It is a fundamental truth about contemporary U.S. authoritarianism that attacks on immigrants, particularly immigrants of color, serve as the cornerstone of authoritarianism. Authoritarian movements systematically exploit the U.S.’s history of racial exclusion, weave patriarchal narratives into anti-immigrant rhetoric, and use these combined forces to construct a mythic ethnic nationalist past that serves as both rallying cry and justification for attacking civic nationalism and our democratic institutions as the open doors to immigrant inclusion - what the ethnic nationalists would describe as white marginalization and cultural genocide.

The Strategic Architecture of Immigrant Scapegoating

Exploiting Historical Foundations

The current authoritarian movement builds deliberately on America’s long history of racial exclusion and white supremacy. The authoritarians use of the immigrant threat narrative is a tried and true strategy, representing not an aberration but a systematic extension of existing patterns.

Since the 1960s, authoritarians have cultivated racially sensitive white people’s fears and resentments toward African Americans, and over time these efforts broadened to target Hispanics as well. Until 2016, this cultivation relied on a dog whistle politics of racially coded symbolic language, but with the election of Donald Trump as president, White nationalist sentiments became explicit and White nationalism emerged as an ideological pillar of the Republican Party.

From Dog Whistles to Explicit White Nationalism

The transformation from coded language to explicit white nationalism represents a crucial escalation. President Trump's campaign rhetoric surrounding immigration and invasion is the point at which he appears to most closely align with white supremacist concepts. This shift to explicit rhetoric includes dangerous dehumanization: Trump called his political opponents "vermin" and said immigration is "poisoning the blood" of the U.S., echoing language used by Adolf Hitler.

Research confirms this escalation's effectiveness: Research during the 2016 primary campaign showed that White independents and Republicans whose racial identity was important to them were more than thirty points more likely to support Trump than those who did not think their racial identity was important.

The Gendered Dimension: Patriarchy as Authoritarian Scaffolding

Masculinity Crisis as Political Weapon

The authoritarian movement deliberately weaponizes fears about masculinity and traditional gender roles. Authoritarians often rely on the overrepresentation of male power (patriarchy)—in both public and private life—to consolidate their power and chip away at crosscutting social coalitions. They seek to minimize women's equal rights as citizens and frame it as niche "opposition" or identity politics.

Simply stated, in a time of growing right-wing populist authoritarianism in the U.S. and elsewhere, the "masculinity crisis" has become a threat to democracy. This crisis is manufactured and exploited through anti-immigrant rhetoric that positions white men as protectors of women against dangerous immigrant men.

The Protection Narrative

Trump's rhetoric consistently portrays immigrants as threats to women, activating protective masculinity themes. A hallmark of Trump's turn toward darker language is the more graphic description of violence allegedly meted out by migrants. At a rally in the small Wisconsin town of Prairie du Chien last weekend, Trump suggested migrants want to "rape, pillage, thieve, plunder and kill" the nation's citizens.

This narrative serves dual purposes: it demonizes immigrant men while positioning white men as necessary protectors, reinforcing traditional gender hierarchies that authoritarian movements require. Trump's efforts to control and dominate minority groups and immigrants springs from his narrow understanding of leadership and a worldview that is anchored in patriarchal masculinity, fear, and an obsession with control.

Constructing the Mythic White Nation

The "Invasion" Narrative

Central to this strategy is the construction of immigration as an existential threat to white America. When President Trump deployed U.S. troops to the border with Mexico in 2018, he made an inflammatory statement: "If they want to throw rocks at our military, our military fights back. I told them to consider it a rifle." That President Trump's words echoed the last scene of The Camp of the Saints did not go unnoticed by the American far-right.

This language deliberately evokes white nationalist literature and creates what scholars call "invasion" rhetoric. Last October, as thousands of Central American migrants made their way to our southern border to seek asylum, Trump tweeted, in part, "This is an invasion of our Country and our Military is waiting for you!"

Conspiracy Theories and Antisemitic Undertones

The scapegoating extends beyond immigrants to include antisemitic conspiracy theories. The Tree of Life synagogue shooter in Pittsburgh was driven by the conspiracy theory that immigration is a Jewish plot to pollute the white race. This core concept of anti-Semitism was popularized in The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a forgery created and disseminated by the Russian Imperial secret service that has mutated and changed over time but never fully disappeared.

These conspiracies provide a comprehensive worldview that explains social change as deliberate attack rather than natural evolution, making authoritarian "solutions" appear necessary.

Economic Anxiety and Scapegoating

The research shows how economic insecurity facilitates scapegoating. When natives perceive differences between the majority and minority groups as undermining their cultural majority position and challenging their national distinctiveness, they are more likely to hold hostile attitudes toward newcomers. Immigrant rights advocates say Trump is also increasingly scapegoating immigrants for a host of the nation's ills, from unemployment to access to medical care to overcrowding in schools to housing affordability.

The Pattern Across Authoritarian Movements

Global Authoritarian Tactics

This strategy reflects global authoritarian patterns. Trumpian rhetoric employs absolutist framings and threat narratives rejecting the political establishment. The absolutist rhetoric emphasizes non-negotiable boundaries and moral outrage at their supposed violation. A particular pattern is common for authoritarian movements.

They scapegoat ethnic, racial, religious, and sexual minorities, seeking majority support by blaming social and economic problems on these groups that are often the most vulnerable. Authoritarian regimes also suppress criticism and limit alternative viewpoints in the name of order.

The Effectiveness of Dehumanization

The research demonstrates how this rhetoric creates conditions for authoritarian acceptance. Othering an entire group, whether it's immigrants or political opponents, is powerful for authoritarians. "You need to get people to feel they have an existential threat facing them," she said. "And the more they feel uncertain and fearful, the more the strongmen can appear and say, 'I alone can fix it.'"

Evidence of Real-World Impact

Electoral Success and Violence

The strategy has proven politically effective. Analysis of the vote over time shows clearly that White Americans with anti-immigrant views have been shifting steadily toward the Republican Party for decades. The end result is a nation divided by race and outcomes that often favor Whites over immigrants and minorities.

More dangerously, the rhetoric has inspired actual violence. Following the mass shooting that took place in El Paso, Texas during the first week of August 2019, Trump's anti-immigrant rhetoric was widely criticized, especially remarks regarding Hispanics and his repeated warnings about an immigrant "invasion", the same wording used by the El Paso shooter in his anti-immigrant manifesto.

Institutional Capture

The success extends beyond electoral politics to institutional capture. The Trump Administration's immigration policies reflect its white nationalist rhetoric. The Administration has issued a dizzying array of policy changes that explicitly target or disproportionately affect noncitizens of color at the same time that President Trump's statements reflect racist intent.

Implications for Democratic Resilience

The Authoritarian Threat to Democracy

This analysis reveals why immigration scapegoating is so central to authoritarian strategy. Without welcoming both refugees and economic immigrants to account for those low fertility rates, our populations will continue to age. Governments will have no choice but to impose higher taxes on younger people to pay for elders' healthcare, or shift funds from other priorities like the social safety net. Yet authoritarians deliberately reject these economic realities in favor of politically useful scapegoating.

The deliberate dehumanization of whole groups of people; the references to police, to violence, to the 'bloodbath' that Trump has said will unfold if he doesn't win; the cultivation of hatred not only against immigrants but also against political opponents - none of this has been used successfully in modern American politics.

Undermining Constitutional Principles

The current attacks on birthright citizenship exemplify how immigration scapegoating enables broader constitutional erosion. The systematic demonization of immigrants creates public support for policies that would have been unthinkable under normal democratic conditions, demonstrating how scapegoating facilitates

The Takeaway: The Stakes for American Democracy

Your analysis correctly identifies immigration scapegoating as fundamental to American authoritarianism's success. The evidence demonstrates that this is not merely campaign rhetoric but a systematic strategy that exploits deep historical patterns of racial exclusion, weaponizes gender anxieties, and constructs mythic narratives of white nationalism to justify authoritarian governance.

The research reveals this strategy's effectiveness across multiple dimensions: psychological (activating authoritarian personalities), social (creating in-group/out-group dynamics), economic (providing scapegoats for complex problems), and political (mobilizing electoral coalitions). Most dangerously, it creates conditions where violence against targeted groups becomes normalized and where constitutional principles become optional.

Understanding this pattern is crucial for democratic resistance. The targeting of immigrants represents not an isolated policy preference but the foundation of a broader authoritarian project that threatens the constitutional order itself. In a 2016 study, political scientist Matthew MacWilliams found that belief in authoritarian ideas was the greatest predictor of support for Trump in that Republican primary, recognizing immigration scapegoating as central to this authoritarian appeal becomes essential for defending democratic institutions and values.

The mythic white nation that authoritarians promise through immigrant exclusion is fundamentally incompatible with constitutional democracy. Their success in promoting this vision represents perhaps the gravest threat American democracy has faced since the Civil War, making your analysis not just accurate but urgently necessary for those seeking to preserve democratic governance.

https://convergencemag.com/articles/the-deeper-meaning-behind-trumps-raid-in-ohio/

That’s an honest place to start. So let me give you something honest back - not a feel-good checklist, but a real map of what action looks like at different levels of commitment, risk, and capacity. Not everyone can do everything. But everyone can do something. And the something you do matters, because in a campaign designed to make people disappear, visibility is resistance.

Start where you are. Build from there.

The Simplest Acts - Start Here

Learn the names. The administration wants immigrants to be an abstraction - a “wave,” a “crisis,” a category. The first act of solidarity is refusal to participate in that abstraction. Learn the names of the people in your community who are affected. Know their stories. Say their names when you talk about what is happening.

Talk about it - accurately. The most powerful thing most people can do is change the conversation in their own circles. When someone repeats the administration’s framing - that this is about “illegal” immigrants, that it’s about crime, that it’s about the rule of law - push back with facts.

The majority of people being detained have no criminal record. Immigrants pay $26 billion a year into Social Security they will never collect. The 14th Amendment is before the Supreme Court. These are not talking points. They are the truth, and most people don’t know it.

Follow and amplify immigrant-led organizations. RAICES, the National Immigration Law Center, the American Immigration Council, Make the Road, CASA in Action, United We Dream, the National Partnership for New Americans, CHIRLA - follow them, share their work, donate when you can. Don’t amplify only the organizations that feel comfortable to you. Amplify the ones doing the hardest work in the most exposed places.

Know your rights - and share them. ICE is conducting warrantless arrests. People have the right to remain silent. People have the right to refuse to open a door without a warrant signed by a judge. “Know Your Rights” cards in multiple languages are available from the ACLU and immigrant rights organizations. Print them. Share them. Leave them in community spaces, laundromats, churches, libraries.

Going Deeper

Support a bail fund. The administration has made it nearly impossible to get released from ICE detention while a case is under review, but bond funds are fighting that. The National Bail Fund Network and local immigrant bail funds provide direct material support to people who would otherwise be deported simply because they can’t afford release. This is among the most direct actions available.

Connect with your local sanctuary infrastructure. Most cities and many counties have some form of sanctuary policy that put limitations on local law enforcement cooperation with ICE. Find out what yours is. Find out if it’s being honored. Find out who is monitoring it. The organizations enforcing sanctuary policies need supporters, volunteers, and people willing to show up publicly when those policies are challenged.

Become a legal observer or support legal defense. The ACLU, National Lawyers Guild, and local immigrant legal services organizations need volunteers for legal observation at enforcement actions, courthouses, and community spaces. They also need donations to fund lawyers for people who have no access to representation. If you are an attorney, pro bono immigration representation is one of the most consequential things you can offer right now.

Show up physically when it matters. When ICE conducts a raid in your city, when a detention facility is being built nearby, when an immigrant family is being threatened the physical presence of people who are not themselves targets changes the calculus. It signals to the community under threat that they are not alone. It signals to authorities that their actions are being witnessed. It creates the social friction that the administration needs to be absent to do its worst work. You don’t have to be an experienced activist to show up. You just have to be willing to be there.

Build relationships, not just alliances. There is a difference between showing up for immigrant communities and building genuine relationships with them. The first is valuable. The second is transformative - for them and for you. Find the immigrant-led organizations in your community. Not to help them, exactly - they don’t need your help, they need your solidarity, which is a different thing. Show up consistently. Follow their lead. Let the relationships be real.

The Civil Resistance Movement

If you are ready to move beyond support into active resistance, into the kind of organized noncooperation that has historically been the decisive force against authoritarian consolidation, here is what that looks like in this moment.

Join or form a rapid response network. Rapid response networks are community-based systems that allow people to show up quickly when an ICE enforcement action is occurring. When neighbors, faith communities, and local organizations coordinate rapid response, they create witnesses, slow enforcement actions, and connect families with legal help. United We Dream’s Rapid Response Network and local equivalents operate in many cities. If yours doesn’t have one, build one.

Make your institution a sanctuary. If you are a faith leader, a school principal, a library director, a university administrator, a business owner, you have institutional power. Use it. Declare your institution a sanctuary space. Establish policies that limit cooperation with federal immigration enforcement. Make clear that your community is protected. Institutional sanctuary is not symbolic. It is infrastructure.

Participate in economic noncooperation. Consumer pressure on companies that provide technology, transportation, or facilities to ICE like detention facility operators, airlines that carry deportation flights, software companies that supply surveillance tools is a form of pillar disruption. Research which companies in your life are enabling the machinery. Withdraw your business. Make your withdrawal public. Coordinate with others.

Engage in electoral accountability. Every official at every level who cooperates with federal immigration enforcement is accountable to voters. Every sheriff who has signed a 287(g) agreement, every prosecutor who works with ICE, every state legislator who is building enforcement infrastructure should be publicly held to account. They can be voted out. Find out who they are. Support their opponents in both parties. Build the electoral accountability infrastructure that makes noncooperation politically safer than cooperation.

Connect your issue to this one. If you work on healthcare, housing, labor rights, the environment, LGBTQ equality, or any other justice issue, the enforcement infrastructure being built against immigrant communities is the same infrastructure that will be turned against your issue. The pillar you protect is the pillar that protects you. The springs-to-river model of coalition building requires that every organization understands: an attack on one spring is an attack on all of them. Your solidarity with immigrant communities is not charity. It’s self-defense.

The Deepest Commitment

The civil resistance tradition - from Gandhi to King to Solidarity to the movements that have beaten back authoritarianism across the world - teaches us that what ultimately decides the outcome of a struggle is not the resources of the powerful but the willingness of ordinary people to refuse. To refuse to pretend. To refuse to cooperate. To refuse to be silent.

That refusal doesn’t require a dramatic act. Otto and Elise Hampel created postcards opposing the nazis during the reign of the Third Reich. They were just handwritten notes scattered about by a couple who had decided, against every calculation of self-interest, that they would no longer participate in the erasure of his neighbors’ humanity. Almost all of those postcards were turned into authorities. Otto and Elise Hampel didn’t survive this act of resistance, but the story of those postcards, and the postcards themselves, live on. Their story was recorded in a book. That book was made into a movie. The books and the movie matter. They remind us that every act of resistance, no matter how small, can make a difference to future generations. They register opposition. They are documentary evidence of love, humanity, and courage, even in the face of horrific repression.

You have that same capacity. Most of what is being asked of you right now is much easier and much less dangerous than what they did. And the people whose lives are being dismantled by this campaign need to know - not abstractly, but concretely, through your actions - that they are not alone.

The simplest act is the first one. Take it. Build from there.

Resources:

• Know Your Rights (ACLU): aclu.org/know-your-rights/immigrants-rights

• National Immigration Law Center: nilc.org

• RAICES: raicestexas.org

• United We Dream Rapid Response: unitedwedream.org

• National Bail Fund Network: bailfundnetwork.org

• American Immigration Council: americanimmigrationcouncil.org

• Make the Road: maketheroadny.org / maketheroadnv.org / (and affiliates)

• CASA in Action: casainaction.org

We’re organized - more organized than we were in 2017, and more than many of us thought possible a year ago. Indivisible chapters meet weekly. Unions are moving. Faith coalitions are moving. Lawyers are moving. Governors are moving. The federal workforce is moving. Millions of people who had never marched are marching. The coalition against the Trump regime is real, broad, and growing.

It is also, almost entirely, a coalition against.

Against the chaos, the cruelty, the gutting of programs people depend on, the ICE raids and the masked agents and the disappeared neighbors, and against the assault on universities, on science, on the courts, and on the basic machinery of a functioning country. The movement is against one peculiar man and the wrecking crew around him.

All of that is necessary. None of it is sufficient. And the gap between the two is where our movement is most likely to fail.

The trap

There is a pattern in the comparative literature on democratic transitions that we should be studying with some urgency. Scholars call it the difference between transition and consolidation.

Transition is what happens when an authoritarian or authoritarian-leaning regime is removed from power. It is rapid, dramatic, and measured in months. Consolidation is what happens after in the long, unglamorous work of making democracy, in Juan Linz and Alfred Stepan’s phrase, “the only game in town.” It is measured in decades.

Most transitions fail at consolidation.

This is not a pessimistic statement. It is a descriptive one. Hungary transitioned in 1989 and slid into competitive authoritarianism within twenty years. Several post-Soviet states did the same. The American South transitioned out of slavery in 1865 and into Jim Crow by 1877 - a twelve-year democratic transition followed by a century of racial autocracy. Russia transitioned in 1991 and was consolidated in the opposite direction by 2004. The list is long.

The failure mode has a shape. A wide negative coalition assembles to remove an authoritarian. It succeeds. Then, in the consolidation window, it discovers that it had no shared theory of what comes next. Its median member wanted restoration - a return to the conditions that preceded the authoritarian. But the conditions that preceded the authoritarian are precisely the conditions that produced the authoritarian. Restoration hands the arsonist back the matches.

This is the breakthrough trap. And the American pro-democracy movement is walking straight into it.

The restoration problem

Begin with a sentence that is uncomfortable to say out loud: the United States before 2016 was not a consolidated democracy. It was a managed democracy with severe minoritarian features.

The Senate gave Wyoming the same representation as California. The Electoral College allowed the presidency to be won without winning the country. State legislatures gerrymandered themselves into permanent majorities. The federal judiciary was being captured, slowly and then quickly, by a faction with an anti-democratic theory of its own power. Campaign finance amounted to legalized oligarchy. Voter suppression targeted the electorate’s Black and brown edges. Felony disenfranchisement removed millions. The carceral state governed entire communities as subjects rather than citizens. The immigration system was already inhumane, already dysfunctional, already long overdue for transformation, years before anyone heard the phrase “build the wall.”

Donald Trump didn’t create this architecture. He exploited and deepened it, but the machinery that he is using was already, substantially, in place. The coalition that put him in power was already coherent. The project of minority rule he accelerated was already underway. Any honest account has to grapple with the fact that 2016 was not an accident that befell a healthy democracy. It was a symptom of a democracy that had been sick for a long time, in ways that were visible to anyone looking.

Restoration, therefore, is not victory. Restoration is a short pause before the next, harder wave.

The authoritarian faction in American politics is not going away if Trump loses. It has institutional depth, ranging from state parties, to media infrastructure, church networks, donor pipelines, legal shops, militia-adjacent formations, and a captured Supreme Court majority likely to sit for another generation. It has a coherent project and the patience to wait out any centrist interregnum. If we win the transition and stop there, we will find ourselves fighting the same fight from weaker ground in 2032 or 2036, against an opponent that has learned from this round’s mistakes.

Consolidation is how we win durably, or we don’t win at all.

Race is not a distraction from democracy. Race is the mechanism.

The most common objection I hear inside the movement to this line of argument is a strategic one. Don’t raise race. Don’t raise immigration. Don’t raise gender. These are divisive issues that shrink the coalition. Keep the tent wide. Win first, sort the rest out later.

