How to prevent authoritarian revolts?

To sum up the tweet:

I prefer thinking about myself as the kind of person who wants to help others.

But if I got a chance to hurt people in a way that does not cause cognitive dissonance with my preferred self-image, I would enjoy [? · GW] doing it.

This is a problem I've been wrestling with for some time. The recent invasion of Ukraine brought it back to the forefront of my mind, but so far I haven't found concrete actions an individual can take.

At the moment, it seems to me that the key to keeping authoritarianism at bay is repairing and strengthening institutions because my assumption is that a well-functioning collection of institutions (aka. a state) is what prevents people from turning to bloody revolution. In other words, if people trust the government to get their needs met, they will not wish to overturn it.

There are many forces destroying institutions. Many are internal, such as corruption and bureaucratic cost disease. These things decrease the trust in institutions, making people upset and pushing them toward fixing issues on their own. At best, this means self-help groups, but at worst, this turns into armed militias. There are external forces as well, ranging from nature (disasters, pandemics, etc.) to other states (propaganda, blockades, etc.--depending which country you live in).

I recently read an article about how Estonia is strengthening its defenses against Russian hybrid warfare. It boils down to how hybrid warfare damages social contracts (formal/informal, small/large institutions), decreasing the legitimacy of the government and of democracy itself, potentially weakening Estonia's reaction against a Crimea-like land grab. It set my mind thinking about how it should be possible to apply reverse-hybrid warfare to instead strengthen the social contracts that hold society together.

But it seems like all of this is large scale, long term work, and nothing an individual can get going in a month or six.

Like I said, I don't have concrete ideas for individual actions, but this line of inquiry has pointed me in some direction as opposed to wandering randomly. It has also made visible to me concrete examples of things that damage liberal democracy, such as the tweet you posted, perhaps helping me take on a more defensive posture.

I'm not going to put this as an answer because you said you didn't want to hear it, but I don't think you're in any danger.  The problem is not very serious now, and has been more serious in the past without coming to anything.

To get a sense of where I'm coming from I'd encourage you to read up on the history of communist movements in the United States, especially in the 1920s (sometimes called the First Red Scare, and IMO the closest the US has ever come to communist overthrow).  The history of anarchism in the US is closely related, at least in that period (no one had invented anarcho-capitalism yet I don't think, certainly it wasn't widespread), so study that too.  To brutally summarize an interesting period, USG dealt with a real threat of communist revolt through a mixture of infiltration/police action (disrupting the leadership of communist movements and unions generally) and worker's-rights concessions (giving the rank and file some of what they wanted, and so sapping their will to smash the state).

For contrast, study the October revolution.  Technically speaking, how was it carried off?  How many people were required, and what did they have to do?  How were they recruited?

Also I'd encourage you to interrogate that "1% to 5%" figure pretty closely, since it seems like a lot of the problem is downstream of it for you.  How did you come to believe that, and what exactly does it mean?  Do you expect 1% of Americans to fight for communist revolt, as Mao's guerillas did?  If not, what proportion do you expect to fight?  How does that compare to the successful revolutions you've read about?

It might also be useful to role-play the problem from the perspective of a communist leader, taking into account the problems that other such leaders have historically faced.  Are you going to replace all US government institutions, or make your changes under the color of existing law?  Each institution will have to be subverted or replaced -- the army especially, but also the Constitution, Supreme Court, existing federal bureaucracies, and so on. Think through how you might solve each of those problems, being as specific as you can.

Again, I know you said you didn't want this, but sometimes when you look through your telescope and see a meteor coming toward the earth, it's going to miss.

I think you are asking the wrong question. What you want to achieve is to prevent radicalization that makes revolts conceivable. Here is a quote from Scott Aaronson :

Nazism explicitly repudiated any “guardrail,” any principle that would explain why Jews shouldn’t just all be exterminated. Which is why, when I look at modern ideologies—from Trumpism to wokeism—the first question I ask is always: what guardrails, if any, are in place to prevent my worst nightmares, should the proponents of this ideology get unchecked power? And the appeal of liberal Enlightenment ideologies is precisely that they do have such guardrails—in the form, for example, of due process, the presumption of innocence, and free speech.

The tweet you linked is a radical opinion without a guardrail. Eliezer talked about it somewhere, how bounded rationality can lead to radical ideas, and one has to learn to see one's own limitations when evaluating the conclusions you reach. The further out of the mainstream, the more likely that your ideas are wrong somewhere.

“Republicans (30%) are approximately three times as likely as Democrats (11%) to agree with the statement, “Because things have gotten so far off track, true American patriots may have to resort to violence in order to save our country.” Agreement with this statement rises to 40% among Republicans who most trust far-right news sources and is 32% among those who most trust Fox News. One in four white evangelicals (26%) also agree that political violence may be necessary to save the country”

https://www.prri.org/press-release/competing-visions-of-america-an-evolving-identity-or-a-culture-under-attack/

It’s more than 1-5%; it’s a sizable minority.

Are you specifically against a communist revolution, or just a member of team "advocating violence is wrong, no matter the cause?"

Successful communist revolts usually (but not always) produce brutal, authoritarian police states.

I'd recommend focusing on that parenthetical.  When are revolts actual improvements for a large segment of the populace?  I suspect the answers you seek will be in recognizing what parts of the current equilibrium are unstable or unsustainable, and find ways to change those without losing the parts you like.

I personally don't think that political and social-expectation stability is feasible for more than a few generations in a technological era.  There will be revolution - some of it will be minor and bloodless, but occasionally brutal and all-encompassing.  We're overdue in the US.