M. Gessen and Michelle Goldberg on How to Resist

0:01This is The Opinions, a show that brings you a mix of voices from New York Times Opinion. You've heard the news. Here's what to make of it.

0:18I'm Arielle Kaminer. I'm an editor at New York Times Opinion. My colleague Masha Gassen, whom I have the good fortune to edit, recently published a piece that explored how to be a good citizen when your country is doing things you think are immoral. Masha reported their story in Israel. Our colleague Michelle Goldberg has been asking similar questions in her reporting here in the United States. Masha and Michelle are here in the studio today. Thank you both for joining me. Hi, thanks for having us. The people you both wrote about are not professional activists. They're just normal people trying to put their values into action.

0:54And a particularly fraught moment in both countries. I'm interested to know, where do you think they've found the courage to take on their government? Masha, why don't you answer first? You know, that's actually the most difficult and important question. So the answer right away is, I don't know. I have some hypotheses. And these hypotheses boil down to, I think there are situations and there are people who find that the psychic cost of moral compromise is greater than the cost of acting. That for them to live in harmony with themselves and with their values, they have to do things that are scary.

1:44And they feel like they're not paying a greater price than they would be if they just sacrificed their values. There are all kinds of people in Israel resisting their government in all kinds of ways and gradations. What was it about these people that interested you specifically? I feel like the four people I ended up including give a kind of range of responses. And maybe the person I'm most interested in is Jonathan Dekel. And he is just a mess. I actually realized that the first time I ever interviewed him, which was about six months after October 7th, he is a Jewish Israeli who lives in an intentional co-living community.

2:30It's a village called Nevesh Shalom Ahad al-Salam, where half the families are Palestinian citizens of Israel. Half the families are Jewish Israelis. And the entire project is to create a kind of working model of the future, of this co-living, not coexistence, but co-living because of the intentionality and because of the constant conversation. And he told me a year and a half ago that he had moved there thinking that he was going to bring up his children to not serve in the military. to live in a different Israel-Palestine than the one he knew. And the morning of October 7th, he reported for reserve duty without being called.

3:10And so when I interviewed him six months into this, he was just like one of the sentences that I remember him saying was, look, I'm okay with this being done in my name. I'm at peace. I am not at peace. Like this was just coming out of his mouth like in a constant flow. And when I contacted him this time, I just assumed we would have a check-in. And he said, no, I'm actually living in the Upper West Side of New York. Because that was the only way I could stop serving. I couldn't say no when they called if I was in Israel. But if I'm 6 ,000 miles away, then, you know, I just can't get there. And I so appreciate that frankness, but also his willingness to just sit in the mess of it.

3:56The sort of I am at peace, I am not at peace, and being able to express it. And, you know, I think that that's ultimately that's a much more difficult place to be than a place of total moral clarity. And I hope it speaks to a lot more people. Actually, there was a line in, Masha, in your piece that I thought spoke directly to something, Michelle, that you wrote. In yours, I'm going to read from the piece. Masha wrote, It is strikingly easy to shrug off one's responsibility for the country where one pays taxes, contributes to the public conversation, and at least nominally has the right to vote if that country is the United States.

4:35It seems one can just say not in my name and continue to enjoy the wealth and the freedom of movement one's citizenship confers. Michelle, the people you wrote about had that option, chose not to take it. But tell us about how you got interested in their story. You know, I think about it a little bit differently. Because, I mean, I agree with Masha about the maybe like moral dimensions. But at the same time, something that I was struck by in Masha's piece was Michael Svard. Is that how you pronounce his last name? Was Michael Svard saying that I'm no longer a part of the opposition because there is no meaningful political opposition in Israel.

5:13I'm a dissident. And that's a place where I think that the United States is quite different than Israel. Well, you know, the United States, you know, in some cases, the political opposition has let us down. But there is a political opposition. The society as a whole is not behind this Trumpian project. You know, so people who are standing up to it don't necessarily experience themselves as marginal. And so a lot of the people that I wrote about, I mean, they're very brave and I am not trying to minimize that in any way. But in some ways, it's like they just hadn't gotten the memo about capitulation.

