Eleanor Roosevelt had lost her husband only two years earlier. On the April afternoon President Franklin Roosevelt died, she was the one who told Vice President Harry Truman, resting an arm on his shoulder before he could speak, and when he finally asked what he could do for her, she turned the question around and asked what anyone could do for him. “For you are the one in trouble now.”

Within a week she had packed up the White House. When a New York Times reporter asked what came next, she answered in four words: “The story is over.”

Truman disagreed that Eleanor’s story was over. He appointed her to the American delegation to the brand-new United Nations, where she was asked to chair a commission to define the rights of every human being on earth.

The problem of agreeing on a legal framework for universal human rights was nearly impossible, but after the murder of millions in the Holocaust, it was also essential.

Let’s start with a key question: what makes a law a law? Jeremy Bentham, an eighteenth century English philosopher, laid the groundwork for legal positivism, which says that a law is valid because of who made it and how it was made, without regard to what it says. Whether that law is good or evil is an entirely separate question, one about morality rather than law.

Splitting morality from the law made the law predictable, professional, and scientific. That sounds great (especially in contrast to the arbitrary whims of kings), but the Nazis provided a stellar example of why this is a deeply flawed approach. Hitler became the chancellor of Germany legally, through the German constitution. The purges, property seizures, deportations, and camps were dressed up in appropriate statutes, decrees, and judicial orders. German judges, whose motto was Gesetz ist Gesetz (“Law is law”), enforced these laws because there was no limit to how unjust the law could be as long as it arrived with the right paperwork.

During the Nuremberg trials in 1945, the accused Nazis defended themselves with three arguments that were grounded in positivism:

• First, much of what they did was lawful under German law at the time, and law is law.

• Second, they were charged with “crimes against humanity,” which wasn’t based on any law they were subject to when they acted.

• Third, sovereignty: international law applied to relations between states, not to the relationship between a state and its own citizens which was, legally speaking, nobody else’s business. On what legal basis could anyone judge what Germany did to German Jews?

The Allies had to decide: they could accept those arguments and let the Nazi leaders go free after the murder of millions, or they could establish that there is a law above any country that binds everyone everywhere. ‘Crimes against humanity’ only makes sense if humanity itself is a jurisdiction.

Eleanor Roosevelt and her guests at tea that day were working on what the agreement about fundamental human rights would look like, in order to make sure that “it was legal here” would never again be an acceptable answer to genocide.

Eleanor described the trouble as beginning right as the teacups were being filled. Peng-chun Chang, the Chinese philosopher and playwright who served as her vice chair, was arguing with Charles Malik, a Lebanese Christian philosopher with a Harvard doctorate, who represented newly independent Lebanon and served as the commission’s rapporteur, the officer responsible for the text itself. The remaining guest was John Humphrey, a Canadian lawyer who ran the UN’s Human Rights Division.

The fight between Chang and Malik was not about the conclusion: everyone in that apartment agreed there had to be a law above every state. The fight was about what the basis for such a law could be.

Chang insisted that the declaration they were building couldn’t simply dress up Western ideas and pretend they were universal, saying that there is “more than one kind of ultimate reality.”

Malik responded by citing Thomas Aquinas and natural law. Aquinas proposed the idea that certain rights and morals are inherent in human nature and can be discovered through reason. It follows logically that an unjust law is no law at all. When Martin Luther King Jr. needed to explain to eight white clergymen why he was entitled to break Alabama’s segregation ordinances, he cited Aquinas by name from a Birmingham jail cell.

To put it in the terms of St. Thomas Aquinas: An unjust law is a human law that is not rooted in eternal law and natural law. Any law that uplifts human personality is just. Any law that degrades human personality is unjust.

- Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Letter from a Birmingham Jail

It was clear to everyone working on the Declaration that whatever it was based on had to be something that was beyond the reach of any government, because (as the Nazis demonstrated) if you base it on something a government grants, then the government can also revoke it.

Chang argued that Aquinas and natural law were too Western to use as the basis for the Declaration: a Declaration built on Aquinas’s scaffolding wouldn’t be universal, it would be a Western document imposing Western theology on the rest of humanity.

Chang’s approach to the question was Confucian. Confucian ethics considers the highest virtue to be ren, meaning (roughly) co-humanity or humaneness. The written character for it is built from two parts: the sign for a person next to the sign for the number two. The question of ethics is not about a person’s relationship to God, but rather a person’s relationship to other people.

Confucius described the single principle one could practice throughout life as the concept of reciprocity:

What you do not wish for yourself, do not impose on others.

— Confucius, Analects

Five hundred years before the Sermon on the Mount, the Confucian code of ethics had arrived at the same foundation without mentioning God.

Chang’s argument was that the Western framework Aquinas offered was not needed for the Declaration. China had practiced reciprocity and dignity for 2,500 years without it. No single tradition owned the truth about why humans matter, so a universal document would require openness to non-Western traditions and non-Western ethics.

But if no single tradition could be said to own the truth, would that mean that right and wrong were merely a matter of local custom, valid only inside the culture that practices them?

Roosevelt listened to the debate between Malik and Chang and poured more tea for everyone. Before the meeting ended, the group agreed on one practical step: the Canadian lawyer, Humphrey, would write the first draft. The person who hand-wrote the founding document of modern human rights was an orphan from a New Brunswick village who lost his left arm at age six.

Here was the problem with the choice for what to base the Declaration on: if either side won, the project would fail.

Malik was proposing a view that included God or Nature, which would make the Buddhists, Confucians, secular French, and Soviet bloc walk away. The notion of Universality would end before it began.

Chang’s proposal for pluralism ran a risk of rights becoming a matter of local custom. If a local custom said torture or genocide was okay, there would be no standing from which to judge that, no standing for condemnation of the Holocaust or prosecutions for crimes against humanity.

One path would lead to a document no one signed; the other would lead to a document with no meaning.

How do you solve the unsolvable problem?

You reject the false choice.

The drafters proceeded carefully. For most of the drafting, the first article said people are endowed by nature with reason and conscience. In the final debate, they took out ‘by nature’ because it suggested a theory about where reason and conscience come from. The Declaration simply says people are endowed with reason and conscience. The foundation was left open, and both Aquinas and Confucius fit. Jacques Maritain, who worked on UNESCO’s survey of world philosophers, said, “Yes, we agree about the rights, but on condition no one asks us why.”

The fight over frameworks wasn’t necessary, because you don’t have to decide why humans matter before deciding how they should be treated.

All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights.

— Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Article 1

Less than two years after that meeting, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights passed the United Nations General Assembly, and there was not a single vote against it. Malik guided the draft through eighty-one meetings that fall, serving as an Arab delegate defending universal rights during the first Arab-Israeli war. He never saw his heritage and his principles as a choice he had to make.

There is an obvious false choice dividing dinner tables, campuses, and coalitions in the US right now, which is: Whose side are you on, Israel’s or the Palestinians’?

This question is fundamentally flawed. It assumes the only answer is to pick a side and in picking accept anything that happens to the people on the other side. Mourning a starving child in Gaza is seen as ignoring a family killed on October 7.

That false choice is terribly dehumanizing. We can grieve for every person killed on October 7 and simultaneously grieve for every person killed in Gaza. Most people believe that killing a child is wrong, regardless of who the child is. Most people believe that the basic rights of everyone in Israel and Palestine should be protected. But that answer is often dismissed as naive, evasive, or a dodge.

It is the answer forty-eight nations voted for in 1948.

Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.

- Martin Luther King Jr., Letter from Birmingham Jail

So how has the answer that once united the General Assembly become the answer you are not allowed to give?

In general, false dichotomies aren’t mistakes or accidents. They’re tools. Tell people that the choice is A or B, that your team is for A and the other team is for B, and you have an extremely effective way to get people to stop paying attention to principles. As long as the question is about your team rather than your values, it becomes possible to justify almost anything, and it makes accountability treason.

So ask yourself: who gains when there is no universal standard?

In February 2025, Elon Musk described his weekend “putting [the United States Agency for International Development] into the wood chipper.” The agency he gleefully destroyed had, over twenty years, prevented about 91 million deaths: more than 25 million from AIDS, 8 million from malaria, and nearly 5 million from tuberculosis, according to a study in The Lancet. The same study predicted that dismantling the agency would cause over 14 million more deaths by 2030, including about 4.5 million children under five.

A Boston University study found that Musk’s wood chipper had, in the first few months, already caused about 108,000 adult deaths and 224,000 child deaths, or about 88 people every hour. In one Dubai warehouse, nearly 500 metric tons of high-energy biscuits, emergency food for malnourished children in Afghanistan and Pakistan, sat for months waiting for approval to be distributed, and then, after they expired, were destroyed at a cost of hundreds of thousands of dollars. Those biscuits would have fed 1.5 million children for a week.

Elon Musk’s actions weren’t an argument that a TB patient in Sierra Leone has rights that matter less than those of an American taxpayer; it’s an argument that her rights have no effect at all.

The richest people in the world are terrified of a world in which the rights of other people are enforced. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights says that cutting off a child’s food so they starve to death is a violation of that child’s rights: there is a victim and there is someone responsible, and Musk is morally culpable for every one of the millions of deaths his actions cause.

Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will.

— Frederick Douglass, 1857

The Declaration isn’t just a floor for human rights. The phrase ‘the full development of the human personality’ appears three times, linked to education, social security, and our duties to each other. The drafters were trying to describe a world focused on what each person could become. After the war, Eleanor Roosevelt wrote that freedom without bread means little.

But the Cold War turned questions of human rights into questions about what team you were on: civil liberties, or bread? In 1966, the United Nations split the Declaration into two treaties. The United States ratified the civil and political rights, but never the economic rights.

Frederick Douglass’s choice of demand rather than fight is important: a fight is force against force, and a plea is an appeal to the other side's mercy, but a demand claims something the other side owes you. It only works if some rule binds both of you.

Both false dichotomies and relentless appeals to team tribalism serve the same purpose: they undermine discourse about standards and accountability. If you excuse your own side's cruelty, then standards about cruelty can’t bind anyone: they just become team slogans. It’s your side or the other side. And the people at the top? There are now no standards that bind them and no consequences they have to answer to.

Where, after all, do universal human rights begin? In small places, close to home.

— Eleanor Roosevelt, 1958

Collectively, we have power over the Elon Musks of the world. Every structure that protects him and people like him is supported by our everyday participation: our money, our attention, our data, our labor, our votes, and even our silence. It is possible for us to change the balance, to withdraw our consent, to stop supporting them.

Eleanor Roosevelt spent the last part of her life explaining to audiences that the decisions we make close to home can change the world. She wasn’t talking about mere sentiment: she was describing a supply chain.

A few days later, hopped up on caffeine from consuming too many cups of my newfound beloved beverage, I stood outside the hotel talking with my friend Conrad about this idea I had for a framework describing the six kinds of power. Conrad knew more about D.C. than almost anyone I knew. He thought about it for a few seconds, and then looked at me.

“I think you’re missing something important,” he said. “Love. Love is a kind of power.”

I didn’t know how to think about that at the time. I’d conceptualized power as levers and gears, mechanical things to change the world. But over the intervening years I have realized that Conrad was right (of course): love and human relationships and trust and loyalty are absolutely forms of power, and maybe they’re the most potent forms of all.

On the last evening of Lindsey Graham’s life, he had just come home from Ukraine and was scheduled to appear on Meet the Press the next morning. He called Donald Trump to talk about the SAVE America Act, the voting bill Trump badly wanted and the Senate had refused to give him.

At about 8:30 that night, emergency crews were sent to Graham’s Capitol Hill home.

Lindsey Graham had grown up with his sister Darline in Central, South Carolina, where their parents ran a restaurant and pool hall. The family lived in one room behind the business. Their mother died of cancer when Lindsey was twenty-one; their father died of a heart attack fifteen months later. By then Lindsey was twenty-two, starting law school, and Darline was thirteen. He became her legal guardian, and then adopted her so that she could receive his military benefits if something happened to him.

When Lindsey Graham died, South Carolina Governor Henry McMaster appointed Darline to fill his Senate seat. Three days after her brother’s death, JD Vance swore her in.

Darline can cast the same vote her brother would have cast. She can introduce the same bill. But she does not step into the same position of power her brother held, because much of his power was in relationships, like the relationship that had Lindsey Graham on the phone with the president on a Saturday night.

I’ve struggled for years with how to think about Conrad’s observation in the context of the framework for power, but thinking about the mortality of Mitch McConnell and Lindsey Graham and Donald Trump makes it a little clearer, because it’s clear to anyone who thinks about it that whoever succeeds them won’t have the full measure of their power, so much of which is based on relationships. It’s the much more personal version of network power: not sending an email to a million people, but instead making a phone call to a single person.

