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- [00:01]
A
I was walking down the street yesterday. I just parked my car, my phone buzzed, and it was the indictment of James Comey. We all knew this could happen, but this feels to me like an absolute threshold moment.
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B
I was going back and looking at Watergate. I mean, we have had sort of persecutions using the power of the government against perceived enemies of a president. But it was considered the biggest blot on our history, and we've rivaled that, if not surpassed that.
- [00:29]
C
And what's remarkable, of course, this is Trump is Richard Nixon on steroids, and he personally, in writing, has ordered the Justice Department to do this. And they carried out his wishes with remarkable speed.
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A
Welcome to the Political Scene from the New Yorker, a weekly discussion about the big questions in American politics. I'm Evan Osnos and I'm joined, as ever, by my colleagues Jane Mayer and Susan Glasser. Hi, Jane.
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B
Hey, Evan.
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A
And hi, Susan.
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C
Hey there. Great to be with you guys.
- [01:06]
A
Today on the show, new dominoes falling in the assault on democracy. Just in the last few days, we've seen the indictment of a former FBI director, James Comey, and a directive from the Justice Department to investigate and perhaps prosecute George Soros's philanthropic vehicle, the Open Society Foundations. There is also, however, been a surprising bit of news, what we might call the fall and rise of Jimmy Kimmel. His abrupt return to late night television after his suspension last week delivered something very rare in today's politics, a moment in which it felt as if perhaps some complicated combination of public resistance actually turned the tide. And we're gonna look into that today. To help us answer these questions, we're turning to Hardy Merriman. He's an expert on the history and practice of civil resistance. He's written extensively over the years, authoritarianism and the forces that can chip away at its power. He's helping identify some patterns of action and cooperation that can mean a lot in a moment like this. And he joins us now. Hardy, thank you so much for being here.
- [02:13]
D
Great. Thank you so much, Evan. It's great to be here, Hardy.
- [02:16]
A
We have to begin with Jimmy Kimmel's suspension last week. As you remember, he was pulled off the air after an FCC pressure campaign on his employer, abc, and then reinstated after public outrage and pushback. Why do you think this particular moment broke through when so many others over the last eight months have not? What made it resonate so widely?
- [02:40]
D
I think a few things. The first is that it builds on a wave that we've already started to see in this country and starting earlier in this year of people who are angry and taking action about it. So if we compare, for example, protests in 2025 and the first six months of 2025 with the number of protests in 2017 during the first Trump administration, we can already see actually that the number of protests in 2025 is about three times greater than it was in the first Trump administration during the same time period. So there are a lot of people who are not just angry, but active. They're mobilizing. They're looking for things to do with their frustration. And so, you know, for example, the no Kings protest in June is looking like it was the second largest protest in US History.
- [03:28]
A
Wow.
- [03:29]
D
So when we see this as part of a broader trend of people taking action, it makes sense. Right? It's building on a base of people who have already used their activist muscles in the past and want to continue to. But another, I think, important aspect of this is that people went beyond symbolic protest. They did what we call an act of non cooperation. They changed their behavior in a targeted and strategic way to impose a cost on an opponent. And acts of non cooperation are very powerful. Historically, when we think about pro democracy movements, things like strikes, boycotts have been very powerful tools for large numbers of people to push back against unaccountable governments and unaccountable corporations. So those are two things, I think. Also another thing that I think helped was the range of groups that got involved quickly. So you had activists and organizers who sprung into action quickly, calling for a boycott and sharing materials. But you had organized labor like the Writers Guilds of America that became active and put out a very strong statement. You had groups like the ACLU quickly releasing a statement with over 400 artists supporting free speech. And then of course, you had Republicans too, some who stood out and said, this is not right. So I think all of those were factors in making this successful.
- [04:50]
B
So the act of non cooperation, in that case, you're thinking of people who said they'd cancel their subscriptions. Is that basically enough? Did consumer behavior matter?
- [05:03]
D
Enormously. And non cooperation is very much about numbers. You don't necessarily need people doing things that are high risk. You just need large numbers of people doing them. And we've seen plenty of examples. I mean, just going back to US History, the Montgomery bus boycott was an act of non cooperation, and it was incredibly powerful. Or for example, the Nashville lunch counter sit ins, they started with an act of civil disobedience sitting in at lunch counters, but they escalated to a boycott of downtown businesses in Nashville in 1960. Right. A consumer boycott it's very difficult for governments and aspiring authoritarians to know what to do when large numbers of people simply shift their buying patterns or shift their attention or start shifting their investment patterns or the way that they work. Right. And so these are all examples of ways that people have pushed back quite effectively again against authoritarian abuse, not just in this country, but around the world.
