What does it take to stand up for what you believe in when your personal safety, security and even liberty are at stake? Ami Fields-Meyer, a political strategist and former senior policy advisor in the Biden-Harris White House, who spent the last two years crisscrossing the globe interviewing more than a hundred dissidents, organizers, and everyday people who chose to speak out despite real risk. That reporting became his new book, co-written with journalist Julia Angwin, “On Courage: How to Be a Dissident in an Age of Fear,” which distills those stories into practical lessons anyone can use. From authoritarian drift to cancel culture to corporate retaliation, Fields-Meyer joins Terms of Engagement hosts Archon Fung and Stephen Richer to discuss the psychology, mechanics and practicalities of speaking out in tumultuous times.
About our Guest
Ami Fields-Meyer is a New York Times bestselling author, political strategist, and former White House senior policy advisor. His first book, “On Courage: How to Be a Dissident in an Age of Fear,” co-authored with Julia Angwin, is a deeply reported manual about how anyone can defy an authoritarian – based on original interviews with more than 100 dissidents, activists, and theorists across the world. From 2021 to 2024, Fields-Meyer served as a senior policy advisor in the White House, where he led U.S. policy on civil rights, consumer protection, and technology. He has advised political candidates, leaders of top civil rights groups and major philanthropic foundations, and high-profile public officials. A former senior fellow at Harvard Kennedy School’s Allen Lab for Democracy Renovation, his writing on democracy and public policy has appeared in The New York Times, The New Yorker, The Atlantic, and Foreign Policy. He is a term member of the Council on Foreign Relations.
Voiceover:
You're listening to Terms of Engagement, a weekly show from the Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation at Harvard Kennedy School, featuring Ash Center director Archon Fung and senior practice fellow in American democracy, Stephen Richer. Now let's get to the show.
Archon Fung:
Hey, welcome to Terms of Engagement everyone. I'm Archon Fung, a professor at the Harvard Kennedy School and faculty director of the Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation.
Stephen Richer:
And I'm Stephen Richer. I'm the former elected Maricopa County recorder, and I am now a fellow at the Ash Center. Archon, where are you coming from today? Is that your-
Archon Fung:
I'm coming from home. I'm dodging the office for this couple of weeks. I'm supposed to be on vacation this couple of weeks, and I was in North Carolina with the family yesterday, and I'm here for a couple of days to pack and regroup, and then we're going to New Hampshire for about three or four more days. Then I will be joining back in the office with you and everyone else.
Stephen Richer:
Well, folks, if you were wondering about the level of Archon's commitment, here he is during his vacation, reading books and appearing on Terms of Engagement nonetheless. So thank you for that.
Archon Fung:
It is an intellectual vacation for me.
Stephen Richer:
Well, we got to delve into an intellectual enterprise this week with the book that we'll be introducing here in a second. But before we get to that, a reminder that Archon and I are speaking on behalf of ourselves and only on behalf of ourselves, not the Harvard Kennedy School, not the Ash Center and not Harvard University. And as always, we really welcome your input. So please feel free to either email us about the show, about future shows, or feel free to enter comments into the comment box. We monitor those during the show and we try to integrate them into the conversation. And as always, for those of you who are not able to join us live, we do record the show and we make it available on YouTube and all podcasting platforms. So what's going on? And turning to the topic at hand, Archon.
Archon Fung:
All right. So the topic at hand is courage and dissonance. And for most of the show's episodes, we talk a lot about democracy as a system and big institutions, courts, elections, election agencies, political parties. And today we are going to focus a little bit more on democracy as something that individuals do, or maybe they don't do. Democracy, success, failure, and survival may depend ultimately on people as much as the institutions and organizations and agencies that we all try to build and work in.
Over the last few years in the US and abroad, we've seen some amazing examples of courage in the face of attacks on democracy. Political scientists look at these indicators of democracy. And over the last five, 10 years, democracy around the world in many, many societies has taken a big step backward according to some of these indicators. Some of the most moving examples to me from the United States come from conservative institutionalists, not least you, Stephen, but then also Vice President Mike Pence, the team led by Brad Raffensperger, who was Secretary of State of Georgia in the wake of the 2020 election.
And Steve and I both are privileged to know members of Team Georgia and the Secretary of State's office there. All of them insisting against political interest, and at great professional and personal cost, that President Trump lost to Joe Biden in that particular case. And today we'll talk about many, many others. Our guest and co-author here has interviewed more than a hundred people who've dissented under real pressure all over the world. Hungary, Venezuela, Russia, Hong Kong, Israel, here in the United States. And who is that guest, Stephen?
Stephen Richer:
Yeah, it's great that you mention people, because the word institutions actually sort of triggers a negative reaction from me now just because I feel like it's so overused. Why can't things be an organization or a company? Everything's an institution these days. And I slightly jest because I do believe that institutions are hugely important, and I think that we're seeing a real decline in their strength. But also important are exactly, as you said, people.
And to discuss some of those people, we have a person. We have a person who has written a book. So welcome Ami Fields-Meyer. Ami is first and foremost the co-author of the recent book, On Courage: How to Be a Dissident in an Age of Fear, recently published by Mariner Publications. Archon and I both know Ami because he is a former fellow of the Allen Lab for Democracy Renovation here at the Harvard Kennedy School and in the same building as we are.
