The Feelings and the Facts
Building courage like Ikea Furniture
First, a few feelings. I have been walking around with that hovering sense of tears wanting to come out, that brimming sensation.
I have been veering into pockets of anger and deep sadness, some of which gets hung on the people in my life who voted for this. I have been thinking about what it means that you can be a person who is right often, right about a lot of feared things that come to pass, and yet because of your physical and social identities, that repeated being right and seeing reality does not accrue as reputation or identity. It does not attach to your body. I think one of the hardest things is not being listened to, that feeling like screaming into the void. I’ve also been thinking about all of the people who voted for him, and how I imagine that each person had one or more of those people in their lives, someone who is informed and warning and knew, and how those people were disregarded.
What does it do to us to be unheeded by those who say they love us?
Many people have chosen to break off contact with those who say they love us but never listen to us. There is something that I am searching for a name for: is it arrogance? The ability to dismiss other people’s concerns because you yourself don’t feel concerned. The ability to say, “Oh, you’re a worrier. You worry too much.” It’s gaslighting, because then we end up being right, over and over, but somehow still we aren’t listened to.
I am thinking about what it means to be called a worrier, the way that accrues to our bodies, when what we are is paying attention. I really don’t have a sense of how deeply that pejorative—you worry too much—has pervaded my days and my mind. How challenging it is, after a lifetime of soaking in this feedback, to continue to summon the ability to monitor the world, to pay attention, to assert opinions, and to carry the knowledge alone.
On the other hand, we’ve gotten very good at it. We’ve gotten very good at carrying that knowledge that other people won’t help us carry. We’ve gotten very good at finding others to share the burden with. And it is a burden: it is the ultimate burden of caretaking for the world, of watching the horizon for threats. It’s exhausting and unacknowledged labor, this emotional and intellectual work of protecting and caring for our communities by carrying the knowledge of the threats that face us.
I am sending love to you in your moments of courage.
I think part of what it is for me is knowing I have to have courage, as I’m in small local leadership positions, and those roles force me to do the next right thing, while others are showing enormous courage and we all need more of it.
I put out a newsletter at work (I’m a professor and president of our AAUP chapter). My first draft of the note to my colleagues was, “This is a frightening time.” And I got feedback that I needed to redo the intro because, though it is a frightening time, that’s not my role. My role is to cohere courage. So reframing that, and erasing the fright and writing a new intro, took a kind of backbone I had to choose to step into. Instead, I quoted someone else who called the rotten pumpkin an authoritarian. That was a public step into some kinds of things I can’t take back. I had the sense of bravery and courage as something you consciously have to put together like Ikea furniture.
And now for something completely different! Or really, very connected.
Dahlia Lithwick’s amicus podcast at Slate featured an episode about Trump’s American Takeover in which she interviews Kim Lane Shephely, an expert in authoritarianism, Lawrence S. Rockefeller professor of Sociology in International affairs in the Princeton School of Public and International Affairs, AFFS and the University center for Human Values at Princeton. She lived in Russia and Hungary.
I don’t listen to many podcasts because I can read faster than I can listen, and I tend to get less overwhelmed when I’m reading. So because everyone is overwhelmed, but because I found this super-helpful for global context, I thought I would pull out the main points so you don’t have to listen to or read the whole thing.
TLDR Summary
Autocracies happen after free and fair elections. It’s not gonna be happening with tanks. It’s been, instead, happening since the 1970s but just got really real.
Shephely: “Americans have this idea that when democracy fails, it’s going to fail with tanks in the streets, it’s going to fail with some radical rupture, it’s going to fail with normal ceasing to be normal. And when you look at how autocracy works these days and the rest of the world, it almost always comes in on the backs of a free and fair election.”
The models include Hungary, Venezuela, Poland, Russia, and Ecuador. Especially Hungary.
“Two thirds of the President’s Day One executive orders are lifted from Project 2025. Project 2025 is authored principally by the Heritage Foundation. The Heritage Foundation’s president, Kevin Roberts, has said that Victkor Orban’s Hungary is, quote, not just a model for conservative statecraft, but the model, end quote.”
A private group writes the laws—in our case, the Heritage Foundation.