- [05:59]
C
Hardy, I'd love to ask you a little bit about the broader view has been not one of successful civil society resistance to Donald Trump, but his almost extraordinary felicity in finding the weaknesses in our institutions and in leaders of civil society. And actually kind of the reverse narrative is much more the story as many people have told it over the last few months. And I'm curious, have you been surprised by Trump and his supporters ability to find those cracks in American civil society, or is it a matter of time and the power of greater numbers opposing Trump kicking in? Why is it that we focus so much on the many kind of spectacular examples of corporate leaders and academic leaders folding to Trump when the numbers, as you point out, are really in many ways on the other side?
- [06:54]
D
Well, you know, it's interesting. So doing international work for years to support movements that are fighting dictatorships, one thing that's very common is that movements feel like they're losing a lot. They look at the headlines on any given day and they're saying, we're losing on policy. We don't feel like we have momentum, we're not able to push back effectively enough. But oftentimes they're gauging how they're doing based on these external things. And to be sure, like an autocrat, radically inclined leader who doesn't feel constrained by the rules can, on any given day, grab headlines and make your life miserable. And they're very good at it. Right? And so movements have to look at different metrics to really assess how they're doing. They have to go beyond the headlines. And so when we look, for example, at like, what are the attributes that movements have that lead them to successful defensive democracy and resistance to autocracy, Things like unity really matter. Solidarity, the ability to build trusted networks where if one group is attacked, others come to their aid, that really matters. Another would be what I'll call strategic capacity, the ability to engage in a range of nonviolent actions. Not just protests, but things like boycotts, strikes, and others. Another would be mass participation, just the sheer number of people who are joining. Right. A fourth would be the ability to remain nonviolent even when provoked. And then there's others. You could look at like you could look at, like, is the authoritarian's repression backfiring or are you starting to see defections from their coalition? Most of those indicators are not going to make headlines every day, but they're actually incredibly important for assessing the strength of how an opposition movement is doing. So if we judge by just like policy wins, the administration seems to be doing incredibly strong and doing a lot of things very effectively. If we look though, at the other measures that I mentioned, like I said, there is a growing wave and I think that these attributes, like, are people more united now than they were three to six months ago? Yes. In supporting democracy and wanting to stand up to the administration, are they able to exert a greater number of tactics? Yeah, it's starting to happen. Are we seeing more mass participation? Yes. And did we just see an act of repression backfire in the attempt to get Jimmy Kimmel fired? Yes, yes, we did. And so those indicators matter too. And ultimately these are contests. Aspiring autocrats have their strategy and resistance movements have theirs. And strategy, unity, discipline, all these things matter in determining the outcome.
- [09:21]
A
That question of at what point does an autocrat's action engender backlash? That is sort of an essential piece of the history and of the present. I mean, as you just described it a moment ago, Hardy, there is this moment now where the same organization, ABC, which in 2024, you'll recall, settled Trump's defamation lawsuit for $15 million, despite at the time there were experts saying, well, that case is unlikely to win for the President, and yet they did it anyway. But here you had them responding very differently. Is the lesson that you take from that that ABC was responding to this sense of ambient pressure coming from a range of different actors? Or is it that you think there is a cumulative sense that one action by the administration after another has changed the environment in which it is being perceived?
- [10:14]
D
Well, I think more and more people are seeing that the game has changed. So democracies tend to be very stable. They have predictable rules. And a lot of big institutional actors, corporations and universities, learned how to function within those predictable rules. They could make financial contributions, they had lobbyists, they had insider connections, they could resort to the legal system. And it was all fairly stable and predictable. And so for institutions that have experienced that for decades, that's what they've known. And it is shocking how quickly the game can change when you start to have an aspiring autocrat in charge. Right? And so the game has changed now. And I think a lot of institutions were caught flat footed initially. I think they're starting to recognize that when an extortion demand is made of you, if you pay it, it doesn't satisfy the extortionist at all. It only conditions them to continue to expect to do it. So there's very little to be gained by continuing to pay out, by continuing to bow down. Your alternative, however, is to push back. Pushing back alone is not tenable. Right. There's no one group that's strong enough to push back against an authoritarian administration. So what you need to do is start thinking like a team. I call it team democracy. Who are the allies that we need to start building? Maybe within our sector, but maybe also across sector. Right. If we look at civil society, for example, the attack on unions, the attempted stripping of collective bargaining rights of over a million workers, unions need to fight that together. And they're going to be even stronger if they can get cross sector collaboration from faith communities, for example, from veterans communities, from civic associations, from others. And so we all need allies in this. We need to start thinking, thinking as a team. We need to start having each other's back. That is how you push back against authoritarianism effectively.