Prior to joining the Kennedy School, Ami was a senior policy advisor to Vice President Kamala Harris on science and technology. In addition to this book, he has written for The New Yorker, The New York Times, and The Atlantic, among other places. He is a graduate of Emory University. And of course, most importantly, he is somebody I call a friend and he is somebody that I can text, but I promise that is not the qualification for coming on the show. It just happens to be wonderful when some of my friends do some really cool stuff, like publish, again, this new book called On Courage.
Ami Fields-Meyer:
By the way, this was definitely... Thank you, Stephen, and thank you, Archon. I'm really happy to be with you. I will say this is... We've been doing book events and media appearances all summer, and this is the first time I've been introduced as a person. So I appreciate that. It's true. It's true.
Stephen Richer:
Granted.
Ami Fields-Meyer:
It's true.
Stephen Richer:
I think we talk so much about the constitution. We talk so much about organizations and whether they stand up and whether they fold. We talk so much about having the right election infrastructure in place and whether or not elections are run at the federal level or the state level and what that means. But at the end of the day, it takes people doing either the right thing or doing a courageous thing. Oftentimes those are the same thing, in order to be able to push back against some of the ugliest tyrants in human history or to just be able to hold the line in terms of keeping a rule of law system a democratic form of government. And so yeah, your book was a healthy reminder that those people like yourself exist.
Ami Fields-Meyer:
Thank you. Well, I appreciate being here and appreciate all of your work.
Stephen Richer:
So tell us why'd you decide to write this book? Obviously you have a co-author, Julia Angwin, who is a former journalist for the Wall Street Journal, a tech policy journalist. Why did you and she decide to write this book?
Ami Fields-Meyer:
Well, we wrote the book because in 2024, after the election, we had a president who had been explicitly running a campaign with promises to punish political enemies, to round people up, to change the flavor of American democracy. I think that if American democracy is defined by a series of choices that we make, I think that we're all used to mechanisms of democracy that are formal and recognizable and familiar, like elections and litigation and legislation, and every two years or four years we show up and cast a ballot.
It felt like the calculus was changing. We started to see, after the election, people be rounded up in dramatic ways for their political speech. We began to see institutions, to your point, Stephen, start to come under extraordinary political and financial pressure in ways that were coercive. And so the flavor of politics really, I would say the tenor of politics changed and darkened.
And what we found was that it felt like risk, like risk-taking in this new reality, as you are no stranger to, Stephen, was going to become a vector for change. And in a world in which it felt more and more risky to do those normative things in a democratic republic, all of us were going to have to learn to take a little bit more risk. And so Julia and I picked up the phone and we started calling people all over the world. And actually, I will say many of the first conversations we had were people at the Ash Center, folks who had... Archon I know has helped facilitate this for many years, but in many ways, the Ash Center did end up being where dissidents go. They need somewhere to sit.
Archon Fung:
From all over the world.
Ami Fields-Meyer:
From all over the world to lick their wounds, exactly, and to regroup and figure out what comes next.
Stephen Richer:
Not lick their wounds. Yeah, regroup, re-energize, and figure out how to renew democracy throughout the world.
Ami Fields-Meyer:
There you go. That's good, Stephen. That's the propaganda of you, for sure. I like that you've been studying.
Stephen Richer:
I'm an Ash Center Kool-Aid drinker at this point, obviously.
Ami Fields-Meyer:
I will say, I mean, I'm an Ash Center Kool-Aid drinker too, and I think that being at the Ash Center, not to do a commercial here, really jump started our progress because we were able to start with folks like Freddy Guevara and Shadi El-Ghazali Harb from Egypt. So leader of Venezuelans, and Maria Custanova, who was at the Ash Center from Russia. And so that actually was the beginning of many of our calls, and then those calls led to others. We ended up talking to over a hundred folks on five continents, people who had faced political repression in some form, certainly not all the same thing, but we were trying to distill some of the basic lessons about how they faced down authoritarianism or political repression that we could bring to this country now.
Archon Fung:
Yeah, that's great. We should maybe get this out of the way at the beginning of the show and build on it. So your book takes for granted, or you're talking to people who believe that the tide has turned in a dark way. And many of our discussions are appropriately about, in the United States, how do you judge whether the tide is turning? And so for this, we have this mechanism, the hot pepper scale, where one is, it's not turning. We're just in a democracy. We have elections. It's kind of like it has been for 50 years or 150 years, depending on how you want to count. Whereas five is super hot, is the Carolina Reaper, and we're on the verge of some democratic, I don't know, collapse or serious backsliding or creeping authoritarianism, more than creeping. And a lot of people have been on the show at kind of the three level.
It's not like it was, but we're kind of in the middle. We're not Hungary or Turkey or certainly not Russia. I think your book opens with these examples, as you said, about people in the streets, about Rumeysa Osturf being abducted in Somerville, et cetera.
So where are you? I mean, I guess your book is premised for a US audience anyway, of being higher up on that scale of, hey, wake up people.
Ami Fields-Meyer:
Yeah. I mean, I would say a couple of things on this really important threshold question. Other people who are smarter than I am and are more quantitative than I am, and have been studying this for many years, have made the argument that I find persuasive that we are in some kind of an authoritarian breakthrough. Some of them are at Harvard. Levitsky has made this argument. Anne Appelbaum has said that we are sort of closest to Hungary in its descent, until recently, into authoritarianism, sort of the capturing of institutions by mostly, although not entirely legal, mechanisms. M. Gessen has written extensively comparing the experiences that we're having here to the beginnings of what was happening in Russia around the turn of the century. But I would also say that there are other important indices here. One is that the V-Dem Institute, which does the Liberal Democracy Index, and is, in my view, the best quantitative study of the health of democracy, says that the US has lost its status as a liberal democracy.
