AAUP v Rubio

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On March 25, Tufts student Rümeysa Öztürk was abducted by masked ICE agents because she had co-authored a clearly legal op-ed in our campus newspaper, not directly about Israel but about how the university had responded to our student government. According to Andre Watson, the Assistant Director of the National Security Division of ICE, this op-ed could “undermine U.S. foreign policy by creating a hostile environment for Jewish students and indicating support for a designated terrorist organization.”

After an unconscionably long period of detainment in inhumane circumstances, Rümeysa was ordered released. Subsequently, the American Association of University Professors and the Middle Eastern Studies Association sued Donald Trump and members of his administration, seeking an injunction against the policy that had ensnared Rümeysa and other defendants.

Yesterday, federal District Court judge William G. Young, an appointee of Ronald Reagan, issued a 161-page decision in favor of the plaintiffs that is a blistering denunciation of the Administration. It makes quite a read.

It starts with the image that I reproduce above. (I have never seen a judicial decision with a front-page illustration.)

The judge’s main finding comes early:

Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem and the Secretary of State Marco Rubio, together with the subordinate officials and agents of each of them, deliberately and with purposeful aforethought, did so concert their actions and those of their two departments intentionally to chill the rights to freedom of speech and peacefully to assemble of the non-citizen plaintiff members of the plaintiff associations (pp. 4-5).

Judge Young does not mince words in the many pages that follow. For example, “the facts prove that the President himself approves truly scandalous and unconstitutional suppression of free speech on the part of two of his senior cabinet secretaries” (p. 96).

After considering the arguments in favor of masking ICE agents, the court “rejects this testimony as disingenuous, squalid and dishonorable” (p. 98).

The judge explains:

It was never the Secretaries’ immediate intention to deport all pro- Palestinian non-citizens[.] for that obvious First Amendment violation … could have raised a major outcry. Rather, the intent of the Secretaries was more invidious — to target a few for speaking out and then use the full rigor of the Immigration and Nationality Act (in ways it had never been used before) to have them publicly deported with the goal of tamping down pro-Palestinian student protests and terrorizing similarly situated non-citizen (and other) pro-Palestinians into silence because their views were unwelcome.

The Secretaries have succeeded, apparently well beyond their immediate intentions” (p. 95).

I have been saying that we in academia should enhance ideological pluralism because it’s the right thing to do. It makes our thinking and teaching more rigorous. However, the Trump’s Administration’s attacks on higher education have nothing to do with that goal, except that intellectual diversity is occasionally and inconsistently used as a pretext. The Administration is trying to crush pluralism by applying a set of tools popular among modern authoritarians of the left, center, and right. The Administration’s policies make it considerably more difficult to promote reasonable dialogue across ideological differences on campuses. But more importantly, the government is “terrorizing” vulnerable people into silence.

Near the end of the decision, Judge Young quotes the president who appointed him, Ronald Reagan: “Freedom is a fragile thing and it’s never more than one generation away from extinction. It is not ours by way of inheritance; it must be fought for and defended constantly by each generation, for it comes only once to a people.” The judge concludes:

As I’ve read and re-read the record in this case, listened widely, and reflected extensively, I’ve come to believe that President Trump truly understands and appreciates the full import of President Reagan’s inspiring message –- yet I fear he has drawn from it a darker, more cynical message. I fear President Trump believes the American people are so divided that today they will not stand up, fight for, and defend our most precious constitutional values so long as they are lulled into thinking their own personal interests are not affected.

Is he correct?

See also: primer on free speech and academic freedom; academic freedom for individuals and for groups; Holding two ideas at once: the attack on universities is authoritarian, and viewpoint diversity is important

consider the octopus

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Ancient Greek members of the Skeptical School taught methods or habits that helped people to live better. One method involved pondering how different the world might seem to different animals, considering that other species have diverse types of eyes, ears, and tongues; preferences and aversions; and perhaps whole senses unknown to us.

Skeptics said that we are animals and not fundamentally different from the “so-called irrational animals.” Meditating on examples of animal psychology would prevent people from believing that their own experience was true or that the pursuit of truth was possible. In turn, suspending judgment was a path to inner peace and good treatment of others.

