The midterms delivered a stunning rebuke of Trump and the MAGA movement, but what will it take to turn electoral victories into lasting change? In this episode of “Movement Memos,” I talk with anti-authoritarian strategist Scot Nakagawa about the opportunities and dangers of this political moment, the enduring power of tech oligarchs, and how movements can build the solidarity and infrastructure needed to defeat authoritarianism and transform our political culture.

Music: Son Monarcas, Dusty Decks, and Guustavv

TRANSCRIPT

Note: This transcript was originally published in Truthout. It is shared here with permission.

Kelly Hayes: Welcome to “Movement Memos,” a Truthout podcast about organizing, solidarity, and the work of making change. I’m your host, writer and organizer Kelly Hayes.

This week, we’re talking about what comes next after an extraordinary midterm election. In a striking rebuke of Trump, Democrats have won control of both houses of Congress, and won governor’s races in traditionally Republican states like Texas, Georgia, Iowa, and Ohio. Democrats also made down ballot gains, including taking control of the Texas State Board of Education and flipping ten state House seats in South Carolina. These wins came as a result of a massive early voting mobilization, which helped fuel a historic midterm voter turnout — leading some observers to dub this historic event the “No Kings” election.

Unfortunately, reactionaries also won some important victories, including ballot measures attacking trans people in multiple states. In Washington, for example, Initiative 638 restricts the participation of trans girls in grade school and high school athletics.

So, what does all of this mean in the fight against fascism, MAGA politics, and authoritarianism? Where does it leave the tech oligarchs who pledged allegiance to Trump, and where should our movements go from here? To explore these questions, I spoke with Scot Nakagawa, executive director and co-founder of the 22nd Century Initiative and author of the Anti-Authoritarian Playbook. In this episode, we discuss the possibilities and dangers of this moment, and what it would take to build a democracy worthy of the name.

If you appreciate this podcast, and you would like to support “Movement Memos,” you can subscribe to Truthout’s newsletter or make a donation at truthout.org. You can also support the show by subscribing to “Movement Memos” on Apple or Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts, or by leaving a positive review on those platforms. Sharing episodes on social media is also a huge help.

Truthout is an independent news organization, publishing stories that the craven corporate press won’t touch. We are a union shop with the best family and sick leave policies in the industry, and we could not do this work without the support of readers and listeners like you. So thank you for believing in us and for all that you do. And with that, I hope you enjoy the show.

[musical interlude]

Kelly Hayes: Scot Nakagawa, welcome to “Movement Memos.”

Scot Nakagawa: Well, thank you for having me. I’m excited to be here.

Kelly Hayes: How are you doing today?

Scot Nakagawa: Well, big question. I’m relieved. I feel, however, quite clear-eyed about the work ahead of us, but I mean, it’s good to have a week where the news is basically ours, and I just want to say I know how much work it took to get us to this point, and so I’m also thinking about the people who did it, who should be very proud of what they’ve accomplished.

Kelly Hayes: I’m also holding a lot of gratitude for so many people right now. For the folks who worked to get out the vote, and to keep their communities safe during this process. For people who redefined what’s possible, or kept our values on the map, even if they didn’t win. Black organizers who mobilized southern communities, ICE resisters who won game-changing narrative battles. So many people who leveraged the momentum of mass marches and community defense to make early voting a mass action. I’m holding all of those folks, and so many others, in my heart, as we sit down to discuss what this moment really means, and where these victories might help us go.

Scot Nakagawa: Yeah.

Kelly Hayes: So, some of our listeners will be familiar with your work, but for the unacquainted, what would you like our audience to know about who you are and what you do?

Scot Nakagawa: Well, I’m the executive director and co-founder of something called the 22nd Century Initiative. The initiative is a national strategy and action hub that’s working with organizations across the country to defeat authoritarianism and to build a democracy worth having. I also write something called the Anti-Authoritarian Playbook on Substack, and so if you want to learn more about what we’re doing, you can join us there and read along. But basically that’s who I am now in my current role.

I come from nearly five decades now in social movements, starting in Hawaii actually, so far from here, where I grew up on a sugar plantation. So that was my orientation. Those were the people I was working with. But I came to this particular fight against authoritarianism in Portland in the late ’80s when I met the organized far right up close. They committed a very famous murder there of an Ethiopian student who was an immigrant to Portland named Mulugeta Seraw. A group called East Side White Pride basically beat him to death on the street.