Love sounds squishy next to constitutions, money, courts, and mass communication. But power is the ability to shape what happens. Love obviously does that. Love changes what people are willing to do, what they will sacrifice, who they will take care of, and whose call they will answer. So do trust and loyalty and friendship and fear and the accumulated understanding that comes from knowing another person for a long time.

In August 1920, after more than seventy years of organizing, the Nineteenth Amendment to give women in the US the right to vote was one state short of becoming part of the Constitution. As it was being considered by the Tennessee House of Representatives, a twenty-four-year-old Republican named Harry Burn arrived wearing the red rose of the anti-suffragists. He voted twice to prevent the amendment from coming to a vote.

But in his pocket was a letter from his mother, Febb Burn: seven pages about the rain, the farm, an upcoming wedding, and people they knew. Tucked among those ordinary tidbits of their family life was an instruction:

“Hurrah and vote for suffrage and don’t keep them in doubt.”

Near the end, she added,

“Don’t forget to be a good boy and help Mrs. Catt.”

“Mrs. Catt” was Carrie Chapman Catt, leader of the National American Woman Suffrage Association, and the main organizer of the state campaigns to pass the Nineteenth Amendment. When the amendment finally came up for a vote, Harry Burn, thinking of his mother, said aye. His vote broke the deadlock, making Tennessee the thirty-sixth state to ratify the Nineteenth Amendment and giving women in the U.S. the right to vote.

Generations of women had organized, marched, lobbied, been arrested, endured beatings, changed Congress, and carried the amendment through thirty-five states. That work brought the country to a moment when one young man had to decide whether to obey the people threatening his political career or listen to his mother. Women have the vote, in part, because one mother wrote to one son—and he loved and trusted her enough to listen.

A map of power which treats human beings as interchangeable will always be missing something important. In a diagram of a network, every connection looks like a line. In an actual human life, some of those lines can carry almost no weight, and some carry the full weight of a lifetime of love.

It is a good thing I started working with him, because about 18 months ago, the wheels came off of my life. In addition to the concerns about the state and direction of the world that I think most of us share, and the concerns about a second Trump Administration, I also managed to stack a fairly major set of personal health issues, a company bankruptcy, a personal bankruptcy driven by the company bankruptcy, a divorce, and an extended period of unemployment on top of that. Zero stars out of five, do not recommend.

And yet.

At our sessions each week, he would ask me, “How are you orienting?” What he meant was: I can’t necessarily control the situation I’m in or the presence of all of these external stressors, but I do get to control what I focus on, how I interpret it, and who I want to be in the moment. I choose whether I stop to enjoy the greenness of the cedar tree in my yard, the sweetness of a fresh apple, the twinkle in my son’s eye as he tells me a joke. I choose whether to visualize and work towards the future I want, or whether to focus my energy and my attention on my disappointment or frustration or anger.

The ability to choose where to focus our attention is incredibly powerful. It’s not about ignoring reality or taking a simplistic view of a complex world; it’s about deciding, in this one life we each get, who we want to be and become and how we want to spend the minutes and hours and days we are given, however many there are.

And so, in the early days of this interregnum, while I was still partially bedridden and so much felt out of my control, I wrote the book that I’ve been meaning to write for the last fourteen years or so. I’ll be honest: I wasn’t sure I could write a book. For me, mostly, writing is hard and somewhat exhausting, even when at the end I’m happy with what I’ve written. But I’d given a keynote at Netroots Nation in 2012 right before Elizabeth Warren and Mazie Hirono, and I’d laid out a taxonomy of power that I thought might be useful, and I’d wanted to flesh it out more and get it out into the world to help people.

So I chose how to orient, and I wrote. And then I edited. And then I threw that away and tried again. For most of the chapters, I wrote and rewrote and revised them between seven and a dozen times, and I’m still not completely satisfied. But I got it down, and I sent out notes to some literary agents to see if one would want to represent me, and I got some kind and helpful responses from several agents and a yes from the person I signed a contract with.

The book is at a stage which in publishing is described as “out on submission” where the proposal and a sample chapter or two have been sent to publishing houses, and they are deciding whether they are interested in publishing it. Three publishing houses have expressed significant interest; several more have declined but said nice things; a few have declined and said less-nice things. It’s all a part of the process, so it’s all good.

A few weeks ago I went to Netroots Nation, the conference where I’d introduced the ideas, and I did a training on the framework. For folks who attended, I had a 56-page document they could take home, a condensed, distilled version of the taxonomy and levers of power. I’ve gotten some feedback that it’s useful, and I promised to post it here in the Substack, so here it is.

A taxonomy of power

I don’t think, in the absence of the cascade of crises in my life, I would have taken the time and focus to write the book, or to distill the taxonomy in quite this way. So to the question of how I’m orienting: I wouldn’t say this has been a blessing, but it has been an opportunity to reorient, to do something outside of my comfort zone that I might not otherwise have done.

What the caterpillar calls the end of the world
the master calls a butterfly.

Richard Bach

My mother had a stroke on Christmas Day. It was my dad’s birthday. I drove with my brother and nephew from Washington to Nebraska with a small fridge of yogurt in the back of the car.

When we got there, my mother was in hospice. The hospital had sent her there straight from the stroke because nobody expected her to survive, and they had stopped giving her food and water. My brother and I saw that every time someone moistened her lips, she reacted. She wanted water. We argued to the rest of the family that she should get to decide whether to live, rather than die of dehydration. We gave her water through a straw. She drank. She lived for several more months. She regained her speech, and the first words she said were to tell my dad that she loved him.

My father, beside her bed through all of it, ate marionberry yogurt from the fridge in the car and told me it tasted like home. Home was Coram, Montana, where he had grown up extremely poor in a town with copper mines that had polluted the groundwater. He drank that water as a kid. He left Coram at eighteen by enlisting in the United States Air Force.

His name was Ralph Gibbons. He retired as a major, but he started as an airman, which is the lowest enlisted rank, and put himself through college and then a master’s at the University of Nebraska Omaha while moving around the world for the Air Force, mostly by correspondence in the years before that was easy. He had wanted to be a pilot, but his eyesight didn’t cooperate, so instead he spent most of his Air Force career staring at a radar screen in remote outposts, watching for what the Soviets might send our way.

He never stopped loving the sky. He taught me to identify the planes flying overhead by their silhouettes; he taught me about airfoils and air flow and model rockets and space. He knew by heart the poem that begins Oh, I have slipped the surly bonds of earth, and danced the skies on laughter-silvered wings. When the Challenger exploded he grieved with me about it as a teacher, and as a man who had once wanted to fly. He wanted me to go to the Air Force Academy. He was secretly disappointed when I chose Harvard instead, though he tried to hide it.

He met my mother on a blind date in Omaha, and married her after a handful more, because he was being transferred and they didn’t want to be apart. They were married and devoted to each other for more than sixty years. He was tall and sturdy, with hands that looked enormous to me even after I was a grown woman, like he was a giant pretending to be a human. He smelled like Irish Spring soap. He was calm, slow to anger, patient with everyone in his life. Every week, until the day he died, he called the members of our extended family — his five children, his five siblings, his nieces and nephews, his grandchildren — to ask how they were.

He believed everyone was equal. “You’re no better than them, and they’re no better than you,” was how he put it. He said it to me when I was a child and he said it to me when I was a grown woman, and he meant it every time. He had grown up in a town the country had failed. He believed in the country anyway, because giving up on it meant giving up on the idea that all of us, every one of us, are created equal.

He believed in the Constitution fervently. He believed everyone had the right to speak, even when they were saying things he thought were wrong. I may not agree with what you have to say, he liked to say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it. He was a Republican for most of his life, because of the way the anti-war left had treated returning Vietnam veterans. He had enlisted out of patriotism. He saw his work as protecting people. He could not forgive the people who called the men who came home baby killers.

I am a Democrat. He never once questioned my patriotism, or treated my politics as a betrayal. He understood that he and I both believed deeply in the promise of the country, even when we thought about it differently. He did not believe Republicans and Democrats were enemies. He believed we were citizens of the same country, working — sometimes from different perspectives — on the same long unfinished project.

That project was sketched two hundred and fifty years ago. The Declaration of Independence was signed in July of 1776, and the Constitution was ratified eleven years later, and together they laid out a country an unlikely group of men had not yet figured out how to build. They knew that. They left the work for later generations. The work is never finished. It is also never abandoned, because people like my father keep showing up to do it.

I am writing about him this Memorial Day because I think the country needs to remember those things he believed: that everyone is created equal; that among our fundamental rights is freedom of speech, even for people we don’t agree with, and freedom of religion, even for people who don’t believe the same things we do. He understood that political disagreement can be constructive, rather than destructive, and that disagreement was not enmity. He believed the country was a project worth giving his life to, even though the country had failed him before he was old enough to vote.

We are in a moment when the people running the country appear to have forgotten all of this. They believe some people are not equal. They believe speech they disagree with is criminal. They believe political opponents are enemies. They believe the country is something to take from, rather than something to serve.

My father would have been heartbroken. He would also have kept showing up. He would have called everyone in the family every week. He would have mentored cadets. He would have voted in every election and treated his Democratic daughter as a fellow citizen and not a foe. He would have done the long unfinished work.

He needed minor surgery in the spring after my mother’s stroke. He went into the hospital for it. He caught influenza there from someone who wasn’t wearing a mask. He died.

We buried him at the national cemetery in Nebraska in his Civil Air Patrol uniform, which he had worn as a volunteer for more years than he had worn his Air Force uniform on active duty. He had started showing up to CAP meetings with me when I was thirteen and announced I wanted to be an astronaut. He kept showing up after I left for college. He mentored cadets for the rest of his life.

My mother went a few months later. A chaplain visited her at the nursing home. The chaplain had COVID and was not wearing a mask, because in Nebraska masking had become a left-wing conspiracy theory. She started to have trouble breathing, and she had another stroke, and she died.

Both of my parents were killed by viruses they caught from unmasked visitors. I am angry about this, and I am going to be angry for the rest of my life. I’m not just angry at the visitors, who were careless; I’m angry at the kind of thinking that would rather kill vulnerable people than take a sensible precaution because there is a political point to be made. My father did not think like that. He thought political disagreement could be honorable. He did not think it was worth killing anyone over.

She is buried with him at the national cemetery, in a matching casket. I helped find caskets for them that were made in the United States, because that would have mattered to him.

Memorial Day is for people like my father. It is for the ones who believed in the country with a particular kind of devotion - not based on the country’s perfection, but its founding promise. Poor kids from polluted Montana towns who enlisted in spite of what the country had done to them. Teachers who taught fifth and sixth graders to read after the kids had given up on themselves. Volunteers who showed up to the meetings nobody else came to. Republicans who never doubted that Democrats loved the country, and Democrats who never doubted that Republicans loved it back. People who held the line on the country’s founding idea in the small rooms of their own lives, generation after generation, even when the country itself was failing them.

You don’t have to be certain the work will succeed. You only have to keep showing up.

I am going to drive past the Family Pancake House in Redmond today, where my parents used to eat breakfast with me on their visits to Washington. I am going to think about my father: about the boy in Coram who drank polluted water and grew up believing in the country anyway; about the airman who put himself through college; about the man who knew by heart the poem about slipping the surly bonds of earth; about the Republican who never questioned his Democratic daughter’s patriotism; about the man beside my mother’s bed in hospice eating marionberry yogurt that tasted like home.

On this Memorial Day, let us remember together the promise of the American experiment and the people who have given their lives towards making it real.

So when Don Scott walked to the Speaker’s podium on January 10, 2024 and talked about the people who looked like him who had built the place, he was carrying the weight of a history longer than the life of our nation. He teared up thanking his eighty-eight-year-old mother, watching from the gallery.

“When you see me in the room,” he told his colleagues, “understand I carry all of y’all with me.”

Scott had spent nearly eight years in federal prison on drug charges. Under Virginia’s constitution, that meant he permanently lost the right to vote, not for the duration of his sentence, but forever, unless a governor personally chose to give it back.

Virginia was a slave state, the largest in the country: by 1860, one third of its population was enslaved, roughly 550,000 people. One in every eight enslaved people in the entire United States lived in Virginia. The first enslaved Africans arrived in 1619, the same year the House of Delegates first met. Slavery and representative government in Virginia are the same age.

Virginia fought to preserve slavery and lost. After the Civil War, the federal government readmitted Virginia to the Union under a law called the Readmission Act of 1870. The price of readmission was a promise that Virginia would not change its constitution to strip citizens of the right to vote, except as punishment for a short list of serious crimes, the nine felonies that existed under English common law at the time: murder, manslaughter, arson, burglary, robbery, rape, sodomy, mayhem, larceny. That was the list.

Virginia immediately started breaking the promise.

