Next Saturday June 15, at 3pm ET, I’ll be doing an online conversation with my dear friend James Carroll regarding my forthcoming book RESISTING THE RIGHT: HOW TO SURVIVE THE GATHERING STORM, as part of Writers for Democratic Action’s Democracy Book Club.

Formed in August 2020, Writers for Democratic Action began as a small group of writers, poets, and journalists—Paul Auster, Peter Balakian, James Carroll, Carolyn Forché, Todd Gitlin, Siri Hustvedt, and Askold Melnyczuk—who believed the Trump administration to be uniquely dangerous to our society. Today it is a volunteer organization of writers, readers, editors, and booksellers with a membership of more than 3000 worldwide, standing together to champion democracy and the institutions that embody and protect it. 

The WDA is devoted to defeating Trump in 2024; to fighting the wave of book banning in places like Florida and Texas and censorship in all its guises; to connecting citizens to their bookstores and libraries; to defending civil liberties including the right to vote and to have our votes counted; and to advocating for justice and equality in the US and across the globe.

Every month, the WDA’s Democracy Book Club features a book on a pressing issue related to those matters. In the past year the Club has done talks with Margaret Atwood, Salman Rushdie, Congressman Jamie Raskin, Dahlia Lithwick, and many others. I’m honored to be included in that parade.

My book surveys the current emergency for democracy in the United States and what we can do to protect the republic from the autocratic forces that Trump represents. Out of prudence—but not fatalism—it also contemplates the “worst case scenario” of a second Trump presidency and what we can do should that dark fate befall us.

You can register to see my talk about it with James Carroll here.

Having previously previewed it in these pages, here’s another brief passage from the book, which is available for pre-order now from OR Books here in New York, and will come out next month.

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The primacy of the vote in a democratic society can hardly be overstated. Every other nightmare, no matter how horrible—whether it’s a policy of forced birth, or of kidnapping immigrant children, or of accelerating an environmental catastrophe that threatens the very future of human life—can be addressed so long as we have recourse to free and fair elections as a means to eject elected officials with whom we are unhappy. But once that is gone, democracy is gone with it.

As the Yale historian Timothy Snyder notes in his slim but seminal 2017 book On Tyranny, when free elections disappear, few citizens realize they are voting in the last one. That paradigm, of course, is common in many nations that succumb to autocracy. In the modern era, the demise of a democracy via an extralegal takeover, violent or otherwise, is much rarer than one that begins at the ballot box, with an authoritarian party ascending to power through legitimate or quasi-legitimate means, then slowly choking off the very mechanisms it used to gain that power and installing itself in permanent control.

 In How Democracies Die, the political scientists Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt offer voluminous historical examples, including Mussolini and Hitler of course, but also Fujimori, Chávez, Orbán, Erdoğan, and to some extent even Putin.Almost all follow the same pattern, which involves capturing the courts, controlling the media, neutering (or co-opting) the legislature, and installing loyalists in every relevant arm of the bureaucracy. Surprisingly, control of the military and law enforcement—the chief tools of old-school autocracies—are less important, and typically fall into place once the other goals are achieved. Also omnipresent in these scenarios: vicious demonization of the regime’s critics and opponents that justifies their subjugation.

For America to go down that dark path, all that remains is for the GOP to obtain control of the US government, which it very much aims to do in 2024. When it does, it is unlikely ever to give it up.

But rare is the autocracy that needs to maintain power through total repression of a seething, resentful populace, or can. More often a Stockholm syndrome takes effect, an invitation to conspire in one’s own bondage.

“The truth about many in the GOP base (is) they prefer authoritarianism to democracy,” writes Jennifer Rubin, noting that about 26 percent of the US population qualify “as highly right-wing authoritarian,” according to a recent study—twice the number of the runners-up, Canada and Australia. In order to keep the American experiment alive, we will have to reckon with this demographic, the one that facilitates and gives oxygen to the Republican Party’s campaign for countermajoritarian power and is energized by it in return.

Autocrats want you to be discouraged. Instilling a sense of apathy and resignation is one of their favorite and most frequently reached for tricks, as they prefer a public that believes it has no power to improve its lot and can’t change things. But we do and we can—and the ferocity of their gaslighting is evidence of that power and how much they fear it. Human history is thick with examples, even with regimes far more brutal than we have yet faced in the United States.

“Ordinary people are not powerless to challenge the political and economic élite who have such disproportionate authority over our lives,” writes Professor Keeanga Yamahtta-Taylor of Northwestern University. “But our power is often located outside of the institutions of tradition and influence.” In fact, even in the best of circumstances, when American democracy is functioning reasonably well, change typically comes from forces outside the government putting pressure on it—which is to say, from the people. Should a truly repressive, retrograde right-wing government come to power, the onus will shift even more in that direction.

