Count me out/in
See you on June 14th 2025?
You say you want to defend your world - a democracy?
The GOP voters have their Trumpian revolution. They elected a “corrupt, incompetent and treasonous administration”, and this includes sadism and violence.1 An imperial presidency, with a very strong arm, aggressive form of leadership, on the other hand, it is characterized by inexperience, chaos, and a 'anything-goes' kind of politics. Not just DOGE or oligarch Elon Musk.
Now it’s up to you, dear friends in the USA.
Non-military civil servants from ICE, in fake military uniforms, are acting as a rogue army. Fuera ICE! The USA has an active militia - again. First, on January 6th, and now, in 2025.
It is out there on the streets.
Take me home, country road.
Citizens in the San Diego area drove ICE civil servants away, just by using their cameras, chanting voices, and their bodies, screaming against the attitude of these rogue soldiers.
Dear Beatles fans in the USA and other countries inflicted by totalitarian and authoritarian leaders, do you make the choice Lennon advises in his 'Revolution'-trilogy?
Lennon sang/said in ‘Revolution I’: ‘Count me out/in’ on physical destruction/violence. Count me out = no violence and destruction. Count me in = when the protest and goals are achieved without violence and destruction.
You, my dear friends in America, you, do have the choice to protest and participate. Can we count you in or out?
Whatever choice you make, whatever the outcome, most important is that we maintain respect for those who do not have the courage and the intellectual power you have to decide to protest, flee or stay, taking care of their children. Some of them are only willing and able to become members of Amos Oz’s ‘Order of the Teaspoon’.2 Others are dedicated followers of a neo-fascist fashion called MAGA. Do not dismiss them. Fascism, or ultra-conservatives with conspirational and violent thinking, has been around in American politics, and closer to mainstream than you might want to acknowledge and concede.3 Yes, you might get rid of your disease of conceit. By the way, dismissing is what GOP-Trumpian folks do. It is one of their most important tools. It is a key element of their politics.
”We all doing what we can”, Lennon sang. Not true, of course, but that doesn’t matter. Whatever the choice we make, do not dismiss others for the choices they make.
Timothy Snyder wrote a short manual with 20 ideas for attitude and activities that help to resist an authoritarian regime. It is called
On Tyranny,
20 Lessons from the Twentieth Century.4
This book is part of a trilogy with ‘The Road to Unfreedom Russia, Europe, America’ (2018) and ‘On Freedom’ (2024). These may help you to understand how in the USA, Russia, and some countries of Europe, ‘we the people of…’ have invoked authoritarianism and oligarchy. These books offer advice and insight on how to be an active citizen to help protect the society you want to be free in. Oh, and by the way, without a good health care system to support people who suffer from maladies, there is no freedom. For no one.5
Inspired to disagree? If you don’t like Timothy Snyder’s ‘On Tyranny’, why not try some other guide? Snyder offers a guide to other sources, with perhaps other approaches or analyses.6 Listen to, read Chenoweth and Maria Stefan, read Václav Havel. If you don’t like the presentation of oligarchal fascism in ‘The Road to Unfreedom’, then read Ruth Benjiot, read Anna Applebaum, read Peter Pomerantsev, read The Ukrainians, read Volodya Yarmolenko. There are plenty of guides, but find a guide, somebody’s work, or something you think is worthwhile. Inform yourself!
Inspired by Lucía Benavides from a 2020 ‘Me-too’ piece on John Lennon, in the Los Angeles Review of Books, I found Lennon addressing the same issue in the 1980 Playboy interview. He criticized the “romanticization of artists”.7 Today the same is relevant for all of us regarding heroes and villains, and authors and presidents. Lennon’s motto was/is:
“Learn to swim.”
“We can have figureheads and we can have people that we admire and like to have standing up and all that. We can have examples … but leaders is what we don’t need. It’s the utopian bit again.(…) Don’t follow leaders, watch yer parking meters. (…) It’s easier to identify with the package than with the message—and then you miss it completely. Forget about the teacher. Learn to swim. You don’t need the package.
With Elvis, the basic thing, the basic energy, is on the records. (…) you don’t need the Christian package or the Marxist package or the Buddhist package to get the message. (…) This doesn’t mean there isn’t validity in the message. The swimming may be fine, right? But forget about the teacher. If the Beatles had a message, it was that.”8
There is so much experience with authoritarianism and totalitarian states. America and these days are not unique. It never is. Learn from others to find out what you are able and willing to do to defend.
Talking about ‘totalitarianism’, get Snyder’s ‘Bloodlands’. Or read Hannah Arendt.
If you don’t like my substack because The Beatles Review of History connects The Beatles with the current situation in the world, including the USA, follow something else. Go your own way.
But please...
“the important thing is don't treat me or anyone else, any other imperfect person, as your excuse to disengage. That's using your agency the wrong way. That's how we lose. So don't drift along online with the people or the bots who are looking for excuses to dismiss or disengage. Get offline, be online, get people to act. That's lesson 13 of On Tyranny, corporeal politics. Recognize that action means imperfect people working together. Democracy means imperfect people working together. Freedom, it has to. Freedom means imperfect people working together, acting together. It has to. Freedom is solidarity and solidarity is freedom. And by the way, while you're doing all that, make sure you're protesting. June 14th.”9
Stay healthy, stay safe, and please defend actively a democratic state in which we rule ourselves by law, not by following any religion or people or things you admire, whether it is Trump, a celebrity, an author, a father, or a spouse. For that matter, dear women readers, please pick up anything by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, a cool American-Nigerian feminist writer for the young. Her last marvelous literary piece of art is ‘Dream Count’.10 It is more informative and tangible than anything by Yoko Ono, who is regarded as a feminist artist.