In 1876, the General Assembly added petit larceny (petty theft) to the list of crimes that cost a person the right to vote. Petty theft was not on the Readmission Act’s list. It wasn’t a common-law felony. But it was a crime that Black Virginians could easily be charged with in a system where white sheriffs decided who to arrest and white juries decided who to convict. The following year, the legislature required courts to send lists of everyone convicted of disqualifying crimes to county voting registrars. The Staunton Spectator made explicit what the system was for: “We publish elsewhere a list of negroes convicted of petit larceny,” the paper advised in 1877. “Challengers should examine it carefully.”

In 1902, a constitutional convention led by Carter Glass, a Lynchburg newspaper editor who would go on to become a U.S. Senator and one of the most powerful politicians in Virginia's history, decided they hadn't gone far enough. They expanded the list of disqualifying crimes to include forgery, perjury, embezzlement, and obtaining money under false pretenses. They added a poll tax. They added a literacy test administered by white registrars who could pass or fail anyone they chose. Glass said the purpose out loud, on the convention floor:

“Discrimination! Why, that is precisely what we propose. That, exactly, is what this Convention was elected for — to discriminate to the very extremity of permissible action under the limitations of the Federal Constitution, with a view to the elimination of every negro voter who can be gotten rid of.”

The convention didn’t submit the new constitution to voters for ratification; they just declared it was in effect. Black voter registration dropped from 147,000 to 21,000. In Richmond, from 6,000 to 760. In Jackson Ward, the heart of Black political life in the capital, from 3,000 to 33.

And the system to keep Black Virginians from voting kept expanding. By 1971, Virginia’s constitution stripped voting rights from anyone convicted of any felony, hundreds of offenses that didn’t exist in 1870, including the entire modern drug code. Drug possession was not a crime in 1870. Drug conspiracy was not a crime in 1870. But Black Virginians are incarcerated at six times the rate of white Virginians, and nationally, Black Americans make up about 5% of drug users but 29% of drug arrests. The crimes were created, the enforcement was selective, and the people convicted lost the right to vote under a provision that was never supposed to cover them. This January, a federal judge ruled that Virginia had been violating the Readmission Act all along.

How voting rights are restored, and who gets their rights back after serving the sentence, is another structural choice. Under Glass’s constitution, restoration required the governor to personally act. One person, at one person’s discretion, with no criteria and no right of appeal. Governor McAuliffe restored rights for 168,000 Virginians; Governor Northam continued that practice. Governor Youngkin ended it. The structure didn’t change, but the person in the chair did, and the structural default for what happens when nobody acts is permanent disenfranchisement. Today, more than 300,000 Virginians can’t vote: that’s one in ten Black adults of voting age in the state.

It was Governor McAuliffe’s restoration of rights that allowed Don Scott to vote again, to become a lawyer, to run for office, to win, to become the first Black Speaker in the four hundred years since slaves were brought to Virginia and the Virginia House of Delegates began operating. And from that position, Scott did something with structural power that almost nobody who has been on the receiving end of it gets the chance to do.

He changed the lines.

Last summer, Donald Trump called Texas Republicans and told them to redraw their congressional maps. This was not after a census, and not because of population shifts, but because he wanted more seats. Texas Governor Abbott called a special session, and Republicans passed maps targeting five Democratic-held seats, most of them majority-minority districts.

Missouri followed, then North Carolina followed, then Ohio followed. Trump threatened to primary any Republican who resisted. Before 2025, only two states had conducted voluntary mid-decade redistricting since 1970. By the end of the year, it was six.

Redistricting is structural power applied to elections the same way disenfranchisement is structural power applied to voters. You don’t need to change anyone’s mind: you change the lines, and the lines do the work. When Texas redraws its maps so that five Democratic seats become Republican, the voters in those districts are still there. They still show up. Their votes just don’t translate into representation anymore. The structure changed the outcome before the campaign started.

Virginia’s Democrats decided to change it back.

Within weeks of the Texas maps passing, Don Scott and the Democratic leadership announced a constitutional amendment to allow mid-decade redistricting. This was procedurally a substantial lift: Virginia requires an amendment to pass in two consecutive legislative sessions with an election in between. They passed it in October 2025. There was an election in November 2025. Then they passed it again in January 2026. They drew a map, and they put it on a special April ballot. 2.5 million Virginians showed up to vote on a single question. There was nothing else on the ballot.

Under the previous lines, Virginia has been sending six Democrats and five Republicans to Congress. Under the new map, Democrats are favored in ten of eleven districts.

Texas, Missouri, North Carolina, and Ohio tore up their maps mid-decade for partisan advantage. Republicans could net nine additional House seats from those maps alone. California countered with five, and Virginia added four. For the first time in this fight, the two sides are roughly even, because Democrats in two states decided to contest the structure instead of organizing inside lines someone else had drawn.

The fight isn’t over. A circuit court judge in Tazewell County, the same judge who blocked the referendum twice before, who ran for the House of Delegates as a Republican in 1999, called the ballot language “flagrantly misleading” and voided the results the day after the election. Virginia’s attorney general promised an immediate appeal. The Virginia Supreme Court, which already overruled this judge once to let the vote proceed, will have the final word.

And there is one more structural change moving through Virginia right now. In 2025 and 2026, the General Assembly passed a constitutional amendment to automatically restore voting rights to anyone who has completed their felony sentence. If voters approve it in November, Carter Glass’s provision, the one written for the explicit purpose of eliminating Black Virginians from politics, the one that stripped Don Scott of his right to vote, the one that still disenfranchises more than 300,000 people, comes out of Virginia’s constitution for good.

Don Scott stood at the Speaker’s podium in a chamber built by enslaved hands and carried four hundred years of history with him. Then he went to work on the structure itself.

That is the man Donald Trump is picking a fight with this week.

Most Americans know him now as Pope Leo XIV, the first American pope, elected last May. What they may not know is the man underneath the title. When the La Leche River overflowed its banks in 2017 and cut off entire neighborhoods, Robert Prevost showed up in a pickup truck with boots and a poncho and helped load aid kits himself. When the staff tried to stop him, he said, I’m here to help, to serve. When COVID hit and the hospitals ran out of oxygen, while speculators charged hundreds of dollars per tank and families suffocated in their homes, he raised money from local businesses and bought the diocese two oxygen plants. “Families were dying,” OSV News his Caritas director said later. “Thanks to Msgr. Prevost, we were able to provide free care to hundreds of families.”

That same year, as Chiclayo locked down, he walked across the city on foot carrying the Blessed Sacrament, so the people of his diocese would know their bishop had not abandoned them. He refused a personal driver and drove himself to remote villages along unpaved roads, hours from the cathedral, to say Mass for people who otherwise would not have had one. In the 1990s, living in community in Trujillo during the years of terrorism and dictatorship, he cooked pizza for his housemates because you couldn’t buy pizza in Peru. His birthday is September 14, and the parish had to block off an entire week for the celebrations, because every community inside the diocese wanted its own party.

A friend from his theology school days, Sister Barbara Reid, was asked this spring what he was actually like. She said: “He’s a person who immediately exudes kindness. He is very present to you, deeply pastoral, discerning, and trustworthy. You know that anything you say to him will be kept.”

This is the man preaching from the basilica of Saint Augustine in Algeria this week, on the second day of an eleven-day journey to Africa. He has given his life to the theology of the African saint whose basilica he now speaks from, the saint who argued that a war was justified only to protect the innocent. On February 28, the United States and Israel launched Operation Epic Fury. Pope Leo XIV said what the man who taught him what a just war looks like would have said. He called it unacceptable.

Trump called him “WEAK on Crime, and terrible for Foreign Policy.” He told reporters the Pope “said things that are wrong.” When Leo called the threat to annihilate Iran’s “whole civilization” unacceptable, Trump posted that he didn’t want a pope who “thinks it’s OK for Iran to have a Nuclear Weapon.” Then he posted an image of himself with Christ-like powers.

A former real estate developer, twice impeached, convicted of thirty-four felonies, has decided he outranks the man who carried the Blessed Sacrament across his locked-down city on foot so his people would not feel abandoned.

Then the Vice President joined in.

J.D. Vance, who was baptized Catholic in 2019, gave a Q&A at the University of Georgia in which he quoted a line Leo had posted on X — that God “is never on the side of those who once wielded the sword and today drop bombs” — and challenged it. “How can you say that God is never on the side of those who wield the sword?” Vance asked. “Was God on the side of the Americans who liberated France from the Nazis?”

Consider the specific absurdity. A recent convert, six years a Catholic, lecturing the first Augustinian pope, a man who spent half a century inside Augustine’s theology, who ran the seminaries that teach Augustine’s work, who is at this moment preaching inside the basilica named for Augustine — about what Augustine actually meant by just war. Vance is not saying Leo is wrong because of what the text says. He is saying Leo is wrong because Leo said it and Vance is Vance.

Even Giorgia Meloni, Italy’s far-right prime minister, Trump’s erstwhile ally, called the administration’s remarks unacceptable. The Iranian president rose to defend the Pope. The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops said it was disheartened. Trump has refused to apologize.

Eric Swalwell got away with what he was doing for almost twenty years.

A congressman, a prosecutor before that, a man who spent two decades in public life, with a staff, with donors, with reporters on his beat, with colleagues who saw him at every fundraiser and floor vote. For two decades, according to reporting in the San Francisco Chronicle, CNN, and NBC, he was allegedly sexually harassing, assaulting, and in at least one case raping the women around him.

How does a person do this for that long?

Not: how do they get away with it once. Not: how do they hide one bad night. How do they build a twenty-year career on top of it, rise through the ranks, chair committees, run for president, run for governor… with women in their twenties rotating through the office every cycle, each one a potential witness, each one a potential story, and none of it touching him until April of 2026?

I’ve been in a similar situation to those women. Not with Swalwell, whom I’ve never met, but with men like him. In D.C. over the years there were enough incidents that I stopped counting them as incidents and started counting them as weather.

January 2009. I was in DC for Obama’s inauguration, trying to get hired into the administration. I had dinner with a rising star of the labor movement, a man whose work has since made a real difference for American workers. I woke up in his hotel room the next morning, covered in bruises, dark marks climbing my neck, with no memory of how I got there.

Fall of 2011. I was running a progressive advocacy nonprofit. A board member demanded I come to his hotel room to talk. Once I was there, he tried to demand sex. He got physical. I got out, and I sent the board chair an email laying out what had happened. He never responded. His administrative assistant told me later she had been horrified by what happened to me, and horrified he never responded. When I eventually left DC and moved back to Washington State, I had to block the harassing board member’s email, phone number, and Facebook.

Netroots Nation, between those two dates. I had brought together a group of progressive bloggers with a sitting member of Congress and some of his staff. I got stuck sitting next to him at dinner. He was drunk, and he spent the meal trying to put his hand on my thigh. Afterwards one of the bloggers, a woman who was a friend of mine, came up to me, very concerned, and asked if I was all right. Her male boss was at the table right next to her. He had not noticed anything was happening.

I never reported any of it. I couldn’t. I didn’t work for the union, or for Congress, or for any of these men. There was no HR department somewhere with my name on a file. The only place I could have gone was the police, and I was acutely aware that filing anything would not lead to consequences for those men. The only thing reporting would have accomplished was to end my career.

The reason women don’t come forward isn’t fear of being disbelieved, exactly. It’s the math. The system is not designed to weigh the evidence, it is designed to weigh the people, and you are not the heavier one.

The women who spoke about Swalwell this month understood the math. One of them said she didn’t report the assault because she believed him when he told her he hadn’t made advances toward other women. She was wrong. There were many other women. But her calculation — his word, his reputation, his platform, against hers — was the same calculation I made in 2009, in 2011, and at that Netroots dinner.

Swalwell’s first statement after the Chronicle story was the tell. “For nearly 20 years, I have served the public — as a prosecutor and a congressman and have always protected women.”

Not “the evidence will show.” Not “I didn’t do this.” Look at my resume.

I am going to give this a name, because names matter.

A name is a tool. Once you have a word for a thing, you can see it in a way you could not see it before. For decades in this country there was no phrase for what happened to women at work — the hand on the thigh, the closed door, the veiled threat. Women knew what was happening. They did not have a word for it. In the 1970s, a group of feminists at Cornell coined one: sexual harassment. The behavior did not change overnight. But from that moment on, you could point at it. You could tell a friend what you meant in two words instead of twenty. The name gave women a handle on a thing that had been, until then, too slippery to hold.

The philosopher Miranda Fricker has described one small piece of what I am about to describe, what she calls testimonial injustice, the harm of having your credibility discounted because of who you are. Her analysis is precise and true, and I am in her debt. But the thing I am describing is bigger. It is not only that certain speakers are believed less. It is that in the system we actually live in, status has been substituted for evidence altogether. The question is no longer what is true. The question is who is allowed to be right.