- [12:07]
B
I can see how in the case of Jimmy Kimmel, the pressure was focused on a company, but it seems far harder when we look at something like the prosecution of James Comey, which is the next abuse of power we've seen unfold this week. And in that case, it's the government that is abusing the power. And the actor in this case, it's not an outside company and it's violating norms, which is not the same as violating laws. So it's a little mushier. How does a democracy movement, how do ordinary citizens wage effective protest when it's actually the government that's crossing these lines? And I mean, I think we've seen one thing that's happened is we've seen resignations, which are very unusual from Assistant U.S. attorneys, and in the case of the Eastern District of Virginia, the actual U.S. attorney who was politically appointed by Trump, who quit saying he wasn't going to do this. But is that effective? I mean, how do you take on directly a government that is abusing power?
- [13:17]
D
So in a stable democracy, you would expect that public opinion would be a guardrail on this kind of overreach, that if the public didn't approve that, that would stop it. And again, that was a fairly stable assumption for recent decades, at least on some issues. In a backsliding democracy, though, it's really public mobilization. That's the guardrail. And mobilization shows intensity. Right. And it also has the capacity to impose costs. And the costs don't just need to be imposed on the administration. They can be imposed on enablers of the administration. So if we look like, I'll just go back in time. I talked about the Nashville lunch counter sit ins again, right? So the Jim Crow system was upheld by the government and corporations there. And so they put pressure on corporations by boycotting them. And suddenly the corporations went to the government, said, can we actually do something about this? We want to get business going again. So you start looking comprehensively not just at the government, but the enablers, those who are contracting with the government, those who are serving into it. What is the ecosystem that is supporting attacks on democracy? There's no one tactic that's necessarily going to turn things around. It's going to be a lot of different people getting involved. It's a huge country. Every state has their own political scene. So there might be like very localized responses in some cases, and then there might be cases like with Kimmel, where you actually can get a national scale response. But the key thing is that when the government overreaches, that it backfire, that actually what happens is the opposite of what they want. What the government wants to happen when they do politicize prosecutions is they want everyone to be afraid. The target of what's happening to James Comey is not actually James Comey, it is everyone else. Can we scare everyone else by making an example of James Comey when everyone else refuses to be afraid and said, actually, we're just going to get stronger? When you do that, it has a deterrent effect. It makes the government pause before they try something like that again on this.
- [15:11]
C
Question of fear, because I think that's the key point that you made, which is the goal of this is to inject fear. And from my perspective, having covered Washington on and off for several decades, it's succeeding. I don't see the signs that you're talking about of solidarity. I see people, and including people in positions of power and authority, whether it's in the media or the people that we're used to quoting, even opponents of Donald Trump are now afraid to be quoted, who just a couple years ago were not. So the thing that I observed overseas that I worry about is that the goal of Trump is not only to instill fear, but to create new facts on the ground as quickly as possible. And that by the time American civil society might mobilize in the ways that you're talking about, a new reality has already been created. And from my perspective right now, it looks like Trump and his people have been very successful at creating a shocking set of new realities that would have been almost unthinkable in many ways, even in Trump's first term. Some of which may be able to be rolled back, but not all of it. I don't see the signs that you're talking about of successful mobilization at this point against it. I see the potential for it, but I don't see the reality of it yet.
- [16:36]
D
Yeah, so as authoritarianism rises, I start to think of it. I mean, a lot of people don't like authoritarianism once they experience it. Some people, it's immediate. I'm a dissident, and I might be targeted, so I'm scared, for example, is what some person might think. And then a lot of other people start to not like it because of the economic effects it has on their life or because they saw their neighbor targeted and so forth. And so over time, this dissatisfaction, I think of it kind of like a spring that's getting compressed in society. People experience authoritarianism over 6 months, 12 months, 18 months, 2 years, and they start to say, this is not what I want, and that spring compresses. That's like potential energy to push back. It does take a while to build sometimes. There are plenty of people who are ultimately going to oppose an authoritarian because of economic justice reasons more than democracy reasons, for example. But regardless of how authoritarianism affects them, regardless of how they come to realize this is not what I want, that backlash takes time. And often what you see is you start to see a lot of folks who are scared, but also would love to find a reason to take action. They're just too scared yet to do it. Even in the business community, you find plenty of discontent. Now they're just not quite sure what to do with it. They're not used to thinking that way. They're thinking in terms of competitions foreign to them to think about how do we act collectively? And yet what we also see is that there are opportunities for those kinds of fence sitters, those kinds of folks who want to do something but are still too scared to speak out. There are opportunities that come that actually enable them to speak out. So one example would be when authoritarians attempt to subvert elections. Lots of folks say, nope, this has gone too far, and there are others, too. And so I don't always know. You cannot always predict what is going to cause people to say, okay, now is the time where I actually must speak out. I can only tell you from country after country that sometimes this does take. Unfortunately, years to build. But it does build. And the visible acts that we see are in one manifestation, and then another manifestation is all the folks who are sitting there with this cognitive dissonance of saying, this is wrong, and I need to find something to do that does eventually manifest.
