Amid Farahi/AFP/Getty

“We already live in a fascist state.” I’ve been hearing that so often these last few months, from friends, pundits, Mother Jones readers. And who can blame them? People have been disappeared to torture prisons overseas and ICE is shooting Americans in the streets. The federal workforce is being gutted, the economy is on a razor’s edge, America’s global credibility is in tatters, and kids go hungry while billionaires cash in. A conspiracy theorist is in charge of our health agencies. Universities, law firms, and nonprofits live in fear of the Eye of Sauron fixing on them. Midterm elections? Will we even have them?

To feel grim in the face of all this is to be realistic. But to throw in the towel and declare game over—that’s something else. Call it anticipatory defeat, the cousin of anticipatory obedience: settling into the worst-case scenario, because it seems hard to imagine getting to somewhere better. But we need to be able to imagine getting to somewhere better.

My parents lived at a time when lots of people settled into the worst-case scenario. They were children in Germany when Hitler was in power, and their memories were those of people lucky enough not to have suffered the true brutality of the regime, but still living fully within its totalitarian reach. An uncle who said some stuff about the Führer was hauled off. My dad and his friends dodged the goons who snatched boys with hair longer than the prescribed style.

These were just the tiny, banal manifestations........

© Mother Jones