But there is a second front that is not getting nearly enough attention - not in the pro-democracy sector, and certainly not in the general public. It is the intersection of environmental catastrophe, economic disruption, and authoritarian politics. It is what I want to call disaster authoritarianism, and it may ultimately be more consequential than anything the Heritage Foundation has put in writing.

We have a concept for part of this. Naomi Klein named it twenty years ago: disaster capitalism. The idea is straightforward and well-documented. When crises strike, including hurricanes, financial collapses, and pandemics, the normal political resistance to radical restructuring is temporarily suspended. People are frightened, disoriented, and desperate for relief. Institutions are overwhelmed. In that window, economic elites and their political allies push through changes that would be impossible in calmer times: privatizing public services, eliminating regulations, restructuring labor markets, redirecting public resources to private interests. The crisis is not just an emergency to be managed. It is an opportunity to be exploited.

Disaster authoritarianism works the same way, but the goal is political power rather than economic extraction, and, in practice, the two are increasingly inseparable. When catastrophe strikes, authoritarian movements use the moment to do several things simultaneously: concentrate emergency powers in the executive, eliminate the oversight mechanisms that would constrain them, scapegoat vulnerable communities to redirect public anger, and build the surveillance and enforcement infrastructure that outlasts the crisis itself. The disaster creates political permission. The authoritarian project builds the permanent architecture. By the time the emergency passes, or is declared to have passed, which is a decision the people in power get to make, the consolidation is real and the rollback is very difficult.

We have already seen this playbook run, in this country and around the world. After September 11th, the Bush administration used the crisis to push through the PATRIOT Act, dramatically expand domestic surveillance, create the architecture of indefinite detention, and launch wars that the political system would not otherwise have authorized. After Hurricane Katrina, the destruction of New Orleans’ public housing and public school system was not a tragic side effect of the response - it was a deliberate act of disaster capitalism that permanently restructured the city along class and race lines, displacing tens of thousands of poor Black residents who never returned. After COVID-19, governments around the world used emergency powers to restrict assembly, expand surveillance, and in several cases accelerate authoritarian consolidation that had been underway before the pandemic began. Viktor Orbán in Hungary used the pandemic emergency to rule by decree indefinitely. Narendra Modi in India used the chaos to advance Hindu nationalist policies under cover of the crisis. In the United States, the pandemic became a rehearsal space for the contestation of institutional authority that has now become the central feature of our political life.

What is coming next is not a single crisis. It is an era of crises, cascading and interacting in ways that will test democratic institutions more severely than anything we have faced in living memory.

The Drivers

Climate change is the most significant long-term driver of disaster authoritarianism, and it’s the one the pro-democracy sector is most consistently treating as someone else’s problem. This is a category error that we cannot afford.

The disasters themselves - hurricanes, floods, wildfires, droughts, and heat events - are becoming more frequent, more severe, and more geographically widespread. Each one is a potential trigger moment, for authoritarianism or for democratic resistance, depending on who is prepared and who isn’t. But the disasters are only the most visible layer. Beneath them are slower-moving catastrophes that are equally dangerous to democratic governance.

Water scarcity is already a source of conflict in the American West, across sub-Saharan Africa, in South Asia, and in the Middle East. As aquifers are depleted and glaciers recede, competition over water will intensify. And the politics of scarcity are almost always the politics of exclusion. Who gets access and who doesn’t is a question that authoritarian governments answer by deciding who counts as a member of the community and who doesn’t. Climate-driven water scarcity is a machine for producing the kind of zero-sum resource politics that authoritarianism runs on.

Food system disruption follows from water scarcity, from extreme heat events that reduce crop yields, from supply chain fragility, and from the monoculture vulnerabilities of industrial agriculture. We have already seen, in the food price spikes of 2007–2008 and again in 2022, how quickly food insecurity translates into political instability. The political instability that followed the Arab Spring was not solely a product of food prices, but food prices were a significant accelerant. Authoritarian governments respond to food insecurity by consolidating control over distribution, by creating dependency relationships between populations and the state, and by scapegoating the people they were already targeting.

Climate-driven migration is already generating the political backlash that authoritarian movements are most effectively exploiting. The number of people displaced by climate events, including floods, drought, sea level rise, and extreme heat, is already in the tens of millions and is projected to reach hundreds of millions by mid-century. Every wave of migration is an opportunity for authoritarian movements to activate the politics of threat and exclusion, to militarize borders, to treat human beings in motion as invaders rather than as people in need. The European far right has been built, in significant part, on exactly this dynamic. The American far right has studied the playbook carefully.

Beyond climate, there are other drivers worth naming. The fragility of critical infrastructure, of electrical grids, water systems, financial systems, and supply chains, means that cascading failures are increasingly plausible. A prolonged grid failure in a major region would create the conditions for emergency powers that could be used in the ways described above. Pandemic risk has not gone away; the conditions that produced COVID-19 - habitat destruction, live animal markets, global travel, and underfunded public health infrastructure - have not been meaningfully addressed. Economic disruption, including the kind that can be produced intentionally by tariffs and trade wars as well as the kind produced by technological displacement and financialization, generates the anxiety and anger that authoritarian movements have always known how to harvest.

None of these are hypothetical. They are all in motion. And the current administration is making several of them worse by gutting the agencies and international agreements that represent our best collective response to climate change while weakening the public health infrastructure that would allow us to respond to future pandemics, and concentrating economic power in ways that guarantee greater instability and hardship for working people.

How Disaster Authoritarianism Works

Understanding the mechanism matters, because it tells us where to intervene.

Disaster authoritarianism typically follows a sequence. The crisis hits, and the immediate response is necessarily centralized. Disasters require coordination, and coordination in an emergency tends to flow toward executive authority. This is not inherently wrong. Some degree of centralized emergency response is appropriate and necessary.

The authoritarian capture happens in the second and third phase. In the second phase, emergency powers that were justified by the immediate crisis are extended, broadened, and normalized. The emergency becomes the new baseline. Oversight mechanisms that were suspended “temporarily” don’t come back. Surveillance infrastructure that was built to manage the crisis is repurposed for political control. The framing of the crisis, of who is responsible for it, who is threatened by it, and who can be trusted and who cannot, becomes the dominant political narrative, and that narrative serves the consolidation.

In the third phase, the scapegoating becomes policy. The communities that were blamed for the crisis face targeted enforcement, legal jeopardy, and the withdrawal of the protections that democratic institutions are supposed to provide. The disaster has become the justification for doing what the authoritarian project wanted to do anyway.

The pattern is old enough to have a founding example. On the morning of November 1, 1755, All Saints’ Day, when most of Lisbon was at Mass, a massive earthquake struck the Portuguese capital, followed by tsunamis and six days of fire. Somewhere between 30,000 and 60,000 people were dead. A third of the city was gone. Into that vacuum stepped Sebastião de Carvalho e Melo, the Marquis of Pombal, the king’s chief minister, who used the crisis to do what he could never have done without it: break the power of the aristocratic families who had checked royal authority for generations, expel the Jesuits, and rebuild Lisbon from scratch as a monument to centralized state power. The new city was rational, orderly, and secular - a masterpiece of Enlightenment planning, and an object lesson in who was now in charge. Pombal did not create the earthquake. But he understood, with cold clarity, that the earthquake had created an opportunity, and he moved faster than anyone else to claim it. The disaster didn’t just kill people. It reorganized power. And here is the part that matters for the present: the authoritarian political culture that Pombal helped normalize, the idea that crisis justifies the concentration of authority, that strongman governance is what competence looks like, that the destruction of checks on power is a reasonable price for getting things done, echoed forward through Portuguese history for nearly two centuries, until it found its fullest expression in António Salazar, who used a different kind of crisis, the exhaustion and chaos of a failed republic, to build the “Estado Novo”: forty-eight years of clerical authoritarianism that ended only when the military, bled dry by unwinnable colonial wars, finally said enough. The earthquake of 1755 and the dictatorship of the 20th century are not the same thing. But they are connected, through the habit of mind that disaster authoritarianism installs: the conviction that emergency justifies the surrender of accountability, and that the strong man who rebuilds the city deserves to run it.

This is not a conspiracy theory. It is a pattern, documented across multiple countries and multiple crises, by scholars who study authoritarian consolidation. What varies is the specific form. In the current American context, we already know who the scapegoats are - they are the communities that have already been targeted: immigrants, trans people, Black communities, Muslims, and political dissidents of various kinds. A major crisis does not change the target. It removes the remaining constraints on how the target is treated.

There is a version of disaster authoritarianism that is particularly relevant to the climate crisis, and it deserves a name of its own. Call it “climate fascism”: the political program of a narrow, racially exclusive coalition that accepts the reality of climate catastrophe but responds to it by building walls, both literal and figurative, to protect the inside from the outside, rather than by addressing the crisis at its roots. Climate fascism is not a distant hypothetical. It is already visible in the politics of the European far right, in the “great replacement” ideology that frames immigration as an existential threat, and in the American right’s combination of climate denialism for domestic consumption and military preparation for the geopolitical consequences of a destabilized world. The logic is brutal and internally coherent: if there is not enough for everyone, the job of governments is to ensure that there is enough for us. The definition of “us” is the authoritarian project’s most important product.

What Preparation Looks Like

Here is the hard truth about trigger moments: they reward whoever is most prepared. The pro-democracy sector tends to be reactive. We are good at mobilizing in response to outrages, and we have demonstrated real capacity for mass action. But we are not consistently good at being ready before the moment arrives. We, too often, don’t have the plans, the relationships, the narratives, and the infrastructure already in place so that when a crisis hits, we can move quickly and strategically rather than scrambling to catch up.

Authoritarian movements, by contrast, are increasingly good at pre-positioning. They have developed narratives that explain crises in ways that serve their political goals; narratives that can be activated quickly when a disaster strikes, because the groundwork has been laid. They have networks that can be mobilized for specific political purposes. They have relationships with media infrastructure that can amplify their framing in the critical first hours and days of a crisis. But this is when narratives form and harden.

We need to do the same work, and we need to start now.

Preparation begins with scenario planning - not in the abstract, but concretely and specifically. What happens if there is a major climate disaster in your region in the next eighteen months? What is the likely government response? Who will be scapegoated? What emergency powers will be invoked, and on what legal basis? What are the specific institutions and decision-makers who will be under pressure to comply with authoritarian demands, and who, among them, can be supported in refusing? What are the mutual aid networks in your community, and how quickly can they be activated? What is the narrative you want to be telling within the first 48 hours, and who are the messengers who can carry it?

These are not abstract questions. They are operational ones, and the time to answer them is before the disaster, not during it.

Narrative preemption is one of the most important and most underinvested in forms of preparation. Authoritarian movements win the narrative war in crises partly because they’ve been telling their story for years before the crisis hits. When the crisis arrives, the audience is already primed. The pro-democracy sector needs to be doing the equivalent work: building the narratives that explain who is actually responsible for the conditions that made the disaster possible and that severe, building the relationships that create trust across difference before the moment of stress, and building the frames that make solidarity the instinctive response rather than exclusion.

This means talking about climate change not just as an environmental issue but as a democracy issue - as a driver of the instability that authoritarian movements exploit, and as a policy failure produced by the same concentration of corporate power that is now funding authoritarian consolidation. The fossil fuel industry has spent decades funding climate denialism not just because it protects their market but because the denial of shared reality is itself a democratic threat. When you can’t agree on the most basic facts about the physical world, you can’t build the shared understanding that democratic governance requires.

Mutual aid infrastructure is both a democratic good in itself and a form of disaster preparation that directly counters disaster authoritarianism. When communities have the capacity to take care of each other - when there are food networks, emergency communication systems, neighborhood-level support structures, and relationships of trust that cross racial and class lines - they are less dependent on the authoritarian state in moments of crisis, and therefore less susceptible to the dependency relationships that authoritarian governments use to consolidate loyalty. Mutual aid is not charity. It is the material expression of the democratic principle that we are responsible for each other, and it is infrastructure for the moments when the authoritarian state will try to use relief as a weapon.

Coalition infrastructure matters for the same reason. The pro-democracy coalition that can move together in a crisis is one that has been building relationships across differences before the crisis arrives. The labor union that has been in solidarity with the immigrant rights organization, the faith community that has been in relationship with the racial justice group, the disability rights organization that has been connected to the climate activists are not just morally important. They’re strategically necessary. Disaster authoritarianism depends on the isolation of targeted communities. Solidarity infrastructure is the direct counter to that strategy.

What Our Responses Should Look Like

When the trigger moment arrives, the response that builds democratic power rather than just managing the emergency has several distinguishing characteristics.

First, it names the political dimension immediately and clearly. When a climate disaster hits a community that has been systematically denied the resources to prepare for it - which is most frontline communities - the response does not just provide relief. It names the political choices that made the community vulnerable: the fossil fuel subsidies, the infrastructure disinvestment, the regulatory rollbacks, and the defunding of emergency management. It connects the immediate disaster to the long-term policy failures that produced it, and it names who made those choices and who profited from them. This is not politicizing a crisis. The crisis is already political. Refusing to name that is itself a political choice.

Second, it actively contests scapegoating. In the first hours and days of a crisis, authoritarian movements move quickly to establish who is to blame, and that blame almost always lands on the communities that were already targeted. The pro-democracy response must be equally fast, equally clear, and equally persistent in redirecting that narrative. This requires having the relationships with journalists and media platforms that allow you to get your framing in front of audiences quickly, and it requires having the narrative already developed, tested, and ready to deploy.

Third, it makes solidarity visible and contagious. One of the most powerful things a pro-democracy movement can do in a disaster moment is demonstrate, visibly and at scale, that people are taking care of each other across the lines that the authoritarian movement is trying to harden. When mutual aid networks that cross racial, class, and immigration status lines are visibly functioning and the images of the crisis that circulate are images of solidarity rather than images of chaos and threat it both serves the immediate need and contests the authoritarian narrative at the level of emotion and identity, which is where it operates most powerfully.

Fourth, it uses the moment to build lasting infrastructure rather than just surviving the emergency. Every crisis that the pro-democracy movement navigates well, that it uses to demonstrate the value of democratic governance, mutual accountability, and solidarity, is an opportunity to build relationships, expand the coalition, and develop the narrative that will serve the movement in future moments. The question to ask at every point in a disaster response is not just “what does this community need right now” but “what relationships, what organizations, and what capacities will be stronger on the other side of this, if we do this right?”

Fifth, it connects local response to national strategy. Disasters are inherently local in their immediate impact, but their political implications are national and often global. The pro-democracy movement needs coordination infrastructure that can connect what is happening on the ground in a specific affected community to the national narrative, the national political moment, and the national coalition. That coordination infrastructure is what makes local resilience into national democratic power.

The Deeper Stakes

The era of compounding disasters that we are entering is, at some level, a political choice. It is the cumulative result of decades of decisions made by people with enormous power in favor of their short-term interests and against the long-term welfare of everyone else. The fossil fuel industry knew about climate change in the 1970s and chose to fund denial rather than transition. The financial sector knew about the fragility of the global financial system and chose extraction over stability. The political class, with some honorable exceptions, chose the donor class over the public.

The authoritarian project that is currently attempting to consolidate power in the United States is, in significant part, an attempt by that same class of people to ensure that when the consequences of their choices arrive in full - when the disasters multiply and intensify, when the inequality becomes impossible to ignore, and when the instability becomes undeniable - they will be insulated from those consequences by political power that cannot be held accountable. Climate fascism is the wealthy locking the gates and deciding who gets in.

The democratic project, in this moment, is the opposite: building the capacity for collective response that is accountable to the people who will bear the greatest costs of the disasters that are coming, and using every crisis as an opportunity to demonstrate that solidarity and democratic governance are more equal to these challenges than walls and exclusion and concentrated power.

This is not an easy argument to make, and it is not an easy program to build. But the history of democracy is the history of people making exactly this argument and building exactly this kind of power under exactly these conditions. The question is whether we will build it fast enough, and whether we will build it together.

The answer to that question is not determined by history. It is determined by the choices we make now, before the next disaster, about what we are building and why.

The assault has been systematic. In 2025 alone, the Trump administration froze billions in federal research funding at Columbia, Cornell, Harvard, Northwestern, the University of Pennsylvania, Princeton, and Brown. The National Science Foundation’s proposed budget was cut by more than half. The National Institutes of Health faced a nearly forty percent reduction. Research grants were canceled for subjects the administration deemed “woke,” including climate science, diversity and equity research, and public health equity. Brown University was forced to cancel doctoral programs. Columbia paid $221 million and accepted an external government monitor overseeing its compliance with administration demands regarding admissions, curriculum, and campus speech.

The Department of Education launched at least ninety-seven investigations targeting DEI programs and alleged antisemitism, using the threat of funding loss to compel compliance. Faculty were arrested and deported for lawful speech. International student enrollment dropped seventeen percent. The administration introduced a “compact” pressuring universities to sign loyalty agreements dictating admissions criteria, curriculum content, campus speech norms, and hiring practices or forfeit all federal funding. Historian Ellen Schrecker, the leading scholar of McCarthyism in American higher education, has assessed that the current assault is more severe and far-reaching than the Red Scare.

The strategic logic is straightforward. Universities produce independent knowledge. They train critical thinkers. They house dissenting voices and provide institutional legitimacy for facts that contradict regime narratives. That is precisely why they must be captured or destroyed. As the president of the American Council on Education put it: “Higher education does not work if it is an agent of the state.” The administration’s project is to make it exactly that.

What This Means for Campus Labor

University workers - faculty, graduate students, staff, maintenance workers, and food service employees - are both targets and potential defenders. The same administration attacking academic freedom is also gutting the labor protections, public funding, and institutional independence that campus workers depend on for their livelihoods.

But campus labor also possesses distinctive power. Campus unions span every demographic and job classification on a university. Faculty unions defend academic freedom with legal force. Graduate worker unions are the fastest-growing sector of the American labor movement. University labor can model sanctuary workplace protections for vulnerable members including international scholars, LGBTQ staff, and researchers in politically targeted fields. And the Big Ten faculty “mutual-defense compacts” that emerged in 2025, in which faculties at major research universities voted to coordinate their response to federal attacks, demonstrate that cross-institutional solidarity is already being built.

Most importantly, campus labor connects to the broader community. Universities are anchor institutions in their cities and regions. When campus workers organize, the effects ripple outward into local labor councils, community organizations, religious institutions, and political networks. This is the springs-to-river dynamic that the 22nd Century Initiative has been developing: distinct communities maintaining their own identities while building channels for coordinated mass action.

From Coin Toss to Mandate

The research is clear. The history is clear. The current threat is clear. What campus labor centers can do right now is concrete and actionable.

First, educate. Help members understand authoritarian consolidation, not as partisan politics but as a structural threat to the conditions that make unions, universities, and democratic participation possible. The 22nd Century Initiative provides briefing materials, training modules, and analytical frameworks designed for exactly this purpose.

Second, build cross-campus solidarity. The cross-class coalition that drives the eighty percent success rate starts with mutual solidarity across job classifications. Faculty, graduate workers, staff, trades, food service - these are the diverse participants whose collective action signals to the broader public that this movement represents everyone, not a narrow interest group.

Third, connect to the broader movement. Unions don’t have to build the infrastructure for democracy defense from scratch. The coordination networks exist. The question is whether labor will plug into them.

Fourth, protect the vulnerable. Develop sanctuary workplace models that shield international scholars, LGBTQ staff, researchers in targeted fields, and other members facing federal overreach. This is both morally necessary and strategically important. People who feel protected are people who can participate in collective action without paralyzing fear.

Fifth, practice. Every grievance filed, every contract fight won, every solidarity action taken builds the muscle memory for the larger fight ahead. The skills of collective action - negotiation, mobilization, discipline, endurance - are not innate. They are built through practice. The ordinary work of union life is, in this moment, preparation for an extraordinary challenge.

Without organized labor, reversing authoritarian consolidation is a coin toss. With organized labor, it is a near-certainty. The research tells us this. The history of Poland, Tunisia, South Korea, Brazil, Chile, and dozens of other countries tells us this. The structure of what unions are - their economic leverage, their organizational infrastructure, their cross-class composition, their discipline, and their moral legitimacy - tells us this.

The question is not whether workers have the power. It is whether we will use it. The 2026 midterms approach. The institutions we depend on - our universities, our public services, our independent judiciary, our right to organize - are under systematic attack. The window for effective action is open, but it will not stay open indefinitely.

Autocrats need us to feel powerless. They need us to accept the slow erosion of democratic norms as inevitable. They need us to retreat into our individual workplaces and our individual grievances and forget that the conditions making those workplaces and grievances possible are themselves under assault.

We won’t.

Extreme wealth polarization has made many people profoundly insecure, both financially and socially, whether we’re employed or not. This is creating a circumstance more fundamental than inequality statistics in lifting the appeal of authoritarian populists. We’re talking about the collapse of economic legibility; the ability to understand how the economy actually works, who’s extracting value, and what you can do about it.

The Structural Transformation

Between roughly 1980 and now, we’ve experienced a wholesale restructuring of how wealth is created, captured, and distributed:

The industrial economy was legible. You could see it. Factories employed thousands. Company towns existed because companies needed workers nearby. Value creation was visible: raw materials went in, products came out, workers got paid, communities had tax bases. When workers organized, it wasn’t equally effective for everyone to shut down production and win concessions, but it was possible. The system was exploitative, but you could see how it worked and where power was.

The financialized, platform-based economy is illegible. Value extraction happens through:

• Rent-seeking on digital platforms you can’t avoid

• Financialization that extracts wealth without producing anything

• Monopoly power that captures entire markets

• Data harvesting that turns your life into their profit

• Algorithmic management that controls your work invisibly

• Private equity that buys your employer, loads it with debt, extracts assets, and disappears

You can’t see the factory. You can’t picket the algorithm. You can’t organize against a platform that’s everywhere and nowhere. You can’t shut down production when production is automated or happens in data centers. You can’t tax a company that shifts profits through shell corporations in tax havens.

The Concrete Manifestations

This creates specific forms of economic violence:

Company towns collapsed: When the factory closed, the entire town began dying. But now there’s no factory to fight to keep open. Private equity bought it, extracted the value, and vanished, or automation made most workers redundant, or the company moved production overseas…The jobs aren’t coming back, and there’s no clear enemy to fight because the system is designed to diffuse accountability.

Platform monopolies control access: Want to sell products? You pay Amazon’s platform tax. Want customers to find you? You pay Google’s search tax. Want to reach your audience? You pay Meta’s algorithm tax. They don’t employ you, so you can’t easily organize. They don’t compete with you directly, so antitrust is complicated. They just sit between you and everyone else and extract rent. You’re working, but someone else is capturing most of the value.

Your data and attention are the product: Social media platforms are factories where you’re simultaneously the worker (creating content), the product (your data and attention being sold), and the consumer (being sold things). It’s genius extraction; they’ve made you work for free to make them rich while making you think you’re the customer. And they’ve done it by creating addiction mechanisms that exploit your psychology for profit.

The professional class is also affected: Even high-skill workers are increasingly precarious. You might be a software engineer making six figures, but you’re:

• One layoff from catastrophe

• Working contractor gigs without benefits

• Competing with AI for your job

• Under constant surveillance by productivity monitoring

• Unable to organize because you’re classified as management

• Drowning in costs (housing, healthcare, student debt) that consume your income

You’re not secure. You’re just one level above disaster, and you know it.

Ethnic entrepreneurs exploit the chaos: When economic pain is illegible, people look for explanations. Opportunistic political entrepreneurs offer simple ones that map economic anxiety onto identity politics:

• “Immigrants are taking your jobs” (not automation and financialization)

• “Diversity initiatives are why you’re struggling” (not wealth extraction)

• “Elites look down on you” (reframing class war as culture war)

• “Traditional values are under attack” (making economic collapse feel like cultural persecution)

These entrepreneurs are often from minority communities themselves, using identity politics to build power by scapegoating other minorities or liberals. They’re not the architects of inequality, but they’ve learned to monetize the chaos it creates.

Why This Drives Conflict

This economic transformation doesn’t just make people poor. It shatters multiple ideological frameworks simultaneously:

Market fundamentalism breaks: The “free market creates prosperity” framework fails when markets are rigged by monopolies, when financialization extracts rather than creates value, and when workers do everything right and still fall behind. But admitting markets don’t work threatens the entire neoliberal project.

Labor organizing frameworks break: Traditional union models assumed you could shut down production, negotiate with bosses, and win better wages. But how do you strike against an algorithm? How do you organize gig workers who never meet? How do you negotiate with a platform that operates globally and has no geographic nexus? The old tools don’t work.

Meritocracy breaks: You got educated, worked hard, played by the rules. But you’re drowning in debt, can’t afford housing, and see people who inherited wealth doing fine without effort. The framework that said “work hard, succeed” is exposed as a lie, but acknowledging this destabilizes the core American mythology.

Small-government conservatism breaks: When unregulated platforms and financial markets are destroying your community, “government is the problem” stops making sense. But admitting you need government intervention threatens the entire right-libertarian framework that powered politics from Reagan through the Tea Party.

Localism breaks: Efforts to “buy local” and invest in “community resilience” crash against the reality that Amazon undercuts local stores, platforms monopolize information, and financial capital can simply buy or destroy local businesses. You can’t buy your way out of monopoly power.

The nationalist framework becomes incoherent: Jobs didn’t just go to other countries. They disappeared to automation, financialization, and the conversion of full-time employment into gig work. “Bring back manufacturing” doesn’t work when manufacturing is automated. “Make America great again” doesn’t identify who actually has power or how to contest it.

Why This Is Fuel for Authoritarianism

Illegible economic exploitation creates perfect conditions for authoritarian movements:

People know they’re being screwed but can’t see how: You’re working harder than your parents, more educated, more productive. But you’re poorer, more insecure, and more anxious. You know the system is rigged. But you can’t see the mechanism clearly enough to fight it effectively. That creates rage without clear targets.

Authoritarians offer visible enemies: Can’t see how private equity hollowed out your town? Here’s a visible immigrant to blame. Can’t understand platform monopolies? Here’s coastal elites looking down on you. Can’t grasp financialization? Here’s “cultural Marxists” destroying values.

The authoritarian promise is: “I can see the real enemies. Trust me. I’ll fight them for you.” They replace illegible extraction with visible enemies.

They promise to “run the economy like a business”: When democratic governments can’t seem to regulate platforms, can’t stop factory closures, can’t provide economic security, the strongman promises: “I’m a businessman. I’ll fix this.” The fact that he’s usually a failed businessman or a con artist doesn’t matter. He promises decisive action when democratic deliberation feels paralyzed.

They weaponize insecurity: Authoritarians don’t need to fix the economy. They need to keep you scared and angry enough to accept their power. Economic insecurity means you’re desperate for anyone who promises order, even if the price is democracy.

Why the Springs-to-River Model Is the Answer

Here’s the crucial insight: different ideological communities understand this economic transformation through incompatible frameworks, but they can coordinate against it if each ideological or identity-based community commits to maintaining the health and well-being of their spring, recruit or connect to as many people to it as fit within your framework, and prepare for trigger moments - moments of vulnerability of the authoritarian regime - when each spring commits to feeding a shared river of resistance broad, deep, and ideologically diverse enough to make authoritarianism ungovernable.

We don’t need to flatten out our ideologies in order to find our way to middle ground. Instead, every spring must commit to protect every other spring on the overarching principle of pluralism, the cornerstone of a free society.

The socialist spring says: This is capitalism working as designed. Wealth concentrates upward. Exploitation becomes more sophisticated. We need worker ownership and democratic control of the economy.

The religious spring says: This is idolatry - the worship of money over people, of profit over community. It’s a betrayal of the call to care for the least among us. We need moral economy rooted in human dignity.

The small-business conservative spring says: This is monopoly power destroying fair markets. Platforms and private equity aren’t “free market,” they’re rigging the game. We need to break them up and restore genuine competition.

The labor spring says: This is the final assault on workers’ power. We need new models of organizing that work against platforms, new solidarities across the gig economy, and new ways to make capital accountable.

The nationalist spring says: This is globalized capital betraying local communities. We need economic sovereignty, protection for domestic industry, and policies that prioritize citizens over capital.

The civic/democratic spring says: This is market failure requiring democratic intervention. When private power gets this concentrated, only democratic government can constrain it. We need to rebuild state capacity.

Each framework is internally coherent. Each explains real aspects of what’s happening. Each mobilizes different constituencies. And they’re completely incompatible at the level of ideology. You can’t be simultaneously anti-capitalist and pro-free-market, globally-oriented and nationalist, faith-based and secular.

But you can coordinate action.

You can:

• Fight platform monopolies together even if you disagree about whether markets are good

• Resist private equity destruction of communities even if you disagree about capitalism

• Demand data privacy and regulation even if you disagree about government’s role as a regulator

• Protect workers even if you disagree about unions

• Rebuild local economic resilience even if you disagree about globalization

• Stop authoritarian exploitation of economic anxiety even if you disagree about solutions

Ideological conflict happens because everyone’s trying to make their framework hegemonic (dominant) before taking action. The socialist insists everyone must become anti-capitalist. The free-marketer insists everyone must accept capitalism. The religious conservative insists everyone must adopt faith-based values. The labor organizer insists everyone must join unions.