- [18:49]
A
We're going to take a quick break, but when we come back, we'll turn to civil resistance movements throughout history and around the world. What they can tell us about resistance in the United States. The political scene will be back in just a moment.
- [19:05]
E
America is changing, and so is the world.
- [19:09]
A
But what's happening in America isn't just.
- [19:12]
D
A cause of global upheaval. It's also a symptom of disruption that's happening everywhere.
- [19:17]
E
I'm Asma Khalid in Washington, D.C. i'm.
- [19:20]
D
Tristan Redman in London, and this is the global Story.
- [19:24]
E
Every weekday, we'll bring you a story from this intersection where the world and America meet.
- [19:30]
D
Listen on BBC.com or wherever you get your podcasts.
- [19:43]
A
Hardy, you mentioned earlier that the no Kings protest was enormous by historical standards in this country. One of the things in your work is that you draw this important distinction between individual protests and movement building. You know, I just. As we're talking about this, I think a lot of listeners would say, God, this is all kind of language that I used to associate with things very far away. This is sort of what we would talk about in the Arab Spring or these movements on the other side of the world. And so it takes some recalibration to imagine, okay, well, what does this mean in an American context? Can you explain the difference between a protest and what is actual movement building? When we talk about civil resistance, this term that comes up over and over in your work, what are we really talking about?
- [20:25]
D
Sure. So I mean to define civil resistance as it's a way for people, often people without any special status or privilege, to wield power without the use of violence or the threat of violence. And there's basically three kinds of acts. One is what we call acts of commission, where people do things that they're not supposed to do, not expected to do, or forbidden from doing for somehow. Right. So protest when you're not supposed to protest, display a symbol when you're not supposed to display a symbol. The not supposed to could be like a cultural expectation, a political expectation, an economic expectation, but you go outside of what you're ordinarily expected to do. And then the second is an act of omission where you don't do something that you're supposed to do or expected to do or required to do. Right. So divestment, or working slowly, or a strike or a boycott. And then the third is sort of a combination of both, like a boycott, deliberately boycotting one place but buying from another.
- [21:14]
A
For example, a boycott. That's not a term I'd ever heard before, but it's an interesting one.
- [21:18]
D
Yeah, right. And so within that definition, there's a huge range of tactics. That's the thing, right? It goes way beyond just protest. There's lots of ways that people can choose to behavior and obedience patterns in strategic and targeted ways to exert pressure. And every movement around the world creates their own. And indeed, even just within that category of protest, there's lots of different ways people can do it. They can do it in centralized ways, they can do it in decentralized ways, and so forth. And the most powerful uses of civil resistance are through movements. And movements are they involve widespread voluntary participation of people. So unlike a structured organization that may have staff and that are paying their staff and so forth, movements just depend on people showing up. People vote with their feet to support movements. They do it because they believe in what the movement stands for. They do it because the movement is a community where maybe they have friends and feel respected and heard. And when you start to build a movement, you can actually create situations where you can actually get thousands and millions of people who say, you know what? I have confidence. I haven't normally protested in the past or taken an action, but I have confidence that when I work with my community members in this movement, that it's going to make a difference and people do it. Within movements, there can also be organizations. So, for example, if we look at the civil rights movement, there was like the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and the NAACP and SNCC and various entities within it. But the movement was bigger than just the entities within it. It was all the people who showed up and took action to support it.
- [22:54]
B
But it also had leaders. You had Martin Luther King, eloquent, brave, charismatic. Can you have a movement without a leader like that? And are we seeing those kinds of leaders in the United States?