And they point to everything from executive overreach to undermining the rule of law, suppression, intimidation of media, and of dissenting voices. Levitsky, as I just said before, says that this is sort of some form of an authoritarian government. And Levitsky, we don't have to go through all these, but Levitsky and Ziblatt, who I think maybe you've had, Steve, on, but will put these four categories of things that if they're happening, means that we're in some kind of an authoritarian moment.
Actually, I will just read them because I think it's worth saying at the top, which is that a leader rejects democratic rules of the game. A leader denies the legitimacy of opponents, a leader tolerates or encourages violence, or a leader indicates a willingness to curtail the civil liberties of their opponents. And so smart people who study this and who do this in a comparative way have been a very persuasive case for, certainly what we're going through is not normal, I would say even worse.
I'll just say one other thing, Stephen, before you jump in, which is just to say, the other person who I believe on this is the president who himself says that the only limits to his power are his own morality. And so I think that by many mechanisms, many indices, I should say, both quantitative and qualitative and personal, it does feel to me like we are, I don't know, how many peppers did you say altogether?
Archon Fung:
One to five. Five is the-
Ami Fields-Meyer:
One to five. Yeah, three and a half. Three and a half to four. I don't think we're in a good spot.
Archon Fung:
Well, you're on the high side of the scale out of people.
Stephen Richer:
But to put that in people terms, we've had speaker Kevin McCarthy on the show, and he's probably at a one, which is, look, this is politics. Sometimes your team wins, sometimes your team doesn't lose, but there are necessarily different politics depending on the outcome of the election. In fact, that's the sign of democratic health.
And then we have John Roush on who writes for The Atlantic, and he said, "This is fascism." That was the title of his article. And so I would say he's more in a four-five type situation. But while that is sort of a predicate of this book, I don't believe that accepting that predicate is necessary for appreciating this book, because obviously a large percentage of Americans don't accept that predicate that we're in an authoritarian moment. But those same people would say there are authoritarian moments throughout human history. So is it sort of written for anyone who wants to be a dissident in an authoritarian moment or is it written for anyone who wants to be a dissident in any moment?
That was something I was a little bit confused about in the book. Was this just dissidence against state actors or was this dissidence against any sort of entrenched power?
Ami Fields-Meyer:
Dissident?
Archon Fung:
It's unjust.
Ami Fields-Meyer:
Say it again, Archon.
Archon Fung:
Or anything you regard as unjust.
Ami Fields-Meyer:
Yeah.
Archon Fung:
It's unjust. Yeah.
Ami Fields-Meyer:
So I will say that, of all the people who we interviewed in the book, I'll give a couple of examples of the people who have not read the book. I assume that everyone listening, of course, has read the book, at least two or three times.
Archon Fung:
I'm sure everybody's read it. Stephen and I.
Ami Fields-Meyer:
We interview everybody from a mother in Venezuela who was a member of the Chavez Medora Movement for a long time. And then ultimately when she realized that she wasn't going to be able to feed her children, dissented and began organizing for the opposition to, as you said before, Archon, folks in Israel and in Palestine who are anti-occupation activists. We interview people from Nicaragua who were opposition leaders. And then also in Hong Kong, Nathan Law, who helped lead the Umbrella Revolution. Many, many, many others just to give you a little bit of a taste, but also folks all over the United States.
So there is, I think to your point, Stephen, there is an imprecision to the way that we tell these stories. Part of that is because a dissident itself is a fairly provocative term. Most of the people who we interviewed, actually none of the people who we interviewed wanted to be called a dissident or identified as a dissident. Very few of them even really felt comfortable being called courageous in any meaningful way.
So really what we're trying... And so one thing that we're learning once again in American politics, as we try to renegotiate our American political social contract here right now, is that labels can be a challenging threshold for people. So I don't care what you call it. I mean, I think we say authoritarianism because we think that's fairly good shorthand for what's going on. But this is a book for anybody who objects to what is going on around them, who believes that it is unjust, and who by virtue of speaking out or doing something about it, is putting something at risk. And that can be your job, that could be your safety, that can be your life.
And what we certainly are not saying is that all of these risks are the same or that every regime is the same. But what we are trying to do is to say that there is something that all of us can learn from each other as links in the same chain, as pushing forward for some kind of multiracial democracy when that is at risk.
Archon Fung:
So G Moke in the comments raises something that I think you address early and keep addressing in the book. And they say, "My understanding from my readings is that the response to tyranny starts less with courage." As you say, few people said, "Yeah, I'm courageous and that enables me to do this." And then they say, "And more with, this is just what people do." But it can't be just what people do because in any society-
Stephen Richer:
It's exceptional.
Archon Fung:
A few of them are dissidents and most are not.
Stephen Richer:
Exactly.
Archon Fung:
But it is what they do. So talk a little bit about what you learned about motive and why a few people are in it when they look to their left and they look to their right and those people are not in it.
Ami Fields-Meyer:
Well, I'm going to answer this question and then I'm going to ask Stephen to weigh in on this, because he is an example of somebody who's had a moment like this. Although you can object to that, but I'll fight you on that, Stephen.
