Heroic work from ordinary people

People have been asking me lately about countries that fell into an authoritarian abyss. They want to know when the tipping point will come. Has it already passed? What are the effective ways to resist?

I’ve mentioned in passing before that in the research I’ve done on concentration camp history around the world, the two most critical tools for a country facing a destabilizing internal threat tend to be keeping a vestige of independent courts and maintaining the right to public protest. Without either of these, it becomes very difficult for a country to correct course.

That answer isn’t necessarily reassuring to a lot of people. Since the U.S. Supreme Court has embraced both financial and ethical corruption from its members, and Chief Justice John Roberts has sought to protect them from consequences, people wonder whether the judiciary is effectively closed as an avenue to reestablish democracy.

Others say on social media that protest is useless, or too dangerous, because Trump and Musk could care less about public opinion, and massive protests are likely to trigger an even greater clampdown.

Those who don’t read history for a living don’t necessarily have a lot of context. So a few days ago, I decided to write in a more focused way about these two critical democracy-saving institutions—one very much rooted in formal rules and roles, the other ephemeral by design, with no permanent structure.

And as if to bless this idea, “No Kings” protests against Elon Musk and Trump’s executive overreach took place all around the country on Monday, Presidents' Day—promoted by 50501 (50 states, 50 protests, 1 movement). I had a chance to spend a couple hours on Capitol Hill at one of those protests and do some first-hand observation, which I’ll use to explain more about what I still think are our two most reliable ways to save the country.

At the reflecting pool

Make no mistake, the members of the public that showed up at the reflecting pool on the West Side of the U.S. Capitol on Monday were in a mood. They were angry and frightened, and convinced that the current administration was not only a blight on the nation but currently making an illegal power grab. From blocks away, my path began to converge with people carrying signs.

Hundreds of demonstrators had arrived by noon, and chants of “No more money for Elon Musk!” floated across the vast pool as I approached. Before I could get closer, I ran into a couple who were carrying signs saying “No Donald Musk” and “Shame on GOP.”

They didn’t want to give their names, but they explained that they were on vacation and had come directly from the Holocaust Museum to the Capitol, because the parallels felt so obvious to them. They were former deep-red Republicans. Since youth, they’d been committed to the party, but now they no longer recognized it. They were convinced it couldn’t be salvaged.

Asked what they wanted to see changed, they said the country was in the middle of a coup, and they were there to demand government by and for the people.

Other signs linked Musk and Trump to Nazi Germany. Some Musk signs added an extra S to “Tesla,” turning double letters into SS lightning bolts. There were plainer placards decrying “billionaire populism,” reading “Butt Out Elon” or pointing out that “Nobody elected Musk.” An informal poll showed that Donald Trump was only marginally less vilified than Musk.

At one point the crowd broke out in a chant, telling Congress, “Do your job!” even though everyone knew that neither the House nor the Senate would be in session until Tuesday. But fair enough—what exactly Congress should be doing is a valid question right now. I’m focusing on courts and protests in this post, but I don’t want to ignore legislators completely.

What’s shaking on the Hill

Representatives and senators alike are cheering on the countless court cases brought by nineteen state attorneys general, the American Bar Association, and many litigants. At times, they’ve seemed to be waiting on the court cases to provide some kind of direction.

Why aren’t elected officials who oppose the president’s agenda doing what Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez called for when she asked her colleagues to “stop playing nice in the Senate and block every damn thing that we can. Do not give votes to the nominees”?

Some commenters responded that the 2026 elections and battle for control of the Senate are very much tilted against Democrats. Still, we’ve seen people in government service resigning their jobs rather than collaborate with illegal actions, as happened this week with acting head of Social Security Michelle King. King was Trump’s pick for the position but resigned after 30 years of government service rather than give DOGE members access to the public’s sensitive information.

No one is asking representatives or senators to match this level of heroics or to resign their jobs. But on the whole, they’re not showing a similar spirit of refusal in the places where they can still act.

While some members of Congress do seem like they’re waiting for the wheels to fall off the Trump administration so that he can take the blame, others are out there actually talking about what they can do, and what constituents can do, and how those things might complement each other. Representatives like Ocasio-Cortez and Maxwell Frost have worked on raising public awareness and joining people in the fight rather than encouraging from the sidelines.

The Senate did filibuster the nomination of Russell Vought, who now leads the White House budget office. But no nomination has been successfully torpedoed since Matt Gaetz lost his chance to run the Department of Justice.

Democrats will have a clearer opportunity next month, when Capitol Hill works to avert a government shutdown on March 14. To do so will require some votes from Democrats and is the most obvious place where elected officials in Congress opposed to Trump’s policies can exercise power.

