Enough opining. Get in the streets

Some advice from an expert on what will stop Trump. Plus: a new book on what it means to lose your country to a dictator

Good morning, all! Anand here. We have a hearty serving of insight for you today, from practical actions you can take to the question of what it’s like to lose your country to dictatorship — and how you reclaim it. As always, thank you for being part of this. If you haven’t already, join us as a supporting subscriber, and let’s build a new media together. — AG

We’ve been talking a lot about what’s happening to us: a coup, a constitutional crisis, an authoritarian takeover aided and abetted by the broligarchs and their roving gangs of junior developers. But a lot of you have been writing in and letting us know that you want to do something about all of this — and you aren’t sure what. So we reached out to the political sage Anat Shenker-Osorio for some clear advice on that score.

Public opinion is meaningless (I should know — I get paid to measure it). So what does work to change public policy and — and more importantly right now — topple autocracy? It's visible, IRL, unrelenting public action. Indeed, a mere 3.5 percent of the people need to get involved. It turns out that no autocracy in the world has withstood that sliver of a population, engaged in active, ongoing, IRL resistance, refusal and ridicule.

That means you can do everything from learning and spreading Know Your Rights to stop ICE in their tracks, calling Dem lawmakers with concrete and specific demands to grind Congress to a halt, organizing very localized actions (think about your next school board or city council meeting) to beat down bad bills and demand good ones, just to name a few. This current administration of the bullies for the billionaires is hellbent on sweeping shock and awe — but what actually happens in our country comes down to what we do together in the places where we live.

To put it bluntly, most elected officials just do not care what you think — but they care a lot about what you do. And it works! So get out and do it. And we suggest you read Anat’s great new piece in Rolling Stone on this subject if you want to know more.

The bottom line is this. If you want to stop an autocracy, you need to recruit one out of every thirty people around to your cause.

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And…lessons for America — from Haiti

In the 1950s in Haiti, a doctor named François Duvalier exploited poor people’s justified resentment of the country’s elites, captured the imaginations of the working classes with a lot of empty promises to do something about their problems (that sound familiar?), and overthrew the newly elected democratic government, turning the country into a brutal dictatorship that killed tens of thousands of people and from which Haiti hasn’t recovered 70 years later.

How can that happen to a country — and how can a country recover once it has?

Asking for a geopolitical friend.

Today we’re delighted to bring you a conversation with someone uniquely positioned to answer. The anthropologist, author, commentator, and critic Rich Benjamin — who found out in adulthood that his grandfather was Daniel Fignolé, the labor leader and president whom Duvalier overthrew and forced into exile — set out to answer those questions and better understand the country his family lost and left behind in a new book, Talk to Me: Lessons from a Family Forged by History, that is part memoir, part family history, and part cautionary tale.

We spoke with Benjamin about the new book, as well as his earlier work researching whiteness in America at the dawn of the Obama presidency. It is a conversation about the fears that drive people into the arms of authoritarian leaders, and how what happened in Haiti has shaped his understanding of what is likely to happen in the U.S. under a second Trump administration.

Read on for an interview with Rich Benjamin, and an exclusive excerpt from the book.

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In your new book, you tell the story of how François Duvalier takes power by telling the story for working people, co-opting and turning their interests against them. Can you look back on that from our perspective today and use it to think about what's happening now in this country?

For me, the political and historical lessons of the book are that you can't take progress for granted. It has to be fought for, and it has to be vigilantly watched. Remember in 1989, when Francis Fukuyama said, "The Berlin Wall has fallen, and it's the end of history. Freedom has triumphed. Liberalism has triumphed." And we know now that that was horseshit, right?

I believe that if your kinfolk fled Hitler, if your kinfolk fled Mussolini, if your kinfolk fled Stalin, you have this sixth sense that history can just yank the sidewalk from underneath your feet. And that's what happened to my family. So this is what's made me vigilant now.

There are so many fears in this country that Trump and MAGA have been allowed to turn on their head. About work, the very nature of work. Will work be profitable? What will work look like? Will I be employed? Will tech replace me? There's this concocted fear of the media — that it's run by elites, that it's untrustworthy. And then there's this fear of migration. All of these forces are helping authoritarians turn pro-labor people against themselves.