And while we’re gridlocked, authoritarians are winning by offering simple enemies to distract us, and strongman solutions.

The springs-to-river model says: maintain your frameworks, coordinate your action.

Your spring can give you:

• Coherent analysis of why wealth inequality happened

• Moral foundation for why you should fight it

• Community and identity in the struggle

• Vision of what should replace it

• Political education and meaning-making

The river gives you:

• Enough combined force to actually contest power

• Coordination at the scale monopolies and authoritarians operate

• Mutual defense when any spring is attacked

• Proof that pluralism works through practice

• Power to win what no spring can win alone

A socialist can maintain their critique of capitalism while coordinating with small business owners to break up monopolies. A religious conservative can hold traditional values while coordinating with labor organizers to protect workers. A nationalist can prioritize citizens while coordinating with internationalists to regulate global platforms.

These aren’t contradictions. They’re pluralism in action.

The Illegibility Problem Is Why This Matters So Much

When economic exploitation is illegible - when you can’t see how you’re being screwed - authoritarian simplicity is incredibly seductive. “It’s them. Trust me. I’ll fix it.”

But here’s what the springs-to-river model offers: multiple frameworks for making the illegible legible.

Different people will understand wealth extraction through different ideological lenses. That’s not a bug. That’s a feature. Because people need their framework to make sense of their experience, to have identity in the fight, to know why they’re resisting.

The traffic jam happens when we demand everyone use the same framework. The river happens when we let people understand through their frameworks while coordinating action across them.

No single spring can defeat monopoly capitalism, platform power, financialization, and authoritarian exploitation of economic anxiety. They’re too big, too dispersed, too sophisticated.

But a river fed by many springs, each with its own clarity about why this matters and what must be done, can be powerful enough to win.

The wealth extraction is real. The company towns did collapse. The platforms are really monopolies. Data harvesting is exploitation. The authoritarians are using this chaos to consolidate power.

The question is whether we’ll keep fragmenting over which framework to use, or whether we’ll build a river powerful enough to change the conditions we’re all trying to explain.

She died on May 14, 2022, of breast cancer, at sixty-three. She was too young. She would have had a great deal to say about the moment we are living through now. She did have a great deal to say about it, as it turns out. She saw it coming decades ahead of most of us. That is one of the things that makes The Dream of a Common Movement, the collection of her essays, speeches, and interviews published by Duke University Press and edited by her sister Jyotsna Vaid and Urvashi’s longtime collaborator Amy Hoffman, so necessary and so haunting to read.

I knew Urvashi for over thirty years. We were political colleagues and friends, and in the last years of her life we co-founded the 22nd Century Initiative together, the work that I carry forward now, the work that this newsletter is part of. I want to be honest about that relationship as I write this, because it shapes what I’m able to say and what I’m not. I cannot review this book the way a stranger could. But I also think that what I know from having been in the room with her - from having argued with her, been challenged by her, having watched her think in real time - is evidence of something the book confirms on every page: that Urvashi Vaid was one of the finest strategic and moral minds the American left produced in the twentieth century, and that we have not yet fully reckoned with what we lost.

She didn’t argue for intersectionality as a theory. She practiced it as a discipline, and she held everyone around her to the same standard.

The book takes its title from her 1993 speech at the March on Washington for Lesbian, Gay, and Bi Equal Rights and Liberation - a speech that, reading it now, sounds less like a document of its time than a warning directed at ours. The dream of a common movement, she told the crowd that day, is not a dream of sameness. It is a dream of solidarity. Of people who are different from each other choosing to act together not because their interests are identical but because they understand that their liberation is linked. She was thirty-four years old. She had been the executive director of the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force (now the National LGBTQ Task Force - the first woman of color to lead a national gay and lesbian organization - for four years. She already knew, with a clarity that most of us took another decade to catch up to, that a movement organized around identity alone would not get where it needed to go.

What the collection shows, spanning nearly four decades of writing, is not just the consistency of that conviction but its development. The early pieces are already sharp, already intersectional in a way that precedes the vocabulary that would later be used to describe what she was doing. By the time you reach the later essays, those on race and class and what she called the “status queer” politics of an increasingly professionalized LGBT establishment, you are reading something closer to a political autopsy of the movement she helped build, written by someone who loved it enough to be ruthless about what it had gotten wrong.

She writes about the AIDS crisis not only as catastrophe but as a political crucible; a moment that clarified, for those paying attention, that the line between who is protected and who is expendable in America runs directly through race and class and gender, and that any politics that doesn’t account for those lines will reproduce them. She writes about the danger of what she called mainstreaming, by which she meant the way a movement can win formal rights and lose its soul, and can achieve inclusion in institutions that haven’t changed and call that victory. She writes, with characteristic precision, about the difference between a movement and a constituency: a constituency is mobilized to win something specific; a movement is organized to transform something structural. She always wanted the movement.

The goal of any liberation movement should be transformation, not assimilation. She wrote that decades ago, but she was writing about right now.

There is a section of personal essays in this collection that I found almost unbearable to read, in the best sense. Urvashi writes about growing up Indian and queer in upstate New York; about the double consciousness of being an outsider to every majority, neither fully Indian nor fully American, never the default anything. She writes about her family, about her parents’ household full of books and argument, about the ways that immigration shapes a political sensibility. These essays are doing something different from the political analysis: they’re showing us the ground from which the analysis grows. The reason Urvashi could see what she saw is inseparable from where she stood to see it.

Tony Kushner, whose foreword opens the collection, writes that she was “lit from within.” That is exactly right. I have been in hundreds of rooms with hundreds of brilliant people over the course of a long career in movement work. Urvashi was different in a way that is hard to describe without resorting to words that don’t quite fit. She had intellectual ferocity and personal warmth in a combination that I have rarely encountered. She had the ability to dismantle an argument without diminishing the person making it, and to hold high standards without making people feel small. She made the people around her sharper. She made you want to be equal to the conversation.

The 22nd Century Initiative, which we built together, was animated by exactly the analysis that runs through this book: that the threats to democracy in the twenty-first century are not separate from the struggles for racial justice and gender liberation and economic equality but are the same struggle viewed from different angles. That a movement capable of meeting this moment would have to be broader and more coordinated and more honest about power than anything we had built before. We were in the early stages of that work when she died. I have thought about her every week since.

Read this book. Read it if you knew her and want to understand her more fully. Read it if you never heard her name - and if you are in this movement and have never heard her name, that is itself something to sit with, something that the book’s introduction addresses directly and without sentimentality. Read it because the argument she was making for thirty years is the argument we need right now, made better and earlier than most of us managed to make it. Read it because the moment we are in - the assault on democracy, the targeting of queer and immigrant and people of color communities, the dismantling of the very infrastructure of civil society - is the moment she spent her career warning us about and preparing us for.

She wasn’t ahead of the curve, as her colleague Cathy Renna said when she died. She was the curve. We have been catching up to her ever since.

The Dream of a Common Movement: Selected Writings of Urvashi Vaid. Edited by Jyotsna Vaid and Amy Hoffman, with a foreword by Tony Kushner. Duke University Press, 2025.

Roughly ninety percent of the revenue of arts nonprofits in America comes from earned income and private philanthropy - ticket sales, memberships, subscriptions, individual donors, and foundation grants. Federal funding, through the National Endowment for the Arts and its state partners, makes up a small minority of the sector’s total budget.

And yet the administration’s attacks on arts funding - the proposed elimination of the NEA, the dismantling of cultural grantmaking across federal agencies, the intimidation campaigns targeting arts institutions that resist - have been disproportionately devastating, and the devastation has been disproportionately racial.

This is not a paradox. It’s a tell.

The reason the small federal share does such outsized damage is that it’s the most democratic portion of arts funding. Private philanthropy clusters in wealthy coastal cities, around prestige institutions with established donor bases, and in networks built on inherited wealth and class connection. Federal arts funding, by design, goes somewhere else. It flows through state arts agencies to small and mid-sized organizations in places the private donor class does not typically reach. It supports community theaters in Detroit and Oakland, teaching artists in rural New Mexico, Indigenous cultural programs on reservation land, immigrant music organizations in Queens, Black theater in Atlanta and Minneapolis, Chicano muralists, Asian American film collectives, and the thousand small institutions that hold together the multiracial cultural life of the country.

Cut the federal share and the Metropolitan Opera barely notices. Cut the federal share and a Black community theater in its fourth decade of operation closes its doors.

This is not an accidental asymmetry. It is the architecture of the cut. And it is the same architecture that runs through the rest of the consolidation agenda.

The pattern

I want to use the arts example as an entry point into a larger pattern, because the pattern is what the public debate is mostly missing, and the pattern is what makes this regime different in kind from ordinary conservative governance.

Consider housing. The Department of Housing and Urban Development was created, and has been shaped for fifty-five years, by America’s ongoing reckoning with racial discrimination in housing. Its enforcement of the Fair Housing Act, its administration of public housing, its oversight of Section 8 vouchers, and its support for community development in historically redlined neighborhoods - all of this exists because private markets in housing were so thoroughly structured by racial exclusion that only federal intervention could provide a serious counterweight. Attacks on HUD aren’t neutral budget cuts that happen to fall on communities of color. They’re strikes at the institutional apparatus that was built specifically to address racial inequality in housing. The racial effect isn’t a side effect. It’s the function of the cut.

Consider entitlements. Medicaid covers a disproportionate share of Black, Latino, Indigenous, and Pacific Islander Americans. SNAP serves a disproportionately nonwhite population. Head Start, housing assistance, WIC, the Child Tax Credit in its expanded form - each of these programs has an impact profile that is visibly racialized, because each exists in part to partially compensate for the accumulated effects of centuries of racial exclusion from wealth-building. Cuts targeted at these programs, while leaving other forms of federal spending untouched, are not race-neutral choices that happen to have racial consequences. The selection of which programs to cut is itself a racial selection.

Consider the gutting of civil rights enforcement. The Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division, once the agency that brought cases against segregated police departments and unconstitutional prisons and discriminatory lenders, has been repurposed to pursue the reverse - cases against universities for admitting too many students of color, against employers for consulting the demographics of their workforces, and against cities for noting the racial patterns in their policing data. The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission has been hollowed out. Fair housing enforcement at HUD has been effectively suspended. The specific tools that were built over sixty years to counteract racial discrimination are being retired one by one, not in a general downsizing of government, but with a precision that tracks their civil rights function.

Consider the federal workforce. And here I want to slow down, because this is the piece of the pattern most people do not yet see, and it is perhaps the most important.

The hidden ladder

The federal civil service has been, for the better part of a century, the single most important institution of Black middle-class formation in the United States.

This is a historical fact that is not often taught and not often said out loud. It begins with the post office, the first large employer that would hire Black workers into stable jobs with benefits and pensions, and that for generations supported entire Black communities by providing the one route into the middle class that private labor markets largely refused. It continues through the expansion of the federal workforce in the mid-twentieth century - the Social Security Administration, the Veterans Administration, the General Services Administration, the Department of Defense civilian workforce, and the Department of Housing and Urban Development - each of which, because of the legal requirements of equal opportunity employment and the relative strength of federal union protections, offered Black and Latino workers something they could rarely get in the private sector: a job with dignity, a pension, a pathway for their children.

The Black middle class in America is, to a degree most Americans do not appreciate, a civil-service middle class. In some cities - Washington, Baltimore, Atlanta - the federal payroll has been the economic backbone of Black professional and working-class life for three generations.

This means that when this administration sets about firing federal workers en masse, imposing return-to-office mandates designed to force attrition, reclassifying career positions as political appointments, and transferring federal functions to private contractors outside the reach of civil rights enforcement, it is doing something very specific. It is not merely shrinking the state. It is dismantling the single most successful ladder of Black middle-class mobility that the twentieth century produced, and creating the means by which the federal bureaucracy can be whitened and stacked with those loyal to the regime in power.

The racial effect is not an unfortunate consequence of a neutral efficiency project. The racial effect is the project, or one of the projects, running inside the larger one.

The same logic applies to the targeting of public-sector unions, which have a disproportionately Black membership; to the attacks on public universities, which have been the second most important ladder; and to the assault on the teaching profession, which has similar demographic texture. Each attack looks, on its surface, like a general critique of “bureaucracy” or “the blob” or “waste.” Each attack, in practice, falls with targeted weight on the specific institutional architecture through which people of color have built economic security.

Two things at once

Once you see the pattern, you begin to see that the regime is doing two things simultaneously, and they reinforce each other.

The first is political mobilization. The coalition that put this administration in power is held together, in significant part, by a politics of racial grievance - a sense, cultivated over decades by conservative media and increasingly shared by elite political actors, that white Americans have been unjustly displaced by the rising multiracial majority and that the state has been captured by nonwhite interests. To sustain that coalition, the regime has to keep producing evidence of its racial commitments. The masked ICE raids, the DEI purges, the assault on diverse universities, and the visual theater of deportation - all of this is racial content production, aimed at convincing the base that the grievance is being addressed.

The second is structural. The opposition to this regime is, demographically, overwhelmingly multiracial. It contains the majority of Black voters, the majority of Latino voters, the overwhelming majority of Asian American and Pacific Islander voters, the majority of Indigenous voters, and the majority of white voters under forty, along with the majority of college-educated white voters across age groups. This is the coalition that will have to defeat the regime if the regime is to be defeated. And the regime knows it.

Which means that many of the structural attacks we are witnessing - on the federal workforce, on civil rights enforcement, on the arts, on public universities, on HUD, and on entitlement programs are attacks on the institutional infrastructure of the opposition. They weaken the economic base of the multiracial middle class. They defund the cultural institutions that sustain multiracial civic life. They dismantle the enforcement mechanisms that protect multiracial participation in public institutions. They hollow out the federal presence in exactly the communities where the opposition coalition lives.

This is not incidental damage. It is pre-positioning for the next phase of the fight.

A regime that attacks the arts is doing one thing. A regime that attacks the arts, HUD, Medicaid, SNAP, the civil rights division, the federal workforce, public universities, public-sector unions, fair housing enforcement, and community development funding, all in the same eighteen months, is not doing one thing. It is doing one large thing, with many moving parts.

The one large thing is the construction of a political order in which the multiracial opposition coalition is structurally weaker than it was before, and in which the institutions that have supported multiracial democracy for sixty years have been removed from the playing field.

Why this matters

Two implications, briefly, because the diagnosis matters for strategy.

The first is that a pro-democracy movement that frames this regime primarily in terms of “chaos,” “corruption,” “authoritarianism,” or “incompetence” is missing what is actually happening. All of those descriptions are accurate and should be shared with the public. None of them, however, captures the racial architecture. A politics that cannot see the architecture will not dismantle it. The damage being done right now will outlast this administration unless the pro-democracy movement understands what is being damaged and names it.

The second is that a restoration to the pre-2024 status quo will not undo the architectural damage, because the architecture being targeted was itself already weaker than it needed to be. HUD was underfunded before Trump. The NEA was underfunded before Trump. Civil rights enforcement was already over-stretched. The federal workforce was already under attack. Public-sector unions were already under attack. Medicaid was already a political football. A pro-democracy agenda serious about the architecture would not aim to restore 2024. It would aim to build what 2024 failed to build - a durable institutional infrastructure of multiracial democracy that does not depend on which party is in power to survive.

The arts funding case is a small example that tells a large story. A cut that looks like ten percent of a budget lands as the destruction of the democratic share of that budget. A pattern of such cuts, across agencies, across programs, and across the institutional fabric of the state, is not a coincidence. It is a design.

Race is not a side effect of that design. Race runs through it, all the way down.

The pro-democracy movement needs to say so, plainly, and often. The damage is already underway. The architecture of consolidation is being built in real time. And the only movement that can stop its construction, and eventually reverse it, is one that sees it clearly enough to name what is actually being done.

That naming is the work. Let’s do it.

Healthy Polarization

Polarization can be healthy when it fosters robust debate, clarifies policy differences, and motivates political participation. In such cases, polarization reflects genuine differences in values, priorities, or ideologies within a pluralistic society.

Characteristics of Healthy Polarization:

1. Policy-Driven Disagreement: The focus remains on competing ideas and solutions rather than identity-based animosity.

   • Example: Debates over healthcare reform, tax policy, or climate change that engage citizens in substantive discussions about the direction of governance.

2. Civic Engagement: Polarization mobilizes people to participate in politics, such as voting, protesting, or running for office.

   • Example: The Civil Rights Movement in the U.S. polarized the nation over segregation and racial justice but ultimately expanded democratic rights and inclusion.

3. Respect for Democratic Norms: Polarized groups still accept the legitimacy of democratic institutions and processes, ensuring that disagreements are resolved through elections, debate, and compromise.

4. Deliberation and Innovation: Diverging views lead to creative problem-solving and new ideas that reflect diverse societal needs.

Toxic Polarization

Polarization becomes toxic when it transforms into deep-seated animosity between groups, undermining democratic norms, institutions, and the ability to govern effectively. This occurs when divisions are rooted in identity rather than ideas, leading to an "us vs. them" mentality.

Characteristics of Toxic Polarization:

1. Identity-Based Divisions: Political identities align with other social markers (e.g., race, religion, geography), making politics a proxy for broader cultural conflicts.

   • Example: Partisan identities in the U.S. increasingly correlate with racial, religious, and urban-rural divides, fueling mistrust and hostility.

2. Erosion of Trust: Citizens lose faith in democratic institutions, viewing them as tools of the opposing camp rather than neutral arbiters of power.

   • Example: Election denialism in the U.S., where unfounded claims about voter fraud undermine trust in electoral processes.

3. Zero-Sum Thinking: Opposing sides see politics as a battle for survival, where any concession is viewed as existential defeat.

   • Example: Legislative gridlock, where parties refuse to compromise, leading to government shutdowns or the inability to pass critical legislation.

4. Normalization of Violence and Intimidation: Toxic polarization often coincides with increased political violence, as individuals justify coercion to "protect" their side.

   • Example: The January 6th Capitol attack in the U.S., where polarization drove some to reject democratic outcomes and resort to violence.

Example: Healthy vs. Toxic Polarization

Healthy Polarization:

Post-Apartheid South Africa

• After the fall of apartheid, South Africa experienced polarization over how to address its legacy. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) allowed for open debate and testimony, helping to build a shared understanding of history while negotiating differences through democratic processes. This type of polarization fostered engagement and progress rather than deepening divisions.

Toxic Polarization:

Venezuela under Chávez and Maduro

• Political polarization in Venezuela turned toxic as identity-driven divisions emerged between supporters of Hugo Chávez's socialist "Chavismo" and his opposition. The government delegitimized dissent, eroded democratic institutions, and exacerbated economic inequality, leading to widespread repression and a breakdown of governance.

How to Mitigate Toxic Polarization

To prevent polarization from becoming toxic, societies must:

1. Strengthen Democratic Norms: Promote respect for democratic institutions, electoral processes, and the peaceful transfer of power through active engagement with and participation in these institutions, demanding transparency, accountability, and responsiveness to community needs.

2. Foster Cross-Group Engagement: Create opportunities for dialogue and collaboration between polarized groups to build trust and reduce animosity. One of the best means of accomplishing this at scale is through cultural engagement, making arts and culture a form of pro-democracy martial art.

3. Depersonalize Politics: Shift focus from identity-based ranking and demonizing to focusing on the effects of inequality and oppression broadly, across identity differences and conflicts, driving substantive debates on policy and good governance for all.

4. Reinforce Neutral Institutions: Ensure courts, election commissions, and media are perceived as impartial arbiters, and get active in monitoring these institutions and holding them accountable to ensure that they are, in fact, neutral.

5. Counter Disinformation: Combat false narratives that deepen divisions and fuel mistrust. Here is it very important not to refute false narratives by repeating them, but instead just skip to and make the case for the truth.

The Wrap Up

Polarization is an inevitable feature of democracy, but its impact depends on whether it drives productive debate or entrenches irreconcilable divisions. By recognizing the line between healthy and toxic polarization, societies can take proactive steps to ensure that democratic systems thrive, even in the face of disagreement.

WHY THIS DOCUMENT

This is a checklist, not an essay. It’s meant to be used in coalition meetings, in funder conversations, in panel preparation, and in the internal strategic conversations of organizations and tables that are building anti-authoritarian capacity in the United States right now.

It begins from a single proposition: the participation of communities of color, disabled people, immigrants, Indigenous nations, working-class people, LGBTQ communities, and other historically marginalized groups in the anti-authoritarian movement is not a moral preference or a coalition courtesy. It’s the structural infrastructure on which any successful pro-democracy movement - and any successful pro-democracy government - must be built. Without it, no democratic breakthrough consolidates. With it, consolidation becomes possible.

The checklist is organized in five parts. Part One establishes that meaningful minority participation is democratic infrastructure rather than democratic decoration. Part Two frames civil rights as the architecture of pluralism, not as a separate policy domain. Part Three addresses the specific contributions of communities of color and disabled people to anti-authoritarian capacity. Part Four addresses what it means to build a democratic system of governance and to democratize the economy. Part Five is operational, describing what “at the table throughout” actually requires.

There is no consolidation of a sustainable democracy without these communities. The math does not work.

PART ONE

Meaningful minority participation is democratic infrastructure.

Not decoration. Not optics. Not a value-add. The structural condition without which democratic governance cannot operate.

☐ Pluralism is the foundational architecture of democracy.

Self-government is meaningful only when the self doing the governing is genuinely plural. A government in which decisions are made by some on behalf of others, without the others present, is not a democracy regardless of what its constitution says. Pluralism is not an outcome of democracy. It is the precondition.

☐ Inclusion is not pluralism.

Inclusion is a host’s virtue - the host decides who is welcome on what terms. Pluralism is the abolition of hosts. The communities historically positioned as guests in American democracy must be co-residents, not invitees, for the system to function as advertised. Conditional inclusion produces conditional democracy.

☐ The communities most experienced in democratic struggle are the communities most often excluded from democratic decision-making.

Black, Indigenous, immigrant, disabled, and working-class communities have been doing the practice of democracy from below for generations, building distributed, accountable, mutual-aid-centered, civically rigorous practice under conditions where formal democracy did not extend to them. This is the country’s actual democratic tradition. The exclusion of these traditions from movement leadership is the exclusion of the most usable pro-democracy expertise we have.

☐ Authoritarian regimes target minority communities first because the broader public has been conditioned not to defend them.

The pattern is documented across every successful authoritarian consolidation in the modern era. The communities targeted first - immigrants, religious minorities, racial minorities, disabled people, sexual minorities - are the early-warning system for what is coming for the broader population. A democracy that does not center these communities is a democracy that disables its own early-warning system.

☐ Threshold mobilization requires breadth.

Erica Chenoweth’s research on the 3.5% threshold for successful nonviolent resistance is now widely cited. Less widely cited is the finding that mobilizations crossing the threshold are demographically broad - they look like the society in which the contest is happening. Mobilizations that remain demographically narrow do not cross the threshold no matter how energetic they become. The math of victory requires the math of inclusion.

Diagnostic question. If the leadership tables of your coalition do not look like the country, you are not building a coalition that can win the country.

PART TWO

Civil rights are democratic architecture.

Not a policy domain. Not a stakeholder concern. The structural specification of how the system holds together.

☐ Civil rights laws are the operating system, not an application.

The Civil Rights Act, the Voting Rights Act, the Fair Housing Act, the Americans with Disabilities Act, IDEA, Section 504 - these are not separate from the architecture of American democracy. They are the architecture, in the sense that they are the structural specifications without which the constitutional promises of equal protection and due process do not have functional meaning.

☐ Civil rights enforcement infrastructure is regime-fragile.

What the second Trump administration has done to the Civil Rights Division of the Department of Justice, to OCR at HHS and ED, to EEOC, to the Section 504 enforcement infrastructure, and to the disability rights apparatus more broadly is not incidental to its authoritarianism. It is its authoritarianism. Dismantling civil rights enforcement is dismantling the operating system of American constitutional democracy. That’s why the authoritarians are dismantling it. A pro-democracy movement that treats civil rights as one issue among many has misunderstood what is being attacked.

☐ The communities defending civil rights are defending the constitutional order.

When the NAACP, the ACLU, the Disability Rights Education and Defense Fund, MALDEF, the Asian American Legal Defense and Education Fund, the National Disability Rights Network, the National LGBTQ Task Force, and similar institutions defend their communities’ rights, they are not advancing a particular interest. They are defending the structural specification of pluralism. The pro-democracy field needs to be funding, amplifying, and following these institutions, not treating them as auxiliary.

☐ Disability rights, in particular, are democratic infrastructure that the broader pro-democracy field has chronically under-recognized.

Disabled people are roughly 27% of the U.S. adult population. The architecture that allows disabled people to participate - accessible voting, accessible public meetings, accessible workplaces, accessible housing, the entire ADA / IDEA / 504 framework - is the same architecture that allows participation in general. When that architecture is degraded, the operative effect is not only on disabled people. It is on the practice of public democratic life. Disability rights organizations have been quietly building democratic infrastructure for forty years; that work is now load-bearing for the whole movement.

☐ Voting rights and the broader civil rights enforcement apparatus must be defended as a single project.

The post-Shelby era of voting rights erosion, the Trump administration’s mail ballot executive orders, the systematic challenges to the Voting Rights Act, the manipulation of redistricting, the criminalization of voter assistance - these are continuous with the dismantling of civil rights enforcement more broadly. The voting rights field and the civil rights field have been institutionally separate in some ways for decades. The present moment requires that they operate as a single field.

Diagnostic question. If your strategic plan addresses civil rights as a stakeholder concern rather than as the architecture of democracy itself, your strategic plan needs revision.

PART THREE

People of color and disabled people: specific anti-authoritarian capacities.

These communities bring particular capacities to the anti-authoritarian project that the broader movement does not have without them.

☐ Communities of color carry the country’s deepest civil resistance tradition.

The Montgomery Bus Boycott, the Freedom Rides, the lunch counter sit-ins, the Mississippi Freedom Summer, the Chicano Movement, the American Indian Movement, the United Farm Workers’ grape boycott, the Asian American movement, the Black-led organizing in the Civil Rights Movement and after represents the country’s most developed body of nonviolent civil resistance practice. The retiree-driven civil resistance now emerging across the country in 2026 is borrowing from this tradition, often without naming it. The movement needs to name it, fund it, follow its leadership, and learn from its practitioners.

☐ Black-led infrastructure has the longest demonstrated track record of resilience under hostile state conditions.

The Black church. Historically Black colleges and universities. Black Greek-letter organizations. Black mutual aid networks. Black labor traditions. The Black press. Black-led civil rights legal infrastructure. These institutions have survived Reconstruction’s collapse, Jim Crow, the COINTELPRO era, the war on drugs, and the post-2020 backlash. They have institutional memory and operational practice that the rest of the movement doesn’t have. Anti-authoritarian organizing that doesn’t center Black-led institutions is anti-authoritarian organizing that is reinventing wheels and making mistakes those institutions long ago learned to avoid.

☐ Indigenous nations carry a parallel, equally consequential tradition of governance under conditions of attempted erasure.

Indigenous self-governance, treaty-based legal practice, environmental defense (Standing Rock, Line 3, Mauna Kea), and the contemporary tribal sovereignty movement constitute a body of democratic practice the rest of the movement is in no position to ignore. When the federal government becomes a hostile actor, Indigenous nations have several centuries of experience in how to maintain democratic life under those conditions.

☐ Latino, immigrant, and farmworker communities carry the practice of distributed civil resistance under conditions of state violence.

What is now visible in Minneapolis - distributed, neighborhood-based, mutual-aid-centered civic resistance to federal force - has been standard practice in farmworker communities, in immigrant enclaves, in the Black communities of the Mississippi Delta and the South Side of Chicago, for generations. The retirees in The Villages and Lakeland are joining a tradition. The leadership of that tradition belongs to the communities that built it.

☐ Disabled people carry a half-century of experience in defending civil rights infrastructure under hostile conditions.

The disability rights movement - from Section 504 sit-ins in 1977 to ADAPT’s direct action campaigns to the present-day defense of Medicaid Home and Community-Based Services - has been doing civil resistance, legal defense, and federal-agency accountability work continuously for fifty years, often when the rest of the movement was looking elsewhere. The disability community knows how to defend an enforcement apparatus from a hostile administration. That expertise is now urgently needed across the broader movement.

☐ LGBTQ+ communities carry direct organizing experience against state-sanctioned dehumanization campaigns.

The HIV/AIDS organizing of the late 1980s and 1990s, the marriage equality movement, the trans rights organizing of the past decade - all occurring under conditions in which significant elements of the state and society were actively hostile - produced organizers with specific experience in surviving and defeating state-sanctioned dehumanization, social stigma, and vigilante violence. That experience is generalizable, and it is needed now.

☐ These traditions are not interchangeable with one another, and in order for them to fully understood and integrated they need to be explicitly named

The Black freedom struggle is not the disability rights movement is not the immigrant rights movement is not the Indigenous sovereignty movement. They share orientations and they have learned from each other, but they are distinct traditions with distinct lineages and distinct leaderships. “Centering people of color” without specifying which traditions, which leaders, and which institutions is a form of erasure. Naming matters.