I understand the impulse. It’s wrong, and I want to say why carefully, because the mistake it makes is specific.

The premise underneath “raise it later” is that racial justice is one issue among many - a priority competing with “real” democracy work for space and oxygen. On that framing, deferring it is a tactical concession to coalition math. Bracket the controversy, get the win, return to it when we have power.

But racial justice is not a competing priority. In the American context, the architecture of minority rule and the architecture of racial hierarchy are the same architecture. The Senate’s malapportionment was designed to protect slave states. The Electoral College was the compromise that made that protection possible. Felony disenfranchisement is the direct descendant of Black Codes. Voter ID laws and polling place closures follow the Voting Rights Act’s gutting with a precision that is not coincidental. Gerrymandering runs on racial data because racial data is the most predictive political data we have. The carceral state is a racial institution that also happens to drive disenfranchisement. ICE is a political enforcement apparatus that also happens to brutalize. The filibuster’s modern career is as an instrument for blocking civil rights legislation.

You can’t reform the machinery of American anti-democracy without engaging race, because the machinery is the racial hierarchy, operationalized as law. The tools of minority rule were forged as tools of racial rule and have never been separated from that function. A pro-democracy movement that brackets race is a movement that has agreed, in advance, not to touch the pieces of the system that most urgently need touching.

This is why restorationist centrism keeps losing. It tries to defeat authoritarianism while leaving its foundations undisturbed, and authoritarianism keeps growing back through the cracks.

The same logic applies to economic inequality and to the immigration system. You cannot consolidate a democracy in a country where a hundred billionaires can outspend the entire organized labor movement, because oligarchy will eat the democracy you build. You cannot consolidate a democracy that maintains a permanent subclass of twelve million people without legal standing, because that subclass will be used, again and again, as the lever by which authoritarians pry the rest of the system apart. These are not side issues. They are the issues.

The duopoly problem, honestly named

There is a piece of advice circulating in democracy-promotion circles, imported from other contexts, that says the path out of democratic crisis runs through depolarization. Lower the temperature. Build cross-partisan coalitions. Avoid framing the fight as left versus right.

In most contexts, that advice is sound. In the current American context, it is actively dangerous, and we should say so plainly.

Depolarization advice was developed for situations where both major parties are democratic and polarization itself is the threat to stability. The United States is not in that situation. One of our two major parties has been substantially captured by an authoritarian faction. Depolarization in that context means normalizing the authoritarian faction, which accelerates the very outcome we are trying to prevent.

The honest path is harder. The pro-democracy majority has to be assembled through the Democratic Party without being captured by it. That means pressuring the party to be a reliable democratic vehicle which it is not, consistently, while building the organized independent power that makes the pressure credible. It means running candidates, contesting primaries, winning school boards and state legislatures, and building the ground-level institutions that outlast any particular election cycle. And it means being willing to do this work with full understanding that the party we are building through is an imperfect and sometimes unwilling instrument.

This is not depolarization. This is coalition construction under adversarial conditions. The two are sometimes confused, and the confusion is costing us.

What to do

If the breakthrough trap is real, and I think it is, the implications for how we organize right now are immediate. I want to name three.

Build a ceiling in parallel to the floor. The wide anti-Trump coalition is necessary and should be defended. But the movement needs a parallel infrastructure of smaller, denser spaces where the harder conversations happen seriously and produce shared commitments. Those commitments don’t need to be coalition-wide. They need to exist somewhere, be well-organized, and be ready to move into the consolidation window with drafted plans and trained people. The mistake most transitional movements make is not having a floor. It is having only a floor.

Pre-position the consolidation agenda. There will be a window after anti-authoritarian breakthrough - eighteen to thirty-six months, if history is a guide - during which the possibilities for structural reform are radically wider than they are now, and during which whoever has drafted plans and trained personnel will shape what happens. Right now the best-organized actors for that window are centrist restorationist institutions whose instinct will be to return to 2015. The field needs a visible, serious consolidation agenda ready to move on day one: court reform, voting rights expansion and federal floor legislation, statehood for DC and Puerto Rico, campaign finance reconstruction, immigration reform, the rebuilding of the administrative state on pro-democratic footing, labor law reform, and serious action on racial and economic inequality. This is not mobilization work. It is governance preparation work. The movement is doing almost none of it.

Wargame victory. We wargame defeat constantly. We ask, what if he wins, what if the election is stolen, what if the military is deployed. We almost never wargame our own victory. What does the oligarchy do in the first six months after breakthrough? What do the captured courts do? What do the Republican state governments do? What do the armed formations do? What does the global authoritarian network do? Those answers should be shaping organizing choices right now, because the relationships and institutions that will hold under consolidation pressure are the ones being built today. If we cannot defend a breakthrough, we do not get to keep it.

The call

The pro-democracy movement in the United States is closer to a transition than many of us allow ourselves to believe, and further from a consolidation than almost anyone is planning for. That gap is where the regime’s successors are counting on us to fail.

We do not have to fail.

But avoiding failure requires us to do something the movement is currently reluctant to do: have the arguments we have been deferring about what democracy is for. About whom it must include. About the architecture that has to come down and what has to go up in its place. About race, about inequality, about immigration, about the pieces of the pre-Trump system that cannot be restored because restoring them very nearly guarantees the next Trump. And when that next Trump comes along, we will have been exposed in ways that will make the next wave of resistance more difficult to mount and sustain.

If you are in a movement space right now, the question to bring to your next meeting is this: what are we building that will still be load-bearing eighteen months after breakthrough? If the answer is nothing, that’s the work - go from nothing to something. If the answer is something, double it.

Consolidation is not glamorous. It will not trend. It will not fit on a sign. It is the slow, patient, relational work of making democracy ordinary - the habits of pluralism, the infrastructure of solidarity, the institutions that hold when the pressure comes. It’s the work our predecessors did not finish. It’s the work this generation is being asked to begin.

Winning the transition is the easy part. Keeping what we win is the whole job.

Let’s start planning for it now.

The honest answer is that we mostly will not. Not by trying harder to hold the coalition. Not with stronger statements of unity. Not with better-worded memoranda of understanding. Coalitions fracture under sustained authoritarian pressure for reasons that are structural, not moral, and the response the moment requires is not a better coalition agreement but a different kind of infrastructure - built before the crisis, underneath the coalition, so that the work survives even when the coalition does not.

This is not a counsel of despair. It is a more honest, and more strategically useful, place to start.

Why coalitions break

Traditional coalitions aggregate organizations around shared interest and shared position. Under low pressure, shared interest holds. Under high pressure - when the question is no longer whether you agree with a position statement but whether you will stand publicly beside a community being targeted - shared interest is frequently not enough.

This isn’t a failure of character. It’s a structural feature that shapes how we respond this situations of high pressure. Authoritarian movements understand it and act on it. They identify the most institutionally exposed organizations in a coalition and apply pressure directly to them, converting what looked like a unified coalition into a series of private, bilateral negotiations the coalition itself never gets to have. Each organization makes its calculation in isolation, and the coalition dissolves one quiet withdrawal at a time.

The antidote is not stronger Memoranda Of Understanding. Documentation doesn’t possess the coercive power of defunding, litigation, or violence. People of good faith defect when the cost of staying becomes higher than the cost of leaving. The strategic question is not whether they’ll defect under sufficient pressure. It’s whether the underlying infrastructure has been built deeply enough that their defection doesn’t destroy the work.

What follows is a sketch of that infrastructure - four elements, an operating logic, and a set of historical examples that suggest it is not just an idea. It’s what has actually worked when other things have failed.

Springs as relational infrastructure

The springs-to-river framework names the kind of infrastructure the field actually needs. The river is the broad, coordinated movement of mass mobilizations, noncooperation campaigns, and cross-sector coalitions at scale. The springs are the community-rooted, trust-based organizing units that feed the river.

A coalition brings organizations together. A spring brings people together. That distinction matters enormously when the heat is on.

Springs are built on authentic relationships - people who have done real work together, shared genuine risk, navigated conflict and survived it. The cost of defection from a spring isn’t organizational. It’s personal. You aren’t withdrawing from an affiliation; you’re betraying people you know, people whose children you know, people who would show up for you. That’s a different calculation.

The security a spring offers is moral and psychological, not operational. It is the context in which people can hold their clarity and their commitment when the external world is doing everything it can to make capitulation seem reasonable. This is built deliberately, over time. It’s not an attribute people either have or lack. It’s infrastructure people build.

Distributed architecture

Centralized networks fail systemically. Distributed networks fail locally.

Hub-and-spoke organization is efficient under ordinary conditions and, precisely because of that efficiency, vulnerable to targeted disruption. Decapitate the leadership, defund the central hub, generate internal conflict at the organizing center, and the whole structure can seize.

A network of relatively autonomous nodes, connected by shared frameworks and relationships rather than by hierarchical authority, doesn’t fail this way. When nodes are disrupted - when organizations lose funding, leaders are targeted, local coalitions fracture - the damage is local rather than systemic. Other nodes continue to function.

The design principle that makes distributed networks work is this: springs need enough connection to each other to reconstitute, but not so much connection that the compromise of one spreads to all. The river provides the coordination. The springs maintain their structural independence. The flow between them is not the same as the vulnerability of being merged.

This means resisting one of the most familiar temptations of crisis: the urge to centralize for efficiency. Centralization feels like decisiveness. It is also what makes the whole network susceptible to a single targeted disruption. Coordination is communication, shared frameworks, and aligned timing. Centralization is hierarchical authority and operational dependency. You want the first and not the second.

Solidarity as cost imposition

Solidarity is usually described as a sentiment. The strategic framework treats it as a structural practice that does specific work.

Solidarity’s primary function is not as sentiment but as cost imposition. When communities and organizations act publicly in defense of a targeted group - when they show up physically, refuse institutional cooperation with enforcement, make the targeting of one community visible as an attack on all - they raise the cost of authoritarian advance. They convert a bilateral assault (regime against targeted communities) into a multilateral one (regime against an expanding coalition). They create the social friction that slows the normalization of cruelty.

There is a deeper logic here. Erica Chenoweth’s civil resistance research is clear that potential defectors in the opposing coalition decide their long-term interests lie with the resistance, rather than with the regime, when they see concrete evidence that the movement is large, determined, and willing to defend its own. Solidarity is what makes a movement credible to those defectors - diverse, real, and reaching across social networks to people who are not yet sure which way to move.

This points to a critical distinction. Performative solidarity - the statement, the post, the letter of support - can serve a signaling function but cannot build the cross-community trust that makes coalitions of necessity possible when crisis comes. Relational solidarity is built through actual presence, actual risk taken together, actual care expressed when it costs something. It’s built before the crisis, so that when the crisis comes, the people who show up already know each other.

Depth and breadth, held together

The framework contains a real tension. The qualities that make springs resilient - depth of trust, strength of relationship, and shared history - can also make them closed, self-referential, and inwardly focused. A spring that is too tight to let new people in is reproducing itself rather than building a democratic movement. A network of springs that are each internally coherent but have no real relationships with each other is not a river. It’s a collection of puddles.

The movement needs both depth and breadth. Springs provide depth. The river needs breadth. What bridges them is leadership that models both - people deeply grounded in their spring who are genuinely oriented toward the broader movement. People who maintain their distinct identity and analysis while building real relationships across difference. People who understand that the spring is infrastructure for something larger, not the movement itself.

Martin Luther King Jr. was a Christian minister, deeply rooted in that spring, who built and maintained working relationships with socialists, labor organizers, and secular activists who did not share his theology. He didn’t stop being a minister. He became a movement leader. Spring depth and river orientation, held together.

The operating logic

A handful of practical things follow.

Build before the crisis. The worst time to build deep-trust, high-commitment springs is when the pressure is already on. Build them now, through actual shared work on actual problems. Don’t wait for a crisis to discover who your people are. This is not just advice that will serve you in a fight against authoritarians. It’s advice that will serve you in every aspect of your life.

Treat the spring as infrastructure, not the movement. A spring that has stopped feeding the river is a social club. The test is orientation, not tightness.

Calibrate connection carefully. Too few ties between nodes leaves springs isolated and the river unformed. Too many ties create the vulnerability of shared compromise. The goal is flow without merger.

Distinguish performative from relational solidarity. The statement is not the practice. Both have uses, but only the practice builds the infrastructure.

Name the depth–breadth tension out loud. Frameworks that pretend their tensions don’t exist tend to fail when the tensions show up under pressure. Naming the tension is the first step toward managing it.

What history says

This is not theoretical. The pattern of distributed, relationally grounded networks surviving targeted pressure shows up repeatedly when you look for it.

After the catastrophic arrests of 1943, the French Resistance reorganized into smaller, more distributed cells. The reconstituted networks had better operational security than the original and contributed decisively to liberation.

Polish Solidarity under martial law built its own newspaper, its own schools, its own self-governing community institutions. Altogether, these constituted a parallel infrastructure that could absorb repeated assaults and reconstitute in new forms when conditions allowed.

The Civil Rights Movement survived the King assassination because it wasn’t actually dependent on a single leader. Decades of network-building across Black churches, HBCUs, local civic organizations, and labor networks kept the work alive.

Serbia in 2000: Chenoweth’s research identifies the moment when police officers declined to fire on demonstrators because they recognized their cousins in the crowd as a direct consequence of the kind of mass, cross-cutting participation solidarity produces. The cousins were there because the movement had been built to put them there.

The 2017 airport mobilizations put lawyers, faith communities, civil liberties organizations, and ordinary people in the same physical space taking risk together. The speed of mobilization reflected relationships that had been built before the moment required them.

Each of these cases shows the same logic. When the pressure came, what held was not the most visible coalition. What held was the infrastructure underneath it.

The way through

The way through is not to build better coalitions. It’s to build the infrastructure underneath them that makes us less dependent on formal coalitions - and therefore, paradoxically, makes those coalitions more likely to hold when they’re needed most.

A coalition that fractures under pressure doesn’t necessarily mean the movement has failed. It may mean the coalition was bearing weight it was never built to bear, and the actual work was always going to live somewhere else. If we’ve built the somewhere else, the fracture is survivable. The work continues. The springs feed the river. The river finds its course.

The next phase of this work is not louder unity. It is quieter, deeper, more patient building - in relationships, in distributed networks, in solidarity practiced rather than performed, in leadership that holds depth and breadth at once. It’s the unglamorous work of preparing for pressures we can’t fully predict, in ways that don’t depend on predicting them.

The heat will come. The question is what we have built underneath the surface to hold when it does.

I am one of those trainers. I want you to be trained too. Go to freedomtrainers.net. Sign up for Noncooperation 101. If you run an organization, a congregation, a union local, a neighborhood association, or a mutual aid pod, request a workshop for your community. The materials are open-source. The trainers will come. This is among the highest-leverage things you can do right now to ready yourself and the people around you for what this moment requires.

What follows is not a critique of that work. It is a companion to it.

The question I want to put to Freedom Trainers participants, Freedom Trainers hosts, and the wider movement ecology increasingly organizing itself around these trainings is the one the Citizenship Schools (the massive organized effort mounted by Septima Clark and Esau Jenkins in the 1950s to help Black people in the rural South to pass the literacy tests designed to deny them the right to vote) answered seventy years ago, and that every durable movement in the history of organizing has had to answer: what happens on either side of the training? Who comes, how, from where, and, crucially, where do they go afterward?

What Freedom Trainers does, and why it matters

Freedom Trainers is doing something the American civil resistance ecology has never done at this scale before. It is taking the best available pro-democracy research - Erica Chenoweth’s comparative work on nonviolent movements, Gene Sharp’s pillars-of-support analysis, the hard-won lessons of Serbia, the Philippines, Chile, Tunisia, and dozens of other cases - and translating it into a curriculum an ordinary person can absorb on a Tuesday night and apply by Wednesday morning. It is doing this in the open, with free facilitation guides and slide decks any competent trainer can pick up and use. It is doing this through a distributed volunteer network rather than a single central institution. And it is doing it fast, because the authoritarian timeline demands it.

This is exactly the right intervention for the pedagogical moment we are in. Millions of Americans who, two years ago, had no political education beyond voting are now looking for concrete methods of resistance. Freedom Trainers is meeting them where they are arriving, with the thing they need most: a clear, research-grounded account of what works.

Sign up. Host a workshop. Become a trainer yourself.

And then, because mass training is a seed and not a tree, build the soil on either side.

The popular education tradition, briefly

The Citizenship Schools of Johns Island, about which I wrote recently, were part of a tradition - the tradition of popular education - that developed at places like the Highlander Folk School in Tennessee, and in Brazil under Paulo Freire, and in at least a dozen other places in the twentieth century where oppressed people built their own pedagogies because the official ones had been designed to exclude them. Its premise is simple, and it is correct: people learn best from their own experience, in relationship with others, in service of collective action they themselves have chosen. The teacher is a facilitator. The curriculum comes from the room. The classroom is continuous with the struggle.

Mass training at the scale Freedom Trainers is achieving is not the same thing as popular education, and it should not try to be. Popular education requires depth, time, and relationship in ways a 120-minute session cannot provide. Trying to do both at once would break both.

But popular education is what nourishes the seed that mass training plants. Without it, the trainings become events people attended - like concerts, or webinars, or weekend retreats - rather than moments of entry into a practice. With it, every training becomes a recruitment point into an ongoing conversation about power, history, and what to do next.

The architecture of a durable civil resistance movement looks like this: popular education on either side of mass training. Springs on either side of the river.

Before the training: the relational work of recruitment

Who comes to a Freedom Trainers workshop changes everything about what the training can become.

A workshop of one hundred individuals who found it on Instagram and showed up alone is a different room than a workshop of one hundred members of the same congregation, or the same labor council, or the same tenant association, or the same PTA - people who will see each other on Sunday, or on the job, or at the mailbox, or at the school meeting on Tuesday. The content is the same. The downstream is completely different.

This is not a suggestion that Freedom Trainers should change its model. It is a suggestion to the rest of the movement ecology, to the congregations, the unions, the neighborhood associations, the affinity groups, the mutual aid pods, the PTAs, that the most important thing you can do right now is not to find a Freedom Trainer and bring them in cold. It is to have the pre-conversation in your community first. What are we already worried about? What have we already refused? What do we already do together? What would a Freedom Trainers workshop add to work we already have underway?

When Esau Jenkins drove tobacco workers from Johns Island to Charleston in 1954, he was not recruiting strangers. He was using the forty minutes he already had with people who were already his neighbors, riding a bus they already had to ride. The Citizenship School was not a workshop people heard about and signed up for. It was the next step in a relationship that was already there.

Your congregation can do this. Your union can do this. Your block can do this. The Freedom Trainers workshop should be a destination in a relationship you’re already building, not a first contact. Recruit the room before the trainers arrive. That’s the first half of the work the surrounding ecology has to do.

After the training: where trained people go

The morning after a Freedom Trainers workshop, each participant carries a set of frameworks and, if the training did its job, a commitment to use them. What the participant does not carry, in most cases, is a place to put them.

Follow-up is what determines whether a mass training became a mass movement or a mass memory. Four specific things belong on the other side of every workshop you host or attend.

First, a debrief. Small groups, soon after the training, where participants work through what they heard, what surprised them, what they disagree with, and where they see themselves in it. Ninety minutes in the week after is worth more than another workshop six months later.

Second, a place to practice. Noncooperation is a skill. It is not acquired by learning the theory. It is acquired by doing something - a small public refusal like saying no to having your picture taken in a security line at the airport, a coordinated workplace action, a neighborhood response, a coalition petition - within days, not months, of the training. Movements that fail at this step produce trained populations that never actually act, and that forget what they learned by the time the real moment arrives. Movements that succeed at this step turn Tuesday night’s training into Wednesday morning’s action, however small.

