(C) Alec Muffett's DropSafe blog.
Author Name: Alec Muffett
This story was originally published on allecmuffett.com. [1]
License: CC-BY-SA 3.0.[2]


So You Want to Be a Dissident?

2025-04-12 10:00:00+00:00

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.
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[1] URL: https://www.newyorker.com/news/the-weekend-essay/so-you-want-to-be-a-dissident
[2] URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

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