And upon doing some research, a group of us quickly found that East Side White Pride was connected to a national movement and organizations and that there is an initiative to move white supremacist organizations into the Pacific Northwest and particularly into Oregon in order to try to reclaim, or to claim the region as a white home. And I say reclaim because Oregon was founded as a whites-only state. And so we from there started to develop a monitoring counter organizing operation that has carried me now in various different ways, that foundation through many, many years of work against far right movements and against systemic authoritarianism.

Kelly Hayes: Well, I just want to say that your work has meant so much to me, and you’ve been one of the people I’ve really looked to during this second Trump administration for insight around how to interpret events, and how we can communicate and move more strategically. So I’m just really grateful for the opportunity to talk with you about how we should process this moment and how we can pivot from here.

So we’re talking just a couple of days after an election in which Democrats won control of both chambers of Congress and made some extraordinary gains in states that have long been viewed as Republican strongholds. How are you interpreting these results? What do you think they tell us about the political moment we’re in, and what possibilities do they open up?

Scot Nakagawa: Well, I mean they open up some, I think, significant possibilities for us. I think it’s important to keep in mind that when an authoritarian takes over by elections, that authoritarian strongman is usually very, very popular. Even Duterte in the Philippines enjoyed over 80 percent approval ratings when most people understood that he was killing people in a drug war. And so Trump’s lack of popularity is a really huge advantage for us, for social movements and for people who are working in institutions because it gives them a little more space. And what we saw here, I think, is that unpopularity magnified by the ways in which the Trump administration has basically caused the cost of living to increase and made life difficult for people while acting in ways that are obviously corrupt to ordinary American citizens.

So that and the cruelty and the chaos that’s been created have obviously been rejected. And that’s real, that’s ours and that’s a real accomplishment of activists all the way across the country and especially in places like Minnesota where they really beat back the Operation Metro Surge and made it very clear to the Trump administration they better come up with a better strategy than simply trying to terrify us in that way. So a lot of it is about prices, corruption, and Texas is what Paxton’s indictment. It’s about an unpopular war, the memory of Minneapolis, and it’s about organized people. And so what we need to do now is take the infrastructure we built in order to achieve this victory and start to use it to be able to get to the next election and beyond, because where we are now I think is still quite early in the process of figuring out how all of this is going to end up. It does open up some specific things around oversight, rules of Congress, oversight, subpoenas.

They have, now, the power of the purse, which is very important because there are agencies that are being funded that are carrying out unconstitutional acts. This is also about Senate confirmations and a chance to set the agenda for 2029. But the president still has a veto and executive power and state-level machinery in Florida and Texas that is beyond Congress’s reach. So the caution I think here is opposition parties usually gain in midterms. Accepting a midterm loss costs a president relatively little. The real test is 2028 and what gets built between now and then. In this election, I think we saw a lot of testing. They took on a lot of different kinds of efforts to try to see if they could basically rig the election in their favor. Almost none of those worked. And so I think what they’re going to do is learn from that and come back in different ways and we need to be prepared for it.

Kelly Hayes: I really appreciate those observations. Congress basically laid down and died during the first half of the administration, and I think that has some people imagining that bringing this branch of government back to life, with Democrats in control, is going to create some kind of braking mechanism. But Trump has been doing a lot of what he’s been doing without any particular assistance from Congress. Using ICE to launch terror campaigns in major cities, destroying USAID, gutting federal agencies, deploying troops domestically, waging the Iran war, and weaponizing the Justice Department against his enemies — none of that went through Congress, and it’s not clear what a more defiant Congress will be empowered to rein in. Will he have less internal support, now that it’s clear his brand won’t sustain the GOP’s future? Probably, but we don’t know what those consequences look like either, since a lot of these people still need him, including for things like pardons — and we should expect this administration to become a pardon factory before it’s over.

But I do think there are some important possibilities here. In addition to modeling the kind of legislation we know Trump will veto, and making him demonstrably say no to policies that would make people’s lives better, there’s the question of what Congress can expose. Democrats can hold hearings about the damage DOGE, Elon Musk, and ICE have done. They can investigate corruption. They can revisit and lay bare so many things that have happened so quickly, that have been effectively rinsed out of public memory by the news cycle. Republicans like Vance have been quick to acknowledge the role of the war in these electoral outcomes, while largely glossing over the role of corruption, which was also a major factor. And I think that’s something we really need to put a spotlight on. I think we need Democrats to more or less perform an autopsy on this administration while it’s still writhing around on the table. Show us the cancer. Show us the rot. Spare no detail.

Of course, exposing the machinery of authoritarianism isn’t the same as dismantling it. And that brings me to something you’ve written about, which is how authoritarianism takes hold through institutions, corporate power, and everyday decisions.

