On this edition of Your Call’s Authoritarian Playbook series, political strategist Ami Fields-Meyer discusses his new book, co-authored with journalist Julia Angwin, On Courage: How to Be a Dissident in an Age of Fear. Based on interviews with more than 100 dissidents and activists across the world, they provide a roadmap to political courage and make a powerful case for how taking personal risks can help save the free world.
Ami Fields-Meyer and Julia Angwin say that there is a particular conflict faced by people in authoritarian societies: “a collision between the head and the heart, between values deeply held and an outside world unfolding in dramatic divergence. It can happen over decades, or in an instant. It comes of morality, or it arises out of necessity. To dissent is to risk being wrapped in a kind of negative identity—defined by what you are not. But it’s the environment, the external circumstances, that recast these individuals in oppositional terms. Dissidents don’t choose to be dissidents. They simply choose to be who they are.”
Guest:
Ami Fields-Meyer, senior fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School’s Allen Lab for Democracy Renovation, former senior policy advisor at the White House, and co-author of On Courage: How to Be a Dissident in an Age of Fear
Resources:
The New York Times: The State of American Resistance Is Stronger Than You May Think
The New Yorker: So You Want To Be A Dissident?
