How to Survive an Authoritarian Populist Presidency

Your first instinct may be to assume there is a reasonable explanation — a misunderstanding, a temporary measure, a very long-form trolling campaign. Resist this instinct. Historians who study democratic backsliding consistently note that the window for effective resistance correlates strongly with how quickly citizens believe their own eyes.

Not all troubling policies are democratic backsliding. Tax policy you dislike is a political disagreement. Defunding the agency that tracks whether votes are being counted correctly is an institutional attack. The difference matters because they require different responses: one calls for the ballot box, the other calls for showing up to the school board meeting and also the ballot box.

Libraries, state legislatures, municipal governments, regional courts, and community boards often retain meaningful function even when federal institutions are under stress. Locate these on a map. Attend at least one meeting. Introduce yourself. Bring a small dish if it seems appropriate. These are the load-bearing walls of democratic life and they are, for now, still load-bearing.

Identify two or three reputable news sources you trust and read them consistently. Ideally include at least one that makes you slightly uncomfortable, as this is a sign it is from outside your information bubble rather than a sign it should be avoided. A small sense of discomfort is how you know you are receiving information rather than confirmation.

The feeling of having information that proves you were right all along is indistinguishable, neurologically, from the feeling of being about to share a hoax. Both feel excellent. This is by design. Wait 30 minutes. If the story is still real and important after 30 minutes, it will remain real and important. If you have by that point discovered it originated from a parody account, you have avoided a small but non-trivial embarrassment.

Consuming more news does not make you better informed past a certain point; it primarily makes you more anxious. Schedule two to three specific windows for news. Outside those windows, do other things that you would normally do if the world were fine. The world not being entirely fine does not require you to stop eating lunch, and eating lunch will help you remain functional for when you are needed, which will be many times over the coming period.

Some people in your life voted differently than you and have genuinely different values that are worth engaging. Others have views that are not actually arguable and do not require your energy. Arguing with the second group at Thanksgiving dinner will not change their votes; it will change your blood pressure. Allocate your persuasion budget accordingly.

Many people who support a candidate that alarms you are not primarily interested in the candidate's project of institutional consolidation; they are interested in cheaper groceries, or their factory reopening, or someone in charge seeming to be on their side for a change. People who want something are reachable. Understanding this is not an endorsement of anything; it is just how political change has worked throughout recorded history.

Phone banks, letter-writing campaigns, local canvassing, school board attendance, city council public comment, donations to legal defense organizations, mutual aid networks — these are all legitimate civic activities. You do not need to do all of them. You need to do one of them on a repeating basis. A person who phones three voters every Tuesday for two years has made a larger impact than a person who attended every major protest in year one and is now extremely tired.

Legal aid organizations, civil liberties unions, and university law clinics can often provide free or low-cost consultation. Many things you have been told are newly illegal are not yet illegal. Many things you have assumed are fine have recently become complicated. This is a situation in which the specific facts matter, and lawyers know specific facts in a way that Twitter does not, despite Twitter's confidence on this point.

School board elections, judicial retention votes, state legislative primaries, soil and water conservation district elections — these positions exercise real power and are decided by small numbers of engaged voters. The person most committed to a particular vision of your local water table probably votes in every election. You should know who they are.

Read a novel about something else entirely. Learn an instrument. Go outside and look at a tree for a moment. The tree is doing fine. The tree has been here longer than the current news cycle and intends to be here after it. This is not avoidance; it is maintenance. A person who does nothing but think about the political situation will eventually become ineffective at doing anything about the political situation. Schedule the tree.

There is a meaningful difference between a community that helps you take effective action and one that primarily helps you feel correctly alarmed. Both will tell you the situation is serious. Only one will also tell you what you're doing next Tuesday. Prioritize groups that have a to-do list.

Every democracy that has maintained or recovered democratic norms under authoritarian pressure did so because enough people, in enough small ways, on enough ordinary days, chose to act as though the norms still mattered and were worth defending. Most of them were not heroes. Most of them went to work the next day and voted in the next election and told their neighbors what they knew. This is, historically speaking, what worked. It is available to you.