Unbreaking things

Last week I wrote about protest and why people who can do it with little or no risk right now should start doing so. This week, I want to address another important way to defy Donald Trump’s and Elon Musk’s attempts to decimate the federal government: education. But for now at least, I don’t mean public schools.

Maybe like me, you’ve been cheering for the courts. And on the whole, the courts are trying. Trump apparatchik attorneys are making command appearances on tight schedules before judges like exhausted bass getting hauled out of a river. But as the government fails to follow court orders, more and more responsibility will fall on the judiciary in terms of enforcement, which hasn’t traditionally been its assigned role. John Roberts may stand up for his right to not be bossed around by Donald Trump, but there isn’t likely to be any perfect or consistent way to navigate Trump going around ignoring or defying judicial rulings.

It’s not yet clear what will happen when physical enforcement may be necessary, or when more cases get to the Supreme Court. I think anyone who claims 100% certainty about how it will all go is foolish. But the current Supreme Court seems unlikely to uphold democracy as the governing system in a number of rulings that might come down the pike in the next year.

Along with that judicial crisis, we have DOGE dismantling federal programs. Then there’s the recent memo suggesting telephone assistance from Social Security offices will be decimated or abolished, along with many local offices. DOGE also appears to have forced some kind of break-in at the U.S. Institute of Peace, which is not even part of the executive branch.

There will be victories—like the 25,000 federal employees that Chris Geidner reported as returning to their jobs in the last week. But with Trump’s ongoing defiance, my sense is that we’re going to have a lot to be mad about on an ongoing basis. Today I want to talk about what to do with the energy from that anger.

What doesn’t help

Sometimes I post on social media, and a post goes moderately viral. At that point, I get dozens of replies like “Nazi bitch” or worse, not aimed at me but usually referring to someone working for Donald Trump. People write about how they’d like to see this or that administration official raped or sent to a gulag. This happens often enough that I’m not trying to shame anyone in particular. But it does make me wonder what use people think it serves to inject that stuff into my feed, let alone the collective information sphere.

If it relaxes you to spend your free time posting generic insults about Trump stooges into strangers’ replies, I don’t entirely understand you, but I won’t try to convince you to do otherwise. If, however, you find yourself stressed out and exhausted by ongoing social media exchanges like this, I’d like to propose another path.

Apart from a few revved-up elected officials, the Democrats on Capitol Hill are struggling with how to respond right now. We can and should continue to push them to lead. It’s right for us to expect them to play their constitutional role. But neither the courts nor the folks on the Hill can do a good chunk of the work that needs to be done, especially with Trump toadies blocking them.

America elected Trump, and many of the people who voted for him did so for reprehensible reasons. But many did not fully understand what would happen. Many more, who didn’t vote at all, still have no idea what’s coming. However you feel about those people—the nonvoters and those with the potential to become alienated Trump supporters—they have one thing in common, and it’s something you can help fix on a grass-roots level: ignorance.

Imagining the future

Another issue to keep in mind is that, as international relations professor Nicholas Grossman ‪posted on Bluesky in December that “college freshman today were 6 years old in the 2012 election.” Many eligible voters have lived only in an era in which Trump dominated politics.

Maybe they have a few memories of Obama’s second term, but they don’t have much more for context, not the Tea Party or the Iraq War, let alone 9/11 or Watergate. Their entire political awareness is from the era in which Trump has owned our political system. They have a similar kind of ignorance as the nonvoters, but to this point, they’ve never known a national system or a home community that was not divided over a demagogue.

Trump is an aberration in terms of the degree of his lawlessness while also being a direct result of the American political trajectory we’ve followed ever since Richard Nixon’s arrival on the scene. Trump has deep personal roots with reactionary American figures like Roy Cohn and evolved as a creature in that habitat.

To be fair, kids today often have more political sense than their elders. Unlike Gen X and Boomers, Gen Z voters went for Harris over Trump—as did millennials, to a lesser degree.

But as old people, we might still have a role in—even a responsibility to—demonstrate a different kind of society than we currently have. We can atone for our generational sins or at least offer a different model to the kids that have grown up not knowing any overarching political presence but Trump.

I don’t want to fetishize some mystical past. Parts of what’s been lost we can’t get back—the U.S. government is destroying its capacity to do good things in ways that won’t be easy to revive. And other portions might be better not to reclaim, if we get past our current crises.

