"A practical guide to courage in Trump’s age of fear."

April 13, 2025 2:54 AM

From the New Yorker. "We analyzed the literature of protest and spoke to a range of people, including foreign dissidents and opposition leaders, movement strategists, domestic activists, and scholars of nonviolent movements. We asked them for their advice, in the nascent weeks of the Trump Administration, for those who want to oppose these dramatic changes but harbor considerable fear for their jobs, their freedom, their way of life, or all three. There are some proven lessons, operational and spiritual, to be learned from those who have challenged repressive regimes—a provisional guide for finding courage in Trump’s age of authoritarian fear."
posted by Paul Slade (23 comments total)

This article is behind a paywall
posted by reality_is_benign at 4:01 AM on April 13 [1 favorite]

Here’s an archive.ph link for the article.
posted by FallibleHuman at 4:24 AM on April 13 [3 favorites]

This is a great and hopeful peace--the work has been done before, it'll need to be done now, and again in the future if there is a future--but this one part struck me: "Now is the time to clean up your life—your digital life and even, perhaps, your personal life. Dissidents describe a pattern: autocrats and their cronies use even the most minor personal scandal to undermine the credibility of activists and weaken their movements. 'You have to be a nun or a saint,' a prominent Venezuelan political activist, who asked not to be named, told us. 'If someone wants to find dirt on you, they will find it, so give them the least dirt possible.'"

I had a conversation this week (ironically the conversation started because of an antisemitic speaker coming to a local college, who is being welcomed with open arms by the right because of Free Speech), over what on earth to do about social media in this new age. Does it make sense to wipe out your comments and start fresh and careful? Does it matter if you made most of those comments on Facebook instead of Musk's Twitter? What are you actually supposed to do, what level of clean-up makes sense? (or is shutting up part of the whole obeying-in-advance thing?)

Which leads to the idea that maybe we ought to worry less about our timelines and more about our communities: "Many dissidents we spoke to said that, amid prolonged and cascading political crises, establishing a political home for yourself is a necessary ingredient for nurturing non-coöperation. Think of this as the equivalent of participation in a faith community that meets to worship—a regular practice to guard against loneliness and despair, and check in with others going through a similar experience."

Where do you find that kind of political home?
posted by mittens at 4:37 AM on April 13 [8 favorites]

We've worked hard to create that kind of community at our local yarn shop. Hobby groups, maker spaces, tool libraries, libraries, queer bookstores, book clubs, food pantries, school-adjacent groups, martial arts studios, artist collectives, political and social action groups, etc. If you can't find one to join, maybe it's time to start one.
posted by rikschell at 5:06 AM on April 13 [9 favorites]

Also I have found that I want to shrink social media down to people I actually know, or places that work more like communities. Here, discord servers, small subreddits. No Facebook or Twitter or anything resembling that. Build networks of trust rather than followers.
posted by rikschell at 5:09 AM on April 13 [9 favorites]

Yep - I’m curious to see what the impact is on FB, Instagram, X etc. once it really sinks in that they’re going to be used as one basis for the social credit system the US right is busily constructing. Personally, it was what it took to finally break my addiction to FB.
posted by reedbird_hill at 5:34 AM on April 13 [1 favorite]

Manual typewriters. Mimeographs. IRL conversations. One can move offline without “obeying in advance.”

Mocking the administration is a waste of time. “Online resistance” via social media posts is a waste of time, which also exposes you to scrutiny. Not exposing yourself needlessly to authoritarian scrutiny is not necessarily obeying in advance- it is merely moving a pawn one space on the chessboard.
posted by Devils Rancher at 5:43 AM on April 13 [8 favorites]

Resistance as such gets way too much airtime.

Trump's White House isn't a supernatural force. So far it reacts to ordinary feedback in (at least) the ordinary fashion, as we can see in the constant modifications of the approach to the tariffs as their anticipated impacts hit the markets and major market players and the way that the anti-DEI or DOGE-spending-cut mandates (and their respective implementations) give way when they have absurd results. Had the Democrats won one or both the Florida special Congressional elections you would have seen an even greater reaction to that feedback.