5:48You know, they just in some ways to me, what's been more shocking than the everyday acts of bravery have been the everyday acts of cowardice by people who actually have very little to lose and are not really threatened in any way, but have just decided to go along with the new regime. And I think that what you're seeing is a lot of individual people for whom it would never have even occurred to them to do that. So I'm thinking, for example, of Elizabeth Castillo, who was in the piece that I wrote about the protests and the pushback against ICE in L.A. I mean, she wasn't someone who was particularly political.

6:26She didn't consider herself an activist. She was just furious that ICE was coming into her neighborhood and raiding her building and arresting her neighbors. And so she just started going out on her own and like honking her horn and tailing the ice vehicles and warning people that they were in the neighborhood. And when I was asking her, like, weren't you afraid? How did you sort of decide to do this? She wasn't really thinking in those terms. She was just like, what are they going to do to me? You know, actually, they could do a lot to you. But she was just so disgusted. And I don't think it occurred to her not to do what she was doing.

7:01And then she met up with other people in the neighborhood. They got more organized as people are kind of getting more organized all over the country. And I think what you're seeing, this is why maybe I feel sort of veer wildly between hope and despair in the last year. But one of the things that gives me hope is that you do see huge numbers of ordinary people who are not intimidated and who do still have the kind of muscle memory of democratic citizenship that so many of our elites kind of gave up so quickly. You know, the issues that you're raising right now are also relevant in Masha's piece in that I think all of the activity that you guys wrote about was taking place on a very local, very personal level.

7:49These weren't people who were joining a big brand name national movement. And in fact, in your piece, Michelle, you described this as your words were part of a growing shift from symbolic protest to direct action. Have you guys come to feel that this is a more effective model for resistance than big national marches, at least at this time? Yeah, the answer is no. No, I find it very depressing. I mean, I think that these people are doing incredibly important work. And certainly in Israel, the people that I wrote about are probably doing the only things that are possible for them to do in terms of resistance.

8:33There is no coordinated movement for these people to join. They're doing what they can, and they're helping one person at a time in one way or another. But that's how you resist autocracy on behalf of your neighbors, but it is not how you overthrow autocracy. Sounds like you don't think that No Kings is going to topple the king. During the last No Kings march, I was in the little town in the Catskills where we have a house. And the entire town, which is completely democratic, was out on the street, everybody in their inflatable chicken costumes. And I found myself getting so annoyed because I felt like the risk of that little sort of brunch time party was zero.

9:25And the next day I called Erica Chenoweth, the political scientist who studies civil resistance, and I was talking to them about sort of these feelings. And they said, yes, but there were also people who were wearing their inflatable chicken costumes in towns where at the last Snow King's March, they had gotten beaten up, where there were actual neo -Nazis who were protesting at the same time, counter-protesting. And they were also saying that while it may look ineffectual in the moment, it certainly creates a kind of zeitgeist that people who are in a position to make more consequential decisions may refer to.

10:08And then I said, well, so are you feeling kind of more hopeful? And Eric was like, oh, I go through the full cycle every day. It's like total despair to some hope. I feel the same way. I mean, I feel like we're totally in uncharted waters. I've been writing about autocracy for most of my life. And yet I don't think we've ever seen anything like this. I guess those big protest marches, there's a message that they send to whomever they're protesting. But there's also a message that they send to the participants. Yeah, I mean, I think the protest. So, again, maybe I can afford to be like a little bit more cheerful because I haven't.

10:45This is my first go around with all this stuff. And so I think that those marches were extremely consequential in a couple of reasons. And I don't think there's any reason to draw binary between direct action and protests. I think you need both. But I think the protests have been really important because they helped to break the narrative that this administration was a steamroller that had not just all the levers of government on its side, but had the public on its side. But part of the thing that was so dispiriting when Trump was reelected is that this time he really did win the popular vote.