I call this status-based reasoning.

The high-status person is right because they are the high-status person. Arguments are window dressing. Evidence is decoration. The conclusion is fixed before anyone opens their mouth, and everything that follows is the retroactive assembly of a justification.

Once you have the name, you can see it everywhere.

In 2005, on the first episode of The Colbert Report, Stephen Colbert named an earlier, softer version of this thing. He called it truthiness: the quality of seeming true, feeling true, being true for people who go with their gut rather than their books. “I don’t trust books,” he said, in character. “They’re all fact, no heart.”

Colbert meant it as a joke. Sort of.

Truthiness still implied sincerity, a person consulting her gut and reporting back. What we have now is colder. Truthiness was the caterpillar. Status-based reasoning is what crawled out of the cocoon.

For my entire life I have been told that American politics is a fight between left and right, safety net versus personal responsibility. I have understood for a long time that wasn’t the right way of thinking about it. I spent years in Washington watching arguments about all kind of things — the Affordable Care Act, the Iraq War, about who deserved credit for what in which meeting — collide with something that had nothing to do with the argument, and evaporate on contact. The left-right frame explained the surface. It did not explain why, underneath, the debates refused to behave like debates.

The real fight is epistemological. It is over how we decide what’s true. And one of the two answers currently on offer is: whoever has the higher status wins.

The Netroots dinner table and the Oval Office run on the same logic. A congressman’s word outranks a staffer’s word, so the staffer’s word doesn’t count, so the congressman’s word doesn’t have to be true. Once that math is stable, you can build a career on top of it. You can build a movement on top of it.

October 26, 2024. State College, Pennsylvania. A rally.

Donald Trump tells the crowd that Kamala Harris “would get us into a World War III guaranteed because she is too grossly incompetent to do the job.” He warns them that their “sons and daughters will end up getting drafted to go fight for a war in a country that you’ve never heard of.” He repeats it at rally after rally. On Truth Social: “There will be no future under Comrade Kamala Harris, because she will take us into a Nuclear World War III.”

February 28, 2026. Sixteen months later. Operation Epic Fury, launched in the early hours of the morning with joint U.S. and Israeli airstrikes on Iran. Three American soldiers dead in the first weeks. The exact scenario Trump had spent a year promising his opponent would trigger, executed by his own hand, six weeks after he took the oath.

The rest of it, he also did.

He had called Harris an “incompetent socialist lunatic” who would keep “breaking our economy for four more years.” Inflation, which had cooled to 2.5 percent under Biden-Harris, began climbing again under Trump. Sixteen Nobel laureates in economics had signed a letter warning that his plans would reignite inflation and likely trigger a recession. Sixty-eight percent of economists in a Wall Street Journal survey said prices would rise faster under him than under her. Moody’s projected his presidency would cost the economy over three million jobs compared to a Harris term. The economists were right.

He had warned that Harris would weaponize government against her enemies. He did. He had warned she would hand out favors to her friends. He did. He had warned she would appoint unqualified cronies. His cabinet is a master class in the form.

Every major prediction he made about her turned out to describe him.

In a world that ran on cause and effect, this would end a political career. The predictions failed. The warnings described the warner. The evidence is one-sided to a degree that rarely happens in politics.

In a world that runs on status, none of it registers. He is the high-status figure. She was the low-status one. He is right because he is the one who gets to be right.

This is why fact-checking doesn’t work on this movement. If your opponent’s authority rests on evidence, showing the evidence is wrong defeats them. If their authority rests on status, counter-evidence isn’t rebuttal. It’s insubordination. The response isn’t “let me reconsider.” It’s “how dare you.”

It’s why “believe women” became such a flashpoint. The slogan was never asking for women to be believed without evidence. It was asking for women’s evidence to be weighted the same as men’s. To remove the status discount from the scale. That modest request was heard as revolutionary, because it was. Removing the status discount changes who wins.

It’s why Trump could tell a rally crowd, in 2018, “just remember: what you’re seeing and what you’re reading is not what’s happening.” The evidence of your senses is lower-status than my assertion.

Don’t believe your lying eyes.

The crazy-making quality of living inside this system, on the wrong side of the line, is that the argument is never actually about the argument.

You can be right. Demonstrably. Documentably. On-the-record right.

You will lose anyway.

And then you will be told the problem is the quality of your reasoning, or the tone of your delivery, or your failure to build consensus. The goalposts move because the goalposts were never the point. The point was that you were going to lose, and the explanation would be assembled afterward.

This is what the Swalwell staffers lived inside. This is what Harris lived inside for the entirety of the 2024 campaign. This is what every woman who ever kept furniture between herself and a powerful man has lived inside her whole working life. This is where Donald Trump is trying to put Pope Leo.

Cause-and-effect reasoning is harder than it sounds. It demands that evidence be admissible regardless of who produces it. That predictions be checked against outcomes. That status be understood as something you earn by being right over time, not something that grants you the right to be correct in the moment. Most of all, it demands that the powerful change their minds when the facts contradict them. That is exactly what status-based reasoning was built to avoid.

It is also the only path that gets us to the truth. About inflation. About a war. About the man at the dinner table. About the four women with medical records and text messages who spent years being told, by the silence around them, that their story wouldn’t outrank his resume.

The fight over which axis governs is older than our parties, and it will outlast them. But right now, in 2026, one of our parties has openly committed itself to the status-based side of the line, and the other has not. Pretending otherwise is not balance. It’s capitulation dressed up as fairness.

As I write this, Pope Leo XIV is in his fourth day in Algeria. He has visited a nursing home in the port city of Annaba, run by the Little Sisters of the Poor, and spent time with the elderly residents. Speaking to them, he said what he came there to say. “God’s heart is torn apart by wars, violence, injustice and lies. But our father’s heart is not with the wicked, the arrogant or the proud.”

The man he was describing was, at that moment, in the White House, refusing to apologize.

He has never in his life encountered a room he did not assume he owned.

On the afternoon of August 7, 1980, a woman named Anna Walentynowicz walked out of the gate of the Lenin Shipyard in Gdańsk for the last time, carrying her things in a bag.

She was four-foot-ten. She had worked at the shipyard for thirty years: sixteen of them as a welder, the rest as a crane operator in W-2 section. She was small enough that her bosses had used her, in her welding years, to climb deep into the hulls of ships where the men did not fit. They had given her a bronze cross of merit, then a silver, then in 1979 a gold. She was a widow. Her son was grown. She was five months from retirement.

She was also, in their view, a problem.

She had spent years writing for and distributing an underground newsletter called Robotnik Wybrzeża, The Coastal Worker, which talked about things the official press could not: thefts at the shipyard, accidents nobody was reporting, the corruption of the official union. Every December on the anniversary of the 1970 strike, when security forces had killed fifty striking workers on the Baltic coast, she went out and collected money to buy memorial flowers, and every year the police arrested her for it. They had been looking for a reason to be rid of her. On August 7 they found one.

She did not make a scene. She gathered her things. She walked out.

If you had been standing at Gate Number 2 of the Lenin Shipyard that afternoon and someone had told you that this small woman with a bag had just lit the fuse that would end the Soviet empire, you would have laughed. There were a million fifty-year-old women in the Eastern Bloc that summer who had been quietly told they were inconvenient and quietly shown the door. Almost all of them went home, and that was the end of the story.

This one’s colleagues did not let it be the end of the story.

A week later, on August 14, the workers at the Lenin Shipyard struck. Their first demand was that Anna Walentynowicz be brought back to work. The slogan ran through the shipyard like a current: Bring Anna Walentynowicz back to work.A young electrician named Lech Wałęsa, who had been fired four years earlier and was banned from the premises, climbed over the wall to join them. Within days the strike had spread to other shipyards, then to the mines, then to factories across Poland. By the end of the month the government had signed the Gdańsk Agreement, recognizing for the first time in the history of the Communist bloc the right to organize a free trade union.

The union was called Solidarność. Solidarity. Within a year it had ten million members. In a country of thirty-five million people, it was the largest trade union in the history of the world.

Nine years later the Berlin Wall came down.

Anna said about it later: We wanted better money, improved work safety, a free trade union and my job back. Nobody wanted a revolution.

What Anna set in motion went on to dissolve an empire that, on the morning she walked out, had looked permanent. She was just trying to keep her job and bring memorial flowers to dead workers and stop pretending the thefts weren’t happening. The empire was a side effect.

How does one laid off fifty-year-old crane operator set off a chain that ends with the Berlin Wall?

A year and a bit into the second Trump administration, with wars of choice being fought, the world economy teetering, the courts being defied, the agencies being purged, the dollar dropping, masked agents on the streets, and the chair of the Federal Reserve under criminal investigation, a lot of us are quietly asking the same question, on and off, and not finding an answer that feels equal to the question.

What can I do? Me, personally?

Maybe you have been to the marches. Maybe you have given money. Maybe you have called a senator and listened to the same staffer take down your ZIP code for the eleventh time. Maybe none of it has felt like enough.

The answer Anna Walentynowicz’s life points to is, I think, the truest one available. And to explain it, let’s take a short detour through Prague.

Two years before Anna walked out of the shipyard, in 1978, a Czech playwright named Václav Havel wrote an essay called The Power of the Powerless. He set it inside the imagined shop of a greengrocer.

Every morning, like every other shopkeeper on his street, the greengrocer placed in his window a small cardboard sign reading Workers of the world, unite!

The slogan was the closing line of the Communist Manifesto and the official motto of the regime that ran his country. Shopkeepers across the Eastern Bloc were expected to display it, the way American restaurants display health inspection scores. Nobody read it. Nobody cared what it said. Its only job was to prove that the shopkeeper was the kind of person who put up the sign.

The greengrocer didn’t believe it. He didn’t think about it. He put it up because the sign was what shopkeepers put up, and not putting it up would be a problem. The Party would notice. The neighbors would notice. There would be a conversation and there would be consequences.

What if, Havel asked, the greengrocer one morning stopped putting up the sign?

Havel said something extraordinary would happen. Not to the regime, not yet, but to the greengrocer. He would have stopped pretending. And by the simple physical fact of an empty window, he would have addressed his neighbors. He would have said, in a language anyone passing the shop could read: I do not consent.

And other people, on their way to put up their own signs, would have to ask themselves a question they had been very carefully not asking.

Havel called this living in truth. He wrote that it was the most dangerous thing a person could do to a system that runs on lies.

He wrote it from inside that system. He went to prison for it. Eleven years later, in November of 1989, the playwright became the president of Czechoslovakia.

A month after Donald Trump first took office, in February of 2017, a Yale historian named Timothy Snyder published a book called On Tyranny that compressed Havel’s insight into five words. He put them as the first lesson, before all the others, because he believed they came first in time.

Do not obey in advance.

Most of the power of authoritarianism is freely given. In times like these, individuals think ahead about what a more repressive government will want, and then offer themselves without being asked. A citizen who adapts in this way is teaching power what it can do.

Snyder calls it anticipatory obedience. Same coin as the sign in the greengrocer’s window. Anticipatory obedience is how the regime gets paid. Living in truth is how the payments stop.

Force-based regimes mostly do not run on force.

I wrote earlier this week about what I call the legitimacy subsidy. People obey governments mostly because they consent to them—they believe the system is legitimate, so they willingly comply. When that consent stops, enforcement becomes ruinously expensive. Pull the subsidy, and the regime starts paying retail for everything it used to get on credit.

Where does this subsidy come from? It comes from a hundred million tiny daily transactions we barely notice making. You stop at the stoplight, you pay your taxes, you follow the rules. The shopkeeper puts up the sign. Each person thinks ahead, imagines what the authorities might want, and offers it without being asked.

Taken alone, these offerings look trivial. Taken together, they are the budget that makes the whole authoritarian apparatus affordable. Without them, the regime cannot pay.

Anna Walentynowicz had been refusing the small daily payments for years. She refused to pretend the thefts weren’t happening. She refused to pretend the workers killed in 1970 hadn’t died. She refused to pretend the official union represented her. Every December she walked into the police station with the flowers anyway. The regime decided it could not afford her.

What it could not afford was not her. What it could not afford was the fact that other people had been watching her do it.

Within a week, twelve thousand of them stopped pretending. Within a month, ten million.

So: what do you do?

You follow Timothy Snyder’s advice: you do not consent in advance.

You look at what is happening on your block and you decide it is your problem.

Once you know what to look for, you see those empty windows everywhere. You see it in San Diego, where volunteers and teachers started driving early-morning patrols to push ICE vehicles out of Barrio Logan. You see it in Morristown, Tennessee, where teachers built their own meal delivery systems for kids too afraid to attend school after a raid. You see it across Los Angeles and Chicago, where ordinary people spun up mutual aid networks overnight to deliver groceries and medicine to neighborhoods in lockdown. Nobody asked them to do it. They just looked at what was happening on their block and decided it was their problem.