Going back to your earlier book, Searching for Whitopia, which came out right at the beginning of the Obama era and is this deep participant observation of the roots of these sentiments that have turned Americans against themselves and the rest of the world. Can you talk about what you saw?

Around 2007, I packed my bags, and I ventured on a 27,000 mile, two-year journey to the fastest growing and whitest communities in this country. It was a two-year ethnography of whiteness. I hung out with militiamen, with white civic groups in Utah who were raising the alarm against what they called illegal immigration. And they painted this image of a drawbridge, and that if we don't pull this drawbridge up, America will never last. But I was also hearing about international issues, complaints against the "deep state," about forever wars and saw how this country was resegregating, but not just by race, but by ideology.

I was noticing more working-class Republicans who were shopping at Walmart — Sam’s Club Republicans, after the savings program of Walmart. I was also noticing this trend of upscale Republicans who were like, "Just slash the government. We don't need to pay for those other people who don't look like us." And that ultimately became the Tea Party.

The book hit the presses around 2008. Barack Obama had won, and I had a white progressive editor tell me, "Rich, we should cancel this book because the analysis is wrong. There is no more racial polarization. We now have a Black man in the White House." We were so enthralled with this idea of a post-racial America, of racial healing. I said, "This isn't going to last. We're going to see a ferocious backlash to this president." I so wish that editor had been right and I had been wrong.

And now MAGA has managed to fuse those forces; the Sam’s Club Republicans and the Tea Party. There's a direct line from the story you're telling about 2007 and 2008 to what’s happening today.

Yes. It just shifts. But the resentment remains. When I was doing the research, the resentment was against MS-13 and the El Salvadoran gangs. And now it's shape-shifted to the Haitian migrants.

And by the way, that is such a poignant tale because Springfield, Ohio was a demographically dying town. White people had left that city to die. It was in a horrible economic and social decline. So a lot of the civic leadership and the business leadership said, "Why not bring migrants?"

It’s not like if you're Haitian you just find yourself in Springfield. You were asked to be there to revitalize a community that is in a white numeric and demographic decline. And then you show up and you are suddenly the scapegoat for all that community's problems.

The question is, how does this false narrative — that immigrants are threatening America — win out over the real narrative? Because there is an immigration crisis in Middle America, a real one. But the crisis is that there aren't enough immigrants.

The right has won the narrative in that war. The right has told a very coherent story about this: China did this to you. Mexico did this to you.

It's really the job of people on the left to say, "This is the clear coherent story I want to tell about immigration." Because Trump has done that. Trump and Steve Bannon have told a very clear, resonant story about immigration dating from 2016. It's eight years seeping into the consciousness.

And you tell me, what's the coherent story the Democrats have told about immigration? Maybe I'm missing it. It's been like this for decades now. And you would have thought they would have figured it out at the beginning of the Biden term with the end of Covid and with the different policy options at the border as of 2022. Then was the time to figure it out. Not now.

The left got caught flat-footed on this issue. And this isn't rocket science. It was 15 years ago I was like, "You guys better get on top of this."

How can they keep on getting caught flat-footed?

I don't want to let the left off the hook, but it has an ethics that the right doesn't. So that poses a strategic disadvantage. They have an economic ethics. They have an international ethics. They have a progressive racial ethics. And when you're burdened by these ethics, it's harder to tell a coherent story.

There's certainly a way to tell it better, to deal with this third rail better. But I do believe that in the immigration debate, the right has structural advantages in that debate over the left, and the left has added to its disadvantage by incompetence.

On the emotional level, these old, scary narratives that the right is floating still work better to drive them to the polls.

They do. And that's the crux here. They do. They do. They do. But as you say, it's about the emotional narrative of what immigrants do for this country and the bigger story that if we didn't have immigrants, that's the real catastrophe waiting around the corner. Who's going to do the real, important, essential physical work of this country that will never be replaced by A.I.? There just are not enough people.

The big need for labor right now is in care, which is by and large, done by immigrants, by immigrant women, by immigrant women of color. And that’s at a time when union participation is in the single digits, has dropped to historically low rates. So this emotional argument that the right wing is making and winning with is in direct opposition to reality.