I'll say, we interviewed over a hundred folks on five continents. And when you do this, as you know as an academic, when you do a huge amount of research, you start to notice trends. So the book is really broken down into the categories that we saw of the kinds of reactions and behaviors that we saw. So everyone who had one of these ones, you're right, it is exceptional. If it wasn't exceptional, we wouldn't need a book about it.
We could have written about Navalny and Mandela and Malala, and that would've been one interesting book. I don't think that it would've been as useful though, because those people are really preternaturally courageous people. We wanted to write about people who were just normal people who did something. I'm a normal guy. I'm a person, as Stephen said. And so that was what was really important to us.
So here are a couple of the threads, and I think I will get to answer G Moke's question here. One, everyone we spoke to on every continent in every context at the beginning of their process of being a dissident or dissent or whatever you want to call it, before they spoke out, weighed two different kinds of fears against each other. One fear was more immediate fear. Maybe I'm going to lose my job, maybe I'm going to lose my safety, maybe I'm going to lose my status, my wealth, something else. The second fear... Which are really powerful Darwinian fears, survival kinds of things, survival of some form.
The fear that people weighed that against, just to talk about where does this begin, was a different kind of fear. It was more fundamental, it was more foundational, it was more existential. It had to do with the fear of abandoning core values, the fear of being judged in the eyes of history or a higher power or my children or something else. And the people who moved forward did so, not because they didn't have that first fear or sublimated it, they were just more motivated by the second. And that is frequently what happened.
The other things I'll say on one foot and then pass this all back is, after that, what people did was they found other people who shared those values, who might also be dissenting, who might also be outliers, who might also be exceptional, and created what we call in the book, political homes or political communities. I know this has happened, for example, in the sort of ex-Republican world, in places like the Lincoln Project and the Bulwark and others, but I know there are many, many more beyond that. But also this happens constantly.
The dissident movement in the Soviet Union never grew to be bigger than about a thousand people at any given time. It was made up of writers and thinkers and scientists and scholars, and they would gather. And what they found was that in gathering, when you read interviews with many of these people, what they say is basically two things. One, it was helpful because it helped them practically figure out what to do next. How do we smuggle SAMIZDAT out? How do we try to stay safe? How do we try to de-legitimize the regime? But it also just did something spiritual, which is that it emboldened them, because authoritarianism or whatever you want to call it, I'll call it authoritarianism, often is about lies. You thought you saw Alex Pretti shot in the street? No, you didn't. You thought you saw Renee Good shot in the street? No, you didn't. And what it allowed people to do was look into and be emboldened in this web of lies.
The other two things very quickly that people did, and we can get to these, from that moment of moral collision to building out a political community, was the second. The third thing was that they tried to implement basically no unforced errors. They didn't do stupid stuff. And the last thing was that they tried to grow their movement. And so if your political home began with a small enough group of people who share your values, you will only be successful, we found in general, when that political home grows to be encompassing of many more views than just your own.
So that's the arc that we tell in the stories of our book. I've just said it in a sort of semi-academic way, but it's much more narrative in the way that we tell it in the book.
Stephen Richer:
A lot to unpack there. One, I want you to know I caught your rabbinical reference of the on one foot thing. So I get a point for that.
Ami Fields-Meyer:
Yes. Breaking the Jews.
Stephen Richer:
Yes. Two, I think that when I read the book, the defining characteristic of a dissident was the loss component more than the whom were you rebelling or dissenting against? Because you have a story that is of California farm workers. It's not really the state or an authoritarian actor that they're rebelling against. Maybe the state could use police power to get them back into line, but it was mostly a private enterprise, but what were they jeopardizing there? Was their livelihoods, maybe their reputations within the community.
And I will say that one of the things that I bristle about sometimes is the people who cast themselves as dissidents when in actuality, it's like good politics for them. So the easiest, the cheapest example is here in the United States, people who are allegedly rebelling against Donald Trump. And it's like, well, you're a democratic politician. How hard is it for you to rebel or say nasty things about President Trump? I would imagine that's actually pretty easy.
And then, I say this because I was struck, I was reading an article in The Atlantic that was sort of the feature article this week, is about somebody leaving academia and saying some less than perfectly pleasant things about Bates College. And to that, did that person fit the mold that you had been describing there because he gave up something that he had worked so hard for, but it clashed with his moral calling, that he didn't want to be part of that? But again, that wasn't really a state actor.
So I guess that's a long roundabout way to getting to a question here, which is, does that person have any characteristic? When you studied with these 100 people, were they like... We know that they had this moral conflict, but you were like, oh my gosh, all these people are kind of stubborn. They're kind of contrarians. And so looking at that, it wouldn't have been that hard to predict that these would be people who would do this.
Ami Fields-Meyer:
It's such a good question.
Archon Fung:
Is it moral commitment or is it kind of, I don't know, I mean a psychological type of not-rule-following. I'm not an organization person. I'm going to fight the power, whether the power is the growers or the power is a particular government.
Ami Fields-Meyer:
Yeah. Well, let me begin on the point about the farm workers in California, because there are a lot of lessons to be learned and analogies to be made in anti-authoritarian resistance from the labor movement and from labor movements over time. Maria Stephan, who we know and who's done a lot of work with our friend in [inaudible 00:26:28], refers to the kind of activist posture that gets countries out of authoritarian backsliding or democratic backsliding as collective stubbornness. And those are the tools of strike and of boycott and of civil disobedience, of throwing sand in the gears in some form or another, which by necessity creates risk for the people who are doing it. But the idea is that you mitigate some of that risk by doing it together.