A few weeks ago, eight million people showed up to No Kings 3 at 3,300 events in all fifty states. It was the largest single-day protest in American history. Nearly half the events were in red or battleground states. People marched in Driggs, Idaho, a town of fewer than two thousand where Trump won with sixty-six percent of the vote. In Billings, Montana, five thousand people turned out for the largest protest in the city’s history. In Kotzebue, Alaska. In East Glacier Park, Montana. Someone in Portland held a sign that read: “So bad, even introverts are here.”

None of these people, taken alone, could bring down this authoritarian regime. But by refusing to look away, refusing to cooperate, each refusal was a withdrawal from the legitimacy account that this administration is burning through faster than any in American history. And each one made the next refusal easier for the person watching.

That is how it worked in Gdańsk. Anna Walentynowicz refused to cooperate in advance, every day, for years, until the regime decided it could not afford her. And then it could not afford the people who had been watching her. And then it could not afford the people who had been watching them.

She lived to see Solidarity win. She lived to see Wałęsa become the first non-Communist president of Poland. She lived to see the empire that fired her dissolve.

On April 10, 2010, at the age of eighty, she boarded a Polish Air Force plane bound for Smolensk. She was traveling with the President of Poland and ninety-four other leaders to commemorate the seventieth anniversary of the Katyn massacre, where the Soviets had murdered twenty-two thousand Polish officers in 1940 and spent fifty years lying about it. The plane went down in fog. There were no survivors. She spent her whole life refusing to pretend the dead hadn't died., and she died doing it.

Most of the power of authoritarianism is freely given. A four-foot-ten crane operator from Gdańsk understood that in her bones.

Live in truth. Do not obey in advance.

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Péter Magyar voted on Sunday morning at a polling place in a leafy district of Budapest called Hegyvidék. He took a selfie with a woman in a puffer coat. He held a brief press conference for the international media. By midnight he had handed Viktor Orbán the largest electoral defeat any sitting authoritarian populist has suffered in the twenty-first century.

Magyar is forty-five years old. Two years ago almost nobody in Hungary had heard of him. He had spent most of his career as a Fidesz man, a member of Orbán’s own party, married to Orbán’s justice minister, a fixture of state company boards and government commissions. Then, in early 2024, after a scandal he refused to help cover up, he broke publicly with the party. He started a new movement called Tisza. He spent the next two years driving around Hungary in a van, holding town-hall meetings in places no national politician had bothered to visit in years. On Sunday, Tisza won fifty-four percent of the vote and a two-thirds supermajority in parliament. Turnout was the highest Hungary had seen since the fall of communism in 1989.

This was not supposed to be possible.

Viktor Orbán was supposed to be unbeatable. He had spent sixteen years building the kind of regime that Donald Trump and his coalition openly admire and openly try to copy. Friendly courts. Captured media. Weakened universities. Districts gerrymandered to the point of cartoonishness. State resources funneled into his party through every channel his lawyers could find. Deepfake videos circulating in the final week. Cash payments to favored districts. Five days before the election, Vice President JD Vance flew to Budapest in person to campaign for him at a “Day of Friendship” rally. Donald Trump posted on Truth Social, offering “the full Economic Might of the United States” to prop up Hungary’s economy if Orbán needed it.

None of it worked. Orbán conceded before midnight. The crowds in Budapest chanted Russians, go home.

Why? Why did the courts, the media, the gerrymanders, the deepfakes, and the American vice president fail to save the man who had spent sixteen years showing Donald Trump how it was done? Why does a regime that controls every visible lever of power suddenly lose to a forty-five-year-old former insider in a van?

To answer that question, it helps to look at another country.

By 1989, the East German government, the German Democratic Republic, had built the most invasive surveillance apparatus the world has ever seen.

The Ministry for State Security (the Stasi) kept files on roughly six million people in a country of sixteen million. More than a third of the population was under surveillance. They employed 91,000 full-time officers. They ran a network of nearly two hundred thousand unofficial informants on top of that: neighbors, coworkers, husbands, wives, even children, reporting on the people around them. By some estimates, counting occasional informers, one in every six and a half adults in East Germany was passing information to the secret police. Nothing in the modern history of states comes close.

Now ask the same question. Why? Why did this government need to spend so much of its national resources on watching its own people? Why was a Stasi necessary at all, when democracies of comparable size were running their countries with a small fraction of the personnel?

The answer to both questions, to understanding what happened in Hungary on Sunday, and to what was happening in East Germany forty years ago, is the same answer.

For the most part, people stop at red lights even when there is no cop in sight. They stop because they accept that traffic laws make sense, that the system is fair enough, that the rules apply to them the way they apply to everyone else. Multiply that by every American filing a tax return, every soldier following an order, every bank honoring a check, every foreign central bank parking its savings in U.S. Treasuries. None of that is force. All of it is built on consent, on the consent of the governed.

Consent is what makes force cheap.

It is the legitimacy subsidy that runs underneath every powerful regime in history, and it is the most undervalued asset on any government’s balance sheet. With it, you can run a country on a normal-sized police force and borrow money at four percent. Without it, you need East German numbers of secret police and you pay fourteen percent.

Force at full price is ruinously expensive.

By the late 1980s, almost no one in the German Democratic Republic believed the official story anymore. Nobody thought the rules were fair. Nobody thought the state was legitimate. So the state had to do, by force, what every functioning regime in history has done by consent. It had to police every conversation. It had to put a watcher in every apartment building. It had to manufacture, at staggering cost, the cooperation that working systems get for free.

It worked, in the way that holding your breath works. Right up until it didn’t. And then the Berlin Wall came down in a few weeks.

The same thing, in slow motion, was happening to Viktor Orbán.

One way to think about power is that there are six kinds of power in the world. Three of them (political, economic, and enforcement) are force-based. They can compel. They are visible. They are the part of the iceberg above the waterline, and they are what almost everyone means when they say the word power. The other three (cultural, moral, and network) are consent-based. They don’t compel anything. They tell the story of who we are, and who we ought to be, and who can reach whom. They are the part of the iceberg below the water: invisible, enormous, and the entire reason the visible part stays upright.

The legitimacy subsidy is the line where those two halves meet. It is the conversion mechanism. When the consent-based powers are working, when the story holds, when the moral case feels right, when the networks carry it through the population — the force-based powers operate almost for free. Most people just go along. When the consent-based powers shift, the subsidy dries up, and the force-based powers have to start paying full freight for everything they used to get on credit.

This is why regimes built on force are always more fragile than they look. Not as a moral observation. As an accounting one.

Through this lens, the second Trump administration is not a winning streak. It is an arsonist setting fire to his own house.

He is not consolidating power. He is spending the subsidy that made his power cheap, and he is spending it fast.

Start at home. Planes flown to El Salvador after a federal judge ordered them turned around. A federal judge finding probable cause for contempt over those flights. The Justice Department filing an unprecedented suit against an entire district court bench in Maryland. Whistleblowers from inside the Justice Department reporting that defying judges was the strategy, not an accident. A sitting Vice President saying out loud that judges who rule against the administration should be removed. An executive order trying to redefine birthright citizenship that every court that has touched it has called blatantly unconstitutional. Masked agents grabbing people off the street with no badges, no warrants visible, no due process. Federal employees fired in defiance of court orders to reinstate them. Universities pressured into compliance. The chair of the Federal Reserve under criminal investigation.

Each of these things, taken alone, looks like the administration getting its way. That is how it gets reported, and that is how Trump’s coalition experiences it.

It is not what is actually happening.

What is actually happening is that each of those things teaches some new constituency that the system isn’t fair, isn’t predictable, and doesn’t deserve their voluntary cooperation. Judges. Federal workers. University administrators. Soldiers. Immigrants who used to comply with ICE check-ins because compliance felt safer than flight. Ordinary people who used to assume the government wasn’t lying to them. Each of those people is a withdrawal from the legitimacy account. Once they are gone, you do not get them back by signing another executive order.

Now look abroad. Same play, bigger stage. Trump opened 2026 by threatening to annex Greenland and slapping escalating tariffs on eight NATO allies for refusing to go along. He launched a war on Iran without consulting any ally and then publicly raged at NATO members for declining to send their navies into the Strait of Hormuz to clean up his mess. He has called NATO a paper tiger. He has questioned Article 5 out loud, repeatedly. He has used the dollar settlement system as a coercion tool so aggressively that countries with no particular love of China are quietly building alternatives.

Mark Carney, the Canadian Prime Minister, ran the Bank of England before politics. He is not a man given to dramatic rhetoric. Last month, he described what is happening to the U.S.-led world order with one word: rupture.

The obvious objection is that Trump still has his base. He won the popular vote. His coalition watches the El Salvador deportations and cheers. The masked ICE agents are heroes to a third of the country. Every court ruling against him is, to MAGA, evidence that he is the only one fighting for them. The legitimacy subsidy may be draining from the elites and the institutions and the allies, but the people who matter to Trump are still with him.

Or so the story goes.

The polling says the story is wrong.

In CBS News surveys, Trump’s net approval among white voters without a college degree — his core demographic, the people who put him in office — went from plus thirty-six in February 2025 to minus four this month. That’s a forty-point negative swing in fourteen months. Among self-described MAGA supporters specifically, approval has dropped five points since the Iran war began. Among Republicans overall: down five. Among 2024 Trump voters: down six. Among independents: twenty-two percent. CNN has him at thirty-five percent overall, thirty-three percent on Iran. Pew has him at sixty-one percent disapproval on Iran. Harry Enten at CNN ran the numbers and found that Trump’s disapproval on inflation now exceeds both Jimmy Carter and Joe Biden at comparable points in their presidencies. The generic congressional ballot has Democrats up nearly six points.

The number that matters most in any of those polls is one that didn’t show up.

John Cluverius is a political scientist at the University of Massachusetts Lowell who tracks presidential approval ratings for a living. He is, by profession, exactly the kind of person who knows what a normal pattern looks like. American presidents who start wars almost always get a rally-around-the-flag bounce that lasts months before public opinion turns. It is one of the most reliable findings in political science. When Cluverius’s April poll came out last week, the rally bounce was missing. He called the Iran war “an unmitigated public-opinion disaster” because Trump had skipped the rally entirely and gone straight to the decline.

That is not how this normally works. It happens when the consent-based foundations have already shifted before the war begins. It happens when the population is no longer willing to extend the wartime president the benefit of the doubt that Americans normally extend by reflex.

The subsidy was already draining. Iran just made it visible.

The bills are starting to arrive.

The international ones are the easiest to see, because they come denominated in dollars. The United States has spent seventy-five years enjoying what economists politely call exorbitant privilege: the ability to borrow in our own currency at below-market rates because every reserve manager on Earth parked their savings in U.S. debt. That privilege is not a law of physics. It is the legitimacy subsidy with a yield curve attached.

The dollar has dropped roughly ten percent on a trade-weighted basis in the first year of Trump’s second term. Not in a slow grind. In sharp jolts that line up almost perfectly with his most erratic moments. The April 2025 tariff rollout. The January 2026 Greenland threats. Each shock produced something the textbooks say is not supposed to happen: the dollar fell and Treasury yields rose at the same time. That is not a flight to safety. That is capital walking out the door. Deutsche Bank’s head of FX research called it uncharted territory. Traders had to invent a name for it. They called it the Sell America trade.

The structural picture is contested: reserve managers are slow to move, and the dollar still dominates global trade. But the trend is real and the trajectory is wrong. European NATO members increased their defense spending by more than sixty percent between 2020 and 2025 and are now mobilizing close to eight hundred billion euros under the explicit assumption that the United States will not be there. None of that is happening because Europe woke up loving Trump. It is happening because the subsidy is gone and they are pricing in what comes next.

The domestic bills are harder to see, because they don’t come with a yield attached. But they are just as real. Immigration enforcement that used to run on voluntary check-ins now requires masks, soldiers, thousands of agents per high-profile raid, constant litigation, and a population that is becoming structurally non-cooperative. That is not cheap. That is the opposite of cheap. The previous version of immigration enforcement worked because most people complied voluntarily, because the system carried enough perceived legitimacy that compliance was safer than flight. Burn the legitimacy and every arrest now requires the full apparatus of force.

The same pattern is showing up everywhere. Federal workers refuse to leave when they’re fired. Whistleblowers leak. Judges who used to give the executive enormous deference now write opinions with visible exasperation. States sue every other Friday. Universities lawyer up. The friction coefficient on every action this administration tries to take is rising, and rising friction means rising cost.

Force-based regimes do not gradually weaken. They usually look invincible right up until they don’t.