The role of the courts

Every Democratic legislator I’ve heard address the current crisis with Trump dismantling government has immediately invoked the court strategy as the first line of defense. This seems like a sound approach to start—bringing the law to bear on illegal actions. And countless cases are already making their way into the system.

The only one in which the Trump administration’s arguments are widely seen by legal experts to have any potential substance is in the case of Hampton Dellinger’s removal as the head of the Office of Special Counsel. I mention this as a reminder that seasoned lawyers are saying it’s an outlier and should probably not be interpreted as a harbinger of how every case related to the new administration will be treated by the Supreme Court.

The rest of the cases brought so far, with the slightest pressure on material facts, reveal mostly a grasping and venal free-for-all in progress. Even Tanya Chutkan, who seems to be giving the government the benefit of the doubt about whether the situation is urgent enough to issue a temporary restraining order barring all of DOGE’s intrusions, seemed started when the government did not seem aware of exactly how many people had been fired, and by the filing asserting that Elon Musk isn’t the head of DOGE and has no special authority in the new administration.

That the courts so far are setting limits, even temporary ones, is a tremendously good sign for judicial independence. There are three main issues, brought out by several legal scholars. The first is that the Supreme Court could reverse many of the decisions made against Trump at the lower level. The second is the question of enforcement, if various court rulings are not enforced by law enforcement agencies out of the Department of Justice’s loyalty to Trump. The third is that the law is very slow-moving with frequent delays for appeals and administrative due diligence.

I won’t speak in much detail about enforcement, except to note that there are more options than most non-lawyers probably realize, from U.S. Marshalls to privately hired law enforcement. While the courts are often the least speedy and change-oriented of all our federal institutions, and most judges see themselves upholding tradition, so far, they also seem more responsive and tuned in to the magnitude of the crisis Trump has launched than the legislative branch.

Where we’re at

I don’t want to minimize the effects of what is happening. Some of the damage that’s already been done cannot be repaired. Careful systems built over decades to protect the public health and our most vulnerable citizens have been smashed.

One NIH employee told me at Monday’s protest about a coworker whose position had taken years to fill, because so few people in a lucrative specialty would take the pay cut of working in the public sector to do the necessary work. That coworker had already been fired, and even if the current course were reversed immediately, this NIH employee wondered how many people could simply not return or could not be replaced. Who would accept such a government position now?

We find ourselves in a grave situation. And given the timetable consideration, we probably have to consider the courts only a wrench in the works rather than a permanent solution. They’re a way to stop some immediate harms perhaps, but mostly a way to dampen the scale of the damage until we have an executive more inclined to serve the people than to serve himself.

But there is a lesser advantage in this delay, too. Even if the Supreme Court ends up ruling in favor of the Trump administration in most of the cases that will eventually reach it, that too will take time. And in the interim, legislators and the public can use the decisions of more independent, less corrupt judges as a drumbeat to raise public awareness, alerting those who have checked out to what’s happening to the country. Media coverage of these decisions can play a role as well.

In the end, it comes down to the people, expressing themselves and demanding rights, including the right not to be exploited or abused by the current administration.

The importance of networks

Protesting is a key part of this right, but the umbrella is much larger than that. People expressing themselves can take a lot of forms.

This is why I’ve talked about networking before. It’s important to know who's inside your trusted group, to be able to provide support to one another now, even if you’re not yet directly affected by what’s happening. Volunteering with your library or at a food pantry, or working out a community program that’s needed can be ideal ways to engage, particularly when the relationships are more complex than just donors and recipients (although donors are necessary to many efforts). The more connections that exist between people who care for one another on a grass-roots level, the harder it will be to impose the kind of atomized, reeling society that will give Trump, Musk, and many Republican officials free rein.

If mass protests take place on the scale of those we’ve seen force government change or oust corrupt rulers elsewhere, it will be due in part to people feeling connected with their neighbors, sharing enough of a vision of a common future to take a chance.

The current protests are in the hundreds or thousands, which is a good start. But protests will likely become larger and more dangerous over time. We have to consider the deliberate cruelty inflicted on immigrants deported to Guantanamo or to Panama (for eventual transfer to a camp near the jungle) as a warning shot, and symbolic of the kind of harm the current administration would like to inflict on anyone who opposes them. To understand the direct connections, we need to look no further than watching border czar Tom Homan saying he’s calling on the Department of Justice to investigate Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.

