered. The Serbian courts would not touch him. His trial for war crimes happened not in his homeland, but in The Hague, where he mocked the proceedings and dragged the case on until his death. There was no Serbian reckoning, no deep purge of those who had enabled him. His party, his allies, his nationalist rhetoric—they survived. They bided their time. And years later, they returned to power. The lesson was clear: removing a leader is not enough. If the structures that upheld him remain intact, the darkness is only postponed.
The Shah was a tyrant. His secret police, SAVAK, tortured dissenters. His rule was enforced by U.S. support and a military bloated with foreign weapons. When the revolution came in 1979, it was not just a rejection of one man but of everything he stood for—Western influence, secularism, elite corruption. The people demanded change, and they got it.
But even in light, the shadows lingered. The TRC traded justice for truth. The worst perpetrators confessed their crimes in exchange for amnesty. The economic structures of apartheid remained largely untouched—those who had profited from the old regime continued to hold power. South Africa became a democracy, but it was a democracy burdened by an unresolved past. It was better than outright collapse. But it was not enough.
Some collapses never come. Some uprisings surge toward the breaking point and then are crushed so completely that history itself is rewritten. Tiananmen Square was not a revolution. It was the moment before a revolution—a moment that might have changed everything. And then the tanks came.
The fall of the Berlin Wall was not a coup, not a battle, not a war. It was an accident of history, an error in bureaucratic messaging that sent East Berliners swarming the checkpoints before the guards could react. Within days, the border was gone. Within months, the state that built it no longer existed.
But revolutions do not always bring freedom. The monarchy fell, only to be replaced by theocracy. The executions began immediately—first the Shah’s officials, then leftists, liberals, journalists, moderates, anyone who had once thought the revolution belonged to them. The same prisons that once held the Shah’s enemies now held the Ayatollah’s. The lesson of Iran was brutal: tearing down a dictator means nothing if the structure that replaces him is just another cage.
The students had hope. That was their crime. For weeks in the spring of 1989, Beijing’s Tiananmen Square filled with thousands of demonstrators—young, idealistic, calling for reform, not even for the overthrow of the Communist Party, just for accountability, transparency, democracy.
The reckoning, when it came, was swift but selective. The old Stasi informants, the enforcers of surveillance and repression, were exposed. Many were tried, but many more walked free. The economy of East Germany collapsed overnight, consumed by a reunification that turned former comrades into paupers. Justice was given to some, but not all. And the resentment—at lost jobs, at the destruction of an old way of life—never fully faded.
Pinochet stepped down, but his shadow remained. The military, the courts, the elites—many had backed the dictatorship and feared what would come next. The new democratic government, knowing that outright prosecutions could provoke another coup, took a different path: truth without immediate punishment. The commission documented the disappearances, the torture, the mass graves. Victims were named. Perpetrators were identified.
And for a moment, it seemed possible. The government wavered. Communist Party officials debated. Some even sympathized with the students. But when the hardliners seized control, the decision was made. The solution would not be negotiation. The solution would be annihilation. On the night of June 3, 1989, the People’s Liberation Army rolled into Beijing.
The standard courts could not handle the scale of the crime. Hundreds of thousands of genocidaires sat in prisons, accused of atrocities. Trials would take decades. The international community had abandoned Rwanda during the genocide—now, it offered only the slow, bureaucratic mechanism of the UN’s International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR), based in Arusha, Tanzania. The ICTR would convict some of the masterminds. But what about the men who held the machetes?
But justice was delayed. Pinochet himself lived as a free man for years, dying before he could be fully prosecuted. Many of his enforcers never faced consequences. The truth was laid bare, but the system that enabled his rule remained embedded in Chilean institutions. The past was exposed, but it was not erased.
The Communist Party claimed that no one had died in Tiananmen Square itself. Maybe that was true. Maybe the real killing happened in the side streets, the alleyways, the back roads where bodies were dragged and stacked and burned.