Given what happened on election day, I’m curious about how you think about the durability of authoritarian power. What can electoral victories actually dismantle, and what remains in place even after voters have rejected the people advancing an authoritarian agenda?

Scot Nakagawa: Well, it’s important to keep in mind that elections remove people, but they don’t remove infrastructure, and so we need to keep that in mind. And the Trump administration has put in place quite a bit of infrastructure to enforce consolidation of authoritarian power. So, don’t take your eyes off of that. Keep in mind that, for example, after they stopped Operation Metro Surge because of what people in Minnesota did and the way in which the broad public reacted, which was to basically begin to reject the administration for its cruelty and corruption, they decided to go quiet and they actually made that very clear that they were going to go quiet. But deportations have increased since then, they are at record highs. And so the machinery is still at work. What we’ve seen is a change of style, not in substance in terms of their determination to execute mass deportation.

And so we need to recognize that this election may be a similar kind of thing where they decided that they didn’t want to trigger a crisis moment with the American voters that they maybe thought they would not be able to win. But it doesn’t mean they’re not going to continue to move their agenda. And so I think that’s really important. One way to think of this is kind of like climate, like the whole climate movement. For a long time the climate movement did not want to have to prepare for the negative effects of climate change, to actually build the levies and whatnot because it felt like losing to admit that we had gone that far. I think in this fight with authoritarianism we need to recognize that mistake and understand that what we’re facing here is not just bad weather, it’s a change of climate. And so we need to be able to now learn how to function in this new climate.

74 percent of the people of the world, according to the report of the largest democracy watchdog organization in the world, live under authoritarian governments, and that’s as a result of year-over-year gains over the last 20 years. A year ago, 72 percent. The year before that it was 70 percent. And so authoritarianism is continuing to spread and assert itself, and it’s because there’s an international network basically of oligarchs that are trying to execute this change, in part because I think they recognize something that we are also beginning to recognize, which is that if we don’t do something about it, their bots will erase us from our employment and also from the ability to be able to articulate ideas and express ourselves without being drowned under a tidal wave of what amounts to bullshit.

And so with all of that in mind, there’s still a really big fight ahead of us and we need to continue to be building on it and thinking of this election as one of those times when we’re able to get to proof of concept that we can, if we mobilize in large enough numbers, overcome gerrymandering, overcoming all these other things they’ve done to undermine the power of majorities and actually win over people who we thought perhaps in the first Trump administration you could never win an argument with. And so circumstances are changing and we need to change with them, adapt quickly and recognize that we need to start to reframe some of our arguments and continue peeling people off of the MAGA base.

Kelly Hayes: What you said about deportations increasing, and a change in style, rather than substance, has me thinking about criminalization. My friend Mariame Kaba often says that “criminalization is the fuel of fascism,” and I think that’s one of the realities we have to contend with right now: that it’s easy to disappear behavior that people might otherwise identify as fascist into the criminal legal system, which is a system that most people view as legitimate. That’s something we have to contend with now, as our neighbors are being snatched in ways that look more like standard policing, and it’s something we’re going to have to contend with in the future, if Democrats retake the White House.

Because I don’t see any way for these oligarchs and corporations to really hold onto their power without angling for something like authoritarianism. And that can be shaped quietly, and more palatably, without the Stephen Miller race war aesthetics, and it we should expect those efforts. So we have a lot of work to do, in terms of helping people understand that, in the long and short term.

Zooming back in on this moment, I think it’s really important that we communicate to people that this victory isn’t some kind of handoff, where we’re passing the baton to the people we’ve elected. To advance an agenda that’s anti-authoritarian and pro-human in our communities, and at a broader scale, we’re going to need movement power. We cannot rely on the power of Democrats in Congress or Democratic Party elites to get us where we need to go. We have to keep building movements that can challenge these forces and reshape what’s politically possible.

And when we think about the elites in Silicon Valley, we need to remember that, as Ruth Wilson Gilmore tells us, when an existing set of social relations cannot be replicated, struggle occurs. Our enemies are struggling right now. They’re reorganizing. They’re trying to figure out how to advance their agenda under these shifting conditions.

We have Silicon Valley elites who pledged allegiance to Trump, but that was a marriage of convenience. They were advancing their particular brand of fascism by aligning it with his. And now, they’re going to adapt. If that means making alliances with neoliberal Democrats, they’ll do that. If it means creating new narratives and rebranding what they’re doing, they’ll do that too. We’ve already seen them trying to rebrand data centers right around the midterms, which is hilarious, but also revealing in terms of how they’re moving and why.