- [23:10]
D
Sure. So in terms of a single charismatic leader, no, there's not right now. And that's not actually essential. And what's, I think, important to remember in terms of movements is that people ultimately choose the leaders. Right? Somebody who takes courageous action, who inspires confidence, where people feel like it's worth my time to support this person, they will elevate that person naturally to leadership by following them. And so oftentimes, movements do produce their Leaders. And the leaders are people who have shown courage and inspire a great deal of confidence. The fact that there is not a single leader yet does not concern me. And again, I think there are many leaders at the community and state level as well. And I want to be very clear here, too, as I talk. There are some differences between the United States and what we're experiencing and, say, Egypt or these other places you mentioned, which I think we can learn a lot from. But the United States is not an authoritarian dictatorship. It is a backsliding democracy. And that context is quite different. We still have elections. We still have a legal system. They're not working as well as they should, but it still works. And we need to use, as much as possible the institutional options available to us. For sure, they're valuable. We need to protect them. We need to use them. I think the core insight, though, is that we need to also develop popular pressure so that the institutions function the way they should, because the default in an authoritarian regime is that they're trying to bend every institution. Unless there is countervailing pressure, the institutions do tend to bend. There's a great piece of research on this that I love to share. There was a study of about 35 cases of democratic backsliding from 1991 to 2021. The researchers, when they do the regression analysis on those cases, they find that when you try to protect democracy primarily with institutions without a broader movement, the predicted probability of Success is about 7.5%. Very low. Institutions by themselves do not stand up well to autocrats. But when you have a broader civil resistance movement, the predicted probability of success goes up to about 51.7%. So that popular aspect of participation makes a huge difference. It is not sufficient by itself, but neither are institutions. You really need both.
- [25:34]
C
Hardy, I'm so glad that you brought this up around the context of having a movement. I'm very struck in the couple weeks since the killing of Charlie Kirk and one of the rights movement leaders that the response from Donald Trump and those around him has been to sign executive orders and to appear to launch a campaign against the possible sources of funding and support for the kind of popular movement that you're talking about. How serious do you think this move by Trump and Stephen Miller is to go after sources of institutional and organizational support for civil society and for the kind of political organizing that would be necessary to counter what Trump is doing?
- [26:19]
D
So we should not buy into incredulous claims that nonviolent protesters are somehow a threat that needs the government to crack down on them. In the way that they seem to be proposing to, that is, that is actually against what this country has stood for. So the attempt to claim that one's opposition is a violent threat. Authoritarians frequently use the word terrorism where it's completely inappropriate. Or sometimes they'll claim this is actually a foreign backed agenda and so forth. I mean, these claims have been made by the likes of Vladimir Putin and others for years. What's going on is that people are frustrated and they are exercising their First Amendment rights to push back. They are acting in the highest traditions of what our constitution stands for, which is they're using their rights, they're using their freedoms to redress the government grievances. This is what they should be doing. Many of the greatest achievements we've made internally as a country in terms of progress have come about through public pressure. It's not just that the institutions worked, it's that public pressure was a core part of it. So it's not surprising that an authoritarian sees this as a threat and tries to find a pretext to crack down. They want to spread fear. That is like their first main thing. And so when they grant themselves these emergency powers illegally, by the way, when they just decide they're going to start ruling by decree, even though we have no kings in this country, when they start targeting again particular groups through politicized prosecution or politicized investigation, it is very important that it be met with a mobilization response, that it be met with solidarity. It is very important that others not shy away when one group is singled out and attacked for political reasons, but rather come to them and say, look, you come for them, you come for all of us. That is part of how again, you try to deter this kind of activity from continuing. So, yeah, I mean, we will see how things play out. I want to be very clear that what really works is nonviolent resistance. Violence has no place here.
- [28:25]
A
I'm reminded of something that was in your work. I think there was a study that looked at these kinds of movements to advance democracy going back a long way, you know, from 1900 all the way through the turn of the 21st century. And what you find is that more than half of the time it is the non violent movements that succeed, it's not the violent movements. You know, Susan and I have both, and Jane has studied it. We've lived in and worked in countries that have gone through moments like this. I was in Egypt back around 2004, 2005, when there was a movement there called the Enough Movement, which was intended to try to bring about the end of the Mubarak regime. And it didn't work at the time, but you had to Fast forward another five or six years to 2011 when you had the Arab Spring. And in that context, it did in fact bring about the end of the Mubarak government. And I wonder, as you look at that and a host of other examples going all the way back to Pinochet or to Marcos in the 80s in the Philippines, how much does the passage of time, the accumulation of dissatisfaction, how much does that matter? And how much does the external context, the way that the rest of the world is also talking about and looking at the affairs in that country, how much does that factor into the end result?