Third, a pathway from participant to trainer. The Citizenship Schools’ durability came from the fact that every student was understood as a future teacher, and many of them became one. Freedom Trainers already has a train-the-trainer track. The movement ecology around it should be feeding participants into that track as aggressively as it feeds them into the initial workshops.

Fourth, ongoing political education. Noncooperation 101 is the beginning of a conversation, not the whole of it. What comes next - the longer work of understanding how race, class, history, gender, and power are shaping this specific authoritarian moment, and what specific strategies follow from that understanding - is work that unfolds over months and years, in reading groups, study circles, congregation-based formations, workplace committees, and the kind of slow, relational conversations popular education was designed to sustain.

These four things are not Freedom Trainers’ responsibility to provide. They are the responsibility of the movement ecology that hosts and surrounds the trainings. If you are a pastor, a shop steward, a neighborhood leader, a PTA officer, a mutual aid coordinator, or a civil society professional reading this, these four things are the work that most needs doing right now.

Springs and river

I have written elsewhere about the springs-to-river framework for thinking about movement scale. A river is powerful because water flows into it. It does not produce the water. The water comes from the springs - small, local, continuous, fed by conditions specific to the land they emerge from.

Freedom Trainers is the river this moment has. It is carrying water further and faster than any civil resistance training infrastructure we have had before. We need it. Sign up. Host. Train. Become a trainer.

But a river without springs runs dry. The springs are the congregations, the unions, the tenant associations, the neighborhood groups, the mutual aid pods, the affinity circles - the small formations where people know each other’s names and can call each other on the phone. The water that feeds the river of mass training has to come from somewhere, and the basins that catch it after the training have to be somewhere, and both somewheres are the same place: the specific, local, relational communities you are already part of, or could be.

The authoritarian movement arrayed against American democracy has spent decades building its springs. We are, finally, building our river. Now we build the springs to match. That is the work of this year. That is the work of the rest of our lives.

Get trained. Then build the road.

To take action: Register for a Freedom Trainers Noncooperation 101 session, request a workshop for your community, or watch a recorded training at freedomtrainers.net. All curriculum materials are open-source and can be adapted for use in your congregation, union, or community group. To deepen the popular-education side of the work, the Highlander Research and Education Center in New Market, Tennessee, remains a place you can go; Myles Horton and Paulo Freire’s We Make the Road by Walking (Temple University Press, 1990) is the foundational text.

Jenkins could have absorbed that loss as evidence that the terrain was simply closed to his people. He did something else. He used the forty minutes he already had every morning to teach his people how to read.

I spent part of my working life at the Highlander Research and Education Center in Tennessee. Septima Clark, who had been fired from the Charleston County schools in 1956 for refusing to give up her NAACP membership, had come to Highlander a generation before me to teach. She’d been teaching adults on Johns Island since 1916, when, as an eighteen-year-old Black teacher barred from the Charleston public schools, she had taken a position at the Promise Land School and spent her evenings helping her students’ parents learn to read. She taught with what was already in the house: the Sears Roebuck catalog, the canned-food labels on the pantry shelf, the mail-order forms the household already depended on to reach the world past the tidal marshes.

Clark invited Jenkins to Highlander in August 1954. There he met Myles Horton, Highlander’s founder. He also met Clark’s cousin, Bernice Robinson. Over workshops and long evenings, the three of them - Jenkins, Clark, and Robinson - built what became the Citizenship Schools.

The first one opened on January 7, 1957, in the back of a grocery store on Johns Island. Fourteen adults came. The oldest was sixty-four. None of them had been to school. Bernice Robinson, who taught the class, was not a professional teacher - she was a beautician. Clark had insisted on this, precisely because a professional teacher would have taught the way teachers had always taught, and that was not what the room needed. Robinson asked the students what they wanted to learn. They told her. How to read well enough to pass the voter registration test. How to fill out a money order. How to sign their own names. How to read the Sears catalog that was already in every house. That was the curriculum. When there was no blackboard, they wrote on dry cleaner bags.

Three months later, the class took a field trip to the Charleston voter registration office. Eight of the fourteen passed the literacy test.

By 1961, there were thirty-seven Citizenship Schools across the Sea Islands and the nearby mainland. The program was absorbed into the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, and Clark moved it to the Dorchester Center in Liberty County, Georgia, where she spent the next decade training roughly ten thousand teachers who carried the method across eleven southern states. By 1965, the schools had taught more than twenty-five thousand adults to read and had added about fifty thousand new voters to the rolls. Andrew Young, who worked alongside Clark at SCLC, later said the Citizenship Schools became the base on which the whole civil rights movement was built.

They didn’t build a base by recruiting to their analysis. They built a base by meeting a need their neighbors already had.

What civil resistance must take from this

The people I work with in the growing civil resistance movement - in the United States and increasingly abroad - are often in a hurry. The moment demands it. But the hurry produces a recurring error, which is the tendency to bring a framework to a community rather than to let a community produce its own. Jenkins, Clark, and Robinson did the opposite. Here is what their method teaches the people just starting out.

1. Meet a need people already have

The need was to vote. The obstacle was literacy. The literacy was going to be acquired through the material of everyday life - a catalog, a money order, the name of one’s own child to be signed on a school permission slip. The political frame followed the human one, not the other way around. Movements that invert this order, that require people to care about the organizer’s theory of change before the organizer will engage with their actual life, do not build bases. They build audiences.

2. Let the room set the curriculum

The first question Robinson asked was what the students wanted to learn. That question is the whole method. It sounds unremarkable. It is, in fact, the move that separates durable organizing from everything else. Most attempts at movement-building fail at exactly this step, because organizers come with a syllabus and try to recruit a class to it. Durable organizing does the opposite. It asks the people already in the room what they need, and it builds the work from the answers.

3. The teacher comes from the room

Bernice Robinson was a beautician on Johns Island. She was someone her students already trusted, who already knew them, who spoke in the cadences of their own homes. Clark insisted on this choice for a strategic reason: a credentialed teacher would have re-created the power relationships that had already failed these adults. A neighbor would not. Movements grow from horizontal relationships of trust. They wither when they depend on imported experts.

4. The materials of liberation are already in their hands

The Sears catalog is the lesson in miniature. Civil resistance, in its early stages, tends to over-invest in its own vocabulary - pillars of support, noncooperation, narrative infrastructure, framing. These are useful terms. I have written enough of them. But the catalog teaches something different. It says: the materials of liberation are already in the hands of the people you are trying to organize. You do not have to bring them. You have to notice what is there, and help people use what is already theirs.

The guidance you find here is intended to help those facilitating the participation of communities in civil resistance to bound their work in the context of tried and true strategic frameworks and well-tested tactics, not to substitute for community wisdom.

5. Every student is a future teacher

Many of the people who learned to read at a Citizenship School went on to teach the next class. They became the organizers, the deacons, the block captains, the poll workers, and, in time, the candidates. Andrew Young’s claim that these schools built the base of the movement is not poetic overstatement. It is an accurate description of what happens when a method treats every participant as a future leader. The durability of the Citizenship Schools came from the fact that graduation and recruitment were the same act.

6. Respect self-interest honestly met

The students did not come because they had been inspired by a speech. They came because they wanted to vote, or fill out a money order, or sign their own name. The organizing used that. It did not pretend the motivation was somewhere nobler than where it actually was. Movements that respect the real reasons people show up tend to hold. Movements that demand a conversion to the organizer’s theory of change before participation begins tend not to.

Where to start

The Highlander Center sits on a ridge in East Tennessee. The original building burned down in 1961, set on fire by people who understood perfectly what was being taught there. It was rebuilt. It still teaches. In the archives are photographs of the people who shaped this work - Septima Clark, Esau Jenkins, Bernice Robinson, Myles Horton - and thousands of students whose names are less famous but whose hands held the catalog, the pen, the registration form, and eventually the ballot.

The question facing civil resistance today, in the United States and around the world, is the same question they answered. What do the people in your town, your congregation, your neighborhood, your workplace, already want? What do they already know how to do? What is already in their hands that, if used a little differently, could bend toward freedom?

The answer is always specific to the place. That is the point. Start there. Ask the room. Let the curriculum come from the catalog.

To read further: Katherine Mellen Charron, Freedom’s Teacher: The Life of Septima Clark (University of North Carolina Press, 2012) is the definitive biography and the indispensable one. Guy and Candie Carawan, Ain’t You Got a Right to the Tree of Life? The People of Johns Island, South Carolina - Their Faces, Their Words, and Their Songs (University of Georgia Press, revised edition 1989) is a beautiful documentary record of the community that produced this work. The SNCC Digital Gateway’s entry on Septima Clark (snccdigital.org) is a well-sourced short introduction with primary photographs. And the Highlander Research and Education Center, in New Market, Tennessee, is still a place you can go.

In 1940, Elise’s brother was killed in France. Something in her broke, and something in Otto broke alongside it. They did not have a platform. They did not belong to any resistance organization. They were not connected to the White Rose or to any underground network. What they had was a kitchen table, a stack of postcards, a pen, and a decision.

Starting in September of that year, and for the next two years, Otto and Elise Hampel hand-wrote more than two hundred postcards denouncing Hitler and the Nazi regime. The messages were plain. Refuse military service. Refuse to donate to the Winter Relief. Refuse to cooperate. One card, written across a stamp bearing Hitler’s face, read simply: worker murderer. Another read, Mother! The Führer has murdered my son. Mother! The Führer will murder your sons too.

They dropped the cards in mailboxes. They left them in stairwells. They walked their own city, an ordinary couple on an ordinary errand, and scattered the truth like seeds.

Here is the part that will break your heart. Nearly every postcard was turned in to the Gestapo immediately. The people who found them were terrified, to be caught with such a card was to be marked. So they handed them in. Card after card. The Gestapo, reading them, became convinced it was tracking a communist spy ring, a sophisticated underground network. The idea that two working-class people at a kitchen table were producing all of this, alone, for two years, did not occur to them.

For two years, Otto and Elise Hampel risked their lives every week. They believed that somewhere, somehow, someone was reading. They believed the seeds would find soil. They didn’t know that almost every card they wrote was going directly into a Gestapo file. They didn’t know their campaign, by any immediate measure, was failing.

They were arrested in October 1942. Otto told the police he was happy to have protested against Hitler. Roland Freisler’s People’s Court convicted them of preparing for high treason and demoralizing the troops. On April 8, 1943, Otto and Elise were guillotined at Plötzensee Prison within hours of each other.

Sit with the part of this story that feels like defeat. They didn’t overthrow Hitler. They didn’t start a movement. They did not, as far as they ever knew, move a single reader. They went to their deaths with no evidence that their two years of quiet, terrified, unglamorous work had mattered to anyone at all.

And yet.

After the war, the German novelist Hans Fallada was handed their Gestapo file. He wrote a novel based directly on what they did, published in English as Every Man Dies Alone, and in the UK as Alone in Berlin. The file itself survived. Their mug shots, their handwriting, their confessions, and several of the actual postcards were contained in it. Schoolchildren in Germany study them. A plaque now marks the place they lived. Emma Thompson and Brendan Gleeson played them in a 2016 film. Eighty years later, I am sitting down to write to you about them.

The regime they opposed is gone. The people who turned in their postcards are forgotten. The Hampels are not.

You will be told - I’m sure you have already been told - that you are too small to matter. That you are not famous enough, not positioned enough, not important enough for your refusal to make a difference. The Hampels were less positioned than you are. They had postcards. You have more than that. The question they answered at their kitchen table, and the question in front of you now, is not whether your witness will be measurable in your lifetime. It is whether you will stand witness anyway.

They didn’t know, when the guillotine fell, that we would be speaking their names. They acted anyway. That is the whole lesson. The meaning of a small refusal is not what it accomplishes in the week you make it. The meaning is that it enters the record of what human beings did when it was hard. Someone, later, will find it. Someone always does.

To read more: Hans Fallada, Every Man Dies Alone (Melville House, 2009). The U.S. edition includes an extraordinary appendix reproducing pages from the actual Gestapo file - the Hampels’ mug shots, their handwriting, several of the original postcards. In the UK the same novel was published as Alone in Berlin. The 2016 film Alone in Berlin, starring Emma Thompson and Brendan Gleeson, is faithful to the arc of the story and a fine ninety-minute introduction. For a concise historical account, the couple’s Wikipedia entry under “Otto and Elise Hampel” is solid and well-sourced.

The core insight

Authoritarian movements need to concentrate power. Federalism makes concentration difficult as compared to many other countries around the world that have fallen to authoritarianism that are frequently cited as examples of democratic backsliding and authoritarian takeovers.

Power in the U.S. system is split across the national government, fifty states, and tens of thousands of localities, each with its own elected officials, courts, budgets, and legal authority. There’s no single switch to flip and no single building to capture. For a movement defending democracy, that dispersion is a terrain advantage: even when one level of government turns hostile, others retain real, independent power, and that power is closest to the ground where it’s cheapest to build and hardest to take away.

The same structure is neutral as to who uses it (see the caution at the end). The advantage is real but conditional: it only works if pro-democracy forces actually win and hold subnational power. This brief is about doing that.

Seven structural advantages

1. Multiple independent power centers. States hold genuine sovereign authority - the “police power” over elections, education, public health, criminal law, and policing. A hostile federal government can’t simply override it. Holding a governorship, legislature, attorney general’s office, or city hall gives you real leverage, not just a platform.

2. States and localities run the elections. Election administration is radically decentralized - thousands of local jurisdictions operating under state law handle registration, ballots, certification, and audits. That makes nationwide manipulation logistically hard and puts the actual machinery in the hands of whoever holds state and local office. Secretaries of state, local election boards, and county clerks are frontline democracy positions.

3. The anti-commandeering doctrine. The federal government can’t compel states or localities to enforce federal policy or to use their own personnel and resources to do so (New York v. United States, 1992; Printz v. United States, 1997). States can lawfully decline to cooperate - a real brake on federal overreach. Refusing to hand over data, personnel, or facilities is a legitimate and powerful tool.

4. State constitutions and state courts. Most state constitutions protect rights more expansively than the federal one over explicit privacy, voting, education, and free-expression provisions. State high courts can rest decisions on “adequate and independent state grounds” that The Supreme Court can’t review. This has kept doors open on voting rights and redistricting even as federal doors closed.

5. Laboratories of democracy. States and cities can pilot reforms and prove they work before anything is possible nationally: independent redistricting commissions, automatic and same-day registration, ranked-choice voting, early voting, and more. Ballot initiatives are especially powerful - in many states citizens can enact policy directly, routing around a captured legislature.

6. Redundancy and resilience. Capturing Washington doesn’t capture fifty states and thousands of localities. State attorneys general can sue the federal government; cities can set their own policies; legislatures can pass protective laws. An anti-democratic movement has to win many fronts at once, which is slow, expensive, and reversible.

7. Proximity and mobilization. Local government is closest to people and cheapest to influence. A city council seat costs a fraction of a congressional race. It’s at this level where new leaders are trained, organizing infrastructure is built, and durable coalitions are formed, all of which represents the pipeline that feeds every higher level.

Strategic priorities

Treat down-ballot offices as frontline democracy positions. Secretaries of state, attorneys general, county clerks, election board members, and state legislators control the machinery of elections and the levers of non-cooperation. These races are low-cost, low-turnout, and high-leverage - and they’re routinely under-contested. Recruit, fund, and defend candidates here first.

Build the bench. School boards, city councils, and county commissions are where leaders are made. Sustained investment in local recruitment and training pays off for a decade. Don’t treat local races as a consolation prize; treat them as the foundation.

Use state constitutions and state courts deliberately. Litigate rights claims under state constitutions where they’re stronger, and on independent state grounds where possible. Invest in judges’ races - they’re decisive and badly under-resourced.

Go directly to voters where you can. In the 24 states with citizen ballot initiatives, use them to enact reforms a captured legislature would block: including redistricting commissions, voting access, and ethics rules. Pair every initiative with a long-term organizing program, not just a campaign.

Network the resisters. Coordinate across states and cities - shared model legislation, joint AG litigation, mutual-aid compacts, rapid-response legal networks. Isolated wins are fragile; a coordinated bloc of states and cities is a structural counterweight to authoritarian federal overreach.

Protect the people who run elections. Election officials face harassment, threats, and pressure to bend results. Legal defense, physical security, clear certification procedures, and public solidarity keep the machinery in trustworthy hands. This is infrastructure, not a side project.

Defend the doctrine. Anti-commandeering and independent state grounds are legal assets worth protecting. Support the cases, scholars, and officials that keep them strong.

An important caution

Federalism is structurally neutral: it empowers whoever controls the subnational level. The same “states’ rights” framing that shields democratic innovation today was the banner of slavery, segregation, and voter suppression, and decentralization can let local majorities trample vulnerable minorities. Two implications follow. First, the advantage is entirely contingent on winning and holding power as federalism rewards organizing, not wishful thinking. Second, pro-democracy forces should defend the federal floor of rights (federal civil-rights and voting protections) at the same time they exploit state and local autonomy. The goal is not states’ rights as an end in itself, but a resilient system with many places to stand and no single point of failure.

Bottom line

Concentration is the authoritarian’s project; dispersion is the defense. The federal system hands pro-democracy forces dozens of independent power centers, control of the election machinery, a legal right to refuse cooperation, stronger state-level rights, and a low-cost local arena to build lasting power. The advantage is only as real as the organizing behind it, so the strategic imperative is to contest and hold state and local power everywhere, relentlessly, starting now.

This was not luck, and it was not inevitable. It was the product of three years of meticulous organizing, an unprecedented coalition of eighteen political parties that genuinely despised each other, a massive voter registration drive under conditions of terror, and - here is the part that matters most - a campaign built on joy rather than fear.

As we prepare for the 2026 midterms, facing accelerating threats to democratic governance in the United States, the Chilean model is not just instructive. It is essential. And Chile is not alone. From Serbia to Estonia, from Hong Kong to the American South, the history of successful resistance is, at its core, a history of cultural production, of music, art, humor, performance, and collective celebration deployed not as decoration on a political campaign but as the campaign itself.

Chile, 1988: The Anatomy of Joy as Strategy

First, understand what Chile was facing. Pinochet had ruled with an iron fist since the CIA-backed coup that overthrew the democratically elected Salvador Allende in 1973. Over the course of his rule, more than 3,000 people were killed or “disappeared.” Twenty-eight thousand were tortured. Two hundred thousand were forced into exile. The regime exercised complete control of the media, the military, the police, and the machinery of government.

In 1980, Pinochet pushed through a fraudulent constitution that included a provision for a 1988 plebiscite—a straight yes-or-no vote on whether he’d continue in power. He controlled everything. He had destroyed all voter registration records. He required expensive new registration that most people were too terrified to pursue. The media was his. The military was his. He expected to win.

The opposition faced every structural disadvantage imaginable. It was fragmented across eighteen political parties spanning from Christian Democrats to Communists who had spent years fighting each other. The population was traumatized - people had learned over fifteen years that political participation could get you killed, disappeared, or tortured. And the proposition they were trying to sell - “No” - was inherently negative, a pure negation with no personality, no program, no future.

Three things made the campaign work.

The Coalition

Eighteen parties formed the Concertacion and united behind a single campaign. This was what I call the springs-to-river model in its purest form: distinct streams that disagreed on virtually everything agreed on one thing, the dictatorship had to end. They didn’t resolve their ideological differences. They didn’t try to. They built a channel wide enough for all of them to flow through toward a single shared objective.

Conservative parties remained formally outside the coalition but many of their voters supported the No. The Catholic Church, led by the Cardinal, provided moral authority and physical infrastructure including churches as meeting spaces in a country where meeting spaces had been systematically closed. Labor unions, particularly the Confederation of Copper Workers, provided organizational muscle. Student organizations provided energy and bodies.