And we’re also seeing political realignment among some Democrats, too. We have establishment figures like Obama going to bat for Abdul El-Sayed, and I think that tells us something about how the party is trying to regain its footing. This is a moment of instability, and a lot of powerful people are trying to reorganize and realign themselves. And that means we have to push and shove and make demands about what those new arrangements are going to look like.

And we need to be ready to challenge Democrats when they align themselves with tech oligarchs and other monied forces whose agendas will hurt us. Because if we don’t continue to assert ourselves and push for transformative demands, new political arrangements will be negotiated at our expense. We know Democrats are often willing to capitulate in ways that are harmful to us, which we saw from some candidates around trans issues.

Now, you’ve warned about the impulse to make our coalitions more respectable by distancing ourselves from people who are being targeted, or whose demands are considered politically inconvenient. You describe that impulse as something that feels like strategy but is actually surrender.

In light of these election results, how should we be thinking about the relationship between building broad coalitions and refusing to sacrifice marginalized people for political advantage?

Scot Nakagawa: Well, I mean this is the most important point, I think. The movements that win globally are ideologically and culturally diverse at the same time. They’re both things at the same time. They also center women’s leadership, and that’s something people should think about because so many of the lines of society run through women’s experience. So they have these characteristics that are, I think for some people, unexpected. The diversity of ideology is a source of those movements’ power. And so we’re not talking about making everything approximately beige and avoiding any controversial issues. It’s really about understanding that the movements that win have power that is directional rather than ideological.

And so those things just are important to keep in mind. But breadth and principle aren’t opposites. So the question is what you build the coalition on. And that’s going to be really important because they’re going to name enemies and target them and count on us to actually duck and cover when we see what’s happening. That’s why they make it all so terrifying, why it’s just so brutal when they go after people is to get the rest of us to see that and to back off. A good example of this is the House Un-American Activities Committee in another generation under [Sen. Joseph] McCarthy. They went after people in the Hollywood community, famous movie stars. They forced them to have to testify before Congress and when they wouldn’t give up names, they put them in prison, some of them.

But the whole thing was just theater. They already had the names. They had already planted people in the organizations they were investigating, and those people had access to the lists. And so they already had the names. The whole thing was simply in order to take these famous people we thought of as powerful and iconic and bring them to their knees before us to scare the rest of us. And so that’s what we see happening when they go after minority groups that are unpopular. They’re counting on us not to be able to put majority coalitions together to defend them, and they’re hoping that many of us will see that and become so afraid that we back off.

When they go after people on voter rolls, for example, if you lived in a mixed family of mixed immigration status families, suddenly the idea of registering to begin with becomes scary because it puts you on a list with your home address on it. So that’s the kind of thing that they’re attempting to do, and we can’t let them do that. When they go after different groups of people, they basically are claiming definitional power over who those people are. And by being able to have that power, they’re also deciding who all the rest of us are as well. What does it mean to be human if being gay makes you a pervert or being trans makes you a predator? What does that say about what it means to be human and what kind of world should we be living in, in order to protect ourselves from those problems? That’s the thing that they’re trying to build toward.

Really important in this election to understand that with all the great results we saw and how effective people were at beating back the kind of anti-trans rhetoric directed at candidates running for various different offices, there were trans ballot measures that were also on the ballot. And while the candidates who ran anti-trans ads mostly lost, the bans themselves mostly passed. So voters punished the wedge and still voted against the trans people when asked directly. That’s why the temptation to drop them will grow strong right now. I think that that’s a real danger going into this next period is that people will start to think, well, you can go after them when they come at you with these kind of ridiculous claims that someone is trans or whatever. But that you need to go quiet on the trans people and stop talking about them so much, when in fact we should be talking about them all the time because what we need to be clear is that we need that argument against trans people to backfire, to teach them a lesson, because if it works, they’re going to come after the rest of us too.

Kelly Hayes: I really appreciate this point. That there’s a continuous danger of Democrats bowing to the scapegoating because it’s still there, and it’s still working on a lot of people, which is why we’re seeing those ugly outcomes with ballot measures. We need moral leadership in our communities around this, and I am not talking about the leadership of elected officials, although I do think it’s important when you have a winning candidate like Abdul El-Sayed saying, “The minute you assent to government taking anybody’s rights, whether you use them or you don’t, you are assenting to government taking everybody’s rights.” I think that’s really important. But the leadership on this has to come from us. It’s not going to be the dominant popular position, right out of the gate, which is going to make a lot of Dem officials squeamish, but that was also the case with civil rights. Most white people did not support the Civil Rights movement, and a lot of the white liberal support those protests saw was as fickle as the support trans people have gotten. This is always what it is to champion protections for the most marginalized, and attach that to a larger agenda that is actually better for everyone. It takes time, but we can build momentum, and also build culture around the realization that when we allow trans people to be targeted, we’re all being set up.

