NTK: On Courage: A Conversation with Ami Fields-Meyer and Julia Angwin

Really? I mean, my story is totally...

“Steuja, how do you feel about the story?”

Yeah, I have a lot of time to get over 1,000 euros. Do you have connections or exes or supercrafts? No, just like Steuja is. Wow, and that's easy. Yeah, the taste is almost all automatic.

I feel like it's so... In Spand, hold your money to cook. Upgab of Christ 31st, say Yuli. What?

Do you have a Spand with like Steuja?

Oh, here. And, I, twelve, and twenty-eight, two, twenty-three. This is Deep State Radio.

“Coming to you direct from our super secret studio in the third sub-basement of the”

Ministry of Snark in Washington, D.C. and from other, undisclosed locations across America and around the world. Hello, and welcome to the latest episode of Need to Know where we bring together people. We thank you on a "no" to hear from about subjects we think.

You will find important. I'm David Roscoff.

I'm your host, and we are joined today by two folks who are behind a brand new book.

You've probably heard something about it. Tommy Fields Meyer is currently Senior Fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School's Allen Lab for Democracy Renovation, boy could leave some democracy renovation from twenty-twenty-one to twenty-twenty-four he served in the White House, including as Senior Policy Advisor to Vice President Kamal Harris, and as a member of the President's Science and Technology

Policy team, Julia Angwin is an award-winning investigative journalist, a best-selling author, a New York Times contributing opinion writer, and the founding director of the independent media and audience project, also at Harvard's Kennedy School, in this case, the Shorenstein Center on Media, Policy, and Public Policy, they have collaborated on a new book. It's called "On Courage. How to be a dissident in an age of fear."

Welcome, guys. Great to be here. Congratulations on the new book. You know, it resonates for man and number of levels I've known for a while. We talked about it as he's been doing it, but the book begins with a scene that I was

actually present in, which was the series of scenarios that were done in the United States in which a bunch of fancy Washington-Dypes, political leaders, military leaders, advisors, Republicans and Democrats got together and asked the question, "What happens if the president of the United States goes rogue, becomes an autocrat?" Starts cracking down in ways that are undemocratic. And I have to say I watched in horror pretty much as you're opening

same describes, because the response of virtually everybody in the room was, "Well, of course, that wouldn't happen." Or, "Well, of course, we would sue." Or, "Well, we would write a strongly worded letter." Or, "We would get a bunch of folks on Capitol Hill and we'd have a press conference." And I was like, "Holy crap." I mean, there were rioters attacking the Capitol. The other side isn't playing the game you're playing. And it struck me at

the time that we need to understand how to work when working inside the system doesn't

“work. And that, I think, is what your book expertly describes. Julia, I was reading”

something that you had said earlier, which was essentially why would you stop doing what you were doing in your successful careers, the journalist, and focus on this. So let's start with that. Why? Yeah. I mean, I spent most of my career as a tech investigative reporter writing about sort of the power of big tech and how the harms that it has enabled. And I think the moment, this last election, I woke up the next morning, and I really just thought,

maybe your listeners will understand this if they are deep state radio listeners. I really thought my threat model is wrong. Like, I have been a little bit too focused on corporate power and need to focus more on authoritarian power. And so caught up on me. And he was at the Ash Center. And I was like, we need to talk to people who have been in authoritarian regimes.

And so I was like, you want to help me? Like, let's just do this and start talking to them.

And that is sort of how it began. But I think that it really, as, as we worked on this, I feel like it's actually the same problem, right? Which is corporate power, government power, unaccountable power is, is the problem here. And we've let it go unchecked on too many fronts. And haven't built up the muscles for what it looks like to resist. Like, there are other countries where they protest all the time. And they have a little bit more of an understanding

“that you have to constantly keep a check on power. And like you said, that that scenario,”

the reason we opened with it was because it's clear that people here haven't been practicing

those reps. Yeah, no, for for sure it is. And, you know, most people, you know,

down at the ability to just convene a meeting at the Kennedy School and say, well, how do we solve this problem? But I also don't think that goes quite far enough. They come, those people come from societies, people, your book come from societies where they don't take democracy for granted, where there have been experiences that were too recent or that are still ongoing in which authoritarianism has manifested itself in which rights have been stripped away. And I have to say,

you know, that's happening here. And I wake up every morning, much as you did Julia and Alex and day morning. And I'm like, why aren't we doing so? And I look to like, you know,