Meanwhile, the Crusade for Citizen Participation ran a voter registration drive of staggering scope, enrolling over seven million voters under dictatorship conditions. This was the “Demand” phase of the framework; creating the conditions for a legitimate vote before a single ballot was cast.

The Message: Joy Is Coming

Under international pressure, Pinochet granted both sides fifteen minutes of uninterrupted television time nightly for twenty-seven nights in September and October 1988. The opposition’s internal debate about how to use this airtime is the most instructive part of the entire story.

The traditional faction wanted to do what felt morally right and emotionally authentic: show footage of torture, list the regime’s crimes, feature testimony from families of the disappeared. Make the moral case against dictatorship through unflinching documentation of its horrors.

The advertising team, led by Eugenio García at the Porta agency, argued that this approach would be strategically catastrophic. Their reasoning was grounded in something that research on political mobilization has since confirmed: fear-based messaging suppresses participation among undecided and infrequent voters. Reminding people of trauma they were trying to survive would make them want to withdraw further, not engage. And it would play directly into Pinochet’s framing of “stability versus chaos” by making the No vote feel like a return to the darkness rather than an escape from it.

García’s team made a decision that was genuinely radical at the time: they would build the entire campaign around the proposition that saying “No” was the pathway to joy.

Chile, la alegría ya viene. Chile, joy is coming.

Alegría doesn’t just mean “happiness” in Spanish. It carries a connotation of collective, carnival-style celebration - the joy of community, of dancing together, of belonging to something larger than yourself. It was forward-looking (joy is coming, not here yet). It promised something without specifying policies. It was emotionally unifying as everyone wants joy. And it contrasted starkly with the grim authoritarianism of Pinochet’s Chile.

The rainbow logo symbolized both the plural coalition (each party had its own color) and the promise of a better future. It was bright, beautiful, professionally designed, and easy to reproduce on flags, T-shirts, banners, and posters. The nightly broadcasts featured celebrities alongside everyday people of all ages - families, workers, students, the elderly. There was dancing, music, and celebration with mimes and performers, and international solidarity messages. And the catchiest jingle in Chilean history, one so catchy that even staffers on the “Yes” campaign were caught humming it during their own brainstorming sessions.

They made supporting “No” look fun, desirable, and, critically, normal. Not radical, not dangerous, but normal. The thing happy, reasonable people do.

What they did not do is equally important. They did not attack Pinochet personally. Instead, they made it about the system, not the man. They did not promise specific policy outcomes. They did not relitigate the past in detail. They did not match the regime’s negativity. They did not use fear as their primary motivator.

The government’s own Interior Minister later admitted: “In a few days nobody could ignore the evident technical superiority of the No campaign: superior in argumentation, superior in filming, superior in music.”

The Mobilization

On September 22, the campaign launched the Marcha de la Alegría - the March of Joy - a ten-day rolling celebration that moved through Chile from its northernmost to its southernmost cities, culminating in Santiago. This created visible, joyous, participatory momentum heading into the vote.

Combined with a massive parallel vote count operation - the opposition knew Pinochet would try to steal it and built the infrastructure to prove the real results - the campaign produced a decisive 55.99 percent No vote. Pinochet was forced out. Democratic elections followed in 1990.

The Pattern: Chile Is Not Alone

The strategic logic of Chile’s No campaign, of fighting fear with joy, using cultural production as the primary instrument of political mobilization, and making participation feel desirable rather than obligatory, appears in every successful cultural resistance campaign of the past half century. The cases differ in their specifics but converge on the same insight: arts and culture don’t illustrate a political argument. They create an emotional reality in which political action becomes possible.

Otpor, Serbia (1998–2000): The Comedy of Resistance

When students in Belgrade decided to challenge Slobodan Milosevic, they understood that direct confrontation with a regime that had survived a decade of wars, sanctions, and international condemnation would fail. So they chose a different weapon: absurdist humor.

Otpor, or “Resistance,” deployed street theater as a form of political warfare. In the most famous action, activists painted Milošević’s face on a barrel and placed it in a busy square where passersby could hit it with a stick for the price of one dinar. When police arrived, they faced an impossible dilemma: arrest people for hitting a barrel, or tolerate public mockery of the president. They confiscated the barrel. Footage of uniformed officers solemnly carrying a barrel with the president’s face through the streets created more mockery than the original action.

On Milosevic’s birthday, Otpor organized mock celebrations, bringing cake, and singing birthday songs with exaggerated cheer. Police could not figure out how to respond to people singing birthday songs. “Smiling Resistance” had activists simply walking around in branded T-shirts, greeting strangers and smiling. The clenched fist logo - simple, black and white, cheap to stencil or print - appeared on every wall and lamppost in the country.

Otpor grew from eleven founders to tens of thousands of members and contributed directly to Milosevic’s electoral defeat in 2000. The strategic lesson: humor reduces fear, lowers the barrier to participation, and forces authoritarian regimes into lose-lose situations. You can’t shoot people for laughing at you, but you also can’t afford to be laughed at.

The Singing Revolution, Baltic States (1987–1991): Freedom in the Key of F

In the late 1980s, Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania found their way to independence from the Soviet Union through an instrument that seems, on its face, absurdly insufficient: folk songs.

The traditional song festivals that had been part of Baltic cultural life for over a century became the vehicle for independence movements. In Estonia, 300,000 people - a full quarter of the country’s population - gathered at the Tallinn Song Festival Grounds to sing national songs that had been forbidden under Soviet rule. Night after night, people gathered to sing. The events were cultural, not political - or rather, they were so deeply cultural that their political content was undeniable but impossible to prosecute.

Mass singing accomplished several strategic objectives simultaneously. It was a cultural act that was harder to repress than a political act. The Soviets could not justify sending tanks in to disperse a song festival. It created emotional bonds among hundreds of thousands of strangers who discovered, through the act of singing together, that they were a community with a shared identity and shared aspirations. It asserted national identity against imperial erasure. And it made participation joyful rather than grim. People came back night after night because singing together felt good, not because they were grinding through a duty.

The Singing Revolution is the clearest demonstration of a principle that Chile also proved: when you make resistance feel like celebration, you don’t have to recruit participants. They recruit themselves.

Hong Kong’s “Glory to Hong Kong” (2019): The Crowdsourced Anthem

During the 2019 pro-democracy protests, a musician using the pseudonym “Thomas” composed an orchestral protest anthem. The lyrics were crowdsourced and refined collectively by the movement. The song was released online for free, with Cantonese and English versions, YouTube tutorials, and downloadable sheet music for every instrument.

“Glory to Hong Kong” was sung by thousands at protests, performed in flash mobs in shopping malls, played on pianos in train stations, and adapted for settings from solo guitar to full orchestra. When the government eventually banned it, the ban made it more symbolically potent. It was the most effective advertisement any song can receive.

The anthem gave the movement an emotional anchor that persisted beyond any single protest. It made demonstrations feel like cultural events, not just political actions. And it provided a way for people who could not attend protests because of work, disability, family obligations, or fear to participate by learning, performing, and sharing the song in their own contexts.

The U.S. Civil Rights Movement: The Original Playbook

The most relevant domestic precedent is also the most familiar, though we often underestimate just how strategically deliberate its cultural dimensions were.

Freedom songs were not morale-boosters. They were tactical instruments. “We Shall Overcome,” “Ain’t Gonna Let Nobody Turn Me Around,” “This Little Light of Mine” - these songs created courage in the specific moment of confrontation. When you are sitting at a lunch counter and a mob is pouring ketchup on your head, or when you are marching across a bridge and the state troopers are forming a line, singing together is how you maintain nonviolent discipline. It regulates the group’s emotional state. It communicates to observers what kind of people you are. It builds solidarity among strangers who have just met but are now, in this moment, a community.

The visual aesthetics were equally deliberate. The dignity of Sunday dress at protests was a strategic choice, not a coincidence. It created a visual contrast between disciplined, well-dressed nonviolent protesters and the violent, snarling segregationist response. The choreography of marches, the composition of photographs, the selection of which confrontations to seek and which to avoid were all decisions about cultural production in service of political goals.

This is the American tradition we inherit. Cultural resistance is not an import. It is homegrown, and it is tested.

Rock Against Racism, Britain (1977–1981): Making Resistance Cool

In the late 1970s, the National Front was making significant inroads among white British youth, weaponizing punk and skinhead culture for fascist recruitment. Rock Against Racism responded not with counter-arguments but with counter-culture: massive concerts and carnivals that made anti-racism the socially desirable position.

The Carnival Against the Nazis in Victoria Park in 1978 drew 100,000 people and is widely credited with blunting the National Front’s electoral rise. The movement didn’t try to refute fascist ideology point by point. It made fascism uncool. It offered young people a more attractive identity, one that was multiracial, musically vibrant, and joyful, and let the contrast speak for itself.

The lesson for our moment: you do not defeat authoritarian cultural appeal by out-arguing it. You defeat it by out-performing it. You build a cultural environment in which democracy is the exciting, creative, community-building proposition while authoritarianism is the ugly, repressive, joyless one.

The Throughline

Across all of these cases - separated by decades, continents, languages, and political systems - the strategic logic is identical:

Arts and culture were not deployed to illustrate a political argument. They were deployed to create an emotional reality that made political participation feel desirable, joyous, and socially rewarding.

Chile’s No campaign didn’t use music to make people think about dictatorship. It used music to make people feel what freedom would be like, and then offered voting as the pathway to get there. Otpor didn’t use humor to explain why Milošević was bad. It used humor to make resistance feel fun, low-risk, and attractive to people who would never attend a conventional political rally. Estonia’s singing didn’t make an argument for independence. It made 300,000 people experience independence - the feeling of being a free people, singing their own songs, in their own language, together.

The No campaign solved the fundamental problem of resistance under authoritarian conditions: people are afraid, demoralized, and fragmented. Fear-based messaging - however factually accurate - makes all three worse. It paralyzes the afraid, deepens the demoralization, and gives the fragmented no reason to come together. Joy does the opposite. It mobilizes the afraid by promising something worth taking risks for. It reverses demoralization by making people feel powerful and connected. And it unifies the fragmented by offering a big tent built around a simple emotional proposition that doesn’t require ideological agreement.

What This Means for 2026

We face the 2026 midterms under conditions that democracy scholars describe as competitive authoritarianism. Under competitive authoritarianism elections continue, but the state apparatus is being weaponized against opposition. Federal agencies are being dismantled. Funding is being used as political punishment. Universities are being captured. Courts are being packed. Dissent is being criminalized. The playing field is not level.

The standard progressive response is to amplify the alarm. Document the threats. Sound the emergency. Explain how bad things are and how much worse they’ll get. This approach is factually correct and strategically counterproductive. Research on political mobilization shows that fear-based messaging suppresses turnout among precisely the populations most needed - young people, infrequent voters, economically stressed communities. The 2024 election made this painfully clear: youth turnout dropped from over 50 percent to 42 percent, and 59 percent of non-voters said no organization or campaign had even contacted them.

Chile teaches us a different approach. Pair urgency with agency. Make people feel that the situation is serious and that their participation can change it, and that participation will be a joyful, community-building, identity-affirming experience. Frame the midterms not as a grim duty to prevent disaster but as a plebiscite on freedom - a collective act of defiance and celebration. Build a cultural infrastructure from songs, art, performance, and community gatherings that makes voting feel like joining a party rather than performing a chore.

Alegría ya viene. Joy is coming. That’s not naivety. It’s a strategy. And it has a track record of defeating dictators.

Solidarity is not primarily a moral good. It is not a litmus test. It is not a utopian aspiration. It is the mechanism by which movements redistribute risk. And risk distribution is what determines whether people will act.

Every person facing a decision about whether to resist - whether to speak publicly, refuse an order, shelter someone, sign a letter, or simply refuse to pretend - is performing an implicit risk calculation. That calculation is not primarily ideological. It is: What happens to me if I do this? Will I be alone when the consequences come?

The answer to that second question is what solidarity controls.

How the Machine Works

Authoritarian consolidation is a machine for making that risk calculation come out wrong. The machine works through specific, predictable moves: arrest a few visible people early, to create examples. Use legal and financial pressure to make resistance expensive. Isolate resisters from their institutions and networks. Then let fear do the rest.

The goal is not to suppress every act of resistance. That’s impossible. The goal is to make the individual calculation produce inaction often enough that organized resistance never reaches critical mass. Not everyone has to be afraid. Enough people have to be uncertain that anyone will be there with them if they act.

Properly built solidarity disrupts every stage of that machine. But it has to exist before the crisis arrives, not after it begins. Solidarity assembled under pressure, after someone is already in detention or already fired or already isolated, is emergency response. Emergency response matters. It is not a substitute for infrastructure.

Five Things That Have to Be Built Now

Financial solidarity. Legal defense funds that are pre-capitalized. Rapid-response funds for people who lose employment because they refused to comply. Mutual aid networks that solve the material logistics of showing up. Financial solidarity doesn’t manufacture courage. It removes the material obstacles that make courage impossible. Most people are not held back from resistance by a lack of conviction. They are held back by a concrete, legitimate fear: I cannot afford to lose this job. I cannot afford to be sued. I cannot afford what comes next. When the movement answers that fear materially, the calculation changes.

Legal solidarity. A coordinated network of attorneys committed to rapid pro bono response, built in advance, not assembled under pressure after someone is already in a detention facility or facing a lawsuit they cannot afford to contest. This means relationships built now, retainers arranged now, protocols established now, so that the response is organized before the need is urgent.

Institutional solidarity pacts. Formal, pre-committed agreements among coalitions of organizations that an attack on any member triggers a coordinated response from all. Selective targeting only works when the targeted entity can be isolated. When targeting one organization means triggering 150, the cost-benefit calculation facing the regime changes dramatically. This is why the administration goes after organizations one at a time, quietly, through financial and legal pressure rather than through dramatic public action. The quiet approach depends on the target being alone. Pre-committed solidarity pacts make that approach structurally impossible.

Witness and amplification networks. Organized visibility, so that when someone is targeted, that fact becomes widely known immediately. The regime sets a price for resistance. Our response either accepts that price or contests it. When targeting becomes visible and costly - when it produces immediate and organized public response, documentation, and accountability - the price of targeting rises. When targeting is quiet and invisible, the price stays low.

Psychological solidarity. This one is least talked about and most important over the long haul. Sustained resistance under intensifying pressure produces hypervigilance, grief, burnout, and isolation. Psychological attrition is one of the primary mechanisms by which authoritarian campaigns succeed over time - not by defeating the movement in a single confrontation, but by wearing it down across many months and years until the people who were doing the work can no longer sustain it. The movement that asks people to take risks must also hold them when the risks land. This means regular community, regular acknowledgment, and regular care built into the structure of how we organize, not added as an afterthought when people are already depleted.

What the Evidence Tells Us

The historical record of movements that have survived sustained repression gives us several consistent findings worth naming directly.

Movements that survive are distributed, not centralized. When any single organization can be decapitated and the movement collapses, that was never a movement. It was a campaign. Distributed organizing through networks of relatively autonomous nodes connected by shared frameworks and genuine relationships, rather than by hierarchical authority fails gracefully rather than catastrophically. When nodes are disrupted, other nodes keep functioning. The work does not depend on any single piece for its survival.

Cross-identity solidarity must be built before the crisis that demands it. The time to build a multiracial, cross-sector coalition is not when the raids begin. It is now. The most common failure mode in progressive coalition work is asking communities that have been underserved by the broader movement to take risks on behalf of a solidarity that has not yet been demonstrated to them. Communities that have been disappointed before, that have been used as props for other people’s campaigns and left without support when their own needs were most acute, are correct to be cautious about calls for unity that arrive only when someone else needs something.

The answer to this is not more urgent appeals. It is making deposits before withdrawals. Showing up for communities before you need them to show up for you. Building the trust that makes solidarity real rather than rhetorical, which means doing it over time, through actual shared work, before the crisis that will demand it.

And the message must be rooted in material reality. Hungary’s pro-democracy opposition didn’t win in 2025 by running on democracy as an abstraction. They won on corruption. On healthcare. On economic stagnation. On what sixteen years of authoritarian consolidation had been costing ordinary Hungarians in their daily lives. Seventy-nine percent of voters turned out despite a captured media, a gerrymandered electoral system, and the active intervention of foreign heads of state working to keep the authoritarian in power. And they turned out because the opposition made the material cost of authoritarianism visible and concrete. People do not mobilize to defend institutions. They mobilize when they can see, in concrete terms, what is being taken from them and their families.

The Bottom Line

Authoritarian consolidation is not permanent. It is not inevitable. It is a political project. Political projects can be defeated when we build the infrastructure to defeat them before the crisis demands it, when we show up for each other across lines of difference before we need anything in return, and when we refuse to let anyone believe they are alone.

The solidarity that will matter most is not what we declare at rallies. It is what is already organized, funded, practiced, and legally prepared on the day it is needed.

That day is coming. The infrastructure has to already exist when it arrives.

Build it now.

I want to give you something useful.

Not another analysis of what’s happening. Not a framework or a field guide. Just books - some of them novels, some of them memoirs, some of them the kind of nonfiction that reads like a novel because the lives inside them were that vivid and that consequential.

These are books I return to, or that people I trust have pressed into my hands at moments when the world felt like it was narrowing. They share a quality I’ve come to think of as essential right now: they take seriously the question of how people maintain their humanity, their courage, and their capacity to act when the systems around them are designed to crush all three.

Some of the people in these books won. Some of them died without knowing whether anything they did mattered. Some of them are still alive, still at it. What they all have in common is that they refused to pretend that silence equals safety, and their refusal left something behind that outlasted the forces trying to erase them.

That feels like enough, right now, to be worth sitting with.

Novels

Every Man Dies Alone - Hans Fallada

Start here. Primo Levi called it “the greatest book ever written about German resistance to the Nazis,” and I can’t argue with him. It’s based on the true story of a working-class Berlin couple - a factory foreman and his wife - who, after losing their only son to the war, start leaving hand-written anti-Hitler postcards around the city. Almost every postcard gets turned in to the Gestapo. Almost no one is moved to act. By the numbers, the resistance fails completely.

And yet. Fallada, who lived through the Nazi hell and wrote this in 24 days from the couple’s actual Gestapo file, insists on something the numbers can’t capture: that the act of refusing to cooperate with a lie is not made meaningless by the fact that most people ignore it. It is made permanent by the fact that someone did it at all.

This is an honest book, not a comforting one. It will shake you. Read it anyway.

A Gentleman in Moscow - Amor Towles

If Every Man Dies Alone is for the difficult nights, this one is for the long haul. Count Rostov is placed under house arrest in a Moscow hotel in 1922 and remains there for thirty years while the Soviet state rises, consolidates, and slowly begins its long unraveling outside his window. He builds a life inside constraint that is so full of beauty, friendship, humor, and meaning that the regime’s attempt to diminish him reads as a sustained and spectacular failure.

This is not an escapist novel. It is a serious argument about what authoritarianism cannot reach when people insist on the quality of their attention to daily life. I find it one of the most sustaining books I know.

Life and Fate - Vasily Grossman

Grossman wrote this novel about the Soviet-Nazi conflict in the late 1950s. When the KGB confiscated the manuscript in 1961, an officer told him it couldn’t be published for two hundred years. It was published in seventeen, after friends microfilmed it and smuggled it to the West. The novel survived the state that tried to suppress it.

It’s a big, demanding book at the scale of War and Peace. It describes the moral weight of everything that happened in the twentieth century concentrated into one story. Its central argument, that the human impulse toward freedom and individual dignity is ineradicable, is not naive optimism. It is hard-won testimony from someone who had seen both fascism and Stalinism up close and still believed it.