The things where Trump appears inflexible, are, entirely unsurprisingly, the things about which there's a pretty strong disconnect between elite outrage, and popular indifference, like deporting foreigners for supporting Hamas or cracking down on Ivy League schools or big law firms.
posted by MattD at 6:52 AM on April 13

The things where Trump appears inflexible, are, entirely unsurprisingly, the things about which there's a pretty strong disconnect between elite outrage, and popular indifference, like deporting foreigners for supporting Hamas or cracking down on Ivy League schools or big law firms.


not framing lies, oppression and manufactured controversy in the service of fascism as "elite outrage" would be real swell hoss
posted by lalochezia at 6:58 AM on April 13 [17 favorites]

Elite outrage can be and often is quite merited. But you can't deny non-elites don't care about the fates of 7-figure-PPP law firms that they could never afford to retain or colleges that would never admit them or their kids.
posted by MattD at 7:48 AM on April 13 [3 favorites]

"they" ?
posted by stevil at 7:56 AM on April 13 [1 favorite]

Sorry if your dumb kid can’t into…checks notes…the university of Alabama.

I do think people care if students are rounded up in vans and sent to torture centers because of something they said.
posted by MisantropicPainforest at 7:56 AM on April 13 [9 favorites]

Where do you find that kind of political home?

I have found it where I've been finding it for a long time: among Quakers, and among my heavily-weighted-trans queer community. Neither group is perfect (my fellow Quakers in particular can be vexing at times, and I'm sure they would say the same about me), but I am lucky to have been part of these communities for decades. Articles like this one have been really helpful to me, but it was a group of queer Quakers who got there first for me, offering online workshops about responses to authoritarianism practically as soon as the election was over, and exposing me for the first time to certain ideas that I've since seen propagate all over the place (which I am glad to see happen). I notice that my political home has never in my life (I'm almost 60 and became an activist in my teens) been a political party, but has always been a movement or a counter/subcultural community. It's one of the reasons I feel lucky to be queer: it booted me out of a lot of the mainstream options really early on, which I think has prepared me somewhat for our current moment.
posted by Well I never at 8:02 AM on April 13 [10 favorites]

Also we’re calling people who have lived here for years and years “foreigners”? They’re not tourists.
posted by MisantropicPainforest at 8:04 AM on April 13 [7 favorites]

I do think people care if students are rounded up in vans and sent to torture centers because of something they said.

Many people care. Perhaps even most people. But keep in mind that at this point, the kakistocracy only cares about its cultists, though it pays them only lip service and views them as suckers. And in that cohort, there is a dominant majority of people who a) loathe college/university because it's where all the smarty pants people come to make their life hellish with terrible scheduling at work, b) loathe college/university on general principle because all their propaganda outlets tell them to, c) view protestors/activists the same way, d) deeply, deeply resent foreigners "taking slots" for white people, and e) especially despise people engaging in activism for other people the cultists consider subhuman.

So while most people don't want students rounded up in vans, their opinions don't really count right now, and there are lots of people who cheer on the regime rounding up students, especially foreigners advocating for other foreigners. Ignore this at our peril.
posted by outgrown_hobnail at 8:16 AM on April 13 [5 favorites]

Many dissidents we spoke to said that, amid prolonged and cascading political crises, establishing a political home for yourself is a necessary ingredient for nurturing non-coöperation. Think of this as the equivalent of participation in a faith community that meets to worship—a regular practice to guard against loneliness and despair, and check in with others going through a similar experience."

Where do you find that kind of political home?

You're posting in it.
posted by orange swan at 9:52 AM on April 13 [7 favorites]

Recently, and relevant: https://www.metafilter.com/208354/Ordinary-people-have-more-power-than-they-know
posted by johnabbe at 1:04 PM on April 13 [2 favorites]

deporting foreigners for supporting Hamas

Shitty framing, but about what one would expect from you; opposition to genocide isn't "supporting Hamas".
posted by Pseudonymous Cognomen at 3:09 PM on April 13 [4 favorites]

I recently joined a local Indivisible group and they are having small in-person meetings, going to protests together, and have a book club. You could look on the Indivisible site for one in your area, or create one if there are none. I joined as a result of reading the other thread johnabbe linked.
posted by jilloftrades at 7:07 PM on April 13 [2 favorites]

If you check mobilize.us, they'll have a list of actions going on in your zipcode and you might find something interesting there. I've seen Indivisible meetups there, local environmental groups, protests, town halls...

Also in light of that if 3.5% of a country joins a nonviolent protest action they are likely to succeed statistic I'll just mention generalstrikeus.org again. Though they seem stuck at the same level of support (300,000 people) they had a month ago so momentum may be stalled there.
posted by subdee at 7:23 PM on April 13 [2 favorites]

But the American approach to dissent will likely have to evolve in this era of rising “competitive authoritarianism,” wherein repressive regimes retain the trappings of democracy—such as elections—but use the power of the state to effectively crush resistance.

