Back in high school, I bore witness to the events of Snyderville, the unbelievable saga of a small-town fascist power grab that briefly turned a half square mile in northern Indiana into a two-person autocracy.
(A disclaimer: There aren't a lot of primary sources about this that are easy to access anymore. Many of the specific details in this article, including all the images, come from a student documentary that's still on YouTube. The rest are drawn from local news reports and my own memories of what went down. I may get some details wrong or I may have embellished some things in memory, but otherwise, the story you are about to hear is true.)
This is a wild story but...it tracks.
I'm in a significantly larger city but the mayor's illegally banned clapping for any speakers criticizing city hall during council meetings. The police are using drones to spy on bookstores. This came after they arrested our journalists for covering their crackdown on a mutual aid effort at a homeless camp. On christmas.
City hall looks well on its way to losing a major civil rights lawsuit for their years-long policy of giving any cop or official the power to ban people from public property, in secret, without an ounce of due process.
Currently the vast majority of city council (and the vast majority of candidates running for office in this year's election) are backing a proposal to tax everyone in downtown to essentially give the Chamber of Commerce their own private security force to crack down on, in their own words, "anything deemed out of the ordinary." Pretty much everyone outside of a handful of the ultra-wealthy hates this idea but they're doing it anyway.
And this is all from "progressive" politicians, though they're often happy to work with the far-right if it helps them fight anti-gentrificafion efforts and grassroots protests.
The thing about the Snyders' story, so vividly told in the post above, is it's not really that much of an exception. Sure, usually the corruption's at least slightly more subtle and involves more of those in power than a single couple. But a lot of other local journalists and active community members I know have similar stories from tiny towns all the way up to some of the largest cities in the country. Hell, a longtime resident of a mountain town not that far from here once summed it up as "less democratic than North Korea," especially due to the extensive marriage and property ties between law enforcement and a handful of political dynasties.
The slow death of local news is definitely part of these stories getting buried. So is establishment news outlets who view their primary role as appeasing the local gentry. Run into them enough drinks in and they'll even tell you so.
Local government's where the power of the state really touches the ground. That means that so many of its defining traits - petty cruelty, arbitrary bureaucracy and open corruption - are harder to hide. Across america, today, there are a thousand other tyrants like the Snyders who will merrily go about their reigns until someone finally stops them.