And you're right, Stephen, that for example, in the example of the farm workers, that isn't state-sponsored political repression, that is negotiating with a private enterprise, but it is a form of injustice that people use that collective stubbornness against.
And in some way or another, what we're talking about in being collectively stubborn as a country and using those kinds of mechanisms of collective stubbornness is collective bargaining for our democracy. We're saying we will create pain for you until you move us back onto the path of normative democracy. You stop attacking elections and you stop all this other stuff. So that's one piece. So certainly not to... I agree with your premise that these are not the same, but I do want to push you and say, this is not a book for the literalist, although that's fine. It's really a book about what we can learn from many of these different contexts for our own context now.
The other thing I will say in response to this very good question is, it's interesting, when you're asking about, is there a category of person here? Is there a psychological profile? Sometimes. Some of the people who we interviewed are obstinate people, are people who just are really clear on who they are and are always pushing. But we wanted to do less of that. We wanted to do more people who had a moment or a series of moments where things changed for them, because I think the most natural thing to do when you object but there's risk, is to just suppress that voice in your head and keep going because of the Darwinian thing that we described before. And the thing that most of these people had in common was not that they were particularly obstinate people or that they were especially stubborn themselves. There's some. The thing that bound most of them together was that they were extremely clear on their own values. They were really, really clear on what they believed in and what they wanted the world to look like.
And this is also something that we get from the Soviet dissident movement. We tell a story toward the beginning of the book about a Soviet era writer named Andre Sanofsky, who wrote under a pen name. And he says, he described when Stalin passed a series of laws that functionally made it illegal and punishable by gulag or death to continue to make what he called anti-Soviet art, or anti-Soviet culture, that he said he faced a choice, and it was either I stop writing or I continue writing, but writing is my life and art is my life. I am a writer. And so he continued to write and he suffered the consequences of it.
But most of these people are not defined by what they're against, they don't see themselves as being defined by what they're against. They're cast as dissidents or opponents or whatever by the circumstances. They're affirmative. We believe in fair wages. Or in the case of Sanofsky, I believe what he writes.
Stephen Richer:
He believed in free expression of art, artistic free expression rather than casting himself as an opponent of the Soviet regime.
Ami Fields-Meyer:
This is what he says. And actually over and over and over again, we hear this from people. They really just say, again, at the beginning of the book, we profile a civil rights lawyer at HUD who would not be considered a dissident by this Navalny standard, but he's somebody who's been a civil rights lawyer, a civil servant at the Department of Housing and Urban Development for a long time. And he figured out early on in his tenure that this administration was functionally not going to enforce the Fair Housing Act anymore, which meant that in his view, there were all these people whose housing was now at risk, who could suffer the consequences of housing discrimination. And he said, he started speaking out, he risked his job, he was ultimately fired. He became a whistleblower and told Congress and Congress investigated it. But when you ask him why he did it, he just says, "I'm a civil rights lawyer. That's what I decided to do with my life."
So I think it's actually much more simple than a psychological profile. It just has to do with knowing who you are and then deciding to act on this value.
Archon Fung:
Did you get any insight into why some people take their values so seriously and where they come from? Because I mean, I'm asking this because my course that I've taught at the Kennedy School for, I don't know, 30 years now is ethics and politics, political ethics. And for about the first two thirds of my career, it was a really hard sell to students to say why they should be taking an ethics course. It's like, "Oh, it's obvious," or, "No, I need the hard skills of doing policy analysis and somebody else worries about the ethical issues." It's true that I hear that less now, but for most of the time I've been hearing... teaching here at the school, many, many students have regarded ethics as something that didn't merit space in the core curriculum. And that may go along with, in society more broadly in a kind of technical time or managerial time, people go to church less, these traditional spaces where people learn about values and traditions feel like they're a little bit less common or we're in them less.
So how did these people get their values? I mean, the artist, he might say, or the lawyer, that's part of the profession. They're inculcated, you have to believe, in freedom of expression in order to be an artist or you need that because that's what you do. And if you're a lawyer, you kind of need the rule of law unless you're a certain kind of...
Ami Fields-Meyer:
Unless you're a certain kind of...
Archon Fung:
Yeah.
Ami Fields-Meyer:
Well, one of my favorite stories from the book is about a guy named Mikhael Manekin, who is a religious Israeli who grew up learning, studying Torah and being observant and religious and wearing a yarmulke kippah on his head. And that's the world he grew up in. And we tell a story in the book around the time of the second Intifada. There's mandatory military service in Israel, and he was doing his service in the West Bank. And a lot of what was happening at the time, it's different now. It's a different period now, but will sound familiar.
But there had been a lot of roadside bombs in the West Bank, and he was ordered to remove a Palestinian family from their home, and to set up shop with his soldiers in that home and basically make it their command center, their command post. And the Palestinian family moved across the street into another family, to a neighbor's home.
