Why Resistance Has a Sequence

On Authoritarian Phases, Civic Discipline, and the Cost of Acting Too Soon

Editor’s Note:

This essay is not a rebuttal of Chris Hedges, nor a dismissal of his experience or warnings. Hedges has witnessed authoritarian systems at their terminus, and his voice carries the authority of lived history. What follows is a sequencing argument, not a disagreement about danger. It asks a narrower, strategic question, how resistance functions at different stages of authoritarian consolidation, and why moving too quickly to later forms of confrontation can foreclose the very conditions that make resistance effective. The aim here is not to lower the alarm, but to ensure it’s sounded in a way that preserves leverage rather than surrendering it.

I want to begin carefully.

Chris Hedges has earned the right to be listened to (Read his “The Machinery of Terror” here). He has lived inside regimes that completed their descent. He has seen where this road can end. When he speaks about terror, disappearance, and the slow closing of civic space, he isn’t speculating. He’s remembering.

That matters. It deserves respect.

But I want to speak alongside his warning, not echo it wholesale. I want to talk about timing. About sequence. About how resistance actually survives long enough to matter.

Because there’s a difference between knowing where a road ends and knowing where you are on it.

People who’ve lived through collapsed societies often speak from the far shore. They’ve seen the iron doors close. They’ve watched fear become ordinary. Their urgency is honest. But for those of us still living in a country that hasn’t fully sealed itself, there’s a danger in mistaking the end of the story for the middle.

That mistake can cost everything.

The question isn’t whether resistance is necessary. That part’s settled. The real question is whether skipping steps makes resistance stronger or hands the state exactly what it’s waiting for.

Authoritarian systems don’t arrive all at once. They move in phases.

Before explaining them, it helps to name them plainly.

Common phases of authoritarian consolidation

• Normalization

• Selective enforcement

• Legitimacy strain

• Open repression

First comes normalization. Language shifts. Enforcement expands. Institutions wobble but still function. Arguments stay procedural. People debate interpretation rather than intent.

Then comes selective enforcement. The law still exists, but it applies unevenly. Some groups are targeted. Others are reassured. Impunity begins to show itself. Many notice, but tell themselves it’s temporary or contained.

After that comes legitimacy strain. The state no longer governs by consent alone. It needs spectacle. It needs fear. It needs visible force to remind people who’s in charge. Authority grows louder because it’s thinner.

Only after all that do you reach open repression. The phase Hedges knows well. Force becomes routine. Law becomes decoration. Violence is no longer denied, only justified.

Where you are in that sequence matters. Because resistance has phases too.

And just like authoritarianism, resistance works best when those phases are traveled in order.

Again, it helps to name them before explaining them.

Corresponding phases of civic resistance

• Witness and exposure

• Noncooperation and civil disobedience

• Legitimacy withdrawal

• Confrontation

Early resistance looks boring. It’s witness. Documentation. Exposure. Refusal to normalize what’s happening. Building shared reality when confusion is being engineered. This isn’t passive. It’s groundwork.

Then comes noncooperation. Civil disobedience. Legal resistance. Economic withdrawal. Institutions refusing to play along. This is where leverage begins to form.

After that comes legitimacy withdrawal. The public stops granting moral permission. Elites fracture. Enforcement hesitates. Orders start to feel brittle instead of inevitable.

Only sometimes, and only after all that, does confrontation appear. And when it does, it works because the state no longer has a unified base, a shared story, or moral cover.

Each phase earns the conditions that make the next phase survivable.

This is the part fear tends to erase.

Violence doesn’t create resistance energy. It spends it.

Introduce organized civic violence before legitimacy has collapsed and you don’t fracture the state. You unify it. You hand the regime the story it’s desperate to tell. You collapse undecided publics into fear. You end nonviolent leverage before it’s been fully used.

Authoritarian systems are strongest when they can point and say, see, this is why we had to do this.

That isn’t timidity. It’s strategic reality.

One of the most dangerous confusions right now is that civil resistance, civil disobedience, and civil violence occupy the same mental space for many Americans. They get flattened into a single word. Protest.

When everything looks the same in our heads, the most dramatic tool starts to feel like the most honest one. That instinct is understandable. It’s also how people get maneuvered into traps they didn’t design.

Movies teach us revolt, not resistance. History gets remembered as explosions and showdowns, not the long years of organizing, refusal, and legitimacy erosion that made those moments possible.

Courage isn’t escalation. Courage is discipline.

Courage is staying in the phase that still works even when rage wants to leap ahead. Courage is resisting the urge to confuse feeling right with being effective.

None of this denies the brutality Hedges describes. None of it minimizes the danger. It names it more precisely.

There’s a reason authoritarian systems try to provoke early violence. It simplifies their work. It compresses the timeline in their favor. It allows them to move from selective enforcement to full repression without having to justify the jump.

That’s why sequence matters. Not because people are naive. Because people are trying to survive long enough to win something real.

Hedges warns us where roads end. We should listen. But we’re also responsible for noticing where we still are, and which exits remain open if we’re disciplined enough to take them.

We’re not forced to choose between denial and premature confrontation. There’s a long middle space where resistance is active, disruptive, exhausting, and still nonviolent. That space isn’t weak. It’s where legitimacy actually breaks.

If we abandon that space too early, we don’t look brave. We look predictable.

So the question I keep asking myself, and the one I want to leave you with, is this:

Are we trying to resist tyranny,

or are we accidentally helping it declare itself early?

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