So, there are battles we won in this election, but we clearly have a lot of work to do around this issue, both in terms of resisting the scapegoat narratives themselves, and around resisting capitulation, which really amounts to a kind of human sacrifice. And once you normalize that kind of sacrifice, everyone’s life is cheaper. That’s the reality.

Scot Nakagawa: Well, trans people and immigrants, I think we need to understand are this cycle’s test cases for tools that will get extended to everyone, like ID rules, data collection, detention. So just keep that in mind. Respectability by distancing is also a form of anticipatory obedience that they’re counting on. So it hands the other side for free what they couldn’t otherwise force. They can’t make us all stop talking about trans people. What they can do is create an environment in which we voluntarily do so. So it’s just important that keep in mind that what makes the coalition broad and principled is that it’s built on shared stakes such as wages, safety, and freedom from domination, and that has to be freedom from domination for everybody because pluralism means every group gets respected and pluralism is fundamental democratic infrastructure.

Kelly Hayes: And I think some people are taking an incomplete lesson away from these ballot outcomes. I see some people saying, Well, we won some things, but clearly, trans people are still in danger. But as you say, what this really means is that we won some things, but we’re all still in a lot of danger. Defending trans people is fundamental to defending everyone.

And what we’re seeing here really highlights that while Trump fucked up by tanking his popularity before he’d fully consolidated power, and by making life more expensive for people, plenty of people are not rejecting some of the underlying, reactionary ideas that MAGA’s been selling. A lot of people are totally fine with targeting marginalized groups if they think it doesn’t affect them personally. We need everyone to understand that it does affect them personally. And we need people to recognize the abandonment of trans people as a form of surrender to a kind of authoritarian, reactionary politics that could destroy us all.

Now, I want to pivot for a moment to talk about some of the authoritarian infrastructure that’s still in place, even as this authoritarian project gets disrupted. So you’ve been talking about issues involving corporate consolidation in the entertainment industry, and you described that consolidation as a form of authoritarian infrastructure. Can you talk about the role of concentrated economic power, particularly in the media and technology, in this authoritarian moment? Because in spite of these recent electoral outcomes, that infrastructure is still in place, and I feel like it has to be reckoned with.

Scot Nakagawa: Well, in the first place, just the general principle, that hugely consolidated wealth is kind of why we’re in the stew we’re in. Neoliberalism effectively, basically, insulated large corporations and financial markets from democratic decision making, and it’s that insulation that allowed these huge fortunes to be developed so that we have the world’s first trillionaire, for instance. The protection against democratic decision making is something that they’re as clear as we are, is what led them to be able to accumulate those fortunes. They would like to make that permanent. They also recognize that this robot revolution that we’re facing may create the kinds of conditions of massive unemployment that welcomes in pitchforks and torches in time. And so they’re trying to get ahead of that and figure out how to put together the repressive apparatus necessary or apparati, I guess, necessary to be able to suppress dissent and to maintain control and to safeguard their fortunes.

So all of that stuff, I think as a backdrop for all of this in terms of how we frame it is really important, that this is really ultimately a fight over money and power, obviously. But, that that much money has been basically put outside of democratic decision making, gives them a base to fight from, and so we’re likely to be in this fight for a very long time to come. Now, in the media, it’s particularly important because media is the means of cultural production. This is how we know who we are, how we tell stories, how we find our way to one another so that despite all of our diversity, we hold things in common.

And so in order for authoritarians to rule, they need to control the story of society. It has to be a single story with no contradictions, no one laughing. A single story about their divine right to rule, about the power of the strong man, and about how complying with the strong man keeps you safe, and how not complying with the strong man puts you in ultimate danger. And so what we need to do is protect the means by which we can communicate and express ourselves freely. The authoritarians always go after the stage first, they go after expressive spaces first. And they do that because they know that if they can start to shrink those spaces, we will shrink along with them unless we can find some way out, and that’s basically what they want. So it is really, really, really important.

On tech in particular, when you add tech to it, there are two things to consider. It gives you control over attention. So that’s what the algorithms amplify, and data, what can be used to surveil and sort people. And so as those platforms consolidate, it becomes more and more dangerous because these are the tools that they can use in order to accomplish those things. They can put a lot of pressure on these media companies as they consolidate. Keep in mind, I talked about the HUAC, the House Un-American Activities Committee and all of those hearings at that time. It was not that there was a law passed that said that certain people like Dalton Trumbo, who was a famous screenwriter of that period who got blacklisted, could never work again. The studios just got together and decided that they would comply with the administration with the conditions of the time by creating a blacklist themselves.

