After the 100 days: Where we go from here

How to win the race against time

Our democracy is in a race against time.

1,285 days from now there will be another presidential election. 1,360 days from now the next president will be sworn in.

The Trump faction’s shock-and-awe approach to governance is intended to consolidate control over key institutions of government and society before these deadlines. If it can do so, it can tilt the playing field — by quieting critics, controlling the narrative, and changing the rules of the election itself — to ensure its continued grip on power.

But that’s not a foregone conclusion. As Ian Bassin wrote earlier this week, the authoritarian movement is starting to falter, and an opposition coalition is beginning to show its strength:

Trump is losing in court, losing the public, losing over and over, which ultimately means he's losing the one thing critical to the success of autocrats: momentum.

This race against time looks much more winnable than it did two months ago. But it is still a race, and to win it we must collectively do two things: First, we must slow the entrenchment of authoritarian power — preserving the right and freedom to dissent, disagree, and collectively change course. And, second, we must build a robust and growing opposition and present a new alternative vision that challenges the status quo.

Both of these tasks are critical. We cannot afford to ignore one in favor of the other — or worse, to treat them as somehow in tension. We must do both.

How to slow authoritarianism’s march

Three things to keep in mind as we continue working to slow the progress of consolidation of power:

One: Keep up the pressure — autocracy is not inevitable. The authoritarian faction is losing momentum. This is good. Critical, in fact. Autocrats require momentum to bully their opposition into submission.

But it does not mean democracy will survive. It gives us the opportunity to protect it. As Zack Beauchamp writes this week in Vox: Trump is losing.

[Trump’s] failure is, in large part, a result of his team’s errors. While their approach broadly resembled foreign authoritarians’, it was a poor copy at every level — a strategically unsound campaign, with poorly thought-out tactics that were executed incompetently.

“We should thank [our] lucky stars that Trump chose to do this in the most stupid way possible,” says Lucan Way, a political scientist at the University of Toronto who studies democratic backsliding.

None of this is to say that American democracy is safe. Never before has a president been so committed to breaking the constitutional order and seizing power. We do not know whether America’s democratic institutions will hold when the pressure has been mounting for years rather than months. But the events of the first 100 days give us reason to hope.

The pro-democracy coalition has been given an incredible gift: a would-be autocrat who may not have the competence to execute on his vision of autocracy. We must seize that opportunity.

Two: Be ready for escalation — and don’t be intimidated by it. The White House knows that they are struggling, especially on the economy and in approval ratings. Their stalled progress makes the situation more dangerous. As they get desperate, expect them to resort to ever more extreme maneuvers to try to consolidate power.

The rhetoric coming from the administration is already escalating. Consider Attorney General Bondi’s comments about Judge Dugan in Wisconsin: “This is a criminal judge sitting on a criminal bench.” Or Stephen Miller’s comments this week about Illinois Governor Pritzker:

Be ready to spot these escalations when they come — and to stay the course in the face of heightening intimidation tactics.

Three: Keep a focus on elections. We know one thing: Competitive authoritarians don’t cancel elections, they just rig the game so no one else can win. That’s already happening here.

I live in North Carolina, where a losing candidate from last fall’s state Supreme Court race is still trying to flip the outcome by disqualifying thousands of military and overseas voters (*coincidentally* targeting only voters from four Democratic-leaning counties) who followed every rule in casting their ballots last fall.

As my colleague Anne Tindall told The New York Times:

The big story here is that never, ever, ever before have we seen a court, months after an election, change election rules to retroactively disqualify a class of voters and flip the results.

If you can do that, no election is safe — period.

But we also need to watch for more subtle subversion tactics that seek to twist and distort America’s political playing field, such as the budding attempts to use the FCC to censor and intimidate the free press or to use the Justice Department to go after the opposition’s ability to raise money by attacking ActBlue (but not the Republican alternative, WinRed).

In short, if you’re struggling to decide what you should prioritize, my recommendation is to focus on the things that pose the biggest threats to free and fair elections — both the legal and administrative architecture and the less-tangible public square.