Albania and there are 4 million people in the street, Albania who are outraged at the corruption

of Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump. And I'm going Albania. I mean, you know, the president just made $2 billion last year turning the White House into his own personal told booths. When, when, when Julia called you, I mean, you know, were you, were these same sort of concerns bubbling up

“in you? Yeah, I was equally concerned. But I think I felt like one of the people who didn't”

quite know what to do about it. And as much as this became what I hope is something like a public service project. It really began as a personal project. It was clear that the tools that we were using were not going to be the same tools that work. And I will just say David, I think that there are a couple of reasons why Americans are having so much trouble identifying that what we're looking at is authoritarianism is a liberalism. You know, it is a real break for a while. I think that people

even United States senators and members of Congress leaders of Congress said, well, this is just another flavor, you know, the characters are a little bit more extreme, a little bit more colorful, but this is going to, you know, this, this is not going to be through the past on the Patel make. This is going to be just a new flavor of American history. And obviously, that's not true.

“One reason I think it's hard for Americans to really wrap their head around what's happening here”

is that we tend to not, this is a flavor of American exceptionalism. We tend to not look at what's going on in places like Albania. And if you look at pretty basic data, you know, the data from, for example, the V-DEM Institute, you can see as that what's going on in the United States is just an extension of what's going on everywhere else. You know, liberal democracy is now the least common form of government on Earth. Three out of four people in living on the planet now live under some

form of autocracy. And so it really only takes puncturing the, our American ecosystem a little bit. The other reason it to fact to really see what's going on. The other reason I think, though, is that authoritarianism just looks different. That's not exactly what we remember from the movies. It's, it's a different kind of a thing. It's the hollowing out of institutions and the hollowing out of its institutions and democratic institutions voting and courts and independent media happens

slowly and gradually. And it's a bit of a frog boiling in water situation. So a lot of what we're trying to do in our book is to point to the people like Timothy Snyder and Apple Bomb and others M.G.S. and who have pointed at the indicators and told us what to look for. And then we actually try to give folks tools for out a respond to it once they've identified that something is wrong. Hey, it's David and I hate to interrupt the podcast. But I want to tell you some exciting news.

We are now on Substack. Through Substack, we're going to be able to provide you with even more benefits, including live streamed episodes, access to new content, ways to save money,

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“terrific development. And that's what I want to get as many people as possible to subscribe to it.”

And while you're at it, go subscribe to us on YouTube. So you get great videos on YouTube. The more subscribers we've got, the more support we've got, the more good independent journalism we can do. So we rely on you. We are grateful. Join us on Substack. Thanks. So what are the smartest people I know on this subject with whom I've had countless conversations on the subject? Was one of the organizers of that event that I mentioned a

minute ago, Rosa Brooks, who rose as a professor of constitution law at Georgetown University.

Law of Centers, she was a senior official in the Department of Defense. She's even been police officer in Washington, DC. She's done a lot of very interesting things. She's thought about this lot. And we've been doing this podcast, Deep State Radio, for 12 years or so, in one form or another. And there's this kind of running thing every time Trump is president, where I'll go to Rosa and I'll say, well, he just did this. Is it a constitutional crisis yet? And, you know, she's like,

well, no, it's not one yet. But if this happens, it'll be, and she's very attuned to these things. But it goes to, obviously, point about it being sort of a frog being boiled in the water. Now, one of the things we know, they don't need your book to play this out, is that actually, if you put a frog into water and eat it up, it'll jump out. Yes. It's time for a new analogy. It's time for a new analogy. But, having said that, we are real comfortable in the United States.

And, you know, when you strip away the rights of immigrants or you strip away the rights of people who use a VA, and you don't use the VA or when you're not really that sure whether the Congress voting to certify an election is that important. You know, you said, there and you go, well, that's, that's interesting. And I'm going to change the channel and, and call door to Ash.

“And, and, you know, you just sort of go on with your life. And, and I think the question becomes,”

is there a tipping point in these countries, Julia, that have responded to this, that we might ever reach here in the United States, or is this going to be harder to do in a country that's so darn comfortable? You know, a lot of people will say that to me, right, when I talk about this book, that we like, no one's in the streets, like, look at Albania, right, there's a, there's a feeling that we're not doing anything. But when you talk to the organizers,

who really study movements and, and the scholars of movements, the, the thing that you see in the streets, right, where they topple in the loss of it, and the whole of Serbia comes out, those are what they call the victory lap, right? Like, that is actually the, the frosting on the cake. And the cake actually, the way you bake the cake is actually a lot of things that are less glamorous,

“don't really take up the TV cameras, right? A lot of those things we are doing here, right?”