And so one of the lessons of the Dalton Trumbo story is that, of course, he continued working under pseudonyms, and it became an inside joke in Hollywood. I think he won two Oscars for screenwriting while writing under pseudonyms when he was supposed to be blacklisted. And then Kirk Douglas finally decided that he wasn’t putting up with it anymore. And when he hired Dalton Trumbo to write Spartacus, he gave him a credit in his own name, and that ended up breaking the blacklist because it just didn’t work. It was just not going to work. And so we can do a lot in this situation, but this is the kind of thing they’re trying to prevent, and that’s why they’re going after those things.

If they can control the news media while continuing to flood the zone with all of their BS, it becomes really impossible to tell what is the truth and not the truth, what matters and doesn’t matter. And it puts you in the stew of worry that I think most of us are already familiar with, sitting doom scrolling, looking at all of the shitty news and feeling more and more helpless the deeper you get into it.

Kelly Hayes: Yes. And I think all of this raises important questions about how we engage with culture and media. What news are we consuming and sharing? Are we supporting independent outlets? Are we having meaningful conversations about what’s happening in the world, or are we just participating in cycles of reaction online? And how are we engaging with art, appreciating it, and making it together? I think all of these things matter, because we have to think about how we can build and sustain a culture that isn’t simply being dictated to us by these powerful interests, even as we work to challenge their power at an industry level.

And that brings me to something you’ve written about, which is the need to “block and build, in one motion.” You argue that every defensive fight should create some kind of durable capacity. What would it look like for movements to build on this electoral moment in ways that strengthen their long-term capacity, rather than simply returning to a defensive posture?

Scot Nakagawa: Well, I’m going to answer that, but I want to put a pin in something you said, which is the importance of independent media and of local news. It just matters the world and more to us that those kinds of institutions survive and can continue telling the truth to people. When the local newspaper or community radio station, whatever closes down, what replaces it is things like Meta. And so these are the kind of platforms that are being controlled by authoritarians that give us nothing like real vetted news. And so people get caught in conspiracy theories, they get caught in all kinds of different ways of understanding things that have nothing to do with what’s actually happening in front of them and why it’s happening. So, support those things to the extent that you can and know that they really matter.

But as to blocking and building in one motion and what we just experienced in this election, I think what we need to do is we need to make sure that we keep those relationships, those institutions that were part of this need to have an agenda for what to do between now and 2028. They need to contribute to the building of a mass civil resistance movement. So that’s infrastructure that we have. Elections should always be looked at in those ways because everybody’s attention is on the election for that period of time. There are really big opportunities to basically co-op the infrastructure of the election in order to engage people and get them to take action. I think what we should do is view this election as a kind of a plebiscite on authoritarianism, which we want and to start to now go from the plebiscite to the next big election when we can actually perhaps experience a democratic breakthrough, and I mean small D democratic breakthrough.

So that I think is something people really, really need to think about. We need to continue to defend people from retaliation that’s likely to happen. This means building a standing mutual defense network with legal support, security, and a shared fund. We’re building something called Free Country, which is a new kind of network across the United States that is founded on this idea of mutual defense and we’ll build out some of those pieces, but people who are doing that work as well should not stop because we’re doing it. What we should do is merge.

And we need to pressure new members of Congress, and keep in mind that these new members of Congress, many of them ran on democracy. And so we have a whole new group of people who are in Congress now for whom that was the number one promise. Pressuring them by building district accountability teams in the flip seats that outlast this Congress will be very, very important. We’re going to have to hold this Congress accountable to us because the likelihood is that they will begin to compromise and to back up in order to try to find their places, some kind of bipartisan sweet spot. You do not negotiate that way with people whose intention is to basically achieve single party rule. Every compromise helps them to achieve that end.

And we need to keep documenting everything and feeding oversight hearings with county-level data on arrests, detainers, and local police agreements, build a permanent monitoring system for local campaigns. I think that’s going to be really important in a way to repurpose some of these election observers we deployed. We also need to be fighting for state protections. Keep in mind that in order to consolidate authoritarian government in the United States, Trump can’t just take over all of our federal agencies. He also has to take over 50 states and under those states, thousands of other jurisdictions. And so this is not an easy task and we just made it harder in this midterm election. So continue fighting for state protections such as banning local police deals with ICE, as Maryland did, and build models other states can copy.