In this spirit, consider the octopus, as described in detail by the philosopher Peter Godfrey-Smith. People who study this animal almost universally conclude that it is curious, intelligent, and interactive and that each octopus has a personality that persists over time. Yet the species is so remote from us on the evolutionary tree that it is like an alien visitor to our planet. Or we could be the aliens on theirs.

For one thing, an octopus has quite different senses from ours, such as suckers that each have 10,000 sensors and eyes of a fundamentally different design. Since an octopus lives underwater and has a soft and flexible body, its whole relationship with its environment must be profoundly different from ours.

I gradually became who I am over many years–the first period now barely a memory for me–and I was deeply connected to other people from the start. I have persisted for almost six decades, building up (and losing) memories. An octopus emerges from an egg and for lives for two years, if it’s lucky, before it dies of old age. Its combination of substantial intelligence and a brief lifespan is unusual on earth and would presumably give it a different sense of time from mine.

An octopus doesn’t have a brain, because its complex nervous system is distributed through its body, and its arms have considerable autonomy. “Octopuses [may] not even track where their own arms might be” (p. 67). Nevertheless, each octopus functions as a coherent organism with an individual personality.

I think of myself as one thing, my body parts as something a bit different (because I control them imperfectly), and the external world as something distinct from both my self and my body. This experience deeply influences my assumptions about fundamentals like self and other, thought and matter, cause-and-effect, intention, and the objective world. It is hard to believe that an octopus feels the same way, yet my experience is no more valid or true.

If you doubt that an octopus has enough mental capacity to have a model of its own world, fine—just imagine an extraterrestrial creature with a similar design as an octopus and 10 times as many neurons. It doesn’t matter whether an alien like that exists on other planets, only that it is plausible. The thought-experiment is enough to tell us that we experience just one of many possible worlds.

Sources: Sextus, Outlines of Pyrhhonism (see 1.13:61 on humans as animals); Peter Godfrey-Smith, Other Minds: The Octopus, the Sea, and the Deep Origins of Consciousness (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2017). See also: thinking both sides of the limits of human cognition; ‘every thing that lives is holy’: Blake’s radical relativism;

Tufts equity dataset

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The Tufts Survey of Equity in Health, Wealth, and Civic Engagement was a longitudinal study of a nationally representative sample of adults across the United States from 2020 to 2022. The data includes responses to our original questions plus more than 100 purchased archived variables previously collected by Ipsos. As many as possible of the same individuals were contacted across the waves. Items involve measures of health, wealth, and civic engagement, broadly defined.

The dataset is now available to anyone for free, courtesy of ICPSR. We have also built an interactive website where you can explore variables and produce infographics with very little knowledge of statistics. This is an example of a result produced by that website:

The interactive website is a few years old, but the ICPSR version of the dataset is new.

Citation: Levine, Peter, Stopka, Thomas, Allen, Jennifer, and Mistry, Jayanthi. Tufts Survey of Equity in Health, Wealth, and Civic Engagement, United States, 2020-2022. Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research [distributor], 2025-08-19. https://doi.org/10.3886/ICPSR39204.v1

national narcissism

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At the United Nations yesterday, our president told the assembled leaders, “Your countries are going to hell.” The Trump Administration extolls the unique excellence of the United States. An early executive order (14190, Jan 29, 2025) called on schools “to instill a patriotic admiration for our incredible Nation.” But the same movement also paints a picture of decline in the face of overseas rivals and traitors within.

Aleksandra Cislak and Aleksandra Cichocka (2023) provide a review of research on “national narcissism.” This phrase does not mean a secure affection for one’s nation or a commitment to enhancing it. Rather, it is a belief that the nation with which one identifies is “exceptional and deserving of privileged treatment but underappreciated by others.” It “reflects a demand for recognition, privileges and special treatment … and predicts aggression and hostility when these are not provided to the nation.”

At the individual level, indicators of national narcissism are correlated with higher support for “populist” politicians (using that adjective in a pejorative sense) and lower support for democracy (Cislak & Cichocka 2023).

In the 2016 election, national narcissism predicted voting for and approving of Donald Trump even when many other variables were controlled (Federico & Golec de Zavala 2018).

