The word ‘resistance’ isn’t doing much for me these days. It conjures images of angry activists and sit-in’s and a way of being that just doesn’t jive. Not like it did in the past.
But in the face of this new Trump term and the onslaught of illegal and unconstitutional things taking place, I’m feeling the need to dig in my heels, create friction, and do something —anything!—to counter what’s going on.
Which is where my inner world comes in.
So often resistance, and any kind of political work, is thought about in terms of the outer world— organizing boycotts, petitioning legislation, distributing food. It’s work that happens out there in the world.
But a key component to the rise of authoritarianism—the type of leadership that consolidates power and uses illiberal force to do so— is the capture of our inner worlds. Both the way we feel and what we believe.
And Trump’s first two weeks in office, my friends, has been proving to try to do exactly that.
As I rack my brain and have conversation after conversation with friends about what the f*ck is going on, a sliver of opportunity that’s been showing itself to me is the role my inner world plays within all of this. The power and sovereignty of it.
Because in the context of political strategies that rely on me being overwhelmed and isolated for them to work, my inner world becomes a frontline for resistance. It’s a kind of resistance that feels different than the 2017 resistance of public outrage and condemnation. There’s a deeper and wider awareness to this kind that lends itself well to these times, and feels essential as the starting point for any outer action.
So that’s what I want to play with here and invite you into with me. This idea that, when things feel totally out of our control and deeply devastating there are still things we can do—even in the inner recesses of our minds—to push back and respond.
Below I share puzzle pieces I’ve been resonating with, like:
The value of calling it what it is (for me, it’s ‘rising authoritarianism’)
Saying fuck that to the overwhelm, knowing it’s purposely here.
Having choice in the war for my political imagination. Coming up with my own version of things.
Turning inward but not away, to fill up my proverbial cup in order to tap back in.
My current—and ongoing—checklist for how to work with my inner world these days.
I want to know what you think—how does this idea of our inner world being a place of resistance land for you? What does it bring up? How is this moment showing up for you and what are you feeling within it?
With love,
Liz
In the name of nourishing our inner worlds…
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Calling it what it is
In this age of hyperbolic media, I can find myself exhausted by claims of fascism and Nazi-ism. Intense political rhetoric about democracy being at stake and the end of life as we know it wear me down after a while (especially when it’s not matched with proportionate action, cough cough Democrats).
But there are things that are changing in America these days, and finding the right words to describe what’s happening is helpful. It gives me a framework to make sense of what’s playing out, and breadcrumbs for what to do about it.
Bernie Sanders, for instance, was on the Senate floor Tuesday calling what’s happening a rapid move towards kleptocracy. Others see Trump’s rise as inevitable within late-stage capitalism.
For me, the big picture framing that has been most helpful is seeing what’s playing out as rising authoritarianism, specifically the populist kind. A form of political leadership that leverages people’s angst and discontent in a way that allows them to consolidate power away from the people and towards vested self-interest. An antithetical move to our Founder’s principles.
Here’s how UC Berkley’s Míriam Juan-Torres González describes authoritarian populism in a report published by the Othering and Belonging Institute. Let me know if you think it fits -
“Authoritarians consolidate power so that they, as the executive branch, have sweeping authority. They often suppress political opposition, spread disinformation, fuel political violence and turn historically independent institutions into political actors that will help achieve their agenda.”
…the authoritarian populist worldview is ‘almost as if it were like binoculars.’ Through one lens, she said, there’s the threat of an identity-based outgroup. Through the other, there’s a deep-rooted struggle between the people and elites. The sense of fear and antagonism these lenses promote leads people to accept authoritarian measures to protect themselves and their in-group. ‘Taking these extreme measures that are anti-democratic [is] justified because of the enormity of the threat.’”
Hm, yea. This framing fits for me. It gives me a map I can use to track broader patterns. The intense anti-immigrant and anti-trans rhetoric has new meaning. The loyalty tests and firings and law suits have new context.
Why is it helpful to start here? Because once I can identify what’s happening—at least a part of what’s happening—then I can figure out what to do. As Juan-Torres says, “words and ideas have power; they can frame our understanding of what is and what ought to be done.”
Which brings me to our inner worlds.
This sh*t thrives on overwhelm—we don’t have to feed it
I’ll leave it up to you to decide whether ‘rising authoritarianism’ fits this current administrations approach or not. For me, it fits quite clearly, which gives me breadcrumbs to follow on what to do.
Specifically, it’s led me to seek out voices and views from non-US folks who have been or are currently living under authoritarian rule. Tips and insights from them on what to do.
In this vein, Daniel Hunter from the platform Waging Nonviolence shares insights in his piece “10 ways to be prepared and grounded now that Trump has won” from working alongside colleagues living under autocratic regimes:
“[G]ood psychology is good social change.