Diagnostic question. Whose specific traditions are your movement’s tactics borrowing from? Are those traditions credited, and resourced? Are they integrated into the leadership?

PART FOUR

Building a democratic system of governance and democratizing the economy.

Without these, breakthrough does not consolidate. The concentrations of power that produced the authoritarian moment will reproduce it.

☐ Anti-authoritarian breakthrough without economic democratization is reversible breakthrough.

The historical record on consolidation is unambiguous. Where pro-democracy movements defeated authoritarian or proto-authoritarian regimes without breaking up the underlying concentrations of economic power, those regimes returned within a cycle and in Hungary, Brazil pre-Lula, and Italy across multiple cycles. Where consolidation held - post-Carnation Revolution Portugal, post-1988 South Korea after sustained pressure, Brazil under Lula’s most successful periods - economic democratization was part of the project, not a sequel to it.

☐ Concentrated wealth is concentrated political power.

The American oligarchic class - a few hundred individuals, the major holding companies, the largest asset managers, and the dominant tech platforms - has more political power than any democratic legislature can countervail without structural changes to the economic distribution of power. Public financing of elections, antitrust enforcement, financial transaction taxes, wealth taxes, worker representation on corporate boards, sectoral bargaining, public banking, public broadband, public media, public utilities, expanded cooperative ownership - these are not auxiliary policies. They’re the structural conditions of democratic survival.

☐ Worker power is democratic infrastructure.

Labor unions are not merely an economic institution. They’re one of the few mass-membership democratic institutions in American civil society, and their presence is correlated across the comparative literature with successful democratic resilience. Where unions are weak, authoritarian movements find more purchase. Where unions are strong and democratic, the floor of pro-democracy capacity is substantially higher. The defense and expansion of worker power is anti-authoritarian work. Authoritarians can’t govern without the cooperation, even if coerced, of workers, full-stop.

☐ The economy must be democratized along the same lines as political life.

If political pluralism is the architecture of political democracy, then economic pluralism is the architecture of economic democracy. This means racial and gender wealth gaps are democratic problems, not adjacent ones.

Reparative investment in Black, Indigenous, Latino, and immigrant communities. Disability-inclusive economic development. The closure of the gender wage and wealth gaps. Public investment in care work. Universal basic services in health, education, housing, and care. All of these are core to the building of resilient, durable democratic infrastructure that is resistant to authoritarian takeovers.

☐ Communities of color and disabled people must be at the center of designing the post-breakthrough economic order.

These are the communities the current order extracts from. They’re also the communities with the most direct experience of what the current order’s failure modes look like. Their leadership in the design of the post-breakthrough economy isn’t just a courtesy. It’s a quality control mechanism. An economy designed without them will reproduce the failure modes they know best.

☐ Governance reform is the connective tissue between political and economic democratization.

Electoral reform (proportional representation, ranked-choice voting, multi-member districts, automatic registration, expanded voting rights). Anti-corruption reform (lobbying restrictions, revolving-door bans, asset disclosure, federal ethics enforcement). Judicial reform (court expansion, term limits, ethics enforcement). Federal agency reform (civil service protections, IG independence, OMB transparency). Police and immigration enforcement reform along the lines this movement is already building. These are all essential for democratic consolidation. Without governance reform, both political pluralism and economic democracy remain vulnerable to capture by the existing concentrations of power. Governance reform is what makes the other two reforms durable.

Diagnostic question. If your transition planning addresses electoral reform without addressing economic democratization, or vice versa, your transition planning is preparing for breakthrough without consolidation. Breakthrough without consolidation opens the door to re-capture of the state by authoritarians that will have learned and grown stronger by having been pushed out of position by anti-authoritarian forces (i.e., Trump 1.0 versus Trump 2.0).

PART FIVE

Operational: what “at the table throughout” actually requires.

Most coalitions claim it. Few coalitions practice it. Here is what practicing it looks like.

☐ Decision-making power, not advisory presence.

If communities of color, disabled people, immigrants, and other marginalized groups are present in your coalition’s advisory committees but not its decision-making bodies, they are not at the table. Advisory bodies are how organizations launder the appearance of inclusion without sharing the substance of power. The test is whether the institutions led by these communities have a vote that matters on questions of strategy, resource allocation, and direction.

☐ Resource sharing, not resource extraction.

Coalitions led by white-led institutions routinely extract organizing capacity, narrative authority, and credibility from communities of color and disabled communities while concentrating funding in the white-led institutions themselves. This is a structural pattern. It produces coalitions that look diverse and operate as extractive. Funding has to flow to the institutions led by these communities, in proportion to the work and the leadership they are providing.

☐ Pre-decision consultation, not post-decision communication.

If the institutional partners representing marginalized communities are being briefed after major strategic decisions are made, they aren’t at the table. Pre-decision consultation is the operational test of inclusion. It’s also the test of whether the coalition takes the analytical contributions of these communities seriously because their analysis frequently changes the decision.

☐ Accessibility as a baseline condition, not an accommodation.

ASL interpretation, real-time captioning, accessible venues and materials, scent-free meeting environments, pacing that accommodates fatigue and chronic illness, recordings for asynchronous participation, and translation across the languages your coalition’s communities speak aren’t extra requests to be evaluated case by case. They’re the baseline operational conditions of a coalition that includes the people it claims to include. If accessibility is being negotiated meeting-by-meeting, the coalition is not yet operationally inclusive. Funders must support these functions or most organizations will not be able to manifest them.

☐ Conflict capacity, not conflict avoidance.

Multi-racial, cross-class, multi-faith, multi-ability coalitions experience conflict. Conflict is not a coalition failure. Conflict avoidance is. Coalitions that smooth over disagreements between their constituent communities in order to maintain surface harmony are coalitions that are not actually integrating those communities’ analyses. The capacity to hold conflict, work through it, and emerge with stronger shared analysis is the practical test of coalition maturity.

☐ Long-term commitment, not crisis-driven solidarity.

Many of the relationships now being formed across constituencies in the anti-authoritarian moment are formed in crisis. Crisis-formed relationships generally dissolve when the crisis abates. The work of maintaining relationships beyond the immediate emergency - relationships around funding, programmatic continuity, leadership development, and intergenerational succession - is what determines whether the coalition holds when the threat changes shape. The threat will change shape. Plan accordingly.

☐ Followership as well as leadership.

Predominantly white, predominantly able-bodied, predominantly cisgender coalitions need to develop the practice of following - of taking strategic direction from institutions led by people of color, disabled people, immigrants, and other marginalized communities. This is both a moral and an operational requirement. The strategic intelligence of the movement disproportionately resides in the institutions led by these communities. Following them is how the movement becomes smarter.

Diagnostic question. Take an audit. Look at your last five strategic decisions. Were the institutions led by communities of color, disabled people, and immigrants involved in making them, or briefed after they were made? If the latter, the work begins there.

THE BOTTOM LINE

The movement to defeat authoritarianism in the United States can’t be built on the same foundation as the order that produced authoritarianism. That foundation was the political and economic exclusion of communities of color, disabled people, immigrants, working-class people, and Indigenous nations from the practice of self-government and the distribution of political and economic power. To build on that foundation a movement that opposes authoritarianism is to build on the same fulcrum the authoritarians are using, and to wonder why the lever doesn’t move.

That’s not to say that every organization and individual will start in a perfect place on these questions. My own organization is not in a perfect place on these questions but we are in the process of attempting to address them and that process is integral to our development. Don’t allow “perfect” to become the enemy of progress, but don’t allow “progress” to become the enemy of the processes, tough, challenging, and often frustratingly slow as they may be, that builds the kind of constituency and pro-democracy muscle we need to consolidate a robust, resilient, authoritarianism-resistant democracy after breakthrough.

The participation of these communities is not a moral preference. It is the structural condition of victory - victory at the level of mobilization (because the math of the threshold requires it), at the level of breakthrough (because the analysis the movement needs is held disproportionately by these communities), and at the level of consolidation (because the post-breakthrough order has to be built by the people who know what the pre-breakthrough order’s failure modes were).

The work, if we are doing it, will be visible in our resource allocations, our decision-making structures, our accessibility practices, our public-facing leadership, and our day-to-day operating conditions. If those things are not changing, the words are decoration. We have to choose the work.

There is no breakthrough without us. There is no consolidation without all of us.

—

Use, share, adapt. Send corrections.

Some friends push harder. They say I’m being too structural, that what’s actually happening is a being driven by a personality - one peculiar man and his apparatus - and that once he’s gone, the pressure releases.

That would be comforting. I don’t believe it. Authoritarians come and go. What persists is the ground they stand on.

So when people press me for the one mechanism that makes all the others operational, I’ve stopped dodging the question.

Fear is the fulcrum of authoritarianism.

A fulcrum, Merriam-Webster has it, is ”the support about which a lever turns” or ”one that supplies capability for action.” It’s what converts a small amount of force into the movement of a much larger mass. A pry bar alone moves nothing. A pry bar plus a fulcrum moves a boulder.

Hang with me for a minute and consider what this means for authoritarianism. A handful of people cannot force the compliance of tens of millions. They can, however, arrange conditions under which tens of millions force their own compliance. Fear is the fulcrum that makes that lever work.

Despite its reputation, authoritarianism is not mainly a story about brute force. The Gestapo was not an especially large organization relative to the population of Germany. The Stasi depended on neighbors reporting neighbors. Putin’s Russia does not have enough police to follow everyone; it has enough fear that most people follow themselves. In Orbán’s Hungary, democratic decay ran on budget cuts and boredom and the quiet conviction that nothing can be done without facing retaliation. In each case, a minority faction governs a resistant majority - not by overwhelming us, but by arranging the conditions under which resistance feels irrational.

Those conditions are mostly made of fear.

Fear of losing what little one has. Fear of the stranger, the migrant, the trans kid, the protestor, the professor. Fear of being alone in one’s objection, of being the first to say no, of being wrong, of being watched. Fear of collapse. Fear of chaos. Fear that any alternative is worse than this. Fear, above all, of one another.

Hannah Arendt saw this. She argued that totalitarianism’s deepest precondition is not hatred but loneliness - the kind of isolation in which people lose the capacity to form judgments alongside others making them available for mass movements that will think for them. Loneliness is fear held still. Solitude is the absence of company; loneliness is the conviction that help is not coming.

This is why the authoritarian project spends so much on disinformation and so little, relatively, on coercion. The disinformation is the real labor. The goal is not to make people love the regime. The goal is to make them doubt each other. They don’t need us to believe in them. They just need us to never find each other.

That’s the strategy, condensed. The strongman’s force is relatively small, requiring the cooperation of those who that force targets. Our fear of each other is what amplifies it.

Which means - and here is the good news, if we can bear to hear it - the fulcrum is not where the power is. The fulcrum is the mechanism by which a small amount of power is made to move a large mass. Pull the fulcrum out and the lever stops working. Put a better one in its place and the leverage runs the other way.

So what replaces fear?

Not courage, if by courage we mean the absence of fear. Nobody has that, and we should be suspicious of anyone who claims to. Courage is a practice, not a trait, and it is overwhelmingly a practice people do together. Erica Chenoweth’s research on civil resistance is often cited for its 3.5% threshold - that this is the percentage of the population that must refuse to cooperate in order to topple a dictator - but the more interesting finding underneath is about how movements succeed: not by being fearless, but by building the relationships that make action feel possible while still afraid.

The practical work, then, is solidarity - not as sentiment or moral measure, but as infrastructure. The ordinary disciplines of showing up for each other. A block club that checks on its elders. A faith community that walks its immigrant members to court. A union that pickets with the fired federal worker. A congregation that learns the names of its school board candidates. A neighbor who says, if they come for you, they’ll have to come through me first, and means it. These are not sentimental gestures. They are load-bearing.

And there is a second lever, which the authoritarians understand better than we do: joy. The Carnation Revolution in Portugal ended a half-century dictatorship in culminating event lasting roughly eighteen hours, with flowers in rifle barrels and soldiers switching sides in the street. The regime didn’t fall because the opposition was more frightening than the regime. It fell because the opposition was more inviting. Ordinary Portuguese could see themselves on that side of the line.

We keep forgetting this. We think to meet a terrifying moment we must become terrifying ourselves - that only grimness is serious. But the history of authoritarianism’s defeat is overwhelmingly a history of singing, marching, feasting, joking, dancing people whose refusal became contagious because it looked like a better life. The regime had force. The movement had company.

This is our task. Not to be unafraid, which is impossible, but to make unafraid-together the ordinary fact of our days. To build so many small, durable relationships that the strongman’s lever finds nothing to pry against. To refuse quietly, and then to discover, in refusing, that we were never actually alone. To laugh at what is ridiculous, which is almost all of it. To sing with people, because it is cheap and portable and an exercise in collective action that reminds us how beautiful and powerful we can be when we’re together.

There is no hierarchy of tactics where authoritarianism is concerned, but fear is the fulcrum. Find each other, and the lever stops working.

Technically, Heritage says there is no formal “Project 2026.” What they’ve released is a document called “Restoring America’s Promise,” a 2025–2026 policy agenda organized around nine priorities they’re calling Heritage 2.0. But whatever you call it, the plan is clear: finish what Project 2025 started, deepen the consolidation of authoritarian power, and use the 2026 midterms as a mandate to go further still. Project 2025 was the blueprint. Project 2026 is the construction phase of building the authoritarian infrastructure, brick by brick, while the pro-democracy sector is still catching its breath.

To understand what that construction looks like, you have to understand what Heritage is actually pushing for across its nine stated priorities and recognize that these are not independent policy proposals. They are components of a single, coordinated strategy.

The first priority is finishing what Heritage calls the dismantling of the “deep state” - the systematic replacement of career civil servants with political loyalists through the continuation of Schedule F, the executive order that reclassifies thousands of federal workers as political appointees who can be fired at will. The goal is a government that serves the president, not the public. The second priority, framed as putting “family first,” calls for restoring the nuclear family to the center of American life and reducing “the demand and supply for abortion at all stages of human development.” The language that children should be raised by a married “mother and father” directly targets same-sex marriage, LGBTQ+ family recognition, and reproductive rights. This is Christian nationalist family policy dressed in wholesome language.

“Education freedom” - Heritage’s third priority - supports dismantling the Department of Education and redirecting public school funding to private and religious institutions through voucher programs, while framing public education as corrupted by “woke ideas like critical race theory and radical gender ideology.” This is the language used to ban books, purge curricula, and silence teachers who discuss race, gender, or accurate history. The fourth priority, border security, expands the machinery of exclusion: more detention, more deportation, the legal structures that enable mass removal, and the framing of immigration as military invasion to make it into political cover for policies that separate families and terrorize communities.

Heritage’s fifth priority, winning the “new cold war” with China, calls for aggressive economic decoupling and a hardline military posture, framing that has enabled the administration to use national security justifications for tariffs devastating working families and small businesses, while concentrating economic power in the hands of loyalist oligarchs. The sixth priority, “energy dominance,” warns of an impending electricity shortage that only fossil fuel expansion can solve. This is not energy policy. It is a subsidy program for the fossil fuel industry framed as crisis response, with the added benefit of providing pretext for dismantling environmental regulations and withdrawing from international climate commitments.

Heritage’s economic agenda, its seventh priority, centers on deregulation and the framing of corporate freedom as worker freedom. In practice, this means weakening labor protections, dismantling consumer financial protections, and removing the guardrails that keep working people from being exploited by the same oligarchs bankrolling the authoritarian project. The eighth priority, countering “big tech,” frames antitrust enforcement as a remedy for the suppression of conservative speech. The goal is not democratic accountability for tech monopolies. It is the installation of loyalist control over the information infrastructure. And the ninth priority, strengthening national defense, supports military expansion and the use of military framing to justify domestic policy, including the “narcoterrorism” designation for cartels, which is being used to justify military intervention in Mexico and expanded domestic surveillance, blurring the line between foreign adversaries and domestic political opponents in ways that are characteristic of authoritarian consolidation.

Taken together, these nine priorities constitute a coherent program for dismantling the institutions, norms, and communities that could resist authoritarian power, and replacing them with a state that serves a narrow coalition of loyalists.

The consequences are already visible across three domains.

The first is institutional destruction. The federal civil service is being systematically replaced with political loyalists, and when that process is complete, there will be no independent bureaucratic check on executive power. The Department of Education, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the Centers for Disease Control, the National Institutes of Health, and other agencies are being defunded, gutted, or eliminated. The goal is not efficiency. It is the dismantling of the public institutions that working people depend on. The judiciary is being packed with loyalists at historic speed, and the administration is actively testing the limits of court authority, signaling that judicial review itself may be a target.

The second domain is community targeting. LGBTQ+ people, especially transgender people, are being systematically erased from public life: from schools, from military service, from healthcare, from legal recognition. Immigrant communities are living under a regime of terror, with families being separated and people being deported to countries they have never lived in. Communities of color are being targeted through the elimination of civil rights enforcement, the gutting of voting rights protections, and the erasure of accurate history from public education.

The third domain is democratic infrastructure. Ranked-choice voting is being targeted for elimination, not because it produces bad outcomes, but because it threatens the narrow coalition now holding power. The administration’s attacks on the press, on academic freedom, on nonprofit organizations, and on civil society more broadly are designed to eliminate the information infrastructure that makes democratic accountability possible. And the concentration of economic power in the hands of a small oligarchy is creating a structural advantage for the authoritarian coalition that will outlast any single election.

All of this is real. None of it is inevitable.

The authoritarian project is being pursued by a minority coalition that is already overextended, facing resistance on multiple fronts, and dependent on the compliance of institutions and individuals who have the power to refuse. Every pillar of support they rely on is a potential site of resistance, and several of those pillars are already showing cracks.

The administration’s speed and ambition are generating backlash from constituencies that are not traditionally aligned with the pro-democracy sector, including some business leaders, military and national security officials, and conservative legal scholars who understand what the dismantling of institutional norms means for their own interests. Polling consistently shows that even many Trump voters oppose specific elements of the agenda when presented concretely such as cuts to Medicaid, attacks on Social Security, and the elimination of public schools. The gap between the ideology and its consequences is a political opportunity, and the 2026 midterms represent a genuine inflection point. Authoritarian consolidation is rarely reversed through electoral means alone, but elections that demonstrate the breadth of democratic opposition shift the balance of forces and expand the space for noncooperation and resistance.

Institutional resistance, meanwhile, is real and consequential. Courts continue to issue rulings that constrain executive overreach. State and local governments are exercising their authority to refuse compliance with federal directives, creating a patchwork of democratic protection and demonstrating that institutional noncooperation is both possible and effective. Federal workers, educators, healthcare providers, and others inside the targeted institutions are refusing, resisting, and documenting. These are acts of individual and collective courage that are holding the line while broader resistance develops.

The scale of public mobilization has no precedent in recent American history. People who had never engaged in collective action are participating in protests, strikes, boycotts, and civil disobedience at historic rates. Cross-sector coordination is improving. Organizations that rarely worked together - racial justice groups, labor unions, disability rights advocates, faith communities, and libertarian-leaning civil libertarians - are finding common ground in democratic defense. The conditions for a broad noncooperation campaign are developing.

The authoritarian coalition itself is less stable than it appears. The oligarchs funding the project have competing interests. Trade wars are hurting the business community. The elimination of regulatory guardrails is creating legal liability, and the administration’s unpredictability is a business risk that some corporate actors will eventually decide outweighs the short-term benefits of complicity. Christian nationalist ideology and MAGA economic populism are in tension: a base that was promised economic relief is experiencing tariff-driven inflation and cuts to the programs they depend on. And internationally, the administration’s attacks on alliances and its embrace of authoritarian governments are alienating partners whose cooperation the administration needs for its own stated national security agenda.

So what can you do with all of this?

The question is not whether resistance is possible. History is full of examples of nonviolent movements that defeated authoritarian consolidation against longer odds than these. The question is whether we will build the coordination infrastructure that allows scattered resistance to become strategic, unified action.

Refuse normalization. The authoritarian project depends on people accepting the new reality as inevitable. It isn’t. Every time you name what is happening - clearly, accurately, and without euphemism - you are doing essential work. Authoritarianism normalizes through silence and euphemism. Counter it with clarity and truth.

Build relationships across difference. The pro-democracy coalition needs to be broader than the progressive left. That means building genuine relationships with people who are coming to democratic resistance from different starting points, including libertarians who care about government overreach, conservatives who are alarmed by the erosion of institutional norms, and business owners whose livelihoods are threatened by oligarchic consolidation. Find common ground without flattening differences.

Support coordination infrastructure. Individual acts of resistance matter enormously, but what turns individual resistance into strategic power is coordination - the networks, frameworks, and relationships that allow people to act together at scale and speed. The 22nd Century Initiative is building that infrastructure. So are dozens of partner organizations across the country. Support them.

Prepare for trigger moments. The authoritarian project will continue to generate crises. These are moments when public attention is high, when the stakes are clear, and when coordinated action can shift pillars of support. Prepare for those moments now. Know your organization, your network, and your community. Know what you are willing to do. The time to decide that is before the moment arrives, not during it.

The authoritarian project is a political program, not a force of nature. Political programs can be defeated. The work is building the power to defeat this one and that work is already underway.

If we are able to achieve a democratic breakthrough, we suffer the possibility of falling into the breakthrough trap. The breakthrough trap is, if we are able to topple this particular dictator but we don’t have a plan for democratic consolidation, the void this creates will either be filled by left wing authoritarianism - the desperate attempt to hold power against a more powerful force within the economy and in terms of infrastructure through purges, court packing, limiting democratic decision-making, and avenues for popular participation, etc. - or the other side will simply topple us and come back stronger having learned from us and what we did to topple them. This is a historical pattern so consistent as to be functionally like a rule.

I want to explain what I meant, and why it should reorganize how we think about what we are doing right now.

Two halves of one project

Movements that defeat authoritarian consolidation do two distinct kinds of work. They are easy to confuse, because they happen at the same time. They are also easy to collapse into one, because a movement that is doing one of them well can convince itself it is doing both. But they are different. They require different infrastructure, different leadership, different time horizons, and different theories of what victory looks like.

In the popular language of the movement people refer to this as “block and build.”

Block is the work of stopping the authoritarian project from completing its consolidation. It is the federal lawsuits against unlawful executive orders. The mass mobilizations on March 28 and the ones to come. The economic boycotts. The faith-based civil disobedience. The civil resistance that has filled the streets of Minneapolis. The general strike capacity emerging in the labor movement. The legislative pushback in Congress and the legal pushback in the courts. The Substack essays, the podcasts, the truthful, defiant journalism, and the institutional defense of universities and the press. Block is what most people picture when they picture pro-democracy work right now. It’s loud, it’s visible, it’s urgent, and it is essential.

Build is the work of constructing the institutional, economic, civic, and analytical infrastructure that a democracy actually requires to function, and that the country, in significant respects, has never fully had. Distributed economic power instead of oligarchic concentration. Civil rights enforcement architecture as the operating system of pluralism. Mass-membership civic institutions in the places they have been hollowed out. A multi-racial governing coalition with positive content rather than only negation. Workers’ power. Public institutions adequate to the public’s needs. Build is what most people don’t picture when they picture pro-democracy work because it is slower, less visible, and not catalytic in the way block is. It doesn’t produce viral news stories or popular memes.

Block prevents the worst from happening. Build makes possible the better that comes next.

A movement that only blocks can win the immediate fight and lose the long one. A movement that only builds cannot survive the immediate fight long enough to see the long one. Both are required. The question that determines whether we win or lose this round of American democratic struggle is whether the movement we are now building is integrating block and build as one project or as two.

What goes wrong when we only block

Block-only is the more common failure mode in movements like ours, for understandable reasons. Block is responding to an emergency, and emergencies command attention. Block has clear opponents, clear targets, clear metrics. The dictator either falls or doesn’t. The bill either passes or doesn’t. The federal raid either succeeds or is met with effective resistance. The success of block work is legible in a way the success of build work is not.

But a movement that defeats an authoritarian regime without having built the substantive infrastructure that consolidation requires walks into what we have been calling the breakthrough trap. And the breakthrough trap, I want to be clear, is not theoretical. It is one of the most consistent patterns in modern democratic history.

Hungary in 1989 - a peaceful, constitutional, internationally celebrated democratic transition - collapsed within twenty years into Orbán’s competitive authoritarianism. Why? Because the 1989 transition negotiated procedural democracy without redistributing the underlying concentrations of economic power that incentivizes and facilitates authoritarianism, and without building civic infrastructure adequate to defend what had been won.

Reconstruction in the United States after 1865 - a constitutional revolution that abolished slavery and established multiracial citizenship collapsed within thirty years into Jim Crow and the disenfranchisement of Black voters across the South, and for substantially the same reasons.

The pattern repeats. Russia in the 1990s. Brazil through several cycles.

When the breakthrough trap closes around a movement, it closes through one of two doors. The first is that the movement, having defeated the immediate authoritarian threat without building the infrastructure to sustain its victory, finds itself trying to hold power against the same concentrations that produced the authoritarian moment in the first place. Capital is still concentrated. The media is still concentrated. The judicial and bureaucratic apparatus the previous regime built is still in place. The opposition is regrouping, often more sophisticated than before, having studied what defeated it. And the movement, lacking the institutional capacity to govern from a positive program, reaches for the only tools available to a coalition that is structurally weaker than the forces arrayed against it: purges of the opposition, packing of the courts, restrictions on civic participation, emergency powers that outlive the emergency, the silencing of internal dissent on the grounds that the threat is too urgent to permit disagreement. This is what I mean by left-wing authoritarianism. It is not what anyone in the movement wants. It is what desperation produces when victory comes without infrastructure adequate to sustain it. And it discredits the movement morally and politically in ways that create the conditions for its replacement, often by something even worse.

The second door is more direct. The movement defeats the immediate threat, fails to build the consolidation infrastructure necessary for democratic governance, and the right-wing authoritarian movement, which has been studying what defeated it, comes back stronger. It comes back having understood the failure modes of the breakthrough. It comes back having built better institutions of its own during its time in opposition. It comes back with new oligarchic alliances, new media infrastructure, new analytical frameworks for state capture. And it captures what the breakthrough left in place. This is Hungary. This is the post-Reconstruction South. This is, in significant respects, what the second Trump administration is to the first - a return, more sophisticated, after a movement that defeated the first round did not build the consolidation infrastructure to keep the door closed.

Both doors close around the same kind of movement: the movement that blocked authoritarian consolidation well, but failed to prepare to build democracy.

What goes wrong when we only build

The opposite failure mode is rarer, but worth naming. A movement that focuses on long-term institutional construction - on cooperative economy, civic infrastructure, and educational and cultural transformation - without engaging the immediate authoritarian threat doesn’t build durable institutions either. It builds them in a context that consolidates around them, captures them, or destroys them before they can mature. You can’t build pluralist civic infrastructure in a country that’s consolidating into authoritarianism. You also can’t build distributed economic power in an economy whose rules are being rewritten in real time by an oligarchic state. Moreover, you can’t build an effective multi-racial governing coalition while the institutions you would govern through are being captured by a movement organized to destroy them.

This was the structural error of significant parts of the American left in the 1990s and 2000s - the assumption that institutional construction could proceed at its own pace because the formal democratic framework was secure. The framework was not secure. The construction did not survive the reaction.

Build without block is, in a different way, a setup for the breakthrough trap. The infrastructure being built gets dismantled before it can stabilize. The slow institutional work is overrun by the fast political work the movement neglected.

What block and build together actually requires

I want to be careful here. I am not arguing that every organizer needs to do both. I am arguing that the movement, as a whole, needs to be doing both, in coordinated relationship, in a way that the field is currently not yet doing well but can. It has the expertise, but deploying that expertise needs to be prioritized.

Specifically:

The movement needs to treat block and build as one strategy, not two parallel tracks. The civil resistance training that is now being scaled up needs to include analytical content about distributed power. The economic redistribution work needs to be in conversation with the civil resistance work, not in a separate funder portfolio. The civil rights infrastructure needs to be defended as load-bearing for both block (because civil rights enforcement is what protects targeted communities from immediate authoritarian harm) and build (because civil rights infrastructure is the operating system of any pluralist democracy that consolidates).

The communities that are best at build - the ones that have been doing distributed civic life, mutual aid, cooperative economy, and democratic practice from below for generations because formal democracy did not extend to them - need to be at the center of the block work, not adjacent to it. The Black Southern organizing tradition, indigenous sovereignty practice, disability rights movement infrastructure, immigrant community mutual aid, Latino farmworker organizing are American traditions with deep roots. The build is happening already, in the places that have always had to do it. The question is whether the block work knits itself into those traditions, which is what we need, or operates in parallel with them.

We need to stop sorting block and build into separate program areas. Democracy work and racial justice work and economic justice work are, structurally, the same work seen from three angles. The funding architecture that currently keeps them in separate portfolios is reinforcing the parallel-track problem rather than dissolving it and needs, to the extent possible, to be pointed at greater integration through field mapping, convening across tracks, and investing in the research and planning necessary to prepare for a democratic breakthrough.