Darkness at Noon - Arthur Koestler

This is the novel Orwell read before writing 1984, and in many ways it cuts deeper because Koestler was writing from inside knowledge. A veteran revolutionary named Rubashov, who helped build the Soviet state, is arrested and methodically broken by the very system he created. Not primarily through torture. Through logic. Through the internal contradictions of a worldview that had taught him to subordinate individual conscience to collective necessity until he could no longer find the ground to stand on.

If you want to understand how good people capitulate - how institutions that know better find ways to go along - this is the book. It is uncomfortable in exactly the right way.

The Feast of the Goat - Mario Vargas Llosa

Called the emblematic novel of 20th-century Latin America, this is the story of Trujillo’s dictatorship in the Dominican Republic — and of the conspiracy that finally brought him down. Vargas Llosa moves between the perpetrators, the victims, and the conspirators with such precision and moral seriousness that the book functions as both history and meditation on what it costs people to act, and what it costs them not to.

The Tin Drum - Gunter Grass

Oskar Matzerath decides at age three to stop growing in protest against the world adults have made. He uses his tin drum to disrupt Nazi rallies. He deploys ridicule as resistance. He refuses, with perfect consistency and perfect absurdity, to participate.

This is the great novel of noncooperation and the use of humor as a form of defiance, which is to say it maps very directly onto the strategies that actually work. It’s also one of the funniest serious books I know, which seems right.

It Can’t Happen Here - Sinclair Lewis

Written in 1935, It Can’t Happen Here imagines a populist demagogue winning the 1936 election and establishing fascism in America. Lewis’s uncanny intuitions about the social foundations of the authoritarian impulse - the resentful underclass taking advantage, the families that cleave along lines of principle and opportunism, the newspapers and churches and universities that find ways to accommodate - read less like prophecy than like reporting from the present. The resistance in the novel refuses to die. The costs borne by those who stand up are steep. The book is honest about both.

The Dispossessed - Ursula K. Le Guin

The most serious political novel in the science fiction tradition and one of the great novels about freedom, full stop. Shevek is a physicist from a deliberately impoverished anarchist moon who travels to the wealthy authoritarian world his ancestors fled, in order to offer his discovery freely to both societies and to understand what freedom actually requires of people who claim to want it. Le Guin was one of the most sophisticated political thinkers of the 20th century working in fiction. This book, which won both the Hugo and Nebula awards, asks the question that underlies everything else: what does a genuinely free society demand of the people living in it? The answer is harder and more beautiful than most political writing allows.

Nonfiction and Memoir

Long Walk to Freedom - Nelson Mandela

The autobiography against which all other political memoirs of the 20th century are measured, and not only because of what Mandela accomplished. It’s the best account I know of how a person maintains moral and psychological resources across decades of repression - how one reads, teaches, argues, hopes, and refuses to be diminished inside prison. And it’s granular about strategy in ways that feel directly useful: how the ANC built organizational capacity, navigated the relationship between different tactics, held the movement together across 27 years of imprisonment and exile. Required reading.

Why We Can’t Wait - Martin Luther King Jr.

King’s account of the 1963 Birmingham Campaign, including the full text of “Letter from Birmingham Jail.” The letter remains the most articulate case ever made in English for the ethical necessity of civil disobedience against unjust law. Its analysis of the “white moderate” - who “prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice” - is the exact frame for thinking about every institution that is currently finding reasons to go along. Read the whole book, not just the letter. The strategic thinking is as important as the moral argument.

Stride Toward Freedom - Martin Luther King Jr.

King’s earlier book about the Montgomery Bus Boycott is, among other things, the most precise documentary record available of how a civil resistance campaign is actually organized from the ground up. How the decision was made. How a reluctant community was mobilized. How nonviolent discipline was maintained in the face of real violence. How success was translated into something bigger. It reads with the excitement of someone reporting from inside a movement that is winning, because that is what it is.

Defying Hitler - Sebastian Haffner

Haffner was a young German lawyer who watched the Nazi takeover happen in real time, month by month, year by year, and wrote about it from exile in London in 1939, before knowing how it would end. What he describes is the phenomenology of democratic backsliding from the inside: the small surrenders, the rationalizations, the moments when resistance was possible and the moments that passed without anyone acting. He watched his circle of friends gradually accept what they had initially found unacceptable, and he describes the mechanism with a precision that is still almost unbearable to read.

He ends with his decision to flee - itself an act of resistance. The question the book poses to every reader is quiet and relentless: where is your line?

The Captive Mind - Czesław Miłosz

Miłosz was a Polish poet who left Communist Poland rather than return to it after the war and wrote this from exile in 1953. It is an intimate, precise, and devastating analysis of how the four most gifted writers he knew personally had accommodated themselves to the Stalinist system, not through cowardice exactly, but through intellectual sophistication, career survival, and a form of self-deception he calls “Ketman”: the performance of false allegiance so sustained it eventually becomes indistinguishable from belief.

Every analysis of why institutions capitulate, why people who know better go along, finds its deepest framework in this book. It is essential, and also sad in ways that linger.

All the Frequent Troubles of Our Days - Rebecca Donner

The true story of Mildred Harnack, a scholar from Wisconsin who married a German academic, stayed in Berlin after Hitler came to power, and built one of the most significant anti-Nazi resistance networks in history before being arrested and executed on Hitler’s personal order in 1943. Donner spent fifteen years researching this book and writes with both the precision of a historian and the skill of a novelist. Harnack is the counterpart to the Quangels of Every Man Dies Alone - an ordinary person who chose resistance - but her network was larger, her politics more developed, and her story connects American and German democratic traditions in ways that feel urgently, specifically contemporary.

Fear No Evil - Natan Sharansky

Written after Sharansky’s release in a prisoner exchange after nine years in Soviet prisons and labor camps. The psychological and moral discipline required to maintain integrity under sustained interrogation, years of solitary confinement, and the slow grinding pressure of a system specifically designed to break people. All of this Sharansky describes with a clarity about what inner freedom actually consists of that has few equivalents in any literature. The book ends with genuine freedom. The journey from arrest to liberation is one of the most specific accounts I know of how a person stays whole.

Gandhi: An Autobiography

The foundational text of the civil resistance tradition, and still the most thorough account by any practitioner of how the doctrine of nonviolent resistance was actually built - tested through failure, revised, and ultimately vindicated. Gandhi describes developing satyagraha, or truth-force, first in South Africa and then in India, with the rigor of someone thinking through strategy and the honesty of someone willing to record his mistakes. The spiritual framework will not resonate with everyone. The strategic thinking is rigorous and available to anyone. Everything that Erica Chenoweth’s civil resistance research has found empirically has its practical antecedent somewhere in this book.

The Diary of a Young Girl - Anne Frank

I include this not as a story of winning in any conventional sense. Anne Frank did not survive. It’s included because the legacy question requires it. The most widely read personal account of life under Nazi occupation in any language, Frank’s diary has shaped the moral imagination of democratic resistance for eighty years and continues to. The specific entries in which she refuses to become bitter, insisting on her belief in human goodness despite everything she has witnessed, constitute one of the most durable arguments ever made for the indestructibility of the human spirit under authoritarian pressure. If you haven’t read it since childhood, read it again. It is different when you are old enough to understand what she was up against.

One More

The Book of the City of Ladies - Christine de Pizan

Written in 1405 by a medieval French woman who sat down one day and systematically refuted, from inside a deeply misogynist culture, every argument for women’s intellectual and moral inferiority that had ever been made, constructing an imagined city built entirely from the stories of women who defied their circumstances and left legacies. It is the founding document of the feminist intellectual tradition and a six-century-old demonstration of how to build an alternative narrative structure against authoritarian consensus.

I include it here because it is the oldest root of everything else on this list, because it was written by a woman who understood herself to be alone against the weight of received opinion and did the work anyway, and because it is a reminder that the tradition we are working in is longer than any of us usually remember.

There is a thread connecting all of these. It is the same thread that runs through the civil resistance tradition, through the history of democratic movements, through the work all of us are trying to do right now. Every authoritarian system ultimately rests on the willing or forced cooperation of ordinary people. The most consequential act available to any individual inside such a system is the refusal to pretend. The insistence, at whatever cost, on naming what is real.

That is what the Quangels were doing with their postcards. What Mandela was doing in the dock at Rivonia. What Anne Frank was doing in her diary. What Grossman was doing when he hid his manuscript.

The books keep saying it because it keeps being true.

I hope some of these find you when you need them.

Two arguments follow. The first is about narrative: what silence surrenders. The second is about strategy: what anti-racists can uniquely deploy. They turn out to be the same argument.

1. Silence doesn’t lower the temperature. It hands over the thermostat.

There is no race-neutral space to retreat into. Race is one of the central organizing stories of American political life, and the only live question is who gets to tell it. When funders and movement organizations go quiet, they don’t open a calm, post-racial clearing. They vacate a field - one the authoritarian project is more than willing to occupy, and is occupying right now, with discipline and resources.

What gets surrendered in that retreat is definitional power: the authority to say what racism is, whom it harms, and what people of color represent to the nation. These aren’t abstractions. They’re the upstream settings from which every downstream policy flows. Define racism as a fiction - or, more aggressively, invert it so that white grievance becomes the real injury - and the case for every protection collapses on its own just as the case for white ethnic nationalism is being made. Define people of color as threats, burdens, or invaders rather than as co-authors of the country, and exclusion stops looking like cruelty and starts looking like security.

That’s the definition being installed while the field is looking away. It doesn’t require a majority to win; it requires only that no one with resources is contesting it.

And here’s the part the prudence argument misses: the polarization funders are reacting to is, in significant part, manufactured. Making race-explicit work feel too costly to touch is not a side effect of the authoritarian strategy - it’s the strategy. The chilling effect is the deliverable. Backing away doesn’t let a donor sidestep the trap; it springs it. Engineered fear works precisely by converting the people who should be contesting the narrative into people who decide it’s safer to say nothing.

Underneath “what do people of color represent to the nation” sits the question of whether membership in this country is full and unconditional or ranked and revocable. That’s democracy’s load-bearing question. Conceding it isn’t a tactical retreat on a peripheral issue - it’s a retreat on the main line, dressed up as discretion.

Going silent on race doesn’t take the country to neutral. It takes the microphone away from the people who would call our neighbors full members and hands it to the people who would call them a threat.

2. To white anti-racists: Privilege is an asset. Assets do real work only when they’re pooled.

That whiteness carries a pecuniary quality (that it’s like money) is not a new or fringe claim. Du Bois named the “public and psychological wage” of whiteness nearly a century ago. George Lipsitz called it a “possessive investment.” Cheryl Harris mapped, in law, how whiteness functions as a form of property - a standing that can be possessed, used, and excluded from. Strip away the academic registers and the point is plain: whiteness operates as unearned credit. A currency.

The dominant mode of white antiracism has been confessional - “recognize your privilege.” That work is necessary, and it’s nowhere near sufficient. Recognizing that you hold a currency isn’t the same as spending it. And even a person who does spend it - who uses their standing well, at real cost - has executed a single transaction. The racial order is a system. Systems aren’t moved by single transactions, however admirable.

Worse, the currency is never truly idle. Privilege left unspent doesn’t sit in neutral reserve. It keeps paying out to its holder by default - that’s what unearned advantage is, an accrual that requires no action - and every passive payout quietly ratifies the system cutting the checks. So the choice was never between spending the currency and holding it safely. It’s between deploying it against the order that issues it and letting it keep working, automatically, on that order’s behalf.

This is exactly where Showing Up for Racial Justice (SURJ), (which I’m naming because in order to collectivize your privilege, you need to join with others) does something no individual can: it pools that race-based currency. Like a donor pool, a credit union, or a mutual fund, SURJ aggregates dispersed, individually modest assets and converts them into concentrated, deployable power - directed in accountable relationships to the organizations led by the people most affected. That aggregation is the leverage. It’s what turns privilege from a private virtue into a movement instrument.

It’s also the answer to the question, why an organization of white people? The specific asset - white standing - is held by white people, and pooling it at scale means organizing them.

One person spending their privilege is a good deed. A hundred thousand people pooling it is a balance sheet. SURJ builds the balance sheet.

The two arguments are one argument.

Both rest on a single fact donors already understand from their own work: in a contested field, inaction is not neutral. Capital left in a falling market still moves, if only downward. Silence in a narrative fight still speaks, but for the other side. Privilege left unspent still pays out, but to the status quo. The only way to stop subsidizing the outcome you oppose is to deploy what you hold against it.

What your investment buys.

Joining and supporting SURJ is not funding a single message or a single good deed. It’s funding the infrastructure that pools an asset the pro-democracy field is currently mostly leaving on the table, and that holds definitional ground the authoritarian project is working to seize without contestation. Pooled standing plus a tightly held narrative: at a moment when the field is retreating, that combination is precisely the leverage the moment demands.

Backing race-explicit organizing now is not the risky bet. Going silent is.

The stories a society tells about itself are not decorative. They are structural. They determine who is visible and who is erased, what is grievable and what is not, and which experiences are recognized as belonging to the common human inheritance.

There is a scene near the end of Hans Fallada’s Every Man Dies Alone - called by Primo Levi “the greatest book ever written about German resistance to the Nazis” - in which Otto Quangel, a simple Berlin factory foreman, sits in his prison cell awaiting execution. His crime: writing anti-Hitler messages on postcards and leaving them around the city. Most of the postcards, Fallada tells us, were turned in to the Gestapo immediately by terrified citizens who found them. Almost no one who picked one up was moved to act. The resistance, by any conventional measure, failed.

And yet the novel insists it did not fail. The act of refusing to pretend, of naming reality in a society organized around enforced silence, was itself the victory. The postcards were not propaganda. They were testimony. They were proof that someone, somewhere, in the grinding machinery of terror, insisted on remaining human.

This is what art does. This is what it has always done. And this is why authoritarian governments move against it first.

What Happened

The Trump administration’s proposed 2027 budget allocates just $29 million to the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), $38 million to the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), and $6 million to the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS), not to continue their work, but to “permanently wind down operations.” These are not the opening shots. In May 2025, the NEA began issuing grant termination notices to organizations with pending or open awards, rescinding offers already extended and ordering seven-day appeals windows for grants already in progress. DOGE placed approximately 80 percent of NEH staff on administrative leave and terminated thousands of individual grants. An executive order targeted the Institute of Museum and Library Services for dismantlement.

Courts intervened. Congress, in a rare display of bipartisan resolve, restored funding for the NEA and NEH in its FY2026 package. The immediate crisis was partially arrested. But the structural assault continues, and its logic is more important than its current status in the appropriations process.

Gone from the surviving NEA are the Challenge America grants dedicated to underserved communities. Surviving agency guidelines now cite compliance with executive orders banning “woke” ideologies. Funds have been redirected toward projects celebrating the 250th anniversary of the United States, including a $14.1 million IMLS grant to traveling Freedom Truck exhibitions organized by evangelical interests.

This is not budget discipline. It is cultural policy - the systematic replacement of a public cultural infrastructure that served the full breadth of American life with one that serves the consolidation of a particular, narrow vision of American identity. The authoritarian cultural playbook has two moves: defund the voices that complicate the story, and fund the voices that tell the story you want told. Both are happening simultaneously and at speed.

The cultural sector has responded with advocacy, litigation, and emergency fundraising. All of that matters. But the dominant philanthropic frame - fill the gap left by government - is not a strategy. It is a stopgap dressed as a strategy. And it may be quietly making things worse.

Who Government Was Actually Funding

To understand what was lost, and what philanthropy’s responsibility therefore is, we need to be precise about who received federal arts funding and why it can’t simply be replaced.

The NEA’s Challenge America program, eliminated because its language around “underserved communities” was deemed to constitute DEI, specifically supported small arts organizations in communities with limited access to the arts relative to geography, ethnicity, economics, and disability. In fiscal year 2025, it awarded $2.7 million to approximately 270 organizations: a Native artists’ residency in North Dakota, LGBTQ+ and BIPOC exhibition programming in Fort Lauderdale, a mural-apprenticeship employment program in Seattle for young people facing systemic barriers, arts programming for aging adults combating memory loss in Newark, a classical music festival in a Michigan town of fewer than 2,000 people, dance tours to rural Minnesota towns that have no other gateway to live performance.

The National Assembly of State Arts Agencies has reported that while private funders are the largest contributors to major U.S. cultural institutions, rural communities specifically rely on state and federal programs. Georgia ranks last in the country in state arts funding per capita. Without federal access, organizations like the Stonewall National Museum in Fort Lauderdale, which lost not only its Challenge America grant but most of its corporate donors once federal signals shifted, have no comparable private alternative.

Under the Biden administration, the NEA had celebrated increasing first-time grant applicant rates, translated its guidelines into Spanish and Chinese, and deepened engagement with HBCUs and Native communities. All of that has been deleted. The new requirement of five years of prior programming before application - up from three - is not an administrative adjustment. It is a gatekeeping mechanism that systematically excludes the organizations least likely to have institutional longevity: grassroots groups, newer immigrant-serving organizations, community-based arts collectives that have never had a development department and no prospect of getting one.

What is being defunded is not “the arts.” What is being defunded is a specific commitment - the only one of its kind in the United States - to reach every community regardless of what it can offer in return. The NEA is the only arts funder in the country, public or private, that provides access to the arts in all 50 states, the District of Columbia, and U.S. territories. Nothing in the philanthropic universe approximates that geographic and democratic scope.

What the Books Tell Us

The literature of resistance to authoritarianism returns, across every culture and century, to a single insight about the relationship between art and power: the stories a society tells about itself are not decorative. They are structural. They determine who is visible and who is erased, what is grievable and what is not, which experiences are recognized as belonging to the common human inheritance and which are treated as exceptional, peripheral, or dangerous.

This is why every sustained authoritarian regime has moved against cultural expression, and why the quality and diversity of that expression is among the first casualties when democratic norms collapse.

Vasily Grossman’s Life and Fate - arguably the greatest novel written about the Soviet-Nazi conflict - was confiscated by the KGB in 1961. The officer who took the manuscript told Grossman it could not be published for two hundred years. It was published in seventeen. Friends had microfilmed it and smuggled it to the West. The art survived the regime. That is also the story, but it required people willing to carry it, hide it, and reproduce it. It required cultural infrastructure the state could not fully reach.

Nelson Mandela spent 27 years in prison partly because he understood that the ANC’s power was cultural as much as political - that the stories Black South Africans told about themselves, the songs they sang, the art they made inside and outside prison, were not adjuncts to the freedom struggle but its substance. Martin Luther King built the civil rights movement on cultural infrastructure: the church traditions that provided meeting space and moral authority, the spirituals that encoded collective identity, the trained orators who could frame suffering as testimony and testimony as demand. Czesław Miłosz, writing from exile in The Captive Mind, dissected how the most gifted writers he knew had accommodated themselves to Stalinism through intellectual sophistication, career calculation, and the slow deformation of moral reasoning he called “Ketman.” His analysis of capitulation is a handbook for understanding why institutions fail, and why cultural independence from state power is not a luxury but a democratic necessity.

The most persistently marginalized voices in federal arts funding - Indigenous communities preserving languages and traditional arts, Black artists documenting histories the dominant culture prefers not to examine, LGBTQ+ cultural institutions maintaining archives of lives systematically excluded from official memory, and immigrant communities whose creative expression is the primary vehicle for cultural continuity, are not peripheral to the democratic project. They are its most precise measure. The degree to which a democratic society sustains space for these voices is the degree to which it is actually, rather than nominally, democratic.

