How to make sense of America’s turbulent times? In my role as historian, I tried on period costumes: togas for the death of the Roman Republic, tri-colored cockades for the French Revolution, grey military caps for the Insurrection of the Confederacy, jackboots for Hitler’s Nazi Putsch. Then, I remembered my graduate school training in Russian history and Vladimir Lenin’s grotesquely unreadable but deeply influential treatise entitled “State and Revolution.” 

Lenin wrote it in 1917 while banished from Russia. The book contains his ruminations on how communists could successfully take power in Russia when tsarist Russia collapsed at the end of World War I. In 1918, Lenin slipped back into Russia on a sealed train. The Bolshevik Revolution began that same year and succeeded through luck, a disorganized opposition and economic distress.

State and Revolution became the communist handbook on how to seize government power. Lenin argued that the Communist Party had to create the social, cultural, and political conditions to ensure permanent governance. To do so, they had to use the tools of the existing provisional democratic government to overthrow that government and assume everlasting power through an authoritarian, centralized “vanguard” that understood the needs of the chosen portion of the population, in the communists’ case, the “proletariat.” 

This was to be a class struggle led by a small group who ultimately learned to control the levers of power from political and military bureaucracies down to the very music that musicians were allowed to compose. Lenin, having laid down the state’s foundation, died in 1924; Stalin followed with precise logistics tactics, such as the purge of suspect bureaucrats and their replacement with “commissars,” inexperienced loyalists who forced adherence to the party line in every corner of society, even in battlefield trenches!

“Project 2025” is the State and Revolution of our time. Kevin Roberts, president of the Heritage Foundation and various others have written the Lenin-style treatise for our era. In place of the Communist Party, we have, what the historian Timothy Snyder labeled, the Mump Party (Musk + Trump). The Mumpers, as the vanguard of the oligarchs, understand politics as Lenin did — a class struggle. In this case, however, the Mumpers have turned communism on its head, reserving power for the few instead of the many who don’t understand their own best interests. 

Project 2025 carefully assessed the state of 21st-century America and brilliantly analyzed how to use the tools of democracy to overthrow it. We see it chronicled everyday by some of the press and authors like Heather Cox Richardson (a former UMass history professor) in her “Letters From an American.” Mumpers attack everything from the judiciary down to suspect DEI wording and the kind of music allowed at Kennedy Center. As expected, Trump made a Stalinesque move to fire the inspectors general and replace them with commissars.

In the midst of this maelstrom, we find it impossible to see where the whirlpool will spit us out. We don’t know what we’ll look like in two or three years, and it’s hugely frustrating to face deep uncertainty, without knowing how or where to respond to the horrors surrounding us. The Mump Party succeeded in attacking the heart of our society and body politic before we had a hint of how to resist. They had the same kind of luck, persistence, and preparation as did Lenin. We will need Abraham Lincoln’s ferocity and intelligence to win this desperate battle for America. 

Let Timothy Snyder guide us with his “Twenty Lessons for Fighting Tyranny.” We only have months to organize and resist! I hope to see you all out in the streets this spring!

John Sinton lives in Florence.