We’ve gotten a ton of excellent advice from our guests this year about how everyday people can get involved in fighting authoritarianism and encouraging citizen engagement. So, in this year-end lookback episode, we decided to put the top seven suggestions together in one place. Featuring clips from Ece Temelkuran, Jeffrey Winters, Deva Woodly, Maria Stephan, Sharon Davies, Steven Levitsky, and John C. Yang.
Alex Lovit:
As the host of The Context, I get to talk to a lot of really cool people, really smart people who have deep knowledge about politics, social movements, and how to make positive change. We put a lot of thought into who we invite on the show, and we're proud to bring you the ideas and insights that our diverse roster of guests have to offer. Our guests help us understand the ways that the fundamental parts of democracy are under attack, our elections, rights, freedoms, and institutions, and what people like me and you can do about it, how we can be part of resisting authoritarianism, and building a better, more inclusive future.
As we looked back on all the episodes we brought you this year, we realized we'd gathered a ton of excellent advice about how we all can make a difference, so we decided to put the best of the best together in one episode. You're listening to The Context. It's a show from the Charles F. Kettering Foundation about how to get democracy to work for everyone and why that's so hard to do. I'm your host, Alex Lovit. Today on the show, what can everyday people do to make a difference, to fight for democracy? You'll hear some of our favorite moments this year speaking to that theme.
We're starting out with wisdom from Turkish writer and political thinker, Ece Temelkuran. Ece had a front-row seat as President Erdogan took her country into authoritarianism, and she predicted the same could happen around the globe long before most of us saw it coming. She outlined those concerns in her bestselling book, How to Lose a Country: The Seven Steps From Democracy to Fascism. If that book is a diagnosis of a political problem, her follow-up book prescribes a remedy. It's called Together: A Manifesto Against a Heartless World. I asked Ece what inspired her optimistic tone in a time of turbulence.
Ece Temelkuran:
Fascism today, more than anything else, is the loss of faith in humankind, because as you live long enough under such an oppressive regime, you know what happens to people. And it's not loss of hope. It's not loss of determination. It's not loss of opposition. People do not yield to fear. People just start losing faith in themselves and in the others. This is the biggest and the deepest damage that oppressive regimes create in human psyche, and that damage becomes the reason that people do not do anything after a while. They cannot do anything after a while.
So I started thinking about this hope, especially the hope, because after I wrote How to Lose a Country, people kept asking me, after I gave speeches, they asked me the same question over and over again, "Where is hope?" And I told them at some point, I go, "There is no hope. There is us, and that's it." And I think many other countries now beginning to realize that there might not be hope, or hope is too fragile a word for our cruel times, so to speak.
The moral value that keeps people going is not hope. It's faith. Faith is composed of several things, self-esteem, trust in each other, and determination to do the good work against all odds. I think hope is a passive word, whereas faith is the word that keeps you alive when everything is horrible. And once you lose faith actually, faith in humankind, in yourself, in your fellow citizens, that is when you actually give up and that is when actually they win.
Alex Lovit:
I wanted to talk about one of the chapters in How to Lose a Country. You write that, "The resistance in Turkey wasted time reacting to right-wing populism with humor and sarcasm, trying to laugh away our fears. And I took our political culture down a cul-de-sac, bringing about a new type of fatalism, one that always has a smiley at the end." Can you describe how laughter can be counterproductive? I think we're in a moment in the US when a lot of people are making fun of Trump.
Ece Temelkuran:
Humor is a good way to bring down a fascist regime, or disturb it at least, but also sometimes we are doing it to console ourselves, to calm ourselves, because we think that as long as we laugh, nothing would happen to us. But then, as it is now in United States, it becomes part of the cynicism, I think, like a defeatist cynicism. And that is dangerous because then you contribute to the normalization of oppression by laughing at it. Laughter is a political tool, sometimes political weapon, but it has to be handled carefully, I think.
Alex Lovit:
When is humor a useful tool?
Ece Temelkuran:
I think humor is useful when there is political action that supports it. Otherwise, it's empty.