It's interesting that you point out that the service class, the working class, is increasingly women. It's increasingly people of color. And once the working class becomes more people of color, becomes more women, it's been gutted in many instances of its protections, of its advantages.

At the end of the book, you talk about going back to Haiti, and you find the aftermath of this kind of politics.

So in 2010, Haiti has a devastating earthquake. And for me, not investigating my past becomes untenable. So I go to Haiti, and there's a cholera epidemic, another natural disaster. And there's political uncertainty due to a presidential election at that time.

And I see the crushed presidential palace, and I have this vision of what happened after a dictatorship won out over my grandfather's presidency. And I hear echoes of his voice and how he foresaw this. Because in the presidential campaign, when he ran against Duvalier, he called him a "profoundly stupid little man." He foresaw that if Duvalier was granted power, he would wreck the country.

And the resonance for today is I am certain that the effects of what's happening now with Project 2025 and Trump in office are going to resonate for decades. And that's what's heartbreaking. You don't have to have a crystal ball. But if this program gets fully executed, it's going to be your grandchildren who are going to still be living with MAGA.

They're the ones who are going to have to clean up at the crushed presidential palace down the road.

And that's just the visible things, right? But then you have civic infrastructure. Haiti is suffering from a lack of civic infrastructure. And Trump is explicitly taking a wrecking ball to our civic infrastructure, to our political culture. We haven't even got to the culture of kindness and social relations and race relations that our parents worked so hard after this country's disastrous history, that Trump is explicitly also trying to wreck. These things matter. It's heartbreaking.

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Returning to Haiti

From Talk to Me: Lessons from a Family Forged by History

I was closing out my ten-­hour workday at a think tank that advocates for a more equitable economy in America and a better-­ functioning democracy. I had fought for regulators to put guardrails on Wall Street avarice, for states to increase black access to ballot boxes, for cities to combat police brutality. I had rallied to increase the federal minimum wage and against anti-black racism, in swelling movements that would soon become the Fight for Fifteen campaign and Black Lives Matter. I had just returned from touring my first book, on the growing politics of fear in America, and tasks had piled up in my office. I gathered the belongings scattered across my cluttered desk and put them in my bag. As I walked to the elevator, I caught a glimpse of the news on the large flat-­screen TV pinned above the reception desk. At the word “Haiti,” my body clenched. I braced myself to hear of a miracle or a catastrophe —­ the only ways America talks about that country.

No one could possibly have been prepared for the images that appeared: an earthquake had leveled the capital, damage far beyond anything most Americans had ever seen. Voices from those desperate for aid resounded in my ears. I looked at the noble faces, creased with resolve to help their neighbors, the faces appealing for comfort, faces that held my concern, unlike the ones I’d tuned out as a child: boat people bobbing in dinghies off Florida’s coast.

The news flashed images of one damaged building after another. The presidential palace lay in ruins, its stately columns buckled, its white dome cratered. The central pavilion, main hall, and ornate staircase collapsed into a cloud of dust. The building that my grandfather had occupied, a heap of debris. Decimated icon of a disremembered man.

An aide-­ mémoire without warning or logic: the news was like a long-­lost relative appearing on my doorstep. Not looking became untenable. The next day, I watched survivors, haunted and haunting, pleading at me from YouTube and Flickr, as though to say, Who will be our witness? The worst earthquake in the Western Hemisphere in over two hundred years, killing three hundred thousand people, made recognition urgent. To continue my indifference toward this country and my Haitian blood suddenly felt like a dereliction of my humanity.

I was ready to amend my future. The moment was ripe for me to understand what about my family’s past undercut my present, my ability to have a richer, more honest emotional life. Something would always be off in any relationship I had until I got that first, primal one straight.

I packed my bags for Haiti.

Haiti’s government was in disarray. Some 30 percent of civil servants had died in the earthquake. Gun violence and kidnappings spread amid the shambles. The U.S. State Department advised prospective travelers to postpone their visits or to buy evacuation insurance. Two days before my scheduled flight, the eye of Hurricane Tomas just missed the island, though torrential rains soaked the roughly 1.3 million displaced people lucky enough to have survived the earthquake. The flooding and turmoil exacerbated a two-­ week-old cholera epidemic that was already ravaging the population. Lacking housing, clean water, garbage removal, medical clinics, and civil servants, the country stood in paralysis.