“But what Victor Orban did and what now Donald Trump has done is to use their time out of office to put together a team of people who will write all the laws. You need to entrench yourself. And it’s being written by private groups. It’s not going through the normal lawmak making process. Private lawyers are writing up all of these plans, and then as soon as you come into power, you start to shovel this stuff out the door as fast as you can. You take advantage of incredibly obscure laws already on the books that already give the executive tons of power.”
The attacks on trans people and immigrants are happening to provoke fear and also to distract us from the massive power grab.
“It’in all these places, inflammatory rhetoric disguises the real work of autocracy. And what’s the real work of autocracy? Removing all checks on executive power. And a lot of that is happening in a very unsexy way in laws that are buried deep beneath the surface that only a technical lawyer could love.” “And they do it while their cover story is a lot of inflammatory rhetoric that causes pain to people”
Mass firings happen first.
“So let me tell you two things that look familiar from Hungary, because these were really crucial in the early days. So one thing Orban did was to immediately suspend the civil service law in order to fire tons of governmental workers….” Biden put in a law that prevented that, and “the Biden regulation is doing something to slow this process down. But in some of these executive orders, they actually say, in our view, this Biden regulation is unconstitutional, and so we are going to ignore it, which is why they’re just firing some people also.”
Democracy is whether or not the next election will be free and fair. It took Europe 10 years to realize the Hungarian elections had been rigged.
Shephely’s definition of democracy: “My definition is forward looking. Is the next election going to be free and fair and the one after that? So I think that we still, of course, want democracy by the people. People have to be able to throw the bums out, rotate power. But if you have a system that is set up in such a way that power does not rotate anymore, to me, it doesn’t matter if it was an elected government that created that structure or a dictator with tanks in the streets. Democracy is about future free and fair elections and not just about the last one.”
Autocracy doesn’t mean that you don’t still have elections. They just aren’t fair. “And what I mean by autocracy is a government in which power no longer rotates and in which it’s no longer accountable to anybody outside the executive branch. Again, very simple because, you know, you can complicate it with all kinds of things, but ultimately, the rotation of power through free and fair elections is the thing that makes democracy and it’s possible to capture the institutions of a democratic state so that you no longer have that. Now, of course, what’s interesting is that all these autocrats go on having elections. You know, even in Hungary, after Orban captured, I mean, the 2014 election, which was the first election after he had consolidated power, the election monitors came in and gave it more or less a clean bill of health because the way he changed the election law so that he wouldn’t lose were so incredibly complicated that the election monitors couldn’t figure it out. And the political opposition trying to win the election didn’t realize the whole thing was just rigged against them. There was no way they could win. And so it took until the 2018 election, you know, the European Parliament in 2020 finally said, Hungary is no longer a democracy. It took 10 years for Europe to catch up to the fact that power was no longer capable of rotation in Hungary. So that’s what you got to keep your eye on.”
Things still look legal, but the law becomes not the solution but the problem, and the law is rewritten to allow lawlessness. “And I think, as a definitional matter, the reason that’s so intriguing to me, and I think it will be hard for listeners to understand, is that everything looks lawful. As long as a lawyer’s doing it. Right. As long as a court is putting its imprimatur on it, then it looks like, how can this possibly be illegal? And I think that you have this lovely line. I’ve heard you say law is the way the state talks to itself, but that doesn’t mean that law is lawful. Right. It means that law goes, at some point, tilts from being the solution into the problem. And I know that’s a really big question, but it feels as though we have this very American notion that as long as these executive orders come down and we’re like, is that legal? Is that not legal? Is there a statute? Is there not a statute?”
After World War II, people looked at Constitutions and tried to figure out how to make them autocrat resistant, and ours is older. In the 1970s, people who didn’t like democracy in the US started arguing that our Constitution could be said to mean different things, including things opposite to what was written. “Okay, so what that didn’t anticipate is, you know, and actually, most of the world’s constitutions” emerged “after the Second World War. So we’re unusual in having a very old Constitution. We gotten there first, but you look at U.S. constitutional law, and it explodes after World War II. A lot of constitutional protections we have in place are much newer than the Constitution itself. But then what happened, starting in the US starting really in the 1970s and into the 80s, was that people who were determined and this movement, by the way, to create a kind of what I call autocratic legalism in the United States started really back in the 70s as a set of conservative lawyers started looking at the Constitution and saying, Gee, you know, Constitution can be interpretable. We can make it mean something else by coming up with historical arguments, with textual arguments, with off the top of our head arguments that make the Constitution say something that justifies what we’re doing with this other law.”