And Manekin describes this moment. He says a few days into this operation, the restroom had broken inside the house and he went outside to relieve himself in the yard. And as he was doing that, he looked up and he made eye contact with the grandmother of the family that they had evicted from their home. He said in this moment, he describes this moment of dissidence where he said, "Suddenly I was more aware than I've ever been before of the kippah, the yarmulke that was on my head. And suddenly I felt more estranged from the values, the Jewish values that I had grown up with." And he names a few of them, humility and awe, reverence of God, et cetera, et cetera, than I had ever had before. And after the military, after he finished his time in the army, he was one of the founders of a group called Breaking the Silence, which has shattered a taboo in Israel, which is to speak regularly at great personal risk, confessional risk about the kinds of abuses that they either witnessed or engaged in against Palestinians in the West Bank and elsewhere. And so for him, I think for him it was, I don't know, call it religious, but it's probably deeper than religious. I think it was familial. I think it was core to who he thought that he had been brought up to be.
And I don't want to suggest that religion or family values are the only way to do this, but I do think that this is an example of somebody who just heard a voice and said something is wrong. Where exactly to locate that voice, I think probably differs from person to person. But a lot of people in the book had stories of that of becoming aware that they were estranged from something they wanted to be and then tried to get themselves closer to it.
Stephen Richer:
One quick reminder that you can post a comment to the chat box and we're tracking those and would love to integrate those. But let's take us to. So one is a dissident by your definition, oftentimes because it's just a moral compulsion for them. They didn't make a conscious choice someday and wake up and say, "Well, today I want to be a dissident," but they just do something that they had to do.
Nonetheless, once people find themselves in that type of situation, they probably want to be successful. So how does one become a successful dissident? And I want to sort of first throw this at you, that by your own admission, a lot of people that you spoke to are either in exile, have lost in some other capacity, or you're reading their writings because they're dead. So were these people successful, and how does one become successful?
Archon Fung:
And just to flesh that out, what is success? Well, a couple things. One is, I think one statistic that motivates the book is the... 751. When you look at other people, scholars have looked at countries that have reversed this democratic backsliding. 7% have been just through institutional means only, like vote for the democrats.
Ami Fields-Meyer:
Exactly.
Archon Fung:
1%, far more have involved some sort of civil resistance, dissent. And that's why one kind of motivating factor that says, "Hey, here's why we got to write a book about dissidents." And then to Stephens, I want to add to that, there's a real tension in your book about what success means. One is, people are dissidents out of integrity reasons. The reasons that you just cited, like the guy who was in the IDF, and that's what's driving a lot of it. And then to be successful in that sense probably means, well, being true to your values, even if it's very, very costly, even at your life, Alexei Navalny. But then there's the more ordinary sense of success, which means you move your society toward more democracy and justice. So how do those two things interact for you and the people you talk to?
Ami Fields-Meyer:
Well, I think you can't have the second one without the first one. That's sort of a basic math problem. You need some number of people who are willing to do the personal work, to have the sort of personal success, the personal integrity success. But I think, Stephen, the way that both of you articulated it, it's a really good question because it is a contradiction and it's one that we don't solve in the book. It's very awkward to be writing a book about how to help save democracy in a moment when democracy is failing all over the world. Three out of four people on earth today, again, according to this V-Den Institute study, three out of four people on earth now live under some form of autocracy, broadly construed, and liberal democracy is now the least common form of government on earth.
And so I will say a couple of things on this. One is we also quote in the book as a sort of spiritual guide, Leonard Cohen, who has a line, a very famous line where he says, "There is a crack in everything, that's how the light gets in." But the less famous part of that line is the first part of that, which is, "Ring the bells that still can ring. Forget your perfect offering. There is a crack, a crack in everything, that's how the light gets in." So the reason I bring this up now is because there are a lot of reasons to just throw up our hands and to give in. And if we were all falling into the trap that Steve Bannon has set for us, that is what we would do. We believe, and I argue that you got to start with something. Even if the trends are against us, you have to find, to start somewhere.
And so the book is not a theory of the case of how exactly to get out of this. I leave that to people, to scholars like you, Archon, or to Erica or others. What it is is a buffet menu of options for how to get into the movement. And so there are many different ways of doing this, and I don't really care what they're motivated by. Maybe they're motivated by personal integrity, maybe they're motivated by strategy, but I'll just name a few of them.
We were talking before this, before we got on here about, we've never really done the Truth and Reconciliation Commission thing in this country in any meaningful way and any national way. So we can all be paying attention and recording the crimes and the injustices that happen under this government for the future. That is how justice happens. Transitional justice happens, post-conflict justice happens all over the world. There are other things we can do too. We profile in the book, a woman at Brown University who testified against the ideological deportation policy. A Brown University professor of Middle Eastern studies who is a non-citizen of the United States, a green card holder. And the Department of Justice refused to say that if she testified that they wouldn't go after her, but she did it anyway. And the reason that she did it, and they won that case, the American Association of University Professors, that policy was struck down, the reason that she did it was because she felt like there was a strategy. And so she had a role to play. She didn't have to push back against the winds of authoritarianism on her own. She could just sit up there and testify.
So I would say, Stephen, there is a tension. There is a tension, but there is also evidence in the scheme of things that civil resistance and civil disobedience can be effective. And that part of what we advocate for in the book is not an act of faith, but a decision to become more well-versed in tools of politics that most of us, especially in the professional class, are not used to. What does it mean to gum up the works of an unjust government until they stop doing what they're doing? To not only rely, as Archon says, on elections and courts and other things, when the integrity of our elections are under attack, when we continue to have courts that function but the courts are increasingly stacked in one direction, and we have a media and we continue to have a free media but the media is increasingly stacked. At least the corporate media is increasingly stacked in one direction.