- [29:40]
D
So the, the primary domain in general is what's going on domestically within the country. And it's based on a very simple premise that ultimately authoritarians can't rule if people disobey, if large numbers of people choose not to buy, not to work, to, to shift the way they, they interpret orders, the authoritarian actually has no power. They're quickly revealed to be not effective. And this is how many authoritarians have have fallen, by the way. I mean, if you look, for example, at Serbia, Slobodan Milosevic, the quote, unquote, butcher of the Balkans, right, who launched multiple wars and was brutal and had political opponents killed Milosevic when he lost an election in 2000 and tried to subvert it. And people said, we're not going to go along with it. And then the coal miners struck and it came to a head. Security forces didn't obey. When he pushed the repression button, so to speak, and said, okay, time to crack down, it didn't work. They didn't obey. He had no options left. And so authoritarians are vulnerable in this way. I'll say one other thing on that too. So a lot of times in a backsliding democracy, people didn't like the way the democracy worked before it was backsliding, before the demagogue took power. And I think it's really important to recognize that that's probably not where we want to go back to as a country. The system that we had was a democracy that was pretty flawed, had some pretty antiquated parts to it, had some frankly undemocratic parts to it, were actually pretty every vote doesn't matter equally, right? And so there needs to be a deeper look at where we're going as a country. People don't want to go back. If you look at the way that this country has produced unbelievable amounts of wealth and income Inequality is that if you want to build a movement of people who want to mobilize against authoritarianism, you're not going to get people to mobilize to say, yeah, let's go back to the system. That that hasn't helped me in any kind of meaningful way in my day to day life. You want people to come because they are supporting making the system better, moving us forward. And I think there is a improving our democracy aspect of it, but I also think there is going to be an improving the way our economy functions aspect so that people can get their needs met. I was looking at a report by the Congressional Budget Office a few days ago. It was released late last year and it found that 10% of the country owns about 60% of the wealth, about 50% of the country owns about 6% of the wealth. We have to deal with that as a country as we move forward, if we want to build a movement that gets people to participate. Starting to think not just in terms of the democracy aspect, but also the economic aspect and how actually if you improve one, you will improve the other. And how we go forward, what are the demands, what is the vision for where we're going, I think is going to also be really important here.
- [32:32]
B
This was exactly what I was hoping to ask you about because I saw an interesting study by Adam Bonica, who is, I guess a professor at Stanford, and it was about how the issue of corruption and economic injustice is an issue that the Democrats should pay more attention to, but in order to do that, they have to clean their own house too. And so I guess what I wanted to ask you about was whether fighting corruption has been a viable and effective issue in bringing down autocrats, because autocrats seem to go hand in hand with huge corruption. Does that mobilize people?
- [33:11]
D
It can. It can when it's accompanied by acts of courage. Right. So a lot of people in the United States, in my view, have come to almost expect their leaders to be corrupt. So a corruption scandal by a leader doesn't seem to move the needle for a lot of folks. That may not always be the case. I've seen corruption go on in countries for years and then suddenly some scandal. People are ready and they say that's enough. That can always happen. But I think more deeply what people want is not just a leader who's not corrupt. They want a system they can trust. They want a system that they feel works for them. There's a level of feeling like the system is inherently corrupt. I think some of that came from the financial crisis. And people realizing, wait a minute, I lost everything. And people, the system didn't look out for me. And so I think people can get active on corruption if they feel like you are really genuine about tackling the problem, not just saying, hey, vote for me. I'm not going to be corrupt as the last guy, but actually I'm going to take on the system. So I would agree with what you're saying. We are in a toxic polarization in this country. It has been deliberately created as a way to try to. For certain groups to try to rise to power. They try to foment a red blue division, an urban rural division and so forth, or a racial division. And we have a choice. We can play into that existing polarization. Sometimes politicians do, and they might get a little bump from it. But ultimately playing into that polarization doesn't get us out of the ditch that we're in. We can primarily try to depolarize. People say, we're not a red America or blue America, we're the United States of America. I think Barack Obama was prodigious at depolarization. Extremely good. I think the challenge with over relying on depolarization, though, is that people are angry. And when you are constantly trying to depolarize them and they're angry, they sometimes don't feel listened to and they're not really going to mobilize after a certain point. They're not going to feel like you're listening to them. And so there is a third option which we call repolarization. You say, okay, polarization is going to happen. People are angry. But we need to shift the lines here. We need to shift the polarity. And in a country with income and wealth inequality the way we have it, a logical line for repolarization is along those lines. It is about people who work for a living and then some who are extraordinarily wealthy who have really started buying and selling our system. And we are the collateral damage to that. This is not just like being against every wealthy person. I'm not saying that. And I don't want repolarization to become toxic. But democracies need a healthy level of polarization. And I think saying, look, this is bigger than Democrats and Republicans. This is about a huge swath of people. Those who have not been able to get ahead, those who were living paycheck to paycheck a few years ago, but now, because of the cost of the rising cost of living, can't even make it. But it's also even about those who are working and doing okay, but recognize just how precarious their situation is. They're one job loss away from falling through a trapdoor and possibly losing it. There's a huge group of Americans in that situation. There's an opportunity to repolarize and say, yes, we are taking on not just a corrupt leader, but a system that has had unaddressed corruption for too long. So if you lost your job, we want to get your job back, but we also want to change the system that made you lose your job to begin with, for example.