When I announced to my mother that I was visiting Haiti, she begged me not to go. I would not be deterred. Before leaving, I made appointments at Haiti’s two major national archives, so that I could inspect every document, every object, concerning my grandfather. I hoped to catalog and study every frame of film footage capturing Daniel, every recording of his voice, in addition to ferreting out his belongings. I tracked down the addresses of two grizzled old men who had worked for him. I couldn’t locate their phone numbers, so I planned to drop in on them unannounced at their homes, where I would plead for an audience. I also arranged to volunteer at a makeshift medical clinic in Cité Soleil, one of the poorest neighborhoods in the capital. I wanted to contribute whatever I could while I was there.

The night before I left, I telephoned Mommy to say goodbye.

“What time is your flight?”

“Tomorrow afternoon.”

“What suit will you be wearing?”

“There’ll be no suit. I’m wearing cargo shorts and a T-­ shirt.”

“You have to wear at least a tie!” she shrieked. “You’re a professor!”

I would soon land in Port-au-­Prince amid an earthquake recovery, a cholera epidemic, election turbulence, and post-hurricane flooding, and what my mother was concerned with was how I would come off to strangers. She said that people with my credentials had to look right.

The jet touched down in Port-­au-­Prince. Collecting my bags proved difficult; the baggage carousel was crowded with people kissing cheeks, dispensing hugs, bumping hips. Arriving to an airport in a European capital had always struck me as a sterile affair, marked by order and the hosts’ suspicion of black and brown travelers. But when I arrived to Dakar, to Havana, and to Port-­au-­Prince, the arrival gates were warm and raucous —­ the people welcoming their returning diaspora.

Stepping out of the airport, I heard a band blare its own taste of calypso to greet the arriving travelers. I slipped five dollars into the trumpeter’s upside-­down hat. The passengers on the plane had spoken English and French, but as soon as I stepped out of the airport, the hard edges of Kreyòl’s clacking flooded my ears. The melody, the inflection of G’mère’s voice, rang all around. Thoughts of her overwhelmed me. She was everywhere.

I arrived to Port-­au-­Prince prepared professionally, not emotionally.

Honor?

Respect.

On top of the earthquake recovery, epidemic, and flood damage, Haiti was also approaching a charged Election Day. It was only the third presidential election in the nation’s 206-­year history —­ not surprising, given how long colonial puppet presidents and the Duvaliers had monopolized power.

Gunshots disrupted the dark silence. In my small room in the Coconut Hotel, I could smell gunpowder and smoke. It was a few nights after I’d arrived. I sat up in bed and peeked out the window. It was a shabby place, a motel-­ style building surrounded by outdoor walkways, like a strip-­mall Howard Johnson’s. My bedroom door led directly into the night. A brown metal security gate stood between me and the street.

More gunshots.

An instant later, Ben, an American friend living in the capital, called to say he was hearing bullets. His voice shaking, he added that smoke from the streets was clouding his living room. The smoke was in my bedroom too, I told him. Police sirens wailed.

Thirty-­eight candidates were running in the presidential election. Most of the protesters in the capital were in the camp of Michel Martelly, “Sweet Micky,” a ribald kompa singer, bandleader, and former drug dealer, but the previous night, the sitting government, widely mistrusted, had proclaimed its own candidate, Jude Célestin, the victor in first-­round balloting. Many Haitians I spoke to, across all walks of life —­ judges, scholars, librarians, street sweepers, cocktail waitresses —­ dismissed the results. International election observers also doubted the integrity of the vote. And because so many countries and global institutions had promised billions of dollars for earthquake recovery, the world was watching.

By dawn, the government had put the country on lockdown. It shuttered the airport, all public offices, and private businesses “until further notice.” I read on my cell phone that the U.S. government was advising American citizens in Haiti to remain in our homes until further instruction.

Holed up among foreigners —­ blans — in the Coconut Hotel, I got cabin fever by late morning. I called a newfound friend, Rodney, a black Haitian, and asked him to come pick me up. Ben had introduced me to Rodney by the hotel pool. A taut adrenaline junkie with rippling muscles, Rodney had once been a boxer and a soldier and spoke perfect English.