And the movement needs to be honest with itself about where it currently is. Block work is roughly where it needs to be, scaling fast, with the retiree turn making mass mobilization at threshold-level numbers genuinely possible for the first time in decades. Build work is far behind. The infrastructure for democratic consolidation - the cooperative economy, the civic institutions, the multi-racial governing coalition with positive content - is in much earlier stages. The risk is that we win the block round and have no build round to follow it with. That is the breakthrough trap, named in operational terms.

The work this moment is asking of us

What the moment is asking of us is harder than what either block-only or build-only would ask. It is asking us to fight the immediate fight while building the long infrastructure, with the same coalition, in coordinated relationship, with the discipline to hold both time horizons at once.

Movements that have done this, including Brazil’s Workers’ Party in its strongest periods, Portugal’s Carnation Revolution, South Korea’s candlelight movement followed by the post-Park institutional reforms, and parts of the post-apartheid South African transition produce consolidation. Movements that have failed to do this, however heroic their block work, produce a window in which the authoritarian project comes back stronger. The pattern is, again, consistent enough to be almost a rule.

Block is necessary. Block is not sufficient.

Build is necessary. Build is not sufficient.

Block plus build, held as one project, in coalitions that include the communities concentrated power excluded, with the discipline to hold both time horizons across the years it will take, that is what the breakthrough requires to consolidate.

And consolidation, not breakthrough alone, is what we are trying to win. Don’t short change yourself. Breakthrough is not enough. Ask for more.

This is a strange situation, and I think it deserves more attention than it gets. The word pluralism appears in democracy discourse roughly the way the word “sustainability” appears in corporate marketing - ubiquitously, approvingly, and without reference to any specific practice that would make the thing it names real. We invoke pluralism the way a person in a long illness invokes health: as a word for the condition we would like to be in, decoupled from any plan for actually getting there.

I want to argue that this is not a vocabulary problem. It’s a design problem. A pluralistic democracy is not a state of mind or a cultural attitude. It is a specific kind of political infrastructure, and we’ve been failing to build it for so long that most Americans no longer know what it is supposed to look like.

Here’s what I mean. Oregon, where I live, is a useful illustration. More than half the state’s voters live in and around Portland, which is racially diverse and politically liberal; the rest of the state is largely rural, overwhelmingly white, and politically conservative. Portland’s electorate shapes statewide outcomes by sheer math, and its elected officials - mayor, council, legislators, much of the congressional delegation - are almost without exception liberal Democrats or social democrats. That majority is real, and it’s entitled to govern. But consider what the majority produces when filtered through a two-party, single-member-district system.

If you live in almost any rural Oregon county, you’re represented by Republican conservatives at the county level and effectively unrepresented at the state level, because the statewide coalition is assembled without you. The only meaningful political voice you have stops at the county line. That’s alienating on its own terms, and it’s also the ground in which something more dangerous grows. When the only representation you can access tracks hard to the right - toward the Posse Comitatus (power of the county separatism) ideology and anti-federal county-supremacy politics the Bundy family trades in - the system has effectively sorted reasonable rural conservatives into the same political home as its most reactionary elements. Alienation plus no exit produces radicalization. And if you’re a conservative Republican in Portland, the mirror image applies: no local representation, often no candidate who represents your actual views, and no path to being heard inside city limits.

Both experiences are failures of pluralism, and neither is solved by either side winning harder. The system itself can’t hold these perspectives in productive relationship, which means the disagreement metastasizes into resentment, alienation, and the radical-flank politics that feeds authoritarianism on both ends. A pluralistic system would give each constituency a real political home from which to act, and coalitions would form issue by issue across those homes. Ours does not.

The authoritarian project on offer in this country is one answer to the question of how a society organizes disagreement. Its answer is that disagreement should be eliminated - that there should be one nation, one people, one party, one truth, one leader, and that pluralism itself is a weakness to be overcome. That answer is coherent, attractive to a frightened population, and currently on track to win unless something different is built.

The something different is pluralism, actually built. Not as a slogan. As an infrastructure.

The category error

Most American political conversation takes place inside a frame where politics is fundamentally one-dimensional. There is a left and a right. Every issue is located somewhere on that spectrum. Every person is a point on the line. The question is always where on the line you stand, and the options are always some version of closer to left, closer to right, or somewhere in the middle.

This frame is so pervasive that most of us treat it as natural. But it’s not natural. It’s, in fact, the product of specific institutional arrangements, principally first-past-the-post elections in single-member districts, which, as a French sociologist named Maurice Duverger noticed in the 1950s, reliably produce two-party systems over time. Two-party systems, in turn, reliably produce one-dimensional politics, because two coalitions competing for fifty-percent-plus-one have to bundle positions into coherent packages and sell those packages as take-it-or-leave-it deals.

The result is a politics in which every disagreement is forced into the same binary. You cannot be, in American electoral politics, economically egalitarian and culturally traditional. You also can’t be environmentally protective and skeptical of regulation, and you can’t be pro-family and pro-immigrant without specifying which party’s version of pro-family and pro-immigrant you mean. The bundles are the options. You take a bundle or you don’t participate.

This isn’t pluralism. This is its opposite. A pluralistic society is one whose political system is capable of running on multiple axes at once, so that different issues mobilize different coalitions, no single cleavage dominates indefinitely, and the ruling coalition on any given question can vary depending on the question.

Most of the democracies we admire run this way. A functioning parliamentary democracy will have a cluster of parties that align differently on economics than they do on immigration, and than they do on climate, and than they do on cultural questions. Coalitions form issue by issue. The government is a coalition, and the coalition shifts as issues shift. Disagreement doesn’t accumulate into a single overheated binary, because there are multiple axes for it to distribute across.

This is what we don’t have. And it’s not an accident. We’ve been institutionally prevented from having it.

What pluralism actually is

Let me offer a definition, because the word is used so loosely that it has nearly lost its meaning.

Pluralism is a political condition in which multiple, distinct, organized, and irreducible perspectives coexist in the same society with enough institutional scaffolding that their disagreements are productive rather than destructive. Four things are load-bearing in that definition. Let me take them one at a time.

Multiple. Not two. Two is a duopoly, not pluralism. A pluralistic society has more than two significant organized political formations, because the alternative is binary competition, and binary competition collapses all disagreements into the same axis.

Distinct. Not variations on a single theme. The formations have to have actually different analyses of what’s wrong and what should be done. A pluralism of brands is not pluralism.

Organized. Not just present as individual sentiments. The perspectives have to have institutional form - parties, unions, congregations, civic associations, movements - through which they can act in public life. An unorganized opinion is not a political actor.

Irreducible. Not reducible to some deeper single thing. A pluralism in which every disagreement turns out, on closer inspection, to be a proxy for the master disagreement, is a one-axis politics in disguise. Genuine pluralism means that some of what people disagree about is not further decomposable.

All four of these are conditions that have to be produced. None of them is automatic. None of them is stable. Each of them requires infrastructure.

The infrastructure, named

Three kinds of infrastructure produce and sustain pluralism. I want to name each, because the naming helps make clear why we are currently failing to build any of them at the scale required.

Rules infrastructure. This is the electoral and institutional rules that determine what political formations can exist at all. Proportional representation, multi-member districts, ranked-choice voting, fusion voting, public financing, lowered ballot access thresholds, and, in the American case, the gradual dismantling of counter-majoritarian veto points that currently allow a minority faction to govern against the preferences of the majority. These rules determine whether a new political formation can enter public life or is structurally prevented from doing so. Under current American rules, the answer is overwhelmingly prevented. The rules don’t permit what they do not permit.

Coalition infrastructure. This is the organized civic institutions through which distinct perspectives maintain themselves as ongoing political actors. Parties, of course, but also unions, faith networks, small business associations, farmer cooperatives, tenant unions, professional associations, immigrant mutual aid networks, neighborhood institutions, and the dense fabric of civic life that Alexis de Tocqueville once described as the defining American feature. This fabric has been thinning for half a century, under pressure from economic concentration, cultural individualism, geographic sorting, and active political suppression, often justified on racist premises. Without it, people can’t participate in public life except as individuals, and individuals cannot sustain pluralism. Only organized collectives can.

Relational infrastructure. This is the habits, dispositions, and trained capacities that allow people who disagree to remain in working relationship across their disagreements. This is the least tangible of the three and the most critical. It’s not cultivated by reading essays. It’s cultivated by doing politics, together, over time, with people whose views differ from yours, in institutions that make the working-through of disagreement part of the work itself. Labor organizers know this. Good faith community leaders know this. Movement trainers know this. Political scientists generally do not know this, because it’s craft rather than literature. It’s also the piece that no rules change can produce by itself. A proportional electoral system in a country of atomized individuals who don’t know how to disagree productively is still going to fail. The relational infrastructure has to exist alongside the rules.

All three are necessary. None alone is sufficient.

Why the authoritarian project is winning against this

The authoritarian project has an advantage, both rhetorical and organizational, that pluralism doesn’t have. It offers coherence. It says: one people, one truth, one leader. It doesn’t have to hold together multiple axes. It collapses them, deliberately, into a single axis of belonging versus not belonging. That collapse is its entire political technology. Everything the project does - its demonization of immigrants, its attacks on universities and science, its targeting of LGBTQ people, its capture of the courts, and its theatrics of strength - is in service of producing a single-axis politics in which the only question is whose side you are on.

Pluralism can’t answer this with its own slogan, because pluralism is by definition not a slogan. It’s the messy practice of holding together things that don’t naturally cohere. Its coherence comes from work, not from branding.

This is why the American response to authoritarianism has struggled to articulate itself. The movement against the current regime has a lot of the components of a pluralistic response, but it has not assembled them into an infrastructure that can hold. It has the civic energy of Indivisible chapters and faith coalitions and union halls and neighborhood block captains. It has organized labor, organized faith communities, organized immigrant networks, organized civil rights organizations. It has, in certain places, genuine cross-partisan organizing on specific issues. What it does not have, yet, is the sense of itself as a deliberate project of building pluralistic political infrastructure - the rules, the coalitions, the relationships - that will outlast the current crisis and govern what comes after.

That absence is the strategic gap. Authoritarianism has a project. Anti-authoritarianism has a reaction. Pluralism is what a project for anti-authoritarianism would look like. We have not yet assembled it.

The bottom-up qualifier

One more thing, because it matters.

The infrastructure I am describing can very much not be built top-down. It can’t be built by a coordinating center, a lead organization, a single funder strategy, or a party committee. Pluralism built from a center stops being pluralism, by definition, because a center would have to decide which perspectives count. A pluralistic politics has to emerge from the organized activity of multiple distinct actors who are not coordinated and who do not want to be coordinated.

This is what bottom-up means, structurally. Not the absence of leadership, but the presence of many leaderships. Not the rejection of strategy, but the coexistence of different strategies that share a commitment to the rules of the game and the relationships that make it workable.

The infrastructure, in practice, looks like a thousand small organizations getting better at working with each other without needing to agree on everything. It looks like unions and small business associations finding a common cause on anti-monopoly without requiring either to adopt the other’s politics on immigration. It looks like urban progressives and rural conservatives building cross-partisan electoral reform campaigns without pretending their cultural differences will disappear. It looks like faith communities hosting the conversations that secular organizers can’t host, and secular organizers running the campaigns that faith communities can’t run, and each understanding that they need each other without becoming each other.

This is slow work. It is relational work. It doesn’t produce the rapid coherence of authoritarian politics. Its strength is different, and longer-lasting. Authoritarianism, once it cracks, collapses quickly, because its coherence is imposed and has no organic support. Pluralism, once it is built, is nearly impossible to dismantle, because its coherence is woven into thousands of horizontal relationships that no central actor can reach.

The long history of democracy is, in this sense, the history of that weaving. The periods when it was undone were periods when the weaving stopped. The work we’re being asked to do now is the work of resuming the weaving, on purpose, at scale, as a deliberate infrastructure project.

The call

If you are organizing right now, I want to suggest that the question to carry into your next meeting is not only what are we building that will hold eighteen months after breakthrough, though that question still matters. It is also this: are we building toward pluralism or away from it?

A movement that builds toward pluralism is a movement that deepens its relationships with formations unlike itself, that works across cleavages rather than within a single one, that contributes to rules changes that create room for more political life rather than less, and that treats the cultivation of cross-axis relational capacity as part of the work rather than a distraction from it.

A movement that builds away from pluralism is a movement that sharpens its own internal coherence at the expense of its reach, treats other formations as competitors rather than potential coalition partners, defers rules change as a technical matter, and collapses its politics into whichever single axis feels most urgent in the moment.

Both kinds of movement exist in the current American landscape. The difference between them will decide whether the post-authoritarian period produces a consolidated pluralistic democracy or a restoration that sets up the next authoritarian cycle.

Pluralism is not a feeling. Pluralism is an infrastructure. It has rules, it has coalitions, and it has relationships, and each of these has to be deliberately built, by specific people, in specific places, at a specific scale, over a specific period of time.

The people are available. The places are everywhere. The scale is national. The period is now.

Let’s begin.

Why These Songs Matter

Every movement that has ever won has had its music.

This is not a coincidence, and it’s not decoration. Music is infrastructure. It does things that speeches can’t do, that strategy documents can’t do, that even the most brilliant organizing cannot do on its own. A song can hold a room of strangers together in a single breath. It can carry a message past censors who can’t arrest a melody. It can encode defiance in a form that looks, to the uninitiated, like entertainment. It can travel across borders and languages and generations, arriving intact in places the singer never imagined.

Authoritarian regimes understand this. That’s why they target music early and consistently; banning songs, jailing musicians, shutting down concerts, defunding the arts. They know what we sometimes forget: that the capacity of a population to make meaning together, to name what is happening, to sustain hope and moral clarity under pressure, is itself a condition of democracy. Destroy it, and you’ve done half the work of destroying democracy itself.

The songs gathered here aren’t a playlist. They’re a collection of stories about what music did in specific places, at specific moments, for specific people fighting for their freedom. Some of these songs are famous. Some you have probably never heard. All of them changed something. They gave people a way to say what couldn’t be safely spoken, a way to find each other in the dark, a way to keep going when every rational calculation said to stop.

I’m sharing them one at a time because each one deserves your attention, not just as a song to listen to, but as a story to learn from. Every resistance movement we will ever build needs its music. The question is whether we understand why.

Songs of Collective Refusal

Kaulana Nā Pua

Eleanor Kekoaohiwaikalani Wright Prendergast - Hawai’i, 1893

In January 1893, a group of American businessmen, mostly descendants of missionaries, overthrew Queen Lili‘uokalani and the Hawaiian Kingdom, backed by 160 armed U.S. Marines who had come ashore from the USS Boston. The Queen yielded her authority temporarily to avoid bloodshed, directing her protest not to the conspirators but to the United States government itself. She expected justice. It would not come.

The new Provisional Government moved quickly to consolidate power. They declared martial law, silenced newspapers, and then took a step that would seem minor on paper but was devastating in practice: they required every government employee, from cabinet ministers to teachers to mail carriers to police officers, to sign an oath of allegiance to the new regime. If you would not forswear your Queen, you lost your livelihood.

Among those employees were the members of the Royal Hawaiian Band. Since 1836, the Band had represented the Hawaiian nation. Now its musicians faced a choice: sign the oath or lose everything. They refused. Every one of them walked away from their jobs rather than deny their Queen’s right to rule.

The bandleader, Ellen Kekoaohiwaikalani Wright Prendergast, a friend and lady-in-waiting of Queen Lili‘uokalani, wrote them a song. She called it Kaulana Nā Pua-“Famous Are the Flowers.” In Hawaiian, pua means both “flowers” and “children.” The song spoke of the children of Hawai’i standing loyal to their land, refusing to sign the document of the enemy, valuing the rocks of their homeland over the government’s money. Its most famous line gave the song its other name, Mele ‘Ai Pōhaku - the Stone-Eating Song: we would rather eat stones than accept your bribe.

The song spread through the Hawaiian-language newspapers. It was sung at gatherings, at protests, and in homes. It was considered sacred - not for dancing, but for solemn standing performances by master hula dancers in black holokū, using only their hands to interpret the words. And it did something that no political pamphlet could have done: it made the refusal collective. It was not just the Band members who had refused the oath. Now anyone who sang the song was refusing too.

Five years later, when the United States moved toward formal annexation, the Kū‘ē Anti-Annexation Petitions were signed by the vast majority of the Native Hawaiian population and presented to the U.S. Senate, where they succeeded in blocking the annexation treaty. The spirit that produced those petitions was the same spirit Prendergast had given a melody - the organized, dignified, unyielding refusal of a people who chose stones over surrender.

Today, Kaulana Nā Pua remains central to the Hawaiian sovereignty movement. Most non-Hawaiian-speaking listeners who hear its beautiful melody have no idea they are listening to one of the most profound acts of musical resistance in history. That’s part of its power: to the ear of the colonizer, it sounds like a lovely island song. To those who understand the words, it is a declaration of war waged entirely in dignity.

To read the lyrics in English and Hawaiian, go here. To listen to the song in the Hawaiian language, go here.

____________________________________________________________________________

Grandola, Vila Morena

Jose Afonso - Portugal, 1971 (broadcast 1974)

For forty-eight years, Portugal lived under the Estado Novo, one of the longest-running fascist dictatorships in Europe. By the early 1970s, the regime was spending forty percent of the national budget on colonial wars in Africa, censoring the press, and jailing dissidents. The secret police, the PIDE, were everywhere.

Jose Afonso, known as Zeca, was a folk singer-songwriter whose political songs had made him a target. Many of his compositions were banned from the radio. But in 1971, he wrote a song about a small town in the Alentejo region called Grândola, a song about fraternity among working people, sung a cappella in the style of cante alentejano, the traditional polyphonic singing of the region. The censors, apparently, did not consider a song about a friendly town to be subversive. They let it pass.

On March 29, 1974, Afonso performed the song at a concert at the Coliseu dos Recreios, one of Lisbon’s largest concert halls. The audience sang along with such fervor that government agents in attendance noted the intensity in their reports. Sitting in that audience, unknown to the agents, were several of the young military officers who were planning what would come next.

The Armed Forces Movement - the MFA - was a group of left-leaning officers who had decided to overthrow the dictatorship. They needed a signal that could be broadcast nationwide by radio, telling every MFA unit in the country to move simultaneously. The chief strategist, Otelo Saraiva de Carvalho, chose two songs. The first - a Eurovision pop ballad - was the preliminary alert, broadcast at 10:55 PM on April 24, 1974. The second signal, the one that meant go, came at 12:20 AM on April 25, when Radio Renascca played Grandola, Vila Morena.

A song about fraternity, broadcast on a Catholic radio station in the middle of the night, started a revolution.

Within hours, MFA units had occupied strategic points across Lisbon. The dictator’s prime minister fled to the secret police headquarters. The population poured into the streets. Civilians placed red carnations in the barrels of the soldiers’ guns giving the uprising its name: the Carnation Revolution. By afternoon, the regime had fallen. It was nearly bloodless.

Grandola, Vila Morena became the anthem of Portuguese democracy. It is still sung every year on April 25. In 2013, when Portugal was suffering under austerity, protesters in the public galleries of Parliament interrupted the prime minister by singing it; a reminder that the song’s promise of fraternity and popular power was not a historical artifact but a living demand. No song in modern history has more literally started a revolution.

To hear the song with English subtitles, go here.

____________________________________________________________________________

Bella Ciao

Italian partisan song - Italy, c. 1943–1945

The origins of Bella Ciao are debated - it may have roots in the rice paddy workers’ songs of the Po Valley, or in earlier folk melodies. What’s not debated is what it became: the song of the Italian partisans who fought against Mussolini’s fascist republic and the Nazi occupation during World War II.

The song tells a simple story. A partisan wakes one morning, finds the invader at his door, says goodbye to his beloved, and asks that if he dies fighting, he be buried under a flower in the mountains so that those who pass by will see the flower and say, “This is the flower of the partisan who died for freedom.”

What has made Bella Ciao extraordinary is not its Italian history but its global afterlife. It’s been adopted by resistance movements on every continent - from anti-fascist demonstrations in Greece and Turkey to labor strikes in South America to pro-democracy protests in Hong Kong. Its melody is simple enough to sing without rehearsal, its message universal enough to fit any struggle against tyranny. It’s become the closest thing the world has to a common anthem of resistance, proof that a song written for one fight can belong to all of them.

To hear the song with English lyrics, go here.

____________________________________________________________________________

Which Side Are You On?

Florence Reece - Harlan County, Kentucky, 1931

In 1931, the coal miners of Harlan County, Kentucky, were trying to organize a union. The coal companies responded with their standard toolkit: private armies, evictions, intimidation, and murder. The county sheriff, J.H. Blair, was on the companies’ payroll. His deputies, armed thugs, raided the homes of union families, searching for weapons and union literature, terrorizing wives and children.

One night, the deputies came to the home of Sam Reece, a union organizer. Sam wasn’t there. They ransacked the house while his wife Florence and their children watched. After they left, Florence Reece tore a sheet from a wall calendar and wrote a song on the back of it. The question was simple and total: Which side are you on?

The song compressed the entire labor struggle into a binary that allowed no evasion. There were no neutral positions. The bosses and their thugs were on one side; the workers and their families were on the other. Florence Reece had no musical training. She set the words to an old Baptist hymn tune that everyone already knew. The song could be learned in minutes and sung by anyone.

It became one of the foundational songs of the American labor movement, and later was adopted by the civil rights movement, the anti-war movement, and every subsequent struggle where the question of solidarity demanded a clear answer. Pete Seeger, Natalie Merchant, Billy Bragg, Ani DiFranco, and dozens of others have recorded it. But its power was never in the recording. Its power was in the fact that a woman whose home had just been violated by armed men sat down and wrote something that millions of people would be singing nearly a century later. Some songs are composed. This one was torn from someone’s life.

To listen to this song, go here.

____________________________________________________________________________

Die Gedanken Sind Frei

German folk song - origins dating to at least the 13th century

The oldest known version of this text dates to a manuscript from roughly 1229. The melody most commonly sung today emerged in the early nineteenth century, during the period of political repression that followed the Napoleonic Wars. The words are deceptively simple: “Thoughts are free. Who can guess them? They fly by like shadows in the night. No one can know them, no hunter can shoot them. It remains true: thoughts are free.”

The song has been sung by political prisoners across nearly eight centuries of German history - during the 1848 revolutions, under Bismarck’s anti-socialist laws, and in the concentration camps of the Third Reich. Sophie Scholl, the young member of the White Rose resistance who was executed by the Nazis in 1943, reportedly sang it to her father through the walls of her prison cell on the night before her death.

Regimes can imprison bodies, ban books, burn libraries, and silence speech, but they cannot reach inside a human mind and extinguish what a person thinks. The song doesn’t promise victory. It promises something more fundamental: that the inner life of a free person is a territory no tyrant can occupy. For nearly eight hundred years, people in cages have found that worth singing about.

To listen to the song with English lyrics, go here.

____________________________________________________________________________

Solidarity Forever

Ralph Chaplin - United States, 1915

Ralph Chaplin was a labor organizer, artist, and member of the Industrial Workers of the World - the Wobblies - when he wrote Solidarity Forever in 1915. He set it to the tune of the Battle Hymn of the Republic, which meant every American already knew the melody. The song made one argument: that the power of working people, when organized collectively, is greater than any force their bosses can muster. “In our hands is placed a power greater than their hoarded gold, greater than the might of armies magnified a thousandfold.”

The song became the anthem of the American labor movement for the next century - sung on picket lines, at union halls, and at marches. It was deliberately composed to be a unifying song, one that could hold together the IWW’s wildly diverse membership of immigrant workers, native-born laborers, Black and white, skilled and unskilled. The melody did half the work: people already knew how to sing it. The lyrics did the rest: reminding people that what they built together could not be defeated alone.

To listen to the song, go here.

____________________________________________________________________________

Songs of the Black Freedom Movement

No movement in American history understood the power of music as deeply as the Black freedom movement. Songs weren’t accompaniments to the struggle; they were the struggle’s circulatory system - the mechanism by which courage, solidarity, and strategic discipline moved through a community under siege. In mass meetings, in jail cells, on marches into the teeth of police violence, the singing never stopped. It was not optional. It was infrastructure.

To hear the songs, click on the links.

This Little Light of Mine

Gospel song, popularized in the movement by Fannie Lou Hamer - Mississippi, 1960s

Fannie Lou Hamer was a sharecropper from Ruleville, Mississippi, who became one of the most powerful voices of the civil rights movement. She had been beaten nearly to death in a Winona, Mississippi jail for the crime of trying to register to vote. She walked with a limp for the rest of her life. She suffered permanent kidney damage. And she sang.

This Little Light of Mine was a children’s Sunday school song before Hamer got hold of it. In her voice, in the mass meetings of the Mississippi movement, it became something else entirely. It became an act of defiance - a declaration that the light inside you, the light of your dignity and your determination, was not something any sheriff or registrar or Klansman could extinguish. Hamer would lead this song in rooms full of people who’d been terrorized, people who had every reason to be afraid, and by the time the room was singing together, the fear had been transformed into something the opposition could not defeat.

That’s what music does that nothing else can. It doesn’t argue people out of their fear. It gives them something to do with their bodies - their breath, their voices, their physical presence in a room - that makes the fear smaller than the collective sound they’re producing together. Fannie Lou Hamer understood this in her bones.

____________________________________________________________________________

Oh Freedom

African American spiritual, adapted as civil rights anthem - 1950s–1960s

Oh Freedom is one of the oldest songs in the Black freedom tradition, with roots reaching back to the spirituals of enslaved people. Its central declaration is absolute: “Oh freedom, oh freedom, oh freedom over me. And before I’d be a slave, I’d be buried in my grave, and go home to my Lord and be free.”

That line is not a metaphor. It is a statement of priority: freedom is worth more than life itself. Enslaved people sang it knowing exactly what they meant. Civil rights marchers sang it in the same spirit, walking into violence, knowing they might not walk out, choosing to go anyway because the alternative was to remain unfree. The song has survived because the choice it describes has never stopped being relevant.

____________________________________________________________________________

Ain’t Gonna Let Nobody Turn Me Around

Albany Movement - Albany, Georgia, 1962

The Albany Movement of 1961–1962 was one of the first large-scale community-wide civil rights campaigns in the Deep South, and it was where the movement learned some of its most important lessons about singing. The campaign faced enormous repression - mass arrests, jail overcrowding, and police violence - yet the singing in Albany was constant and fierce.

Ain’t Gonna Let Nobody Turn Me Around was adapted from an older spiritual and became a signature song of the Albany Movement. Its structure made it a perfect protest song: the form was call-and-response, the melody was simple, and the lyrics could be improvised on the spot. “Ain’t gonna let nobody turn me around” - then you insert whoever was trying to turn you around. The sheriff. The governor. The Klan. Segregation. The singer could name the specific oppressor standing in front of them at that specific moment and fold them into the song. It was strategic communication disguised as singing.

____________________________________________________________________________

A Change Is Gonna Come

Sam Cooke - United States, 1964

Sam Cooke was the most successful Black pop singer in America when he wrote this song. He was also a man who had been turned away from a whites-only motel in Shreveport, Louisiana, and arrested for disturbing the peace when he protested. He’d heard Bob Dylan’s Blowin’ in the Wind and been moved by it, but also stung that a white songwriter had written the anthem of Black struggle. So he wrote his own.

A Change Is Gonna Come is not a protest song in the way that Which Side Are You On is a protest song. It doesn’t demand. It testifies. It says: I was born by the river, I’ve been running ever since, it’s been too hard living but I’m afraid to die, because I don’t know what’s up there beyond the sky. And then, out of that weariness and that fear, the declaration: it’s been a long time coming, but I know a change is gonna come.

Cooke was shot and killed in December 1964, three months before the song was released as a single. He never saw it become what it became: one of the most important recordings in American music, a song that gave the movement not a battle cry but something equally essential - permission to be exhausted and still keep believing.

____________________________________________________________________________

Strange Fruit

Abel Meeropol (poem), recorded by Billie Holiday - United States, 1939

Abel Meeropol was a Jewish schoolteacher from the Bronx who wrote a poem after seeing a photograph of a lynching. He called it Strange Fruit. The poem described Black bodies hanging from Southern trees as a grotesque harvest - “pastoral scene of the gallant South” - with an unflinching specificity designed to make it impossible for anyone to look away.

Billie Holiday first performed the song at Café Society in Greenwich Village in 1939. The club would go dark. A single spotlight would find Holiday’s face. She would sing. When she finished, the light would go out. There was no encore. The song was effectively banned from radio for years. Holiday was harassed by the Federal Bureau of Narcotics, and some historians believe the persecution was connected to her refusal to stop performing it.

Strange Fruit matters because it did something that the civil rights movement would later do systematically: it forced white Americans to see what they had been choosing not to see. The song didn’t ask for sympathy. It described an atrocity with such precision that denial became harder to sustain. Music can do this - it can carry truth past the defenses that people erect against information they do not want to receive. You can choose not to read an article. It is harder to choose not to hear a song that is already inside you.