The courts are pushing back on constitutional violations. Congress, not too much. So, like, maybe they could get into the game, right? But we are seeing citizens standing up. We saw, we've seen successful boycott movements, right? Avello Airlines was pressured by boycotts and legislation and community resistance into canceling its contract with ICE. Tesla has, you know, faced huge repercussions for the political actions of its CEO. And so, we are seeing that there are consequences.

You have to basically, all authoritarianism, they can't actually force everybody to comply with

their lawlessness and their corruption. They need people to basically agree to do it without, you know, a gun to their head. And so, every time an institution is pressured into pushing back, and a lot of institutions themselves are a moral. They don't necessarily want to push back, but if they're employees or they're shareholders and force them to push back, those are wins.

“And that's what you do to build up to that final day new wall where everyone's in the street”

and the dictator leaves, right? So, I think we're doing better than we give ourselves credit for, but that doesn't mean there's not still a huge amount more to be done. Yeah, well, you know, I'm old enough to, well, I don't want to say I'm old enough for every time I get together with Tommy. The first thing he says, "Well, people like you and my father's generation."

I mean, and I'm like, "I would never come back." Yeah, and I'm like, "Okay, I'm out of here."

But having said that, you know, there are generations that actually were more prone to do this in the United States, and they were better at it. And I have to say I find that a lot of the recent manifestations of dissent in the United States have been just a little bit tidy, or they've missed

“a key component, right? So you remember Occupy Wall Street, you know, and there was Occupy Wall Street,”

there were all these pictures and tents and people all over Wall Street, Occupying it. But there was no leader, there was no agenda, there was no ask, there was no what if, it was just a kind of, you know, sort of a flash mob, you know, and it was, you know, not particularly great. Now we have these big events, and, and, you know, everybody gets together in a Saturday morning, and the PTA paint signs, and they come out with zany signs, making fun of JD events, which, let's be honest,

not that difficult. And then they do an event at last three hours, and they say in 50,000 cities around the world, you know, 100 people gathered in each one. So this was the biggest event, ever, ain't that something, but it doesn't do anything. And the point is, how do you, how do you get to a point, or what are the conditions, you know, what are the, you know, what's the process, that gets you, not to dissent, easy, but to dissent that actually is effective and matters.

Let me take a step back and just say a little bit about it. Apologize, apologize for attacking my, I mean, take a look. Okay, let me take, let me begin by taking a step back and apologize to my elder.

“Oh, we're slightly, man. The Torah is very clear. You need to be respect your elders. Yeah. I'll remember,”

I remember all this. God. You know, let me say a word about our methodology in this book, because we, we jumped into the conversation. Julia and I began, as she said, having these one-off conversations with dissidents in different places, mostly people who had been exiled. But over the course of a year, we spoke to over a hundred dissidents, opposition leaders, scholars, activists, on five continents, mostly from, from authoritarian countries, from Venezuela, to Russia, to Hong Kong,

Nicaragua, and beyond. And we saw patterns about what worked and what didn't work.

One of the most important, to get to the question of what works, because I think it is the most

important question, is that people pointed to the idea of what one movement scholar named Maria Stephan calls collective stubbornness, such as people out in the streets. It's finding creative ways to throw sand in the gears of the regime, to impose costs and to impose pain for being allies of the regime. There is a statistic from that we rely on in the book, because we think it's so compelling. From two political scientists named Jonathan Pikney and Claire Trilling, who say

who evaluated over 50 years of backsliding democracies, and what they found is that the countries that began backsliding and were able to turn it around, that of all of those seven percent had no civil resistance movement. They only relied on the normative mechanisms of democracy that we were talking about before. Elections, courts, media. Only seven percent of those countries

and relied on what we would call mechanisms collective stubbornness, that strikes and boycotts,

“throwing sand in the gears, creating, inflicting pain on the regime, and civil disobedience.”

Like that, like that, for example. Of those countries, 51 percent were able to turn it around.