But we need to remember the ways that we’ve worked together (or failed to) in the past and the real legacy of our history. Referring to the erasure of the role of Navajo code talkers during World War II from military websites, Dartmouth professor Jeff Sharlet has mentioned teaching students to name and record losses. “It's critical to keep naming these losses,” he says, “not in the spirit of ‘can you believe what they're doing,’ but to remember what's being lost. I've taught students from countries that erase the past, and they're stunned to learn of major events in their own countries.”

If you don’t know what’s been taken away, you might not even know how to reestablish the parts of society worth keeping. You can lose sight of what’s possible.

Two-way learning

What did I mean by saying today’s post is about education? It’s our job to speak honestly about what’s happening. However, the shouty voice and jokes about Trump administration officials being the products of incest aren’t going to work in this space. I did a whole episode on the quiet voice and how to use it. Doing education is the kind of place where that voice will be more useful.

But you might even need to step back further than that to do the real work of education. Because unless you’re already a member of a vulnerable community, it might not be time to come in with a quiet voice to explain things to that community. It might be time to pitch in and help build up that community in some way, and to listen.

If you’re already an expert on one of the broken systems—maybe you’re a retired social security worker—congratulations. You’re going to be critical to helping keep people informed and safe. We might need you to lead the way.

But honestly, there are going to have to be a lot of community-level leaders, and many of them won’t yet have the background they’re going to need to step up. That’s not to discourage you at all. It’ll be okay to make mistakes at first. In fact, you’re guaranteed to.

And it’s true that in its simplest form, education can accompany the kinds of protests I mentioned last week. Handing out flyers at a Tesla protest, or putting out stickers that mirror the catchphrases or memes related to the protest—as long as they’re comprehensible to the general public—those things are all great.

Going deeper

But there’s a more serious kind of education that’s necessary. A lot of people are already being harmed by what the Trump administration is doing, and a lot more are going to be harmed going forward by the previously unsteady and now-collapsing safety net.

They’ll come from all walks of life, and connecting with them is key to building a movement. This is not just about volunteering or giving someone a handout, though both those things can play important roles. And it’s definitely not just about giving a lecture about “the orange turd” or telling people they deserve what they’re getting if they voted for Trump.

For a lot of people, it’s about finding out what their neighbors actually need and working on a kind of mutual support with a deep understanding that we’re all in jeopardy—the whole country. It’s about building a society that cares about people across the board. By now, I hope everyone is tired of The New York Times diner-profile approach to Trump voters, so please know that I’m not encouraging you to locate some GOP supporters and spend the next year trying to explore their political views, or to validate bigotry in any way.

At the same time, blaming Trump voters for what they brought on themselves when many of them have been bathed in propaganda for decades is a step down the path to the kind of rhetoric that blames individual users for the opioid crisis, or sexual assault on a woman who got drunk on a date and went home with a guy she’d just met. The penalty for poor choices should not be sexual assault, death, or the dismantling of the country.

Meeting the need

Instead, I’m suggesting that you look around your community and see what the needs are. You can focus on a group that is particularly maligned by the president and his allies, or you can also proceed without necessarily applying a political lens to who is suffering. Go to FindHelp.org or look online at local services and consider groups that are already working in your community on an issue that matters to you. Plug into that initiative, so that you can understand what’s critical to the affected community from people who’ve already been working in it.

As our civic society crumbles, we have to reimagine it and reinvent it real-time. Reading the news can help you stay informed and understand what’s going on, but shouting about national meta-narratives from the political realm on social media isn’t going to fix anything. If you need to do that for catharsis, fine. But I’d suggest using some of that nuclear-grade energy elsewhere.

If you don’t find a listing for the thing that matters to you, you can just start doing it yourself. No diaper bank nearby? Start one, even in a small way. Handy with tools? Teach neighborhood teens woodworking skills. The more integrated the project is with the population it serves, the better. The more integrated you are with a population, the better. The more it can be about people helping one another, about developing peer educators from those who have already learned some skills or show up with them, even better. Many of these things will hinge on your being willing to be educated yourself. This approach helps everyone, all of us.

Moving forward, I suspect some areas already under strain will crack in big ways. Food insecurity will loom larger. We’re going to need more basic health care than can be provided through existing community clinics. The role of libraries as community centers will need shoring up.

More ways to help

If you’re a vet, you can help work on crises that will be exacerbated by a diminished Department of Veterans Affairs, or on the psychological toll this disruption will take on vets. This could be an eventual path to educating them on not talking unlawful or immoral orders down the road, when that may become even more critical. But in the meantime, there’s groundwork that needs to be laid.

Anyone can, with some training themselves, help people navigate increasingly frustrating bureaucracies. Seniors are going to need more help getting their Social Security benefits. Disabled folks are even more likely to have new obstacles to getting assistance. The abandonment of trans people by American elected officials on both sides of the aisle has been shocking. There are a lot of avenues to support trans youth in particular.