East Germany looked invincible in October 1989. The Wall came down in November. The Shah looked invincible in 1978 and was gone by January 1979. Mubarak looked invincible the week before he wasn’t. The Soviet Union looked invincible the year before it dissolved. Viktor Orbán looked invincible the morning of April 12, 2026. By the end of the night he had conceded.

In every one of those cases, the visible institutions held right up until the moment the legitimacy subsidy underneath them ran dry. Then everything collapsed at once. And afterward everyone said they had seen it coming, even though almost nobody had.

But collapse is not automatic. The bills come due either way. Whether they bring down the regime depends entirely on whether something better is ready to take its place.

East Germany fell in a few weeks because Solidarity had already broken Poland, because Hungary had already opened its border, because Gorbachev had already decided not to send the tanks, and because there were enough East Germans in the streets of Leipzig every Monday for months that the regime ran out of options. Hungary fell in one night because Péter Magyar had spent two years driving a van around the country building Tisza into something voters could actually grant their consent to, and because the opposition coalition put their differences aside long enough to give the country a coherent alternative. The subsidy ran out in both cases. That part was structural. What was waiting on the other side was not.

This is where the framework turns into a job description.

The fight for the United States right now is not the fight to control the visible institutions. Trump already has those. The fight is for the legitimacy subsidy underneath them, which is generated by cultural power, moral power, and network power: the story of who we are, the story of who we ought to be, and who can reach whom. Every act of organized non-cooperation is a withdrawal from a regime that absolutely cannot afford to pay full price for what it is doing. Every judge who writes a sharp opinion. Every soldier who refuses an unlawful order. Every European leader who builds the workaround. Every reserve manager who quietly buys gold instead of Treasuries. Every citizen who shows up at the courthouse, the school board, the town hall.

But that is only half the work. The other half is building the thing that is ready to be granted consent next: an organized opposition with a real story, real moral credibility, and real reach. That is what Magyar built in Hungary. That is what Solidarity built in Poland. That is what is not fully built yet here.

Trump and his people think they are accumulating power. They are not. They are spending a subsidy they did not build, do not understand, and cannot replenish. The Stasi spent its subsidy too. And in the end the watchers and the filing cabinets and the apartment-building informants and the microphones in the lampshades did not save the German Democratic Republic. They were what it had instead of legitimacy. They were the bill it could not stop paying. And when it could no longer pay, the whole thing came down in a few weeks.

The question for us is whether when the subsidy finishes draining out of this regime there is something organized enough and morally credible enough waiting to be the thing that people grant their consent to next.

That part is on us.

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Last month, Blazing Bagels—a Redmond institution for twenty-five years, with multiple locations, a wholesale business, and a fiercely loyal customer base—abruptly shut down and filed for Chapter 7 bankruptcy. Employees got an email. Customers showed up to locked doors and handwritten signs.

Within days, Andrew Villeneuve of the Northwest Progressive Institute published an analysis of the bankruptcy filing. His verdict: mismanagement. The founder’s daughters had taken over after his retirement, and Villeneuve painted a picture of decline, an “almost nonstop downhill ride” since the transition. The subtext was clear: this failure belonged to the people running the business.

I read that and I found myself frustrated. I like and respect Andrew, but this was like the frustration of watching someone describe the scene of an accident without noticing the road conditions.

I ran a small manufacturing business in Washington State for more than a decade. Buttonsmith made custom buttons, magnets, and badges using software-driven, just-in-time manufacturing, with over a million customers served, more than $5 million in annual revenue at our peak. My son and I co-founded it. He made Forbes 30 Under 30 for it. Our innovation got national and international attention. And we closed in January 2025. The business failure forced me into personal bankruptcy. Like most small business owners, I had to personally guarantee Buttonsmith’s debts and contracts, so I’m starting over at 55 in the teeth of a terrible job market while the safety net shreds beneath me.

I know exactly what it feels like to be the camel.

The Weight on the Camel’s Back

Here’s what running a small business that makes physical goods in Washington State actually looks like:

• You pay the highest minimum wage in the country. I want to be clear: I’m not arguing against the minimum wage. Workers deserve to be paid fairly, and there are good reasons Washington has set the floor where it has. But every dollar of that wage comes directly out of a small business’s operating margin. That’s a fact, and we should say it out loud.

• You pay the Business & Occupation tax, Washington’s main business tax, which is a gross receipts tax. Not a tax on profit. A tax on revenue. If you sell a physical product, you’re taxed on the full sale price, not on the sliver of margin you actually keep. A software company with 80% margins and a bagel shop with 8% margins pay the same rate on the same revenue. The B&O tax hits businesses that make and sell physical things far harder than businesses that sell services or software. The legislature actually acknowledged this problem in the bill Governor Ferguson just signed: they doubled the small business B&O credit and exempted businesses grossing under $300,000. That’s a tacit admission that the tax was crushing small businesses. But if you gross $400,000 making bagels? You’re still paying tax on every dollar of revenue whether you made a dime of profit or not.

• You comply with paid sick leave, paid family leave, and an expanding set of mandates that each, individually, are good things for workers. But each one adds cost, administrative complexity, compliance risk, and paperwork. You either do it yourself, burning hours you should be spending running your business, or you pay someone to do it for you. Either way, it costs money you may not have.

• You have to file sales tax with rates calculated for each receiving address any customer got your items at, with nearly four hundred possible tax rates just in Washington.

• You went through the pandemic. Washington shut down longer than any other state and opened up more slowly. Maybe you survived it as Blazing Bagels did under its founder, but you came out weaker, with less cash, more debt, and a customer base whose habits had changed.

And then your landlord raises the rent, or your lease runs out, and you need to find a new location. Now you’re navigating permitting, zoning, inspections, business licensing… a maze of municipal friction that exists for no ideological reason at all, serves no progressive value, and can take months to clear. For Blazing Bagels, which was near the new Marymoor Village light rail station in a location where the landlord was apparently being difficult, the inability to quickly relocate may have been the final blow.

No single one of these things killed Blazing Bagels. But we should be clear about the cumulative weight.

The Straw Fallacy

When progressives talk about small business failures, there is a tendency to treat each failure as an individual story of personal responsibility while ignoring the environment those businesses are operating in.

Could Whitney and Jenna Ballen have run Blazing Bagels differently? Maybe. Could different management decisions have bought them more time? Possibly. But they were trying to run a food-production business in one of the most expensive, most regulated, most demanding operating environments in the country, with post-pandemic headwinds, declining discretionary income among their customers, rising ingredient costs, and a landlord situation that was squeezing them.

When you stack enough straws on enough camels, some of them are going to fall. That’s not a surprise. That’s math. And pretending that each fallen camel is a story about that particular camel’s moral failings, rather than a predictable consequence of the straw-loading policy you chose, is dishonest.

It may be inadvertently dishonest. I don’t think Andrew Villeneuve sat down and thought, “I’m going to blame this business owner for a systemic problem.” I think he genuinely believes that a well-managed business should be able to survive in this environment. But that belief requires not looking too closely at the math, or at how many other camels are also struggling under the same weight.

The Moonshot Tax

This problem just got a new dimension in Washington. Governor Ferguson signed the millionaires’ tax five days ago: a 9.9% income tax on household income above $1 million, effective in 2028. This comes on top of the capital gains tax that was already increased in 2025.

Whatever you think about taxing the wealthy (and there are strong progressive arguments for it) this changes the math for anyone thinking about starting a business.

Here’s how small business creation usually works: someone takes a huge personal risk, works brutally hard for years with uncertain income, and hopes that if they build something valuable, they’ll eventually get a payoff through a sale or an exit. That payoff is the incentive that justifies the risk. You’re not doing it for the salary: in the early years, you’re probably making less than your employees.

When you increase the tax on that eventual payoff, first with a capital gains tax, now with an income tax that captures exits above $1 million, you’re changing the risk-reward calculation at the front end, before the business even exists. Some number of people who would have taken the leap will look at the new math and decide it’s not worth it. Some number of existing business owners who are hanging on, hoping for an eventual exit, will decide to shut down instead.

We will never see these businesses. We’ll never know what jobs they would have created, what products they would have made, what communities they would have anchored. They’ll be invisible, which makes them politically very easy to ignore.

But they’re real. And pretending that changing the incentive structure doesn’t change behavior is just as dishonest as pretending that loading more weight on the camel doesn’t increase the number of camels that fall.

What I’m Actually Asking For

I’m not asking that we progressives abandon progressive policy: I believe in a fair minimum wage; I believe workers deserve paid sick leave; I believe the wealthy should contribute more. I’ve spent most of my career in progressive politics, running for office, standing up the non-profits for the Congressional Progressive Caucus, serving on the boards of ActBlue and NARAL and Netroots Nation and the Center for International Policy and PeacePAC. I’m deeply progressive.

I’m asking for two things.

First: be honest about the tradeoffs. When you raise the minimum wage, say out loud, “We believe the benefit to workers is worth the fact that some businesses will fail as a result.” When you impose a gross receipts tax, acknowledge that it hits makers harder than software companies. When you add a mandate, recognize that the compliance cost falls disproportionately on the smallest businesses, the ones with no HR department and no compliance team. Own the choice. Don’t pretend there isn’t one.

Second: reduce every cost that isn’t serving a progressive value. Permitting delays aren’t a progressive value. Baroque filing requirements aren’t a progressive value. Zoning rules that prevent a beloved bagel shop from relocating when its landlord gets greedy aren’t a progressive value. Disproportionate fines for late paperwork filings by tiny businesses aren’t a progressive value. These are just friction, and every bit of unnecessary friction compounds the weight of the policies you do believe in.

If you’re going to load the camel (and you are, and some of those loads are worth carrying) then you owe it to the camel to take off every ounce of weight that doesn’t need to be there. You owe it to the bagel shop, and to the button factory, and to every small business owner who took a risk because they believed they could build something.

And when one of them falls, you owe them better than a scathing analysis of their bankruptcy filing.

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Those tapes ended forty years of losing.

Right now, with the Republican Party splintering over Epstein, a war in Iran spreading like wildfire with no exit strategy, and an economy punishing the people who were promised prosperity, his story contains the seeds of a solution for Democrats.

In 1954, Republicans lost the House of Representatives. They didn’t get it back until 1994.

In that forty years between one Republican Speaker and the next, America desegregated its schools, fought Vietnam, put men on the moon, watched Nixon insist he was not a crook, watched the Berlin Wall go up and come back down, and invented the personal computer. An entire generation of House Republicans served their whole careers in the minority. They chaired no committees. They set no agendas. They couldn’t bring a bill to the floor. The Democrats who ran the House didn’t need Republican input, didn’t seek it, and didn’t pretend to.

The Republican leadership made its peace with this. They got along with the Democrats. They cut small deals. They had nice offices.

A backbencher from Georgia named Newt Gingrich did not have a nice office.

Gingrich had been elected in 1978, and from his first term he was a problem for his own leadership. He didn’t want to be a comfortable minority. He wanted the majority, and he had a theory about why his party couldn’t get it: three hundred Republicans were running three hundred separate races, each on its own terms, and nothing added up because there was nothing to add up to. They weren’t a team. They were three hundred people who happened to have the same letter after their names.

In 1986, Gingrich started to fix it.

He took over a political action committee called GOPAC and turned it into something American politics had never previously seen: a farm system.

GOPAC didn’t just raise money. It recruited candidates, trained them, and taught them how to talk. The operation mailed cassette tapes (this was the 1980s, young friends, that was the highest tech option) and printed guides to aspiring Republicans across the country: not just people running for Congress, but city council members, state legislators, school board candidates, anyone who might run for anything someday. The tapes taught them how to frame issues, draw contrasts, and sound like part of something larger than their own district.

By one count, nearly half the Republican freshmen elected between 1990 and 1994 had come through GOPAC. John Boehner, who went on to become Speaker of the House, later said that without those tapes, he probably wouldn’t have run for Congress at all.

Nobody noticed, because it didn’t look like politics. It looked like a guy mailing cassette tapes.

In 1990, GOPAC put out a memo called “Language: A Key Mechanism of Control.” Gingrich had developed it with a young pollster named Frank Luntz, who tested words and phrases to find the ones that moved people. The memo was blunt. Two lists. Here are the words you use to describe us: freedom, truth, moral, courage, prosperity, liberty. Here are the words you use to describe them: decay, traitors, corrupt, radical, sick, pathetic.

This memo did enormous damage to American political culture, the beginning of the toxic discourse we’re drowning in now. But the strategic effect was immediate. For the first time, Republican candidates in Oregon and Georgia and Ohio and Florida sounded like they were on the same side. Hundreds of isolated local races started to feel like one national movement.

