Ami Fields-Meyer was cursed with knowing what was next.
His new book, co-written with Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative journalist Julia Angwin, On Courage: How to Be a Dissident in an Age of Fear, begins before the latest Trump regime rumbled into power. He describes the tabletop exercises that democracy organizations led by the Brennan Center for Justice ran before 2024 — Model UN-style scenarios where civic leaders played out what happens when a president decides the Constitution is optional.
“In every single one,” Ami told me in the conversation above, “there was very, very little to stop a president who decided, I am not abiding by the Constitution.”
Almost every scenario ended the same way: troops in the streets of major cities.
One veteran government official threw his hands up at the end of a session and said, “This is new. We have no tools for this.”
Ami’s answer — and the book’s — is that we do have tools. Just not ones that many, if not most, white suburban Americans were familiar with. Well, we’re a lot more familiar with them now than we were in January of 2025. But there’s so much more to learn.
Ami had spent a decade in government—local, state, and White House. He and Angwin decided to seek out those who put their lives on the line to take on the institutions that are supposed to protect us. The book is built from conversations with more than 100 dissidents, activists, and scholars across five continents, written fast because they felt they had to.
And you can feel the urgency on every page.
The first thing On Courage: How to Be a Dissident in an Age of Fear does is redefine who counts as a dissident. Not just Mandela. Not just Navalny.
It’s anyone, he said, “who just did something risky in their context and followed their conscience.” Every dissident in the book, Ami told me, heard the same internal moment — what they call a moral collision, a voice that says something is wrong — and instead of suppressing it, followed it despite their fear.
I, because I can’t shut up, noted that Stephen Miller has a very similar definition of dissident — anyone involved in organizing, by any degree — and that the horrific Prairie View sentences and the Minneapolis indictments are the proof.
That brought the conversation to selective repression. You don’t need many political prisoners to freeze a society. In Russia, he noted, you’re roughly 20 times more likely to be killed by a drunk driver than jailed for dissent — and yet the message gets through. Pick someone visible enough, normal enough, in enough different segments of society. Broadcast it. Watch the fear meld into everyone’s daily social calculations.
Which is why the book keeps returning to something that looks, at first, like it isn’t a political argument at all.
The answer On Courage: How to Be a Dissident in an Age of Fear finds — over and over, from Venezuela to Czechoslovakia to Bushwick, Brooklyn — is community as infrastructure. Ami explained: in Judaism, a minyan of ten is the quorum required to say certain prayers. You cannot fully grieve alone. You cannot say the mourner’s kaddish without ten others present. The rabbis’ answer to why, he said, is that “there are just certain things you can’t do alone. And one of those things is breaking fear.”
Ami points to Czechoslovakia in 1989, where theater actors who'd worked together for years joined the student protests almost immediately— trust most movements spend months trying to manufacture. The Bushwick, Brooklyn WhatsApp groups built during the pandemic to get food to undocumented neighbors were repurposed, when ICE arrived on the block, into real-time alert networks. The Rutgers faculty senate — a body that had spent years debating parking and academic calendars — recognized it already had relationships, and used them to organize a NATO-style declaration: come for one university, all universities push back.
“Almost nobody who we spoke to started from scratch,” Ami said. “You probably don’t need to learn any new skills. What you do need to be able to do is look around and say, what communities and what networks am I already a part of?”
This is also, he argued, the correct reading of what Erica Chenoweth’s research actually shows. The 3.5% rule — the finding that nonviolent movements reaching 3.5% of the population have historically succeeded — has become, he said, “a bit of a headache,” because people treat it as a magic number. Show up in sufficient quantity and you win.
But the reason those movements reached 3.5% is the organizing that preceded it: the minyan work, the trust-building, the relationships that meant when the moment came, people could be deployed. The big rally, as one activist who helped bring down Milošević put it, is the “victory lap.” It is not the work.
I also got to discuss the part of the book that will live in my craw as a reminder that I am, too, cursed with knowing what (likely) comes next.
He and Angwin offer research from political scientists Jonathan Pinckney and Claire Trilling that makes the stakes impossible to ignore. Countries experiencing democratic backsliding that rely exclusively on institutional responses — elections, litigation, legislation — have roughly a 7% chance of reversing course. Add nonviolent civil resistance, and it climbs to 51%.
I had not heard these numbers. And they’ve completely confirmed my belief that winning elections will only matter if there’s a massive civil resistance movement to make sure they stay won.
I asked Fields-Meyer about the elected left, about the fury directed at Democrats who don’t seem to understand the moment they’re in. His answer was generous as you’d expect from someone who knows these people and precise: the skills that make you a successful Senate leader, that make you good at counting votes and threading needles, are not the skills that make you a movement leader.
“I don’t think most politicians get it,” he said.
He wants politicians to read On Courage: How to Be a Dissident in an Age of Fear. He wants them to understand that “just because you’re wearing a suit every day and you’ve been trained for a certain kind of political combat doesn’t mean that you don’t have a lot to learn from activists of history.”
The book pulls heavily from the American tradition filled with dissidents — activists who risked it all for civil rights, abortion rights, LGBTQ rights — who are now whispering in our ears, “We tried to tell you.”
Now is the time when we must hear those whispers, we must live, as Kurt Cobain never did, our “Leonard Cohen afterworld,” in the here and now. And that starts with remembering the only way to do this wrong is to do nothing.
“Ring the bells that still can ring,” Leonard Cohen wrote in his song “Anthem,” which is quoted in the book’s opening. “Forget your perfect offering.”
Ami ended our conversation there — not because the moment calls for optimism, but because waiting for the perfect coalition, the perfect action, the perfect moment is, as he put it, “how fascists win.” They lose when we make politics our practice, do it in community, with intention and regularity. Not because it will definitely work. Because there are certain things you cannot do alone. Things that must be done.
The book is On Courage: How to Be a Dissident in an Age of Fear. It is one of those rare ones that comes to you at exactly the right moment and makes you feel, not that everything will be fine, but that you are not as alone in seeing it as you feared.
And that makes it easier and more urgent to do something.
If you don’t believe me, maybe you’ll believe Maddow.
Thank you Cat RN, WhoopDeeDoo Basil, Ruth Suyenaga, and many others for tuning into my live video with Ami Fields-Meyer!
