Maddow: Finding ways to express your defiance in the age of Trump

As Americans, we tend to think of dissidents as heroic, saintly figures in faraway, repressive foreign countries, or maybe from sometime in the distant past. But in our time, in this political moment, Americans are finding that the idea of being a dissident is local to us, and contemporary to our time.

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But what does that mean in practical terms? What do we actually do? How can we stay safe while doing it? And how effective are today’s American dissidents likely to be?

Last spring, The New Yorker published an article titled “So You Want to Be a Dissident?” by Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative journalist Julia Angwin and a former senior policy adviser to Vice President Kamala Harris, Ami Fields-Meyer. The article was billed as “a practical guide to courage in Trump’s age of fear.” Angwin and Fields-Meyer have now expanded that reporting and research into a new book, “On Courage: How to Be a Dissident in an Age of Fear.”

Their methodology is simple and pragmatic — and surprisingly revelatory. Angwin and Fields-Meyer simply interviewed “people who had bravely stood up to authoritarianism around the world [to] see if they had any advice for staying safe and preserving democracy.”

I’m not in the business of doing book reviews, but suffice to say, I’m so impressed by their work, I volunteered to record the audio version of the book.

“On Courage” helped me think about my own prejudice — my own sort of self-defeating assumption that the most effective dissidents aren’t made from the same stuff as us normal, flawed concerned citizens — that somehow they were born superheroically brave and insightful, and because they know they are superheroically brave and insightful, they have innate confidence that their own destiny is to go out and slay Goliath.

What Angwin and Fields-Meyer discover — and what international dissidents explain to them in their own words — is quite the opposite. Most people whose stories get told in this book found themselves becoming dissidents simply because they insisted on paying attention to their own quiet internal moral compass. It didn’t mean they didn’t have fear or conflicting emotions, only that they trusted the personal, moral tug that guided them to say no, and then to take action.

Angwin and Fields-Meyer describe “a conflict often faced by people in authoritarian societies: a collision between the head and the heart, between values deeply held and an outside world unfolding in dramatic divergence. It can happen over decades, or in an instant. It comes of morality, or it arises out of necessity.”

“Dissidents don’t choose to be dissidents. They simply choose to be who they are,” Angwin and Fields-Meyer write.

Holding closely to your deepest values; listening to the internal voice that is uncomfortable with what is going on around you: these are the individual starting points for how a people, a nation, can become collectively stubborn against a dictator — how they can find the courage to inconvenience, annoy, slow down, mock and ultimately topple an authoritarian government.

They write, “Beginning with small acts like showing up, telling the truth, searching for our options, and bearing witness to injustice can embolden us to do more.”

Angwin and Fields-Meyer tell the story of Kathy O’Leary, a suburban mom who helps keep watch outside the Delaney Hall immigrant prison in Newark, New Jersey. She and the other volunteers offer human-level practical help to the families being hurt there — everything from blankets on cold days and sunscreen on hot, sunny ones, to phone calls and rides. That practical work is an important form of resistance to a government that tells us to hate and fear each other. O’Leary and her fellow volunteers have also done everything they can to document what’s happening at Delaney Hall, making sure there’s a record — often a video record — of everything they can see that happens there. That’s important resistance work too.

Angwin and Fields-Meyer point out that historically — in the Soviet Union, for instance — getting the truth out about what was happening inside their country was the job of journalists, writers and artists, smuggling illegal newsletters — physical paper — to the wider world. Today, when almost everyone has a smartphone, the work of witness and documentation and spreading the word is shared among everyone.

The work of witness is crucial, because victims and perpetrators need to know that justice will come one day. This is what one human rights statistician tells Angwin and Fields-Meyer:

“We will know who you are,” says [Patrick] Ball, who has spent his career cataloging perpetrators of state violence. “You are not going to be anonymous,” he says. “You can wear cute little balaclavas. It may protect you from a few minutes of social media shame, but people are never going to give up their pursuit of you because you’ve destroyed their lives.” … “The things you’re doing now will haunt you for the rest of your life,” he says. “Your children will be ashamed.” 

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Angwin and Fields-Meyer say another key to finding courage in a repressive regime is finding a political home — a group of like-minded people to keep you grounded and sane and supported: “None of us can be expected to absorb the shocks of authoritarianism on our own, or to face rapid-fire changes in laws, norms, and institutions alone.”