When I spoke to Andrea Pitzer before the election, I told her we would need to do a project together if things went wrong. And things went wrong. You’ve probably heard.
I knew her wealth of knowledge of the worst humanity can do—gathered to write her book One Long Night: A Global History of Concentration Camps—would be essential for Americans should a vengeful and democracy-hating Donald Trump be installed into the presidency by an even more vindictive and democracy-hating Elon Musk.
I knew said installation would mean concentration camps would be as inevitable as the theft of the generations of wealth by some of the richest men ever to live.
So, who would people need to hear from more than Andrea?
And I was right! But for reasons I did not yet know.
Andrea graciously agreed to give a project together a chance, and her podcast Next Comes What has quickly become one the best and important projects I’ve ever worked on. I knew Andrea had an impeccable mastery of human tragedy at scale and moral clarity. But there’s more! Quickly, I—and many listeners—were moved by her ability to communicate in a way that simultaneously pierces illusions while also moving you toward a calming center.
But it wasn’t just her knowledge of concentration camps that proved essential in this disorienting moment. It was also her unflinching grasp of the authoritarianism that, almost by necessity, accompanies mass detention of civilians that I believe every American needs now and probably for the rest of our lives. These burdensome insights have combined to make her the perfect spirit guide for the brutal psychedelic/poison our country has been fooled into ingesting.
Because I’m a goofy narcissist, I often feel as if Andrea is speaking directly to me in these episodes. And this episode above, number 13, proved that to be true.
This section below couldn’t be more addressed to anyone like me who “steps up” online but struggles to find similar pluck in public:
I think that clip is the most important thing I’ll ever share.
An expert on global authoritarianism and concentration camps is telling us:
" We need to gather in public to make connections and assert control right now before it becomes any harder to do that."
She chooses her words so carefully, so please linger on those words “any harder to do that.”
We now have a Secretary of Defense who has called for rolling tanks on his political opponents. We have an Attorney General who has been chosen to act like a defense attorney for Donald Trump—a role she enacted at one of his impeachments—and is literally staffed by his actual defense attorneys. And we will likely soon have an FBI Director whose primary qualification is a seething passion for punishing his (and Trump’s) perceived opponents.
We are still America. The Constitution is still in effect, somewhat. We are still, in general, far more free and stable than humans have been in nearly all of our species' history.
“There’s a real difference between understanding that this is a deadly serious situation and catastrophizing by saying, ‘We’re cooked.’ We are not cooked,” Senator Brian Schatz told The New Yorker. “The roots of democracy are still strong. It depends on not just members of the legislative branch fighting back but there being a mass movement to back us up.”
A mass movement to back us up. That movement only exists if it is in public.
Democracy happens in public, Andrea explains.
And here’s how I figured out she’s talking directly to me:
All this may not be the fault of the people who understand the jeopardy we're in at this moment—and who want a democratic future for the country—but it's become our problem to solve.
Now is the time to get serious about solving it—before it gets any harder to do.
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