I submit that Donald Trump himself would score high on the group narcissism scale, answering questions like these positively:

  • “I wish other countries would more quickly recognize the authority of my country”
  • “My country deserves special treatment”
  • “I will never be satisfied until my country gets all it deserves”
  • “Other countries are envious of my country”

And 19 more (Golec de Zavala et al. 2025)

I do not know how many other Americans share these views. Some people certainly voted for Trump without being national narcissists. I also do not know whether national narcissism has risen in the United States. It is not a new phenomenon. However, I would guess that it has risen lately in response to anxieties about the US role in the world.

After all, the United States spent most of this century so far fighting two wars and essentially lost both. Typically, foreign policy issues do not register in national surveys as reasons for voters’ preferences. My suggestion is subtler and more difficult to document. Two long and costly military disasters discredited elites, worsened polarization as communities bore disparate burdens, and provoked deep self-doubt and resentment in a country that had seen itself as enormously powerful. At any rate, it is difficult to imagine that twin defeats at this scale would not affect the mood of an electorate; and one outcome could be national narcissism.

Sources: Cislak, A., & Cichocka, A. (2023). National narcissism in politics and public understanding of science. Nature Reviews Psychology, 2(12), 740-750; Christopher M Federico, Agnieszka Golec de Zavala, Collective Narcissism and the 2016 US Presidential Vote, Public Opinion Quarterly, Volume 82, Issue 1, Spring 2018, Pages 110–121; de Zavala, Agnieszka Golec, et al. “Collective Narcissism and its Social Consequences.” Journal of personality and social psychology 97.6 (2009): 1074-96. ProQuest. Web. 24 Sept. 2025.

See also: anxieties about American exceptionalism; American exceptionalism, revisited

tips for democracy activists in 2025

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This is a 22-minute video of me offering suggestions and diagnostic questions for activists in nonviolent, pro-democracy movements in the USA right now, and for those want to get involved.

I have been offering these ideas in interactive webinars and in-person meetings. In those settings, I don’t lecture; we discuss. For this publicly accessible video, I have extracted some of my own thoughts and questions.

truth, justice, and the purposes of a university

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On the website of the Heterodox Academy, Jonathan Haidt writes, “it is clear that no university can have Truth and Social Justice as dual teloses [goals]. Each university must pick one.”

He undermines his own case in the previous paragraph by distinguishing between “finding and eradicating disparate treatment” and “finding and eradicating disparate outcomes.” The former is “always a good thing to do, and … never conflicts with truth,” whereas the latter “causes all of the problems, all of the conflicts with truth.”

This is a view of social justice. It is perfectly respectable. It sounds like classical liberalism. It also echoes Karl Marx’s Critique of the Gotha Program. (Marx demands equal treatment–in the form of shared ownership of industry–as opposed to equal outcomes.) However, this view conflicts with Catholic social justice doctrines, the classical republican idea that citizenship requires rough equality, and many people’s sense that some levels of suffering are simply unacceptable. In short, it is a substantive and contested political view that Haidt is sure is always right.

We could delete this passage and try to envision a university devoted to truth, not to any form of (social) justice–Haidt’s or otherwise. I would ask whether such an institution can employ thousands of workers, confer valuable degrees and professional licenses, own extensive real estate, conduct research with military and medical applications, field quasi-professional sports teams, and invest in the stock market.

One answer, to be taken seriously, is: no. Socrates believed that he had to be completely independent–financially and otherwise–to be a gadfly. Unlike his Sophist rivals, he wouldn’t charge a drachma for teaching. There is a long tradition of creating spiritual or intellectual communities (monasteries, sanghas, communes, wikis) that have minimal social obligations so that they can focus on truth. But those are not like modern American universities.

Another answer is yes: the university can operate as a billion-dollar enterprise without views of social justice. I don’t see how that is possible. If you employ people, they must be employees or contractors, unionized or not, with or without various benefits and mandates. If you build a new building, it must either raise or lower rents in the neighborhood and consume fossil fuels or renewables. You can start a business school or an education school (or both, or neither). There are no neutral answers. You should welcome alternative opinions and arguments by students and faculty, but your actions reflect positions.