- [36:30]
A
Well, Hardy Merriman, we know there are a lot of people who want to talk to you these days. Your time is limited. We are just thrilled to have had you today thinking about the mechanics, the potential for resistance, what it sounds like, what it looks like in history, and as strange as it sounds, what it means now in the United States. We're grateful for you coming on, and we'll hope to talk to you again.
- [36:49]
D
Hey, thank you for having me. It's a pleasure.
- [36:52]
A
We're going to take a quick break, but when we come back, we'll debrief on our conversation with Hardy Marman. The political scene will be back in just a moment.
- [37:03]
E
What the hell is going on right now? And why is it happening like this? At Wired, we're obsessed with getting to the bottom of those questions on a daily basis, and maybe you are, too. I'm Katie Drummond, the global editorial Director of Wired, and I'm hosting our new podcast series, the Big Interview. Each week, I'll sit down with some of the most interesting, provocative, and influential people who are shaping our right now. Big Interview conversations are fun.
- [37:30]
D
I want a shark that.
- [37:32]
E
That eats the Internet, that turns it all off, unfiltered and unafraid.
- [37:36]
A
So in a lot of ways, I try to be an antidote to the unimaginable fossil of reactionary content that you see online. To the best of my ability, every.
- [37:45]
E
Week, we're going to offer you the ultimate luxury of our times. Meaning and context. True or false. You, Brian Johnson, the man sitting across from me, one day, at some point, as of yet undefined in the future, you will die. False. Tell me more. Listen to the Big Interview right now in the same place you find WIRED's Uncanny Valley podcast. Subscribe or follow wherever you get your podcasts.
- [38:22]
A
Well, I have to say, that was fascinating. I mean, the. The shows that I always find the most interesting are where there's a body of work that has been out there that smart people and experts and historians and scholars have been putting Together that never felt especially relevant to people who are so closely follow American politics. But suddenly you open it up and you realize, oh, there's things in here that help explain what's happening and not happening right now.
- [38:48]
B
I thought, you know, also being here in Washington, in some ways we're the last people to see what's happening in the rest of the country. If this is about something coming from the ground up, we study the top down in Washington. And what he's saying is what happens at the ground level and the local level is sometimes just as important, if not more so.
- [39:08]
A
More so. I mean, the history on this is kind of amazing. If you look at these move that go back, let's take just a study of the last several decades done by Freedom House. Three quarters of these successful movements against autocracy, three quarters of them were bottom up. They were not top down. And we miss that, I think, sometimes with our focus on institutions.
- [39:29]
C
Well, that's right. I mean, the interesting question, and I really appreciate in particular his ability to offer us a language and ways of framing and categorizing and understanding these events that we're seeing sort of unfold in this very chaotic way. So I think just naming the problem is going to be the key for those who are seeking to resist. You can't do that unless you have a framework for understanding it. And I thought he was really terrific at pointing that out. However, Freedom House has also documented the direction of travel overseas and in the US and, you know, I think we're at well over. I think we're approaching two straight decades of fewer democracies in the world than there were at the start of this period of democratic retrenchment. And it's a marker of that moment that we're having this conversation. Right. You know, when you and I became foreign correspondents, Evan, the United States was still in the very tenuous business of exporting democracy overseas. Now we're trying to import the lessons of how to resist democratic backsliding here into the United States. And it's that tragedy that has even given us the reason for having this conversation, unfortunately.
- [40:39]
A
Well, and talking about resistance rather than just a sense of resignation that this is just a kind of meteorological fact that goes on without anybody interfering with it. I think that's an important mindset.
- [40:51]
B
You know, one of the things that I found really interesting was when he said you have to look at different metrics because there's a kind of conventional system for measuring power and how it's working, especially if you're a Washington Reporter, which is getting what you want in Congress or executive orders or all the rest of these kinds of things, winning elections, obviously. But what he's saying is there are other metrics you need to think about if you're looking at the power from the ground up that have to do with unity and local protests and all these other things that he mentioned. And I think, you know, it was eye opening to think, okay, there are probably other metrics that we should be thinking about when we don't see it here in Washington.