What is being defunded is the democratic imagination - the capacity of a pluralist society to recognize itself in its full complexity rather than in the curated image that consolidating power wants projected. Otto Quangel’s postcards threatened the Nazi regime not because they were persuasive to many people but because they existed, because they made visible the gap between official reality and lived experience - the gap that every authoritarian system depends on people agreeing to ignore.

The books are not cautionary tales. They are field reports from people who understood what we are only beginning to learn.

Why Gap-Filling Is the Wrong Frame

When government retreats from the arts, philanthropy’s instinct is to fill the gap. This is understandable. It is also, as a strategic frame, both practically insufficient and conceptually dangerous.

It is practically insufficient because the math does not work. The NEA funds at $207 million annually; the NEH at $207 million; the IMLS at $291 million. These numbers represent not just the direct federal investment but the multiplier of state arts council matching requirements, private foundation co-investment, the economic activity that federal legitimacy catalyzes. Philanthropy cannot replace federal arts infrastructure at scale, and claiming otherwise relieves political pressure to restore public investment while shifting an impossible burden onto a sector already operating under severe strain.

It is conceptually dangerous because gap-filling accepts the premise that public arts funding is optional. It treats federal arts support as a service any provider can deliver, rather than as a public commitment - a democratic declaration that cultural expression is a good to which all have a claim, regardless of where they live, what they look like, or whether their cultural production appeals to private wealth. The difference between a government that funds the arts and a philanthropist who funds the arts is not a matter of degree. It is a matter of kind. Government funding is accountable to democratic process. Philanthropic funding is accountable to the preferences of wealthy individuals and institutions whose historical investment patterns have not aligned with the cultural expression of the communities most marginalized by economic and racial hierarchy.

When philanthropy fills the gap left by retreating government, it does not restore what was lost. It replaces a public democratic commitment with a private one - one that can be withdrawn, redirected, or conditioned in ways that public commitments theoretically cannot. The arts organizations that rebuild their sustainability models around philanthropic gap-filling are not becoming more resilient. They are exchanging one form of dependency for another, less accountable, form.

There is a subtler danger too. Gap-filling philanthropy, if it substitutes for political mobilization, can actually reduce the pressure on elected officials to restore public funding. Every dollar that flows from a private foundation to replace a terminated NEA grant is a dollar’s worth of evidence that the problem is being managed, that the sector is resilient, that the community is responding. The arts community and its philanthropic partners, in their shared desire to keep organizations alive, may be inadvertently dampening the political signal that needs to be heard loudest right now.

What Philanthropy Should Do Instead

None of this means philanthropy should withhold support from arts organizations in crisis. Some will not survive without emergency intervention. The sector’s most vulnerable institutions - the smallest, newest, most marginalized, and those with no endowment and no wealthy board - need emergency general operating support now, without the bureaucratic timelines that make “responsive” philanthropy anything but.

But emergency support is not strategy. Here is what strategy looks like.

Fund the communities government has specifically abandoned, at the level of their actual need.

The Challenge America universe of small organizations serving rural communities, folk and traditional arts practitioners, Indigenous cultural institutions, LGBTQ+ archives, BIPOC arts organizations, organizations serving people with disabilities, and immigrant cultural centers is the most precise available map of where philanthropic investment is most urgent and most absent. These are also the organizations that corporate philanthropy and major foundations have historically overlooked, because they lack the grantwriting capacity, the institutional prestige, and the social networks that larger funders reward. Fund them. Fund their operating costs, not just their projects. Fund them for three years minimum. Fund them without the programmatic conditions that force them to reshape their work to fit funder priorities.

Treat cultural organizations as democracy infrastructure.

The Oregon ArtsWatch journalism series on gender identity supported by a Challenge America grant was not just arts coverage. It was the kind of cultural expression that authoritarian consolidation targets specifically. The LGBTQ+ museum maintaining archives of suppressed lives is not just a cultural amenity. It is a node in the civil resistance ecosystem - a keeper of memory that makes it possible to know what was, and therefore to imagine what could be again. Philanthropy funding arts organizations should be thinking and communicating in these terms. The framing of arts funding as enrichment, even among funders who believe in it, cedes the most important argument: that cultural expression is not optional to democratic governance. It is its precondition.

Fund political organizing and advocacy within the cultural sector.

The mobilization of arts advocates that stalled NEA and NEH elimination in the House’s FY2026 appropriations package, with overwhelming bipartisan support, demonstrates that the cultural sector has real political power when it deploys it. Philanthropy should be funding the organizations doing that work - Americans for the Arts, state arts advocacy coalitions, arts worker unions - not just the organizations making the art. The sector will not survive this political moment through cultural production alone. It will survive through civic power, through electoral accountability, through the kind of coordinated political action that movements build and that most arts funders have historically been reluctant to support because it looks too much like politics.

Invest in models that reduce donor dependency.

The arts organizations most vulnerable to both government and philanthropic withdrawal are those whose economic model is entirely dependent on external funders. Philanthropy can invest in the development of alternative economic structures, including community land trusts for arts spaces, cooperative ownership models for cultural institutions, and community-membership funding models that build genuine democratic ownership. An arts organization owned by its community is harder to defund than one that depends on the goodwill of a government agency or a foundation board whose priorities may shift. Durability is democratic power.

Be a visible institutional actor in the democratic defense of public arts funding.

Some of the most important things philanthropy can do right now are not grantmaking. They are positioning: signing onto legal briefs in support of IMLS and NEH litigation, speaking publicly about the democratic function of federal arts funding, using institutional platforms to frame these cuts as authoritarian consolidation rather than fiscal management, and making clear to elected officials - especially the Republican members of Congress who supported bipartisan arts funding in the House - that there are organized, resourced constituents watching their votes. The American Alliance of Museums is already circulating letters to Congressional leaders. Foundations should be signing them, loudly.

Resist the pressure to self-censorship.

One of the most insidious effects of authoritarian cultural policy is the chilling effect it produces in institutions that aren’t directly targeted. Private funders, watching government agencies require compliance certifications against “promoting gender ideology,” face invisible pressure to quietly avoid grants that might attract scrutiny and to self-censor their grantmaking before anyone compels them to. This is the mechanism by which authoritarian cultural policy extends itself beyond the reach of direct enforcement. Foundations that respond by quietly shifting their portfolios away from LGBTQ+ cultural institutions, racial justice arts programming, or immigrant cultural expression are not being prudent. They’re participating in the suppression they claim to oppose.

The Longer View

The books in the resistance literature canon share something beyond their politics. They share a conviction about time. Grossman believed his novel would find its readers eventually; he was right. The Hampels’ Gestapo file inspired Fallada’s novel because the act of resistance it documented survived even though the resisters did not. Mandela built ANC capacity during 27 years in prison because he understood that democratic movements operate on a different timescale than the states that oppress them.

The cultural sector is being told, implicitly, that the present moment is an aberration and that government will return, that funding will be restored, that organizations just need to survive until the political weather changes. This framing produces an orientation toward preservation rather than transformation. It asks artists and cultural organizations to hold on rather than to build.

A more honest framing acknowledges what the civil resistance literature understood: authoritarian consolidation rarely reverses itself without being pushed, and the organizations most likely to push effectively are those that have developed their own institutional power, their own community roots, their own capacity to name what is happening. Philanthropy’s job is not to restore the status quo ante. It’s to help the cultural sector become stronger, more politically coherent, more democratically owned, and more resistant to future encroachments than it was before the cuts began.

Quangel’s postcards didn’t work, in the narrow sense. They were turned in. The people who wrote them were executed. And yet here we are, reading about them because someone else, in a different time, understood that the act of bearing witness had made something permanent that the regime could not erase.

That is the timescale on which culture operates. Philanthropy that is serious about democratic culture must operate on it too.

Solidarity is not primarily a moral good or a utopian aspiration. It is the mechanism by which movements redistribute risk - and risk distribution is what determines whether people will act. The question is not whether we believe in solidarity. The question is whether we have built it.

I. THE CORE ARGUMENT: SOLIDARITY AS RISK ARCHITECTURE

The dominant framing of solidarity in progressive movements treats it as a value - something you practice because it’s right, because we are bound to one another, and because no one should suffer alone. That framing is not wrong. But it is strategically incomplete, and in conditions of escalating authoritarianism, the incompleteness becomes dangerous.

The tactical case is this: solidarity is the mechanism by which movements redistribute risk, and risk distribution is what determines whether people will act. Every individual facing a decision about whether to resist an authoritarian move, whether to speak publicly, refuse an order, join a demonstration, shelter someone, sign a letter, or simply refuse to pretend, is performing an implicit risk calculation. The calculation is not primarily ideological. It is: What happens to me if I do this? Will I be alone when the consequences come? The answer to that second question is what solidarity actually controls.

Authoritarian consolidation is, among other things, a machine for making the risk calculation come out wrong. The machine works through a series of specific moves: arrest or fire a few visible people early, creating examples; use legal and financial pressure to make resistance expensive; isolate resisters from their networks and institutions, and let fear do the rest. The goal is not to suppress every act of resistance - that is impossible and unnecessary. The goal is to make the individual calculation produce inaction often enough that organized resistance cannot reach critical mass.

Solidarity, properly designed and deployed, disrupts every stage of this machine. This is why solidarity should be understood not as a moral supplement to strategy but as the infrastructure of escalation itself. You cannot escalate tactics without it. Every increase in pressure from the movement, including more visible actions, more organized noncooperation, and more institutional defiance, requires that participants trust they will not be abandoned if the regime responds. Without that trust, escalation is an invitation to walk into a trap alone. With it, escalation becomes possible, sustainable, and self-reinforcing: each act of solidarity publicly changes the risk calculation for the next person considering action.

II. THE REGIME’S COUNTER-SOLIDARITY PLAYBOOK

Before building the solidarity toolkit, it is essential to understand what it is being built against. Authoritarian consolidation follows a remarkably consistent counter-solidarity script.

Selective targeting to maximize deterrence

The regime does not need to punish everyone who resists. It needs to punish enough people visibly enough to make the rest calculate that resistance is not worth it. This is why early targeting is often spectacular (the arrest of prominent figures, the firing of entire departments, the prosecution of someone for a minor infraction that would otherwise go unnoticed) and why it is essential that solidarity responses to early targeting be equally visible. The regime is setting a price; the movement’s solidarity response is either accepting that price or contesting it.

Isolation as a primary weapon

The more isolated a resister is, the more total the regime’s leverage over them. This is why attacks on funding sources such as defunding universities, threatening nonprofits’ tax status, and pressuring employers are not just economic moves. They are solidarity-severing moves. When an institution capitulates under federal pressure, the message is not only ‘we will not protect you here.’ It is ‘the people and institutions you thought were with you are not.’ The atomization that results is itself a form of social control.

Creating division within coalitions

As pressure intensifies, regimes attempt to splinter solidarity networks by creating or amplifying real or invented divisions: offering partial protection to some groups in exchange for abandoning others, exploiting existing tensions between communities, creating competing hierarchies of victimhood. The tactical response begins with recognizing this as a deliberate move rather than a natural occurrence.

Making solidarity itself a target

This is the most advanced stage, and it is already visible. Legal defense funds are investigated. Solidarity organizations are designated as subversive. Mutual aid networks are surveilled. The point is not always to destroy these structures but to raise the cost of participating in them to make solidarity itself feel risky, and to shift the calculation for would-be participants. A bail fund designated as supporting ‘domestic terrorism’ is a bail fund whose members now have to calculate whether to remain associated with it.

III. THE SOLIDARITY TOOLKIT: CONCRETE MECHANISMS

1. Financial Solidarity Infrastructure

The most immediately tactical form of solidarity is financial, because financial insecurity is the primary lever through which regimes extract compliance from ordinary people. The person who refuses to carry out an illegal order is the person who can afford to lose their job. The activist who agrees to be arrested on the frontline is the person who has rent covered and a lawyer paid. Financial solidarity does not make courage; it removes the material obstacles that make courage impossible.

Legal defense funds

The most established mechanism and the most immediately necessary. The most effective are pre-capitalized - money raised before arrests happen, so that the legal response is immediate rather than a fundraising campaign that takes days or weeks while someone sits in detention. The National Lawyers Guild model (rapid-response legal support teams deployed to actions in advance) is the tactical gold standard. Every network operating in Tier 1 and Tier 2 states should be building relationships with NLG chapters and other movement lawyer-led organizations now, not after the first mass arrest.

Emergency rapid-response funds

For people who lose employment as a result of resistance activity - less common but arguably more important for sustaining mid-level and upper-level professional engagement. The academic, the federal employee, the healthcare worker, the lawyer who speaks out publicly are not people who will be sustained by a bail fund designed for street protesters. They need salary replacement capacity that kicks in within days. The structure that works is a pre-committed pool from institutional funders with a simple, fast application process and a small trusted review committee that can approve disbursements in 48 hours.

Mutual aid networks

Food, housing, childcare, harm reduction, and transportation make up part of the solidarity infrastructure that makes sustained participation possible for people without financial cushion. This is especially critical for immigrant communities, low-income participants, and anyone whose participation requires taking time off work. The Minneapolis ICE resistance demonstrated this clearly: the organizations that maintained the highest participation rates over time were the ones that solved the material logistics of showing up. Mutual aid is not charity; it is the logistics of collective action.

Movement insurance

A concept still underdeveloped in the U.S. but present in some labor traditions is pre-arranged financial support for people who face professional retaliation for civic resistance. A formal letter of support from a credible network of organizations does not pay the rent, but it does change the professional calculus for future employers and funders, and signals that the movement will not let a targeted resister be erased from professional life.

2. Legal Solidarity Networks

The functional equivalent of the legal defense fund at the institutional level is a coordinated network of attorneys committed to rapid pro bono response to politically motivated prosecution, civil suits against resisters, and employment retaliation cases. This network needs to be built in advance through establishing relationships, clarifying specializations, and agreeing on response protocols, not assembled under pressure after someone gets arrested.

The specific pressure points in the current moment:

• First Amendment retaliation suits against government employees disciplined for speech

• Employment discrimination against activists

• Civil rights claims arising from ICE cooperation policies

• Election protection litigation

• Challenges to politically motivated prosecution of voter registration and ballot cure workers

There is also a solidarity role for bar associations themselves, formally censuring law firms that capitulate to federal pressure, providing ethical guidance for attorneys facing pressure to act against their clients’ interests, and creating protective cover for individual attorneys who want to do resistance work but fear firm-level retaliation. The legal profession’s capitulation in early 2025 was partly a function of isolated firms calculating that they were alone; bar association solidarity changes that calculation.

3. Institutional Solidarity Pacts

The most powerful and underused solidarity mechanism at the organizational level is the formal, pre-committed mutual defense pact: an agreement among a coalition of institutions that an attack on any member will trigger a coordinated response from all. The logic is simple and historically demonstrated: selective targeting is only effective when the targeted entity is isolated. When targeting one organization means triggering a response from 100 organizations simultaneously, the cost-benefit of selective targeting changes dramatically.

The pact has to be real to be useful. It requires:

• Clear triggering conditions: What counts as an ‘attack’ that activates the pact? (IRS investigation, loss of federal funding, criminal referral, coordinated public attack campaign, employer pressure on member staff)

• Pre-committed response protocols: Public statements, co-signed letters, coordination of legal defense, economic pressure on the attacker

• A decision process that is fast enough to matter: The response has to come within 24-48 hours to function as deterrence, not retrospective solidarity

• Regular maintenance: Testing, updating, and publicly demonstrating the pact’s existence so it functions as deterrence rather than just response

4. Witness and Amplification Networks

One of the most undervalued forms of solidarity is organized visibility - the commitment to ensure that when someone is targeted, arrested, fired, or harassed for resistance activity, that fact becomes widely known immediately. This matters tactically in two ways: it raises the regime’s reputational cost for targeting individuals (making the example-setting function of selective targeting more expensive), and it signals to other potential resisters that they will not disappear unremarked if they are targeted.

Witness networks that can provide coordinated documentation of arrests, firings, and retaliation, along with rapid publication and amplification require infrastructure: a communications protocol, designated people in key cities trained to document and report, relationships with journalists, and social media amplification capacity. The expanded version includes systematic tracking of employment retaliation and professional targeting of resisters, published in a format that makes the pattern visible.

5. Psychological and Community Solidarity

This is the form most frequently acknowledged in movement culture and most frequently underfunded and understructured. Sustained resistance under intensifying pressure produces a specific set of psychological conditions including hypervigilance, grief, rage, burnout, isolation, and a form of grief-for-the-world that is not pathological but is genuinely destabilizing. The movement’s solidarity infrastructure needs to address these conditions not because people’s wellbeing is just nice-to-have but because psychological attrition is one of the primary ways authoritarian campaigns succeed over time.

The tactical requirements:

• Regular structured community maintenance: Not occasional retreats but weekly or bi-weekly practices of genuine connection, celebration of small wins, shared acknowledgment of the weight being carried. This needs to be scheduled and protected, not left to spontaneous affinity.

• Distributed, local care networks: The movement cannot rely on a small number of designated ‘wellbeing’ people; it needs distributed practices where checking in on peers is normalized and expected.

• Naming isolation as a tactic: Making it explicit in movement culture that the regime wants people to feel alone - that the feeling of isolation is a designed effect rather than a true reflection of reality - is itself a psychological solidarity move.

• Counter-suppression framing: When someone is targeted and publicly shamed or prosecuted, the movement’s narrative should immediately provide an alternative frame: not ‘look what happened to them’ but ‘look what the regime did to someone who stood up, and look who is standing with them.’

IV. SOLIDARITY ACROSS DIFFERENCE: THE HARDER TACTICAL PROBLEM

Everything above describes solidarity within communities that already share substantial trust and common cause. The harder tactical problem, and the one that determines whether a civil resistance movement can reach the scale that Chenoweth’s research requires, is solidarity across real difference: across race, class, ideology, geography, religion, and political affiliation.

The tactical case for cross-difference solidarity is not primarily moral. It is this: the regime’s primary strategic advantage is the ability to target isolated communities one at a time. First immigrants, then LGBTQ+ people, then academics, then lawyers who won’t cooperate, then journalists, then labor unions. The sequential targeting strategy works precisely when each targeted community believes its experience is unique and its defense is a solo project. Cross-difference solidarity denies the regime the ability to pick off communities in sequence by making it visible and credible that an attack on one is an attack on all.

‘If they come for you, they will come for us’ framing

The explicit, public articulation of why communities that haven’t yet been targeted have material interest in the defense of those who have. This is not a moral appeal to altruism; it’s an argument about shared strategic interest. The Catholic Church defending immigrants is not about kindness to immigrants; it is about the Church understanding that a regime that can override conscience on immigration will override it on other matters. The cannabis community defending voting rights is not about abstract democracy; it is about recognizing that the same enforcement infrastructure coming for immigrants is coming for them. Making this explicit, in community-specific frames, is the core communications work of cross-difference solidarity.

Solidarity deposits before solidarity withdrawals

The most common failure mode of cross-difference coalitions is asking communities that have been underserved by the broader movement to take risks on behalf of a solidarity that hasn’t yet been demonstrated to them. Black communities are asked to show up for issues that the broader coalition has historically not shown up for in return. Immigrant communities are asked to join coalitions that were absent when ICE raids happened. The tactical solution is to make deposits before making withdrawals: show up first, consistently, for the communities that have the most to lose and the least institutional protection, before asking anything in return. Trust is not declared; it is accumulated through demonstrated behavior over time.

Explicit solidarity agreements with reciprocal terms

The most durable cross-difference solidarity is the kind that has been negotiated and agreed to explicitly, not assumed. A formal agreement between organizations along the lines of ‘we commit to showing up for each other in these specific ways when these specific things happen’ is more reliable than a general declaration of solidarity, because it specifies what solidarity actually means in practice and creates accountability for whether it is delivered.