Well, let me give you a recent example. A few days ago in Turkey, the most important, most famous protester became Pikachu. Pikachu, like somebody put on this Pikachu costume, and there was a footage, Pikachu running away with the protestors from the police. And it was a funny side. Of course, then it became a global phenomenon. Pikachu, that is good laughter, because now you are encouraging the protestors. You're encouraging the people. You are keeping their spirits up. And this happened while hundreds of people were under arrest. Young people, 18 years old, sometimes 17, they were arrested and tortured under police custody. There was nothing to laugh at that point, but this Pikachu running with the protestors, and then next day striking back again, that is something that gives courage to people. If the humor says, "We are not defeated, we can do this together. We are in it together," that's good humor.
Alex Lovit:
The Pikachu costume protester Ece's talking about there became a viral sensation in Turkey and around the world last March. It's reminiscent of the inflatable frog and dinosaur costumes that we've seen in the last few months at protests in the US. But before you put on an inflatable costume or pick up a protest sign, you might wonder, what do protests actually achieve, and what else can we do to make an impact?
Deva Woodly was a natural person to ask. She studies social movements and what makes them succeed. Deva is a professor of political science at Brown University and a research fellow here at the Kettering Foundation. I started out by asking her what role social media plays in getting people into the streets.
Deva Woodly:
The internet and social media have been really useful for spreading the word faster and farther, but they are not that useful for the in-person, durable relationship-building that's really necessary for social movement strength. In the social media age, there was a little bit of a divergence between the size of movements and their strength. That strength comes from the resilient relationships that are sustained in organization and in-person local organizing.
Alex Lovit:
We're seeing a lot of protest activity opposing actions of the Trump administration. How did the actions of the last year or so compare to the scale of previous protests?
Deva Woodly:
Well, I think that there's been a regrouping in the last year, and I think that protests have become more localized and less centralized. So if you notice in the No Kings protests, if you notice in the protests that have taken place around various kinds of actions from the Trump administration, they have been frequent and numerous, but more dispersed than has been common in the past. So this seems to be a deliberate choice on people's part. They will stay in their town of Lowell, Massachusetts instead of traveling to Boston. And this is partly to make connections with people in that place to make themselves visible to one another, and that's something that builds morale in addition to building interpersonal connections.
It's also the case that movements are actually really focused on developing strategies for community protection. Protest is not the only tactic in a social movement's toolkit, and now is a time when other kinds of activities are gaining traction within social movements. And those activities might be less visible to the general public, but they're actually very important in terms of building social movement, strength, and resilience.
Alex Lovit:
And can you just lay out what those activities are?
Deva Woodly:
Sure. Getting together and forming mutual aid groups; getting together and forming contact trees, so who you call when such things happen; getting together and developing information networks so that you know what's going on in your locality, who may be there, what they may be doing, you're able to distribute that information really fast; getting together and educating the public about their rights, about what they can do to protect their communities.
Also, coordinating economic non-cooperation, that is a very powerful tool, which has actually not been used as effectively in the 21st century as it was in the 20th century. That's something that we are seeing more of. You see that in a kind of distributed manner in terms of where people are declining to buy and where people are buying. So I think the most sort of popular example of this is the Target boycott, where people sort of broke from Target to go to Costco. And we see these kinds of economic non-cooperation strategies gaining traction and actually having impacts in a way that they really haven't for a number of years. That muscle for economic non-cooperation is one that really needs to get built up because that's one of the most effective ways to counter decision-makers or people with power.
It's those kinds of long unused or less used muscles that are getting a workout right now, and that's in part because the political environment has changed so much that people have really come to realize that not only is protests dangerous, it has a risk, but it's less effective than some of these strategies where you're strengthening the connections in your community and the ability to protect yourselves.
Alex Lovit:
You may have heard a statistic that it only takes 3.5% of the population taking to the streets to topple a dictatorship. Maria Stephan was one of the researchers who came up with that number. Maria is the co-lead and chief organizer of The Horizons Project, which serves as a hub for organizations working on peace, democracy, and social change. And she wrote about that 3.5% statistic in her bestselling book, Why Civil Resistance Works, co-authored with Erica Chenoweth.
In the last year, the largest protests in the US have included about seven million people. That's a lot of people, but it's only about 2% of the population. So I asked her, if people want to make a difference, why should they get involved now, rather than waiting until the movement gets closer to that 3.5% target?
Maria Stephan:
I mean, in part because we're all being affected by what is happening in our country. We're all being affected by the abuses of power, by the attacks on our community, by the abductions, by the threats, harassment, and intimidation. Standing up and taking action builds the strength and the confidence for others to join. So when we're out there doing seemingly small things out with a sign on the street corner or joining a local vigil, we are normalizing dissent. We are mainstreaming the idea that what is happening in this country is unacceptable and people will not go along with it. And so it may seem small, but you are creating an ethos of solidarity and defiance, and that is what builds up over time to more collective action.
