"It remains possible for Americans to form a
popular front: an alliance of people whose politics would not normally
put them in alliance." (photo: Stephen Lam/AP)
Once upon a time—say, several weeks ago—Americans tended to think of dissidents as of another place, perhaps, and another time. They were overseas heroes—names like Alexei Navalny and Jamal Khashoggi, or Nelson Mandela and Mahatma Gandhi before them—who spoke up against repressive regimes and paid a steep price for their bravery.
But sometime in the past two months the United States crossed into a new and unfamiliar realm—one in which the consequences of challenging the state seem to increasingly carry real danger. The sitting President, elected on an explicit platform of revenge against his political enemies, entered office by instituting loyalty tests, banning words, purging civil servants, and installing an F.B.I. director who made his name promising to punish his boss’s critics.
Retribution soon followed. For the sin of employing lawyers who have criticized or helped investigate him, President Donald Trump signed orders effectively making it impossible for several law firms to represent clients who do business with the government. For the sin of exercising free speech during campus protests, the Department of Homeland Security began using plainclothes officers to snatch foreign students—legal residents of the United States—off the streets, as the White House threatened major funding cuts to universities where protests had taken place. And for the sin of trying to correct racial and gender disparities, the government is investigating dozens of public and private universities and removing references to Black and Native American combat veterans from public monuments.
Meanwhile, Elon Musk, Trump’s aide-de-camp, has taken a chainsaw to the federal workforce, dispatching his deputies to storm agencies and fire workers who tried to stop his team from illegally downloading government data. Musk, who regularly takes to his social-media platform to harass government workers, has also incited an online mob against a blind nonprofit staffer who mildly criticized his work, and called for prison sentences for journalists at “60 Minutes” who questioned his shuttering of a federal agency.
More people 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, and gender identities to be outlawed.
Even the list of professions facing harsh consequences for their day-to-day work is growing. A New York doctor incurred heavy fines from a Texas court for providing reproductive health care. (A New York court refused to enforce the fine.) In Arkansas, a librarian was fired for keeping books covering race and L.G.B.T.Q. issues on the shelves. A member of Congress who organized a workshop to inform immigrants in her district of their rights under the United States Constitution was threatened with federal prosecution.
The climate of retribution has caused many to freeze: Wealthy liberal donors have paused their political giving, concerned about reprisal from the President. One Republican senator dropped his objection to Trump’s Pentagon nominee after reportedly receiving “credible death threats.”
Others who are under pressure from Trump have opted for appeasement: Universities have cut previously unthinkable “deals” with the Administration which threaten academic freedom—such as Columbia’s extraordinary promise to install a monitor to oversee a small university department that studies much of the non-Western world. A growing list of law firms has agreed to devote hundreds of millions of dollars in legal services to the President’s personal priorities, in the hope of avoiding punishment. Some in the opposition Party have even whispered concerns that if they protest too much, Trump will trigger martial law.
But fear has not arrested everyone. Hundreds of thousands of people demonstrated in all fifty states on April 5th, to register their discontent with the new government. For weeks, protesters have let out their fury at dealerships for Musk’s Tesla, contributing to a nearly thirty-per-cent drop in the company’s share price since January. Fired National Park employees scaled Yosemite’s El Capitan and draped an upside-down American flag—a symbol of distress—across one of the monolith’s cliff faces. In the well of the U.S. Senate, Cory Booker, a New Jersey Democrat, delivered a historic twenty-five-hour speech in defiance of Trump’s agenda, electrifying a party whose spirit had begun to ebb.
These early actions may feel limited, even anemic, to Americans who recall images of approximately four million Women’s March participants swarming cities across the nation, at the start of Trump’s first term. But data from the Crowd Counting Consortium, a joint project of the Harvard Kennedy School and the University of Connecticut which counts the size of political crowds at protests, marches, and other civic actions, indicates that there are many more demonstrations unfolding in the United States than there were at this point during the first Trump Administration. In the period between the 2017 Inauguration and the end of that March, the consortium tallied about two thousand protests. During the same period in 2025, it counted more than six thousand.
But the American approach to dissent will likely have to evolve in this era of rising “competitive authoritarianism,” wherein repressive regimes retain the trappings of democracy—such as elections—but use the power of the state to effectively crush resistance. Competitive authoritarians, such as Viktor Orbán, in Hungary, raise the price of opposition by taking control of the “referees”—the courts, the media, and the military. In the United States, many of the referees are beginning to fall in line.
