How to Think (and Act) Like a Dissident Movement
AOC, solidarity, and people power.
We had a good show in Phoenix and during our conversation something clicked for me that I want to unpack today.
I’m leaving this edition unlocked. I hope you’ll share it. And if you’re not a member of Bulwark+ yet, I hope you’ll consider joining today. We’re doing something important here. We’re building a community that is going to be part of a broader solidarity movement. And all of the pieces of this movement need to be supported.
In the coming months everyone will be forced to choose a side, like it or not. Stand with the Bulwark community. We want you with us.
1. Seeing Like a Dissident
I was wrong about one big thing in 2024: I did not realize that most American institutions—the media, the legal world, big business, universities, the tech sector—would immediately capitulate to Trump.
In 2016 I believed the Republican party’s submission was the result of the GOP’s particular failings. That was incorrect. The Republican party was merely the first institution to accept authoritarianism because it was the first institution Trump targeted.
We now see that most institutions are weak in the face of authoritarianism.
JVL’s Law is: Any institution not explicitly anti-Trump will eventually become useful to Trump. I originally thought this would apply only to media orgs. Turns out that it applies to everyone and everything. From Ross Douthat to John Fetterman, from Paul Weiss to Facebook. All of our institutions are the Republican party now.
This is an extraordinary moment and it requires extraordinary vision and actions. We must stop viewing political life through the lens of American politics as we have known it, and adopt the viewpoint of dissident movements in autocratic states.
The Democratic party has more to learn from Alexei Navalny or the protesters in Serbia than it does from Chuck Schumer or strategists obsessing over message-testing crosstabs. This battle is half mass mobilization and half asymmetric warfare. Over the next year those tactics will matter more than traditional political messaging as it has been practiced here in living memory.
Once you accept that reality, our next steps become clear.
The rough roadmap for how to proceed goes like this:
Demonstrate popular power in the provinces through large-scale rallies.
Use these events to organize the resistance into a mass movement that can be called into action.
Direct the mass movement into targeted political strikes: Getting blowout wins in special elections; boycotts of Tesla; etc.
Politicize everything: Attack the authoritarians for every bad thing that happens, anywhere in the world. Flood the zone.
Elevate the corruption/graft in a way that pits the billionaire insiders against the “forgotten man.”
When the moment is right, bring this movement to the Capital for a show of strength.
Use this demonstration as a slingshot to take back legislative power in the 2026 elections.
More importantly, use it to send a message to the institutional actors that people will have their back if they show courage.1
2. The Near Term
Winning in 2026 will not be sufficient to stop the authoritarian push; but it is necessary.
And the only way to win is people power. That’s it. No institutions are going to save us. The courts won’t stop the authoritarians. Corporate interests won’t stop them. The Democratic party won’t stop them, either. If the authoritarians can be stopped then the Democratic party will be the vehicle through which people wield power. But the Democratic party, as an institution, is too weak and desiccated to stage a real fight against Trumpism. It will have to be pushed into fighting by a mass popular movement.
AOC’s public events over the last week have been exactly what the opposition needs.
She is making herself a rally point and telling everyone who wants to resist that they have a place to go. She should do these rallies, over and over, across the country. But not in Washington or New York. Not yet.
When you look at the history of dissident movements, they almost always begin in the outer provinces.
The autocrats’ power is greatest near the literal center of the government they control. The further you get from their power center, the weaker their hold and the more risks they have to take if they want to put down demonstrations.
AOC went to Denver and Phoenix last week. She needs to go to Nashua and Nashville. Houston and Chicago. Oakland and Oklahoma City.
The bigger these rallies get, the better. Make them ongoing events.
She will need an infrastructure. It’s not enough to get 30,000 people in the streets. You need to get them organized. People in the pro-democracy space will need to help figure out how to do that—how to turn live attendance into lists that can be activated.
And when I say “activated” I do NOT mean for fundraising. Keep Act Blue away from this project: These lists should never be used for ginning up donations. They should be used to direct people into actions. Getting them registered to vote. Getting them to turn out for elections. Getting them to show up at the next rally; to organize their friends.
This will require a sophisticated data operation. AOC will need help. It would be great if Mark Cuban or Scott Galloway could step in here. The dissident movement will need its own platform.2
It will also need its own media. Because believe me, the New York Times is never going to be explicitly anti-authoritarian.
This movement should have millions of highly activated people attached to it by the end of 2025, building to a show of strength in the summer of 2026. The goal should be a day when 2 million people show up in either New York or Washington and demonstrate that there is an unprecedented mass movement opposing the authoritarians running the federal government.
