Be Not Afraid: A Manifesto for the Late-Stage Trump Era

We’ve watched our elite institutions cave under the slightest pressure. No one is coming to save us. We are the ones we’ve been waiting for.

Photo Illustration by Lizzy Spira

Editor’s Note: This essay is excerpted from Sarah Longwell’s new book, New York Times bestseller “How to Eat an Elephant: One Voter at a Time.” Sarah is an advisory board member for Home of the Brave, and in her book she lays out a game plan for how the pro-democracy coalition can unite to beat back the authoritarian threat—for good.

As I sit here today, lots of people who care about democracy and the fate of our republic are feeling both cynical and optimistic. Because Donald Trump is currently in a free fall. Public opinion is turning against him and his dark, dystopian vision for the presidency.

But also, the first two years of Trump 2.0 have been wildly destructive. Not beyond the imaginations of those of us who foresaw him as the existential threat he was from the jump, but beyond the imaginations of everyone who wasn’t afflicted with our particular strain of Trump Derangement Syndrome. They said we were overreacting when we warned how much havoc Trump and his sycophants could wreak.

But we were, unfortunately, right. And as far as I’m concerned, we have spent the last decade under-reacting to Trump and the manifest ways he is reshaping America.

Many of our civic guardrails—law firms, media companies, universities, tech companies, big businesses—have acquiesced to Trump’s assault on the country. We are now a nation led by profiteers and cowards. The only way to fight back is for average Americans to turn against this perversion of American democracy with such force that Trump’s entire project is viewed as a catastrophic failure.

This is not a moment for regular order. It has to be bigger than that. Trump needs to be seen for exactly what he is: a corrupt, failed president who turned America’s economy into a smoldering dumpster fire and started pointless wars across the globe while dismantling the pillars of our democratic order, all to satisfy his own fragile ego. We cannot waste our time and energy with short-term thinking. We need to adjust the pro-democracy coalition’s strategy for the long game.

Who is this pro-democracy coalition? Like any coalition big and broad enough to do great things, it is composed of somewhat uncomfortable allies, bound together by the necessity of purpose. The broad-but-imperfect swathe of Americans who count themselves as friends of liberal democracy are the only available counterweight to the illiberal forces in our country that are thrusting us further down this dark road to authoritarianism.

Many of the most effective coalitions in history—the Grand Alliance of World War II, the antislavery coalition, the American Revolutionary coalition—were birthed out of extremely uncomfortable bedfellows having the discipline to prioritize one larger shared goal over their bespoke conflicts. These coalitions are made possible by the existential nature of the threat they face.

There’s a great deal that’s tricky about building such coalitions, but perhaps the most difficult is balancing necessary moral boundaries and firmly held principles with sufficient latitude for conflicting ideas and necessary compromises. My personal red line is those who use violence or violent rhetoric. But your mileage may vary.

I spend a lot of time wrestling with this. Because there are a number of friction points—immigration, social issues, race, Israel and Palestine—where key parts of the pro-democracy coalition are reluctant to compromise firmly held principles in order to be more palatable to the widest possible swathe of Americans.

But what if that’s the wrong way to look at the challenge in front of us? What if instead of an interminable, self-defeating intra-coalition struggle session, we change the conversation to what we’re going to build next? Forget about fighting over the best way to build the coalition and instead focus on what the coalition can come together to build.

Because Trump is in the process of burning it all down—our institutions, our social cohesion, the norms and values that used to sustain us as a country. So we—that is, anyone who loves America and wants to save it before it’s too late—have to provide a vision of what we’re going to build in its place.

I spend a lot of time traveling the country, hearing from ordinary Americans who would count themselves as part of the pro-democracy coalition. I’m not talking about professional political practitioners or other DC types here; I mean regular people who desperately want to do something—anything—to combat the feeling of helplessness that accompanies each fresh headline about authoritarian overreach coming out of this administration.

Often, when I speak to these people, I get a version of the same few questions over and over: What the hell is happening? And what can I do to save the country? Here is my best big-picture advice: Be not afraid.

Trump and his MAGA acolytes are bullies working to intimidate you into silence. They were successful—shockingly, disgracefully successful—at menacing American institutions into submission. Trump’s second term launched with an unprecedented assault on universities, law firms, massive legacy media companies, business leaders, tech titans, and philanthropy. Some fought back, but many caved. And a great many more went quiet. It’s the most pathetic thing I’ve ever seen.

And that, my friend, is where you come in. You can become part of a stalwart bloc of the country that refuses to allow itself to be cowed the way our oligarchs have. You can, and must, speak out. Wherever and whenever you are able.

I went to Minneapolis during ICE’s occupation of that city, after agents had killed Renee Good and Alex Pretti. There I found sixty-year-old ladies standing out in the cold, with long johns and hand warmers, telling me about secret Signal chat networks they had set up to provide mutual aid to their neighbors. They told me about the underground doula network that they set up to help pregnant immigrants who were too scared to leave their homes.

Here at Home of the Brave, we’ve documented the stories of people like Daniel Hernandez, an immigrant who is protecting his employees from ICE’s predations; veterans who are standing in the breach to block Trump’s vainglorious arch; artists and musicians who are refusing to take this administration’s censorship of the arts lying down; peaceful protestors who are facing down masked agents in their communities; and survivors of ICE detention who refuse to stop speaking out about the injustices committed against them.

The point is, everyone can do something. Whatever your version of concrete, peaceful action is, go out there and do it honestly and fearlessly. Because as small and insignificant as you may feel in this moment, I promise that those actions add up and make a real difference for people who you might never even meet. That’s the honest work of a true pro-democracy coalition worthy of its name, and it’s on all of us to do our part.

The words that come to me again and again in this moment are all of the quotations about the destructive force of silence:

From Edmund Burke: “When bad men combine, the good must associate; else they will fall, one by one, an unpitied sacrifice in a contemptible struggle.”

From Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.: “In the end, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends.”

From Albert Einstein: “The world will not be destroyed by those who do evil, but by those who watch them without doing anything.”

From Elie Wiesel: “The opposite of love is not hate, it’s indifference.”

This is the answer to the oft-asked question of, “What can I do?” Don’t be silent. Don’t be indifferent. When you speak up, your courage will be contagious. It will build a permission structure for someone else who is nervous and help them speak out, too. It will help someone who has opted out of our shared civic life, because it’s all too dark, to come back in and join the fight.

Every one of us has the power to set an example. It’s only a question of whether—and how—we exercise that power.

Sarah Longwell is an advisory board member of Home of the Brave and author of the New York Times bestseller “How to Eat an Elephant: One Voter at a Time.”