____________________________________________________________________________

Lift Every Voice and Sing

James Weldon Johnson (lyrics), J. Rosamond Johnson (music) - United States, 1900

James Weldon Johnson wrote the poem in 1900 to celebrate Lincoln’s birthday. His brother J. Rosamond Johnson set it to music. It was first performed by a choir of five hundred schoolchildren in Jacksonville, Florida. Over the next two decades, it became so widely sung in Black churches, schools, and civic gatherings that the NAACP adopted it as the “Black National Anthem” in 1919.

The song moves through three verses that trace the arc of Black history in America - from the darkness of slavery through the long struggle for freedom to a statement of hope grounded in faith and determination. It’s not a protest song. It’s something older and, in some ways, more powerful: a song of collective identity, a reminder to a people that they have a past, a present, and a future, and that these are connected by an unbroken thread of survival and resistance. Movements need songs like this; songs that don’t fight the enemy but remind the community of who it is.

____________________________________________________________________________

Songs from International Democracy Movements

El Pueblo Unido Jamás Será Vencido

Sergio Ortega, performed by Quilapayún - Chile, 1973

The song was written and first performed in the final months of Salvador Allende’s democratic socialist government in Chile, as right-wing forces backed by the CIA were closing in. On September 11, 1973, General Augusto Pinochet launched the coup that killed Allende and began seventeen years of military dictatorship. Members of Quilapayún, the ensemble that had popularized the song, were in exile in France. They could not go home.

In exile, the song became the anthem of resistance to Pinochet and then it kept traveling. It was adopted by anti-apartheid activists in South Africa, Solidarity supporters in Poland, pro-democracy movements in East Germany, and protesters on every continent. The title makes the argument in seven words: the people, united, will never be defeated. It’s the simplest possible statement of the strategic logic behind collective action, set to a melody so stirring that people who don’t speak a word of Spanish sing it in the original.

The song outlived Pinochet. It outlived the Cold War. It’s still being sung at protests today, proof that a song created for one country’s struggle can become the shared property of every struggle for self-determination on earth.

For the English lyrics, go here.

____________________________________________________________________________

Nkosi Sikelel’ iAfrika

Enoch Sontonga - South Africa, 1897

Enoch Sontonga, a Methodist school teacher in Johannesburg, composed this hymn in 1897 as a prayer: “God bless Africa, raise up her spirit, hear our prayers.” It was first sung at the ordination of a Tsonga Methodist minister in 1899. Over the following decades, it spread through churches, schools, and political gatherings across southern Africa.

The African National Congress adopted it as its official anthem in 1925. Under apartheid, singing it became an act of resistance. The regime banned it, and people sang it anyway, in defiance, in prison, and at funerals for those killed by the state. It was sung on Robben Island. It was sung at mass funerals for massacre victims. It carried the anti-apartheid movement’s insistence that Africa belonged to its people, not to the regime that claimed to rule them.

When apartheid ended, the new South Africa adopted Nkosi Sikelel’ iAfrika as part of its national anthem. A hymn that had been illegal became the official voice of the nation. There is no more complete victory a resistance song can achieve.

____________________________________________________________________________

Baraye (For…)

Shervin Hajipour - Iran, 2022

In September 2022, a twenty-two-year-old woman named Mahsa Amini was arrested by Iran’s “morality police” for allegedly wearing her hijab improperly. She died in custody. Her death ignited the largest anti-government protests Iran had seen in decades - the Woman, Life, Freedom movement - spanning 164 cities, led overwhelmingly by women and young people.

Shervin Hajipour was a twenty-five-year-old pop singer, relatively unknown, who had been eliminated in the final round of Iran’s equivalent of American Idol. In his bedroom in the coastal city of Babolsar, he did something simple and extraordinary: he collected tweets that Iranians had posted about why they were protesting, set them to music, and sang them. Each line began with the word baraye - “for” or “because of.” For dancing in the streets. For the fear we feel when we kiss. For the students and their future. For the crumbling buildings. For women, life, freedom.

He posted it on Instagram. It received forty million views in forty-eight hours. Two days later, he was arrested.

The arrest amplified the song. It was downloaded, shared, re-uploaded, covered by professional musicians and amateurs alike, sung at protests in Iran and solidarity rallies around the world. Coldplay invited an Iranian actress to perform it onstage in Buenos Aires. The Canadian Senate read a translation into the official record. A TikTok campaign generated 95,000 nominations for the Recording Academy’s new Grammy category, Best Song for Social Change. In February 2023, Jill Biden announced Baraye as the inaugural winner. From a dark room in Iran, Hajipour posted two words on Instagram: “We won.”

He was subsequently sentenced to nearly four years in prison, and then later pardoned. As of late 2025, he remained in Iran, barred from performing, facing ongoing restrictions, and yet still making music. Baraye is proof that in the age of social media, a song can travel from one person’s bedroom to a global movement in hours. It’s also proof that this speed doesn’t protect the singer. The regimes always come for the musicians. The question is whether the song has already escaped.

____________________________________________________________________________

Songs of Sustenance and Endurance

We Shall Overcome

Adapted from gospel and labor traditions - United States, 1940s–1960s

The song’s journey is the American freedom movement in miniature. It began as a hymn, “I’ll Overcome Someday,” written by the Reverend Charles Tindley in 1901. In the 1940s, striking Black tobacco workers in Charleston, South Carolina, were singing a version of it on their picket line. Zilphia Horton, the music director of the Highlander Folk School in Tennessee - a training center for labor and civil rights organizers - learned it from the strikers and taught it to Pete Seeger, who taught it to others, who carried it into the civil rights movement.

By the early 1960s, it was everywhere. It was sung at mass meetings, at sit-ins, in jail, on marches. It was sung in Mississippi and in Selma. It crossed the ocean: it was sung in Tiananmen Square, in the townships of South Africa, in Northern Ireland, and in the streets of Seoul. When Lyndon Johnson used the phrase “we shall overcome” in his address to Congress calling for the Voting Rights Act in 1965, it was because the song had entered the political vocabulary of the nation itself.

We Shall Overcome is sometimes dismissed as naive - too hopeful, too gentle for the realities of struggle. But the people who sang it were not naive. They sang it in jail cells where they had been beaten. They sang it on bridges where they were about to be beaten. They knew exactly what they were facing, and they chose to sing about overcoming anyway, not because they were certain of victory, but because the act of singing it together was itself a refusal to be defeated.

___________________________________________________________________________

Bread and Roses

James Oppenheim (poem, 1911), Caroline Kohlsaat (music, 1917) - United States

In 1912, immigrant women textile workers in Lawrence, Massachusetts, many of them teenagers, speaking over forty languages, went on strike. The strike was triggered by a pay cut but was about something larger: the conditions of their lives, the denial of their dignity, and the insistence that survival was enough and they should not expect anything more. James Oppenheim had written a poem the previous year that captured their demand in a phrase that has never been improved upon: “Give us bread, but give us roses.”

The bread was wages, safety, and decent work hours. The roses were dignity, beauty, education, the arts - the parts of life that make living something more than merely not dying. The poem was set to music and became a song associated with the Lawrence strike and with the larger argument that economic justice and human flourishing are not separate demands. You cannot tell people to be grateful for survival while denying them the conditions that make life worth surviving.

This is an argument we need now. When authoritarians cut arts funding, defund public education, and tell people to focus on “real issues,” they are saying: you deserve bread, not roses. Bread and Roses answers: we deserve both, and we will fight for both, and if you deny us either, you deny us everything.

____________________________________________________________________________

Woke Up This Morning with My Mind Stayed on Freedom

Adapted spiritual - Albany, Georgia, 1961

This song came out of the same Albany Movement that produced Ain’t Gonna Let Nobody Turn Me Around. It’s simpler and, in some ways, more powerful. The entire song is one declaration, repeated with variations: I woke up this morning with my mind stayed on freedom.

That is a sentence about discipline. It is a sentence about the daily practice of resistance - the decision, every morning, before you have done anything else, to orient your entire being toward the work of liberation. It doesn’t talk about strategy or tactics or policy. It talks about what is in your mind when you open your eyes. It’s a song for the long haul, for the movements that last not because of any single dramatic action but because people keep waking up, day after day, with their minds stayed on freedom.

____________________________________________________________________________

Songs from Unexpected Places

Do You Hear the People Sing

Claude-Michel Schönberg & Alain Boubil, from Les Misérables - France/UK, 1980

A song written for a musical about a failed French uprising in 1832 should not, by any reasonable logic, have become one of the most widely used protest anthems of the twenty-first century. But logic has very little to do with how resistance music works.

Do You Hear the People Sing was adopted by pro-democracy protesters in Hong Kong during the 2014 Umbrella Movement and again during the 2019–2020 protests. It was sung by demonstrators in Thailand, in South Korea, and in Taiwan. Its fictional origin turned out to be an advantage: because it was “just a song from a musical,” it was harder for authorities to ban. You could sing it and claim you were just a fan of musical theater. But everyone knew what you meant.

The song asks a question - do you hear the people sing? - that is really a statement: the people are singing, and you cannot pretend not to hear them. When thousands of people in Hong Kong sang it in unison facing lines of police, the fiction became fact. The barricade was real. The song had crossed from the stage into history.

____________________________________________________________________________

Zombie

The Cranberries - Ireland, 1994

Dolores O’Riordan wrote Zombie in response to the 1993 IRA bombing in Warrington, England, which killed two children. The song was a howl of grief and rage directed at the cycle of violence in the Troubles and specifically at the way ordinary people were turned into “zombies” by the propaganda and dehumanization required to sustain decades of political violence on all sides.

The song’s power is in its refusal to pick a side in the sectarian conflict and instead indict the entire machinery of violence itself. “It’s the same old theme since 1916” - the year of the Easter Rising - a line that says: this has been going on for so long that the violence has become self-perpetuating, feeding on itself, and the dead children are the price everyone has agreed to pay. That accusation made it dangerous to every faction. It also made it universal. Zombie has been covered and adopted by musicians across Africa, Latin America, and the Middle East, wherever people are trapped in cycles of political violence they did not choose.

____________________________________________________________________________

Why We Keep Singing

Every song in this collection did something specific: it unified a room, it encoded a refusal, it carried a message past censors, it transformed fear into collective power, it preserved memory, or it sparked a revolution. None of these songs were accidents. Each one was an act of resistance performed in a specific time and place by people who understood, or discovered, that music could do things that nothing else could do.

This is why authoritarian regimes target music. They ban songs. They jail musicians. They cut arts funding. They know that the capacity of a population to make meaning together - to name what is happening, to maintain moral clarity under pressure, to sustain hope across long and brutal timelines - is itself a condition of democracy. If you destroy that capacity, you do not need to destroy democracy directly. It will wither on its own.

We’re in a moment that demands music. Not as entertainment, not as background, and not as a nice addition to the real work of organizing. Music is organizing. It’s the mechanism by which people discover that they are not alone, that their anger is shared, that their courage is contagious, and that the thing they’re building together is larger than any one of them. Every movement that has ever won understood this. Every movement that forgot it lost something essential.

So listen to these songs. Learn their stories. Teach them to other people. And when the moment comes - when you are in a room full of people who are frightened, or exhausted, or unsure whether any of this matters - sing. The history of freedom says that this is not optional. It is infrastructure. And we need it now as much as we have ever needed it.

Famous are the children of Hawai’i
Ever loyal to the land
When the evil messenger comes
With his greedy document of extortion.

Hawaii, the land of Keawe answers,
The bays of Piʻilani help.
Kauaʻi of Mano lends support,
All are united by sands of Kakuhihewa.

Fix not a signature
To the paper of the enemy.
With its sin of annexation
And sale of the people's civil rights.

We value not
The government's hills of money,
We're satisfied with the rocks
The wondrous food of the land.

- Kaulana Nā Pua, 1893

Who Igor Is

Igor Blažević is Senior Advisor at the Prague Civil Society Centre and the founder of One World, Europe’s largest human rights documentary film festival, which he led for a decade before handing it to a new generation. He was born in 1963 (two years after me) in Trebinje, in the Herzegovina region of what was then Yugoslavia, and has lived most of his working life in the Czech Republic. His trajectory runs through the most formative democracy struggles of the last forty years: the Yugoslav wars, Chechnya, the post-Soviet transitions, the Burma democracy movement, the long work with Eurasian and Caucasian civil society networks, and the deepening confrontation with authoritarian consolidation now underway in Georgia, Russia, and Hungary.

For eighteen years he worked at People in Need, the Czech humanitarian and human rights organization that emerged from the generation of the 1989 Velvet Revolution. He was head of its Human Rights and Democracy Department from 1994 to 2010 and still teaches comparative political education to former political prisoners from Myanmar, now mostly online. Igor also sits on the steering committee of the World Movement for Democracy. When he writes about what authoritarians do and what movements opposing them must do, he is drawing on cases he has worked on directly, in rooms where the stakes were not abstract.

What the Prague Civil Society Centre Does

The Prague Civil Society Centre supports democratic changemakers and independent media in what it describes, accurately, as closed and contested contexts. It operates across roughly twelve countries in Eastern Europe, the Caucasus, and Central Asia, a region that includes Belarus, Russia, Ukraine, Moldova, Georgia, Armenia, Azerbaijan, and the Central Asian republics. Its grants are designed to be flexible and low-burden, because the actors it supports are often operating under legal harassment, financial strangulation, or outright exile.

What the Centre does, in practice, is the unglamorous infrastructure work I have spent the last several years arguing is the most important and least funded piece of the pro-democracy field globally. The Centre has been doing it for a decade, in conditions that make the work in the United States look procedural.

Why This Conversation

I write from inside the United States, where the authoritarian consolidation project is real, accelerating, and still incomplete. Igor writes and works from inside a region where the full range of outcomes has already played out: the durable consolidations in Russia and Belarus, the hybrid captures in Hungary and Serbia, the contested cases of democratic backsliding in Georgia and Slovakia, and the democratic recoveries in Poland and the Czech Republic, in addition to the wars and invasions that collapse the framing question entirely.

The Anti-Authoritarian Playbook I have been developing - the inverted Levitsky–Ziblatt model of preparation, breakthrough, and consolidation, organized around springs-to-river civil society architecture, pillars-of-support engagement, and reconstruction imagination - was built primarily for the American case. It draws on comparative experience, but its primary audience is the U.S. pro-democracy sector and the movements trying to build an effective response to the second Trump administration.

Putting that framework in conversation with someone whose working life has been the post-communist and post-Soviet transitions is a test of what travels and what does not. Where the framework holds, it holds. Where it does not, I want to explore, and I want readers to see me finding out what is to be learned.

How to Read What Follows

This is a prep document, not an essay. It is organized around the questions I knew Igor would ask and the answers I wanted to have ready before walking into the exchange. The questions are in Igor’s voice. The answers are mine, written in the register I would use in the actual conversation: more compressed than I would be in long-form writing, but honest about where the tensions sit. I’ve kept the prepared aha moments in for emphasis.

Orienting the Conversation

Q1. Let’s start by explaining what the authoritarian playbook looks like today.

Here, because of the insulating effect of being inside the U.S., as a U.S. citizen, I feel like you probably have more to say than I do, but I’ll give this a stab.

The contemporary playbook is both consistent across cases and continuously refined through learning between them. Today it runs roughly like this.

Authoritarians no longer usually seize power by coups. They win elections, often narrowly, and then use the legitimacy of that electoral victory to begin dismantling the institutions that constrain them. The sequence is usually: capture the judiciary by appointing loyalists and attacking the legitimacy of judges who resist; capture the election machinery of the state by rewriting rules and installing partisan administrators; capture the security services by purging career professionals and promoting loyalists; capture or neutralize the independent media by regulatory harassment, ownership consolidation, and targeted legal action against individual journalists; and capture the universities by defunding, investigating, and ideologically policing them.

Alongside this institutional capture runs a parallel campaign of cultural politicization in order to divide and conquer their projected opposition and build a base for takeover. Enemy groups are named and made visible such as immigrants, sexual and gender minorities, religious minorities, intellectuals, and whoever else the local rhetoric most easily demonizes. Here in the U.S., intellectuals were among these groups - first trivialized as effete, privileged snobs, and then scapegoated for the ineffectiveness of the social justice sector on both the right and the left. This drove a wedge between intellectuals and social movements.

The cultural campaign is not decorative. It is operational. It generates the permission structure for the institutional campaign, and it identifies the populations against whom the consolidating regime will demonstrate its power.

Two features distinguish the current playbook from earlier authoritarianisms. First, the speed of consolidation has increased. What took Putin a decade to do in Russia took Orbán about four years in Hungary and is being attempted in roughly eighteen months by the Trump administration. Authoritarians study each other.

Second, the international dimension has become central. There is now effectively a transnational authoritarian coordination network sharing tactics, amplifying each other’s messaging, undermining each other’s opposition, and providing mutual aid when any one regime comes under pressure. Russia, Hungary, the Gulf states, and now the United States operate as a loose but real alliance of illiberal consolidation projects.

One more thing worth naming. The current playbook relies on what I call socially constructed denialism - the deliberate cultivation of confusion about basic facts, so that people retreat into tribe-based epistemology because reality itself has become contested. This is not a byproduct of the playbook; it is one of its central tools.

Q2. Now outline the inverted playbook. What are the main phases, and what are the key tasks in each?

Three phases. Preparation, breakthrough, consolidation. Roughly paralleling the three phases political scientists Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt describe for democratic death, but with the strategic logic inverted.

Preparation is the longest and most consequential phase. It is the work done before the breakthrough moment arrives, often years or decades before. The tasks of preparation are: building trust-based organizing infrastructure at community scale (what I call springs), engaging the pillars of support of the authoritarian regime to prepare for defection, developing parallel institutions where the state has abandoned its functions, articulating a reconstruction vision that is larger than restoration, and cultivating the political imagination and strategic clarity that mass mobilization will require when the opportunity comes. Preparation is also the phase most movements skip, confusing mobilization with readiness.

Breakthrough is the moment when mass mobilization combines with cascading elite defection to create the possibility of a transition. It is rarely a single event. It is usually a window of days, weeks, and occasionally months during which the established order loses the confidence of the people and of key elites simultaneously. The core task of the breakthrough phase is to convert that simultaneous loss of confidence into a transfer of power without either squandering the moment through disorganization or seizing too much through triumphalism.

Consolidation is the phase when most movements fail. The regime has fallen or retreated, the mobilization has achieved its proximate goal, and then the hard work begins: building institutions that can hold, distributing power widely enough that new concentrations cannot emerge, addressing the economic structures that produced the crisis in the first place, and reconstructing a shared political culture. Most movements mistake breakthrough for victory. Consolidation is where democracy either takes root or fails to.

Q3. Who is the “we” in your Anti-Authoritarian Playbook articles?

The “we” is civil society, which I mean in the classical sense of the organized, non-state, non-market spaces where people build collective capacity. It is made up of community organizations, faith communities, labor networks, cultural institutions, neighborhood associations, cross-sector coalitions, independent media, and the layer of formal private rather than governmental organizations that work with them. I do not primarily mean political parties, and I don’t mean the state. The work the playbook is trying to equip is the work that civil society does, and the “we” is the people doing that work.

I want to be honest about a U.S.-specific distinction, though. The American civil society I write for is unusually professionalized, unusually funder-dependent, and unusually shaped by the service-provision model of nonprofit work. It tends to have weaker roots in communities than civil society in many other places around the world, and it tends to have a more programmatic and less political operating culture. In the U.S., the combination of extreme individualism and the neoliberal devolution of care for society to tax-exempt nonprofits means the missions of groups aiming for deep, lasting social change often lean in the direction of being advertisements for donor investment rather than sets of goals that can actually be attained through the activities the groups engage in.

When I write about confusing mobilization with preparation, or about the dominance of process over judgment, I’m describing something that is particularly acute in the U.S. context. Civil society in Poland, Hungary, the former Yugoslavia, or post-Soviet space often has a different relationship to political work - closer to it, more comfortable with it, and less mediated through the nonprofit industrial complex.

Globally, I think of the activist reader as someone who has been doing the work for long enough to know that tactics without strategy are exhausting and that strategy without infrastructure is fantasy. I’m aiming for someone who has felt the gap between what the moment asks of us and what our current practice can deliver, and who is looking for a framework that makes that gap legible and actionable. That person exists in Minneapolis, Prague, Tbilisi, and Yangon. They recognize each other when they meet.

Applicability Across Contexts

Q4. How applicable is the democracy-winning model across different political contexts?

The honest answer is: the phases and the strategic logic travel well, but the specific tactics and timelines do not. Trying to apply them mechanically is one of the ways movements get hurt.

For democracies under attack by elected leaders, as the Czech case, or the U.S. before the 2024 election, or Israel in the judicial reform fight, or Brazil before Lula returned, the model applies most directly. Democratic institutions still exist and can be defended. The work is to hold the pillars of democratic support in place through exactly the kind of coordinated civil society mobilization the model describes. Electoral strategy remains meaningful. Pillar defection from the authoritarian project is achievable because the society hasn’t yet been fully polarized and the institutions of independent life haven’t been captured yet.

For hybrid regimes where backsliding has occurred but elections remain, like Hungary, Poland before 2023, Turkey, Slovakia, and Georgia, the model requires serious adaptation. Electoral competition exists, but it is structurally skewed. The media environment is captured. The judiciary is captured, and civil society operates under legal and financial pressure. In these contexts, the preparation phase needs to do more work than in a fully democratic context, because the breakthrough window is both narrower and more dangerous. The model’s emphasis on parallel institutions, on engaging pillars that are under heavy pressure from the regime, and on having a reconstruction vision ready when the window opens - these become essential rather than optional. Poland’s 2023 electoral transition is probably the clearest recent case of a hybrid regime being pushed back through exactly this kind of civil society infrastructure plus electoral coordination.

For fully consolidated authoritarian regimes like Belarus, Russia, and Azerbaijan, the model as I’ve written it doesn’t straightforwardly apply because electoral strategy isn’t meaningful in a context where elections are purely performative so mass mobilization without elite defection doesn’t produce breakthrough; it can, in fact, produce massacres, as we saw in Belarus in 2020. In these contexts, the preparation phase may be the entire phase available for a generation, and the tasks of preparation look different: preserving memory, maintaining networks in exile and at home, and cultivating the political imagination that will be needed when a geopolitical shock opens a window nobody could have predicted. The Czechoslovak case from 1968 to 1989 is the historical analogue. There, during twenty-one years of what looked like stasis, civil society was in fact preparing for a breakthrough that arrived in weeks when the external conditions changed.

What I want to resist is the idea that because a fully consolidated authoritarianism is not easily breakable, the framework has nothing to offer. Instead, I think it suggests a long-horizon discipline that most movements in these contexts are already practicing intuitively. Naming it may help; claiming that the model solves the problem does not.

Q5. What does the framework tell us about the Gen Z protest wave, including the Bangladesh and Nepal wins, and the Serbia stall?

Three things.

First, mass mobilization without preparation can produce regime change in fragile authoritarian states where the ruling coalition is already brittle, but it rarely produces democratic consolidation. Bangladesh and Nepal removed governments; what comes next is an open question, and the historical record on uprisings that were not backed by durable civil society infrastructure is not encouraging. Egypt in 2011 is the reference case. The regime fell, but the infrastructure to replace it didn’t exist. What filled the vacuum was the one organized force that had been preparing for decades, which was not the democratic movement.

Second, the Serbian case shows what happens when the regime is not brittle and the mobilization isn’t matched by pillar defection. Vučić’s coalition has held because the institutional capture is deeper than it was in Bangladesh, and because the security services remain loyal, the economic elites haven’t calculated that their interests are better served by transition, and because the international context is ambiguous. The students have done extraordinary work. It isn’t sufficient in the absence of the other moves.

Third, and this is the harder observation, mobilization is psychologically and politically easier than preparation. It feels like doing something. It produces visible results in the short term. It attracts media attention and international solidarity. Preparation does not. The Gen Z wave globally is producing genuine power, but it’s also producing a generation of young organizers who may be learning that mobilization is the work, when in fact mobilization is the tip of a much larger iceberg. If those movements fail to build the infrastructure that allows them to convert breakthrough into consolidation (or to survive the regime’s counter-response when breakthrough doesn’t come) the current moment is very unlikely to produce durable change.

Aha! moment: The Gen Z wave is producing genuine power but also teaching a generation that mobilization is the work. It is not. It is the tip of a much larger iceberg.

Preparation

Q6. What does real preparation actually require in a context where movements confuse mobilizing with preparing.

Let me be sharp on this point because it matters. Most of the pro-democracy sector, particularly in the U.S. and in the internationally funded civil society space, is structurally incapable of doing preparation as I am describing it. Why? Because the existing funding rewards campaigns, the performance metrics reward deliverables, and the professional advancement pathways reward visible activity. Preparation produces none of these things in the short term. So preparation doesn’t happen, and people convince themselves that what they are doing instead - running campaigns, issuing reports, mobilizing supporters on specific issues - is preparation. It is not. It is the thing we know how to do and get paid to do.

From my research, real preparation has four components.

One: building trust-based relational infrastructure at community scale. Here I don’t mean building coalitions of organizations. Instead I mean creating circles of people who have worked together long enough, through enough real stakes, that they can hold under pressure. I call these springs. The springs can’t be built in a campaign cycle. They require years of actual shared work on actual real-life, deeply rooted problems.

Two: sustained engagement with the pillars of support of the authoritarian project, by which I mean business, religious institutions, security services, professional associations, and cultural institutions, done patiently, without expectation of immediate return, over the years or decades required to prepare people for the moment when defection from the regime becomes even thinkable.

Three: development of parallel institutions where the state has abandoned or weaponized its public functions. This can include community-run economic infrastructure, mutual aid networks that actually provide services, independent media, political education networks, and alternative legal and educational systems where necessary.

Four: articulation of a reconstruction vision that is larger than a return to what was there before. If the movement’s offer is “restore the previous government,” it’s not a movement; it’s a coalition of opposition factions. Movements are built around visions of the society that don’t yet exist.

Every one of these directives is work that cannot be adequately funded through campaign budgets, can’t be measured through quarterly metrics, and most certainly cannot be accomplished through the standard operating model of the professional nonprofit. This is why preparation doesn’t happen. It’s also why, when breakthrough windows arrive, the movements that succeed are almost always the ones that have been quietly preparing for a generation while the funded sector was running campaigns.

Aha! moment: The pro-democracy sector is structurally funded to do campaigns. Campaigns are not preparation. This is why preparation doesn’t happen.

Q7. Why springs-to-river rather than unified structure? Give concrete examples.

Unified structures have two failure modes that springs-to-river architecture avoids. First, they’re brittle under repression so when the central structure is targeted, the whole network degrades or fails. Second, they’re bad at holding coalitions of real difference together because the pressure to unify produces either the suppression of legitimate internal disagreement or the fracturing of the coalition over those differences.

Springs-to-river holds the productive tension. Distinct communities keep their own identities, analyses, leadership structures, and relationships of trust. They coordinate when coordination serves a shared goal, and they operate independently the rest of the time. The river is the coordinated action at scale; the springs are the community-rooted formations that feed it.

The 2023 Polish election is a good example. The opposition to Law and Justice didn’t unify into a single bloc. It held distinct parties, civil society networks, women’s organizing around reproductive rights, rural farmer organizing, urban progressive networks, and Catholic-church-adjacent democratic formations in parallel, coordinating around the shared goal of defeating PiS without collapsing into a single structure. The breadth of the coalition is what produced the electoral result. A unified structure could not have held all of those groups together. While Catholic Church adjacent formations were part of the anti-PiS campaign, the Church itself, as has been pointed out to me, is a key pillar of PiS. This is not a side note, but a strategic consideration in the work ahead of us here in the U.S.

Solidarity in Poland in the 1980s is another example, though the language of organizing, so to speak, is different. Solidarity wasn’t one organization; it was a federation of workplace, regional, and cultural formations that coordinated around a shared strategic orientation while maintaining distinct identities. That structure is part of why it survived martial law. The regime couldn’t decapitate it because it didn’t have a single head to cut off.

The U.S. civil rights movement is the case I know best. SCLC, SNCC, CORE, the NAACP, the Black church networks, the labor movement, the National Council of Negro Women, the local community organizations were all coordinated through shared strategic moments (Birmingham, Selma, the March on Washington) while maintaining distinct organizational identities, theories of change, and methods.

Q8. What does non-confrontational pillar engagement look like in practice?

Pillar engagement is long, patient, and largely invisible relational work. It’s the opposite of confrontation, and it is also the opposite of what most advocacy organizations do.

Here’s a concrete example. In the United States, there’s a generation of veterans and retired military officers privately appalled by the politicization of the armed forces under the current administration. Confronting them publicly, demanding that they denounce the administration, puts them in an impossible position and produces either silence or defensive loyalty. Engaging them over time, through the institutions they respect, through peers they trust, through quiet conversations about what military professionalism actually means, produces a very different result. When the breakthrough moment comes, those relationships are what make possible the kind of institutional refusal that actually moves the needle.

