The frog of democracy is nearly boiled. We can still jump out of the pot.

I still remember, from when I was a politically precocious teen in the 1970s, my dog-eared paperback copy of one of that fraught decade’s defining books: The Gulag Archipelago by the Soviet Nobel laureate Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. His nonfiction chronicle of the USSR’s Lenin and Stalin eras’ forced labor camps — where he’d spent eight years of his own life, for the offense of a wartime letter critical of dictator Joseph Stalin — could be a dense tome for a high schooler. But I wanted to understand the thin line between tyranny and the freedoms I enjoyed as a young man in America — where Solzhenitsyn himself fled for refuge in 1976.

“Gradually it was disclosed to me that the line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either — but right through every human heart — and through all human hearts,” Solzhenitsyn wrote amid the grim accounts of conditions in the isolated and often frigid camps.

“This line shifts.”

A half-century later, the line has shifted again — to right here in the United States of America, no longer the land of the free.

Just over two months into the Donald Trump regime, our own nation is, shamefully, beginning work on its own gulag archipelago spanning the clear-blue waters of the lower hemisphere. It started with an aborted-and-thus-wasted multimillion-dollar erection of a camp at Cuba’s Guantánamo Bay. Now, with future gulags likely on U.S. soil, the line has shifted again with a deal with El Salvador’s own strongman to accept shackled, Venezuelan-born young men who’ve mostly been charged with no crime, and dump them in one of the world’s most notorious prisons.

There are so many outrages around the U.S. flights of 238 Venezuelan men to El Salvador’s CECOT maximum security prison that it’s hard to pick which outrage to focus on. That so many of these alleged gang members have no criminal record, and that U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE, an acronym that’s becoming as notorious as the KGB) seemingly singled out some for their innocuous tattoos, including the emblem of the Real Madrid soccer club? That ICE allegedly tricked its detainees into signing papers that falsely claimed they were going to Venezuela, and is weakly defending itself against the charge that it defied a federal judge’s order to turn the planes around? That Trump himself knows that CECOT is a vile hellhole, and joked about sending Tesla showroom vandals there, even as he claims no memory of signing the order that doomed the Venezuelans?

Most importantly, there is no denying the evil that is being perpetrated in our names. The Kafkaesque transfer of the ICE detainees into the violent hands of Salvadoran prison guards was witnessed and written about for Time magazine by an American photojournalist, Philip Holsinger.

“I’m not a gang member. I’m gay. I’m a barber,” one of the detainees screamed as a guard slammed him to the hard floor of CECOT, also known as the Terrorism Confinement Center. Soon, Holsinger watched other detainees — who looked, fittingly, terrorized — kicked, slapped, punched, or slammed against the side of buses. “There was no blood,” he wrote, “but the violence had rhythm, like a theater of fear.”

In this moment, more than any other, our United States had finally become the monster we feared in our youth, turning any remaining notion of American exceptionalism into a hideous lie, converting the fiction of Franz Kafka and George Orwell’s 1984 into our new reality. As the photo of anguished relatives in Caracas, Venezuela, at the top of this column reveals, “the missing” of the 21st century are not in some Chilean strongman’s soccer stadium but in our own gulag archipelago.

And yet, the circle of life continues, even under dictatorship. I’ve been mostly away from my columnist’s watch post for the second month of the Trump presidency, dealing with the illness, death, and funeral of my 88-year-old father. Events that normally would have triggered angry screeds — the cowardly knee bends of some of our great institutions, from Ivy League universities to white-shoe law firms, or the use of Orwellian terms like “DEI” to mask 1619-flavored racism — popped up on my phone and then vanished into the numbness. But not responding to every hourly crisis also gave me the freedom to reflect.

I’d spent most of 2024 warning that a Trump election victory would mean … well, pick your preferred word — authoritarianism, monarchy, tyranny. I obviously wasn’t as hysterical as some of my trolls would have had it, but there’s no temptation to say “I told you so.” In fact, in hindsight I was wrong about one thing: suggesting that dictatorial rule, like the MAGA dream of mass deportation, would send a procession of tanks or jackbooted thugs into the Latino neighborhoods of Philly or Chicago. Instead, life can look normal even as the air we breathe feels less free.