The University of Chicago’s famous Kalven Report mischaracterized that university. It said, “The mission of the university is the discovery, improvement, and dissemination of knowledge … It is … a community of scholars…. It is not a club, it is not a trade association, it is not a lobby.”

But the University of Chicago was a very powerful lobby, especially in its own city. In 1955, a report produced by UC employees lamented “the accelerated immigration of lower-income families, including lower-income Negro families settling in concentrated groups.” The university advocated “demolishing and rebuilding entire blocks of Hyde Park,” which then happened.

Like other universities, UC was definitely a club, and membership conferred substantial benefits. During the Vietnam War, Dow Chemical, the manufacturer of Napalm, recruited on the UC campus because students with Chicago degrees would be well-qualified executives. Dow’s recruitment became a specific target of student protest.

The first human-made self-sustaining nuclear chain reaction in history had taken place under the Hyde Park campus as part of the development of the atom bomb. In that sense, this “community of scholars” had helped to destroy two Japanese cities.

UC also ran and still runs a hospital, which has made controversial decisions, such as shutting down its trauma center in 1988 and starting a new one in 2015. UC even has its own police department, which can arrest and charge anyone in its jurisdiction.

Universities do not have one telos. They are “multiversities,” in Clark Kerr’s 1963 phrase. The Kalven Report makes me think of a seminar room in a liberal arts department. That is where the pursuit of truth is most prominent, and we must be vigilant against challenges to freedom there. But the people mowing the lawn outside are employees or contractors, the building had a wealthy donor whose gift was invested in stocks, the lab across the street may be creating AI tools that could wipe out jobs, and the students in the seminar may use their degrees to enter monopoly professions like law and medicine.

It is better to do all those things justly rather than unjustly. Everyone in the community must be free and welcome to contest what justice demands, but the corporate body will act one way or another. A good university strives for both truth (a topic of debate) and justice (a criterion for assessing action).

See also: primer on free speech and academic freedom; academic freedom for individuals and for groups; Holding two ideas at once: the attack on universities is authoritarian, and viewpoint diversity is important

the politics of nostalgia just isn’t what it used to be

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I believe Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. coined the phrase “politics of nostalgia” in a 1955 article in which he observed, “Today, we are told, the bright young men are conservatives; the thoughtful professors are conservatives; even a few liberals, in their own cycle of despair, are beginning to avow themselves conservatives.”

This article is light but disdainful. Schlesinger dismisses the intellectual conservatives of his day as “irrelevant” and a “hothouse growth.” They feel nostalgic, and they officially endorse a principled form of conservatism that respects ancestors and inherited ways. But the USA “is a dynamic and expanding economy” whose elites are not landed aristocrats but plutocrats. So the real power on the right is not conservatism but business, which seeks lower taxes and less regulation and welcomes rapid change.

Schlesinger wrote a long time ago, and nostalgia seems much more widespread today, when relatively few people celebrate a dynamic economy or its attendant technological and social advances. Even our plutocrats (Silicon Valley barons) often sound scared of the future or bitter about present obstacles to their genius.

Not only is MAGA nostalgic, but so are never-Trump conservatives and, I think, many across the broad spectrum of the left. To be sure, progressives insist that progress occurred in living memory, especially on social issues. Nevertheless, they (or perhaps I should include myself and say “we”) tend to be deeply nostalgic for a remembered time when society seemed to be moving in the right direction and when crises–from climate change to polarization–had not reached their current levels.

Analytically, it might be worth distinguishing these political attitudes:

