WATCH: How to protect and renew our democracy

Ami Fields- Meyer is a senior fellow at Harvard’s Kennedy School. What that means is that he held important jobs in government and likely will again when administrations change. His work there is like our work here- it’s all about democracy- how to protect and renew it. He recently co-authored with Julia Angwin, a fabulous book called On Courage, How to be a Dissident in an Age of Fear.

The book showcases examples of individuals who have faced repression and decided not to back down. Beginning with the individual facing and making a moral choice, to those threatened with harm because of their choices, to the ways community- and safety- get built by those trying to bring change, On Courage offers a practical guide for everyone engaged in the fight to realize those self-evident truths that have inspired our nation from its inception. During our conversation Ami told a few of these amazing stories.

Share

Many of us focus on the current threat posed by the Trump regime. Of course, we are only here because we allowed the guard rails to erode over decades. As Ami explains, when our institutions are compromised, we need other develop other tools.

The lifeblood of civil resistance movements is something that [the scholar Maria Stephan] calls collective stubbornness. And one of the reasons that we wrote this book is that authoritarianism just looks different than it used to. It doesn’t come into town on the back of a coup anymore. It happens through elections, the slow hollowing out of democratic institutions. When democratic institutions are working less well, when the tools that we’ve generally used for these kinds of things, like elections, we still have elections, but they’re skewed, or they’re less free and less fair. We still have courts, but they’re stacked. We still have a media, but it begins to be more tilted.

You have to look to other tools. It’s not so that we shouldn’t keep using those. No, we have to improve them. We have to improve them. We have to shore them up. And we have to insist on them, actually, and keep winning in them. But we also need this other set of skills. And it’s the thing that you’re talking about, which is collective stubbornness, which is gumming up the works. Civil resistance, strike, boycott. These are things that the professional class that I come from, for example, is not used to. We are not schooled in these tactics. There’s a respectability. Let’s just do things the right way. And the truth is that once you hit [a moment like this, as] we learn this from communities of color, from civil rights groups, from women [a collective stubbornness turns out to be effective.]

I revere our democracy because when it works, it works for the people. But the conversation left me quite certain that when it does not work, and instead benefits only the powerful, it’s hard to ask folks to get excited about saving it.

Maybe right now a better tactic is to fight for the things democracy is supposed to deliver- a more just society, an economy where people who work hard have real opportunities, a culture where all of us are respected.

After you listen, let me know what you think.

Edwin hosts "It's The Democracy Stupid" on Lincoln Square & a weekly radio show on WCPT820AM/ Heartland Signal. He is the former CEO of the Chicago Sun-Times, a former Chicago Alderman, HUD Regional Administrator and teacher in Chicago's public schools.