Margolin, who hails from the former Soviet Republic of Belarus, has spent decades understanding and developing tactics for resilience against creeping authoritarianism. Litvinov, a trans immigrant from Ukraine, has leveraged lived experience to understand and explain why authoritarians target disadvantaged communities — and how to fight back. They’re bringing the lessons they’ve learned about combatting authoritarianism internationally home to the U.S., where their relevance is now clear.

Looking at the United States right now, what has you most worried?

Yelena V Litvinov: Two things. First, we are seeing all of the classic moves of the authoritarian playbook unfolding, which are very familiar to folks who've lived through authoritarianism in other places. But I think what is different in the U.S. is how quickly those moves are being taken. The pace is meant to overwhelm us and make it more difficult to respond. And it shows that this particular authoritarian government has learned from other authoritarian governments.

And the second thing is that U.S. civil society is far less prepared, both operationally and mentally, than it should be. There were many warning signs that authoritarianism was taking hold in this country. Rather than heeding those alarm bells, I think a lot of folks held on to the faith that our institutions will protect us, the rule of law will protect us, that these are not the kinds of things that happen in America.

Now that we are actually in it, there's a different version of American exceptionalism that has taken hold. It is this idea that what is happening here is so unprecedented and so unexpected and so beyond the pale, when, in fact, we have seen so much of this before. And so there’s this paralysis where folks are not really working collectively to respond. They are not learning from the examples of other countries because there's this sense of this being ahistorical or unique. When it’s not.

Tatyana Margolin: I grew up in the former Soviet Union. I came here as a teenager. I remember the decrepitude of that regime. I remember what it's like to live under a government that malfunctions, to have health care where you can't navigate it without bribes. These are all things that I experienced firsthand. And watching it take hold and seeing the beginnings of it here is really disturbing to me.
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An average American has not dealt with day-to-day corruption. They have not had to bribe their way out of a parking ticket. They haven't had to pay a doctor to be seen. There are many other obstacles to accessing services, but that level of corruption was not in the DNA of this country for many years. And watching the oligarchy rise here, and seeing the administration push out these loyal civil servants who have been doing their jobs non-corruptly, is really scary for me. Because we actually do not have a solution for corruption.

Corruption is very easy to introduce. It's like a pill you slip in the water. Getting it in is not hard. But getting it out is nearly impossible. And we are so in denial that this level of corruption can happen here that when it does, we don't actually know what to do about it. We don't know how to talk about it, we don't know how to fight it. We almost can't accept it on a very molecular level, and therefore, we just do nothing.

Yelena, you are a trans person as well as an immigrant. Why do you believe that authoritarian regimes so aggressively target immigrants, LGBTQ people, and other vulnerable communities?

Litvinov: It's the oldest trick in the book. It's really easy to distract from your own failures of governance, from your own corruption, by blaming everything on some subgroup of people. They seek out groups that are vulnerable enough that you are able to tell a story that places them in this scapegoat category. It’s a very malleable tool.

And immigrants are obviously a very easy target. What's happening in the U.S. now makes me think a lot about the way that Orbán consolidated power in Hungary, by really campaigning against the E.U. allowing migrants to move into Hungary, when in fact, that was not actually happening. Hungary was not a destination for that migrant wave. You see the same thing here: elections are being won on this same anti-immigrant rhetoric, even in places where there's not a big immigrant influx. This was a campaign tool in many states that were nowhere near a border.

As for the attacks that we're seeing on trans communities right now, it's another example of how malleable this tool is. Attacks on trans communities have just taken the place of what were before, to take one example, attacks on access to reproductive care. Remember, abortion was this really easy wedge issue for Republicans for many years. Then they saw public opinion shift. They needed a new target.

They used to go after the LGBTQ community more broadly. But the gay and lesbian rights movement really pushed this idea that gay people are your neighbor. They are your coworker. There was a big visibility campaign that really made that another tough wedge issue. Trans folks represent such a small percentage of the population. There are fewer individuals who know a trans person the way they know other LGBTQ people. So they are an easier target. They become the very scary other that they can focus on.

Tatyana, can you talk a little bit about the administration's attacks on nonprofits, on media, on lawyers? We now have media outlets paying Trump off and big law firms bending the knee.

Margolin: The fact that they would attack civil society was very obvious to us. You could really see it from a mile away. Because we have a fully subservient Congress. We have a Republican executive branch. We have a judicial branch that has been somewhat compromised. So we knew those would not serve as a check and balance. That leaves only civil society and the business community, because businesses can be a really powerful tool against authoritarianism.

That's where I think the attacks on law firms come in. Attacking corporate law firms serves two purposes. One is that you're undermining the NGO sector, because even groups like the ACLU depend on corporate counsel. Smaller NGOs rely on pro bono hours of big law firms. So you’re crippling them. Second, you are effectively taking an enormous chunk of the business community out of the game, in terms of pushback against the administration.

You both spent a long time at the Open Society Foundations. As you know, the right has long talked about George Soros as this evil puppet master. But now, you have another rich guy, Elon Musk, getting far more directly involved in our politics than Soros ever did. Yet they seem not to have any problem with that.

