Democracy Forward is a national legal organization that has made a habit of filing lawsuits against the federal government since Donald Trump retook office in 2025, challenging everything from the administration’s actions against immigrants to its proposed “anti-weaponization” fund. Skye Perryman, the group’s president and CEO, is publishing “Ordinary People, Extraordinary Times,” a new book about resisting authoritarianism and the actions big and small people can take in their lives to do so, on Aug. 25 via Penguin Random House. In the following excerpt, Perryman writes about how the only way to lift a nation out of oppression is for its people to fight through it.
“IT DIDN’T HAPPEN OVERNIGHT.” I had asked my grandmother how long it took for the Southern magnolia trees in my grandparents’ small Texas town to go from bulbs to majestic blooms. “Years and years,” she said, “It takes care, time, and sun.”
My grandparents lived in Magnolia, a small east-Texas town. The town was known for its tall pine trees, its railroad, and, yes, its magnolia trees. But when my grandmother moved to Magnolia decades before I was born, there were no magnolia trees on her farm or in her yard. So, she began planting. She planted magnolia trees on her farm, in her yard, and also in city spaces, like at the public school and town hall. By the time I was growing up, I would never have known that her farm once lacked magnolia trees amidst its already mighty pines. The glorious white blossoms and distinctive dark green leaves are in the background of so many of my memories — and all because of my grandmother’s work of planting and tending over the decades. As a child of the Great Depression, material things were not where she found her comfort. Instead, she appreciated the beauty that could emerge from planting a single bulb or seed and the years of nurturing that followed — for her it was the greatest inheritance she could leave.
I have found myself thinking of those magnolia trees often these last months as I have traveled the country and spent time with so many people experiencing despair, and as I, too, have struggled with moments of deep doubt and feelings of helplessness. Many of us find ourselves lost — afraid of where the nation is heading and desperately wanting to flip the proverbial switch but overwhelmed by the fact that there isn’t just one switch to flip. There are concerns at the state and local levels. At the Supreme Court. In Congress. And, in the White House. People are angry at the daily incursions on their rights, at the layers upon layers of corruption as
a president and his allies enrich themselves while millions struggle to make ends meet. They have witnessed innocent people, including American citizens, be killed at the hands of their own government. They are scared by the deportations, disappearances, and detentions. They have woken up to masked agents on the streets and community members afraid or, worse, gone. They are bewildered and enraged by overreach and lawlessness, by the blatant disregard for our rights. They are angered by the Supreme Court’s decimation of voting rights, and by the historic numbers of unexplained decisions on its shadow docket that prevent people from
being protected by lower court rulings by not considering the full record or hearing argument. A friend said to me, “Even when we see the wins your team achieves in court, or are inspired by millions in the streets, or are encouraged by off-cycle election victories, we wake up the next day to another nightmare. It seems as if nothing we do matters.” This is an understandable and real feeling.
And it may not go away.
The feelings of hopelessness, defeat, and powerlessness are a feature, not a bug, of the political machine replacing our democracy with autocratic rule. In fact, the number one tool that autocratic leaders use to consolidate power is not voter suppression, election denialism, or gerrymandering — it is convincing people that there is nothing they can do to change their circumstances. That they have no power. Convincing people to give up. That any effort to
save our nation is too late, too futile, and too naïve.
And that’s why, despite these feelings, or in the face of these feelings, we must keep going.
We must commit to ourselves — and to one another — that we will not succumb to the belief that we have no power. We DO have power. And we need to find and use it.
We must also have the determination to look at where we are — at the harms and the realities and heartbreaks — and to not look away. To see it for all that it is. We are living in a nation that is rapidly backsliding into autocracy. Our institutions were not delivering for us before and now, stressed and tested to the point of collapse, they are delivering even less. We must be able to see what is happening and understand: This is where we are. There are no shortcuts out of this. The only way out is through.
But we are far from powerless.
We must do everything we can in our communities and in all upcoming elections to halt the backslide to autocracy. We also have to remember that the work must continue over time. Journalist and historian Anne Applebaum, who has studied rising authoritarianism across the globe, reminds us that autocratic threats “cannot easily be defeated or dismissed in one electoral cycle.” Just as magnolia trees can take decades to reach maturity, and need steady
tending along the way, creating a society that cares for all of us needs active, ongoing efforts. There are no quick fixes to a long-term challenge.
As I have talked with people who are in despair about the seemingly impossible task we have ahead, I have turned to the words of muckraking photojournalist Jacob A. Riis, who documented the seemingly immovable abject poverty faced by people in New York City in the late 1800s as the rich lived in gilded mansions. I first discovered Riis when studying economics, learning how the inhumane conditions experienced by many at the end of the Gilded Age, documented in Riis’s powerful photojournalism book How the Other Half Lives: Studies among the Tenements of New York, gave rise to the progressive movement in the early twentieth century. In law school, I learned that this movement had to work against every institutional power structure — including the Supreme Court — to demand real change. Riis wrote in his memoir, The
Making of An American, “When nothing seems to help, I go and look at a stonecutter hammering away at his rock, perhaps a hundred times without as much as a crack showing in it. Yet at the hundred and first blow it will split in two, and I know it was not that blow that did it, but all that had gone before.”
Eventually, Riis’s work helped shine an important light and contributed to a movement that brought about significant social reforms — from wage and hour laws to worker safety laws, child
worker protections, and more. But the work was long and arduous. It was not solved in one election cycle or through one initiative.
The work we must do now is day-by-day, hammer-by-hammer, step-by-step work. We must do what Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. called the work to “hew out of the mountain of despair a stone of
Hope.” We must remember too, that though some may consider this a new fight, we are building on the movements and actions of people who have been hammering away at the struggle for representation, freedom, and justice for a long time — including those in the Black, Brown, Indigenous, immigrant, and LGBTQ communities. Movement builders and communities with the lived experience of persistent injustice know that the work continues beyond one election cycle.
The only way out is through. The work of justice has always been urgent. The ultimate action that strikes the blow to injustice — and, yes, to autocracy — will make its mark because of the work of ordinary people like you who in this extraordinary time took singular steps, day by day, conversation by conversation, to move the mountain of despair. The majestic magnolia blossoms started from a single bulb that did not develop and bloom until years later. The ultimate split in the rock happens after many hammers. Both recent events and our rich history teach us that what is on the other side of this crisis is, in fact, up to us. But it will take us all doing our part. There are no shortcuts. The only way out is through.
Excerpted from “Ordinary People, Extraordinary Times: How to Reclaim Your Power, Fight for Freedom, and Reimagine Democracy,” by Skye Perryman. Text copyright © 2026 by Skye Perryman. Published in the United States by Ten Speed Press, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC.