Authoritarian power is derived from fear of repression, isolation from each other and exhaustion at the utter chaos. We’re already feeling it.
Thus, for us to be of any use in a Trump world, we have to pay grave attention to our inner states, so we don’t perpetuate the autocrat’s goals of fear, isolation, exhaustion or constant disorientation.”
Which brings me to Trump’s first two weeks in office. NYT columnist Ezra Klein sums it up so well - “It is hard to even think coherently. Donald Trump's first two weeks in the White House have followed Bannon's strategy like a script. The flood is the point. The overwhelm is the point.”
Have you heard of the ‘flood the zone’ strategy? You very well may have, but just in case—it’s a political-media strategy popularized by Steve Bannon and now deployed by Trump’s righthand man Steve Miller. You do so many things at once that the opposition isn’t able to respond.
This onslaught of Executive Orders and illegal DOGE actions are meant to do exactly that—to make our heads spin and explode and deflate all at the same time. We’re too busy looking every which way to make sense of what we see or figure out what to do. It puts us in survival mode.
So knowing this, that we are being purposefully overwhelmed in order to achieve Trump’s political goals, what do we do?
As a first step I humbly propose we full-throatedly say—fuck that. We resist the overwhelm by knowing that what’s happening is designed to overwhelm us. And say, fuck that.
We step back. We don’t try to wrap our head around everything. We lock in on the things we care the most about. We find trusted intellects or friends or teachers who are good at mapping the bigger picture and rely on them to do the zoomed-out-sense-making.
As journalist and lawyer Jill Filipovic puts it in her piece “Believe Your Eyes: This Is Exactly What It Looks Like”, “Our task now is not to follow every twist and turn and to know every bit of minutiae. That doesn’t matter (or at least, it may be counter-productive to try to follow all of it). What matters is identifying the patterns and understanding the larger goals of this administration— and then interrupting the most dangerous efforts.”
There’s a war for your imagination
Trump is a master marketer. He has mastered the ability to both get people’s attention and shape the story they see the world through.
Ezra Klein has been doing a lot of great pieces on this lately. In his recent article titled “Don’t believe him” he says:
“The speed with which things were happening and changing. The sense that this is Trump's country now. It is his government now. It follows his will. It does what he wants. That he is limitless.
Because Trump knows the power of marketing, the power of belief. If you make people believe something is true, you make it likelier that it becomes true.”
What he’s talking about here is our political imaginations. They shape how we see the world and our roles in it; what we believe is possible; who we see as having power and whether we’re able to shift or change that.
These first few weeks of Trump 2.0 are trying to capture our imaginations and re-shape them as they see fit. To make us believe that he has some sort of divinely mandated right to rule; that he—and he alone—is the only one who can save us.
Ezra Klein goes on:
“He clawed his way back to great wealth by playing a fearsome billionaire on TV. He remade himself as a winner after the 2020 election by refusing to admit he had ever lost.
The American presidency is a limited office, but Trump has never wanted to be president, not the way it's defined in Article 2 of the US. Constitution.
What he's always wanted to be is king. And his plan this time is to first play king on TV.
If we believe he is already king, if we believe he already has all that power, it becomes likelier that we'll let him govern as a king.”
When it comes to dealing with the disorientation we feel, we don’t have to give over our imaginations to Trump’s version of things. We don’t have to succumb to his vision. We can come up with our own.
This doesn’t mean ignoring what Trump and his team are doing; pretending like it doesn’t exist and, instead, living in some alternative political fantasy. No, it means arming ourselves with the intellectual tools and political foresight to ground ourselves in the parts of our system we want to preserve—the pillars of our Constitution, norms and values inherent to our way of life—and thinking 5 steps ahead to where there are openings for change that we can leverage for our own visions.
As many of us know, Trump has tapped into something very real within our collective psyche—angst and deep dissatisfaction about the state of things. It’s the ‘populism’ part of his approach. If you’re like me then you resonate with this deep dissatisfaction. Things need to change. But what that change is and how we go about doing it are BIG questions that we all have different answers for.
Being aware that our political imaginations are being fucked with gives us a position of power. Just like the overwhelm, we can step back and have choice within it. We can say fuck that and figure out how to maneuver our way around it.
We can play chess here. Look down the line 5, 10, 15 years. See what can be capitalized on within this current mess and leveraged for the causes and visions we care most about.
And we can stay rooted in our values. Even use this as an opportunity to get clearer about them. Values related to human rights, dignity, and belonging. These all shape our political imaginations, and serve as the basis from which we act.
Turning inward, but not away
So how do we do it all… like for real? How do we withstand the onslaught of bullshit that’s happening and being thrown in our faces? How do we continue to show up for and protect those who are being the most gravely affected by what’s happening?