You have to begin to rely on other tools. And our contention is that if we do begin to use those tools more and more, the chances that we can remove ourselves from this will grow.
Stephen Richer:
Because Phil asked this in the chat, that there is a section of the book that talks about some of the nuts and bolts of being an effective dissident, including which technological platforms to think about, including doing a deep dive on yourself before becoming a dissident. I thought that was almost like you were training somebody to be a candidate with the amount of exposure.
Two sort of nuts and bolts questions before Archon takes it back maybe with a higher-minded philosophical question. One is from David, and it's something that I've noticed a lot of people really stressing out over, which is if you're in an organization or part of a country's leadership that's doing something bad, do you exit and say they were doing bad, or do you try to stay in and steer it back towards doing good? What do you have to say about that?
And then Meg has a question, and I'm going to boil it down to, do you have a favorite dissident movie that can inspire us all after this?
Archon Fung:
That's a great question. First ever movie list.
Ami Fields-Meyer:
I have to think about the dissident movie one. On the inside... I'll think about that in a second. Well, actually I will say, I love all things Steve Biko in South Africa. So there are a number of good Biko films. I can't remember the name. I can't remember the name of the Biko. It might just be called Biko, actually, but I love that film out of South Africa.
I love this question about the inside-outside thing. And I think that it is hard, but that this is another place where I think it's really important to be clear on your values. I will say, I've talked about this, I was inside the Biden administration during the war in Gaza, during October 7th and afterward. And as it became more and more apparent that in my view, that what was happening to the Palestinians was just an extraordinary injustice and worse. I decided to stay inside and to organize from within, to work with other people who had other positions whose jobs were not directly connected to the conflict, to try to push our bosses and our leaders toward a different resolution.
And our theory of the case was that it was an extraordinary privilege in that particular case, and there were so many different versions of this, that it was an extraordinary privilege to be inside and to be that close to power, that it would be an abdication to not try to use our positions and our insideness to push for outcomes that didn't end up happening, but at least we tried. There were other people who felt similarly to the way that we felt, who decided that the best tool that they had was to publicly resign because that would bring attention to what they saw as these injustices.
I don't know what the right answer was to that. I think that in moments of injustice, we all have a moral imperative to try to find a way forward and to try to do something about it. And I think for me, I looked at the tools that I had available to me and used those.
But sometimes you don't have the tools available to you and you have to find another way to do it. And a resignation can be a kind of a catchy thing to do, but it's momentary and it's fleeting. So I think it is complicated. And I also think that this is something that people sometimes argue is not complicated. And I have a disagree with that.
Stephen Richer:
Yeah. You and I happen to view that situation differently.
Ami Fields-Meyer:
We do. I know we do.
Stephen Richer:
But setting that aside, I sort of wonder, it doesn't sound like you have any regrets about that decision to stay in. And then two, I would point out that whenever you're saying, "Well, just quit," that was something that I was always in a position to be able to do, but that is a position of privilege, that I didn't have four people that I had to feed and that was contingent upon my job. And then I would say, and you don't have to say what it is, but did you have sort of a line where you're like, "Okay, but if the administration, the Biden administration as it was that you were part of, if the administration crosses this, then I am out." Did you have that line? Again, don't have to say what it would've been.
Ami Fields-Meyer:
Yeah.
Stephen Richer:
You did? Okay.
Ami Fields-Meyer:
Yeah, I did. And again, I think let's be very clear. There are people who have, in this particular movement that we're describing, I know we see it differently, who have endured really extraordinary repercussions for their activism in support of Palestinian rights. So who have lost jobs, who they've tried to deport, who have spent time incarcerated, and more. And so everyone has to make their own kinds of assessments and evaluations. But yeah, I did. And I think that most people I know who have been involved in some kind of activism, this is the point of the book, are just clear on what their basic values are and what they want the world to look like, and then use the tools that they have available to them to do something about it.
Archon Fung:
Yeah. I just want to highlight, it's a really deep and difficult and personal question. And there's a lot of chatter about South Africa in the chat, and I want to bring up a different piece that relates to South Africa. During the apartheid era, there was this incredibly moving and sophisticated debate among judges in South Africa. And the premise was you're an anti-apartheid, that's your moral set. Is the answer for you to remain on the bench or to resign?
And so there's no question that this is not a democratic regime. It's an authoritarian regime. And on one side, it's like, obviously, resign because you can't participate in this kind of rule of law that is enforcing apartheid and this oppression. And you can use your voice, you're a prominent person, you're a judge. But on the other side, some of the judges were saying, "Yeah, but if Nelson Mandela or somebody else has been in a protest and they're arrested and they come to you in a court, does that person want you or do they want you to have resigned and to have some more pro-apartheid judge be...?" So it's like-
Ami Fields-Meyer:
Absolutely.
Archon Fung:
Yeah.
Ami Fields-Meyer:
I do not think that these things are black and white. And the people who decide to stay in, in a case like that when the system is rotten to the core, are basically harm reductionists. That's how they see it. They say, "This is happening anyway. So if I'm there, the really terrible thing gets one degree less terrible." I think that's a defensible moral position in many cases. We'd have to go individual by individual, and then we would have to debate it in your ethics class.
Archon Fung:
Maybe [inaudible 00:51:00] doesn't die or gets 20 percent or something. I don't know.