  • Despair: the attitude that things cannot or will not improve.
  • Fear, in the sense of Judith Shklar’s “Liberalism of Fear” (1989). Shklar’s starting point: “somewhere someone is being tortured right now.” Her philosophy is “a response to these undeniable actualities, and it therefore concentrate[d] on damage control.” She is “entirely nonutopian,” motivated by memories of disaster, not by hope for a better state. Her main recommendation is to limit state power.
  • Caution based on pessimism. Montaigne (1588) writes, “Our morals are extremely corrupt and have an amazing tilt toward getting worse; among our laws and customs, several are barbaric and monstrous: however, because of the difficulty of putting ourselves in a better state and the danger of further decline, if I could plant a peg in our wheel and stop it at this point, I would do so willingly.”
  • Nostalgia: A bittersweet appreciation for a past state, combined with regret for its passing. Nostalgia is compatible with hope, and it need not imply pessimism. However, the following common features of nostalgia can be obstacles to progress or can simply prevent clear thinking:
  1. Nostalgia often assumes that a harmonious and integrated condition continued over a whole span of the past. “This is how things were back in the day … This is how my life was back then …” In contrast, we often perceive our present selves and our current society as inconsistent or even contradictory and as constantly changing (Hart 1973, Brewer 2023). This contrast biases us against the present.
  2. Envy easily attaches to nostalgia. We wish that we could be like the people back in the time for which we feel nostalgic. We may envy individuals or groups who benefited from causing those good times to end for us. However, as Walter Benjamin notes, we never seem to envy the people of the future. Someone living in 1925 might have anticipated the amount of technological and economic progress that has occurred since then, yet they didn’t envy us. Likewise, we don’t envy our successors, even if we are optimistic. Envy is problematic because it is zero-sum and promotes conflict.
  3. Nostalgia can erase the salutary kind of fear that Shklar recommends. Near the beginning of The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Kundera’s narrator says that everything is bathed in nostalgia in the face of dissolution, even the guillotine. People feel nostalgic for moments of crisis and action, such as the French Revolution: “Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive” (Wordsworth). They forget the violence, confusion, failure, and vices of the moment. Of course, good things also happened, but nostalgia distorts our estimation and causes us to discount present dangers.
  4. Nostalgia suggests that the best choices were obvious and makes us angry at those who chose badly, or self-critical if we think that we were unwise. We think: Why didn’t they (or we) prevent harmful change? But we always act under conditions of deep uncertainty and confusion, and the best choices are rarely obvious until it is too late.
  5. Nostalgia tends to discourage action. It is not a sharp analysis of trends that can recommend concrete reforms to restore broken institutions or to reverse declines. Nostalgia is a hazy, elegiac, twilight feeling; an attitude for spectators rather than actors.

To summarize: Nostalgia can cause symptoms of bias, envy, complacency, anger and/or disdain, and passivity. As one who exhibits all of its symptoms, I recommend trying to avoid it.

See also: nostalgia in the face of political crisis; phenomenology of nostalgia; nostalgia for now.

Sources: Judith N. Shklar, “The Liberalism of Fear,” in Nancy L. Rosenblum, ed. Liberalism and the moral life. Harvard University Press, 1989, pp. 27, 26; Montaigne 2.17 (“Of Presumption”), my trans.; Marshawn Brewer, “Sketch for a Phenomenology of Nostalgia,” Human Studies 46.3 (2023): 547-563; J.G. Hart “Toward a phenomenology of nostalgia,” Man and World 6 (1973), 406-7; Walter Benjamin, Über den Begriff der Geschichte (1940), II.

the nonviolent response

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It’s not yet clear whether the US has entered an authoritarian period or a right-wing period (or both), because the political struggle is still underway and by no means resolved.

But it is pretty clear that we have entered a period of instability or unrest, which is quite common in global perspective but especially dangerous in a superpower. As I wrote on this blog in 2023, “We will know that we are in that situation if the daily news often includes reports of violent clashes, dubious arrests and prosecutions, threats, firings or resignations connected to politics, and occasional assassinations and politically-motivated mass murders.”

All those boxes are checked in 2025.

I also wrote: “I believe we need broad-based nonviolent social movements to get us through any unrest and ideally to bring us to a better place. Such movements will generate protest actions, some of which will involve reported violence–if only as a result of hostile responses by other groups or police. Thus we should be striving for a high ratio of nonviolence to violence.”

I wrote that it was “time to plan, educate, organize, and train” for nonviolent mobilization in the context of unrest and state violence. I tried to do some of that work– for example, at the 2024 Frontiers of Democracy conference. I do not think I succeeded or was part of larger efforts that were successful. I wish we had prepared better.

It’s not too late. As many people as possible must participate in broad-based, visible, nonviolent political resistance. Please feel welcome to join me at a Crossroads and Connections Webinar on Thursday September 18, 2025 from 6:30 – 8:00 PM Eastern to discuss tactics and strategies. I am happy to do other events like that if I can be helpful.