Because naming what is happening and intellectually understanding what to do is one thing, but then actually doing it is another. Like, we can understand that the fear mongering and media approaches are designed to make us feel overwhelmed and afraid. We can wrap our heads around that. But then the actual fear itself—the fear from seeing families ripped apart due to deportations or the fear from seeing USAID shuttered —is real. It’s in our bodies. And it’s there for legitimate reasons.
There is a line we get to walk around this throughout this administration (and beyond). It’s a line that helps us keep our minds sharp and our hearts grounded; balancing our emotional inner world with the sociopolitical world. As Turkish journalist and political commentator, Asli Aydintasba puts it in her Politico piece, ‘Trump Will Overplay His Hand. Here’s How to Be Ready.’ she says:
“Don’t disengage—stay connected.
After a stunning electoral loss like this, there’s a natural impulse to shut off the news, log off social media and withdraw from public life. I’ve seen this with friends in Turkey and Hungary with opposition supporters retreating in disillusionment after Erdogan’s or Orbam’s victories. Understandably, people want to turn inwards.
Dancing, travel, meditation, book clubs — it’s all fine. But eventually, in Poland, Hungary and Turkey, opponents of autocracy have returned to the fight, driven by a belief in the possibility of change. So will Americans.”
We need to balance the very real need to keep ourselves sane—to take breaks from the news and mayhem, fill up our proverbial cups with music and good food and the things that bring our souls alive.
But the invitation here is to do so with the intention to not fully turn away. To turn inward to make sure that your oxygen mask is on first before helping the person next to you. But once it is, then returning back to what’s happening in order to participate. Moving from a place of being better resourced so that you can keep your finger on the pulse of things, and show up in the way you uniquely feel called to within it. Because, as Asli put it, “Nothing is more meaningful than being part of a struggle for democracy.”
My current checklist for my inner world
So here we are with something to do: we fortify our inner worlds and see them as a frontline of resistance to what’s happening.
My current—and ongoing—checklist for doing so looks something like this:
☑️ I tend to my inner world, knowing the fear and angst and pain I’m feeling is real. The pain in the world is real. I need to grieve it, create space for it.
☑️ I counter isolation by pushing back on the way things related to the world, Trump 2.0, etc make me feel alone. Knowing this is a ruse. Understanding that, yes, it’s harder to connect with people these days, for a whole host of reasons—political reasons not withstanding. But I can do it. And I can use things like the We Heal For All Circle practice to do so, and do so in ways that are conscious and embody the things I want to see more of in the world.
☑️ I resist the overwhelm by knowing what’s happening is designed to overwhelm me. I say, fuck that, and step back. Not trying to wrap my head around everything right now. Keeping my eye on the bigger picture.
☑️ I work with the disorientation by seeing it as an opportunity. Yes, things are being shaken up. Yes, it sucks because it’s confusing as hell. And, within this there are opportunities to reorient. To take all that’s kicked up in and around us, like a winter snow globe, and help guide the snowflakes into a new orientation.
☑️ As things turn to mush I keep my mind sharp. Turning to trusted sources to deepen my understanding of history and our Constitution, international law, and knowledge bases that hold time-tested wisdom. History repeats itself. I can learn.
☑️ I allow myself to be shaped and moved by what’s happening. I trust that what’s moving through me—the thoughts, feelings, visions, knowing—is here for a reason. I let the darkness illuminate things for me, a phrasing a dear friend recently said that hit so hard.
☑️ I root myself into the goodness of people, and actively do so with the caricatures of people in mind who I wholeheartedly disagree with. I keep deepening my practice to firmly, lovingly speak my truth, and meet others in a space of spiritual love that feels so counter and foreign to our current political landscape.
What about you?
Okay.. but now what?
I think some reading this might still be wondering, but like what do I do? Sure, I get it, my inner world needs to be solid as a first step within all of this. That’s great, but now what?
And what I’d say to that is that the act of keeping your inner world sovereign and non-commandeered by the Trump version of reality is a political act in and of itself. Retaining your power to envision the world the way you aspire it to be is political action.
From there, it’s true that you’ll be better able to say yes to opportunities to engage in more traditional ‘action’ in the world—putting your weight behind a good candidate, joining up a local cause. But there’s something more subtle here that’ll happen too. You’ll be integrated within yourself in a way that you carry with you into conversations and your daily life that makes a difference.
When your Trump-loving uncle makes a passing comment about Trump’s glory, you’ll be able to respond in an equally passing way, holding a grip on the reality you want to carry forward, and doing so in a way that’s aligned with your values. That doesn’t bark at him and break ties, but instead holds a psychic vision and embodied knowing that’s steady and strong and that influences the collective field.
Our political imaginations matter. Not just because they’re the source from which actions are born, but because they’re the consciousness we carry with us and co-create the world with.
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