11:24He really did have, you know, not the kind of overwhelming mandate that they had claimed, but they had said what they were going to do. And the American electorate had assented. And so in a way, they had a right to be not a right to be, I think, breaking the law, not a right to be torturing people, but they had a right to try and enact their agenda. It's why there was no mass protest the day after the inauguration, the first Trump presidency again, because he came into office without the popular vote. And it was this big shock. You had this immediate society wide kind of immune response that I think was very important in hindering some of their worst impulses the first time around.

12:09This time you didn't really have that. You heard a lot of talk about like a quote unquote vibe shift, you know, that all of a sudden now like all the young people were interested in this sort of edgy avant-garde variant of fascism. And one of the things that we've seen is that the people at the top of industry in Silicon Valley and the American economy are kind of constantly chasing where they believe the zeitgeist to be. Right. So when they saw the first go around, they felt like, you know, resistance was in the air and they were willing to try to co-opt that as much as they could and to try to, you know, fill their stores with pro LGBTQ merchandise and to institute all kinds of DEI programs.

12:59and we've seen how quickly they swing when they're trying to chase what they believe is sort of where society is going. And so I think that having a very public display of this is not where society is going, being able to say this is one of the biggest demonstrations in American history, and it's not just in New York and L.A. and Washington, D.C. It's all over the country. And people who might have otherwise felt alone in their communities, who might have been like, am I the only one who is horrified by this, sees that they're not. And then that translates into other kinds of activism, right? I mean, you see tons of people going into the political system running for office.

13:45And you see then people looking around and saying, what else can I do? So I was actually talking to Pablo Alvarado, who's the co-founder of a group called the National Day Labor Organizing Network. And, you know, he's doing a lot of talks in churches, you know, kind of their congregations want to learn how to do this kind of community defense work. But he's also getting calls from Indivisible and No Kings and the 50501 movement from people who say, you know, OK, people marched and now they want to do something else. And so it's an entree point. Mm-hmm. I think one thing that came through really clearly in both your pieces is that taking this kind of direct action, personal action, can be really clarifying, but it can also be isolating, separating yourself from possibly from your neighbors or your friends, or in some cases, Masha, you wrote about somebody separating themselves from their family.

14:49How did the people that you both reported on manage that? Yeah, that's a great question. It's funny because the person who you just referred to, Ella Greenberg, she might be the most prominent resistor to military service in Israel at the moment. She found herself and her community in her activism. The way she described it to me, I asked her how she got into it and she said, well, it was COVID, I was stuck at home, and then I read the Communist Manifesto. As one does. Which her grandmother had on the shelf. And then she started reading more books. And then she found other young people who were reading books.

15:29And then she found that people were actually acting. And then the lockdown ended and she was able to be with people and act with people. And it was the most wonderful thing that ever happened to her. And I think ultimately that's the secret of all activism. Nobody can act alone. Activism has to be more nurturing than it is costly. That's the only way that it is sustainable. So I think that's true of people who are going to know King's protests or participating in Indivisible. Otherwise, they can't do it for very long. But it's also true that, yeah, the people I wrote about are completely on the margins of Israeli society.

16:06And those margins, and I think this is also a meaningful distinction from U.S. society, those margins, really, you feel them all the time. You feel them at Shabbat dinner because there will be somebody in uniform at your family's Shabbat dinner. You feel them when you talk to people on your block and in your family. And I think a tragedy of American society is that you can kind of go through life without encountering people with different political views. So, yeah, I agree with you 100 percent about the kind of social component of activism. Again, the people that I spoke to, they felt like they had a whole new social world.

16:49All of a sudden there was people in their neighborhood that they hadn't known that now, you know, they felt like were their brothers and sisters were at the center of their lives. And I think how all activism works. There was a study, can't remember who conducted it, but it was about what was it that made people become anti-abortion activists? and the secret was not the kind of depth of their feeling about abortion. It was whether a friend had brought them along to a protest. You know, and we have this as a society that is people are very lonely. They're very isolated. I think we saw with the Zoran Mamdani campaign that one of the secrets of that was that he gave people, you know, not just kind of hope for a more decent and affordable New York, But the Zoran Mamdani campaign became people's whole social worlds.