And they didn’t just sound like a team. GOPAC had connected them to each other with the same tapes, the same guides, many of them meeting at GOPAC events. When Gingrich called, they picked up, because they knew him and they trusted the system that had helped them get where they were.

Then, in 1994, he did the thing that made him famous, though it was really the last step, not the first.

Six weeks before the midterms, he gathered more than three hundred Republican candidates and sitting members on the steps of the Capitol. The visual was extraordinary, hundreds of people standing together, a show of unity that congressional campaigns had never produced. They signed a single document: the Contract with America. Ten specific things they’d bring to a vote in the first hundred days if voters gave them the majority. A balanced budget amendment. Welfare reform. Tax cuts. Term limits. And a line no politician had said before: “If we break this Contract, throw us out.”

The items were a mix of popular and cynical. That almost didn’t matter. What mattered was what the Contract did: it turned three hundred separate races into one race. You weren’t voting for your local Republican. You were voting for a written agenda that connected your district to every district in the country. The midterms stopped being three hundred local elections and became a national referendum.

Democrats responded by mocking it. They called it the “Contract on America.” Then they went back to running three hundred separate campaigns.

Individuals against a team.

Republicans gained fifty-four seats, taking the House for the first time since 1954. They brought nine of ten Contract items to a vote in the first hundred days and passed every one — 299 out of 302 votes in favor.

Forty years in the wilderness. Eight years building a team. Six weeks showing voters what that team stood for.

Right now, the Republicans control the House, the Senate, and the White House. But they are fracturing over the Epstein files, the war with Iran spreading through the Middle East with no plan for how it ends, an economy hammering their own voters and their own districts. The coalition that looked monolithic six months ago is coming apart, because a party built around a personality instead of a platform has nothing to hold it together once the personality starts costing people more than it’s paying them.

What do we need to do in order to win back the House, win the Senate, and win over the country?

We need to play politics as a team sport, not an individual one.

On the plus side, we’re not starting from zero.

Amanda Litman’s Run for Something has recruited and trained young progressives for down-ballot races since 2017, for school board, city council, and state legislature, and connected them to each other in peer networks organized by state. Sixteen hundred of them have won. Since November, sixty-five thousand new people have signed up to run. That’s a farm system.

Swing Left is pouring twelve million dollars into 2026, their largest midterm investment ever, and sending volunteers into swing districts now, not in October, to have real conversations with voters about what they actually need. Indivisible has two thousand local groups in every state, people who show up on the streets to show the power of the grassroots.

We’re most of the way there. What’s missing is the thing that made the Contract work: a shared platform. Run for Something recruits candidates. Swing Left contacts voters. Indivisible organizes locally. But there’s no simple document that connects them — no ten items, no “if we break this, throw us out.” Every candidate still writes their own message. Three hundred separate races, same as 1994.

We need a story that connects every local race to every other local race in the country, so voters know what they’re voting for.

November is eight months away. It’s not yet too late.

The next time you talk to a candidate or an elected official or a Democratic Party officer, ask them: what’s our contract for America?

A company would love to keep every dollar of revenue. The only reason it hands some of those dollars to you is that it can’t get what it needs any other way. Your time is finite. Your skills took years to build. There aren’t enough people who can do what you do. You have leverage, and leverage gets paid.

We never think about this. It’s like gravity.

AI is about to turn off the gravity. Not because it’s smarter than you, but because it’s cheaper, faster, and never needs to sleep. I studied computer science in college and have spent the last year doing a deep dive into AI, so I don’t say this as someone who’s afraid of the technology. I say it as someone who uses it every day and can see what’s coming. For white-collar work across accounting, legal research, marketing, software development, and project management, “good enough and endlessly available” is already here.

Since 2022, tech companies worldwide have laid off more than 700,000 workers. In just the last week, Jack Dorsey cut nearly half of Block’s workforce and said explicitly that AI made them unnecessary. His stock surged 24%. Then he predicted that most companies would follow within a year. Microsoft’s AI chief, Mustafa Suleyman, told the Financial Times that most white-collar tasks will be “fully automated by an AI within the next 12 to 18 months.”

Every one of those lost paychecks ripples outward: payroll taxes that fund Social Security, income taxes that fund schools, mortgages that prop up banks, consumer spending that keeps Main Street alive. Multiply that by millions and the entire circulatory system of the American economy starts to shut down. Blue-collar workers lose their customers. Capital loses its returns. Social Security, already heading toward insolvency around 2033, accelerates toward the cliff. There is no version of this where one part of the economy collapses and the rest keeps humming.

But there is a way through it. Before we get there, though, we need to understand why the two groups with the most power to act are both making it worse.

Two Failures

The tech oligarchs see the problem coming. Sam Altman talks about universal basic income. Elon Musk muses about a world where no one needs to work. Marc Andreessen writes manifestos about abundance for all. Now watch what they do: they’re lobbying to gut Social Security and Medicare, buying up AI infrastructure so a handful of companies control it, and arguing that government oversight would hold humanity back. They want to tear down the current system beforethey’ve built the replacement.

The logic is straightforward: every dollar the government collects in taxes is a dollar that can’t be invested in the AI buildout. When they argue for cutting public programs, they’re clearing the field for their own capital needs. But “abundance is coming” is not going to cover anyone’s mortgage.

That kind of suffering is easy to overlook from a private jet.

Meanwhile, the left has so far failed to articulate a compelling alternate vision. A significant chunk of the left wants to block AI entirely, which won’t stop it from being built — it’ll just be built by people with less interest in fair outcomes. The right has a coherent economic story: free markets, low taxes, growth that lifts all boats. It’s wrong in important ways, but it’s a story. The left’s counter-story is too often just a catalog of things we oppose. A list of problems is not a vision. And you can’t win the most important economic fight of the century without one.

So let me offer one.

The Alaska Answer

In 1976, Alaska faced a version of the problem we’re about to face. The state was sitting on enormous natural resource wealth, and the question was straightforward: who benefits? The oil companies that extract it? The government that taxes it? Or the people who live there?

Alaska chose everyone. They amended their constitution to create a permanent fund, invested the oil revenue, and starting in 1982 began sending every resident an equal annual dividend. The program isn’t perfect — the dividend amount has become a perennial political fight, and since 2018 the fund has also been tapped to cover more than half of state government operations. The 2025 dividend was $1,000, the lowest in inflation-adjusted history. But the core principle has survived over four decades of political pressure: when the land produces wealth, the people who live on it get a share, not as charity, but as a right built into the structure. The fund now stands at more than $83 billion.

AI is about to become the most productive resource on earth. So who gets the share?

Right now the answer is a very small number of companies and their investors. But AI didn’t emerge from nothing. It was built on publicly funded research, trained on data generated by billions of people, developed by workers educated in public universities, and deployed over an internet that began as a government project. The public has a legitimate claim to a share of the wealth this technology produces. A national fund built on equity stakes in AI-driven companies would formalize that claim. The machines generate the wealth. The fund captures a share. Every American gets a dividend.

That’s the foundation. But a dividend alone won’t be enough if the rest of the economy is collapsing around it. The tax base has to follow the value: right now we fund nearly everything by taxing paychecks, and if AI eliminates the paychecks, the funding vanishes. Tax the company that replaces 500 workers and triples its output, because that value is real and the current code barely touches it. Build a real bridge for the people caught in the transition, because the current unemployment system is useless for people whose entire profession just evaporated. Put people to work on things that actually matter, because we have a massive aging population without enough caregivers, infrastructure that’s falling apart, and schools that are desperate for teachers — the work is there, the market just won’t fund it, and a WPA-scale public employment program would absorb displaced workers while getting critical things done.

These are the mechanics. Every one has precedent. None is utopian. And yes, they require a government that works better than the one we have now. Building that capacity is itself part of the project, and anyone who says we can’t is really saying we shouldn’t try. But these are only the machinery of a larger idea, and the larger idea is what actually matters.

What We’re Building Toward

For most of human history, economies have been organized around scarcity. There isn’t enough, so we compete. Your worth is measured by your productivity, your salary, your ability to out-hustle the next person for a finite pool of resources. Every institution we’ve built reflects this: employment as the gateway to healthcare, retirement tied to decades of labor, social standing measured in dollars.

If AI delivers on even a fraction of what its builders promise, that scarcity starts to loosen. And the question we need to be asking is: what do we build in its place?

A purpose-driven economy would start from a different premise. Instead of asking “how do we allocate scarce resources?” it would ask “how do we help people live meaningful lives?”

It means a 55-year-old teacher who’s been scraping by on an inadequate salary can actually do the job our society claims to value. It means the woman who’s been caring for her aging mother full-time, for free, because nobody else will, gets recognized and compensated for doing some of the most essential work in the economy. It means a kid from a working-class family can pursue architecture or nursing or music without taking on a decade of debt, because education is treated as an investment in people rather than a consumer product. It means someone who wants to rebuild wetlands or restore affordable housing or mentor teenagers in underserved neighborhoods can do that work and still feed their family, because we’ve decided that what matters to a community is worth funding even when the profit margins are thin.

This is achievable. It requires the same thing Alaska required: a decision to share the wealth that a resource generates, and institutions strong enough to make that decision stick. The resource has changed — it’s AI instead of oil — but the principle is identical.

The transition won’t be painless. But consider the alternative: an economy where a shrinking number of people own the machines that do the work, and everyone else depends on their goodwill for survival. We spent centuries climbing out of the last version of that arrangement. We called it feudalism.

Progressives need to tell this story. Neither a list of grievances nor a set of policies, but rather a story about where we’re going and why it’s worth getting there. People don’t organize around complaints for long; they organize around a destination. The destination is an economy built around human purpose and dignity, where the question isn’t “how do I survive?” but “what do I want to contribute?” The path runs through shared ownership, public investment in work that matters, and a tax system that follows value wherever it’s generated.

None of that is utopian. None of it requires technology we don’t have. What it requires is political will, built before a handful of people quietly lock up the most powerful economic engine ever built.

Here are the questions I’ve seen asked, along with answers linked to sources so that you can deep dive and check my work.

Q: Why did the US bomb Iran?

Secretary of State Marco Rubio stated to press that the US knew Israel was going to attack Iran and that Iran would retaliate against the US, so the Administration launched a preemptive attack on Iran to reduce the number of US casualties.

President Trump said the goal was to force regime change and bring ‘freedom’ to Iranians.

Q: Did we free the Iranians? Who’s in charge there now?

The US and Israel killed Iran’s Supreme Leader and top officials, but the regime’s security forces are still in charge.

While there had been significant anti-government protests in Tehran in January and February, usually attacks by outside forces unite residents of a country, so it is unclear whether the Iranian resistance will survive this.

Q: Why are other countries in the Middle East being bombed or shelled or hit by missiles?

There are a complicated set of alliances in the Middle East.

After the US-Israeli strikes on Iran, Iran hit back at Israeli targets and US bases in a number of countries, firing hundreds of ballistic missiles and nearly a thousand attack drones at Israel and U.S. bases in the region, including in Kuwait, Jordan, Bahrain, the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and Saudi Arabia.

Hezbollah, a political party in Lebanon, has historically been backed by Iran; they fired missiles at Israel and Israel has fired missiles at Lebanon.

Q: How will this impact most Americans?

The war with Iran is already driving up gas prices and threatening global oil supplies, which means higher costs at the pump and for goods that rely on shipping. US troops are at risk, and there could be more American casualties.

Q: Is this legal under US or international law?

Most legal experts say the US strikes on Iran violate both US law and international law. The Constitution gives Congress the power to declare war, but President Trump acted alone. There was also no UN approval, and targeting another country’s leaders is generally considered illegal under international rules.

Q: This is kind of depressing. Are you sure it’s better than doomscrolling?

Well, it’s a lot quicker, and I’ll include ways to make a positive difference below.

Q: What can I actually do about this?

The single most important thing you can do is build and be part of grassroots networks of people, in person or online, who share your beliefs. It is not safe right now to assume that the news media you can see will be accurate or impartial, or that the algorithms will continue to show content the Trump Administration disagrees with.

In addition:

• If you’d like to help restore Congressional oversight of war powers in accordance with the Constitution, you should contact your representatives and Senators and tell them that. The Congressional switchboard is (202) 224-3121. (I recommend being nice to the staffers who answer, and tell them clearly in your own words what you believe.)

• If you’d like to help organizations who will make a difference for the civilians caught up in the growing war, some good organizations to support include:

  • Partners in Health, https://www.pih.org, who provide healthcare around the world;

  • Doctors Without Borders, https://www.doctorswithoutborders.org, who provide healthcare in conflict zones;

  • The UN Refugee Agency, https://www.unhcr.org, who provide aid to refugees

• If you’d like to support antiwar organizations, some choices include:

  • Peace Action, peaceaction.org

  • Council for a Livable World, livableworld.org

  • Win Without War, winwithoutwar.org

• If you’d like to support our troops and oppose the war at the same time, VoteVets.org is doing good work

Q: Why does it matter if I join an organization?