- [41:35]
C
Yeah. Although I have to say I did not come away feeling that the criterion for a successful civil resistance to what's happening in the country have yet been met. I thought that he offered a lot of very important kind of frameworks for understanding or looking at it. But it's hard to say, even by reframing the metrics, that what has been mounted so far in the kind of shock and awe period of Trump 2.0 has been so far a successful resistance. And he acknowledged that. He said it can take years in many cases. The question is, what's going to be the damage done in that period of time, Whether it's the time horizon of a single presidential term or it's longer than that.
- [42:21]
B
No, absolutely. I mean, I have to agree that what he was saying is if you look at those metrics, they haven't been met. But what he's saying is, you know, you're beginning to see the spring being pushed down. You're beginning to see some unity. That's what you sort of saw with the Jimmy Kimmel situation. I think one of the interesting tests to me, is the press going to actually pull together and unify against what the Pentagon is trying to do in terms of.
- [42:48]
C
No, because they haven't.
- [42:49]
B
And, you know, these are the things that matter. And you're right. I mean, and I think he made a very important point, important point, which is, in this country, we are accustomed to thinking in terms of competition, including in the press. We compete with each other. We don't work together. And that is our culture is competition.
- [43:07]
A
But I think also, as he said, sometimes you can't predict what are the moments that are galvanizing in this case. Look, the fact that Jimmy Kimmel is in people's minds, he's on their screens every night. That made it a more urgent, more accessible issue than something that is of great interest to us. Like what, what the conditions are that reporters at the Pentagon will work under. That's a harder thing for the public to feel attached to. Doesn't make it less important. It just means that it's harder to predict what those moments will be, I think. Look, Susan, to your point, there's no question these are early days. That was one of his takeaways. I mean, this is a work in progress. This could go on in more ways than one.
- [43:44]
C
And by the way, can I just throw out a question for us since we framed this around and Jimmy Kimmel. I don't have the answer, and I don't even know that I have a point of view about what my answer might be. But I'd like to revisit this in a year because it's not clear to me that Jimmy Kimmel will still be on the air a year from now. And it's not clear to me that this is a skirmish that might have been won by the forces of liberal democracy and free speech. But if you look at the general trajectory of both consolidation in our big media enterprises and the incredible financial pressures on television in particular right now, Stephen Colbert is still off the air at the end of his time next year. I don't know what the future is actually for a kind of network comedian who spends every night skewering Donald Trump on the airwaves a year or two years or three years from now. So I remain open to the question of whether this is a battle won or a skirmish in a much longer war.
- [44:45]
B
I don't think anyone would say this is a battle won. All it was was a spark. But that is basically what he's saying is what it would take is real, sustained pushback, creative pushback. And I don't know if we'll see that.
- [45:01]
A
I think we're gonna leave it here for this week. We have no doubt there will be more material for us next week, and I'm very pleased we'll be together to be able to talk about it. Thank you, Susan, and thank you, Jane.
- [45:11]
B
Well, great to be with you guys.
- [45:13]
C
Great to be with you guys.
- [45:16]
A
All right. This has been the Political Scene from the New Yorker. I'm Evan Osnos. We had research assistance today from Alex d'. Elia. Our producer is Nora Richie. Mixing by Mike Kutchman. Steven Valentino is our executive producer. And Chris Bannon is Conde Nast's head of Global Audio. Our theme music is by Alison Layton Brown. Thank you so much for listening.
- [45:37]
D
Foreign.
- [45:44]
E
I'm Katie Drummond. I'm Wired's global editorial director.
- [45:48]
D
I'm Michael Kalore, Wired's Director of Consumer Tech and Culture.
- [45:51]
C
And I'm Lauren Good.
- [45:52]
E
I'm a senior correspondent at Wired.
- [45:54]
C
And our show, Uncanny Valley, is about the people, power, and influence of Silicon Valley.
- [46:00]
E
And right now, Silicon Valley and Washington have never been more intertwined. So each week, we get together to talk about a big story, often at the intersection of tech and politics.
- [46:10]
D
Right. So whether we're talking about Trump, Coin, Doge, or Elon Musk, we will always explain how these Silicon Valley forces are.
- [46:18]
E
Affecting Washington and how they affect you. Make sure you're following Uncanny Valley in your podcast app of choice so you don't miss an episode.
- [46:31]
B
From prx.