17:46It, you know, sort of became the locus of their relationships. And I think that that piece of it, it's also what MAGA has given a lot of people, to much darker ends. But the political movement that can kind of capture people's desire to be part of something bigger has a huge advantage. We've been talking about how to resist a government that you oppose, but there's also the question of when and whether to stop resisting and just leave. Masha, you've written about the experience of seeing a country transform in real time until, as you wrote, until you no longer recognize it. And for you, writing as a trans person, it no longer recognizes you.

18:37you had that experience once before in Russia. Why did you leave? What was the breaking point for you? Well, the breaking point for me was very clear. And for years I actually said, and I still think so, I think I was very lucky. Not lucky that I had to leave my home, but lucky in that it was so clear that I had no choice. the state was going to go after my family they were going to pass a special law to take away my adopted son and that was in the actual newspaper so i called an adoption lawyer the adoption lawyer said oh the answer to your question is at the airport and um so you know And that put an end to a couple of years of soul-searching and is a time to go and will I betray my people if I leave or will I regret it if I'm not here, but it's still possible to live here, you know, all of that stuff.

19:44And then the last, last time I was in Moscow, because I have emigrated from Russia twice in my life, and I also continued to go back and report once my family was in the States. It was actually safe for me for many years to go back and report. So the last, last time I was in Moscow was the week of the full-scale invasion, and that's when my entire community left. Mm-hmm. And it's one of the most extraordinary things I've ever reported on was just looking at my friends sort of one after another. Make that decision without even visibly making a decision, just kind of understanding that they had to leave.

20:30And I likened it at the time to people parachuting out of a plane that's bombing a city. they couldn't stand to be inside the country that was bombing Kyiv. It was a visceral thing, right? It was, there were rumors that they might close the borders or they will go after people. And eventually they did start going after people, but months later. But these people were fleeing not a security threat to themselves. They were fleeing that feeling of just moral impossibility. of being in the place where they were. So how did that experience in Russia and the clarity of that moment, but also preceded by a lot of soul searching, how does that affect the way that you see the decisions that people are making in other countries, in Israel, in the United States, elsewhere?

21:29Well, one way is that I, and I've had these conversations with people who are less experienced in emigrating than I am, And I sometimes joke that there was the Carnegie Corporation of New York does this thing every 4th of July. They make a list of good immigrants or great immigrants. I think you're a great immigrant, Masha. Just great. That's what I say. You know, I'm so good at it. I've done it so many times. I really perfected the art of immigration. So I feel like one of my jobs as a very good immigrant is to reassure people there's no science to it There's no way to know whether it's the right time My parents made the decision to leave the Soviet Union Which if they had known that it was going to collapse seven or eight years later They wouldn't have done it And on the other hand, I know people who have gone back to their country Because they thought, well, surely it can't last forever and 10 or 20 years later had to leave again, right?

22:35We just can't now. But I did ask this question of the people that I interviewed in Israel on this last reporting trip. And I think the most clear answer I got was, look, I'm just going to stay here as long as I can do something. But at the same time, people are asking themselves, okay, that may be a worthy moral measure, but what does it do to my loved ones? Mm-hmm. What does it mean to be raising a child in a genocidal society? And I'm using a term that a person who is struggling with that decision used. What does it mean to raise a child who is marginalized because of their parents' political work?

23:19All of these things are considerations, and there are no right answers. Michelle, could there be a breaking point for you? What's your threshold? I don't know. I mean, I think I feel like I'm so far away from it. I mean, there's certainly like there's part of me that has thought many times maybe I owe it to my children to give them a start in a healthier society. But at the same time, I don't know how you feel, but I feel like we're still we're further down that road than maybe I could have ever imagined in this country. and yet so far away from where the people that you're talking about in Israel are.

