Another key strategy, ironically, is compliance—as in compliance 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 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.
Lederer said that he resents having to be paranoid, but that now he does everything by the book. If a Ph.D. student wants to interview him for a project, he requires an e-mail from a university address, a letter from the professor, and other due diligence, to prove the request isn’t some kind of entrapment. “This is a bad way to live,’’ he said. “You always have to think who is going to trick you or fool you.”
That leads to the next strategy: compartmentalization—don’t share information with anyone you don’t really trust. Technically, compartmentalization can mean having separate work and personal devices such as phones and computers, so that if one is searched, the other remains untouched. But it’s a mistake to think technology is the only way that information leaks.
Those who defend women seeking abortions in U.S. states where it is illegal warn that when women are betrayed, it’s usually not through digital surveillance but, actually, through someone they know—a friend, relative, nurse, or current or former partner. This is where code words can be helpful, allowing you to talk about sensitive topics where you might be overheard.
But there is a fine line between discretion and self-censorship. The key is to pick your battles—fight about the speech you want to fight about, not the speech that isn’t important to you. “Be cautious, but don’t silence yourself,” David Kaye, a human-rights lawyer, said.
One night in February, shivering residents of Washington, D.C., gathered in front of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts. Performers in drag twirled and twerked in acrobatic formations as the swaying crowd shouted the lyrics of Chappell Roan’s dance ballad “Pink Pony Club.”
The scene was equal parts dance party and street protest. One day earlier, Trump had moved to seize control of the Kennedy Center’s board and programming, citing drag shows held there the previous year as his rationale. Trump had vowed on social media, “NO MORE DRAG SHOWS.”
It’s tempting, amid a mounting assault on the constitutional order, to dismiss revelry as a flimsy—even inappropriate—tactic to meet the political moment. In the combat theatre of American democracy, what meaningful advances could come of a few hundred people gyrating and raising hand-lettered signs on a street corner?
According to Keya Chatterjee, one of the organizers of the Kennedy Center event, there are some critical advantages to gatherings like this. Chatterjee believes that through the rising authoritarian tides, places where people can enjoy one another’s company are a beachhead where organizing can begin. “They want us to be so afraid,” she said. “And the only way to counter fear is with joy.”
In January, Chatterjee launched a new organization, FreeDC, with a goal of achieving what the District has never been able to obtain in decades of fighting: self-governance. D.C. has been seeking statehood for generations, but its autonomy has increasing relevance given Trump’s norm-defying efforts to consolidate power over the nation’s courts, Congress, and military and intelligence services. It’s much easier for federal authorities to deploy the military in a federal district than it would be in a state. That means that any civil resistance could be crippled in the nation’s capital. “When you have an authoritarian, it matters very much if you can organize in the capital,” Chatterjee said.
Chatterjee is trying to unite her capital neighbors through drag dance parties, happy hours, bracelet-making bashes, and drum circles. In each of the city’s eight wards, FreeDC organizing committees hold regular events with a stated mission to “prioritize joy.” Each committee aims to enlist as members 3.5 per cent of the ward’s population, or about thirty-one hundred people. Chatterjee knows that figure, generated by Chenoweth’s research, is not a guarantee of success, but it’s a tangible and achievable target.
It’s painstaking work. For the first few weeks, the organization was growing by four hundred people per week. Jeremy Heimans, the co-founder of GetUp!, Australia’s version of MoveOn.org, and a global organizing incubator called Purpose, describes the current moment as the least favorable environment for motivating large groups of progressives that he’s seen in twenty years. “This is probably the low-water mark in terms of both engagement and efficacy of mass movements,” he said.
Heimans points to an increasingly hostile digital landscape as one barrier to effective grassroots campaigns. At the dawn of the digital era, in the two-thousands, e-mail transformed the field of political organizing, enabling groups like MoveOn.org to mobilize huge campaigns against the Iraq War, and allowing upstart candidates like Howard Dean and Barack Obama to raise money directly from people instead of relying on Party infrastructure. But now everyone’s e-mail inboxes are overflowing. The tech oligarchs who control the social-media platforms are less willing to support progressive activism. Globally, autocrats have more tools to surveil and disrupt digital campaigns. And regular people are burned out on actions that have failed to remedy fundamental problems in society.
It’s not clear what comes next. Heimans hopes that new tactics will be developed, such as, perhaps, a new online platform that would help organizing, or the strengthening of a progressive-media ecosystem that will engage new participants. “Something will emerge that kind of revitalizes the space.”
There’s an oft-told story about Andrei Sakharov, the celebrated twentieth-century Soviet activist. Sakharov made his name working as a physicist on the development of the U.S.S.R.’s hydrogen bomb, at the height of the Cold War, but shot to global prominence after Leonid Brezhnev’s regime punished him for speaking publicly about the dangers of those weapons, and also about Soviet repression.
When an American friend was visiting Sakharov and his wife, the activist Yelena Bonner, in Moscow, the friend referred to Sakharov as a dissident. Bonner corrected him: “My husband is a physicist, not a dissident.”
This is a fundamental tension of building a principled dissident culture—it risks wrapping people up in a kind of negative identity, a cloak of what they are not. The Soviet dissidents understood their work as a struggle to uphold the laws and rights that were enshrined in the Soviet constitution, not as a fight against a regime.
“They were fastidious about everything they did being consistent with Soviet law,” Benjamin Nathans, a history professor at the University of Pennsylvania and the author of a book on Soviet dissidents, said. “I call it radical civil obedience.”
An affirmative vision of what the world should be is the inspiration for many of those who, in these tempestuous early months of Trump 2.0, have taken meaningful risks—acts of American dissent.
Consider Mariann Budde, the Episcopal bishop who used her pulpit before Trump on Inauguration Day to ask the President’s “mercy” for two vulnerable groups for whom he has reserved his most visceral disdain. For her sins, a congressional ally of the President called for the pastor to be “added to the deportation list.”
“You often need a martyr or someone very committed to act first,” Margaret Levi, a professor emerita of political science at Stanford University, said. As the crowd of dissenters grows, she said, it generates a “belief cascade,” which sweeps greater numbers into a greater sense of comfort and security when participating in acts of defiance.
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 these early acts, 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. ♦