And so that one of the major lessons that we find is that Americans need to start to get more comfortable with putting themselves in the way. Now, the thing about people like us as a sort of professional class, people who've worked in Washington for many years, people who've worked inside institutions, and I also think members of Congress who have been operating with a set of incentives that's very different, right? The what it takes to be successful

within institutions is a very different set of incentives than what we're talking about in terms of civil disobedience, is that we have to get comfortable being disruptive and being uncomfortable. And so, into putting ourselves in the way. So that is the set of tools that it's time for Americans to begin to learn. And that's a lot of what we talk about in the book. I mean, because when you list, talking to people who are dissenting and rush or people who are

dissenting and Venezuela or people who are dissenting in China or other kinds of backsliding regimes, they fail. Sorry, they just haven't succeeded yet. So, you know, great and more power to them,

“but I think one really needs to shift the focus Julia to the ones that worked. And, you know,”

when I think about big examples of dissented that work in our lifetime, you know, I think of solidarity and Poland, which was a strike movement, right, which was really shut down the country. And I, you know, can think of some other examples where, you know, in a force was used and there were insurgencies and people actually fought back and took even a greater risks. Are there examples, you know, a polite descent or does descent have to be impolite, risky, you know, a lot of the things

that comfortable Americans don't want to do? Well, I think the defining factor is not politeness. It's nonviolence versus violence. So, the, you know, Professor Erica Tenoath at Harvard has done sort of the definitive studies of movements that succeed and trying to tease out what the defining characteristics are and the data over 100 years of movements is really clear. Nonviolent movements succeed 10 times are 10 times more effective than violent movements. So,

you can find examples of violence working here and there, but largely it's not successful. And so, when you're talking about polite protests, like it depends on what we mean by that, because non-violent protest is very successful. And the reason is that the tortarians are playing a narrative game.

They need to win over all the people who basically don't care, right? People who are not paying

that much attention. And they want to say, look, everything's fine. Everything's cool. Don't worry about all the messy stuff where we're talking about changing the way things work. It's all like don't worry about it. It's fine. And that's complicated stuff. And those people who are protesting over there, they're violent criminals. You know, they're doing bad things. And so, part of winning the war of the narrative is protest in some being successfully nonviolent and showcasing state

“violence actually persuades people. They're like, oh wait, I didn't think that was bad, right?”

And Minneapolis is the perfect example of that, right? The protesters were disciplined in being

extremely nonviolent, even when faced with violence. And, and they basically, this is a thing

that's very unfortunate, but true, which is that when the state oversteps, it's hand by killing two nonviolent protesters who were not threatening them, they lost their narrative war and they had to retreat, right? That was a win for the resistance. And, and so, it's true that the protests might look sort of polite in some ways, but that is also a form of discipline, right? And so, there's a, there's a balancing act here. Do we need more protests? Yes, but the purpose of

protest, honestly, is to showcase to the world. It's mostly a marketing technique to show people

pay attention to, but then you see other people that you know, that you like, your peers, out there, you're like, oh, huh, right? It's actually, the purpose of the protest itself

is not necessarily always to change the regime at that moment. It's to win more people to

your side, because the whole thing is a numbers game. You need more and more people to be oppositional and to refuse to cooperate with the regimes requests, right, for their demands that you, you know, give up your voting rights and give up your rights to, you know, bodily autonomy

“and give up without any complaint, all of these rights that you thought you had, right? That's what”

they wanted to do. It was quietly go along with all this. And so, the protest serves as a signaling mechanism. Like, there are more people out there mad about this than you think, and a successful protest is nonviolent and shows the fact that the state is actually the bad actor here.

It seems to me that the critical factor, and, and, and candidly, it's a critical

factor in all conflict is the difference between tactical success and strategic success. And so, you know, Minnesota is a good example. There were organized protesters. They stood up to violence. They sustained blows, and they forced to retreat as Julia says. But Mark Wayne Mullin is back on TV now saying we're going to go into more cities. And, you know, it was a momentary retreat. And I don't think it was necessarily a long-term retreat. Whereas you look at some cases,

whether it was all there, you look at Gandhi and the resistance in India, which was over a

“survey decade. You have to be strong. You have to be organized. You have to have a goal.”

You have to have real leaders, and you have to be tenacious and resilient to work towards a strategic and. And, you know, we've seen this in a lot of other places, because we've seen this also in more intensively conflict, where, you know, the big powers can come in and score tactical victories, whether it's in Vietnam or it's in Afghanistan with the Russians or Afghanistan with the US or in Iran or other parts of the world. But the people are willing to play as a long game,

tend to win. And I just, again, that's a matter of maintaining the will, the organization, the plan of the centers. Do you come away feeling optimistic that we've got it in us here?