Ami Fields-Meyer:
Yeah, but I think it's a really important question and one that, again, I don't think is black and white and that people have to make those decisions for themselves.
Archon Fung:
Yeah. I wanted to bring up, we're running out of time, but this is such a great conversation. Two issues. The first one is, and this has been on my mind a lot, is where do you find courage? And here I'm looking at the social economic gradient, and I see a fair amount of courage at the street level. And you selected on those people, as looking at ordinary people. And then as you go up and look at management and CEOs, university presidents, law firm managing partners, it seems to me that courage is less common.
Ami Fields-Meyer:
Doesn't it?
Archon Fung:
Do you think that's true or that I'm off base? And if it is true, is it a function of selection or what the job is? Your job is running an organization. It's not being a dissident or being courageous. So what do you think about that? What's the distribution of courage?
Ami Fields-Meyer:
Yeah, it's such a good observation and I would love to see an actual study.
Archon Fung:
Yeah, I haven't done the study.
Ami Fields-Meyer:
But what I do think... So I don't know what the distribution is, but what I will say that I have observed is that there is a mismatch between... Let's use the example first. I'll talk about law firms in one second, but let me just very quickly say, people, progressives in general, rail against Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries for being sort of, in their view, sort of fundamentally ill-equipped for this particular political moment. I know nothing is Harvard's position. I'll just tell you, I agree basically with that. But I don't think that's necessarily a really compelling moral argument. I think that what's really happening here is a mismatch between the incentives. What does it take to be a really good speaker of the house, House leader or majority leader? And what does it mean to be a dissident leader or let's just say a movement leader?
Those things are so different. In order to be a really good, one of the congressional positions I just described, you have to be good at counting votes, you have to be good at striking deals, you have to be good at making compromises, you have to be good at just sanding down the hard edges and making them softer. To be a good movement leader, you don't really need any of that. You need public narrative and you need boldness and you need moral imagination. These things aren't the same. And so that's part of I think what we're watching it play out here. That's just not what they were trained for. They're not movement leaders.
The other thing, so just to apply that a little bit to the other question. I went to a university, I studied history. All my friends are doctors and lawyers. And I think that there is something also in the professional class where we are taught to prioritize risk aversion.
It's a high premium on risk. We place get by, get by, get by, get by, get to the next thing, get to the next thing, get to the next thing. We don't have a vocabulary for this. We don't have tools for this because that's not how we've been taught to succeed, broadly. But that I think is, if you have become a partner at a major law firm, if you have become a university president, that is rarely because you were taking big moral risks over long periods of time. It was because you navigated the system.
And so we're just looking at this massive imbalance. And instead of throwing up my hands and saying, "We're F'd. There's no way to do this," part of the reason we wrote this book is to say, some of this risk-taking can be taught. Some of this risk-taking can be trained.
What are the other ways of doing this? And we have seen a number of law firms, for example, that rejected the coercion. We have seen university presidents, not enough, not enough, who have rejected the coercion from the administration. And many of those have happened because, and I know we're trying to get to the end, because they banded together with others. And so one example we give in the book is Rutgers University professors, chemistry professors who banded together, basically created a NATO for universities against the coercion and push back in that way. So a lot of that happens with collectivism.
Stephen Richer:
Yeah. Great. Yeah, I often think of that, if we're in a revolutionary, if ever we were to be in a revolutionary moment, I'd like to think that I do the right thing. But then I think of myself, I'm just like, I'm not very much of a revolutionist at heart, sort of thing. So I might be the one that has to get dragged along by Archon or something like that anyhow. Thank you so much for coming on today.
Ami Fields-Meyer:
Thank you, guys. It's such a joy. And by the way, I will also say before you close out, I really appreciate the back-and-forth and the pushback. I think it's important that these ideas sort of be out there for us all to debate. And I appreciate getting to wrestle with them even as I hawk my book.
Stephen Richer:
Great. Well, again, the book that we're hawking is called On Courage: How to Be a Dissident in an Age of Fear. It is available on Amazon, of course. It has already appeared on the New York Times Bestsellers. It's been out for just a short period now. And so if you would like a series of vignettes of people who are dissidents from throughout the globe, then I recommend it.
Thank you as always to those of you who are watching live and participating in the conversation. Thank you to those of you who are watching later. If you have any ideas for future guests or future topics, please feel free to email us. And thank you as always to our wonderful team supporting this show. That's Ralph, Collette, Courtney, and Evelyn. And Archon, send us home with some brilliance.
Archon Fung:
Well, I don't know about that, but just like, everybody should pick up Ami and Julia's book because you get to meet... I mean, it's a super interesting book for the ideas that we've been talking about, and you get to meet so many interesting people throughout the course of the book. There's so many great stories and ordinary people doing amazing things.
And then I just want to highlight a theme that is run through a bunch of our episodes. It is hard to figure out the kind of moment that we're in. And reread the Declaration of Independence, what it is. It's an argument to the rest of America that we're in one of these moments in which dissidence is very, very important. And it ends with the risk-taking part, right? Pledging our fortunes, our lives, and our sacred honor. That's a pretty big risk if you put all of that on the line.
And so it's not a new problem, and every generation has to solve it for itself. And so thanks, Ami, for helping us solve that problem.
Ami Fields-Meyer:
Thank you guys, both.
Voiceover:
Thank you for listening to Terms of Engagement. Email us your questions, suggestions, or thoughts for future episodes. You can find an email address in the show notes below. See you next time.