Combating Authoritarian Government Of the Rich, By the Rich, And For the Rich:

WAKE UP Dems! Plus Some Lessons From Navalny

Feb 05, 2025

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Jesse's Café Américain: President Carter: US Is Now 'Just an Oligarchy ... — Via jessescrossroadscafe.blogspot.com

"The economy must serve the people, and not the other way around”

-Catholic Social Doctrine, in a nutshell.

First off, check out your local affiliate of Colleges Against Cancer. A worthy mission for sure, as I saw on campus recently.

Also, sending my condolences to the families of the 67 people who lost their lives in a plane-helicopter crash. Notably, Trump restructured staffing and hiring at the FAA a week before this tragedy occurred.

Additionally, don’t let this get swept under the rug: Trump reversed Biden’s actions supporting Hispanic-serving institutions and tribal colleges.

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This past December, I read Alexei Navalny’s memoir, Patriot. For those who don’t know, Alexei Navalny was the Russian political leader who founded the Anti Corruption Foundation to hold Russian oligarchs accountable. He exposed their corruption and power, showing the Russian politicians paying and playing in their schemes. And ultimately, he sacrificed his own life to fight for a fairer, more democratic, and more peaceful Russia. Before that, he had been poisoned with Novichok, only to return to Russia shortly thereafter and suffer under the harsh conditions of the most brutal and infamous Russian penal colonies.

Navalny’s memoir was quite telling for a bunch of reasons. He talked about his early life under Communist rule. He then recounted the fall of that same communist government. While at the time he was certainly not a fan of Mikhail Gorbachev, he respected him much more in hindsight for making principled progress in freeing up Russian society, even when the costs were high and he never got the appreciation he deserved from it (up to this day).

Later, Navalny stood tall as one of the earliest opponents of Putin, never liking him from the beginning of his time leading Russia. The book described his first journeys into investigating corruption, culminating in online blogs, video pages, and campaigns for Mayor in 2013 and President in 2018 to dislodge Putin from power. In many ways, he came closer to proving the impossible than many would have imagined. The memoir really shows that—and the power of his story.

I encourage everyone to read it for leisure at least.

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But for Americans at this time, it might be better to read it for lessons. The similarities are jarring.

The United States, like Russia, is entering a period of even more extreme oligarchy. Donald Trump’s Cabinet and circle of advisors is the richest ever, with figures from Elon Musk, Vivek Ramaswamy, Mark Zuckerberg, and Sam Altman, to Doug Burgum, Chris Wright, Howard Lutnick, and Scott Bessent. Rich people running various segments of our government, and exercising tremendous power to their own potential personal benefits.

This is government of the rich, people. That was what happened in Russia. It was why Navalny reported on it. To showcase how such oligarchic corruption negatively impacts citizens in his country and people all across the world. Putin’s ties to business elites benefited him, but not the country. The same can and will be said about Donald Trump, Putin’s puppet. No wonder Trump was noticeably, and conspicuously silent on Navalny’s death a year ago.

So what’s the point? The point is simply this: people here have to fight the way Navalny did. By reporting, by blogging, by making videos, by protesting, by running for office, by opposing the autocracy in every way possible, even when it means being arrested or having paint and other projectiles thrown at you. Navalny showed overcoming those barriers is a possibility. That was in Russia, a nation that barely had any democracy throughout its history. If it can be done in Russia, it can be done in the United States.

And it must. Way too much is at stake. Government of the rich is here, as we have discussed many times by now as a recurring and regular subject. Furthermore, the authoritarian playbook is on our doorstep—and in some cases, it is already here.

Trump initiated a purge in the FBI, tried to fire civil servants as the US Department of Justice, and took illegal action against career Inspectors General. This is the playbook of Putin’s Russia. It is on all of us to make sure those moves are detected, recognized, and called out for what they are.

That is resistance. It is easy to say words like bipartisanship and disagreement. Do these ideas still matter? Of course. Nonetheless, this is not a usual debate. This is not about one plan for government over another. This is about a battle between the American experiment and the forces trying to destroy it. When the stakes are like those outlined above, Democrats have no other choice.

They have to stonewall and block Trump’s moves at every turn; not to make him look like a policy failure, but instead to grind the move towards losing our system of government to the rich. Bring this madness to a complete and screeching halt.

Whether it is legislative procedure (filibuster or quorum call), judicial litigation, or civil disobedience and activism, all of these tools may have to be considered and implemented in some fashion or another to block and/or slow down the worst aspects of Trump’s Project 2025 blueprint from ever being enacted, whether it was the federal aid freeze we went through, or the displacement of civil servants. Government sabotage is not and never should be a negotiable issue for Democrats.

Nor is it negotiable to continue the consolidation of wealth in America, or the widening of inequalities across the board that has occurred over 45 years. Because one thing is clear for everyone except Trump and Musk: Americans don’t want to be like Russia.

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Will it be hard? Absolutely. Especially while Republicans offer no guardrails at all to Trump. Am I hopeful? I am. Let me give one example of why I am.

Donald Trump won over many voters in 2024. But he did lose ground in some areas. One of his worst performing areas was in Western North Carolina. His bashing of FEMA’s Hurricane Helene response, and piling on of rampantly false misinformation did not work in the community that was the victim of his lies. He lost ground, sometimes with big swings towards Kamala Harris.

In fact, the NC-11 district from 2024 that gave Trump an 11-point win over Biden in 2020 gave Trump a 9-point win over Harris. In an area Trump had done well in, he underperformed despite the direction of the rest of the country. And unlike in most places, North Carolina had higher presidential turnout in 2024 than in 2020.

It is small movements like that, much like some recent special elections in 2025, that can offer great hope to confronting the big challenges we now face as a nation, including the threat of autocracy and the rise of a Trump-Musk-billionaire government and their rigged system.

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With that, it is important Democrats do what they can to make sure a check and balance comes in 2026. That includes rebuilding the party infrastructure nationwide, expanding out the state parties into every corner of their dominions, investing in both base and coalition constituencies, ripping greedy media executives like CNN’s David Zaslav, turning to a progressive populist agenda, learning to litigate elections and redistricting in the courts, flooding the airwaves, and embracing a fresh crop of young, fresh leadership—instead of more of those damn campaign emails. We have to compete everywhere again (the only viable path to gaining any majority in the Senate and expanding one in the House).

Let’s showcase candidate recruitment here. If you genuinely agree and like any of these MoveOn petitions, please do sign them and spread the word around to your friends and colleagues. The democracy is counting on your voice and engagement, which will take a lot more than just voting every 2 or 4 years:

2026 US House Working Class Candidate Petition

Maine State Senator Chloe Maxmin (US Senate)

North Carolina Governor Roy Cooper (US Senate)

Iowa State Auditor Rob Sand (US Senate)

Ohio’s Sherrod Brown or Tim Ryan (US Senate)

Texas’s Cristina Tzintzun Ramirez (US Senate)

Florida State Senator Jose Javier Rodriguez (US Senate)

South Carolina State Senator Mia McLeod (US Senate)

Montana Governor Brian Schweitzer (US Senate)

Kansas Attorney Chris Mann (US Senate)

Colorado Congressman Joe Neguse (US Senate)

Perth Amboy Mayor Wilda Diaz (US Senate)