And then we need to be placing movement people as staff in new offices, which are hiring now. This builds the governing capacity for a generation. We need to develop that pipeline. We need to be ready to govern when our time comes and we need to draft bills that can’t pass yet. It builds the governing agenda for 2029 to do that. And in 2029, if we should be able to win the presidency, what’s going to be really important is for us to not to fall prey to the breakthrough trap, which is something that we’ve observed over and over again and outlets like Truthout have covered in great detail. What happened in the Arab Spring, for example, when brilliant movement organizers were able to take over and put themselves in a position to govern, but they didn’t have a plan or the appetite for doing so. And so the Muslim Brotherhood who did have a plan, stepped in and took over and basically ate their lunch.

We see this happening over and over and over again. It’s one of the biggest dangers we face. So everything should be going toward that end and building the kind of capacity and the kind of bench we need in order to be able to take advantage of the moment when we break through and really start to consolidate a truly democratic government.

Kelly Hayes: Can you say more about the mutual defense network you mentioned, Free Country?

Scot Nakagawa: Yeah. Free Country is based on this thing that I think many of us said when we were children, perhaps still say as adults, when somebody tells you you can’t do something that you should totally be able to do because it’s not against the law or anything. But if someone’s just saying, “I would prefer you not do that and you can’t do it.” We say, “Well, but it’s a free country.” When I was a kid, I would say that to my parents all the time. When somebody responds to that by saying, “Not in this house,” that’s the rule of man. When somebody responds by saying, “There are rules in this house and everyone must follow it,” that’s the rule of law. And so it’s a little bit of a play on that, but it also is the play in the idea that if some of us aren’t free, none of us are, because pluralism requires that we understand the need to protect everyone, everyone’s right to express their ideas and to participate in the political process.

And so what we’re doing is basically building a national network of organizations that have big memberships that have an actual real base in communities to basically join in a mutual defense pack so that if any of those groups is attacked, all of them will respond to protect one another. And so it’s just a way to begin to build the kind of community we need and the infrastructure to communicate across that community to be able to then step up and take on more and more ambitious kinds of projects. But for now, it’s really about understanding that we need to protect the ability of people to be able to do the work, to protest, to organize, to do all of the things that one can do and should be able to do in a free country.

[musical interlude]

Kelly Hayes: You’ve described attrition as one of the most effective weapons of authoritarianism, and you’ve written about the relationship between loneliness, isolation, and authoritarian power. You also argue that care is frontline infrastructure, rather than something separate from political organizing.

What would it mean for movements to take that seriously, particularly after years of exhausting struggles that aren’t going to end simply because an election went our way?

Scot Nakagawa: Well, we are in the midst of a loneliness epidemic in this country, and loneliness is something that authoritarians feed on. They feed on isolation and fear and loneliness. So we need to be aware of that and understand that we need to be addressing that loneliness too. And we address it by providing people with care and a sense of belonging. In building social movements, grievance is the trigger. It’s the ignition switch. But what’s the fuel that gets you on the journey and to your goals is longing for belonging, a sense of identity that’s created in the context of the movement that makes you feel empowered and important, like you really matter. And it’s that sense of solidarity, of mutual support. And solidarity is not just a principle or an idea or a feeling. Solidarity needs to be articulated in terms of real strategy.

And so it means that, for example, if you get picked up by the police for questioning, you know that somebody’s going to take care of your kids while you’re gone. You know that if you need a lawyer, there’s a fund you can turn to so that someone will come and defend you. It means knowing that you’re going to have meals at your home if you get shut in because you can’t go out because of the ICE enforcement raids. Those are the kinds of things that people need. And we need mutual aid. And what mutual aid does in communities is provide people with essential things that we can do with each other, what we can share. So it builds community, but it also increases the distance between us and the strong man’s power by giving us a greater degree of independence, which translates into a greater degree of freedom to organize and to try to oppose what we see happening.

So it’s everything from rapid response and accompaniment when someone is targeted to legal and security support, family preparedness plans and a mutual defense fund and rest and rotation. Rest is an incredibly important thing. Rest and rotation built into campaigns so no one carries the load forever. And it also means joy. So shared meals, music, celebration. My parents and my grandparents were involved in the first successful agricultural worker strike in the history of the United States. They basically brought a white supremacist oligarchy modeled after Jim Crow, the Hawaii plantation system, to its knees by going on shrike for 74 days. 33 of 34 plantations, people walked out and they stayed out for a long time.

