Announcing On Courage Book Project
Hi friends -
I’m thrilled to be sharing this news: I’m writing a book about how to challenge authoritarianism.
Earlier this year, Ami Fields-Meyer and I published an essay in the New Yorker called “So you want to be a dissident?” In it, we extracted lessons on how to fight autocrats from dissidents we interviewed from around the world.
Now we have signed a contract with the Harper Collins Mariner imprint to expand our reporting into a book. Tentatively titled “On Courage: How to be a Dissident in America’s Age of Fear,” it is scheduled to be published next summer.
In book terms, this is an incredibly fast turnaround. Ami and I have been interviewing and writing furiously for months now. We will be chained to our desks for a few more months as we crank out a manuscript.
But the project feels urgent. We are in a country that is losing its grip on democracy terrifyingly and rapidly.
Of course, we will still have elections. But these days, authoritarianism wears a different cloak. It no longer rides into town on the back of a coup or revolution. Instead, autocratic leaders like Vladimir Putin, Victor Orban and Narendra Modi hold elections, but they use state power to crush dissent, manipulate election rules and control the media.
In their book How Democracies Die, Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt describe how today’s democracies erode subtly and imperceptibly. They offer a four prong test of warning signs in an emerging authoritarian leader. They write:
“We should worry when a politician
Rejects, in words or actions, the democratic rules of the game,
Denies the legitimacy of opponents,
Tolerates or encourages political violence,
Indicates a willingness to curtail the civil liberties of opponents, including the media.”
Our current president easily meets all four criteria. And the institutions that are supposed to check his power - Congress and the Courts - have failed so far to stop him meaningfully.
This book is about what we do next - as individuals, as communities, and as a nation. Because even if some of the contours are different, this is still a tale as old as time. People have been fighting for their rights, for their dignity, for each other, for a long time. And it’s time that we study at their feet.
This book will tell the stories of courageous dissidents around the world. It is meant to convey their hard earned wisdom.
But even more importantly it is meant to be an invitation to action. We hope that one or many of the stories we are collecting will illuminate a path that you might not have seen before.
Because history tells us that the only way out of this is if we all pluck up a bit of courage and fight for the world we want.
Thanks as always for reading.
Best
Julia