“Yes. But part of the reason that I think we're optimistic, we have this, and we have it in us here,”

is that it's something that we saw among Soviet incidents. There's a guy who wrote a book called the name Ben Nathan's wrote a book a couple of years ago called to the success of our hopeless cause, which is the most impressive history of the Soviet dissident movement to date. And he boils down the superpower of the Soviet dissidents who were with some help from, from geopolitical

forces, ultimately successful and bringing down that empire. He says,

"In or personally, the what it takes to be able to maintain the kind of long-term vision that you're talking about is the ability to hold hope and hopelessness at the same time to be able to understand that your victories have to be measured in individual campaigns. And it's interesting that you talk about the Marqueurian Mollon thing because that's another example. Marqueurian Mollon is the head of DHS now because the last person was forced out, that was a victory. And certainly

a tactical victory, but one that we can do the regime and that forced the regime to make a change. So, you know what I will say, it is admittedly awkward and strange to write a book about how to save a democracy at a moment when it's not going that well for democracy. And most of these movements across the world are flailing or failing. One dissident, a guy named Nathan Law, who's in his early 30s and 10 years ago was in Hong Kong leading the student protests and now

is living in London and exile. Lots of the people we spoke to we spoke to from exile who said,

think about all the movements that I've wanted and I tend to think maybe we're just in the middle of

history." And look, we're not polyanaish about this, but the United States does have a long internal domestic history of not just dissent for its own sake, but principled movements of throwing sand in the gears. And I will add Julia to say a little bit more about this because she feels maybe a little bit even more hopeful. But what I feel most hopeful about David is that because authoritarianism comes in gradually now because it doesn't come in on the back of a coup.

It happens through elections and through, as we said before, the Halloween out of institutions,

“that means that we have many, many more potential offerings. And I think that Americans”

have a choice before us, about whether we take those offerings, but the civic airspace hasn't been

closed off yet even close to the way that we've seen it in Russia or even in Hungary, although it's happening rapidly and we will continue to have opportunities to do so. But Julia should end here because she has a wonderful way. And I was going to turn it, Julia, we've only got about a minute or 90 seconds, Julia, but certainly my optimism would be an order. Yeah, I mean, between the two of us, I'm what we call myself the hope truth or

and I just really, I feel like we haven't won yet, but the thing is we are being gradients are there. Like the universe after Columbia cave, no other university cave, right? Yes, Marquay Mellon is talking a big talk, but he hasn't done anything yet. Like we are seeing retreats, strategic retreats by the administration and we are seeing strategic victories.

“Do we need tons more? Yes, and that's why we wrote this book to give people those tools.”

But I think that we're actually, where you haven't made any of the big textbook mistakes, of violence and losing the narrative war, we're winning the narrative war right now. Well, that's optimistic. And I hope that I can maintain that optimism. I probably know myself will maintain it until we get off the air. But, you know, as I look forward and as we all look forward, we realize that there are active measures being undertaken by the president of the United

States and the people who stay in, to carve away democracy, to use violence in the cities, putting troops in the cities, putting ice into voting booths, to strip away fundamental rights. And to turn up the heat on doing that, whether it's via the save act or using the Supreme Court to say, "Oh, the rich people can bump in a lot more money than they used to be able to." And so they're going to get to get their way and we know that'll protect us because we'll give

whatever they want in the tax front. You know, there are a lot of things going out in this country that caused me to wonder about whether working within the system is actually going to work. And obviously, you've got to try that, you've got to exhaust all those possibilities. But to me, as somebody who's studied, you know, foreign policy for his own life and, you know,

looks at these things. The critical issue is that there is a tipping point in countries.

And the tipping point is when people no longer feel working within the system is the means of achieving their goals and they then have to start to find ways to work outside the system. But when I was at those events a couple of years ago that we talked about at the outset, I just didn't feel that there were enough people in the room who were even among the most virulent critics of the president who were ready to do that. I think we're at a different place

“right now. And that's why I think the book is so extraordinarily well-timed and it is really”

a manifesto for people who care to be prepared to understand the situation that we're in. It is extremely accessible, it is extremely well-researched, it is extremely well-written. And I endorse it wholeheartedly and I really encourage you to go out and get it. The book is called "On Courage, How to Be a Dissident in an Age of Fear" by Julia Engwen and Ami Fields Meyer. We are super glad you joined us. And who knows? We're happy that we will invite you back.

Or at least we'll invite you back, Julia. If Ami continues to bathe this bike. Yeah, I don't know about this. Yeah, I don't know. Is this elder abuse that's happening? That was unnecessary. Also, maybe we're done. No. Anyway, no, we'll invite you both back sometimes soon. But for now, thank you, Julia. Thank you, Ami. Thank you, everybody, for listening. Bye-bye.

Thank you, David.