23:55I mean, it almost feels like self-indulgent to say, you know, I need to flee the country. I just, you know, I think there are certain people who are in real danger and whose lives have become impossible. And I absolutely would never begrudge them leaving. And I could imagine a scenario where it gets to that point. But again, I also just feel like there's no reason to surrender right now to the idea of these people's inevitability when actually we are already seeing that it's been less than a year. The damage that they have done is substantial. The damage that they can do is even more so. But you're already seeing a kind of mass pushback and they're demoralized.

24:52They know they're unpopular. They know that they are weakening. I'm curious how you would compare it to places that you live. I just think, you know, even in an authoritarian state, you need some level of popular consent. Or resignation. Yeah. I mean, I really do think that we're in uncharted waters in the sense that there's a kind of imaginary authoritarian playbook. It's not like there are that many devices or that many moves that an aspiring autocrat can make. It's known. What's not known is what happens when you do it this fast. And I don't think we've ever, certainly not in my lifetime, we haven't seen a democratically elected leader move this fast and break this many things.

25:53So how do you think about it? How do I think about leaving? Yeah. I think I'm really tired of being repotted. So I'm putting it off as long as possible. But I'm as cognitively dissonant as everybody else. On the one hand, I'm talking to construction workers about doing renovations on the house. And on the other hand, thinking, yeah, but we might be driving to Canada tomorrow. And those two parts of my brain are not really talking to each other. We started this conversation talking about direct action. You're both outspoken critics of this administration. You're also both columnists at the New York Times, which means that you can't participate in direct protest action.

26:46Certainly your position gives you a giant megaphone and a lot of institutional support to express your views. But is that restriction ever difficult for you guys to navigate or to explain to the people that you're reporting on?

27:06Not usually, but I had a funny incident a couple of months ago. I was at a talk in a lovely town in Massachusetts, and people got really mad at me. And somebody asked, you know, what should we do? And I said, look, you know, I'm not here to be prescriptive. Do something. And then someone else said, well, why are we just sitting here listening to people talk about their feelings and thoughts? And I said, well, because that's my job. This is what I do. You want to talk about what to do and how to do activism? You know, maybe go to an organizing meeting. And then people started screaming at me. Wow.

27:46That there's nothing compatible between being a writer and being an activist. and I think that's true. I happen to be much better at one than at the other and so this is what I do and I think that I make a significant contribution by doing what I do best. But that frustration was kind of instructive. I think certainly at that moment in that town people were feeling like they needed something different than someone who helps them think through our predicaments. Before we wrap up, I'm just curious to know what you're both watching specifically now that we're a year into this administration in terms of new forms of resistance, old forms of resistance, people pushing back, especially now, as you say, you in particular, Michelle, said as political tides might be shifting.

28:42Well, we talked a little bit about the Noah Kings protests, and I think the big question is, is there going to be meaningful coordination and visible leadership that emerges from these protests? I think that's what's missing. And I want to say something else about them, which is that I think we don't quite understand how to read them. it used to be that street protest was always the result of community organizing right so if you saw people demonstrating you knew that they some significant minority of them had been in a room together figuring out what their posters were going to be whether they were going to do this at lunchtime or in the evening on the weekend or on a work day in the street or in the park All of this stuff that doesn't really happen anymore because it's enough to post something on social media and then people either show up or they don't show up.

29:42And so I think of this very unscientifically as a kind of collective action discount. Like what is the discount that we apply to these numbers to understand what's actually happening? Was this a one-off where they followed a social media post, went alone or with their friends, and returned with no change to their political behavior or social connections? We don't know that yet. Well, I mean, that was Zeynep, our colleague Zeynep wrote. Zeynep Tufeksi. Yes, wrote a whole book about this changing nature of protest and how it kind of no longer is a show of organizational power because they just kind of appear very quickly and can evidence just as quickly.