We Aren’t Headed Toward Authoritarianism. We’re Here

On Saturday evening, Donald Trump announced that he was deploying 2,000 California National Guard troops to quell anti-ICE protests in Los Angeles. He did so using a rarely used law that allows the president to take control of a National Guard if there is a “a rebellion or danger of a rebellion against the authority of the Government of the United States.” This is against the wishes of Governor Gavin Newsom, who has said that the troops will only inflame tensions. Protests continued throughout Sunday night and seem likely to escalate on Monday. 

This is a calculated attempt by the Trump administration to provoke a conflict. They hope to show cities in chaos in order to justify accelerating “deportations.” Even though deportations remain stubbornly popular, approval over their methods is slipping, and the images of ICE agents raiding restaurants, immigration hearings, and schools undercuts the narrative about deporting criminals. Stephen Miller is reportedly angry at the “slow” pace of arresting immigrants without due process and sending them off to brutal prison camps in foreign countries to which they have no association, like El Salvador, Libya, and South Sudan, and wants to speed them up to reach a quota of 3,000 a day. But to do that, they need to demonstrate greater urgency. They likely picked California because of the state’s size and prominence, and to undercut any attempt at states bucking or resisting immigration enforcement. 

This is an incredibly worrying step in the country’s march toward authoritarianism. The fact that the police are shooting rubber bullets at reporters is equally disturbing, as it seems clear that law enforcement will side with the federal authorities.  We can’t rest complacently and assume that “it can’t happen here.” It can and it is. And U.S. history offers plenty of past examples, with state militia and federal troops having been deployed against protesters as early as the 19th century. Back then, both were used to put down labor disputes and force striking workers back to work. Major strikes such as the Strike of 1877, the Great Southwest Strike of 1886, and the Pullman Strike in 1894 all ended by either federal troops’ or state militias’ force.

At the turn of the 20th century came the massacres of African Americans. In 1917, strikes and labor disputes in East St. Louis, Illinois, erupted into one of the most violent race riots in U.S. history. African Americans fought back against white attackers, and the Illinois National Guard was called in to restore peace—but they chose in most cases to join in on the attacks or at the least, just stood back and allowed them to happen. Anywhere between 40 and 150 Black people died, and thousands more were left homeless. During the Tulsa Massacre in 1921, the Oklahoma National Guard disarmed Black citizens trying to defend themselves and marched them into detention camps, even after white rioters had commandeered planes from the local airfield and dropped bombs on their homes—an unprecedented act.

But just because state-sponsored violence can happen here doesn’t mean that it cements the government’s power. Regimes that send troops to fight against their own people are almost never acting from a position of strength (even though they claim to believe that they are). Silent obedience and complacency are the real hallmarks of authoritarian power, or, as historian Timothy Snyder says, “obeying in advance.” Staging this kind of confrontation is an incredibly risky proposition because it calls the regime’s credibility into question. Even if troops were to obey an order to use lethal force against protesters, doing so usually invites further destabilization. 

The National Guard has changed a great deal since the early 20th century. Even before it was institutionalized, there were times that members didn’t want to fire on their neighbors: During the 1877 Railroad Strike in West Virginia, the militia refused to take action against the strikers. While there are very real concerns about white supremacist infiltration of the armed forces, the Guard and the Armed Forces at large are not a mob of robotic psychopaths waiting to be let loose on the American people. The California National Guard is ethnically diverse, with a large proportion of members who identify as Hispanic or Latino. White supremacist violence by a faction of the armed forces will cause morale and cohesion to crater very quickly, if not creating outright conflict in the ranks. 

For people who were raised in the shadow of the Vietnam War or for those who know their history, the events unfolding in Los Angeles may evoke memories of Kent State, when Ohio National Guardsmen shot college students  for protesting the Vietnam War. On May 4, 1970, the Ohio National Guard was deployed to the Kent State campus to quell protests over the war, specifically the revelation that U.S. troops had entered Cambodia. Some 2,000 students were protesting in various places across campus. Ohio’s Republican governor Jim Rhodes was running for a Senate seat and losing; taking a law-and-order stand over campus protests seemed like one way to revive his flagging political fortunes. 