The decision to grant Trump immunity was the end, and the Supreme Court and the Constitution have both been captured. “But I think the moment of truth for American law professors and Americans looking at the interpretability of our Constitution was the immunity decision…. Even Trump’s lawyers didn’t make the argument that presidential immunity from criminal violations would extend as far as that court said. And what you then realize is that we have not only a captured Supreme Court, but we also have a captured Constitution. That was the thing that was supposed to prevent law from being used in this autocratic manner. And between decades of legal scholarship that has said, gee, we can make, I don’t know, the fourth Amendment sound like a recipe for banana bread if we try hard enough. Right. We just need a little interpretive, you know, a little history, a little textualism, whatever. This has now meant that the anchor that was supposed to prevent this from happening in the US is now not here. And again, this is exactly what happened in Russia. This was what happened in Hungary. In Hungary, by the way, Orban just rewrote the Constitution after one year.”
The recipe, as we have lived through, is to take the executive branch and capture the courts. The host says, “Of the things that I noted in your work is that the tendency is you take over the executive branch and then you capture the court in the United States. As you said up top, that was the one thing Donald Trump did really well in his first term. Everything else was slipping on pudding, but he really nailed it in terms of capturing the Supreme Court and with the help of Mitch McConnell, with the help of the conservative legal movement. And in so doing, we have this funny loop where the court, with the immunity decision and the Colorado decision and its capacious view of executive power, in some sense, before Donald Trump comes into office, the court is already in place.”
What can we do? One thing is that constitutional lawyers can start writing what should have been the decisions if the Constitution was still in place as written. “So when you work in a couple of these countries like that, you begin to realize constitutional law cannot be left only to the courts. Ok, so then what do we do? So one thing that some of the Hungarians did for a while, this happened in Poland after the court was captured. Some of the constitutional lawyers then started doing things like writing the opinion the Court should have written if the old law was still in place, and then acting like that opinion was real. It’s a lot of work for people who are going to then construct an entirely alternative jurisprudence. But the other thing you do is you take the Constitution to the streets, right? And you don’t lean on the technical, formal arguments that we’re all used to making as constitutional law professors.”
We have to talk about what we know the law should be. “Then you have to lean into the popular conception of what law is. And so for this, I want to quote my mother, if I can. So my mother was not an expert in constitutional law. And my family was all at that time Republican. And my parents loved Ronald Reagan. And when Robert Bork was nominated for the Supreme Court, my mother was like, glued to the hearings. And she called me up one night and she said, I don’t get it. He just said, the right to marital privacy is not in the Constitution. And so I tried to explain to her, like, if you look at the language, that’s what he meant. It wasn’t. She said, he’s just wrong. I know what’s in the Constitution, and I know the right to marital privacy is in the Constitution. Okay? That’s the thing we have to work on. A lot of people think they know, and we need to encourage that because this court might say it’s all not there.”
We can’t be distracted by the fact that the courts will sometimes rule against the administration. The question is which cases they win. “The question is whether the Supreme Court is going to go along with this. And again, let me just say something else about these courts. Because if you look at how all these autocracies function, even the captured constitutional court in Poland or the one in Hungary or the one In Russia occasionally rule against the government, and they do that. So we cannot be distracted by the fact that the opposition here is going to win some cases at the Supreme Court. The question is which cases they win.”
The real questions are about executive power. “And the thing to keep our eye on if we’re worried about autocracy is the executive power caseload. That’s really going to be the place where I think we have to keep our eyes peeled. So this is very fast.”
We have something in our Constitution about a Constituent Assembly. Maybe that will happen? She says, “We have this impossible amendment process” to alter our constitution via a constituent assembly.” But then she wonders about this “convention of states…that may just happen. I mean, who knows? This calling a constituent assembly is not completely out of the question here, but I think it’s a rather remote possibility.”
