By Alberto Vásquez Encalada
Midway through our Mad Thinking webinar series, ‘Disability Activism Under Pressure,’ one idea keeps coming to mind: authoritarianism creates the temptation to stay on the margins. To lie low. To let others lead the fight you silently support. It can feel safer. And it’s often safer in the short term—especially when we know elites will fold. But silence breeds acceptance, and it becomes a quiet form of complicity that gives authoritarians more room to grow.
For disability organisers, the pull to the margins is even stronger. Some may think: our job is disability inclusion or disability rights, not democracy. But that’s a mistake. What we’ve seen so far is how authoritarian governments hit disabled and mad people first and harshly—through funding cuts, ugly laws, or scapegoating us as burdens. We don’t live single-issue lives, as Audre Lorde reminded us. We are poor, racialised, migrants, queer. When authoritarianism comes, it comes for us in every way. Even if disabled people were spared, not seen as a threat or instrumentalised, authoritarianism would still threaten everything we stand for.
We argue for inclusion because disability and ableism are everywhere. That means we cannot escape authoritarianism. It’s not ‘someone else’s fight’ while we stick to our corner. Our struggles are already entangled, whether we admit it or not. And this is not just about Trump—it’s about Boluarte, Bukele, el-Sisi, Orbán, Marcos, and others. Fear and danger are real, but so is the cost of retreat.
We need to find the courage to act. To show up. To embody disability justice in the face of authoritarianism. Precisely because we are so often underestimated, we can play an outsized role in moments of repression. We’ve already seen it in disabled protesters backing Palestine Action in the UK, and in those in Argentina standing up to Milei’s reforms and pushing back. Let’s turn vulnerability into strength, and margins into a place of collective resistance and hope. That takes more than individual bravery—it takes all of us working together to build a global movement.
Featured image: Franz Marc, Red Deer I, 1910/11.
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