The solidarity that will matter most in the next two to four years is not the solidarity that people declare at rallies. It is the solidarity that is already organized, funded, practiced, and legally prepared on the day it is needed.

V. THE ESCALATION CURVE: HOW SOLIDARITY REQUIREMENTS CHANGE UNDER PRESSURE

One of the most important and least-addressed aspects of solidarity as a tactical system is that its requirements change as pressure intensifies. What is sufficient solidarity at the beginning of a resistance movement is inadequate at later stages, and a movement that has not built the infrastructure for later stages will find itself unable to escalate when it needs to most.

Early pressure (current phase)

The solidarity infrastructure needed is primarily financial (legal defense, rapid-response funds), organizational (mutual defense pacts, amplification networks), and psychological (community maintenance, countering isolation). The primary function is deterrence - making visible that targeting any part of the movement will cost the regime more than it gains.

Mid-pressure (next 12-18 months)

As targeting intensifies and the costs of participation rise, solidarity infrastructure needs to expand to include broader risk sharing: employment protection networks, more robust mutual aid, sanctuary infrastructure for people who need to move or go low-profile, and more formal coordination among institutional allies — faith communities, local governments, professional associations. The cross-difference solidarity deposits made in the early phase become the withdrawals needed here.

High pressure (if 2026 elections are contested or 2028 approaches)

The solidarity infrastructure required is the full architecture of noncooperation: coordinated institutional refusal, mass economic disruption, and the sustained community cohesion that makes it possible for large numbers of people to absorb the costs of extended resistance. This stage is not reachable without the earlier stages having been built. The mistake is to try to build the high-pressure solidarity infrastructure when high pressure arrives; by then it is too late. The time to build the structures is when building them is still relatively safe.

CRITICAL TIMING NOTE: It is very difficult to build solidarity infrastructure under pressure. Every element of this toolkit - the funds, the pacts, the legal networks, the amplification systems - must exist before it is needed. The movement that waits for the crisis to begin building is the movement that faces that crisis alone.

VI. THE PRACTICAL STARTING POINT

Given where networks are now, the highest-leverage immediate investments in solidarity infrastructure are:

A Movement Mutual Defense Fund

Pre-capitalized, administered by a trusted small committee, with clear eligibility and fast disbursement. Even $500,000 pooled and publicly announced changes the calculation for frontline activists who want to take risks but cannot afford to absorb the costs alone. The announcement of the fund is itself a solidarity act; it signals to everyone in the network that the organization is serious about not abandoning people.

A formal mutual defense pact among network organizations

With specified triggering conditions and response protocols. This exists in principle in many coalitions and in practice in almost none. Making it real requires a specific conversation, a written agreement, and a regular test of whether it would actually function.

A solidarity communications protocol

A pre-arranged system for getting information out rapidly when a network member is targeted, including designated contacts, pre-drafted response frameworks, and amplification commitments from network organizations. Speed matters; a response that comes three days after someone is arrested is less valuable than one that comes in three hours.

A practice of solidarity deposits

The hardest but most important: showing up for communities that have the most to lose, starting now, before asking anything from those communities. Showing up for immigrant communities, trans youth and their families, and Black voter protection organizers in hostile states is both the morally right thing to do and the tactical foundation on which broader solidarity coalitions can be built when pressure intensifies further.

The deepest insight is this: every movement that has won durable democratic gains, from civil rights forward, succeeded in part because it understood its specific fight as inseparable from the broader fight for democratic governance. Solidarity is not the sentiment that supports that understanding. It is the infrastructure that makes it operational.

I’ve come to think both halves of that exchange are doing serious work. The child’s line and the adult’s rejoinder are a folk seminar in political theory, conducted in kitchens. Most of us passed through it before we knew the word “liberty.” It is worth going back to that table as adults because the phrase is more powerful, and more endangered, than its worn-out delivery suggests.

The speech of the constrained

Notice first who says it. It’s a free country is spoken upward, or sideways, by the governed to the governor, or between equals. You will never hear the powerful say it to justify their own power. It is the speech of the constrained.

Notice next when it is said: at the exact moment of constraint. That’s the paradox. You invoke a free country precisely when you are not, right then, free to act as you wish. So the phrase is not a description. It is a claim, an appeal to a background condition the immediate authority is bumping up against, or violating outright.

And what is the claim, really? Not “there are no rules.” The child doesn’t actually want a ruleless house. The claim is narrower and deeper than that: you cannot rule me by whim. There has to be a reason. The objection is to arbitrariness.

The adult’s answer is just as precise. Not in this house concedes the premise that, yes, the country is free, while denying jurisdiction: the house is not the country. It teaches that freedom is scaled, that authorities are nested, that the rules of one body need not bind another. A child learns the architecture of divided power at dinner without anyone naming it.

Two kinds of freedom

We usually hear “free” as one thing: no one can stop me. Leave me alone. Non-interference.

But that’s not quite what the child means, and it’s not the richest thing the phrase can carry. The child being sent to bed is being interfered with - and “it’s a free country” is not really a demand for zero interference. The child accepts that houses have bedtimes. The complaint is about something else: being subject to another’s arbitrary will. The older tradition in political thought calls real freedom not the absence of rules but the absence of a master, the state of non-domination. You are free not when no one constrains you, but when no one may constrain you arbitrarily, unaccountably, on a whim that answers to no rule and to no one.

This is why “because I said so” lands as a small tyranny and “because everyone in this house is in bed by nine, including me” does not. Same constraint. Different freedom. One is rule by will. The other is rule by rule. Hold onto that distinction; the whole of the matter turns on it. Authoritarian power is rule by will. A free country is rule by law, meaning law that binds the ruler too.

A promissory note

Where did Americans get the idea that this is “a free country” in the first place?

The founding supplied the language - the Declaration’s claims, the Constitution’s preamble promising the blessings of liberty. But the founding did not supply the fact. For most people on this soil - enslaved people, Native nations, women, the unpropertied - the free country was not yet free. Frederick Douglass said it without flinching in 1852: the Fourth of July, viewed from inside slavery, revealed the nation’s injustice more starkly than any other day of the year.

So “it’s a free country” has never been a plain description of a finished thing. At best it has been a promissory note - Martin Luther King Jr.’s image - written by the founders and, for a long time, returned to whole peoples marked insufficient funds.

The history that matters here is therefore not the granting of freedom but the widening of it. Every enlargement of who the free country included, from abolition, to suffrage, to the labor movement, and to the civil rights movement, came from below, from people who took the phrase more seriously than the powerful had meant it, and demanded it be made true. The phrase is a genuine folk inheritance for exactly that reason. It belongs more to the people who had to fight for it than to the people who first wrote it down.

What the law actually covers

Underneath the folk phrase sits a real and surprisingly intricate legal architecture, and it is worth knowing what it actually covers, because the phrase claims more than the law always delivers.

The Bill of Rights is the obvious foundation: speech, assembly, conscience, due process, protection from unreasonable search. But for the first decades those were limits on the federal government alone. In 1833 the Supreme Court held they did not bind the states at all. Your state could abridge your speech, and the federal Constitution had nothing to say about it.

What made America a free country, rather than a free federal government surrounded by states that might not be, was Reconstruction. The Fourteenth Amendment rewrote the relationship: it made freedom something the national government guarantees to you against your own state. Over the following century the Court applied most of the Bill of Rights against the states, one right at a time. That process is most of how the phrase became literally true from coast to coast. It is also recent, much of it younger than my parents.

But here is the gap the phrase hides. The Constitution mostly restrains government. It does not, by itself, restrain your employer, your landlord, your platform, your homeowners’ association. Say “it’s a free country” to your boss and you are socially correct and legally almost naked: a private employer can fire you for your speech. The Constitution’s freedoms are, for the most part, freedoms against the state.

So what makes the country feel free in ordinary life - that you can’t be turned away from a job, a home, or a hotel because of your race or religion or sex - is largely statutory. The Civil Rights Act and the laws beside it carried freedom into the private economy, where the Constitution’s writ runs thin. That freedom is real. It is also, being statute rather than constitution, repealable.

Add the structural pieces the phrase leans on without naming: free and fairly counted elections, courts independent enough to rule against the powerful, habeas corpus, equal protection, due process for the unpopular. Those are the load-bearing walls. The phrase is the house. People rarely think about the walls, that is, until something moves.

What is threatened

If freedom is really non-domination - not the absence of rules but the absence of arbitrary, unaccountable will - then watch for whatever makes rule arbitrary again.

Selective enforcement is first. A law that binds your enemies and spares your friends is no longer law in the sense that matters; it is will wearing law’s clothes. When that takes hold, every formal right can remain on the books and the country is still less free, because freedom was never only the rights - it was their even application.

The structural walls are next: courts pressured toward deference, elections whose fairness is placed in doubt, due process suspended for groups defined as outsiders. Remember that immigration has long been the zone where American law lets official power run with the fewest checks. Erode the walls and the rights inside them have nothing holding them up.

Then the statutory layer - the freedoms that made the phrase true in workplaces and schools and housing. They are the most exposed, because they live in statutes, regulations, and the agencies that apply them evenly, all of which can be narrowed without amending a word of the Constitution.

And the deepest threat is to the phrase’s premise itself. “It’s a free country” works as a check only if the powerful accept it as a check - only if, when a citizen says it, authority feels some obligation to answer with a reason rather than a fist. It is a norm long before it is ever a lawsuit. The parent who says “not in this house” is still inside the game. The parent who says “not in this house, and not in this country either” has walked out of it. Authoritarianism, in the end, is simply the powerful refusing to recognize that there is anything they may not do.

Saying it on purpose

This is why the phrase is worth reclaiming, and reclaiming deliberately. We’ve let it decay into a shrug: it’s a free country, do whatever you want. That libertarian sigh excuses everything and demands nothing, and it’s been used as often to wave away other people’s dignity as to defend anyone’s freedom. That’s the weak reading.

The strong reading is the child’s. It’s a free country is the speech of the constrained, addressed upward to power, insisting that authority owes a reason. Its grammar is small-d democratic. And freedom-as-non-domination is, by its nature, distributed. It doesn’t sit in one office or one court. It lives in the standing of every ordinary person to say to power: no, you may not do that. Concentrated power needs that standing to feel naive. It is not naive. It’s the whole thing.

The country is not free because a document says so, and not because the powerful are generous. It’s free in precisely the measure that people keep saying so, out loud, to the people who would rule them by whim, and by making it stick. That was true at the kitchen table. It’s true now.

It’s a free country. Act like it.

So the question is worth sitting with directly. Not as a legal abstraction, but as a thought exercise about lived life. If we lost the 14th Amendment’s guarantee that anyone born here is American, what would actually change? What would we see, feel, navigate? What vulnerabilities would surface that we never had to think about because the constitution had thought about them for us?

I want to walk through this slowly, because the cost is most visible at the small scale where most analyses don’t bother to look.

Two principles

Birthright citizenship - jus soli, the right of soil - is the principle that being born on a country’s territory makes you a citizen of that country, without further qualification. The 14th Amendment encodes it: “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States.” The drafters meant it to be objective, automatic, and beyond the reach of political majorities. They had just won a war over whether some Americans could be made non-citizens at the convenience of the majority, and they wrote the answer into the constitution to settle the matter permanently.

The alternative is jus sanguinis - the right of blood. Under jus sanguinis, you’re a citizen because your parents were citizens, who were citizens because their parents were citizens. Most ethno-national states use jus sanguinis. Most settler and immigrant societies use jus soli because they were built by people who needed to become citizens of a place rather than to inherit citizenship of a bloodline.

The difference sounds technical. It is not. It’s the difference between a country you join by being here and a country you inherit by being descended from someone. The first is open, plural, and difficult for any political majority to redefine at the boundaries. The second is closed, lineal, and infinitely contestable. The 14th Amendment chose the first for us. Losing it would put us in the second.

The chain you would have to produce

Imagine the day after.

Today a U.S. birth certificate is sufficient proof of citizenship for almost every purpose. You were born here; the certificate says so; you are American.

Without birthright, a birth certificate by itself proves only that you were born. To establish that you were born American, you would need to prove that one or both of your parents was a U.S. citizen at the time of your birth, which means producing their birth certificates and any relevant naturalization records. And to prove that they were citizens, they would need to have established that their parents were citizens at the time of their birth. The chain extends backward, generation after generation, until you reach an ancestor whose citizenship was established by some pre-14th Amendment means - by naturalization, by treaty, by some particular legal fact in a particular jurisdiction at a particular time.

This is the part most people don’t think through. To prove you’re American, you would need to maintain - and produce on demand - an unbroken documentary chain of legitimate transmission from yourself back to some original conferring event. Every link must hold.

Now consider how many chains have breaks in them, including for people who have been Americans for centuries.

Where the chain breaks

Black Americans whose ancestors were enslaved have no formal documentary record of those ancestors. Slavery did not produce citizenship records; it produced property records. After emancipation, birth registration was sporadic, racially restricted, or actively obstructed. Many Black births in the rural South well into the twentieth century were attended by midwives and never recorded in any county registry. Many of the county registries that did exist were lost in courthouse fires - a remarkable number of southern county courthouses burned in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, taking entire decades of birth records with them. A meaningful number of older Black Americans first acquired a birth certificate as adults, through delayed registration processes built on affidavits from neighbors and family. They are American. But their documentary chain begins partway through. The 14th Amendment is what makes that not matter. Without it, the chain breaks would matter enormously, and they would matter most for the people the 14th Amendment was specifically written to protect.

Native Americans were excluded from the 14th Amendment by Elk v. Wilkins in 1884, which held that Indians born within tribal jurisdiction were not subject to the jurisdiction of the United States and therefore not citizens by birth. Native American citizenship was granted statutorily by the Indian Citizenship Act of 1924, meaning by Congress, meaning by political process, meaning by something Congress could undo. The legal architecture for re-excluding Native peoples already exists in the case law. The question of who is “subject to the jurisdiction thereof” was the original tool of exclusion. It’s the precise tool the administration is reaching for now.

Rural and poor Americans of any race who were born at home, whose family Bibles are the most authoritative record of when and where they entered the world, have already had brushes with the documentary state at the introduction of Real ID, in the application for Social Security benefits, at the renewal of a driver’s license that required a re-verification. The current rules accommodate them through delayed registration processes built around the assumption that birth on U.S. soil is itself the citizenship fact. Without that assumption, the accommodations become much harder.

Anyone whose name has changed in the documentary record through marriage, through adoption, through anglicization at Ellis Island or later, and through gender transition has a discontinuity that has not mattered because citizenship has not turned on lineage. If it turned on lineage, every name change would become a moment where the chain would need to be reconnected with additional documentation, and every reconnection would become a discretionary administrative judgment.

Adoptees, particularly those from the closed-record era, have birth records that may not be accessible to them. International adoptees became American citizens through processes that depended on the citizenship of their adoptive parents being established. Each of these populations has navigated documentary identity successfully under a regime that asks only whether you were born here. Each becomes vulnerable under a regime that asks whose child you are.

Children of unmarried parents, where paternal lineage was never formalized in the record. Children whose parents fled persecution and arrived with no documents. Children of naturalized citizens whose naturalization could be questioned - denaturalization is already an aggressive line of federal action. People from the territories - Puerto Ricans, Guamanians, U.S. Virgin Islanders - whose citizenship rests on statutes rather than the 14th Amendment, and American Samoans, who are not citizens at all but “U.S. nationals,” a category that already shows what citizenship-by-political-decision looks like in this country.

The list is long. It includes many millions of Americans whose American-ness has never been in question under the regime we have actually lived under. It would all become a question.

What we would see

The first place we would see it is at the everyday administrative interfaces of American life: hospital admissions, school registrations, driver’s license issuance, voter registration, passport renewal, mortgage applications, and employment verification. Each of these is currently a check of identity, not of citizenship. Each would become a citizenship verification point. The bureaucratic infrastructure for that doesn’t yet exist at scale. Building it would mean a new federal agency, or an expansion of an existing one, with the responsibility for adjudicating citizenship claims at every life moment that currently requires only an ID.

This new infrastructure would be a chokepoint, and chokepoints are where discretionary discrimination lives. Whatever the formal rules said, the people staffing the chokepoint would be making judgments about whose documents seemed complete enough and whose claims seemed credible enough. Those judgments would not fall evenly across the population. They never have.

A new professional class would emerge - the citizenship verifier, the document specialist, the immigration-style attorney for native-born Americans - and a new economy around securing and maintaining documentary completeness. People with means would buy their way to documentary security. People without would not.

For the first time in 157 years, we would see stateless people born on American soil. A child born here to parents who could not establish American citizenship and could not transmit any other country’s citizenship would be a citizen of nowhere. Statelessness is a categorical condition under international law. The stateless cannot get passports, cannot legally cross borders, cannot claim consular protection anywhere, usually cannot work in the formal economy, often cannot marry or inherit. The United States has not historically had a stateless population because jus soli prevented its formation. We would acquire one.

What we would feel

The thought exercise turns hardest here, because the daily experience of conditional citizenship is something American citizen s have been spared and don’t have a felt sense for.

You would feel it the first time a school administrator asked for documentation you didn’t have on hand and you saw the look cross their face when you said you would need to bring it next week.

You would feel it the first time someone in your extended family - a cousin, an in-law, a grandmother - got a letter saying their citizenship status was under review.

You would feel it the first time you had a conversation with your sibling about who in the family had the strongest documentary chain, and which members of the family might want to be careful about which interactions with government they undertook this year.

You would feel it in the new habit of carrying documents with you, of having a folder somewhere in the house, of knowing exactly where the originals are, of replacing them when they got damaged with a new, heightened urgency.

You would feel it in the way the question are you American? stopped having an obvious answer for some of your neighbors.

You would feel it in the way community life rearranged itself around documentary mutual aid - churches, immigrant rights organizations, genealogy societies, Black women’s clubs, tribal offices, all becoming front-line institutions in a new kind of triage. You would see entire new categories of pro bono lawyering. You would see people you have known for years quietly become guarded about what they signed and where they showed up.

You would feel it in the new awareness, the new looking-over-the-shoulder, the new calibration of what is safe to say to whom. Conditional citizenship is a precondition of authoritarian rule, because conditional citizens are docile. You would feel that, too.

The second founding

The 14th Amendment is the second founding of the country. It is the constitutional repudiation of Dred Scott, which had held that Black people, free or enslaved, could not be citizens of the United States because the framers had not intended them to be. The 14th took that question away from political majorities and settled it as constitutional fact: if you are born here, you are one of us. That settlement has held for 157 years. It is the spine of every other civil rights gain that has followed, because every other gain has rested on the prior question of who is a citizen having been answered without ambiguity.

To end birthright citizenship is not merely to change a policy. It is to reopen the question the 14th Amendment closed. It is to make the very category of American available for political contest. The first contest is at the margins - children of unauthorized immigrants. But the principle does not stay at the margin once it is breached. The next contest is at the next margin - children of temporary visa holders, then children of naturalized citizens whose naturalization can be questioned, then anyone whose documentary chain can’t be made to satisfy whatever standard the political majority of the moment decides to apply.

This is what authoritarian governments do. They make membership in the political community conditional on the favor of those who currently hold power. Once membership is conditional, the holders of power adjust the conditions, and the people they exclude have no standing to object because they have been redefined out of the polity. The 14th Amendment was specifically designed to make that impossible in the United States. Ending it would make it possible again.

What the exercise reveals

The thought exercise is useful because it makes visible what is otherwise invisible.

Birthright citizenship feels like a technical doctrine of interest mostly to immigration lawyers. The exercise reveals that it is in fact the spine of unconditional belonging in this country. It’s the thing that prevents American identity from being something that can be granted and withheld by political process. It’s the thing that has allowed multigenerational Black Americans and Native Americans and rural Americans and adopted Americans and renamed Americans and the descendants of every wave of immigrants to participate in this country without having to produce a genealogy of legitimacy on demand.