She writes about autocracy that happens fast, some that happen slow, and some that are “on the fence” where the government breaks slowly over time, and people are talking about this—that the breakage that has happened will make it impossible for Dems to govern even if they regain power, and that this began for us with Watergate. “Now, this is India, for example. This is Brazil. This may be the US where you get an autocrat that comes to power, that compromises some institutions. So Trump 1 captures the Supreme Court. He comes back as Trump II. O we’re still living with his captured Supreme Court, which, as your podcast has amply demonstrated, got in the way of tons of things that Biden was trying to do, and particularly stuff that would have made Biden look like a successful president to the general. In other words, they specifically went after the things that would have made people’s lives better in the short term, student loans and all these kinds of things. Okay, so basically, they prevented Biden from governing, and they prevented Biden from really rolling back. Biden came in and thought, if I act normal, everything will be fine. Which also, by the way, doesn’t work. I hope the Democratic Party has learned that lesson by and now. But still. So Biden couldn’t govern. So that meant that it was much more likely that Trump would come back. Were having some of the same problem in Brazil. Bolsonaro broke just enough that Lula can’t really govern. So then Bolsonaro may come back.” Because the Dems can’t govern, the autocrats get elected again. So it may take several rounds. I say autocracy on the fence because even if you can get rid of the autocrat, you never can govern as a Democrat, I mean small d Democrat ever again because some of the institutions are compromised. And so it’s like an up and down and up and down around a declining line. And that’s what’s been happening in the U.S. I would say, ever since Watergate. This is not new.”
Fear is the point, and this is the kind of freedom that hardcore Trump supporters wanted. The host says that we are living with performative cruelty “directed at trans kids, directed at transgender service members, directed at immigrants, migrants, asylum seekers…There’s a real sort of like ebullient joy in bringing people low… Why so much of this is about trans rights, is about women, is about others, xenophobia and race and how that works in this general framework, not just of authoritarianism, but also of what you do to a population in order to instill fear….” Shephely says, “Trump and his ilk are the people who have felt constrained by having to be civil to all the people with whom they disagree or people with whom they now actually have to compete….This is about removing all restraints.” And it is in an attempt to neutralize “civil opposition.”
Most people who elected a populist don’t want to break the government, and they do not want dictatorship, and when things really start breaking, people will freak out. Shephely: “People who elect populists want change, but they don’t want chaos and they don’t want the surf services that they count on to fall apart.” "In the cases of Hungary and now Poland, Poland’s trying to make a comeback, because it really fell to anti-democratic forces. And what shows in the far rights rising all over the place is that there was no demand for it. What he shows in the opinion polls is that people wanted government to be responsive. They didn’t want it to become a dictatorship.” But illness and lack of services will “make people realize that it’s one thing to demonize a thing called the deep state whose exact contours they are not real sure of, and quite another thing to suddenly yank all the the things that have made our lives permissible, tolerable and better all at once. So what you hope is that that makes people rise up.”
What has worked? Host: “What worked in Poland, what has worked in places that are clawing it back? What’s the mission for listeners who really don’t want to give up but aren’t sure that everything hasn’t been lost already?”
Join civic groups and support blue state governments. Lean into state constitutional law. “So first of all, it’s important to keep toe holds that you can use to leverage into more power for the opposition. And by toe holds, I mean civil sector groups, I mean state governments in blue states. I mean anything that’s not yet been captured, we should lean into state constitutional law. You know, we should lean into the parts of the government that are going to go down without a fight. Right.
Put sand in the gears. “We need to hold up and look at, you know, where can public outrage at least gum up the works? Right. Everything that this administration does now that is bringing down democracy and causing pain should be met with friction. You may not be able to stop it, but you can slow it down. So again, can if I can tell a small story. When I moved into New York city in the 1970s, high crime rates, everybody was know, really very concerned. It was the height of dangerous New York. And I moved into an apartment on the Upper West Side. And the first thing I did, like everybody else, was to install three more deadbolts on my door. So while the guys installing the deadbolts. I said to him, well, is this really going to keep out somebody? And he said, actually, he said, no. He said, really talented burglars know how to break through all the deadbolts. What you’re doing is you’re slowing them down until possibly something else intervenes. Okay, now this is my lesson for everybody.”
Think about personal safety but at the state level: “Subscribe to the media that are standing up to this. Put your weight and your money behind the institutions that are throwing sand in the gears you. And that’the basic thing that you can do. We were all now just trying to slow it down, stop it in its tracks. Think of yourself as being like that guy in Tiananmen Square with the shopping bags in front of the tank. Whatever it is that you can do personally to just slow it down, just stop it locally, just do it.”