Since Jan. 20, the Trump regime has been slow-cooking the Crock-Pot of American liberty much like the proverbial frog in boiling water, turning up the heat degree by barely perceptible degree, hoping we merely feel like we are in a hot tub, not tomorrow’s fricassee. Instead of tanks rolling past the bodegas of Washington Heights, we see one Palestinian protester — for a cause half the electorate strongly disagrees with — snatched off the street and whisked to a cell in Louisiana, to terrify tomorrow’s would-be marchers. One or two elite universities are punished for politically unpopular things — vague charges of “antisemitism,” or unfair competition by a transgender female athlete — to mask the real goal of crippling their true enemy, higher education as an incubator of critical thinking.

» READ MORE: Outside Tesla in the Philly suburbs, the green shoots of an American uprising | Will Bunch

The result is that the most egregious human rights offenses — the sudden arrest and would-be deportation of a handful of foreign-born campus protest leaders, or the violent south-of-the-border imprisonment of refugees that the regime claims, with flimsy evidence, are criminal gang members, or the inexplicable detention of foreign tourists — are numbered in the hundreds, not the millions.

For now.

But every time a Mahmoud Khalil is grabbed off the street in the dead of night, or a Spanish soccer tattoo gets a man who thought he was escaping tyranny in his Venezuelan homeland thrown into an American-endorsed gulag instead, or the president of the United States threatens to defund an entire state because its female governor dared speak back to His Highness, the burner is turned up another millimeter or two. The hundreds of direct targets create a fascism multiplier in the millions who are now too afraid, in such a climate, to criticize the government or attend a protest. The goal is dictatorship without any major event that sends millions into the streets, South Korea-style — and so after just 62 days, you can smell the boiled frog legs.

It’s instructive to step back from this hour’s headlines and look to history because almost every shock we’re feeling right now is an echo of yesterday’s tyrants, from, yes, Mussolini and Hitler in the 1930s to Hungary’s Orbán and Turkey’s Erdoğan right now.

That Hitler’s Germany — just a couple of months after the Nazi regime took power in 1933 — enacted a “Law against Overcrowding in Schools and Higher Education” that aimed to remove international and Jewish students certainly feels relevant in 2025. Many have noted that, more broadly, it took only 53 days for Germany’s führer to convert the troubled Weimar Republic into a Nazi dictatorship. There’s a reason why Solzhenitsyn’s moral reflections on Stalin’s crimes against humanity are finding a second life, some 17 years after the author passed away.

But while knowing the history is so critical now, the past is also not our destiny. When you look across all 50 states, you can see a surprisingly large number of everyday folks — some of whom voted for Trump less than five months ago — flooding town halls to ask Republicans just what the heck they are doing here, or to beg lethargic Democrats to throw their bodies against the gears to make it stop. They are peering over the metal edge of the pot and screaming that we’re in very hot water.

Like other political observers, I am somewhat amazed at the massive crowds turning out in places like Denver or Tucson, Ariz., to hear Sen. Bernie Sanders and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez denounce the oligarchy of Trump and his copresident Elon Musk because frankly there’s nothing new or surprising in their spot-on diatribes against income inequality. But what matters is that so many desperate people feel a need to be in the same place, to know they are not alone.

It’s utterly demoralizing that our supposed democratic watchdogs — the media, universities, Congress, the courts — are so craven and morally compromised. But there are still paths of less resistance where our nearly boiling water can flow. The rise of America as a consumer nation has meant the power of the pocketbook remains in our hands.

Populist protests outside showrooms for Musk’s Tesla have helped slash its overpriced stock by 50% since Trump’s inauguration, weakening the regime’s right arm. The retailer Target has paid a price for following the lead of Trump, and not its shoppers, on diversity. A new poll finds that 20% of Americans now support boycotts or economic pressure against businesses that support, or comply with, the Trump regime — a capitalist choke point that could bring the oligarchy to its knees.

We are at a critical point where the frog legs of this American Experiment might soon end up on the serving platter, or we can use them to hop out of their evil, steaming cauldron and gasp the rarefied air of our remaining freedom. We can look inside our hearts and shift the line again. The soaked masses can still emerge to deliver Trump and Musk our simple message: We are not cooked, not yet.

» READ MORE: SIGN UP: The Will Bunch Newsletter