Undocumented immigrants are being hunted for horrific, performative ends. Even those with green cards are being are targeted for deportation without warning. There are a million ways to help on the immigration front. See what programs are being cut in your community, and build the society you want to see on the other side of the current disaster.

What does that have to do with education? A lot. There will be obvious ways to do political outreach in a community once you understand its actual needs. If it’s a community that you’re part of, you may have a special role in doing that. If it’s not a community that you’re part of, then education is very much a two-way street. We’re going to have to be willing to stand for principles that guarantee everyone’s humanity, while being willing to be changed in other ways by this process.

But I’m making all this sound bigger and more dramatic than it will feel. A lot of what needs to happen is grunt work. Start volunteering somewhere in your community, as soon as possible, on an issue that matters to you. It doesn’t have to be your full-time job, just go once or twice a week, or even once or twice a month. See what additional holes need to be filled. Again, you’re going to be educating yourself as much or more than you’re going to educate anyone about politics.

Answering your questions

Those of you who have followed this podcast since last November may have noticed that I go lighter on the historical examples these days. For post episodes, I’ll still offer examples from authoritarian countries and eras from history. But some days, like today, I’ll focus less on historical examples that show us where we’re headed, if only because the administration is catching up to key elements of what I (and many other people) have been saying Trump would do in a second term. It’s become less difficult for most people who read the news to understand what an authoritarian U.S. would look like.

But I know many people are still somewhat baffled by what they’re seeing and have questions. So I want to take two questions that came in last week and answer them for everyone. (If you have your own questions, feel free to send them to me at [email protected].)

One person wrote to ask about using Musk’s Hitler salute as a meme and to mock him, and wondered about spreading that image around and normalizing it. I think this is one of those things where people will differ. As someone who wrote a global history of concentration camps, I personally would not use the image. I wouldn’t necessarily expect the staff of any Holocaust museum to do so either.

At the same time, I’ve seen some clever uses of it. Off the top of my head, there’s one that incorporates it into Tesla’s declining sales graph, for instance, in a way that links his gesture to his failure, to the collapse of his financial empire. It’s such a historically charged gesture—I would definitely pause to think twice about whether there’s a reason beyond the shock of the obscene to use it. But I wouldn’t argue that it could never be used. Mockery has an important place in diminishing self-appointed gods and tyrants.

Another person asked about protests in a vast country the size of the U.S., given that countries where they have had a huge impact, such as South Korea, are smaller and have populations more concentrated around just one or two key cities. I don’t have time to go into this deeply today, but I will in a future episode.

For now, I’ll note that the vast size of the country is why the (nonviolent) #TeslaTakedown protests are ideal. They create a national movement on a local level, one that has a real effect. I would encourage you to think of other business or programs that have a presence across the country, and which deserve targeting. In the current digital era, regional efforts can plant seeds for a national action.

Three sayings

As the final item today, I want to take on three pithy sayings you’ve surely heard referenced in recent months or years. But I want to ask you to try to think about them in a new way.

1) “Do not obey in advance,” from Timothy Snyder.

2) Martin Niemöller’s famous quote “First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a socialist. Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a trade unionist. Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—because I was not a Jew. Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.”

3) Audre Lord’s statement “Your silence will not protect you,” which is often used singly, but it’s part of a larger train of thought.

First, consider the Snyder reference to obeying. Remember that obedience builds a gathering momentum in societies on the brink of authoritarianism, but disobedience also develops its own counter-momentum. Keep in mind that just as one creates pressure, so does the opposite.

Addressing Niemöller’s quote, I’ll say that because he was a pastor, it often gets read as an account of a moral failure and a plea to do the right thing. And as for Audrey Lorde, the sentence before her most famous one is also useful to read alongside it: “My silences had not protected me. Your silence will not protect you.”

These three quotes are often read ominously and can feel like threats—like “step up, or else you’re doomed when trouble starts.” But I want to say that this is not some future threat that we’re assessing. The threat is already here.

So to turn these lines on their heads just a little, I’ll suggest these words aren’t only—as they often get used—an abstract moral argument about complicity or responsibility. They’re also strategic statements. They’re the keys for how to stop what’s already happening right now. They’re people speaking from the aftermath of the kind of harm that the government is trying to unleash today, people who have studied or lived the other side of a society that botched it for everyone or for the most vulnerable among them.

In our current moment, these lines aren’t cautionary. They’re calling to us and saying, “There’s still time. Speak up. Go do something.”

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