Another example, but from a different tradition. Otpor in Serbia in the late 1990s worked extensively and quietly with Orthodox Church networks, small business associations, and pensioner organizations. These were groups that weren’t ideological allies of the student movement and that had no prior reason to oppose Milošević. The work was relational. It specifically did not demand that these groups become activists; it asked them to consider what their own institutional values implied about the Milošević regime. By 2000, these groups had moved from acquiescence to opposition, not through confrontation but through their own internal reasoning, which the Otpor networks had helped facilitate.

The Polish transition in 2023 did extensive quiet work with business associations, with farming communities, with Catholic clergy networks, and with local elected officials. None of this looked like campaigning. Much of it looked like nothing at all. It was the work that made the breakthrough possible.

The pillar-engagement question most movements get wrong is the question of pace. They want defection now, and they want it loudly. Pillars defect quietly and late, when the balance has already shifted. The work is to make the shift possible, not to demand it before the pillar’s internal conditions support it. Mobilizations matter in this context of quiet organizing for many reasons, among which is because they help to make sense of the appeals to these interests.

Q9. Parallel infrastructure.

Polish underground publishing in the 1980s via the samizdat networks, the underground Solidarity press, the alternative educational seminars, and the Flying University was not protest infrastructure, but it made a huge difference. It was a parallel civil society that kept democratic political culture alive through a decade of repression that was ready to operate openly the moment the political conditions shifted in 1989.

The Kifaya and April 6 movements in Egypt through the 2000s built parallel online and offline infrastructure that produced the 2011 uprising. The tragedy is that what they didn’t build was the post-breakthrough political infrastructure that could have held the transition. The parallel work succeeded. The consolidation work had not been done.

The Zapatista communities in Chiapas have built a thirty-year parallel system of governance, education, and health care that demonstrates what long-horizon parallel infrastructure can produce. It’s not a replicable model in most contexts, but it is a proof of concept that distributed, community-rooted alternative institutions can sustain themselves against sustained state hostility for decades.

The mutual aid networks that emerged in the U.S. during the early COVID period, many of which became the basis for immigrant defense networks, food sovereignty work, and neighborhood emergency response infrastructure, are the most promising contemporary U.S. example. They are small, local, unglamorous, and, critically, they exist, just as do the networks of battered women’s shelters, and disability justice support groups and political networks both of which at least partially operate underground, but constitute two of the most successful social change movements in recent U.S. history. Yet, most of the pro-democracy sector does not see them as the infrastructure they are.

The Movement for Black Lives has, very importantly, built distributed parallel infrastructure around community safety, political education, and bail funds that has begun to demonstrate what a U.S.-based parallel institutional network could look like at scale.

Q10. Should movements in Belarus, Russia, Georgia, or Myanmar aspire to the democracy that was never delivered, or is minimal democracy good enough?

This is a serious question, and I want to be careful with it. Let me answer in two parts.

First, yes, people in Belarus, Russia, Myanmar, and comparable contexts have every right to articulate their democratic aspirations at whatever scale serves their movement. Someone organizing under active torture-state conditions has no obligation to theorize reconstruction at the level that an American civil society leader operating under vastly less constraint can. If the minimum democracy being sought is ending arbitrary detention, allowing contested elections, and restoring basic freedoms of assembly and expression, that is already a revolutionary project in those contexts and more than sufficient as an organizing horizon.

Second, and this is the part I want to say carefully, there is nonetheless a lesson in the post-1989 and post-2014 experience that I think is worth engaging. The democracies that consolidated most durably after breakthrough were the ones whose movements had articulated a vision larger than procedural restoration. Poland’s Solidarity vision included workplace democracy and social solidarity, not just free elections. The South African transition vision included social and economic transformation, not just the end of apartheid. Where the post-breakthrough vision collapsed to “restore procedural democracy,” the consolidation phase was vulnerable to economic concentration, oligarchic capture, and the generation of grievances that authoritarian actors later exploited. Russia in the 1990s is the paradigmatic failure case.

So my honest answer is: minimum democracy is a legitimate proximate goal. But movements that do not also cultivate a larger reconstruction imagination while they organize tend to win the breakthrough and lose the consolidation. The imagination of what we want, and not just what we may have to settle for, can be held in the movement’s strategic thinking without being the public demand. That distinction matters when building ideologically diverse movements.

Breakthrough

Q11. Breakthrough = mass mobilization + cascading elite defection.

Mass mobilization alone produces either regime concession or regime repression, depending on the regime’s confidence. Elite defection alone produces either palace coups or factional stalemates. Breakthrough happens at the specific conjunction of the two, because that’s the moment when the regime loses the ability to reliably deploy either coercive force or institutional legitimacy.

Serbia 2000. The mass mobilization had been building for years. What converted it to breakthrough was the moment when the police and military calculated that firing on demonstrators would split their institutions + when business elites concluded that Milošević was a bigger threat to their interests than the opposition + when the Orthodox Church and other traditionalist pillars signaled that they would not back a violent defense of the regime. What worked was mass mobilization plus cascading elite defection within the same window. The regime fell in days.

Poland 1989. The Round Table Agreement was made possible by the simultaneous reality of Solidarity’s mass base and the Communist Party’s internal calculation that the economic crisis was uncontainable and that reform was preferable to collapse. Gorbachev’s signal that Soviet intervention would not be available - a geopolitical elite defection at the international level - was the final element.

Tunisia 2011. The mass mobilization triggered by Bouazizi’s self-immolation became breakthrough when the military refused to fire on protesters and when key members of the ruling party calculated that Ben Ali was a liability. Mass plus elite.

South Africa 1990–94. The mobilization had been building for a generation. What converted it to breakthrough was the business elite’s calculation that continued apartheid was economically unsustainable and the Afrikaner political elite’s internal conclusion that negotiation was preferable to civil war. De Klerk’s decision to release Mandela and legalize the ANC was an elite move; it was made possible by the sustained mass pressure that preceded it.

The cases where movements failed to achieve breakthrough often show one of the two elements present and the other missing. Belarus 2020: extraordinary mass mobilization, but security services held and business elites didn’t defect. Iran’s Green Movement 2009: mass mobilization, but the revolutionary guards and the clerical elite held. Hong Kong 2019–20: sustained mass mobilization, but Beijing’s backing meant elite defection in Hong Kong was insufficient to meet the actual power structure.

Q12. Movements miss breakthrough moments because they aren’t prepared.

Examples.

Egypt 2011 is the canonical case. Tahrir Square produced breakthrough in the form of a mass mobilization plus Mubarak’s loss of elite and military confidence. The movement had no prepared political infrastructure to hold the window that opened. The vacuum was filled by the Muslim Brotherhood, which had been preparing for decades, and then by the military, which had no intention of ceding power to anyone. The lesson is not that the Brotherhood was wrong to be prepared; it is that the democratic movement didn’t have what it took to go from breakthrough to consolidation. They didn’t build infrastructure ahead of breakthrough to accomplish this.

Iran 1979 is a different version. The revolutionary coalition that overthrew the Shah included secular democrats, communists, the bazaar merchant class, and the Islamist networks around Khomeini. Only the Islamist networks had prepared for the consolidation phase. Within eighteen months, they consolidated power and the other components of the coalition had been marginalized, jailed, or killed. The preparation gap produced the post-revolutionary regime.

The 2011 Arab uprisings in general. Tunisia is the partial exception, and it is the exception specifically because Tunisian civil society had built durable preparation infrastructure, including the labor federation UGTT, the lawyers’ syndicate, the human rights organizations, and the democratic political parties that were able to hold the transition through multiple crises. The other cases that reached breakthrough (Libya, Yemen, and to a different degree Syria and Bahrain) didn’t have that infrastructure. The outcomes reflect the difference.

Poland 1989 and Czechoslovakia 1989 succeeded because the preparation infrastructure had been built over decades. The moment the Soviet backing collapsed, civil society had the institutional capacity to enter the breakthrough window with a program, a negotiating team, and a vision. Within months, they had a transition path.

The difference is not heroism. It is preparation. Movements that had done the work entered the breakthrough window with the capacity to hold it. Movements that had not, lost it.

Q13. The fragility of transitions - why, and what do movements need to do?

Transitions are fragile for three structural reasons.

First, the old regime’s personnel and institutions do not disappear at the moment of breakthrough. The security services, the judiciary, the bureaucracy, the economic elites - most of them remain in place, and many of them have every incentive to sabotage the transition. The regime loses its head; it does not lose its body.

Second, the movement’s own coalition is held together by opposition to the old regime. Once the old regime falls, the coalition’s internal disagreements which were suppressed during the fight come to the surface. Secular and religious elements, left and center, urban and rural, rich and poor, national and regional - all of these divisions, real but tolerable under authoritarian pressure, become disruptive under transition conditions.

Third, external actors, including neighboring states, great powers, and ideologically aligned foreign actors, intervene in transitions for their own reasons, often supporting elements of the old regime or backing factions within the movement that serve foreign interests. Ukraine’s post-Maidan experience, Armenia after the Velvet Revolution, Georgia throughout its transitions - all have been shaped as much by external intervention as by internal dynamics.

What movements need to do to manage this phase: maintain the mobilization capacity that produced the breakthrough, because losing the mass base leaves the transition at the mercy of elite negotiations that can be captured. Build institutional capacity fast, including independent media, judicial reform, security sector reform, and electoral administration, because the window in which these can be done before counter-revolution consolidates is short. Manage the coalition honestly - name the internal differences, build the processes to work through them, and, very importantly, resist the temptation to paper over them. Recognize and plan for external intervention before it happens, not after. And crucially: do not demobilize. The mobilization must evolve from opposition to construction, but it cannot simply end.

Inclusion, Reconciliation, and the Strong-State Dilemma

Q14. Where are the limits of inclusion? The secret-police and old-regime-institutions problem.

This is a real question and I want to answer it carefully, because the idealized version of my framework can get this wrong.

The inclusion principle - that a big democratic tent is more durable than a narrow one - is about inclusion of populations who supported authoritarianism, not inclusion of institutions that enforced it. These are different problems with different answers.

Populations who voted for authoritarian parties, who acquiesced to authoritarian rule, who benefited materially from the old regime in ways short of direct enforcement need to be included in the democratic reconstruction, because excluding them produces the grievance politics that authoritarianism feeds on. Postwar Germany and Japan are the cases that demonstrate what inclusion can do. South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation process is the more complicated case that demonstrates both the value and the limits.

Institutions of the old regime - the secret police, the intelligence services, the captured judiciary, the propaganda apparatus, the economic concentrations that funded authoritarianism - these cannot be simply included, because their institutional function under the old regime was specifically to enforce authoritarianism and their personnel are disproportionately the people who enforced it. Attempting to include them as equal partners in the democratic reconstruction produces exactly the spoiler dynamics you (the interviewer) are describing.

The post-Soviet record is unambiguous on this. Countries that substantially dismantled or deeply reformed the security services such as the Baltic states, and Czechoslovakia’s lustration process consolidated democracy more durably. Countries that left the old security apparatus substantially intact like Russia under Yeltsin, many Central Asian states, and several Balkan cases found those institutions becoming power centers that undermined democratic consolidation and in several cases produced authoritarian restoration.

So the limit of inclusion is institutional, not populational. Individuals who staffed old-regime institutions can in many cases be reintegrated into democratic society. The institutions themselves, in their old-regime form, usually cannot be. They need to be dismantled, radically reformed, or replaced. The Polish case, the Czechoslovak case, and the East German integration into the Federal Republic all involved substantial dismantling and rebuilding of key old-regime institutions. The democracies that skipped this step paid for it later.

Q15. The strong-state dilemma. Ukraine, Armenia, Moldova - external threats and hybrid attacks. Is distributed power still right?

This is the hardest question in the framework and I want to give it the answer it deserves. That requires holding two things at once.

Distributed power is the correct long-term architecture. It is sometimes not the correct short-term tactic. The discipline is to know the difference and to not let short-term necessity become the long-term norm.

The long-term case for distributed power under external threat is actually stronger than the case for distributed power in stable conditions. Hybrid warfare specifically targets centralized decision-making, captured media, and monocultural institutions. A society with distributed civil society infrastructure, multiple centers of political legitimacy, and resilient local-level capacity is harder to destabilize than a centralized one. Ukraine’s resistance to Russian invasion in 2022 was structurally enabled by the distributed civic capacity that had developed since Maidan, including the territorial defense units, the volunteer networks, the horizontal mutual aid infrastructure, and the decentralized information environment. A more centralized Ukraine would have been more brittle under Russian pressure, not more resilient.

That said - and this is where the tension needs to be held honestly - there are specific conditions under which transitional concentration of state capacity is defensible such as when a state is under active military invasion, when foreign-backed disinformation networks are operating at a scale civil society cannot match, and when pro-regime insurgency threatens territorial integrity. In these conditions, emergency powers that would be inappropriate in peacetime can be legitimate.

The discipline has three parts. First, the concentration should be explicitly temporary; scoped to the specific emergency, with a defined end state and a legal structure that makes the return to distributed norms mandatory. Second, it should be matched by parallel investment in civil society infrastructure, so that the distributed capacity is being built even as the emergency is being managed. Third, the concentration should be subject to real democratic oversight - parliamentary, judicial, and press - throughout its operation. Ukraine under Zelensky has done most of this relatively well, though not perfectly (nothing and no one is perfect so don’t let perfect be the enemy of good enough).

The failure mode is when “emergency” becomes permanent, when the distributed infrastructure is not being built in parallel, and when oversight erodes. This is how democracies lose democracy while defending democracy. The Orbán government has used exactly this logic for fifteen years. The Israeli right has used it for longer. The U.S. during the War on Terror used it devastatingly. The discipline is to know that emergency concentration is sometimes necessary and that it is almost always corrupting, so we have to build the institutional friction that keeps the corruption bounded.

Aha! moment: Distributed power is the correct long-term architecture. Emergency concentration is sometimes a legitimate short-term tactic. The discipline is to not let the emergency become the norm.

Q16. Banning Russian propaganda media, and comparable measures. How do pro-democracy movements pursue distribution of power under hybrid attack?

Selective restrictions on foreign-state-operated propaganda networks are not the same as restrictions on democratic discourse. Mixing them up is an analytical error. Russian state media operating in Moldova is not a civil society actor. It is an arm of a hostile state conducting hybrid warfare. Restricting it is a defensive measure analogous to expelling foreign intelligence officers, not a limitation of Moldovan civic freedom.

The line I would hold is this. Restrictions on specifically foreign-state-operated or foreign-state-financed information operations are defensible when tied to clear criteria, subject to judicial review, and implemented through processes that cannot be applied to domestic political speech. Restrictions on domestic media, on dissenting speech, or on civil society organizations, even those that echo hostile foreign narratives, are much harder to justify and tend to become tools for the consolidation of power by whoever is holding the restrictions.

The positive agenda matters more than the restrictive one. The durable defense against Russian information warfare is not censorship but the cultivation of a media environment, a civic culture, and a political discourse that can out-compete the hostile narratives on their merits. That means investment in public broadcasting, support for independent journalism, civic education in critical thinking, and the building of civil society capacity to counter disinformation through engagement rather than prohibition. Finland is the case I would point to. Its resilience to Russian information warfare has come primarily through its civic and educational infrastructure, not primarily through its restrictions.

So for movements operating under hybrid threat: pursue the restrictive tools when they are narrowly targeted, legally grounded, and procedurally bounded. Invest much more heavily in the positive infrastructure, because that’s what actually produces resilience. And be explicit with the public about which is which, because conflating them is how democracy erodes under the banner of defending democracy.

Consolidation

Q17. Why do movements fail after winning? The most common mistakes in consolidation.

Six patterns. Movements make some combination of these mistakes almost every time.

One: demobilization. The coalition that produced the breakthrough stops organizing the moment power changes hands, treating victory as the endpoint. The institutional infrastructure that would have held the transition erodes before it can be built into governance.

Two: premature reconciliation. The movement declares the struggle over, embraces the former regime’s personnel and institutions as partners in the new order, and discovers within a few years that those personnel and institutions have been quietly restoring the conditions of the old regime. Post-Soviet Russia is the worst case. Many post-transition states have milder versions.

Three: economic blindness. The movement wins the political transition and leaves the economic structure intact, producing oligarchic consolidation that undermines the political democracy within a decade. This is the story of the Philippines under Corazon Aquino, most post-1989 transitions, and of most Latin American transitions from the 1980s.

Four: coalition fracture. The internal differences that were suppressed during the fight become disruptive under transition conditions, and the movement spends its political capital fighting its own former allies rather than building institutions. Examples include post-1991 Russia, post-revolutionary Iran in a different way, Tunisia after 2011.

Five: institutional capture by the movement itself. The movement’s leaders enter government and become a new elite, with the same incentives toward self-preservation and power consolidation that the old elite had. The revolutionary period becomes the founding mythology of a new regime that’s less democratic than the movement’s rhetoric claimed. This is the historical pattern from the French Revolution onward.

Six: failure of reconstruction imagination. The movement didn’t develop a positive program for what comes after the old regime falls, and discovers that “anti-authoritarian” is not a sufficient organizing principle for governance. The vacuum is filled by whichever faction has the most coherent positive program, which is often not the democratic one.

All six failure modes are products of preparation gaps. The movement that has done the preparation work has durable infrastructure, has cultivated the pillars, has developed the reconstruction imagination, and has the economic analysis, and therefore enters consolidation with the tools the phase requires. The movement that has not, does not.

Q18. Why is concentration of economic power so often overlooked by pro-democracy movements?

Three reasons.

The first is that economic analysis has been marginalized in the dominant Western democracy-promotion framework since the 1990s. The framework treats democracy as procedural, around elections, courts, rights, and rule of law, and treats economic structure as a separate question, often one outside the democracy-promotion mandate. This is sometimes justified within the framework of anti-communism. The result is a generation of democracy-support work that built electoral infrastructure while ignoring the oligarchic consolidation that was hollowing out the electoral systems from below.

The second reason is that much of the pro-democracy funding globally comes from sources whose own wealth depends on the economic structures the movements would need to address. Challenging economic concentration is not an easy fit with the philanthropic frame that funds most of the sector. The analytical marginalization is partly a funding-structural phenomenon.

The third reason is that economic analysis is harder than institutional analysis. It requires engaging with political economy, labor organizing, financial system architecture, and material distribution questions that are less familiar to the sector’s dominant professional cultures. The sector has been built by lawyers and political scientists more than by economists and labor organizers.

The cost of this blindness has been enormous. The post-1989 transitions produced oligarchic economic structures that the transitions’ political institutions couldn’t contain, and those economic structures are what have fueled the authoritarian resurgence of the 2010s and 2020s. Orbán’s Hungary, Putin’s Russia, Erdoğan’s Turkey, Trump’s United States have all have been enabled by economic concentrations of wealth and control that the democratic period failed to address. Any pro-democracy framework that doesn’t treat economic distribution as a central question is extremely likely to reproduce this failure.

Aha! moment: The post-1989 transitions built electoral institutions while oligarchies consolidated underneath them. The oligarchies are what produced the authoritarian resurgence. Economic distribution is a democracy question.

Q19. How should movements address the concentration of wealth in former-regime-elite hands?

There is no clean answer, and the cases that have tried aggressive approaches have produced mixed results. Ukraine’s 2014 attempts at de-oligarchization stalled. Russia under Putin used the rhetoric of de-oligarchization to consolidate his own kleptocratic structure. Venezuela’s approach under Chávez produced state-controlled wealth concentration that was no more democratic than what it replaced.

Three principles I would offer, cautiously.

One: rule-of-law approaches to concentrated wealth work better than expropriation approaches. Transparent asset recovery for demonstrably illegally obtained wealth, serious anti-corruption prosecutions subject to genuine judicial oversight, and structural measures such as progressive taxation, antimonopoly laws, and beneficial ownership transparency produce more durable results. The post-apartheid South African approach, for all its limitations, was more rule-of-law driven than confiscatory, as in, break up oligarchic concentrations and redistribute assets in a more democratic way.

Two: the goal should be structural rather than punitive. The point is not to punish oligarchs; it is to restructure the economic architecture so that the conditions that produced oligarchic wealth cannot reproduce. Breaking up media conglomerates, strengthening labor law, building cooperative and public ownership alternatives, capping wealth transmission through taxation, pursuing antitrust aggressively are structural moves that address the problem over decades.

Three: the economic restructuring needs to happen simultaneously with the political consolidation, not sequenced after it. Movements that say “let us secure the political transition first and deal with the economy later” find that the economy has secured itself against them by the time they get to it. The post-1989 experience is clear on this.

Q20. For small or fragmented movements, what are the first two or three steps to prioritize?

First, build one spring. One circle of people made up ten, twenty, thirty participants who are doing real work together over real stakes, long enough that trust is genuine. Not a coalition, not an organization, and not a chapter of a national headquarters, but a spring. If you can’t name the people who would take real risks for you and for each other, you have not built it yet, and everything else you do will rest on that gap.

Second, identify one pillar of support of the authoritarian project in your context that your spring is structurally positioned to engage such as specific religious community, a specific professional association, a specific business sector, or a specific veterans’ network, etc. Begin the long patient work of engagement without demanding immediate political return. Expect to be doing this work for years.

Third, articulate a reconstruction vision that’s specific to your context and larger than restoration. This is not a platform. It is a vision of the society you want to build. Write it. Debate it within the spring. Let it guide the work. The vision is what tells you what the spring and the pillar work are for.

These three things - one spring, one pillar, one vision - are the preparation phase in its most compressed form. A small, fragmented movement that does these things seriously over three to five years is a substantially different political actor than one that runs campaigns for the same period. The infrastructure compounds. The mobilization does not.

Q21. The single most important thing democratic movements are currently not doing.

Preparing.

The sector is organized around mobilization, campaigns, and communications work. It is not organized around the long-horizon, relational, infrastructure-building work that produces movements capable of holding breakthrough when it comes. The funding does not reward it, the professional pathways do not reward it, the metrics do not measure it, and the political culture does not value it. So it does not happen, and the sector spends its resources on activities that look like work but don’t produce the capacity the moment will require.

If I could change one thing about how the pro-democracy sector operates globally, it would be this: take half the resources currently going into campaigns and reallocate them to the patient, unglamorous, long-horizon work of building the springs, engaging the pillars, constructing the parallel institutions, and cultivating the reconstruction imagination. The movements that do this work will be the ones that matter when the windows open. The movements that do not will spend the next decade doing what they did in the last one, and, regretfully, finding that it wasn’t enough.

Aha! moment: If I could change one thing about how the pro-democracy sector operates globally, it would be to reallocate half of campaign resources to preparation. The movements that prepare are the ones that matter when the windows open.

And then, almost always, the same people reach for a version of centrism as the alternative - moderation on everything, the difference split, the temperature lowered, the hard questions about race and economy and membership and power gently deferred in the name of keeping the tent wide.

I think this is a trap, and I want to propose a different way out of it.

The problem with left-right is not that it is too contentious. The problem is that it bundles together questions that don’t have to move together, and in bundling them, forecloses coalitions that could otherwise exist. The move out of left-right is not to bundle less contentiously. It is to unbundle deliberately, and to ask: is there an axis along which politically productive competition could be organized right now, in this country, under these conditions, without requiring anyone to defer justice in the name of unity?

I think there is. And I think the field is already reaching for it without quite naming it.

The axis is concentrated power versus distributed power. And it is the closest thing American politics currently has to an organizing frame that can move majorities, reach across the current coalitions, and address the inequalities the left-right frame has been unable to resolve.

What the axis picks up

Concentrated power, in the American context, means something specific. It means monopoly in markets like Amazon, Bayer, Ticketmaster, the meatpacking oligopoly, the consolidated health insurance giants, and the private equity roll-up of everything from dental practices to nursing homes to local newspapers. It means concentrated wealth, in the form of billionaire fortunes that now rival the GDP of mid-sized countries. It means concentrated political influence, in the form of a campaign finance regime that turns elections into auctions. It means concentrated surveillance capacity in the hands of a small number of tech platforms and a growing security state, and concentrated media ownership, which shapes what the country knows about itself. And it means the concentration of decision-making authority, both in corporate boardrooms and in an executive branch increasingly willing to act without legislative constraint.

Distributed power is the opposite of each of these. Competitive markets, broadly held wealth, small-donor democracy, data and privacy rights, and diverse and local media. And it means participatory decision-making in workplaces, neighborhoods, and public institutions.

Look at who’s organized on the concentrated side of that line and who’s organized on the distributed side. The concentrated side has the billionaire donor class, the private equity industry, the tech oligarchs, the consolidated corporate sector, and the political apparatus that serves them across both parties. The distributed side has - or could have - small business owners, independent farmers, working-class renters, labor unions, small-town civic leaders, small-town conservatives who remember what their main streets used to look like, urban progressives who want rent to be affordable, anti-monopoly economists, privacy advocates, civic-minded libertarians, faith communities that hold traditions about the dignity of work and the wrongness of usury, and an enormous swath of the American public that believes, correctly, that the system is rigged.

That’s a majoritarian coalition. It’s not currently organized as one, and it’s held apart, in large part, by the left-right frame that keeps its members sorted into opposing tribes on questions that are, from the perspective of concentrated power, beside the point.

Why this axis resolves what left-right cannot

The reason to reach for this axis isn’t novelty. It’s that the inequalities left-right has been unable to resolve - racial, economic, and democratic - are all, at their root, inequalities of concentrated power.

Racial inequality in the United States is not primarily a cultural phenomenon. It’s a structure of accumulated advantage, enforced over centuries, in which wealth, land, credit, housing, education, health, and political voice were systematically concentrated along a racial line. The mechanisms of that concentration - redlining, convict leasing, exclusion from the GI Bill, extraction by subprime lenders, displacement by real estate capital, over-policing as social control - are all mechanisms of concentrated power operating on racial terrain. You can’t address American racial inequality without addressing concentrated economic power, because they’re the same machinery viewed from different angles.

Economic inequality is the direct output of concentrated power. Wages stagnate when labor is disorganized relative to capital. Housing costs explode when ownership concentrates. Healthcare costs explode when insurers and hospital systems consolidate. Small towns hollow out when retail concentrates. Farms consolidate when input suppliers and processors consolidate upstream and downstream. These are not mysterious cultural trends. They are the visible effects of concentrated power operating on ordinary people.

Democratic erosion is what happens when political power concentrates. Voter suppression, gerrymandering, campaign finance capture, judicial capture, the weaponization of state power against dissent - all of it is concentration of political authority, moving in one direction. Authoritarianism is the end state of that process, not a departure from it.

The left-right frame treats these as separate domains, each with its own politics. The concentrated-distributed frame sees them as a single phenomenon with multiple expressions, and proposes a single answer: distribute the power.

This reframing doesn’t erase race. It centers race differently. It says that addressing racial inequality requires addressing the concentrated power that produced and maintains it, and that the coalition capable of addressing concentrated power is larger than the coalition currently organized around racial justice alone. It invites an honest conversation about how concentration was racialized from the beginning, and it makes the economic stakes of racial justice legible to audiences who would otherwise tune out. It lets the racial analysis surface from the work, rather than requiring it as the price of admission.

The American tradition this draws on

None of this is new. The anti-monopoly tradition is one of the oldest strands of American political thought - older than the left-right frame, older than most of what we now think of as American politics. It begins with the Jeffersonian critique of concentrated financial power and runs through Jacksonian anti-bank politics, the Populist Party of the 1890s, the Progressive Era trust-busting of Roosevelt and Taft, the Brandeisian jurisprudence of the 1910s, the New Deal’s structural interventions against monopoly and finance, the Eisenhower-era commitment to small business and independent farmers, and the mid-century labor movement at its most organized. It survived into the 1970s in the person of figures like Fred Harris and Wright Patman. It was deliberately broken, as a governing tradition, by the Bork-era revolution in antitrust law, which redefined the purpose of competition policy as consumer welfare rather than the prevention of concentrated power. That revolution is now being undone, slowly, by a neo-Brandeisian revival that has made significant inroads in both parties.

The tradition has always understood that concentrated economic power and concentrated political power are not separable. Louis Brandeis’s famous line - that we can have concentrated wealth in a few hands or democracy, but not both - wasn’t a rhetorical flourish. It was the analytical spine of a whole school of American political economy. That school is reawakening now because the facts on the ground have made its case again.

The revival is visible in unlikely places. The current Federal Trade Commission’s approach to monopoly, even under hostile conditions, represents a genuine departure from forty years of laissez-faire. Republican populists, however incoherently, attack big tech, big pharma, and big finance in language their pro-corporate leadership would have considered heretical a decade ago. Small farmers in red states are organizing against corporate consolidation of agriculture. Small business coalitions that were once reliable Chamber of Commerce constituencies are now, in many places, pulling in a different direction because the Chamber of Commerce now represents the companies eating them. The energy is there, but it hasn’t yet been organized into coherent political form.

What this makes possible

Three things, immediately.