How to nurture and build a pro-democracy alternative

At the same time, we must do more. If we have learned one thing from the past eight years, it is that just attempting to blunt the harmful tactics is not sufficient to slow the march of autocracy. As we seek to prevent the entrenchment of authoritarian power, we must also seek to build up a potent alternative.

For this, there is no clear playbook. Successful political strategies will be context-dependent, responsive to both the specific authoritarian threat and larger social and economic issues. It’s politics, there is no substitute.

Still, some ideas about how we — collectively — can engage in building a pro-democracy alternative:

• Big-tent coalitions tend to succeed. While there are obvious tradeoffs between movement breadth and coherence, there does seem to be a clear pattern from around the world: Cross-ideological and cross-sectoral coalitions tend to succeed in resisting or ousting autocrats, in part because they give voters a clear choice and signal what’s at stake — nothing more than democracy itself.

• Welcome people into the tent. Over the coming months and years, there is going to be a lot of economic dislocation and other harm flowing from the cruelty and chaos emerging from the White House. The pro-democracy ecosystem must help Americans understand how those harms are related to autocratic governance — and how restoring democracy can help undo them.

• Focus on reform, not just opposition. Successful movements usually have a vision of positive change that contrasts with the status quo. Over the coming period, pro-democracy leaders are going to have to do more to flesh out a compelling vision for a post-Trump democracy that not only undoes the damage, but also speaks to the discontent that sent a would-be autocrat back to the White House in the first place. (For our part, we’ll be focusing on political reforms — but we’ll need a lot more than that!)

• Encourage political entrepreneurship (and even healthy competition). Innovation requires doing things differently — politically, tactically, and rhetorically. It also requires some degree of healthy competition. Individual actors can and should seize the spotlight and, if successful, be rewarded. Even as the pro-democracy movement pushes back on the White House, don’t be afraid of some intra-movement competition and jockeying. It’ll do us all good in the long-term.

Finally, a note of humility. None of us know for sure how to win this race — how to defeat authoritarianism and to restore (and eventually improve) our democracy. That’s okay. I suspect that’s been true at every pivotal moment in our history. There was no certain playbook for the American Revolution or Reconstruction or the civil rights movement or the fight for women’s suffrage or the struggle against McCarthyism.

That didn’t stop the advocates for freedom, equality, and democracy from committing themselves to the task with everything they had. We can — we must — do the same.

What else we’re tracking:

• The New York Times reports that Microsoft has dropped one of the law firms that capitulated to the administration in favor of one that’s standing up (potentially the first of many such cases). As Ben Berwick and Rachel Goodman wrote last week, collective action isn’t just the admirable path — it’s the best way for people targeted to save their own skin.

• The House of Representatives is badly in need of modernization. Drew Penrose and Norm Ornstein write in the Washington Post on how expansion and modernization could not only improve governance, but also change the face of Washington, DC. (Hint: It involves a stunning new public space): Congress needs an expansion. A ‘high line’ could make it possible.

• Two new toolkits in our Faithful Fight series published this week: First, Providing and advocating for mutual aid by Shailly Gupta Barnes. And second, Welcoming the Stranger, protecting immigrants & refugees by Tamara Upfal. Read the whole series (and sign up to get it in your inbox) here.

• A broad coalition of unions, nonprofit groups, and local governments are suing the administration over the reorganization of federal agencies, mass firing of civil servants, and resulting disruptions to government programs and services without congressional authority. Read about the case here: AFGE vs. Trump.

• From the Immigration Hub, see the faces that have been caught up in the administration’s immigration dragnet: Disappeared in America.

How you can help:

It’s not too late to comment on proposed rules to politicize the civil service — now renamed “Schedule P/C”. As Erica Newland, Jules Torti, and Ellinor Heywood write:

Schedule Policy/Career civil servants would have none of the safeguards that actually protect federal employees from politicized firings, demotions, or abuse. The new rule would also allow existing civil servant positions to be involuntarily moved into this category, thus stripping them of their protections.

But these rule changes require public comment before they can go into effect. These comments can both provide credible information about the dangers of politicizing the civil service and build a record of opinion that would help in any future litigation against Schedule P/C.

Learn how here.