Litvinov: One thing to remember about far-right movements is that they love to accuse their opponents of doing what they themselves are doing. They accuse progressive groups of taking over the media, for example, when that's actually what authoritarians do.

The idea that every accusation is a confession.

Litvinov: 100 percent. And the louder the accusation is, the more of a confession it is.

Margolin: The attacks on George Soros were not invented here. They started in Russia because the Open Society Foundations were one of the biggest philanthropies working to support civil society. And then they migrated towards Hungary. And the U.S. right just saw that this particular boogeyman worked as a scapegoat and copied the talking points. They just adapted it to the local context. The age-old anti-Jewish stereotypes, of course, also came into play with Soros.

Litvinov: The narrative around George Soros was that there was this secret international cabal of people sitting in rooms, strategizing, pulling the strings. For those who've actually worked inside of philanthropy, we only wish there was more coordination. Because the idea that there was some international strategy between the E.U. and private foundations and all of these rich people on the progressive side, that's not the reality.

Margolin: We wish we were as effective as we're being accused of being. We would be accused of rapidly funding protests, for example. But it would take us, on average, to make a grant, six months minimum. And yet we would be accused of somehow immediately mobilizing buses of people.

Litvinov: The reality is that there is, in fact, an international collaboration that is extremely strategic and effective and well-resourced — and it’s on the far right.

Look at the way that anti-abortion and anti-LGBTQ laws were spreading country to country using exactly the same rhetoric, even in places where that rhetoric made no sense. You can see that these are imported narratives. It's like, where did those narratives come from? It's because politicians and corrupt church leaders and other members of the far-right were coming together at international networking meetings like the World Congress of Families, and literally exchanging PowerPoint presentations on how to make use of these as wedge issues in order to consolidate power, in order to win elections.

In Sudan, they would have folks go to opposition protests with rainbow flags and plant them in the protest so they could say, “Oh, look, these are the gays who are out here leading these anti-government protests. They're the ones trying to destabilize our country.” Those strategies were exported from one authoritarian country to another, often at these networking events. One example on the U.S. side is CPAC.

There is a transnational right-wing cabal of very high-powered, well-resourced folks who are pumping tons of money into these far-right movements. As we pointed out earlier, they are doing the same things that they accuse progressive foundations of doing. Progressive groups just do not have either the resources or, frankly, the operational savvy to do those things.
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What are some of the lessons that Americans can learn in terms of resilience from what's happened in the rest of the world?

Margolin: We are always championing people who are not just surviving these situations, but they are continuing to push, they're continuing to fight, they're not giving up. And everyone should really be learning from their counterparts. Journalists, for one, should be talking to their counterparts in Russia. They need to learn to do their work in an authoritarian context.

We have many examples of people doing it. They have followed the same trajectory we are seeing here, where first their newspapers were taken over, and they left those newsrooms because they could no longer in good conscience work there. It’s what you see happening with the Washington Post. They go to other outlets, but the other outlets become compromised as well. So they have to set up their own outlets.

This is what I want American journalists to be thinking about. What are you going to do with the reputation you've built for yourself? Are you going to set up a YouTube channel? Are you going to start reaching people on other platforms? Are you going to go to Substack? Who are you going to try to reach?

This is perhaps a naïve question, but I think it’s an important one. Most Americans have never lived in a fully authoritarian regime before. We don’t have a sense of what it’s like. How does life feel different?

Margolin: I think it's a great question, and I hope you never feel the full experience. I hope you never get the whole package. But in a lot of what's so challenging about fully comprehending it is that, for many people, life really just goes on as usual. Until suddenly, it doesn’t.

Litvinov: I want to talk about how we fight back and how we live in this moment. Yes, you need to continue to litigate in the courts. Yes, you need to continue to push other narratives. Yes, you need to continue to do all the resistance work that people are doing. But that’s not all.

The goal of authoritarians, when they rewrite the past, when they tell you that everything is horrible and dark and scary, is to convince you that they are the only hope for a better future. And it is incumbent upon us to offer up a different alternative for the future. It is not enough to say, “We want to go back to the way things were.” Because clearly, some people were unhappy. There are things that are very broken about our society, and there is a reason why this rhetoric of the authoritarians has so much appeal.

And part of that is while they are actually diagnosing a problem, they are also offering a false solution to that problem. And so the more that we can uplift the voices of those who are offering different solutions, who are thinking optimistically and joyously about the future, I think that is what gets us through.

Finding joy gets us through. And having hope for a different reality that actually works for everybody and that unites us. Because authoritarians divide. But in fact, we all want the same things. We want our kids to be able to get good health care and a good education. We want our infrastructure to not be falling apart. We don't want to be throwing bombs around the world, whether via a Signal chat or otherwise. These are just common values, and I think they're common American values that we can unite in and around.

The authoritarians are becoming so powerful, perversely, because they understand that they are losing. They can't win without these machinations, without their manipulations of the electoral playing field. Because our multicultural, pluralistic, multiracial democracy represents the majority. You only have to employ the tactics of authoritarianism when you can’t win without them.

Originally published by The Ink.

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