And the way they were able to do that was not just through the sheer determination of the people on the front line, but because they put together alternative banking systems that bailed people out of debt to the company’s store. They had dance clubs and hunting and fishing clubs, backyard gardening collectives. They did things that built community around people and that created a kind of a safety net so that people felt like they would be taken care of when those men on horseback with whips came by to threaten them, that they would be able to have the resolve to say no. And beyond the material things it gives you, it gives you something more, which is the emotional inclination to want to do what you need to be doing. That, I think, is incredibly important.

Kelly Hayes: I absolutely agree. And I really appreciate that story about the plantation strike, because it illustrates how much more people can sustain when they know they’re going to be cared for.

And I think we really need to talk about fatigue and its impacts, and the ways it can lead us to accept things that aren’t good enough, or declare victory and go home when the fight isn’t over. Because this has been an exhausting couple of years, and people are tired, and traumatized, and I think that puts us at risk of falling into that baton-passing mindset, where people feel like, “Okay, we did it.” When really, what we’ve won here is a better terrain on which to contest for power. This is a long fight. And people are going to need breaks. Some people may be taking one of those breaks right now, because they just organized their hearts out around this election, and that’s good. People should do what they need to do. And we also need to gear up for a long fight ahead, which means making sure that the kind of care, support, and relief people need is part of our infrastructure.

And so, in keeping with this idea of a long fight: You’ve said that we’re not trying to restore a democracy that once existed, because that democracy never fully arrived for most people. Instead, you describe the goal as making domination impossible and belonging ordinary.

At a moment when there’s renewed hope about what’s politically possible, what would it mean to organize toward that larger vision, rather than simply trying to restore the political conditions that existed before Trump?

Scot Nakagawa: Well, I mean, first and foremost, we need to understand that authoritarians always drive their agendas down avenues of race and gender, and we need to close down those avenues. They always take advantage of race and gender inequality, and they trigger status threats among people on the top and they demonize the people on the bottom of those hierarchies. That’s how they do it. They do it here that way, they do it like that all over the world. And so as long as we leave those avenues open, we’re always vulnerable. We need to start to think of gender and race equality and the protection of minorities in general as basic democratic infrastructure. They’re like load bearing walls of a democracy that can hold, particularly in this new climate. And so I don’t think of these as luxury items. They’re not constituency issues. They’re actually critical to whether or not a democracy can hold.

So I mean, just the lessons that we’ve learned. Reconstruction built a multiracial democracy and the redeemers ended it without abolishing elections or courts, they just narrowed who counted. Every democratic advance since has been partial and reversible here in the US because of that. Making domination impossible means the institutions domination depends on refuse to carry it. So schools and courts, congregations, workplaces, police and companies, power has to be distributed so no faction can capture such a largely out-of-proportionate amount of it. And making the long game ordinary means that it’s built into contracts and laws and bylaws and budgets. It’s not just a kind of a mood, right? So it no longer has to be begged for, granted or defended one grant cycle at a time. We got to get past that.

So what it means now to me is that we need to use this moment to build, not just to return to what we had. What we had is no longer viable in this new era. We need to build something quite different. We need to go beyond simple criticism to prophecy. What is it that we’re moving toward? This is something that the right understood better than the left at the end of the Cold War, and that’s why they’ve been going in this direction for so long now. They recognized at the end of the Cold War that questions would not always be answered within the context of liberalism because liberalism had behaved in a way that was incredibly repressive in order to be able to maintain its position in that competition. So they went after cultural divisions and turned them into political battle lines around abortion and LGBTQ and race and you name it.

And were able through the ’90s, a big part of my career was working in Washington, D.C. in the ’90s, where I witnessed how a minority of people were able to act like the majority by simply creating so much conflict and division among everyone else. And so all of that was with this in mind, with it in mind that they could actually marginalize democracy and liberal ideas and to move their illiberal and repressive agenda by creating this sense that nothing’s stable, nothing’s real, and everything’s up for grabs. So I think all of that super matters to us. And in this, hope is also really, really important. And I don’t just mean hope because it makes you happy or it makes you not feel as scared. Those things are important too, but hope is a security issue. A people who don’t believe that they can win are much more likely to break under pressure, to fragment, to turn their back on movements, because if you don’t think you can win, what’s the point? It’s putting yourself in danger for no reason.

And so I think in all of this, we also need to be talking in the language of hope about what it means to have belonging be ordinary so that when the person who normally would have been excluded walks into the room, it is not the first thing on their mind that they will have to defend themselves. The first th

Post truncated. Read the full article at https://organizingmythoughts.org/the-midterms-have-changed-the-game-now-what/.

From Organizing My Thoughts via This RSS Feed.