[CodeMage]

> We (Eastern Europeans) could not do neither of those things without risking jail time and we still managed to topple dictatorships.

As someone who was born and grew up in post-Communist Yugoslavia, there are a few things I can offer as an observation here. Please don't take these as a disagreement or a criticism. It's just additional context I would like to offer to everyone who happens to read this.

One is that people are perfectly fine with a dictatorship as long as the life is good enough for the majority. That's why no one toppled Tito, but they got rid of Milošević in the end, after all the wars, sanctions, and bombings.

Another is that all those things that you said Americans can do without risking jail time aren't the things that toppled dictatorships. Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying they're worthless. On the contrary, things like talking to your neighbor, protesting, and sparking dialogues are all indispensable ingredients for overthrowing a dictator, but they're not the endgame. They're just the stepping stones.

Which brings me to my final observation: the only way to overthrow a dictatorship is through a revolution. It doesn't have to be a violent revolution, but it does have to be a revolution and not just a bunch of limited, scattered, uncoordinated protests.

Whether Trump's administration is a dictatorship or not is not something I'm interested in discussing on HN, but the fact remains that the sentiment GP expressed -- that they're "resigned to the fact that there's nothing we as individuals can do about it" -- indicates that the people who are trying to resist the erosion of democracy in the US lack organization and coordination. The things you listed could help them with that, but I don't think that will happen until there's a critical mass of people willing to take risks, and we're still not in the situation where things are bad enough for that to happen.

[rightbyte]

> the only way to overthrow a dictatorship is through a revolution.

No. E.g. quite many monarchies have been reformed without revolutions.

[Volundr]

Can you speak more about which ones and how that happened? The main one that comes to my mind is the British monarchy (to the extent that they don't really have much power), and my general impression (not a historian) is that that's a bit of a fluke. Looking at the French and American Revolutions, they sort of realized that their necks might stay better attached if they gave some ground. I'm not sure the monarchy being a participant in it's own reform is really applicable.

[rsynnott]

> The main one that comes to my mind is the British monarchy (to the extent that they don't really have much power)

They don't have much power due to _many, many revolutions_; they may not generally get called that, but the wars leading up to the Magna Carta, and later the English Civil War, were clearly revolutions against the monarchy, and successfully limited its power.

[microtonal]

There are more Western European countries with (constitutional) monarchies (The Netherlands, Denmark, Sweden, Norway), that have become less powerful/more ceremonial over the past decades or even centuries.

[rsynnott]

There are few if any examples of a major absolute monarchy going non-absolute without _some_ sort of revolution (often a kind of limited aristocratic one which may not get _called_ a revolution).

Going from non-absolute to purely ceremonial or non-existent is easier, but generally breaking the power of the monarch in the first place does require some sort of revolution.

[CodeMage]

That's interesting and sounds like a hole in my knowledge of history. I'm curious, were those monarchies actually dictatorships? The UK still has a monarch, but it's not a dictatorship.

[tpm]

There are basically two kinds of monarchies, absolutist - the monarch has absolute power, so it is actually a hereditary dictatorship - and constitutional monarchy, which is mostly what you see today in the UK, Netherlands, Belgium, Spain etc.

Going further back in the history, some feudal monarchies were actually not absolutist in the sense the king had to manage various factions of landowners, clergy, etc (so-called Estates) or even share power with them. So it all depended on the relative power of the monarch and others in the society.

[CamperBob2]

Then they weren't dictatorships.