We analyzed the literature of protest and spoke to a range of people, including foreign dissidents and opposition leaders, movement strategists, domestic activists, and scholars of nonviolent movements. We asked them for their advice, in the nascent weeks of the Trump Administration, for those who want to oppose these dramatic changes but harbor considerable fear for their jobs, their freedom, their way of life, or all three. There are some proven lessons, operational and spiritual, to be learned from those who have challenged repressive regimes—a provisional guide for finding courage in Trump’s age of authoritarian fear.
Americans have seen their government weaponize fear before. President Harry Truman directed a purge of the federal workforce amid Cold War paranoia, eventually ensnaring more than seven thousand workers suspected of holding “subversive” views. In the decades that followed, J. Edgar Hoover’s F.B.I. worked diligently to foster a sense of anxiety among Black civil-rights organizers, taking steps such as posting flyers to lure activists to a fake meeting where agents could take down their license-plate numbers. Muslim American and Arab American communities across the U.S. were intensely surveilled after September 11, 2001, by plainclothes detectives who spied on mosques and gathered names and personal details of students attending Muslim campus-group meetings.
One hears echoes of these earlier chapters in today’s political moment. Some demographics, including immigrants and Americans of color, have long been disproportionately subject to tracking, unwarranted surveillance, and suppression. “Institutions that have mostly felt themselves protected from political retaliation now find themselves feeling some of the vulnerability that marginalized communities have long felt,” Faiza Patel, the senior director of the liberty and national-security program at the nonpartisan Brennan Center for Justice, said.
But the fear now is different in kind. The sweeping scope of Trump’s appetite for institutionalized retaliation has changed the threat landscape for everyone, almost overnight. In a country with a centuries-long culture of free expression, the punishments for those who express even the slightest opposition to the Administration have been a shock to the American system.
There is hope, though. Political-science research reveals that autocratic leaders can be successfully challenged. Erica Chenoweth, a professor at Harvard University, has analyzed more than six hundred mass movements that sought to topple a national government (often in response to its refusal to acknowledge election results) or obtain territorial independence in the past century. Chenoweth found that when at least 3.5 per cent of the population participated in nonviolent opposition, movements were largely successful.
Chenoweth’s data also show that nonviolence is more effective than violence, and that movements do better when they build momentum over time—think a long-lasting general strike or wildcat walkouts, rather than a one-time action. Successful campaigns weaken popular support for an authoritarian leader by encouraging different sectors of society—such as business leaders, religious institutions, unions, or the military—to withdraw their support from a corrupt or unjust regime. One by one, the sectors defect, and, eventually, the leader may weaken and their government may fall.
Take South Africa, for instance, where, in the late nineteen-eighties and early nineties, white business owners who were feeling the pain of domestic and global economic boycotts turned their ire toward the ruling National Party government, pressuring leaders to come to the table with Mandela and end apartheid.
Or Serbia, where, during the demonstrations against Slobodan Milošević at the turn of the twenty-first century, a student movement managed to weaken the willingness of state security forces to use violence against them. Activists brought flowers and cakes to the police and military officers while they were standing guard. At the peak of the protests, when hundreds of thousands of people assembled alongside a general strike in Belgrade, Milošević ordered the police to disperse the protesters, but the police refused.
“All power-holders, even the most ruthless and corrupt, rely on the consent and coöperation of ordinary people,” Maria J. Stephan, who co-authored a book with Chenoweth titled “Why Civil Resistance Works,” said.
The key to challenging authoritarian regimes, Stephan said, is for citizens to decline to participate in immoral and illegal acts. Stephan, who co-leads the Horizons Project, a nonprofit that supports nonviolent movements against authoritarianism, has a phrase for this mind-set: “I think of it as collective stubbornness,” she said.
Danny Timpona stood at the front of a crowded room as a slide show of photos flashed on the projector screen behind him: A white Department of Homeland Security vehicle. A Black Chevy S.U.V. with tinted windows. Then close shots of uniform patches stitched with the insignias of various immigration-enforcement agencies—ICE, Customs and Border Patrol, and Homeland Security Investigations.