A real cross-partisan coalition. The concentrated-distributed axis is the only current framing I can see that makes a genuine cross-partisan democracy coalition possible without requiring either side to betray its principles. A small-town conservative rancher and an urban progressive tenant do not have to agree on abortion to agree that Cargill and BlackRock have too much power over their lives. They can disagree on everything else and still organize together on the specific questions where concentrated power is eating them both. This isn’t depolarization. It’s the construction of a new political dimension along which different coalitions form than the ones the current parties offer.

A structural account of the authoritarian threat. The authoritarian project in the United States is, economically, a project of further concentration. Its base theory is that a smaller and smaller group of people should make a larger and larger share of the decisions. Framing the fight as concentration versus distribution makes the economic content of authoritarianism visible, which matters, because a lot of the people currently backing the authoritarian project have been sold on it as a populist revolt against elites. They’re wrong about the remedy, but they aren’t wrong about the diagnosis. A distributed-power politics can meet them where the diagnosis is correct and offer a real answer instead of the fake one.

A policy agenda that is already half-written. Antitrust enforcement. Banking and finance reform. Labor law modernization. Housing supply and tenant protections. Agricultural and rural policy aimed at independent producers. Small-donor democracy infrastructure. Tech and data regulation. Community-owned broadband, energy, and health infrastructure. Public banking. Cooperative and worker-ownership models. Local journalism revival. Each of these exists in draft form, often with bipartisan champions, often stalled by donor-class resistance. A coherent concentrated-versus-distributed frame gives them common ground and makes them legible as parts of a single project.

The call

If you’re in movement work right now, the question I want to put to you is this: is the organizing you’re doing reachable by the coalition that would assemble around distributed power, or is it only reachable by the coalition currently organized around left-right?

If it’s only reachable by the current coalition, you’re operating at the ceiling of what that coalition can win, which is not enough.

If it could be reachable by the broader distributed-power coalition, but isn’t currently, the work is to reframe, recruit, and reorganize. To build relationships across the lines the left-right frame has kept us sorted along. To do the patient, unglamorous coalition construction that takes the small farmer, the independent pharmacist, the gig worker, the laid-off federal employee, the faith community losing its young people to debt, the tenant facing a rent hike from a landlord they will never meet, and the union rep watching his members’ real wages fall, and lets them find each other on the terrain where they are already, in fact, on the same side.

This is the organizing work of the next several years. It’s not the only organizing work. It doesn’t replace the fight for racial justice, for immigrant dignity, for the pro-democracy defense against an active authoritarian threat. It undergirds those fights by making their coalition larger and their political ground more stable.

Concentrated power has been winning in the United States for forty years because it’s organized and the opposition isn’t. The opposition could be organized. The axis exists. The constituencies exist. The tradition exists. The policy exists.

What’s missing is the deliberate political project of putting them together.

Let’s build it.

*When we win, when the authoritarian project fails, when pro-democracy forces break through and begin consolidating democracy, what kind of economy are we consolidating into?

Most of the time, we don’t ask the question. We’re too focused on the immediate work: the organizing, the resistance, the protection of what remains of democratic institutions. The economic question feels like it belongs to some future we haven’t earned yet.

That instinct is understandable. It is also, historically, one of the most dangerous mistakes a democracy movement can make.

The lesson every democratic transition teaches

The warning embedded in every democratic transition that failed to take hold is the same: political breakthrough without prior economic transformation is partial and reversible.

Spain after Franco is the clearest case. The democratic opposition won political power but left Francoist capital essentially intact. That capital simply purchased the new democracy, shaped its parties, constrained its policies, and colonized its media. Which is why Spanish democracy remained economically constrained for decades after the dictatorship ended.

South Africa is even starker. The ANC won the state but the economic architecture of apartheid remained. The mines, the banks, the land - most of the ownership structures that defined who had power - survived the political transition almost entirely undisturbed. South African democracy is now in serious crisis, not primarily from external threats but from the internal weight of an economy that was never democratized.

The counter-model is the Nordic countries, and particularly Sweden. The Swedish labor movement built its cooperative institutions, its union density, and its worker-ownership infrastructure before it achieved political dominance, not after. When Social Democrats took lasting political power in the 1930s, they weren’t starting from scratch on the economic question. The skeleton of a democratic economy already existed and could be scaled using state resources. Consolidation moved at speed because the organizational work had been done during the long years of building power.

That is the sequencing that works.

Why economics is politics

Antonio Gramsci wrote from a fascist prison about the “war of position” - the long struggle to build hegemony in civil society before you can win the decisive battle. He meant moral and intellectual leadership: the capacity to make your vision of society feel like common sense to people who haven’t yet committed to your side.

But economic institutions are how a class reproduces its hegemony materially. They are not neutral. Right now, the economic institutions of oligarchic capitalism are doing active political work for the authoritarian project, and most of that work happens not through ideology but through dependency.

People who depend on hostile employers for their healthcare don’t go to protests. People who are one missed rent payment from eviction don’t take political risks. People who owe their livelihoods to a single corporation that has made its political preferences clear make political calculations accordingly. Economic dependency is political control. It doesn’t require a surveillance state or a secret police. It just requires that the basic conditions of life remain in the hands of those who benefit from passivity.

The infrastructure we need to build inverts that relationship. It reduces the leverage that hostile economic actors have over ordinary people. It creates communities of people with material stakes in democratic outcomes. It demonstrates - concretely, visibly, in people’s daily lives - that another kind of economy is possible.

And when breakthrough comes, it becomes the skeleton for rapid consolidation: institutions that don’t need to be invented under crisis conditions because they already exist and are already working.

What to build, in priority order

First: Labor density

Union membership is the single most proven mechanism for distributing economic power in a capitalist economy, and the one with the clearest democratic spillovers. High-union-density societies are more democratic, more resilient to authoritarian capture, and more economically equal by every measure we have.

The attack on labor is not incidental to the authoritarian project. It is foundational. Because unions are not just economic institutions, they are the organizational infrastructure through which working-class people exercise collective power, develop civic habits, and build the cross-racial solidarity that makes broad democratic coalitions possible.

The immediate build is worker centers for the non-union economy: the gig workers, the domestic workers, the agricultural workers, the warehouse workers who can’t easily unionize under current law but can be organized into economic advocacy and mutual aid. Worker centers were the seedbed of some of the most successful union campaigns of the past two decades. They’re also organizing infrastructure in the deepest sense in that the skills, relationships, and habits of collective action developed in a worker center translate directly to broader civic participation.

The medium-term goal is sectoral bargaining - the Nordic model of industry-wide wage agreements that lift conditions across an entire sector regardless of whether individual workplaces are unionized. This requires legislative access, which requires political power, which is exactly why the organizational infrastructure that sectoral bargaining would require needs to be built now, during the war of position, rather than improvised after a breakthrough.

Second: Alternative financial infrastructure

Capital is a pillar of support for authoritarian consolidation. The large banks are not ideologically neutral. They direct credit in ways that reflect and reinforce existing power structures. A democratic economic strategy requires democratic financial institutions.

Credit unions already hold $2 trillion in assets in the United States and are democratically governed by their members. They are an underutilized asset of the democratic economic ecosystem, in part because most credit unions don’t think of themselves as political actors. Making the connection explicit, connecting credit union networks to movement infrastructure, and building their scale is achievable work.

Community development financial institutions (CDFIs) direct capital to communities and institutions that commercial banks won’t serve. They are already doing democratic economic work by financing affordable housing, worker cooperatives, community health centers, minority-owned businesses, but most are underscaled and largely disconnected from the political organizing ecosystem. Bridging that gap matters.

Public banking at the state and municipal level is the biggest structural play, and the most durable. The Bank of North Dakota has operated for over a century, surviving every political transition, directing capital to North Dakota priorities rather than Wall Street returns. California has passed public banking enabling legislation. Several other states have active campaigns. When democratic forces control state governments - now and after any breakthrough - establishing public banks should be among the first priorities. They’re hard to reverse, they create permanent alternative capital infrastructure, and they demonstrate that democratic government can be an effective economic actor.

Third: Democratic ownership

Worker cooperatives and employee stock ownership plans (ESOPs) shift the fundamental question of who owns the economy. When workers own their enterprises, their material interests change: they have a stake in stable governance, rule of law, and the regulatory environment that protects their collective investment. Worker-owners are also harder to coerce. You can fire an employee, but you cannot fire an owner.

The Mondragon cooperative network in the Basque Country, comprising over 80,000 worker-owners across more than 90 cooperatives was built during Franco’s dictatorship, deliberately, by a priest named José María Arizmendiarrieta who understood that economic institution-building and political resistance were the same project. He didn’t wait for political freedom to start building. He built economic democracy under fascism as preparation for the political democracy he believed was coming.

The most immediately actionable opportunity in the American context is business succession. Roughly half of American small businesses will change hands in the next decade as baby boomer owners retire. Without deliberate intervention, most of those businesses will be sold to private equity, stripped for parts, or simply closed. The employees - often long-tenured workers who built those businesses - will be left with nothing. ESOP conversions offer an alternative that is already well-supported in tax law (ESOPs carry some of the most favorable tax treatment in the code) and require no new legislation. A national campaign to convert retiring-owner businesses to employee ownership is achievable, scalable, and strategically significant. This is among the most underutilized opportunities in the democratic economic toolkit.

Platform cooperatives deserve specific attention because platform capitalism is the fastest-growing form of economic extraction. Uber, DoorDash, Instacart, and their equivalents extract enormous value from workers while denying them the basic protections of employment. Platform cooperatives, including driver-owned ride networks, cleaner-owned home services platforms, freelancer-owned creative agencies already exist: Up&Go in New York, Drivers Cooperative, Eva in Canada. They need capital, regulatory support, and connection to the political organizing ecosystem to scale. When the democratic economy can offer gig workers ownership rather than exploitation, it changes their relationship to the political project in ways that no amount of messaging will.

Fourth: Land and housing

Housing insecurity is political insecurity. The relationship is direct and measurable. Research consistently shows that housing-stable people participate in civic life at substantially higher rates than housing-insecure people. Eviction, the threat of eviction, and the constant anxiety of unaffordable rent are not just personal hardships. They are mechanisms of political demobilization.

Community land trusts remove land from the speculative market permanently, creating affordable housing that is neither dependent on continued government subsidy nor vulnerable to gentrification. The Champlain Housing Trust in Burlington, Vermont is the oldest major model; there are now over 300 community land trusts in the United States. They grow slowly, as land acquisition is capital-intensive, but they create permanent infrastructure that compounds over decades. Land trust residents are often among the most civically engaged people in their neighborhoods precisely because they’ve made a long-term investment in their community and have a real stake in its governance.

Fifth: Democratic information infrastructure

The collapse of local news is not just a market failure. It is a democratic infrastructure failure. The removal of the mechanism through which communities understand themselves, hold local power accountable, and develop the shared factual basis for collective decision-making is an attack on democracy. Authoritarian consolidation depends on information fragmentation and the replacement of shared reality with competing tribal narratives. Local accountability journalism is the antidote.

Local news cooperatives, reader-supported journalism, and nonprofit media are not charity projects. They are civic infrastructure. The Salt Lake Tribune converted to nonprofit status. The Philadelphia Inquirer became a public benefit corporation. Dozens of local news cooperatives operate across the country, most on shoestring budgets that vastly undervalue what they produce. Building these out as a conscious democratic infrastructure project rather than simply as responses to market failure requires investment from foundations and movement funders who currently treat media as a communications line item rather than an organizing priority.

Data cooperatives represent a newer but increasingly important front. The platform economy runs on data - on the continuous extraction and monetization of personal information that workers, consumers, and citizens generate every day. Cooperative data governance, which involves communities owning their own data and controlling how it’s used, is nascent but growing. It matters strategically because data is increasingly a pillar of support for the platform surveillance economy that fuels authoritarian political infrastructure.

The consolidation architecture

When breakthrough comes for democracy, and the historical evidence from Erica Chenoweth’s research and others is clear that sustained nonviolent resistance campaigns do achieve breakthrough, the democratic forces that win will face an immediate and dangerous consolidation challenge. The most vulnerable period in any democratic transition is the first two to five years, when the old order retains economic power and is actively working to recapture political power.

The institutions built during the war of position become the skeleton for rapid consolidation:

- Worker centers become the organizational infrastructure for labor law reform at scale

- CDFIs become implementation mechanisms for public investment in underserved communities

- Community land trusts absorb resources from a revived affordable housing program

- Platform cooperatives receive favorable regulatory treatment that allows them to compete

- Public banks are established in additional states with federal support and technical assistance

- Local news cooperatives receive the public funding that PBS and NPR proved is both feasible and durable

The lesson of the New Deal is instructive here. Franklin Roosevelt had to build many of these institutions from scratch in the middle of a crisis, which made them more fragile, more dependent on political will, and ultimately more vulnerable to reversal. The lesson of the Nordic countries is that preparation during the war of position made consolidation faster, deeper, and more durable. They came to power with the institutional framework already built. We have the opportunity to do that preparation now.

What this has to do with the resistance

There is a temptation, in movements under pressure, to treat economic institution-building as a distraction from the urgent work of political resistance. That temptation should be resisted.

The work described here is not separate from organizing. It is organizing, just with a longer time horizon and a more explicit theory of power. Every worker center is a training ground for civic action. Every cooperative is a community whose members have a material stake in democratic governance. Every public bank is a demonstration that democratic government can be a competent economic actor. Every local news cooperative is a mechanism for accountability and shared reality.

The Mondragon cooperatives were built in a dictatorship - not as a retreat from politics but as preparation for democracy. The Swedish labor movement built its institutions during decades of minority status - not as a consolation prize for losing but as the foundation for winning durably. The civil rights movement didn’t just organize marches. It built insurance companies, credit unions, newspapers, banks, and legal defense funds - the full institutional ecosystem of a community that intended to survive and eventually to govern.

These are not different projects. They are the same project, operating at different registers. Joy and ownership are both forms of belonging. The freedom song and the worker cooperative are both saying the same thing:

“We are not just subjects of this economy. We are its authors.”

The window to do the preparation work is open. It will not be open forever.

History is instructive here. Poland’s Solidarity movement planned for martial law before it came. When it came, they survived eight years underground and eventually won. Movements that didn’t plan were crushed.

If authoritarian consolidation succeeds, the strategic environment changes fundamentally. The question becomes not how to prevent authoritarianism but how to resist under it, maintain capacity for the long fight, and act when trigger moments create new opportunities.

The Normalization Problem

Roughly 50-60% of the country will disagree with the regime. But disagreement isn’t resistance. The regime doesn’t need majority support; it just needs majority acquiescence. And it will get it.

Fear works. When people see others punished for resistance, most choose safety. Exhaustion works. People can’t sustain outrage indefinitely. They have jobs, and families. Normalization works. Humans adapt to almost anything. What was unthinkable becomes normal. Fragmentation works. Without coordination, individual dissent is just grumbling.

The strategic challenge is converting passive disagreement into active resistance, or at least preventing disagreement from sliding into acceptance.

What Survival Requires

Before strategy comes survival. Authoritarian regimes target people. The first task is protecting those most at risk such as organizers, lawyers, journalists, community leaders, members of targeted communities.

This means legal defense infrastructure must be built before it’s needed. We should plan ahead to provide economic support for those who lose livelihoods. Secure communications networks will have to be built. Distributed leadership isn’t just important to winning, it’s also important in the event that the resistance must go underground. Distributing leadership ensures that there are no single points of failure. And we need to plan for who must leave and how they stay connected to domestic resistance.

Organizations must also survive. Vulnerability assessments now. Diversified funding. Protection of membership information. Transformation plans for operating in hostile environments. Redundancy so loss of one organization doesn’t eliminate essential functions.

Communities need rapid response networks, sanctuary arrangements, mutual aid, documentation systems. Cross-community solidarity prevents the isolation that enables escalation.

Maintaining Resistance Capacity

Open resistance becomes costly under authoritarian rule. The question is how to maintain capacity - the ability to act - when open action is dangerous.

This requires organizational structures that balance visibility and security. Cell structures for sensitive work. Secure communications with need-to-know protocols. Vetting processes for sensitive roles. Counter-surveillance training. Legal activities that provide cover for less visible work.

It requires sustaining participation over years or decades. It also requires us to work at a sustainable pace as resistance is a marathon, not a sprint; community maintenance even when gathering requires special care; small (and big) victories to celebrate; mutual aid to sustain us; cultural resistance - art, music, literature - that maintains spirit. Youth integration so resistance transmits to the next generation.

It requires preserving skills and capabilities as well as training cadres who train others; distributed capabilities across multiple groups; practice through smaller actions; documentation that preserves knowledge, and connection to international movements facing similar challenges. And it requires economic resistance - mutual aid networks, targeted boycotts, labor organizing despite restrictions, alternative financial infrastructure for when banking is cut off.

Preventing Normalization

The regime’s greatest weapon isn’t violence - it’s normalization. When people accept authoritarian rule as “how things are,” resistance becomes impossible.

This means we must maintain collective memory of what democracy felt like, what the regime has done, and why it matters. To do this, we need systematic commemoration, oral history preservation, powerful counter-narratives, art and culture that carries memory, and strategic outrage at key moments rather than exhausting constant outrage.

It means maintaining social friction. This means building communities and spaces where dissent is normal, social accountability for collaboration, professional ethics that resist regime demands, family conversations that keep alternatives visible.

And it means building alternative institutions including to deliver education, media, legal services, community governance outside regime control. Parallel structures demonstrate alternatives are possible and build capacity for eventual transition.

Preparing for Trigger Moments

Authoritarian regimes seem stable until they’re not. History shows regimes can crack suddenly, as a result of economic crises, regime failures, succession struggles, international pressure, internal splits, unexpected mobilization, and pillar defections. The strategic task is identifying potential trigger moments and building capacity to act when they occur.

This means scenario planning for specific possibilities: economic crisis, succession crisis, failed foreign adventure, climate catastrophe, unexpected mass mobilization. For each we need: early warning indicators, immediate response protocols, short and medium-term strategies, resource requirements, and coalition coordination.

It means maintaining readiness over years during which preserving core capacity, regular exercises, rapid scaling protocols, redundancy, and communication infrastructure that can reach people quickly will be vital.

And it means being ready to act with clear demands prepared in advance, a planned-for escalation ladder, coalition agreements on objectives, nonviolent discipline training, and connection to reconstruction planning so resistance flows into governance.

The International Dimension

Resistance exists in the international context. Allied democratic governments, international human rights organizations, diaspora communities, and global civil society can provide diplomatic pressure, economic pressure, safe haven, financial support, and amplification. But U.S. power limits external leverage, and the regime will frame international support as foreign interference.

Meanwhile, foreign adversaries will try to exploit U.S. instability. These adversaries include Russia and China both of which may try to infiltrate or influence the resistance. Clear policies against adversary coordination, as well as counter-intelligence awareness, and maintaining clearly domestic character of resistance are essential.

The Long Fight

The movements that won against authoritarianism - in Poland, Chile, South Africa, Czechoslovakia - shared common features. They planned for the long term, not just immediate protest. They built organizational infrastructure not dependent on any individual. They maintained morale through culture, community, and small victories. They stayed ready for trigger moments. And they planned for what came after.

If authoritarian consolidation succeeds, we face a long struggle. That struggle requires strategic clarity, organizational resilience, human sustainability, readiness, and hope.

The Call to Action

Begin planning for this scenario now while we still hope to avoid it.

This means organizational survival planning, personal security assessment, community protection infrastructure, long-term capacity preservation, trigger moment scenarios, and coalition agreements on what we do if we lose.

The hope is this planning is unnecessary; that we prevent consolidation and never face this scenario. But movements that plan only for victory are unprepared for setbacks. And in the struggle against authoritarianism, setbacks are likely.

Poland planned for martial law. Eight years later, they won. We need that strategic realism. The resistance must begin this planning now.

Plan for the worst. Work for the best. Be ready for either.

History is unforgiving on this point. Movements that succeed in resistance but lack reconstruction plans often end worse than where they started. Egypt’s Arab Spring toppled Mubarak. but within three years, the military had consolidated a dictatorship more repressive than what came before. The protesters who filled Tahrir Square were unified against Mubarak but had no shared vision for what came next. The military did, and so they won.

Post-Soviet Russia had reformers who wanted democracy. But they had no plan for managing economic transition, no strategy for what to do with the security services, no framework for the power void. The oligarchs and the KGB had plans. Twenty years later, we have Putin.

This is the pattern: resistance without reconstruction creates power voids. Power voids get filled by whoever has a plan and is better positioned to deploy it, and that’s usually not the people who fought for democracy.

The Specific Dangers We Face

If the pro-democracy movement succeeds in ending the current authoritarian consolidation - through electoral victory, regime collapse, or sustained resistance that makes governance impossible - we will face a set of challenges that most movements never think about until it’s too late.

Armed actors won’t disappear. There are an estimated 20,000+ active militia members in the United States, many with military and law enforcement training. ICE has been transformed into an occupation force, while loyalist law enforcement factions won’t simply accept a transition. What’s the plan? Confrontation risks civil conflict. Ignoring them cedes territory.

Economic sabotage is certain. Those who benefited from authoritarianism will use economic power to undermine any transition. Capital flight can crash an economy in days. If reconstruction means poverty and chaos, the public will turn against it and toward whoever promises stability.

Forty percent (approximately the MAGA base) of the country may view reconstruction as illegitimate. How do you govern when a significant minority sees you as having stolen power? How do you rebuild institutions when a third of the population believes those institutions are corrupt by definition?

Climate change won’t wait. Any reconstruction effort must simultaneously address the most complex governance challenge in human history. Climate emergencies require rapid state action; exactly the kind of concentrated authority that can slide into authoritarianism. How do you handle climate emergencies democratically?

We have no shared vision of what comes next. The coalition resisting authoritarianism includes people who want revolutionary transformation and people who want to restore the pre-Trump status quo. Both are needed for resistance. But they want fundamentally different things from reconstruction. That tension will explode the moment we win unless we negotiate it in advance.

What Reconstruction Requires

Planning for reconstruction means answering questions that no one in the movement is systematically addressing:

Immediate stabilization. What happens to federal law enforcement on day one? Who stays, who goes, who decides? How do you prevent capital flight from crashing the economy? How do you maintain Social Security payments and air traffic control and food safety inspections when federal agencies have been gutted? What do you do about the Insurrection Act, the executive orders, the regulatory changes? How do you communicate with a public that doesn’t know what’s true anymore?

Democratic reconstruction. Does the Constitution need amendments to prevent future capture? How do you reform a Supreme Court that’s been weaponized? What about the Electoral College, the Senate, gerrymandering, money in politics? How do you rebuild a civil service that’s been purged? What new democratic participation mechanisms, including citizens assemblies, and participatory budgeting, should be created?

Climate-resilient governance. What emergency powers framework can handle climate disasters without enabling authoritarianism? What’s the energy transition plan? How do you manage the millions of Americans who will need to relocate due to flooding, heat, and water scarcity? What about food and water systems already under stress?

Security. How do you ensure the military supports constitutional order? What happens to ICE? How do you handle armed militias? Is it through negotiation, integration, isolation, or confrontation? What’s the cybersecurity posture when foreign adversaries will probe every vulnerability?

Economic transformation. How do you position the U.S. in a global economy where China is ascendant? How do you reduce inequality that’s at Gilded Age levels? What’s the infrastructure investment plan for a country with a C- grade on infrastructure? How do you rebuild labor power?

Social repair. How do you advance racial justice when white backlash is powerful? What about reparations? How do you reconcile a divided nation? Is reconciliation even possible or necessary? What about the collective trauma of the authoritarian period?

Process. Who has a voice in reconstruction decisions? How do you build legitimacy when many view you as illegitimate? How do you hold the coalition together when the common enemy is gone?

The Call to Action

The resistance must begin reconstruction planning now, not after victory, not during transition, but now, while there’s time to think, negotiate, and prepare.

This means forming working groups to address different pieces of reconstruction. It means building relationships with potential allies in institutions, including military officers committed to constitutional order, career civil servants who will support transition, business leaders who can be peeled off the authoritarian coalition. It means developing scenario plans for different transition pathways. It means negotiating, within the pro-democracy coalition, what reconstruction actually looks like.

Transitions are most vulnerable in their first weeks. Whoever controls the narrative, maintains security, and delivers stability shapes everything that follows. If we arrive at that moment without plans, others will fill the void, and we will have won the resistance only to lose the reconstruction.

We have one chance to get this right. The planning begins now.

This is not a theoretical observation. It is a historical one. In Hungary, Viktor Orbán systematically captured the media and entertainment infrastructure over a period of years, installing loyalists, defunding critical voices, and using the machinery of the state to reward compliance and punish independence. The result was a cultural environment in which the authoritarian project became the water people swam in, not because it was popular, exactly, but because it was ubiquitous, and because the alternatives had been systematically starved of oxygen. In Russia, the capture of television was a precondition for the consolidation of Putin’s power, not a consequence of it. In Turkey, the same pattern. In every case, the entertainment and media industries were understood by the authoritarian project not as a cultural amenity but as critical infrastructure - infrastructure that had to be captured before the consolidation could be completed.

The United States is not Hungary. But the playbook is being run here, and the entertainment industry is in the crosshairs. Understanding what’s happening, why it matters, and what can be done about it from both the inside and the outside of the entertainment industry is urgent work, and the people who are already doing it, from studio executives trying to hold the line, to writers’ rooms generating satirical counter-programming, to activists contesting mergers, need a shared frame for what they are part of.

What Capture Looks Like Here

Authoritarian capture of the entertainment industry in the American context is not likely to look like state television. It is more likely to look like what it already looks like: the slow contraction of what is permissible, driven not by explicit censorship orders but by the accumulation of financial pressure and regulatory threat, and the social contagion of anticipatory obedience.

The mechanism is familiar from other sectors. The administration and its allies don’t need to ban content they dislike. They need only to make the cost of producing that content high enough through threatened regulatory action, advertiser pressure campaigns, the weaponization of merger approval processes, and the personal targeting of executives and creators who step out of line, that the industry makes the calculation to avoid the conflict. Self-censorship, at scale, is functionally equivalent to censorship. The result is the same: a cultural environment from which certain perspectives, certain communities, and certain stories have been quietly evacuated.

We are already seeing the early stages of this. Diversity, equity, and inclusion programs which, whatever their limitations, represented institutional commitments to expanding whose stories get told, are being dismantled under corporate and political pressure, faster in some cases than even the most pessimistic observers anticipated. Major studios and networks are pulling back on LGBTQ+ content, not because audiences have rejected it, but because the political cost calculation has shifted. Executives who were willing to champion certain projects eighteen months ago are now asking their teams to think carefully about what they’re developing. The creative community has not been told to be afraid. It has been given enough signals to make itself afraid.

The merger landscape is where the structural consolidation is happening most visibly and most consequentially. Concentration of ownership in media and entertainment is not a new phenomenon. It has been a defining feature of the industry for decades that is going through a qualitative shift in the current of the moment. Fewer owners means fewer editorial voices, fewer risks taken on challenging content, and fewer platforms willing to carry work that powerful interests find inconvenient. When the people who control the distribution infrastructure are also, directly or through their investors and funders, aligned with the authoritarian project, the leverage they have over what gets made and what gets seen is enormous. Anti-merger activism in the entertainment industry is not a sideshow to the main event. It is one of the most structurally important forms of anti-authoritarian organizing available.

The Unions: Neutrality Is Not Neutral

One of the most consequential dynamics in the current moment is the posture of the major entertainment unions. The WGA, SAG-AFTRA, IATSE, and their counterparts have enormous potential power in this fight. They represent tens of thousands of workers who are the actual human beings who make the content the industry produces. They have demonstrated, in the 2023 strikes, a capacity for sustained collective action that shook the industry. And they have a direct material interest in the outcome: an industry captured by authoritarian power will not be an industry that respects workers, honors contracts, or allows independent creative voices to flourish.

And yet the unions are, for the most part, in neutral. The stated rationale is that they are trying to avoid drawing the fire of an administration that has already demonstrated its willingness to use regulatory and legal power to punish organizations that cross it. This is an understandable calculation. It is also a losing one.

Here is what neutrality actually produces in an environment of authoritarian consolidation: it produces capture on a slower timeline. The administration and its allies are not going to reward the unions for staying out of the fight. They are going to use the period of union neutrality to advance the structural consolidation, including the mergers, the regulatory changes, and the cultural climate shifts that will make the unions’ own position less tenable over time. A creative industry that has been captured is not an industry in which unions have leverage. The very conditions that make union power possible - a relatively pluralistic, competitive, creatively independent industry - are the conditions that authoritarian consolidation destroys.

There is a stronger argument available to union leadership, and it is both principled and strategic: the unions’ job is to protect the conditions under which their members can do their work with dignity and independence. An industry captured by authoritarian power is an industry in which the creative freedom that makes the work worth doing has been eliminated. Defending pluralism, resisting structural consolidation, and refusing to normalize the kind of political intimidation that is currently being directed at the industry is not a political position that puts the unions in conflict with their mission. It is their mission.