No major changes in our country's history or around the world have started big. They always start with a small group of concerted people who then organize and other people join, and there has to be a way to welcome them in, including people who are maybe not on our side to begin with. At a certain point, people feel what is happening, and that's when we need to be able to provide opportunities through our movements, through our faith organizations, through our community groups to be able to support people getting more involved.
Alex Lovit:
So how do we get to a critical mass of people participating in resistance? My next guest, Daniel Hunter, had a memorable answer. Daniel is a professional organizer and movement scholar. He studied resistance to authoritarianism around the globe, and he's used those ground-up lessons to teach thousands of people how to stand up to oppressive governments effectively. He's a trainer with the organizations Freedom Trainers and Choose Democracy, which he also co-founded and directs.
And the people Daniel says we should prioritize when it comes to expanding the pro-democracy movement are counterintuitive. Daniel says it's important for organizers and activists to identify and undermine the so-called pillars of support that prop up authoritarian regimes. He explained what that looks like with an example from Serbia, where a group protesting the dictator, Slobodan Milosevic, in the 1990s chose the targets of their efforts very carefully.
Daniel Hunter:
One of the things that they analyzed was the military are critical for Milosevic's power, the military and the police. And so rather than simply being oppositional to the military, which they were oppositional to the military's position and the police, how they're being used, but they also understood that these are neighbors, and therefore they can also be moved. So they were aiming for defections. Now, defections do not typically happen quickly, they take time, but they can be set up over a period of time. So one of the things that they would do, they did lots of protests and so forth, and regularly got beaten up by the police, tortured and so on.
And so their response, however, is very telling. So with some of the police officers who would beat them up the most aggressively, they would go to their houses and they would hold up posters, pictures even, of, say, one of the kids' bloody body that was beaten up. And they would say a version of shame, and "You can do better," and so forth, but they would say a real message, which is, "You will have a chance to join us. Even you will have a chance to join our side. It is never too early to join." And again, they're not just hurting them, they're also targeting the neighbors who are watching this. And the intention is to kind of get a neighborhood conversation where a neighbor turns to someone and says, "Why are you beating up these 14-year-olds," and to begin to soften.
Not everything they did was just push like that. They also pulled. So they held a day of remembrance and read the names of all the police officers who were killed in the line of duty, as well as all the folks who were also killed by police from their ranks, and describing them all as victims of the Milosevic regime.
Fast-forward to a moment in time in which their opposition candidate had won and heard nothing from Milosevic. Milosevic did not leave the Capitol. After a period of time, not long, a few hours and so forth, they began mobilizing and saying, "People need to go to the Capitol en masse." And so thousands, tens of thousands from around the country began descending on the Capitol in order to peacefully take it back. The police and military surrounded the Capitol building and were ordered to shoot into the crowd with live bullets, and they didn't do it. So these things can collapse fairly quickly.
And one way we accelerate that is by intentionally and conscientiously thinking of different pillars of support and appealing to them. The primary way of getting defections isn't protests in the streets. The primary way of getting defections is fraternization, chatting with people and encouraging them to defect. It's personal relationships. So it's thinking through, who are the people that you know that are in the National Guard? Who are the people who you know who are in the military? Who are the people who are in any of these pillars of support? And I use military as one example, but I shouldn't lean there because there are many different pillars of support. There are all of the people who are implementing his policies at the judicial level. What we're looking for is defections and movement of the population so that we are in collective non-cooperation together.
Alex Lovit:
And so what about the emotional challenge of having the strength to say, "You're welcome to join me, even though you beat me up"?
Daniel Hunter:
A good political analysis goes a long way. It really does help to analyze, what's your goal? We will have to work with the pro-authoritarian portion of this country in the future. Simply winning, beating them down, will not be a successful way to work with our neighbors in the long term, so we need a political vision that is beyond just one side wins and another side loses. That doesn't mean all of us have to be willing to fraternize with, I mean, I'm using ICE as an example, it doesn't mean we have to be willing to fraternize with them, but it may mean that we are making our job harder by simply writing off ICE as horrible human beings who are unredeemable.