The fact that most of us have never had to think about this is the gift of the 14th Amendment. The gift is now in question. The question is worth answering with our eyes open about what is actually at stake, not for some other category of people, but for all of us. The chain breaks somewhere in almost every American family. The amendment is what keeps that from mattering. Without it, all of our chains would have to hold.

They would not.

Begin with the water.

A spring is the smallest unit of moving water there is. It is the place where the underground reaches daylight, where water that has traveled in the dark for years finds an opening and rises.

As they bubble up, every spring tastes of the ground it came through. Limestone, granite, iron, peat - the water carries the particular country through which it traveled. No two springs taste alike. They cannot. A spring without the taste of its own ground is not a purer spring. It’s a pipe, useful, maybe, but not generative.

I use this image - springs, and a river - to describe how a free people actually holds together. The river is the broad movement: the wide and moving body, the thing finally large enough to change the course of a country. But a river has no single source. It never has. A river is what happens when many springs, each rising from its own particular ground, each carrying its own particular mineral and memory, find one another and turn to travel in the same direction.

Notice what that means. The river is not the place where the springs are blended into sameness. The river is the place where the springs are gathered without being erased. The water moves as one. The waters remain many. And a river is wide in exact proportion to how many different springs were brave enough to keep flowing and reaching for one another.

Now I want to tell you what authoritarianism is, in the language of water.

Authoritarianism is the dream of a single source. One spring, or no springs. One channel, lined and straight. A reservoir behind a dam, where the water is finally still, and finally owned, and finally quiet. Authoritarianism rests, entirely, on a society that can be understood as a single story: one people, one past, one permitted future, one taste. It is monoculture. It is the paved-over creek. It is the drained marsh where a thousand small, wet, living things used to be.

And here’s the part that should make you sit up. The authoritarian doesn’t actually have the hands to cap every spring. He never does. There are too many of us, rising in too many places. So he doesn’t even try. Instead, he does something far more efficient.

He convinces the springs to cap themselves.

He makes it feel wise. He makes it feel responsible, kind, even. He says: there’s something worse coming, and if you want to hold it off, you should make yourself smaller. Tuck it in. Tone it down. Scrub the strangeness off. Roll up that freak flag - not forever, just for now, just until the danger passes. Put the dream of a better world in a drawer; this is no time for dreaming, this is a time for damage control. Be quiet. Be plain. Be like the others. Prevent the worse thing by becoming less yourself.

I want to name that move precisely, because it is disguised as caution and it is not caution. Timothy Snyder gave us the name. It is obeying in advance. It is doing the regime’s work for it before the regime has even asked - handing over, for free and with a feeling of virtue, the one thing it most needs and could never easily take: a population that has agreed, on its own, to become a single story.

When you scrub yourself, you are not preventing the worst. You are delivering it.

Because the worst thing was never one cruel policy or another. The worst thing is the single story itself - the flattened country, the capped springs, the still water. And every time you make yourself smaller in order to be safe, you flatten that country a little more. You cap your own spring. You let your water taste a little less of your own ground.

So here’s what I am asking - and I am asking it as strategy, not as sentiment.

Fly your freak flag. Keep your spring running. Let your water taste, loudly and unmistakably, of the exact strange ground you rose through - your people, your loves, your art, your faith, your particular and unrepeatable way of being alive. Not because it’s brave, though it is. Because it is the actual mechanism. The river has never been fed by people who made themselves generic in order to be useful. The river is fed by springs that refused. Your particularity is not a luxury to be set aside for the duration of the emergency. Your particularity is the emergency response.

And keep the dream. Keep, against every reasonable-sounding voice telling you to be small, the dream of a better future. A people that still dreams forward cannot be governed by fear. A people that has surrendered the future has already lost the present too. The dream is contraband now. Carry it anyway. Carry it out loud.

They need us to never find each other. They need us scattered and scrubbed and quiet, each one a still pond believing it is alone. So find each other. Let the springs run toward one another in the open. That meeting - many waters, many tastes, one direction - is the river. It is the only thing that has ever been wide enough to embrace a people, to feed a community.

And it has never, not once in human history, been made of people who agreed to become a single story.

Let it run.

Black and brown activists and organizers - often people with long histories in social justice work - are expressing a frustration that goes something like this: white people don’t show up until the targeting reaches them. Police violence, housing insecurity, voter suppression, environmental harm, these have been chronic features of Black life in America for generations. Deportation of undocumented immigrants is not new. The Obama administration deported more people than any before it, but the general public didn’t react with outrage. The democratic coalition that’s mobilizing in force against authoritarian consolidation was, for most of that time, largely absent. Now that Social Security is threatened, now that white middle-class professionals are feeling the weight of executive overreach, now that the disruption is landing on broader doorsteps - now there’s a movement growing.

Long after the warning signs were being read clearly by communities of color. Long after the authoritarian politicians of both parties built the carceral infrastructure that is threatening us - infrastructure that was popularized via racism. Now, there’s movement.

I understand this frustration completely. The pattern it describes is real, well-documented, and has cost us enormously as a democratic coalition. Anyone who wants to build the kind of broad, durable, cross-racial movement that can actually stop authoritarian consolidation needs to reckon with it honestly.

And reckoning with it honestly means neither dismissing it nor accepting the frame that sometimes accompanies it - that this is primarily a story about white character, white indifference, white moral failure. Because that frame, however understandable its origins, points us toward the wrong solution and closes off exactly the coalition building the moment requires.

Here’s what I think is actually true.

Every political community organizes around the threats that feel most immediate to its members. This isn’t a uniquely white tendency. It’s a human one. Black and brown political organizing has its own internal questions about whose experiences define the agenda, whose pain gets centered, whose urgency sets the tempo. Latino political coalitions navigate real tensions about which communities and which issues drive collective action. Asian American political identity is contested terrain, with different communities organizing around very different threat assessments. No community is exempt from the tendency to calibrate urgency around the interests of its most proximate and powerful members.

The difference - and this is the structural point that matters - is that these tendencies don’t produce symmetrical consequences. When white voters are the decisive political bloc in a democracy, the calibration of coalition urgency to white threat thresholds doesn’t just reflect white self-interest. It produces a democratic movement that perpetually arrives late to the crises of communities with less political weight. The problem isn’t the human tendency. The problem is what that tendency produces when it interacts with power asymmetry.

This means the complaint is right about the pattern and its costs. It is less useful when it slides from structural analysis into moral indictment; when “white people as a political bloc have produced this outcome” becomes “white people have failed morally as individuals.” Those are different arguments, and confusing them produces different politics. The structural argument points toward building a coalition differently. The moral indictment points toward a ledger of racial debt. That moral indictment has never produced the kind of cross-racial solidarity we actually need to build movements that reach the scale necessary to address the underlying structural inequities that are driving division.

Putting this simply, white people’s relatively privileged relationship to institutions of power and the culture of the U.S. gives greater dynamism and power to the choices white people collectively make as a political bloc. But the behaviors we’re examining here aren’t exclusive to white people. That’s an understanding that matters because it informs a different way of addressing the root causes of the continual failure of more privileged groups to react in a timely way to threats that primarily target those with less power and privilege.

There are a few more things worth naming.

Not all white people are equally aloof to the challenges communities of color face, and treating them as though they are reifies race in exactly the way the critique is supposedly trying to dismantle. Reification, per Webster, is to “consider or represent (something abstract) as a material or concrete thing: to give definite content and form to (a concept or idea) like race, which is, after all, not a biologically based reality, but a political constructed one.

White voters in the South have a different political history than white voters in Minnesota. White union members in the industrial Midwest have organized across racial lines in ways that white suburban professionals have not. White Appalachian communities share economic vulnerabilities with Black rural communities that neither mainstream Democratic nor Republican politics has adequately addressed. The aggregate voting behavior of white Americans as a bloc is a real and consequential pattern. But a bloc is not a monolith, and organizing as though it is forecloses on the relationships we need to build within it to dismantle racism.

Similarly, not all people of color are equally targeted by the dynamics being described. The experiences of middle-class Black professionals, recent immigrants, undocumented communities, Indigenous people navigating sovereign nation relationships with the federal government, and multiracial families navigating identity across generations are not interchangeable. When we speak of “people of color” as a unified political subject with uniform threat assessments, we are doing the same flattening we are criticizing when it happens on the other side of the racial line.

None of this is an argument for ignoring race. Race is a structural reality with profound political consequences. We cannot build an effective democratic coalition by pretending otherwise. It’s an argument for being precise about what we’re actually describing when we use racial categories - structural patterns and aggregate political behaviors, not essential characteristics of persons. When we make this a matter of character, we suggest what racism has imposed on us - that race is the primary way would should understand human difference.

So what do we do with all of this?

The most useful reframe I know is this: the threshold problem is not primarily a problem of white moral failure. It is a problem of strategic interdependence that we have consistently failed to build, not for lack of trying, nor for lack of the intelligence to understand the problem. The relationships, narratives, and organizational infrastructure that would allow communities to move together at speed, before any single community’s threshold is crossed, have to be built in the slow time between crises, not assembled during them. We have consistently underinvested in that work relative to crisis mobilization, in part because of the funding models that advocacy groups depend on, and we are paying for it now.

This means the practical work is not moral accounting. It’s what you might call threat translation: the sustained effort to connect the chronic threats that communities of color have lived with for generations to the threats that are now landing on broader constituencies. Not “you should have shown up earlier” but “here’s why what’s happening to you now is rooted in the same system that has been operating on these communities for decades, and here’s what those communities have learned about surviving and resisting it that you need to survive this.” That reframes the relationship from one of moral debt to one of strategic interdependence. It changes who has what to offer whom, and it’s true.

It also means that white people in movement spaces need to be willing to ask a hard question internally: whose urgency is setting the tempo of our movement, and what does it cost us strategically when the answer is always the same? Not as self-flagellation, but as operational analysis. A coalition that mobilizes at the threshold of its most powerful members is a coalition that will always be slower, smaller, and less durable than it needs to be. That is a strategic problem with a strategic solution, and it’s solvable, but only if we name it clearly.

The complaint from Black and brown activists about white threshold politics deserves a serious answer, and the serious answer is: you are describing a real structural pattern, it has real strategic costs, and the solution is not moral accounting by race but the deliberate construction of the kind of interdependent movement that doesn’t wait for any single community’s threshold to be crossed before it acts. And that means not lumping people together, but finding the cracks, the wedge openings, through which we can drive defections from the least sensitive communities.

The rock and the hard place here - between acknowledging a real structural pattern and refusing to reduce people to their racial category - are not actually in conflict. You can hold both simultaneously. The structural analysis and the anti-reification argument are not opposites. They are, together, the analysis that builds the movement we need.

That’s the work. It’s harder than assigning blame, and it takes longer. It is also the only path that leads somewhere other than where we’ve already been.

Democracy without pluralism is unstable by design. It collapses into authoritarianism the moment a determined majority finds the will to do what the architecture was supposed to prevent. This is the lesson the United States is currently learning the hard way.

But pluralism on paper is not the same thing as pluralism in practice. Architecture is just a drawing if nothing lives inside it. You can preserve every formal feature of a pluralist system - multiple parties, federalism, religious diversity, civic associations - and still have a dead democracy. What makes the architecture live is what flows through it: the unconstrained ability of people to speak, to hear each other, to argue, to refuse, to mock, to mourn, to organize, to imagine otherwise. Free expression is what turns pluralism from a structural drawing into a working body.

I keep reaching for the image of air. Free expression is the air inside the architecture. You can build the most perfectly proportioned house in the world, but if there is no air in it, nothing lives there. Strip away free expression and pluralism becomes a tomb that happens to look like a home, but cannot sustain us.

What authoritarians know that democrats often forget

Authoritarian movements understand this better than democratic ones often do. They rarely begin by dismantling the architecture wholesale. They begin by emptying the air. They go after journalists, teachers, librarians, artists, comedians, religious dissenters, and then anyone whose work depends on speaking the truth about what they actually see. They go after the universities, because universities are large, concentrated, institutionally protected sites of free expression. They go after the cultural sector, because cultural workers are professional sayers of unsayable things. They go after the funders of expression, the foundations, the public arts agencies, the public broadcasting infrastructure, because the strategy is to make expression expensive and risky enough that most people will stop trying.

Once enough of the air has been pumped out, the architecture starts to look exactly the same on the outside while becoming uninhabitable on the inside. The forms of pluralism remain. The substance is gone. This is why every serious catalog of authoritarian backsliding leads with the closing of expressive space, not with the dismantling of formal institutions. The institutions usually come later. The air goes first.

You’re cynical about diversity, equity, and inclusion? Rethink that. Diversity of expression means diversity of people, treated equitably, and truly included.

The heartbeat

This brings me to the point I most want to make, because it is the one most often missed by movement strategists who think of culture as a tactic or a frame rather than as the actual condition of possibility for everything else they want to do.

Artists, writers, musicians, poets, filmmakers, comedians, performers, dancers, designers - the cultural workers - are the heartbeat of social movements. Not the soundtrack. Not the marketing department. Not the auxiliary support to the real work of organizing. The heartbeat. The thing that keeps the blood moving through the body of the movement. Without them, even the best-built organizing infrastructure begins to feel mechanical and hollowed out, performing the motions of opposition while the felt life of resistance ebbs away.

What cultural workers do that nothing else does:

They make the unsayable sayable. They take the experience that exists below political vocabulary - the grief, the rage, the absurdity, the small private knowings that people don’t yet have public language for - and give it form. Once the experience has a form, it becomes communicable. Once it is communicable, it can be shared. Once it’s shared, people discover they aren’t alone in it. This is the precondition of every social movement that has ever existed. People don’t organize from atomized private suffering. They organize once the suffering has been named.

They break the social construction of normality. Authoritarian consolidation depends on a felt sense that the new arrangement is just how things are now - settled, inevitable, beyond effective contestation. Cultural workers, when they’re doing their actual job, keep that construction from solidifying. A song mocks what is supposed to be feared. A poem treats with seriousness what is supposed to be dismissed. A novel imagines what is supposed to be impossible. A comedian says the obvious thing the talking heads have agreed not to say. Each of these is a small puncture in the wall of this is just how it is now. Enough punctures and the wall comes down.

They give resistance an identity to inhabit, not just a position to hold. Movements are not, in the long run, sustained by argument. People can be argued into a position and they can be argued out of it. What sustains people through years of difficult struggle is not the strength of the case for the position but the strength of the felt identity that the position is part of. Cultural work is what builds that identity. The civil rights movement was held together less by the strategic brilliance of its organizers - though that was real and decisive - than by the songs people sang together in the churches and on the buses and in the jails. The songs were not the decoration. The songs were how thousands of people who had never met each other discovered they were the same people.

They keep moral imagination alive when politics narrows. There are years in every long struggle when the political opening is closed and the strategic horizon shrinks to defensive maneuvering and damage control. The function of cultural work in those years is to keep imaginable what cannot yet be enacted. Without imagination, the moment of opening - when it comes - finds no one ready to step into it, because no one has been practicing.

They make defeat survivable and victory durable. This is the part I most want movement strategists to hear. The two greatest threats to a movement’s long-term survival are the alienation that follows defeat and the catharsis that follows victory. Defeat drives people away when there is no meaning available to hold onto; cultural work converts defeat into meaning. Victory dissipates without consolidation when the moment of triumph becomes its own ending; cultural work keeps the memory alive long enough for the slower work of building the new arrangement into law and habit to be done. Reconstruction failed in part because the cultural memory of emancipation was systematically dismantled and replaced with a counter-mythology. Successful movements protect their own memory, and the people who do that protection are the artists, the writers, and the historians.

The builders

Cultural work alone is not enough. A movement that is all heartbeat and no skeleton is a feeling, not a force. It can move people emotionally without ever moving the world structurally. This is the failure mode of cultural ferment that produces no political power - the great refusals that end up as nostalgia rather than transformation.

What organizers and activists do is the rest. They build the structures that turn felt resistance into political capacity: the membership lists, the leadership pipelines, the institutional alliances, the legislative strategy, the legal teams, the field operations, the coalition tables, the long boring meetings where the durable agreements get made. They are the infrastructure builders.

And when the breakthrough finally comes - when the wave actually rises and the political opening appears - organizers become something else. They become the consolidators of democratic expansion. This is the work that determines whether a breakthrough becomes a transition, and whether a transition becomes a consolidation. The history of failed democratic transitions in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries is overwhelmingly a history of breakthroughs that produced no consolidation. The opposition won the moment and then lost the architecture, and it lost it because no one had built the institutional muscle to do the unglamorous follow-through. Cultural work cannot do consolidation. Consolidation is institutional work. Organizers are who does it.

So neither cultural workers nor organizers can carry the movement alone. The heartbeat without the skeleton is a dream. The skeleton without the heartbeat is a corpse. Movements that last - that survive both defeat and victory and emerge on the other side with their meaning intact and their political power compounded - have both, and the two are in conversation.

The secret sauce

The relationship between cultural workers and organizers is the mechanism that gets least studied and most matters. It’s also the place where most movements quietly fail.

When the relationship is working, two things flow in both directions. The cultural side feeds the organizing side with meaning, language, identity, and the felt sense of a shared we that organizing depends on but can’t manufacture by itself. The organizing side feeds the cultural side with concrete struggles, real stakes, encounters with power, and the material conditions that give cultural work something other than itself to be about. Each one keeps the other honest. Organizers without cultural workers become technocratic and brittle; their movements feel like machines and demobilize as soon as the immediate fight ends. Cultural workers without organizers can become self-referential and decorative; their movements feel like scenes and never accumulate durable power.

When the relationship is broken, both sides drift toward their failure modes. The organizers come to see the artists as soft, politically unserious, people who don’t understand the realities of power. The artists come to see the organizers as authoritarian, instrumentalizing, people who don’t understand the actual life of the people they claim to represent. Neither is the summary of the other, but the rupture becomes a crisis for the movement.

This is the secret sauce. Movements that rise and are sustained beyond the obvious ebb-tide moments - the defeats that drive alienation, the victories that end in catharsis before consolidation - are movements in which the heartbeat and the builders have learned to work as one body. They aren’t fused. They remain distinct. But they’re coupled, in continuous exchange, and each understands the other as essential rather than auxiliary.

What this means now

The current moment makes this argument operational rather than abstract. The attack on cultural workers and on free expression is not a side battle in the broader fight against authoritarian consolidation. It is the central battle. The moves against universities, against the public arts and humanities, against public broadcasting, against libraries and librarians, against teachers and curricula, against journalists, against the visa status of foreign artists and scholars, against funders perceived to support critical cultural production - these are not separate fronts. They are one front. They’re an attempt to pump the air out of the architecture while leaving the architecture itself standing, so that the forms of pluralism remain visible while pluralism itself is no longer possible.

The defense of free expression is the defense of democracy. There is no other defense that works in the long run, because there’s no version of pluralism that survives the loss of expressive space. And the people who do that defense most directly - whose work is free expression, who lose their livelihoods and their platforms and sometimes their freedom when expressive space contracts - are the cultural workers. They aren’t the support troops in this fight. They’re the front line.

The job of the movement infrastructure right now is to recognize this and to act on it. That means treating the defense of cultural institutions as defense of movement infrastructure, not as charity for the arts. It means funding cultural work as a core organizing investment, not a discretionary add-on. It means building durable working alliances between organizers and artists in which neither side is being instrumentalized by the other and both understand themselves as load-bearing parts of the same structure. It means understanding that when they come for the artists, they have already come for us.

The heartbeat is what they will try to stop first.

We keep it beating.