Taking different roles

Minority groups of every kind are already facing attacks, with white supremacy becoming a public rallying cry of key people in the Trump administration in very literal ways. Musk and Trump have embraced white Afrikaners as a vulnerable refugee group. At the Munich Security Conference, JD Vance promoted the interests of the Germany’s AFD—the party in the country most in line with Nazi ideology and rhetoric. Racist framing, along with direct targeting of the civil service and anything that can be tied, however spuriously, to DEI appear to have the goal of undoing any postwar civil rights advances made by the country.

To go against this, not everyone will be able to protest in public. Those who are caregivers to older relatives, those with disabilities, those with infants, or whose identity puts them at particular risk in public may decide to stay behind the scenes. Some people will be organizers and educators. Others will become legal observers, not joining protesters in advocacy or making political demands, but documenting what unfolds in ways that will hold up in court. Those who are protesting may be fed by those who are not. Other people altogether may be coordinating legal services or bail. There are a lot of roles to be played.

Past traditions

In this podcast, I talk a lot about foreign examples from history. And there are many protest traditions on which to draw, from Gandhi’s tactics in India to boycotts during apartheid in South Africa, or demonstrations under dictatorship in South America in the 70s and 80s, not to mention dramatic examples more recently in places like South Korea.

But we have deep and powerful traditions of American protest right here in the U.S., ones that have been led at various points by Black people, Native Americans, trans folk, disabled people, and women. These protests were rarely spontaneous. They were often done strategically with a lot of education and aimed at specific goals.

Though informal, protests like Monday’s gatherings around the country are a way to put down a marker, to let people see others like them who are unhappy with what’s going on. But to grow to a size that can make demands, a lot more people are going to need to reach out and connect with communities of the disaffected.

We’re going to need teach-ins. Some of them will be high-profile, like the one happening March 7 in DC. It’s part of a new series from Politics & Prose and will include David Cole, who has done tremendous work on civil liberties in America, Kelley Robinson, the head of Human Rights Campaign, Rep. Jamie Raskin, lawyer Ally Coll, and Skye Perryman, president of Democracy Forward, which is leading some of the court battles against the new administration. If you can’t get to DC, you can watch virtually that evening.

That’s a start. But we’re going to need even more teach ins from career community organizers like Mariame Kaba and Kelly Hayes, among many others.

Just as every instance of a court acting independently is useful, whether it’s delivering tremendous results yet or not, every public action of citizens and residents exercising the right to express themselves and build the kind of society they want to live in is a step forward. These actions help to stop the erosion of rights and preemptive clampdown. They can make those in power more nervous about actually asserting themselves against civilian demonstrations later.

And these small steps are necessary. Building relationships is as important as any other action. Most people feel better after doing something—anything—than doing nothing. And I know from teaching karate that when people are just learning to do pushups, sometimes even one is impossible. But if you break it down into pieces, they can do small parts. Over time, almost everyone can get stronger or do amazing things.

“No kings” is a start

As I saw on Monday, some protesters were stunned fired federal employees looking for a public outlet for the grief over the losses of their jobs and of whole ecosystems of government service. Others were moved by Musk’s egregious role in destroying a government he clearly doesn’t understand.

Some felt motivated by simple patriotism at odds with everything that seemed to be happening since January 20. I asked a woman holding a sign decrying dictators why she had come out, and she said, “Because I’m an American.”

Next to the reflecting pool, Julia Kasdorf strummed her guitar and sang a version of the Star-Spangled Banner that ended unconventionally in a tribute to the “land of the free, and the home of the honest citizens of America.”

This particular protest had a generic rallying cry against kings and executive overreach. Some on social media have worried that these kinds of protest might seem like boomer cringe. What are people trying to do? What do they hope to accomplish?

But really, we’re only at the beginning. For now, especially for those who may not have experience, showing up a real start. Later, demands will become more specific. Danger will surely increase. But often in history, defiance of unjust government starts with saying NOT THIS. Saying no is a first step, even if it’s the first of many.

One of the key reasons that legislators are unable or unwilling to do as much as people would like is due to the fact that the same system that elected Donald Trump elected them. Just as legacy newspapers are bound to the current U.S. political and economic system in ways that make it difficult for them to report in unusual times, current elected legislators are, by and large, bound to the current models of politics in ways that make it difficult for them to work against the current administration.

They do have an important role to play right now, but few of them will choose to play it or even understand how to. Which isn’t to say that the public shouldn’t keep pressuring them to act; it’s just to say that we shouldn’t wait on them if and when they don’t lead the way.

It’s been said that it’s not fair to expect heroic actions from ordinary people. But in the end, whatever salvation we see is likely to come from courts saying no and specifying remedies, and the people saying no and making demands about how they’re willing to be governed. It’s up to us.

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