I've had some interactions with folks with ICE, and many of them are extremely conflicted about what they're being asked to do. They know it's wrong. But they don't necessarily have a pathway. So part of what we have to do is have a very clear, direct path for people who are interested in trying to unseat an unjust regime like this. Our goal here is not beating Trump. Our goal here is bigger than that. Our goal here is building a society that respects all people's rights, bodily autonomy, respects their rights to live in dignity, that has a greater amount of economic equality. We want people to come towards that vision. That's our job.
Alex Lovit:
Of course, political analysis isn't enough. We need to combine that with action. Confronting authoritarianism is going to take courage, whether that's through protest or fraternization or any other strategy. And my next guest has something to say about that.
Sharon Davies is president and CEO here at the Charles F. Kettering Foundation. She's been outspoken about how dangerous it is that so many law firms, universities, and nonprofits have been capitulating to Trump this year, often prematurely. Sharon comes from a law and higher-ed background, so during our interview, she had strong words for her peers who were backing down. But it isn't only elite institutions who need to have courage right now. It's all of us. I asked her what those of us who aren't in charge of a university, a legal office, or a nonprofit can do to demonstrate courage to meet the moment.
Sharon Davies:
I love that question because one of the things that I've noticed recently pretty much in every room that I walk into, the question that I get so often right now is from an everyday citizen, "What can I do about this? I'm concerned, but I feel powerless. What can I do?" I get that question over and over and over again. And I have been thinking about history a lot and the lessons of history and how powerful actually individual citizens are. We may not realize it, but most folks think about, at a time like this, where are the leaders? Where's the Martin Luther King of our era? Because that example feels like the kind of powerful leadership that is required right now to meet the threat that we're talking about. But in actuality, you and I both know that while MLK was an incredible leader, there were so many forces around him, individual citizens, that were equally, if not more important than Dr. King himself. And so all of us should think about what occurs to us as a very small thing to do, but to do something.
I said to my son some years ago as concerns about our democracy were growing, I said to him, he's in his 20s, "I don't care what you do, honey, but you do need to do something. You can't sit on the sidelines. Give it some thought." And he decided that he was going to be a poll worker, and he's played that role now in a number of elections. He's one of the youngest people who are poll workers. You know. You go to cast your vote, you mostly see retired folks. But he's in there, he's in his 20s, and he's decided that he would do that. And it's a small example of engagement.
Recently, there was a protest in cities around the country, the Hands Off protests, where citizens, different communities decided that they would show up with their fellow citizens, many of whom, probably most of whom they didn't know, were strangers to them, wrote out their signs, and participated just in an act of protest. That's one example of what citizens are deciding that they can do to make their voice known and to help to protect a free society for as long as that society remains free to do that kind of thing.
Alex Lovit:
Start somewhere. Our next guest, Steven Levitsky, spoke to that theme too. Steven is a professor of government at Harvard. He's co-written a couple of bestsellers about threats to democracy called The Tyranny of the Minority and How Democracies Die. And he's a senior fellow here at Kettering. In our conversation, Steven said that the US has crossed a line into what he calls competitive authoritarianism. Trump was lawfully elected, but his administration is exerting undue pressure on the people and entities that don't get in line with the White House's priorities. Steven has experienced that pressure himself as the director of a research center at Harvard. I asked him, "What's the most effective way to topple autocracy?" His answer was basically, "That's the wrong question."
Steven Levitsky:
There is no single blueprint for toppling autocracy, and you cannot predict in advance which strategies, which citizen strategies will ultimately succeed when democracy's on the line. I honestly think there are a thousand different ways to do it. There's no single organization to join. There's no single protest to attend. It doesn't have to be street protests. Some people like street protests. Other people are uncomfortable in street protests. There are a thousand different ways to be involved. If your issue is abortion, then it should be abortion. If your issue is mass deportations, then it can be mass deportations. If your issue is corruption, it can be corruption. The important thing is that we all be involved, that tens of millions of Americans be engaged every day.
And we're starting to. There is pretty good evidence that the level of civic engagement is growing, and in fact is higher than it was in the first Trump administration. Some of it takes the form of protests at Tesla dealerships. Some of it has taken the form of people showing up at town hall meetings. Many, many, many people are continuing to write their congressperson and let their congressperson know their views, telling, in some cases, Republicans that they don't like that they're not standing up on behalf of constituents, some telling Democrats that they want them to be more aggressive in confronting Trump. There are literally hundreds of different ways to be engaged in politics.
