“Our citizenship is a daily obligation. It is a daily engagement,” Stacey Abrams notes.
That’s why All Rise News keeps a focus on both law and action.
After transforming politics in Georgia, Stacey Abrams is coming up with a new playbook to push back against Donald Trump’s authoritarian tide in the United States.
“In the coming days, I'm going to be launching a toolkit that gives you more direction and more information and connects you to even more organizations that are doing the work,” Abrams said in a 32-minute Substack Live.
The former Georgia House representative, voting rights organizer and attorney’s latest project, slated for launch as early as next week, springs from the conviction: “We Can Stop the Rise of American Autocracy,” the title of a recent Time Magazine article she co-authored with Princeton University scholar
.Scheppele, who studied Hungary’s descent into authoritarianism under Viktor Orbán, laid out 10 steps in the autocrat’s playbook.
Conceptualizing its inverse, Abrams believes there is a corollary for reclaiming freedom and power.
“Our first job is recognizing,” Abrams said, referring to the seeing the authoritarian threat and its reality. “Our second job, though, and this is the point of that paragraph, is activation. We must activate ourselves because once you understand that something is happening, our next step is to shrug off the fear that those individual steps have caused.”
Abrams observes some of this activation happening already in routine, nationwide and international demonstrations like the #NoKings, #HandsOff, and Workers Over Billionaires protests.
“One of the tools of authoritarianism is the crushing of dissent,” Abrams said. “Protests are a constant reminder that that dissent is still active and alive and viable and resilient.”
Abrams sees opportunities to channel the energy from those protests into local action.
“If you are concerned about the disabled veterans who've been terminated from their jobs by a veteran who now runs the VA, then make certain that you are showing up at those clinics and you're showing up in places where veterans gather,” she said.
After activation, on her list, comes reclamation.
“This is a do-it-yourself response to tyranny, but we have to believe we have the right to it,” she said.
During the 30-minute interview, Abrams discusses Trump’s recent executive order purporting to mandate nationwide voter identification, his use of the military on U.S. civilian streets, and the overall effect of the legal pushback, from a federal judge’s Posse Comitatus ruling in California and a new lawsuit seeking to the end the National Guard’s deployment in Washington, D.C.