Autocratic Legalism (2018) - "The Essay also suggests how the legalistic autocrats may be stopped."[1]

As this evidence reveals, liberal constitutionalism becomes endangered when the rules of the game are themselves gamed.[2,3] This can occur, and often does, even before a charismatic leader’s campaign to sweep away “all that” becomes powerful enough to win elections. Alexis de Tocqueville’s explanation of the French Revolution is generalizable: for a revolution to topple the ancien régime, the ancien régime must have already been hollowed out from within.⁸⁸ A revolution, in Tocqueville’s account, is therefore the final and not the first stage of political transformation. The modern legalistic autocrat who can quickly disable a liberal, democratic, constitutionalist political order is generally simply taking in the political harvest others have planted. Or, he is taking advantage of structural weaknesses that exist in many complex constitutional systems that give him the possibility of exploiting contradictions in the system for his own benefit. Bringing down a healthy constitutional, democratic, liberal order is not so easy unless the system is already weakened before the attempt...

Opponents are fired from their jobs,¹⁰⁶ denied social benefits for technical reasons, and evicted from their buildings because of small and technical violations.¹⁰⁷ Owners of businesses that the government wants to seize in order to redistribute to its own allies are given offers that they cannot refuse.¹⁰⁸ None of these measures amount to serious rights violations because economic security, the right to housing, the right to operate a business free of government inspections, the right to a free university education, or the right to a basic income through either social welfare or pension programs are not rights one can successfully claim in most courts.¹⁰⁹ Instead, the rights recognized by constitutions and transnational human-rights instruments are the rights violated by the great twentieth-century authoritarians who engaged in genocide, political killings, imprisonment without trial, incommunicado detention, torture, censorship, seizure of property without compensation, show trials, and searches of private homes.¹¹⁰

The new autocrats aim to capture and exercise unconstrained power, but they have realized that they don’t need to annihilate their opponents to do so. Rather, the reverse applies. In keeping with their concern to maintain a legitimate public appearance, it is positively useful for the new autocrats to appear to have some democratic openness precisely so that they can claim that they are not authoritarians of the twentieth-century sort.¹¹¹ They therefore tolerate a weakened opposition and other democratic signs of life, such as a small critical press or a few opposition NGOs, to demonstrate they have not completely smothered the political environment with their autocracy.¹¹²

Of course, it is a sign of progress that the new autocrats steer clear of mass human-rights violations and tolerate limited opposition; the human-rights movement has succeeded in many ways. But the new autocrats have found new pressure points to sideline their opponents that are clearly understood as coercive by those targeted but that are not protected by constitutional rights. New autocrats have learned that they can consolidate their power if they can simply get their opponents to give up and go away, or stay home and mind their own business. They don’t need to imprison or kill those who object to autocracy; they simply need to get them to tolerate the diminished freedoms on offer.

[...]

IV. What Is to Be Done?

This Essay has shown that a new generation of autocrats has learned to govern by appealing to electoral legitimacy while using the tools of law to consolidate power in few hands. The new autocrats can and do win elections—often repeated elections—but, after their first victory, they stay in power by weakening the opposition support structures like parties and NGOs, by monopolizing the broadcast media to limit public debate, by harassing critics, and by tinkering with the election rules. They rewrite constitutions to make what was once unconstitutional into something constitutional. They do not, as a first resort, call out the tanks or declare a state of emergency; they do not enter office with a phalanx of soldiers. Instead they come to power with a phalanx of lawyers. The new autocrats look like democrats playing hardball,¹²⁷ not like dictators playing softball.

The move from hardball democrat to legalistic autocrat is achieved by undermining constitutionally entrenched checks on executive power, often (as we have seen) by changing the constitution so that what was once unconstitutional is no longer. By consolidating power under the guise of legality (often constitutional legality), the autocrats set the stage for snapping the trap of democratic pretense when the tide of public opinion turns against them. Once the public loses the chance to change its leaders when the romance wears off, autocracy is complete. But it is too late to use constitutional appeals to fight autocracy at that point because the constitution has become a hollow shell.

By now it should be clear that many of the changes that result in the de-liberalization of constitutional systems are highly technical and therefore hard for the ordinary citizen to understand. How many people in the general public grasp the importance of differences in complex rules about judicial appointments, or see the implications of jurisdictional tweaks to a court’s previous operating rules? How many people really comprehend that changing rules of parliamentary procedure or altering the structural composition of independent commissions or fiddling with the arcane processes for drawing electoral district boundaries are crucial to the maintenance of liberal constitutionalism? Most people see only that there is a constitution still proclaimed in the name of “we the people.” They see that the same institutions they knew before are still standing—the constitutional court, the parliament, the central bank, the election commission. What could have gone so badly wrong when so much looks the same?