Right now, the most essential thing most people can do if they disagree with the Trump Administration is to build the networks that will allow us to connect to each other even if the social media platforms bow to pressure to cut us off, and even if the algorithms suppress our content. Find people you agree with and connect with them. It’s urgent.

How did I get this?

You supported me or something I was working on in the recent past, and I’m trying to help build the resilient networks that can connect us to each other.

I want to talk about something more uncomfortable: the possibility that the wealth and power currently being consolidated at the top of the global economy is about to become meaningless. Not redistributed, not regulated away. Meaningless. And that the people hoarding it most aggressively are the ones who should be most worried.

Here’s what I mean.

Jeff Bezos’s fortune is a function of consumer spending. Mark Zuckerberg’s empire requires billions of humans who want to connect with each other through his platforms. The entire venture capital ecosystem values AI companies based on the assumption that there will be customers: human beings and human-run organizations willing to pay for what these systems produce.

Now follow the thread these same leaders keep pulling on.

AI systems are, right now, beginning to replace human cognitive labor at scale. The trajectory we’re on suggests that within a few years, most of the knowledge work that currently sustains the global middle class will be automatable, and the manual labor that remains is next.

The cheerful version of this story is that new jobs will emerge, as they always have. That’s possible. But it depends on an assumption that has never been tested: that humans remain the relevant economic agents, that when AI can produce, create, analyze, manage, and coordinate better than we can, there will still be a reason to pay us to do things, and therefore a reason for us to have money, and therefore someone to buy what Amazon is selling.

If that assumption breaks (and it might) then the entire structure that makes a billionaire a billionaire collapses. Not because of revolution or regulation, but because of irrelevance. You can’t be the richest person in a room that no longer exists.

I don’t think the people at the top of the current economy have fully internalized that the value of what you hold is only as durable as the system that gives it meaning. A billionaire’s net worth is only real until the economy it’s denominated in stops functioning.

And the billionaires need the rest of us more than they’ve ever been willing to admit for reasons that are structural. Who do you sell things to when your customers can’t earn money? Who uses your platform when people are fighting for survival instead of posting? Who do you negotiate with, compete against, show off to, build legacy for, in a world where most of humanity has become economically vestigial?

Right now, the gains from AI are flowing almost entirely to the companies building it and the investors behind them. There is no mechanism, no institution, no movement, no policy framework to help redirect that surplus toward maintaining a functioning society of empowered humans. And the window for building such a mechanism is closing fast, because the technology clearly isn’t going to wait for us to get our institutional act together.

The cruel irony is that the oligarchs’ self-interest and humanity’s interest may be more aligned right now than at any point in history, but for a reason no one likes. The billionaires need a world full of capable, empowered, economically participating humans in order for their wealth to mean anything. And the rest of us need the billionaires to figure this out before they’ve already destroyed the systems we all depend on.

This is the prisoner’s dilemma at civilizational scale, and the clock is the AI development timeline.

Here’s the question that I think the smartest, most powerful people in the world need to ask themselves:

What are you building all of this for, if the world you’re building it in won’t exist by the time you’re done?

Alex Pretti rescued a dog, a Catahoula Leopard, and named him Joule after the unit of energy a defibrillator uses to restart a stopped heart. When Joule got old and couldn’t walk anymore, Pretti carried him outside every day and sat with him in the grass so he could feel the air.

He rode mountain bikes through South Minneapolis, a regular at Angry Catfish bike shop. He left a research job at the VA to go back for nursing school, got his license in 2021, and came straight back to the ICU. Newer nurses gravitated toward him: steady, patient, the kind of person you wanted next to you when things went wrong. His sister said he made people feel safe. A choir director from his high school in Green Bay remembered that whenever volunteers were needed, Alex threw his hand up before the question was finished: I’ll do it.

On January 24th, he saw federal agents shove a woman to the ground in his neighborhood, and he did what everyone who knew him would have predicted.

His father said later: “His last act on this earth, his last thought, was to help this woman. It’s who he was, every day.”

You know what happened next. And you know how it ended: three thousand federal agents packed up and left Minneapolis three weeks later.

Here’s what you probably don’t know: why it worked.

Why Alex Pretti’s death broke something, when thousands of other acts of violence captured on video every year don’t. Why the most powerful government on Earth reversed course in seventy-five days. There’s a specific answer—a formula, the same one behind Birmingham and Selma and Gandhi’s success in India—and Minneapolis executed it more completely than anything I’ve seen in my lifetime.

And the answer starts with something most people get wrong: the target audience for those videos was never liberals. It was Republican voters.

Last November, the Trump Administration launched Operation Metro Surge: over 3,000 immigration agents deployed to Minneapolis. It was supposed to be a demonstration of overwhelming federal force.

But the people of Minneapolis had been organizing.

Within weeks of the announcement, roughly 5,000 volunteers trained as legal observers across the Twin Cities. They set up encrypted Signal networks. They built rapid-response teams that could put forty people with cameras at any ICE encounter within half an hour. They launched a crowd-funded website—iceout.org—staffed by over a hundred volunteers, publishing timestamped reports with photographs around the clock. One day the site logged more than a hundred ICE sightings across the state.

This will sound like background. It’s actually the most important part of the story. I’ll come back to why.

There’s a pattern that shows up every time ordinary people have successfully challenged overwhelming force—Birmingham in 1963, Selma in 1965, Gandhi in 1930. It’s the same pattern every time, and it has a specific structure:

Someone who is visibly innocent puts themselves voluntarily in harm’s way for the sake of what’s right. Official power overreacts—comes down on them in a way that shocks the conscience. It’s captured on camera. And it spreads.

I call it moral power, and it has six elements:

• A person innocent of wrongdoing

• Voluntarily puts themselves in harms way

• For the sake of the cause they believe in

• Authority responds disproportionately, in a way that shocks the conscience

• It is captured visually, in photos or video

• It spreads widely including to people who had previously consented or were indifferent to what authorities were doing

When those elements align, moral power doesn’t argue or persuade. It just asks a question that lands in your gut: What kind of person am I going to be?

Multiply that across millions of people, and you have the only force that has ever reliably beaten overwhelming authority.

Moral power doesn’t work by converting the people who already agree with you. It works by cracking the foundation of support underneath the people doing the enforcing.

Think about what enforcement actually requires. Not just agents and guns—those are the visible part. The whole system depends on the public believing it’s legitimate. When people believe the government is acting justly, the whole machine runs: citizens cooperate with the laws and the government primarily out of the belief that they should. You don’t run a red light even if a police officer isn’t there to arrest you, because you believe traffic laws are legitimate.

Legitimacy is a form of consent. And consent, it turns out, is fragile.

Moral power is the thing that breaks it. It makes the enforcers’ own supporters look at what’s being done in their name and recoil.

That’s what happened in Minneapolis. Twice.

On January 7th, an ICE agent named Jonathan Ross shot and killed a woman named Renée Good.

Her wife Rebecca said later: “Renée sparkled. She literally sparkled. I mean, she didn’t wear glitter but I swear she had sparkles coming out of her pores. All the time.”

Renée Good was thirty-seven. A poet, she won the Academy of American Poets Prize in 2020. A mother of three. Her youngest was six; he’d already lost his father when Good’s second husband died in 2023. After the 2024 election, Good and Rebecca broke their lease and drove north, looking for safety. They ended up in Minneapolis. Rebecca described the drive: “We held hands in the car while our son drew all over the windows to pass the time and the miles.”

That January morning, Good had just dropped her son at school. She and Rebecca stopped to support neighbors during an ICE action in the neighborhood.

Rebecca’s words: “We had whistles. They had guns.”

Ross circled Good’s car on foot and opened fire. She was sitting in the driver’s seat.

Fifty-seven percent of voters told Quinnipiac they disapproved of how ICE was handling enforcement. More than a dozen federal prosecutors resigned. Minnesota’s attorney general sued DHS.

The ground under the operation was starting to move. But it hadn’t given way.

On January 24th, it gave way.

The volunteer networks were running. Cameras were everywhere. And near 26th and Nicollet, from multiple angles, they captured what you’ve already seen: Pretti stepping between the agents and the woman on the ground. The pepper spray. Six agents on one man. The gunfire.

Everything about it was visible: his innocence, the choice he was making. The kid from Green Bay who always threw his hand up first, doing it one last time. The principle he was standing for is one every American holds regardless of politics: you don’t kill a man for trying to help someone who’s been knocked down. And the response was so grotesquely out of proportion—pepper spray, six agents, gunfire, against a person holding a phone—that no political framing on earth could make it look right.

And it was all on film. From multiple angles. Because Minneapolis had spent two months making sure it would be.

Most of the time, this pattern fails at one specific point: nobody films it. Terrible things happen all the time and nothing changes because there’s no camera. Minneapolis made it structurally impossible for overreach to go unrecorded. Five thousand observers. Encrypted rapid-response networks. Forty cameras to any incident within thirty minutes. When the critical moment came, the cameras were already there, and a woman wearing a pink jacket kept recording through her horror and didn’t let the ICE agents take her phone.

The videos went everywhere, tens of millions of views at minimum, one of the most-watched pieces of footage in the country this year. And once you saw Alex Pretti standing between a federal agent and a woman on the ground, holding nothing but his phone, and then watched what six agents did to him, you couldn’t put it out of your head.

So why did the government actually pull out?

The Pretti video didn’t need to convince liberals. Liberals already opposed the raids. The video’s real audience was Republican voters.

Before the shootings, while the overwhelming majority of liberals and independents opposed what ICE was doing, Quinnipiac polling showed that 84% of Republicans approved of ICE enforcement.

After the videos spread, Ipsos found that the share of Republicans saying ICE efforts “go too far” jumped to 30%, a huge shift among the administration’s own base.

A February Quinnipiac poll found 61% of all voters didn’t believe the administration had told the truth about Pretti’s death. Fifty-eight percent wanted Noem removed from DHS. TIME reported that support for abolishing ICE was surging among Republican voters.

That shift is what it looks like when consent collapses, when millions of people who supported the operation watched the video and thought:whatever I thought I was supporting, it wasn’t this.

And without that consent, the whole operation became politically unsustainable. Enforcement can’t function when its own base is flinching.

On February 4th, Tom Homan pulled 700 agents. On February 12th, Operation Metro Surge officially ended.

Three things worth understanding about what Minneapolis did, because none of them are specific to Minneapolis.

First: they solved the camera problem. Moral power has always depended on the luck of a photographer being in the right place at the right time. Jeff Widener happened to be at the Beijing Hotel with a telephoto lens when Tank Man stepped in front of the tanks. Bill Hudson happened to be on the street in Birmingham when the police dog lunged at Walter Gadsden. Minneapolis didn’t leave it to chance. They organized so that every neighborhood had observers, every encounter had cameras, and every act of overreach would be on film within minutes. Any community in America can do this.

Second: nobody had to argue Republicans out of supporting ICE. The images did it. They bypassed argument entirely and went straight to conscience. That shift didn’t come from a debate; it came from people seeing something they couldn’t square with their own sense of right and wrong.

Third: enforcement looks invincible, and it isn’t. Three thousand agents, armored vehicles, the full apparatus of federal force—and it all became untenable in seventy-five days once the images eroded the belief that what was happening was just. Prosecutors resigned. Lawsuits piled up. Politicians started backing away. The machine didn’t break because anyone overpowered it. It broke because the people it depended on for political cover could no longer provide it.

The formula works. Minneapolis just proved it.

A choir director in Green Bay once asked for volunteers and Alex Pretti threw his hand up before the question was finished. I’ll do it. He spent his career taking care of people who’d served. He carried his old dog outside so he could feel the air. And on January 24th, he saw a woman get shoved to the ground, and he stepped between her and the people who’d hurt her, and he held up his phone so everyone could see.

That’s what moral power looks like: someone choosing to stand in the gap between power and the person it’s crushing. And it always asks the same question:

What kind of people are we going to be?

Nearly a thousand of Pretti’s coworkers packed a chapel at the VA to say goodbye. Two hundred memorial bike rides were organized across forty-two states and twelve countries. And three thousand federal agents left Minneapolis.

• Political power (making the rules)

• Economic power (controlling the resources)

• Enforcement power (use of force)

• Cultural power (the stories we tell ourselves about who we are)

• Moral power (the stories we tell ourselves about who we ought to be)

• Network power (who we can reach)

I started talking about this framework publicly back in 2012, in a keynote at Netroots Nation. Things have gotten so much worse since then.

Given current events, I’m making the toolkit portions of the book available now, for free, for anyone who needs or can use them.

The Invisible Game Workbook V1

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