That’s the moment you force the rest of America to take a side. And the moment you dare Trump to do what he’s always wanted: To take the mask all the way off and use force against American citizens.
The more people you bring out, the greater the provocation and also, the safer the opposition will be. If you put 2 million people in the streets Trump will look weak if he doesn’t respond, but will look like a tyrant if he does.
And everything is about making him unpopular and weak in the final stretch before November 2026.
What will this movement actually look like? I don’t know. These things are unpredictable. But I have a high degree of certainty about one thing: The movement must be, at some level, oppositional to the status quo. It cannot only be a defense of democracy and our institutions, it must be a challenge to them.3
One thing I found interesting over the last week is the way that two potential leaders of this movement from opposite ends of the ideological spectrum were both aligned in this framework.
On Tim’s podcast Maryland Governor Wes Moore put it like this:
[Many Americans] don’t see how this system works for them. And the truth is, it hasn’t. And that’s why I think we have to be real, real careful about somehow spending our time defending a status quo, when for real, for many people, the status quo never worked for them. So how are you defending something that’s indefensible?
For AOC this outsider messaging is right there in the branding of their “Fight Oligarchy” barnstorming. She’s anti-establishment enough to talk about needing a Democratic party that fights harder.
The reality is that a mass movement is not going to arise around protecting institutions. The way for us to actually protect our institutions is to rally together behind leaders who commit to reforming them.
3. Solidarity
The last piece of the puzzle is leadership and solidarity. The dissident movement needs a leader. AOC has been the primary person to step up, though Chris Murphy and a few others have been banging the drum. Maybe in time someone else will emerge as a more potent leader for the movement they are incubating. But either way: Without a leader, this movement will not materialize. People need a rally point. History makes that clear.
Whoever this leader is, she will be imperfect. In addition to being imperfect, she will not be everyone’s first choice. If you are a Paul Ryan-style conservative, you will have many disagreements with, say, AOC. If you are a progressive and Mark Cuban becomes the leader of the opposition, you will have many disagreements with him.
Hear me when I say this: There can be no purity tests in the pro-democracy opposition.4
You are either against Trump, or not. If you are against Trump then the anti-Trump movement must operate in solidarity. We do not have the luxury of saying, “Well yes, I dislike Trump. But Leader X wants higher marginal tax rates, so I can’t sign on with that.”
This doesn’t mean you have to agree with everyone in the opposition. Just for the sake of argument, let’s pretend it’s October 2026 and AOC is the face of the opposition.
You don’t have to suddenly love the Green New Deal and single-payer healthcare. You can disagree with those policies. But you cannot use those disagreements as pretext to distance yourself from the opposition movement.
Remember: Any person or institution not explicitly anti-Trump becomes useful to him. You are either on the bus or you are off.
And the point of solidarity is that everyone in the anti-Trump opposition needs to support one another. Again: History is clear on this.
So that’s the plan.
Find a leader. Bring people together in person, far away from the capital’s control. Build momentum. Organize your supporters. Harness the power of their mass. Build toward an explicit show of strength. Take back control of Congress.
And then, if we’re lucky, we can start thinking about an endgame.
In the meantime, fight the authoritarians on everything. If the stock market drops, scream about it. Because it’s their fault. When a kid dies of measles—their fault. Attack them every day, on whatever the latest thing is. Turn “flood the zone” against them by not needing to cling to any one outrage for weeks. Embrace the idea of snapping up new outrages every day.
Get hot about them. Be passionate about them. And for the love of all that’s holy, talk like a normal human being, not a canned politician going through the motions.
Let’s get to work.
The flip side of this is that institutional actors need to be shown that there is danger in capitulation. Facebook, Amazon, and all the rest need to fear that what has happened to Tesla (by which I mean: public outrage, failed business results, and stock price collapse) could happen to their business if the public comes to view them as Quislings.
Maybe Bluesky is already this platform?
This is not my preference, btw. I very much like our institutions and am an incrementalist. But there are maybe 12 people in America who share my policy preferences. You don’t get an effective, energized mass movement by doing Stuff JVL Likes.
You will have to repeat this to me when someone I detest suddenly declares their opposition to Trump and I start rolling my eyes and letting Bad JVL out of the gimp box.
"The Democratic party has more to learn from Alexei Navalny or the protesters in Serbia than it does from Chuck Schumer or strategists obsessing over message-testing crosstabs."
ABSOLUTELY! And don't forget how Poland was able to topple their authoritarian - "keep the coalition together"...
Also, when we hit the streets, don't be afraid to carry an American flag. We are the patriots in this day.