The takeaway lessons of the twentieth century prepare people for different sorts of threats to liberalism: pervasive ideological appeals that justify the destruction of institutions, the invocation of total emergency, mass violations of human rights, and tanks in the streets. By contrast, the new autocrats come to power not with bullets but with laws. They attack the institutions of liberal constitutionalism with constitutional amendments. They carefully preserve the shell of the prior liberal state—the same institutions, the same ceremonies, an overall appearance of rights protection—but in the meantime they hollow out its moral core. Constitutional institutions survive in the same buildings, but their liberal souls have been killed. How many people can really see this until they themselves need constitutional protection and find themselves defenseless? By then it is too late.

With the rise of autocratic legalism, we are witnessing new political technologies designed to accomplish the goals of autocracy without its usual telltale signs. Autocrats can accomplish this because the democratic publics in these places were trained to look for the wrong signs of danger. As the new autocrats get more and more clever, deploying law to kill off liberalism, constitutionalists need to educate ourselves and democratic publics about liberal constitutionalism.

First, those of us who work in the field of constitutional law have to stare into the face of the new autocracy to track in detail how it works. We need to learn to recognize the new signs of danger, which means that we need to get better at documenting the trouble cases and learning from them.

Then, we need to educate others. Civic education needs to teach people to recognize the new signs of danger. Under what circumstances is it safe to trust the appointment of judges to a political process? When is presidentialism a sign of danger? How can the discretionary use of public power for economic intimidation be curbed? Why is the call to draft a new constitution alarming? People beyond the educated elite need to know why these questions matter, and they need to learn how to think about answering them.

Law is too important to leave only to the lawyers. A citizenry trained to resist the legalistic autocrats must be educated in the tools of law themselves. Liberal and democratic constitutionalism cannot remain an elite ideal that has no resonance in the general public; that leaves this public ripe for autocratic legalists to sweep them away in the last remaining exercises of democratic power that the public may possess. In the days when dictators came to power through military force, civil defense courses provided training for publics to resist with arms. In the days when dictators come to power with law reform as their primary tool, civil defense requires citizens to be empowered with law. Citizens need to be trained as constitutionalists—to understand the point of constitutionalism, to recognize threats to self-sustaining democracy, and to care about defending liberal values.

Liberal and democratic constitutionalism is worth defending, but first we need to stop taking for granted that constitutions can defend themselves.

Trump's Counter-Constitution - "Trump aspires to change the US Constitution quickly, following in the footsteps of Viktor Orbán, Hugo Chávez and Rafael Correa who each rewrote their constitutions in their first year of autocratic consolidation. The US Constitution is practically impossible to amend. Trump is therefore revising the Constitution in the only way that US law makes possible. First, he packed the Supreme Court with judges friendly to his new constitutional vision and now he is making outrageous constitutional claims that he hopes this Court will accept. So far, the lower courts are resisting his attempts to override statutes by executive order on procedural grounds but the Supreme Court may agree with Trump on substance."

Stopping Autocratic Legalism in America – Before It Is Too Late - "President Donald Trump's recent speech to the Department of Justice was meant as a declaration of war against lawyers. His words made clear that the most effective way to consolidate autocracy is by systematically dismantling the independent centers of power that support a healthy democracy, including the independent public prosecutor. As the Executive Orders targeting law firms underscore: the entire legal profession is next. This is no coincidence."[4]

The case for suing - "As more firms face the prospect of Executive Orders, more of my colleagues in the bar will face the same choice: sue or settle? In this post, I will make the case that they should sue." (via)
posted by kliuless at 9:06 PM on April 13 [11 favorites]

Chatterjee is trying to unite her capital neighbors through drag dance parties, happy hours, bracelet-making bashes, and drum circles.

This sounds awesome. Pretty much unavailable in the UK these days :(
posted by low_horrible_immoral at 5:33 AM on April 14

A citizenry trained to resist the legalistic autocrats must be educated in the tools of law themselves.

“One of the things taken out of the curriculum was civics. Civics was a class that used to be required before you could graduate from high school. You were taught what was in the U.S. Constitution. And after all the student rebellions in the Sixties, civics was banished from the student curriculum and was replaced by something called social studies. Here we live in a country that has a fabulous constitution and all these guarantees, a contract between the citizens and the government – nobody knows what’s in it…And so, if you don’t know what your rights are, how can you stand up for them? And furthermore, if you don’t know what’s in the document, how can you care if someone is shredding it?”

--Frank Zappa
posted by ZenMasterThis at 5:40 AM on April 14 [8 favorites]