The Nobel Peace Prize winner Maria Ressa has spoken of democracy dying the death of a thousand cuts, but autocracy can be brought down in the same way. Many of those thousand cuts are in the seemingly small, quotidian actions of ordinary citizens like you and me. Our starting point is the simplest of all, which is the very way we think about what we are doing, for the psychological preparation for the pro-democracy struggle requires full-time vigilance to the ways that autocracy demands our complicity.

In On Tyranny, Snyder advises us: “Do not obey in advance. Most of the power of authoritarianism is freely given.” This impulse to bend voluntarily to an oppressive regime is what he calls “anticipatory obedience,” and need not even take the form of active support. It can be simple apathy, and a Niemöllerian indifference to the sound of marching boots and knocks on neighbors’ doors, and to the even almost-inaudible sound of democratic norms falling one by one.

We are often regaled with Frederick Douglass’s famous line from 1857, that “Power concedes nothing without a demand.” But it’s well worth considering the longer quote, and the context of that maxim:

Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will. Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have found out the exact measure of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them, and these will continue till they are resisted with either words or blows, or with both. The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress.

The first thing to understand, then, is that the source of all political power, even in the most repressive police state, is the consent of the people.

“Obedience is at the heart of political power,” wrote the political scientist Gene Sharp in his three-volume magnum opus, The Politics of Nonviolent Action (1973), calling the submission of the citizenry ”the most important single quality of any government, without which it would not exist.” The citizens of free countries give their obedience gladly, while those living under despotic regimes give it less so. But they give it nonetheless. 

“To say that every government depends on consent of the people does not, of course, mean that the subjects of all rulers prefer the established order to any other which might be created,” Sharp continued. “They may consent because they positively approve of it—but they may also consent because they are unwilling to pay the price for the refusal of consent . . .The degree of liberty or tyranny in any government is, it follows, in large degree a reflection of the relative determination of the subjects to be free and their willingness and ability to resist efforts to enslave them.”

In other words, repression only works when the people are cowed by it.

Admittedly, it sounds naïve. How can an unarmed citizenry under the heel of a tyranny that controls all the levers of power, including a monopoly on violence as exercised by the police and armed forces, possibly avoid submission? 

In his own epic history of nonviolence, The Unconquerable World (2003),Jonathan Schell writes of the delusion “that the foundation of all state power is force,” arguing that it is a confusion of police power with political power. “Terror, even as it keeps its practitioners in office for a time, destroys the foundations of their power,” Schell argues, contending that “each time the  Soviet Union used its tanks to crush a rebellion in Eastern Europe, it was diminishing its power, not increasing it.” Even Clausewitz, Schell writes, was of the opinion that “military victories were useless unless the population of vanquished army then obeyed the will of the victor”—a formulation that calls into question the very definition of victory itself.

But let’s not stop with Clausewitz, an admirable enough figure as far as Prussian generals go. Even Adolf Hitler, the very model of the most monstrous totalitarianism, declared that occupying a conquered nation was largely a psychological matter. “One cannot rule by force alone,” he wrote in the midst of subjugating much of Europe in July 1943. “True, force is decisive, but it is equally important to have this psychological something which the animal trainer also needs to be master of his beast. They must be convinced that we are the victors.”

Sharp then asks a bold question: What happens if the people refuse to accept militarily successful invaders—or domestic oppressors—as their political masters? His conclusion is that “noncooperation and defiance by subjects, at least under certain conditions,” has the power to thwart those rulers, and even destroy them.

“If this is true,” Sharp asks, “then why have people not long since abolished oppression, tyranny, and exploitation?” The answer, primarily, is that “The subjects usually do not realize that they are the source of the ruler’s power and that by joint action they could dissolve that power”—and tyrants have every reason to keep them from so doing. As we have just observed, inculcating a sense of resignation, hopelessness, and despair in the citizenry is the ruler’s greatest tool. Sharp goes on to cite the South African philosopher Errol E. Harris that, consequently, a public subjected to despotism “become[s] its accomplices at the same time as they become its victims. If sufficient people understood this and really knew what they were about and how to go about it, they could ensure that government would never be tyrannical.”

“A nation gets the government it deserves,” Harris wrote. That is not to blame the victim or to allege weakness, only to say that a despotic regime can only remain in power if the citizenry is unwilling to mobilize sufficiently against it (without underestimating how difficult that mobilization might be). That is bitter pill for any nation to swallow, but it can also be inverted. If it is only the complicity of the ruled that enables their oppression, that acquiescence can also be withdrawn. Therefore, it is within the power of the oppressed to be the means of their own salvation. 

 It is this understanding that is central to any American defiance of an autocratic right-wing regime that might arise under Donald Trump and/or the Republican Party. We are the majority, and power flows only with our consent, which we have the capacity to withdraw.