The graphs show incidence of political violence in the USA recently, per The ACLED Explorer. See also: nonviolence in a time of political unrest; a checklist for democracy activists;  the current state of resistance, and what to do about it; tools people need to preserve and strengthen democracy; learning from the Great Salt March: on civil disobedience and breaking through to mass opinion; countering selective harassment in the Trump Administration; building power for resisting authoritarianism etc.

who is most concerned about crime as a political issue?

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Crime’s power as a political issue is troubling.

On one hand, the US experiences far too much crime. Our homicide rate is almost five times that of Britain, almost three times that of Canada, and 17 times that of Japan.

On the other hand, crime rates have tended to fall in the USA since 1992, and today many people assess crime as much more pervasive than it is. Many voters seem to have the idea that urban communities were safe earlier in their own lifetimes but are now very dangerous, even though crime rates were distinctly higher in the late 20th century, and most urbanites are doing fine today. This belief motivates reactionary and authoritarian policies.

An obvious explanation for the mismatch between public opinion and trends is … the media. If it bleeds, it leads. Some major news sources evidently want to fuel hostility to migrants, people of color, and cities by relentlessly presenting crime. And politicians, such as the current president, amplify the media’s attention to crime.

In 2016, the Cooperative Election Study (now housed at Tisch College!) fielded an extensive battery of questions about crime. As one might expect, whether respondents viewed crime as a very important issue was related to which kinds of news they watched. The percentage who rated crime very high was 52% among local news viewers, 49% among national TV news viewers, 49% among readers of print news (which usually means a local newspaper), 34% among readers of an online news source, and 45% among those who followed no news at all. These differences are not very large but would probably expand if we compared specific outlets, such as Fox News versus the online New York Times.

However, it is always worth trying to put media effects in context. No one has to watch Fox News or the local TV news; that is a choice. Media effects probably connect to other factors, such as demographics and values, in a complex system that has no single “root” cause.

I am not an expert on this topic, but I wanted to get a rough handle on it, so I ran a regression using the 2016 CES data. This method purports to predict how highly people will rate crime as an issue based on a set of variables taken together.

For example, I included both whether a person was a victim of crime in the last four years and their education level. We know that people with less education are more likely to be victimized, but a regression disaggregates such relationships so that you can see how much education matters regardless of whether people are victimized by crime, and vice-versa.

The results are shown above and can be explored a bit more here. The units are standardized Betas, a measure of how much each factor matters compared to the others. All the results are statistically significant at p <.05. I had included two variables in the model that I omitted from the graph because they were not significant (social media use and approval of the local police department).

Most of the patterns are intuitive. People are more likely to view crime as a major issue if they are white, Republican, male, less educated, and willing to admit that they fear people of other races. Watching the TV news is related to greater concern about crime, even when considering the other factors separately. And reading a newspaper is related to less concern. Younger people, parents, and richer people are more concerned.

The whole model is not very predictive, explaining only 16% of the variance. That is interesting in itself, suggesting that these factors–including TV viewership, race, and partisanship–do not really explain what is going on. Perhaps more depends on which specific channels and social media accounts people watch–but that would have to be shown.

(The labels on the graph suggest that these are binary variables, e.g., either watching TV or not watching it at all. But the questions were multiple-choice scales, so the labels are really my shorthand.)

See also: what voters are hearing about in the 2024 election; what must we believe?; civic responses to crime; and more data on police interactions by race

a checklist for democracy activists

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Many Americans are working to defend democracy, but we need even more. People with diverse agendas and various diagnoses of our current problems must take action right now. There are several legitimate theories of our crisis. We need people to address whatever aspects resonate most with them, coming from their diverse backgrounds and viewpoints.