What's important is, one, that we all be engaged, that tens of millions of us be engaged, and that we experiment with different forms of opposition. In a way, every time you confront an authoritarian regime, society has to do a certain amount of throwing spaghetti at the wall and seeing which strategies work. In Poland, it turned out public anger about a total ban on abortion is what really mobilized people and turned them decisively against the law and justice government. And it was the street mobilization against a court decision banning abortion in effect that really got people engaged. I don't think you could have predicted that in advance, and that's not necessarily what's going to work in the United States. But we have to be involved, we have to be engaged, and it's important to engage on the issue that you care most about.
Alex Lovit:
I want to leave you with one last bit of encouragement. It comes from John C. Yang. John is president and executive director of the civil rights advocacy organization, Asian Americans Advancing Justice. And he has advice for the moments when it feels like there's no way any one person's actions matter.
John Yang:
Think about all the ways that you could participate in our community as a whole. All of those small pieces add up to a larger whole. If you think about the course of our history, if you think about the Civil Rights Act of 1964, it wasn't because of just one person. Certainly Martin Luther King was a leader, certainly John Lewis was a leader, but it wasn't just the leaders' actions alone that caused these things to happen. It was because people whose names we will never know marched in the streets, people whose names we will never know that made signs that news agencies covered. Don't minimize yourself in this, because if you do, then you're not going to have the government that you want.
On one hand, yes, that's going to feel small and that will feel like, "Well, can it make a difference?" It will. It will. Don't lose hope. Stay engaged. Think about what your little piece in this will be, because your piece is actually not that little.
Alex Lovit:
This last year has been a scary time for democracy in the United States. We've had a lot of conversations about that on this show.
The United States isn't the only place where democracy is at risk. We can learn from other countries' experiences. Americans could stand to benefit from Ece Temelkuran's advice about how humor and faith in ourselves can help keep our morale up in a difficult time. As Deva Woodly told us, the best way to sustain morale is to build community, and the best way to build community is to find ways to work together. That can mean protests, but also things like economic boycotts, mutual aid, and information networks. As we learned from Maria Stephan, it's never too early to start, and working together is how political movements grow and build momentum.
Daniel Hunter challenges us to ask, "When we're boycotting and marching and protesting, who is our audience? Whose minds are we trying to change?" He says, "To fight an authoritarian regime, we need to target the pillars of support that prop it up. When government becomes a tool of injustice, we need soldiers and judges and bureaucrats to refuse to be part of it. Refusing unlawful orders or asking others to do so takes bravery," and that's what Sharon Davies is calling on all of us to demonstrate. All of us need to be in the fight to preserve and expand democracy. And as Steven Levitsky says, "We don't all have to find the same path or focus on the same issues in the fight for democracy. What's important is that all of us, or as many of us as possible, are engaged."
When we're confronting big, frightening social and political trends, it's easy to feel powerless, to feel like our actions as individuals don't matter. But as John Yang reminds us, every successful social movement in our history was built out of individuals. We do all have power.
If there's one thing I take away from all the guests we've had on the context in the last year, the ones you've just heard and all the ones we couldn't fit into this episode, it's that it's important to get involved, to connect with others, to do something. That's advice I'm going to take to heart in the coming year, and I hope you will too. By being engaged, we can not just preserve democracy, we can make it better. We can build an inclusive democracy where all of us have a voice in holding government accountable. Thanks for listening. Let's hope and work for a happier and more democratic 2026.
The Context is a production of the Charles F. Kettering Foundation. Our producers are George Drake Jr. and Emily Vaughn. Melinda Gilmore is our director of communications. The rest of our team includes Jamaal Bell, Tayo Clyburn, Jasmine Olaore, and Darla Minnich.
We'll be back in two weeks with another conversation about democracy. In the meantime, visit our website, kettering.org, to learn more about the foundation or to sign up for our newsletter. If you have comments for the show, you can reach us at thecontext@kettering.org. If you like the show, leave us a rating or a review wherever you get your podcasts, or just tell a friend about us. I'm Alex Lovit. I'm a senior program officer and historian here at Kettering. Thanks for listening.
The views and opinions expressed in this podcast are those of the host and guests. They are not the views and opinions of the Kettering Foundation. The foundation's support of this podcast is not an endorsement of its content.
Speaker 9:
This podcast is part of the Democracy Group.