When the Nazi state fell, it did not dissolve into anarchy. It was shattered from the outside. The Nuremberg Trials, flawed as they were, set a precedent: power would be held accountable, at least in part. The worst crimes were dragged into the light. Not all who deserved punishment received it, and denazification was never truly complete. But history had something to hold onto—a framework, a standard, a moment when impunity was at least partially denied.
They came in the night. Armed with falsehoods brandished as justice, they seized Mahmoud and for 37 hours he disappeared. The Secretary of State personally oversaw the operation. The President promised this was the first of many more such to come.
In thousands of communities, survivors and perpetrators faced each other. Confessions were given. Some were true, some half-truths, some clear attempts to secure early release. But the system functioned because it had to. Rwanda could not imprison every killer forever. It could not execute them all. So it did something else: it forced them to reckon with the people they had harmed.
A judge ruled these hundreds with valid residential status and the paperwork to back it could not be summarily ejected from the country without their due process, that a centuries-old law never enacted outside of wartime could not bear the weight of such an infringement on constitutional rights. The planes departed, all the same.
If a genocidaire admitted his crimes, named the dead, and begged forgiveness, he was often given a reduced sentence. Some walked free. Some were forced into public service, rebuilding what they had helped destroy. It was not perfect justice—what could be?—but it was an acknowledgment.
A judge issues an order. The regime ignores it. A court blocks an executive action. The White House enforces it anyway. Each violation chips away at the rule of law until the legal system becomes a ritual, not a power.
As we discussed in our (somewhat belated1) Sunday Bonus, the Trump regime has ceased merely flirting with defiance of court orders, and finally taken the plunge, deporting hundreds under an accusation of gang affiliation. They will be held in what we can fairly describe as a concentration camp for at least a year.
As discussed in The Courts Are Losing Control—And That’s the Point, the Trump regime is now fully unconstrained:
What happens when a federal court rules against a deportation order, and DHS carries it out anyway? What happens when a judge blocks the use of federal troops against protests, and the troops are deployed anyway? […] This is where we are headed […] executive power is only limited if someone has the ability to stop you.
Trump is already parading his newfound freedom, simultaneously declaring Biden’s preemptive pardons void and his intent to further his retributive record with political prosecutions. The courts will not save us.
The court cases will accrue. The siphoned bank accounts, decimated agencies, pillaged cities, deported and disappeared citizens, destroyed records, will continue to pile up. Eventually, exponential acceleration leads to singularity: a point past which we can no longer make predictions. Phase change. Regime change. At this point if we are to be truly hyperbolic and alarmist in our predictions, we must take the nuclear option—literally. Marshall law? One month out, three on the outside. Gulag’s for political opposition? 12 months. Contested midterms? We’ve been predicting those all along.
The national Democrats squandered their best and only chance of dictating the pace of the battle when the Senate conceded to Trump on Friday’s cloture vote. This is no surprise. We’ve said so from the start.
The courts won’t save us. Congress won’t save us. The media, the military, the corporations, the executive agencies—all captured. Piece by piece.
This is how Weimar fell—not with a single moment, but with a hundred small capitulations. This is how Pinochet rose—not in a single coup, but through the slow capture of institutions. This is how Franco cemented his rule—not with one victory, but through decades of unchallenged authority.
If Radical Federalism stands for anything, it must stand against this.
We must contest the legitimacy of every illegal act, every defiance of lawful court orders, every paper-thin intentionally pathetic contradictory inconsistent excuse for gross defiance of all authority which doesn’t stem from the power of the Regime’s oligarch backers. We must be in the streets. We must protect ourselves and our colleagues. We must demand that the states and cities resist alongside us.
Attend city council meetings, local Democratic Party chapter meetings, and townhalls and forums.
Volunteer with Food Not Bombs, Mutual Aid Disaster Relief, the Autonomous Tenants Union Network, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, or research how to lend your expertise and professional skills to organizations or people in need in your community.
Build networks of mutual aid. Connect with those around you. Have discussions now, and learn who you can rely on, while these conversations can still be had—just in case.
The story is not over.
█ The collapse is here, though at first glance it look familiar. We must start building now.
Apologies for the irregularities of late.