The 2023 strikes demonstrated something important: public support for creative workers, when they are willing to clearly articulate what they are fighting for and why it matters, is real and deep. The strikes were not just labor actions. They were cultural events, because the public understood that what was at stake was not just residuals and AI protections but the conditions under which the stories we share are made. That same public sympathy is available for a broader mobilization, but only if union leadership is willing to claim it.

The Pluralism Problem

There is a different kind of challenge on the other side: the significant portion of the entertainment industry that is not, in any meaningful sense, weak on pluralism out of malice or indifference, but out of a particular misunderstanding of what free speech and creative freedom actually require.

This misunderstanding is common in creative industries, and it sounds like this: “I believe in artistic freedom. I don’t think art should be political. I want to make things that reach everyone, and that means not taking sides.” It is a sincere position. It is also, in the current moment, a form of political concession that effectively aids the authoritarian project.

Here is what it misses. The conditions that make artistic freedom possible - a pluralistic media landscape, legal protections for creative expression, an industry that is not owned by a small number of politically aligned oligarchs, a regulatory environment that is not weaponized against dissenting voices - are not natural features of the landscape. They were built, over time, through political struggle. The First Amendment protects against government censorship, but it does not protect against the concentration of ownership that makes certain voices inaudible, or against the advertiser pressure that makes certain content commercially unviable, or, again, against the regulatory threat that makes certain projects legally risky. The conditions for free creative expression are political conditions, and they require political defense.

The “I just want to make art” position, whatever its merits as a creative philosophy, is not available as a political stance in an environment where the structural conditions for making art are under deliberate attack. This is the conversation that entertainment industry insiders who care about creative freedom need to be having with their peers who are still operating as though the pre-2025 rules apply. Pluralism is not a political preference. It is the precondition for the work.

What Inside Work Looks Like

The most important inside work is the work of building and sustaining a culture of refusal - the explicit, coordinated, mutual commitment to not complying with the normalization of authoritarian pressure.

This means creators, executives, and workers being explicit with each other about what they are seeing and what they are refusing. It means the executive who is being pressured to drop an LGBTQ+ storyline reaching out to peers at other studios to understand whether the pressure is coordinated, who else is facing it, and what the collective response looks like. It means the writer’s room developing the muscle memory of naming political pressure when it shows up in editorial notes, rather than absorbing it as an individual creative decision. It means the talent who has the leverage to attach their name to a project using that leverage to protect projects that wouldn’t otherwise survive.

The writers’ rooms and comedy commons that are forming as spaces for the movement are exactly right as an inside strategy, and not only because they produce content. They produce the relationships and the shared analysis that make collective action possible. A creative community that has been atomized - that has no shared understanding of what it is facing and no relationships of trust across the industry - cannot coordinate a response. The informal infrastructure of conversation, solidarity, and shared frame-building is a precondition for everything else.

Inside work also means being strategic about what gets made right now, and why. This is not a call for propaganda. Authoritarian aesthetics are bad aesthetics, and the demand for didactic counter-messaging is as likely to produce bad art as it is to produce effective politics. But it is a call for intentionality. Stories that demonstrate the humanity and complexity of the communities that the authoritarian project is targeting are not just representation goods. They are political goods, because they build the affective infrastructure - the emotional connection across difference - that makes solidarity possible. Stories that dramatize what institutional refusal looks like, what courage looks like, what people have risked and sacrificed to hold democratic commitments, are not just historical documents. They are preparation for the choices that audiences will themselves face.

The evidentiary function matters here too. Documenting what is being pressured, what is being dropped, what has quietly disappeared from development slates and broadcast schedules, creates a record that will matter for accountability, for litigation, and for the historical understanding of this moment. This is unglamorous work. It is essential.

What Outside Work Looks Like

The outside work operates on several levels simultaneously.

The most structurally important is the fight against consolidation. Every merger that concentrates ownership in fewer, more politically aligned hands makes the capture easier and the resistance harder. Anti-merger activism, through regulatory engagement, through public pressure campaigns, through coalition-building with labor, civil society, and civic organizations that understand the democratic stakes, is not a niche concern for media policy wonks. It is one of the highest-leverage interventions available. The people who are already doing this work need resources, allies, and the public frame that connects what they are doing to the larger democratic project. Stopping a merger is stopping a pillar of authoritarian infrastructure from being built.

The advertising and brand ecosystem is the second major lever. Entertainment content survives or disappears based on the willingness of advertisers to be associated with it. Advertiser pressure campaigns - both the ones directed at keeping advertisers away from content that serves the authoritarian project, and the ones that support advertisers who hold their commitments to pluralistic content - are an underutilized tool.

The corporate community has its own reasons to care about the conditions that authoritarian consolidation destroys: a predictable legal environment, a stable regulatory framework, a culture of creativity and innovation that concentrates in pluralistic societies and withers in authoritarian ones. Making that argument to the advertising and brand community, and building the relationships that make coordinated action possible, is outside work that directly enables the inside work.

Public mobilization on specific moments matters more than a general awareness of the threat. When a major studio drops a project under political pressure, when a platform changes its content policies in ways that systematically disadvantage certain communities, and when a merger decision approaches that will further concentrate ownership - those are the trigger moments when coordinated public response can shift the calculus. This requires the same preparation that disaster authoritarianism requires: having the networks, the narratives, and the mobilization infrastructure ready before the moment arrives, not scrambling to build them during it.

Finally, the outside work includes the work of building alternative and independent cultural infrastructure including the distribution platforms, the financing mechanisms, and the audience relationships that are not dependent on the captured mainstream industry. This is not a counsel of retreat from the mainstream. It is a counsel of not putting all of your eggs in one basket. A movement that has its own cultural production capacity, that can tell its own stories, in its own voice, to its own audience, through channels it controls, is harder to silence than one that is entirely dependent on access to the mainstream distribution infrastructure.

Why It Matters: The Deepest Argument

I want to make the deepest version of the argument, because the stakes are deeper than the immediate political moment.

The entertainment industry in the United States is, by any measure, one of the most powerful cultural forces in human history. The stories produced here circulate globally. They shape how billions of people understand themselves, each other, and the world. When Hollywood produces stories that expand whose humanity is visible, stories that put complex, three-dimensional human beings from marginalized communities at the center of narratives that audiences around the world fall in love with, it is doing something that no political speech, no policy paper, and no advocacy campaign can do as effectively: it is building the common ground on which democratic solidarity becomes possible.

This is what the authoritarian project understands and what its targets sometimes don’t. The fight over who appears in stories, how they appear, whose complexity is honored and whose humanity is denied - this is not a fight about representation as a cultural amenity. It is a fight over the substrate of democratic life. The entertainment industry is not incidental to the democratic project. It is one of the places where the democratic project is made or unmade, at the level of feeling and identification and shared story that is deeper than any political argument.

The authoritarian project is betting that the entertainment industry will do what it has done historically in moments of political pressure: accommodate, self-censor, make peace with the new constraints, and produce content that reflects the new normal. It has happened before. In the 1950s, the Hollywood blacklist did not destroy the industry. It did something in some ways worse: it produced a decade of content that systematically avoided the most important questions of its moment, because the people who would have raised those questions had been silenced or driven out.

The people in the industry who are resisting that outcome right now, who are building writers’ rooms and comedy commons, who are contesting mergers, who are holding their creative commitments under pressure, and who are trying to have the conversations that need to be had about what pluralism requires and what free expression actually needs to survive, are doing some of the most important democratic work being done anywhere. They need a frame for what they are part of. They need to find each other. And they need to understand that what they are protecting is not just their own creative freedom, but the cultural conditions under which democratic life is possible.

The screen is the battlefield. The people who know how to make things for it need to act like it.

There is a conversation happening in LGBTQ spaces right now that mostly isn’t happening out loud. It surfaces in strategy sessions and donor meetings and organizational board rooms, in the careful language of political consultants and the nervous calculations of advocacy leaders who are watching polling numbers and thinking about what is winnable and what is not.

The conversation goes something like this: trans rights, and in particular the specific fights around gender-affirming care for youth and trans women in sports, are polling badly with persuadable voters. The authoritarian project has chosen these issues with precision, not because they represent a serious policy concern but because they are effective wedges, generating visceral cultural anxiety that can be weaponized to separate the LGBTQ movement from potential allies and to make the movement as a whole appear extreme. And some people, some organizations, some funders are wondering whether the rest of the LGBTQ community - and by extension the broader progressive coalition - might be better served by a strategic retreat, by quietly distancing from trans rights, by deciding that this particular fight is not the hill to stand on right now.

I want to be direct about what that calculation is, what it misunderstands about the authoritarian strategy, and why it would be catastrophic, not only morally, which should be sufficient, but strategically, which apparently also needs to be said.

What the Authoritarian Playbook Is Actually Doing

The targeting of trans people - and specifically trans youth and trans women in sports - is not a policy agenda. It is a strategic operation. Understanding it as policy produces the wrong response. Understanding it as strategy produces the right one.

Jason Stanley, in How Fascism Works, identifies the targeting of vulnerable minorities as a core mechanism of authoritarian consolidation. The function is not primarily to harm the targeted group, though that harm is real and intentional. The primary function is to test the solidarity of potential opposition coalitions, to find and exploit the fracture lines, and to establish a precedent: that some members of the coalition can be sacrificed when the political cost of defending them is judged too high.

Every successful authoritarian project has done this. The question it is always asking of the opposition is: is there anyone in your coalition you will abandon to protect the rest? Because if the answer is yes, we know exactly how to proceed. We find that person. We make defending them as costly as possible. And we watch the rest of the coalition either hold together or fracture. If they fracture, we learn where the next fracture line is, and we push there.

The targeting of trans people is not the end of this strategy. It is the test. And what the test is measuring, in real time, is whether LGBTQ organizations, progressive coalitions, and pro-democracy movements will sacrifice their most vulnerable members when the pressure is sufficient.

If the answer is yes - if the movement signals, through organizational silence, funding withdrawal, or explicit distancing, that trans people are expendable - the authoritarian project will have learned something invaluable: that the coalition’s solidarity is conditional, that it has a price, and that the price can be paid in the currency of targeted minority sacrifice. The next target will be identified and pressured with that knowledge.

The Springs-to-River Framework

Before going further, let me explain the organizing concept that makes the strategic stakes here legible.

A spring is a distinct source - an ideologically coherent community, a movement, an organization with its own values, its own history, its own base, its own way of understanding the world. Springs are not interchangeable. Their distinctiveness is not a problem to be solved through merger or ideological alignment. It is the source of their power.

A river, in the organizing context, is what forms when distinct springs coordinate, merging but without ceding diversity; when they maintain their separate identities and commitments while feeding collective action toward a shared goal. The river’s force comes from the combination of many springs. No single spring, however powerful, generates the volume and momentum that a river requires.

The springs-to-river model is the strategic framework for how a genuinely pluralistic coalition produces the kind of mass civil resistance that historical evidence shows is necessary to reverse authoritarian consolidation. Erica Chenoweth’s research establishes that nonviolent civil resistance succeeds at roughly twice the rate of violent resistance, and that the key variable in that success is the breadth of participation counted in the number of distinct communities, constituencies, and institutional sectors engaged in coordinated action. The river has to be wide. Width requires springs. Springs require that the river not demand that any of them stop being what they are.

The LGBTQ community is a spring, or, more precisely, an ecosystem of springs, with enormous internal diversity of experience, culture, politics, and strategy. Trans people are among those springs. Bisexual people, lesbian women, gay men, nonbinary people, queer people who don’t organize their identity around any of these labels - each is a distinct source of energy, analysis, and commitment.

The question that the authoritarian project is forcing the LGBTQ movement to answer is whether it is a river or a collection of springs that are only willing to flow together when doing so is politically convenient. The answer to that question has consequences not just for the LGBTQ movement but for the entire pro-democracy coalition of which it is a part.

Why “Strategic Distancing” Is a Strategic Catastrophe

The argument for strategic distancing from trans rights goes roughly like this: we are in an emergency, political capital is limited, we should concentrate it where it can be most effectively defended, and the polling suggests that trans rights, particularly for youth and in sports, are not terrain where the broader public is with us. Better to consolidate the gains already made on marriage equality, workplace protections, and adoption rights, and fight for trans rights when the conditions are more favorable.

This argument has the structure of a strategic analysis and the content of a moral failure. Let me explain why the strategic analysis is also wrong.

First, the polling. The polling on trans rights is real and the numbers are not good on specific contested questions, particularly those that have been the focus of sustained authoritarian disinformation campaigns. But polling on targeted minorities during authoritarian consolidation is not a reliable guide to underlying public values. It is a measure of the success of the targeting operation. When authoritarians spend years and hundreds of millions of dollars generating fear and confusion about a specific group, the resulting polling reflects that investment. Responding to that polling by distancing is not reading public sentiment, it is rewarding the targeting operation for having worked.

Second, the precedent. Every movement and every institution that signals it will abandon vulnerable members under sufficient pressure has established a negotiating position: we can be moved. The question is only how much pressure is required and who the next target will be. The LGBTQ movement’s credibility as a coalition partner to labor, to racial justice movements, to disability rights organizations, to faith communities, and to the broader pro-democracy movement depends substantially on whether it is seen as a movement that holds together under pressure or one that sacrifices members when politically convenient. Coalition partners watch. They remember.

Third, the moral logic of authoritarianism. Authoritarian movements do not stop at the boundaries their opponents draw for them. If the LGBTQ movement signals that trans people are acceptable losses, the authoritarian project does not accept that boundary and move on. It takes the loss, notes the fracture, and pushes further. Marriage equality, which was described as the settled law of the land and a done deal, is already being litigated. The idea that a strategic retreat on trans rights would protect the rest of the movement assumes that the authoritarian project has a specific, limited policy agenda and will stop when it achieves it. It does not. It has a structural agenda: the elimination of LGBTQ visibility and rights from American public life. Trans people are the current point of attack because they are the most recent addition to the movement’s political gains and because the disinformation campaign against them has been most successful. They are a soft entry point to drive the wedge and divide and conquer, not the only target.

The Solidarity That Is Needed

Let me be honest about what solidarity with trans people actually requires in this moment, because the word “solidarity” is used so often that it has lost specificity.

It does not mean agreeing with every policy position or strategic choice made by every trans advocacy organization. Springs maintain their distinctiveness; they do not require ideological merger to flow together.

It does not mean that no critique within the coalition is possible. Internal accountability and honest disagreement are part of what makes a pluralistic movement functional rather than merely formal.

It does not mean prioritizing trans rights above every other strategic consideration in every context. The springs-to-river model is about coordination, not hierarchy.

What it does mean is this: the LGBTQ movement’s organizations, funders, and leaders must refuse, categorically and publicly, to signal through their resource allocation, their public messaging, or their organizational positioning that trans people are strategically expendable. That refusal must be explicit enough to be legible to the authoritarian project that is watching for fractures, and to the coalition partners who are assessing whether the LGBTQ movement is a reliable river or a collection of fair-weather springs.

It means naming the targeting operation as what it is: a strategic operation, not a genuine policy debate, and refusing to engage it on the terms it sets. When the authoritarian project frames trans youth healthcare as a debate about parental rights, the response is not to find a more moderate position on parental rights. The response is to name the frame as a strategic deception and to explain what is actually at stake.

It means, concretely, that organizations and funders that are quietly reducing their investment in trans advocacy need to understand that they are not managing political risk. They are transferring it to trans people who will bear the consequences of that abandonment, and to the broader coalition, whose credibility as a movement of genuine solidarity will be damaged in ways that are difficult to repair.

The River Holds or It Doesn’t

The springs-to-river model makes a claim about power that is empirically grounded: broad, pluralistic civil resistance is significantly more effective than narrow, homogeneous resistance. The breadth is not incidental to the power. It is the source of the power. A coalition that sacrifices its most vulnerable members to make itself more palatable to a political center that is itself being moved by authoritarian disinformation is not making itself stronger. It is making itself smaller, more predictable, and more susceptible to the next round of targeted pressure.

Trans people are part of this river. Their experience of living under sustained authoritarian targeting, including the legislation, the disinformation, the violence, and the deliberate erasure, is not a political liability to be managed. It is strategic intelligence about what the authoritarian project is doing and how it works, and it belongs at the center of the movement’s analysis, not at its margins.

The LGBTQ movement did not achieve what it has achieved by abandoning its most vulnerable members when the political cost of defending them seemed high. It achieved what it has achieved by insisting, repeatedly, and in the face of enormous opposition, that the humanity and dignity of every member of the community was non-negotiable. That insistence was not naive idealism. It was the strategic foundation of every coalition the movement built and every institutional ally it won.

The authoritarian project is testing whether that foundation holds. The answer the movement gives in its organizational decisions, its funding priorities, its public voice, and the explicitness of its solidarity will shape not just the fate of trans people in this country but the coherence and credibility of the entire pro-democracy movement of which the LGBTQ community is an essential part.

The river holds or it doesn’t. This is the moment that tests which.

This essay draws on the springs-to-river coordination framework developed by the 22nd Century Initiative and on the civil resistance research of Erica Chenoweth. The political analysis of authoritarian targeting of minority groups draws on Jason Stanley’s How Fascism Works (2018).

“Tonight, truth prevailed over lies,” Magyar told the crowd. “Today, we won because Hungarians didn’t ask what their homeland could do for them, they asked what they could do for their homeland.”

Orban, speaking at Fidesz headquarters to supporters who wept as they watched him on television screens, was characteristically blunt about the scale of what had happened. “The election result is painful for us, but clear,” he said. “I congratulated the victorious party. We are going to serve the Hungarian nation and our homeland from opposition as well.”

With more than 80 percent of precincts counted, Magyar’s Tisza party had won approximately 137 seats in Hungary’s 199-seat parliament, a two-thirds supermajority. Turnout reached a record 79 percent, the highest in Hungary’s post-Communist history. This was not a narrow squeaker navigated through a tilted electoral system. It was a landslide, and it is one of the most consequential democratic events in the world this year.

This is not just about Hungary. It is about whether the authoritarian project that Orbán pioneered, and that has been exported, adapted, and celebrated by movements from Washington to Warsaw to New Delhi, can be defeated. Hungary’s answer is yes. And that answer carries implications that democratic movements around the world need to understand and use.

WHAT ORBÁN BUILT - AND WHAT IT COST

To understand what is at stake, you have to understand what Orban actually did. When he returned to power in 2010, he didn’t merely win an election. He systematically dismantled the conditions that make future elections fair. He rewrote the constitution, reshaped the judiciary, and consolidated control over key state institutions. Pro-Orban oligarchs came to own more than 500 media outlets. Approximately 80 percent of Hungary’s media fell under Fidesz control. Through gerrymandering and altering parliamentary entry rules, Orban ensured that his strongholds were overrepresented and opposition parties faced a structurally steeper climb to power.

He called the result “illiberal democracy.” His critics called it what it was: competitive authoritarianism, a system in which elections and deliberative functions of government continue, but have been rigged. In the 16 years since he took office, Hungary descended to the rank of most corrupt country in the European Union, according to Transparency International.

And yet the system was studied, admired, and emulated. Heritage Foundation operatives made pilgrimages to Budapest. Steve Bannon praised the model. Tucker Carlson broadcast from there. Hungary’s former president of the Central European University, which Orban’s government effectively expelled from the country, described it as a “training ground” for a broader illiberal political movement. What Orban built in a country of ten million people became the laboratory for what the global authoritarian right wanted to build everywhere.

HOW THE OPPOSITION ACTUALLY WON

The story of how Magyar and Tisza got to this moment is as important as the outcome itself, because it is a manual for democratic resistance.

Magyar is not a left-wing figure. He is a center-right former Fidesz insider who broke with the government in 2024 after a presidential pardon scandal involving the cover-up of a child abuse case. In an interview, he accused Orban of corruption, saying “a few families own half the country.” He turned a personal rupture into a political movement.

What Magyar did next is the instructive part. He visited scores of towns and cities, drawing huge crowds even deep in traditional Fidesz territory. His campaign was relentlessly domestic, focused on corruption, healthcare, education, and economic stagnation, and this discipline denied Orban obvious lines of attack. He refused to be drawn into the foreign policy debates that Orban wanted to fight on, declined to be painted as a Brussels puppet, and kept the argument exactly where Hungarian voters’ frustration actually lived: in their daily lives.

This was the first election with genuine stakes in sixteen years, as Orban faced a single challenger who was capable of winning. The consolidation of the opposition around one party, rather than fragmenting across a dozen, was itself a strategic achievement that took years and required multiple smaller parties to stand down in the interest of democratic change.

A record 79 percent of Hungarian voters came out on a Sunday in April. That number tells you everything about what was at stake in the minds of ordinary Hungarians. “It feels like this is our first and last chance in a really long time to actually change the system,” said one 24-year-old at the Tisza election night event. “I can’t even describe the feeling.”

WHAT A MAGYAR GOVERNMENT CHANGES - AND WHAT IT DOESN’T

If there is one number that separates tonight’s result from a mere change of government, it is 133. That is the number of seats required to amend Hungary’s constitution, and Tisza appears to have cleared it. A two-thirds supermajority means Magyar will not merely be able to govern. He will be able to begin the constitutional dismantling of the Orbanist architecture that 16 years of captured institutions made possible: the gerrymandered electoral rules, the judiciary stacked with loyalists, the legal framework that entrenched Fidesz power against any future democratic reversal.

The implications extend well beyond Hungary’s borders. Orban has repeatedly blocked EU support for Ukraine, most recently vetoing a 90 billion EU loan to Kyiv. A Magyar government very likely ends that blockade.

For Ukraine specifically, Orban has functioned as Russia’s inside man in the European Union, blocking sanctions, sharing intelligence, and providing diplomatic cover. Leaked recordings showed Hungary’s foreign minister coordinating directly with Russian Foreign Minister Lavrov after EU meetings. That chapter is over. Putin has lost his most reliable ally inside the bloc, and Ukraine’s path to the 90 billion EU loan just cleared its most significant obstacle.

But anyone expecting swift democratic restoration should study the Polish experience carefully. Law and Justice’s institutional legacies continued to obstruct democratic governance in Poland for years after it lost power. Orban spent 16 years packing the judiciary, capturing the media, and building a loyalist apparatus throughout Hungarian institutions. The supermajority helps, and helps enormously, but the work of dismantling what he built will be long, contentious, and institutionally difficult. This is what the democratic backsliding literature keeps emphasizing and what democratic movements keep learning the hard way: it is much faster and easier to dismantle democratic institutions than to rebuild them.

WHAT IT MEANS FOR THE UNITED STATES

The stakes of what happened in Hungary tonight extend directly to the United States, and not only as an abstraction.

The Trump administration was visibly, personally invested in an Orban victory. Trump posted a full-throated endorsement of Orban on Truth Social. JD Vance publicly campaigned alongside Orban in Budapest just five days before the election, attacking the alleged interference of “Brussels bureaucrats.” Trump promised to bring US “economic might” to Hungary if Fidesz won.

The administration’s investment in Orban’s survival was not sentimental. It was ideological and strategic. Orban’s Hungary has been the proof of concept for the claim that liberal democracy can be dismantled from within through legal and electoral means, without triggering the kind of international backlash that outright coups produce. That proof of concept is the intellectual foundation of the Heritage 2.0 agenda. A decisive, landslide defeat for Orban - not a narrow loss but a supermajority repudiation - is therefore a defeat for that argument. It is evidence that the model is not inevitable, not permanent, and not as popular as its architects claim.

There is something else worth naming. JD Vance campaigned for Orban. Trump endorsed him. Russian intelligence services reportedly attempted to stage a fake assassination attempt to boost his popularity. EU Commission President von der Leyen hailed the result. French President Macron called to congratulate Magyar. The global democratic community responded with something close to relief and joy.

None of the authoritarian intervention was enough. The Hungarian people, given a credible alternative and a unified opposition, voted in record numbers - 79 percent! - to end sixteen years of authoritarian rule. That is a data point that should travel.

WHAT ACTUALLY DEFEATED ORBAN - AND WHAT THAT MEANS FOR AMERICAN STRATEGY

There is a temptation, especially among those of us in the pro-democracy movement, to read Hungary’s result as a triumph of democratic values over authoritarian ones. It is that. But the polling and post-election analysis tell a more specific and strategically important story.

Magyar did not win by running on democracy. He won by running on corruption, economic stagnation, and the material deterioration of ordinary Hungarians’ lives. His campaign was relentlessly domestic, addressing kitchen-table issues, healthcare, the cost of living, and the oligarchs enriching themselves while public services collapsed. In other words, it was not just conceptual and abstract, but visceral and grounded in the experiences of ordinary Hungarians’ lives.

This gives us guidance we should heed. Yes, make the case for democracy and against authoritarianism. Doing so builds the core of the resistance movement and strengthens its ability to develop effective strategies for both resistance and post breakthrough governance. But, importantly, expand beyond that base by making sense of how the authoritarian consolidation underway in the U.S. impacts people in their personal lives and in the lives of their families and communities.

Orban wanted to fight the election on foreign policy, on Brussels, on the war in Ukraine. Magyar refused that terrain. He kept the argument exactly where Hungarian voters’ frustration actually lived: in their daily experience of a government that had stopped working for them.

The Atlantic Council’s expert assessment, published within hours of the result, was blunt: Orban’s defeat resulted from his poor performance at home. His posturing could not overcome voters’ objections to a weak economy and blatant corruption. Politico identified six factors driving the outcome, with inflation, economic stagnation, and the collapse of Fidesz’s moral credibility at the top of the list. Bloomberg described it as discontent with rampant corruption, a cost-of-living crisis, and the poor state of public services. One former Orban supporter in a rural town told Al Jazeera that he had built a feudal system that destroyed the country and the future of its youth.

This was not an abstract referendum on liberal democracy versus illiberal democracy. It was a concrete rejection of a government that had made life worse for the people it claimed to serve.

People do not mobilize to defend institutions in the abstract. They mobilize when they can see, in concrete terms, what the corruption is costing them and their families.

The implication for the United States is direct, and it should reshape, to a degree, how the pro-democracy movement talks about what is happening here.

The most powerful anti-authoritarian message available to the American movement right now may not be “save democracy,” a frame that, however accurate, can feel abstract to people struggling to pay for groceries. It may be: they are robbing you, and they are repressing protests, violating free speech protections, and corrupting elections because corruption is the point.

Trump’s corruption is not incidental to his governance. It is the governance. The oligarchic transfers, the regulatory capture, the hollowing out of agencies that protect public health and safety, and the tariff chaos that raises prices on working families - all of it is the system working exactly as designed. And we are still early. The economic consequences of this administration’s corruption are likely to get substantially worse.

Magyar understood something that too many democratic movements learn too late: people do not mobilize to defend institutions in the abstract. They mobilize when they can see, in concrete terms, what the corruption is costing them and their families. The work of the American pro-democracy movement is to make that cost visible, name who is responsible, and offer a credible alternative. Hungary just demonstrated that when that case is made clearly and domestically, even sixteen years of authoritarian consolidation cannot survive it.

This may be how we win through elections. Keep in mind however that elections aren’t the only way to win, and may be manipulated in ways that make winning extremely difficult or impossible. Noncooperation remains the most effective means of resisting authoritarianism, and, should we score a breakthrough, backing up that win and positioning us to consolidate a more democratic government.

THE HARD LESSON AND THE REAL HOPE

Here is what I want anti-authoritarian organizers in the United States and around the world to take from this victory.

Authoritarian consolidation is not inevitable, nor does it make authoritarian regimes invincible once it is achieved. Poland ousted Law and Justice in 2023. Italy’s Meloni suffered a significant defeat in March 2026 when voters rejected her constitutional referendum. And now Hungary - not a narrow win, but a supermajority landslide. The global democratic recession is real and its consequences are severe. But it is a political project, not a historical inevitability. Political projects can be defeated.

The defeat requires preparation that begins long before the election. Magyar spent two years building relationships in places where the opposition had never gone. He unified a fragmented coalition. He kept his message disciplined and domestic. He refused the traps that Orban set for him. None of that happens in the last weeks of a campaign. It is built in the slow time between crises. That’s exactly what the American pro-democracy movement needs to be doing right now, today, with the 2026 midterms approaching.

The hard work begins after the win, not before it. Democratic recovery in Hungary will be a long, contentious, institutionally difficult process. The same will be true in the United States, whenever the democratic inflection point arrives. The record that advocates, journalists, and civil society organizations are building right now, documenting what was dismantled, by whom, and how, will be the foundation for that recovery. Don’t underestimate what you’re preserving.

Foreign validation of authoritarianism is not popular support for it. Vance flew to Budapest. Trump posted endorsements. Putin’s intelligence services ran interference operations. Record Hungarian turnout repudiated all of it. Authoritarians and their allies can make a lot of noise. They cannot manufacture the popular will of people who have decided they’ve had enough.

One 24-year-old Hungarian put it simply outside the Tisza celebration: “It feels like this is our first and last chance in a really long time to actually change the system.”

That feeling, that combination of urgency and possibility, is available everywhere that authoritarian consolidation has overreached. The question is whether democratic movements are building the infrastructure to meet it when it arrives.

Hungary answered. The question is now ours.