Building networks to create and sustain resistance.
Views from the South,
https://ourmoralmoment.substack.com/p/america-has-seen-authoritarianism?
Excellent advice. A conference at Vanderbilt, , and the Poor Peoples Campaign.
Duane Campbell
It may be impossible to mentally survive the onslaught of these times if you track every piece of news. The actions under the Trump/Musk regime are a barrage: rolling back civil rights, watching government run by idiots, every institution weaponized, and dystopian spectacle passed off as governance. The sheer velocity can numb the senses, tempting us to shut down, to turn off the feed, to retreat.
But you also cannot be good to the world — or yourself — if you keep your head down and pay attention to nothing. Withdrawal is understandable, even necessary at times—but permanent disengagement only cedes ground to the authoritarian momentum as it reinforces our image of ourselves as powerless. So: How do we observe what’s happening without being crushed by its weight?
This is where the work of social psychologist Kurt Lewin offers a powerful tool. Lewin, a Jewish intellectual who fled Nazi Germany, developed force field analysis to understand how power, behavior, and transformation occur in real social systems.
He saw that any given situation is held in place by a dynamic equilibrium between forces pushing for change and those resisting it. To shift the status quo, you don’t necessarily need to move everything at once—you can focus strategically on specific forces or actors that influence the whole.
In activist training, I was taught force field analysis thusly: you make a list of forces and organizations pushing towards the dreary authoritarian oligarchy-controlled vision. And then the list of forces pushing towards a reordered society that’s deeply democratic and where wealth is shared.
Those forces are in tension. Pushing towards authoritarianism, Trump’s FBI ordered the arrest of a state judge for allegedly trying to prevent ICE from detaining a man in her courtroom.
But then the judges, lawyers, and plaintiffs who are defeating Trump 93% of the time in court because his orders are sloppy and patently illegal. And notably, most of the time Trump’s regime has quietly followed the judge’s orders.
Pushing the other direction, Trump’s deportation of people to El Salvadoran prison and open defiance of the courts. And the Supreme Court temporarily upholding Trump’s cruelly-written ban on trans people in the military.
But then there’s Harvard standing up to Trump’s intimidation tactics — alongside a growing body of universities organizing in resistance. To add: Harvard wanted to make a deal but veered towards resistance because of Trump’s henchmen being so casually reckless — so their stupidity works in our favor.
Yes, but all authoritarians promote loyalty above competence. And Trump is still fighting Harvard, and trying to take over museums, too.
Sure, but have you met librarians? They are not going down without a fight. They’ve refused, rebuffed, and redoubled efforts to give people the facts.
It’s worth pausing here to note our feelings in these tense times. Many days it’s easy to ask “Are we winning? Are we losing?” Like a basketball game, many of us do a kind of score keeping about how many points are we down? But, just to walk further into the sports analogy, this is more like soccer — where a lot of the game isn’t about immediate scoring but about positioning, repositioning, quick advances, quick retreats. Progress may not always be visible or immediate, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t happening.
A Colombian elder — who has lived her whole life in the shadow of war — told me recently, “You USers are obsessed with winning and it’s very unhealthy in moments like this. You keep wanting to know if it’s going well or not — and these times can’t be analyzed in headlines or moments. Sometimes it just is what it is. It’s losing and winning. The yardstick is measured in hearts and the timeline is generations of work on people’s attitudes and views.”
Lewin’s brilliance was in recognizing that seeing the whole doesn’t mean acting on everything. So we begin to paint the picture of what’s out there and the different forces at play. Forces for good. Forces against. And some forces that are mixed. Crucially, in his analysis you then assess which of these forces can be strengthened or weakened.
And here it’s helpful to get pretty practical. Courage anywhere begets courage everywhere. Because Trump has picked a strategy of everywhere all at once — nearly every group has a chance to stand up and support each other to be more bold. Hundreds of nonprofits signing to support Harvard fighting for its nonprofit status. Lawyers taking the street to do a most unusual thing: retaking their oaths to the Constitution in public. Employees at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration — as elsewhere — attempting “work-on without collaboration” where they resisted unauthorized access by DOGE but continue their important work.
In practical terms, this might mean focusing not on Musk or Trump directly, but on amplifying local election protections, funding investigative journalism, or supporting tech workers organizing against misuse of platforms. You don’t need to tackle the entire regime to weaken its foundation. You need leverage points—clear, concrete places to act.
Using Lewin’s tool helps prevent burnout. It turns despair into direction. It gives structure to what might otherwise feel like flailing.
So, yes: these are hard days. But it’s not all bad or good — it’s a force field in motion. Even small acts, strategically placed, can shift the balance. We are not powerless — we are participants.
In closing, a quote from some of the resistance park rangers calling themselves Alt Acadia National Park:
A quick experiment for you. Go out to the store and buy a set of legos. Drop one on the floor, preferably in a high traffic area of your house, and forget about it. The inevitable will happen and you will eventually step on it. How do you feel about the power of that one lego brick? It’s only one brick.…
Another nice thing about lego bricks is that you can stack them, build with them. Create something more than the sum of their parts. One becomes two becomes three becomes 70,000+ Junior Rangers moving together, empowering each other, and making a difference. We’ll be here with you all the way, building a better future.
One lego brick at a time.