I think these (below) are our most important tasks. And I believe that if many people do them, our disagreements about diagnoses and strategies will not matter very much, because a stronger civil society will preserve democracy:

One-to-one interviews: Fanning out in a community and asking people what they care about, looking for individuals who have various kinds of leadership potential and networks, and bringing them together in meetings. Use a guide like this one.
Local news: Collecting information that would otherwise go unreported because of the collapse of local journalism, and sharing it. Local news is highly relevant to national events, because everything from budget cuts to ICE raids plays out in locations.
Caring for affected people: Raising money, serving food, driving people where they need to go, taking care of their children and pets, helping them find work.
Advocacy in local institutions: We need concerned citizens to meet with their school superintendent to ask how undocumented children are being protected, their local college president to ask about free speech, and their local TV station to ask about biased news coverage. Some of this advocacy can be friendly and low-key. Sometimes, local leaders just need our quiet support. But some issues may have to escalate to public conflict.
Registering and turning out voters: It is fine to do this in a partisan way: party activism is an important aspect of democracy. It is also possible to register and motivate voters in a genuinely nonpartisan way to expand the electorate and protect everyone’s right to vote as they wish.
Recruiting and supporting candidates: This is important at all levels, from school boards to 2028 presidential candidates.
Nonviolent resistance: Civil disobedience is a spectrum, from easy and safe actions to very courageous ones. The method of banging on pots in big cities has spread globally in the last decade and has now reached Washington, DC. It is an example of a relatively safe action. Standing in the way of armed government agents is much more dangerous. Effective nonviolent movements offer and celebrate a wide range of actions.

I did not list protests on this table. They can be valuable, but I want to suggest that they are more means than ends. For example, a march can be a powerful way of publicizing that there is a resistance and collecting the contact-information of people who might do the other tasks. I often think that the most important people at a rally are not the speakers on the podium but the folks at the back of the crowd with clipboards.

These are not tasks for individuals to do alone. None of us can accomplish much by ourselves; we can’t even think wisely unless we discuss what to do with others. Therefore, the tasks listed above require organizations, and there is an equally important agenda for building and sustaining groups:

Recruitment: Individuals must be invited into organizations and made to feel welcome, notwithstanding their previous experience and views, and encouraged to commit to the group. (This is where protests belong on the checklist.)
Logistics: A group can’t get anything done unless someone finds a space, buys the pizzas, arranges childcare, and does all the other scutwork. Some of this requires skill and experience; all of it requires effort. By the way, the people who contribute in this way must be recognized and thanked.
Decision-making: Groups must make decisions efficiently, yet without ignoring dissenters who have genuine disagreements. Effective groups treat meeting time as a scarce resource and use it economically. They know what they are doing at any given moment during a meeting. (Are we venting? Brainstorming? Advising someone? Choosing between two courses of action?) I recommend distinguishing between contested values and merely practical questions and reserving discussion time for the value-conflicts that need resolution. I would delegate practical issues to volunteers to decide. It is also crucial to record all decisions so that it’s clear what the group has committed to do.
Leadership-development: Groups need leaders. Even the most non-hierarchical groups actually have leaders, although those people may not have titles or official powers. Leaders should be recognized and thanked. They should have opportunities to grow. They should also be held accountable and, if necessary, removed.
Raising and holding money: The typical anti-Trump resistance group raises money, but not for itself. Members pass the hat (metaphorically), and their funds go to political candidates or name-brand national nonprofits. This is unsustainable. In the first month of the first Trump Administration, 350,000 people donated to the ACLU, disproportionately funding one organization that had one strategy. Then the money tapered off. Groups need their own bank accounts and budgets, reserving some funds for their own continuous fundraising.
Hiring: We need more people whose jobs involve organizing for democracy, and we need pathways for those who want to do this work. Organizers can be young, part-time, and (frankly) underpaid, but they need salaries.
Scaling up: Once there are three resistance groups in a given county, there should be an umbrella group for the county. This should not just be forum where like-minded people share news; it should make decisions. That implies a leadership structure at the county level–and then upward from there.
Coalition work: There should be many flavors of organizations, and they should coordinate. I completely respect the big emerging networks, such as Indivisible and #50501, but they need company, and not everyone will want to join any given network. Groups have various identities and agendas. To work in coalition is not only to express mutual support or to agree on general principles. (In fact, it’s fine if different groups disagree on principles.) A coalition can coordinate concrete actions at key moments. That requires empowering selected representatives from the various member organizations to meet and make decisions.

See also: “democracy’s crisis: a system map (a longer and revised version of which is forthcoming in Studies in Law, Politics, and Society); the current state of resistance, and what to do about it; tools people need to preserve and strengthen democracy; and a flowchart for collective decision-making in democratic small groups.