The guardsmen were armed with live ammunition and rifles. Efforts to disperse the protesters with tear gas failed. Stone-throwing and chanting led guardsmen to panic, with some even claiming that they were under sniper fire (subsequent investigations showed that there was no sniper fire that day). Some claimed that an order to fire was given, but that was contradicted by others; in the heat of the moment, somebody opened fire and the other guardsmen followed suit. Four students were killed that day, with more injured. In the immediate aftermath of the shooting, most public opinion polls showed high levels of support for the National Guard.

But the comparison to Kent State is a fraught one, too. The United States in 2025 is not what it was in 1970. College students in 1970 were still perceived as an elite and well-off group: Just over a quarter of Baby Boomers got undergraduate degrees. Moreover, college enabled young people to defer draft duty, meaning they didn’t have to be deployed to Vietnam or Cambodia, so there was often a degree of resentment aimed at protesters over their perceived privileged status. Not all protesters in L.A. are students, and the same social dynamics are no longer at play. Nor did the shootings at Kent State bring the antiwar movement to heel; rather, it inflamed it even further. Student strikes exploded after this, ultimately shutting down more than 450 campuses across the country. 

If we are in the worst-case scenario and this is the prelude to the declaration of martial law, that actually raises the stakes for the administration because they have to enforce martial law, which is expensive, and disruptive (think about how angry Americans were over Covid lockdowns), and above all, you have to be willing to back it up with lethal force or it falls apart. If troops refuse orders even after initially carrying them out, it is a profound loss of legitimacy for the government. 

This pattern has played out at a global level as well. Repression can backfire or simply go nowhere. In Iran during the Revolution, the Shah’s troops opened fire on September 8, 1978 in what became known as Black Friday. Dozens were killed, but it only galvanized protesters who began launching strikes that crippled the economy. By December of that year, the Shah’s troops were refusing orders to open fire on protesters. The crackdown in Tiananmen Square worked in part because the Chinese Communist Party brought in troops from outside the city; prior to that, troops had been unwilling to take violent action against protesters. 

South Africa’s State of Emergency in the 1980s failed to contain rising discontent or to bring the townships back under government control. This was despite the fact that more than 26,000 people were detained after 1985 and that policemen were given authorization to use live ammunition after a single warning. The brutality displayed by the government alienated the country’s foreign allies and failed to cow domestic protesters into surrender. 

This is not a call for martyrdom or for people to seek harm; rather, it is a call to keep the pressure up, because acquiescence and surrender is exactly what Trump needs and wants. The labor union leader Dolores Huerta, now 95 and still fighting, spoke to protesters and emphasized that we need to develop unique tactics to meet this historical moment.

One is simply fatigue. At present staffing levels, ICE cannot keep this up indefinitely. The agency simply does not have enough people to be continually fighting back against protests. While they are, they’re hampered in how many people they can deport. There are smaller ways to carry this out than mass protests: People can form ICE watch groups. The internet has made it easier than ever to mobilize mass response, and there’s evidence that constant surveillance and criticism is taking a toll on the morale of those in the agency. Hurting their feelings enough by shaming them and being present actually will take a long-term toll. 

A summer of angry protests also promises to be economically destabilizing in a way that 2020’s protests were not, because Covid had effectively shut down whole sectors of the economy. International tourism to the U.S. is already sharply in decline, but it can go further still: The sight of troops on the streets of Los Angeles or Chicago or New York will keep people away. Will our erstwhile trading partners be inclined to sign favorable trade deals with the U.S., or will they be content to simply let Trump stew in the various messes that he’s made? If nothing else, this drives a wedge between the Chamber of Commerce Republicans supporting Trump and the Stephen Miller types—another distraction that the administration can ill afford. 

The thing we cannot afford to do is to get sucked into debates and demands that the protesters need to be better behaved, because the argument is being made in bad faith. Protesters overwhelmingly are being peaceful, but the administration’s allies are determined to prove that some kind of disorder is happening. They’ll focus on any kind of property damage down to burning shopping carts as proof of “disorder.”

Lastly, we have one last, hidden advantage: Whenever possible, Donald Trump wants a half-assed, quick victory. Stephen Miller might want to go to the barricades, but the longer that this goes on, the more that it will test Trump’s patience. He doesn’t want to be seen as losing or trapped in an interminable battle. So if protests expand to other cities, the National Guard—or whatever other forces the administration chooses to deploy—will be overextended. And the longer protests continue and gum up the works, the likelier it is that Trump declares victory so that he can turn his attention to something else.