When he arrived, I gave him some cash as payment for guiding me through the city. He tipped the armed hotel guard with a small bill to let us out of the security gate. To stymie police, protesters had put barricades in the roads. They’d upended garbage dumpsters, burnt tires, and felled massive tree limbs. Rodney darted, swerved, tipped his motorcycle to dodge

the dreck. Cars could not circumvent the minefields, only motorbikes and pedestrians were running the streets —­ and police officers riding in the cabooses of massive trucks. They stared down we motorbike riders to warn us who was boss.

I ducked my nose beneath my T-­shirt, coughing at the smoke gusting from the smoldering tires. We stopped in Pétion-­Ville, a residential neighborhood with upscale businesses, to investigate on foot. We spotted a crowd of men —­ bandannas hiding their faces — chanting and wielding tire irons. Two of them grabbed a massive cinder block and hurled it through the window of a bank. Then another.

The air exploded.

I yelped, ducking my head into my arms. “Rodney, let’s go! Get on the motorcycle and let’s go!”

“Hey! What’s wrong with you?” Rodney barked, flicking me hard on my nose. “You scared of that gunfire?”

“I thought it was a bomb!”

“So what if it was?” he shouted. “Even if it’s a bomb, I better not hear you scream again. I know my job. Really —­ I don’t work for men who panic.”

I started giggling at the absurdity of the exchange. Rodney did not. He was so offended that I’d second-­guessed his judgment. I was reminded of the time I’d asked Christian, another Haitian friend, for a helmet to ride back seat on his motorcycle. A pained look had contorted his face. Imagine my gall.

Rodney and I made our way to the election bureau. As we’d suspected, UN troops were guarding the office building. The UN presence was meant to safeguard poll stations, voters, and humanitarian efforts, though it also served essentially as the corrupt government’s protector. Rodney drove the motorbike fifty feet from the troops and stopped. They stood side by side in full riot gear, using their bodies and shields to buffer the election office from rock-­wielding protesters. Rodney identified two middle-­aged men who seemed to be in charge of the protest and asked them to have the crowd stop throwing rocks for a second —­ otherwise, the troops would return the favor by lobbing tear gas at us.

“Rete tann ‘jouk blan a kite,” Rodney said, tilting his head at me. “Wait till the foreigner leaves.”

They paused. I moseyed up to the troops, snapping their pictures on my iPod Touch. Decent photos. I eased closer. More pictures. Even closer. One troop lifted his machine gun and pointed it at my chest.

Satisfied with what I’d documented, I hopped back on the motorcycle.

“Can we head toward the National Palace?” I said. “I want to see the nerve center.”

“Why not?”

I had not told Rodney, or anyone for that matter, who my grandfather was. I enjoyed my anonymity: nobody needed to ask me too many questions. A classic social scientist, I wanted to recede into the background. I like to work fast, hard, furious, without any attention drawn to myself.

Rodney revved the engine. Speeding through the streets, he swerved past the barricades, the blood-­orange, blazing tires, the gigantic sawed-­off tree trunk, the carcass of an incinerated car. By wrecking government buildings, by blocking the roads with debris, by threatening terror, the protesters had shut down the country before the government effectively could. As we jetted past the burning tires, crackling in embers, I could see the air blur and ripple around the flames. My skin stung. I stared through the smoke at the recovery-­tent camps that pocked the streets. But amid the litter, the disarray, life continued.

On the sidewalk nearby, some kids were using two cinder blocks as soccer goalposts. They darted about the street and sidewalk, outdribbling one another. Soon we arrived, coughing. Shantytowns of the homeless filling the Champ de Mars. A crushed palace amid wreckage, the capital’s heart appeared as broken from the previous night’s pillage as from the quake’s aftershocks. A crisp pain racked my chest. Natural disaster was one thing, man-­made another.

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Rich Benjamin’s latest book is Talk to Me: Lessons from a Family Forged by History

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Photo by Joseph Perzioso/AFP via Getty Images; Rich Benjamin portrait by Stephen K. Mack. Essay excerpted from TALK TO ME by Rich Benjamin. Reprinted by permission of Pantheon Books, an imprint of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. Copyright © 2025 by Rich Benjamin