It was a brisk night in early March. The audience of seventy-five people—packed closely into white folding chairs at a community center just outside Boston—had come to learn how to spot undercover immigration agents. Timpona, the organizing director for the community-organizing group Neighbor to Neighbor Massachusetts, initiated a pop quiz. As a new batch of images appeared on the screen, people shouted from their seats: “That one’s ICE!” “That’s a police car!”
A few weeks earlier, Tom Homan, Trump’s cartoonishly tough-talking “border czar,” had pledged in a widely covered speech that he would soon bring “hell” to Boston in the form of immigration raids. Within days of Homan’s remarks, a coalition of Massachusetts immigrant-rights groups had begun training people across the state to approach suspicious vehicles and document their conversations with the agents inside before calling a hotline run by the coalition Luce to share as much information as possible.
Long a fixture of civil-rights and racial-justice campaigns in the United States, communal trainings for nonviolent action aren’t just about tactics; they also carry something of a spiritual message: Yes, you’ve signed up to take on a higher level of risk for the greater good, these group sessions convey. But you’re not doing it by yourself.
Many dissidents we spoke to said that, amid prolonged and cascading political crises, establishing a political home for yourself is a necessary ingredient for nurturing non-coöperation. Think of this as the equivalent of participation in a faith community that meets to worship—a regular practice to guard against loneliness and despair, and check in with others going through a similar experience.
Felix Maradiaga, a Nicaraguan opposition leader, was jailed in 2021, after announcing that he would challenge the dictator Daniel Ortega for the Presidency. Maradiaga had risen to prominence as an outspoken critic of Ortega’s corruption, including his channelling of public funds to his family and close allies through private business ventures and government contracts. Maradiaga, who was released from prison in 2023, says that dissent was most personally taxing when he felt most politically isolated. “I spoke openly against crony capitalism,” he said. “To my surprise, there were very, very few who spoke up.”
Maradiaga credits his ability to advocate against Ortega’s dictatorship in the years before his imprisonment to a community of support that he cultivated—both locally, through family and friends, and globally, through the World Liberty Congress, an alliance of antiauthoritarian activists from regimes, including Iran, Russia, Rwanda, and China. Now living in exile in the United States, Maradiaga serves as the director of the W.L.C.’s academy, which helps train activists fighting authoritarian governments around the world. Among the slate of protest tactics that he teaches, he says, none may be as important as finding your people: “Having a community is a powerful tool of resilience.”
A few weeks after the Boston-area ICE-watch training, community preparation paid off when the network received a tip: men in suspicious vehicles had been spotted in front of a construction site where day laborers were working. Casey (whose name has been changed here), a local elementary-school teacher who had attended the community-center session, received a message with a request for volunteers to the location. By the time Casey arrived, others from the network had already engaged with the agents about their presence in the area and had filmed the interaction on their phones. The agents eventually drove away, but Casey stayed at the site for about two hours, before noticing some of the workers leaving through the back. Casey and a few other volunteers approached them with know-your-rights materials and offered them a ride home. The workers accepted both.
Homan has kept his promise, overseeing the immigration arrests of three hundred and seventy people in Massachusetts over a multiday operation in late March. But no one at the construction site was taken into custody or detained that day.
Taking part in non-coöperation or defiance doesn’t have to mean becoming a martyr or abandoning all personal defenses, particularly in the United States, where we still have plenty of legal and cultural support for freedom of expression. Even so, this moment calls for discretion.
“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-coöperation 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.
Now is the time to clean up your life—your digital life and even, perhaps, your personal life. Dissidents describe a pattern: autocrats and their cronies use even the most minor personal scandal to undermine the credibility of activists and weaken their movements. “You have to be a nun or a saint,” a prominent Venezuelan political activist, who asked not to be named, told us. “If someone wants to find dirt on you, they will find it, so give them the least dirt possible.”
That includes deleting old social-media posts and using only trusted encrypted-messaging apps. Sadly, cleaning up might mean swearing off dating apps—or at least going the extra mile to verify that potential suitors are who they say they are. The right-wing activist James O’Keefe has been advertising on Facebook and X for people who will use matchmaking platforms to meet with targets and secretly record them. In January, he nabbed a Biden White House staffer, and last month his former organization, Project Veritas, used a similar technique against a U.S. Education Department worker.
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.
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