A practical guide to courage in Trump's age of fear (The New Yorker)

I teamed up with the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Julia Angwin to interview dissidents across the world. Here's our primer for fighting authoritarianism – and overcoming political fear.

This weekend The New Yorker published “So You Want to Be a Dissident?,” an essay I co-authored with Julia Angwin, the Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative journalist and New York Times Contributing Opinion writer.

For months, Julia and I have been interviewing foreign dissidents and opposition leaders, movement strategists, domestic activists, and scholars of nonviolent movements. We’ve asked them for their advice for those who want to oppose rising authoritarianism in the United States, but harbor considerable fear for their jobs, their freedom, their way of life, or all three.

You may be one of these Americans. More people in the United States who never aspired to be activists but oppose the new order are finding that they must traverse a labyrinth of novel choices, calculations, and personal risks. Ours is a time of lists – of “deep state” figures to be prosecuted, media outlets to be exiled, students to be deported, and gender identities to be outlawed. There are many reasons to be afraid.

But there’s good news: There are also many proven lessons, operational and spiritual, to be learned from those who have challenged repressive regimes. Our essay is full of practical advice, notes on what has and hasn’t worked, and stories of perseverance.

Here are a few key strategies (but there are lots more in the New Yorker essay):

Know that autocratic leaders can be successfully challenged. We learned that when at least 3.5 percent of the population participated in nonviolent opposition, movements were largely successful. Successful campaigns weaken popular support for an authoritarian by encouraging sectors of society – like business leaders, religious institutions, unions, or military – to withdraw support from a corrupt or unjust regime. One by one, sectors defect, and, the leader weakens.

“All power-holders, even the most ruthless and corrupt, rely on the consent and cooperation of ordinary people,” Maria J. Stephan, who co-authored a book titled “Why Civil Resistance Works,” told us. The key to challenging authoritarian regimes, Stephan said, is for citizens to decline to participate in immoral and illegal acts. She has a phrase for this mindset: “I think of it as collective stubbornness."

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

Felix Maradiaga, a Nicaraguan opposition leader, was jailed in 2021, after announcing that he would challenge the dictator Daniel Ortega for the Presidency. He says that dissent was most personally taxing when he felt most politically isolated. Maradiaga credits his ability to advocate against dictatorship before his imprisonment to a network of support – in Nicaragua and globally. Among the slate of protest tactics that he now teaches, he says, none may be as important as finding your people: “Having a community is a powerful tool of resilience.”

Get clear-eyed about your risk profile, and clean up your life. “There’s never going to be zero risk,” Ramzi Kassem, a professor of law at the City University of New York and a co-leader of the nonprofit legal clinic CLEAR, said. “You just have to decide how much risk you are willing to carry to continue to do the work you’re doing.”

Worrying about amorphous dangers can be paralyzing. Instead, if you’re considering non-cooperation work, write up a plan for the worst-case scenario – what you’ll do if you get fired or audited, or find yourself in legal trouble. Reach out to a lawyer and an accountant, or others who could help you navigate complicated decisions. Then clean up your life – digital and personal. Dissidents describe a pattern: autocrats use personal scandal to undermine activists and weaken their movements. “You have to be a nun or a saint,” a prominent Venezuelan political activist told us.

Practice compliance and compartmentalization. Comply with as many laws as possible. Tax laws. Traffic laws. Sandor Lederer, who runs K-Monitor, a corruption-watchdog group in Hungary, recalled being investigated as part of an inquiry into multiple nonprofits by the government of Viktor Orbán, a close Trump ally. Lederer said that the organizations were targeted as part of the regime’s strategy to “never talk about the substance of the issues” that his anti-corruption group has raised but, instead, to find something to disable and distract dissidents. “It’s more about keeping us busy rather than shutting us down,” he added.

That leads to the next strategy: compartmentalization – don’t share information with anyone you don’t really trust. Yes, this can mean having separate work/personal devices, so that if one is searched, the other remains untouched. But it’s a mistake to think tech is the only way that info leaks. Those who defend women seeking abortions in states where it's illegal warn that when women are betrayed it’s usually not through digital surveillance but through someone they know. Codewords can help, allowing you to talk about sensitive topics where you might be overheard.

These are just a few of the strategies we lay out in the piece – and it’s been so gratifying to see that the advice has resonated. Nikole Hannah-Jones, creator of the New York Times’ landmark 1619 Project, called our essay “a critical read in these times,” and Timothy Synder, the Yale scholar of authoritarianism and author of On Tyranny, amplified it as an example of what he called a “crucial point” – that we must “learn from others rather than imagine that everything is new and therefore shocking and impossible to resist.” I hope the guide proves useful to you, your friends and family, and your community as we navigate this difficult chapter together.

The price for those who stand directly in the way of Trump’s plans may indeed grow steeper in the coming months and years. But the early acts of dissent that we’ve witnessed, as much as they are oppositional, also point to a coherent vision of a just and compassionate society.

Even in their darkest hours, in the late nineteen-seventies and early eighties, when the K.G.B. sent many Soviet dissident leaders to forced-labor camps and psychiatric institutions, the activists continued writing their books, making their art, and publishing their newsletters. And, when they gathered, they raised their glasses in the traditional toast: “To the success of our hopeless cause.”

In 1989, the Berlin Wall came down.

You can read our essay on The New Yorker website. It is also available here.