PS: June 14th is No Kings Day Protest. Millions will in hundreds of places.
© 2025 The Beatles Review of History. The work of the original interviewers and publishers is gratefully acknowledged, and excerpts are reproduced on this site under allowances for fair use in copyright law. If anything on this blog constitutes an infringement on your copyright, please let us know, and we will consider removing the materials.
This is an Open Access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial (CC BY-NC 4.0) license, which permits others to distribute, remix, adapt, and build upon this work non-commercially, and license their derivative works on different terms, provided the original work is properly cited and the use is non-commercial. See: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/
Repeatedly over the last ten years I made the point that the GOP voters owe the current authoritarianism and totalitarian inclinations of the Trump 2.0 administration. Paul Krugman:
“I don’t blame either Trump or Musk for America’s degeneration. I blame their enablers, who have refused, again and again, to enforce the Constitution or place any restraints on Trump’s abuses. And yes, this means Republicans. You don’t have to love the Democratic Party to recognize that it does, in fact, expel politicians who engage in egregious corruption.”
I have friends who excuse themselves, but keep on voting for the GOP. They knew.
Those whoknew and are wrong includes ‘old man’ Neil Young. He is one of the enablers of rigorous destructive conservatism, who now says on his website “this is not what we voted for”. Sick behavior, voting for Trump—> and —> complain, and —> offer this invalid opinion:
”Our country and our way of life, that which our fathers and theirs fought for, is now threatened by the government. This is not what we voted for. This is our new reality. Our government is out of control, not standing for us. You can stand up for American values this summer, for our children and theirs.”
Recently, Julian Zelizer offered the following explanation of the historical roots of Trumpian aggressiveness as typical for the GOP:
“He (Trump) is not someone who focuses on what you like. He focuses on what people don't like. And so that kind of bigger culture, which includes the parties, is important. But the Republican Party has changed. I mean, it wasn't simply he found space for a third party within the Republican Party.
The Republican Party of 2015 and 16 had radicalized pretty significantly via the Tea Party in the 2010s, via the new Gingrich generation in the 80s. So by the time he came on, I think you had a party that practiced a very aggressive, smash-mouth form of partisanship where his style, his rhetoric. His willingness to do anything actually fit pretty well. And now it's only intensified as he legitimated that at the presidential level. So for me, that's really kind of how the GOP and Trumpism entered into a marriage.”
Sources:
- Krugman, Paul (2025). Wake Up and Smell the Corruption. How far we've fallen, how fast. On ‘Paul Krugman’, Substack, June 6, 2025. Assessed June 2025: https://substack.com/home/post/p-165331561. Online.
- Bahara, Preet and Zelizer, Julian (2025). Julian Zelizer & Preet Bharara. What lessons can Democrats learn from Ronald Reagan? On Stay Tuned with Preet Bahara, June 03, 2025. Link here.
Check out the ‘Small Acts of Democratic Resistance’. Here is the website.
Historians and political analysts have come out lately with the observation of straight lines from William F. Buckley to Donald Trump. Even though their styles are so different, erudite versus whatever the opposite of erudite is. Julian Zelizer explains:
Sam Tannenhaus has a new biography of William Buckley, ‘Buckley: The Life and the Revolution That Changed America’, it is just out now. (b.t.w. he got the commission to write this biography in 2008, late but a fine book. Spent the whole day reading it today, while the ultra-right in the Netherlands left the coalition government. Tammenbaum does kind of try to see where that does exist and doesn't exist. One argument historians have been looking at, there are elements of what we would consider far-right republicanism or far-right conservatism that were around in the 50s and 60s and often these mainstream conservatives or mainstream candidates had greater proximity to people like William Buckley, than we remember. It doesn't mean they were the top candidate. There was a great book by Daniel Bell, the great sociologist, and he edited a book in the 50s and reprinted in the 60s called ‘The Radical Right: The New American Right Expanded and Updated’. It was about all these groups. If you read it now, you'd think you were talking about contemporary far-right politics. who were in a country we thought was liberal and who were much closer to mainstream either Republican or Southern Democratic politics than we accepted. And so, yes, I think there's been scholars then and today who see that parts of what Trump is doing have deep roots going back to that Buckley generation.
Source:
Bahara, Preet and Zelizer, Julian (2025). Julian Zelizer & Preet Bharara. What lessons can Democrats learn from Ronald Reagan? On Stay Tuned with Preet Bahara, June 03, 2025. Link here.
Snyder, Timothy (2017). On Tyranny. 20 Lessons from the Twentieth Century. Tim Duggan Books, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group. ISBN: 978-0804190121. Ebook.
Snyder, Timothy (2020) Our Malady - Lessons in Liberty and Solidarity. Crown, an imprint of Random House. ISBN: 978-0593238905. Ebook.
Benavides, Lucía (2020). When Loving Lennon Became Difficult. Lucía Benavides on John Lennon, the man and the artist. Los Angeles Review of Books, December 18, 2020. Assessed June 2025: https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/when-loving-lennon-became-difficult/. Online.
Lennon, John, and Yoko Ono and David Sheff (1981/2020). All We Are Saying. St. Martin’s Griffin. ISBN: 978-1-4299-5808-0. Ebook.
Snyder, Timothy (2025). Last Year's Move to Toronto. And This Year's Politics (video and commentary). On ‘Thinking About’, June 02, 2025. Assessed June 2025: https://shorturl.at/3vX14. Online.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (2025). Dream Count. Knopf. ISBN: 978-0593802724. Hardcover.
