From Protests to Progress: What Moves Us to Take Action?

What drives people into the streets in protest?

What motivates them to take their anger and frustration offline out into the open?

What triggers this unrest?

Navigating social change in a poly crisis world requires a compass and a chart, some mission of the direction of popular sentiment and where that direction might lead.

This is the work of sociologists going out into the field, engaging public attitudes.

Their work helps us understand our moment in history, what motivates us and helps to define the catalysts that can create and maintain social movements and change.

Executed with a self satisfied ham handed incompetence, the Trump administration's rising authoritarian brutality is dismantling vital government services, stoking needless economic uncertainty, abandoning due process and civil rights, attacking critical thinking and ceaselessly waging a cultural war.

How does climate change fit into this mix and the growing resistance movement?

In this episode I talk with sociologist and author Dana Fisher.

Dr.

Fisher is a leading social scientist and one of the most innovative voices addressing the critical intersection of climate change, social movements and collective action.

Fisher is the Director of the center for Environment, Community and Equity and a professor in the School of International Service at American University.

She currently serves as a non resident Senior Fellow in the Governance Program at the Brookings Institution and is the Chair of the Political Sociology Section of the American Sociological Association.

Dr.

Fisher has spent over two decades studying how societies respond to environmental challenges.

She has been at the forefront of documenting large scale social movements, tracking everything from climate protest to political resistance that contributes significantly to our understanding of civic engagement, climate politics and social transformation.

Dr.

Fisher's research is featured in numerous prestigious publications and has earned her recognition as a leading voice in understanding how social change happens.

Dr.

Fisher's books include American Resistance, which documents the social mobilization during Trump 1.0, and her latest book, Saving Ourselves From Climate Shocks to Climate Action, where she introduces the concept of apocalyptic optimism, which she expands upon in her TED talk, How to Be an Apocalyptic Optimist.

Fisher fuses rigorous sociological research with, as you'll soon hear, a deeply human approach to understanding our collective response to existential challenges.

She doesn't just study social movements, she provides a roadmap for how ordinary people can create extraordinary change.

Last year I spoke with Dr.

Fisher for an article on Global Warming Is Real about her book Saving Ourselves, which I highly recommend, and there's a link in the show Notes for a discount to the book.

And in this conversation we pick up where we left off, hoping that Donald Trump would not become president again, but knowing very well it may come to pass.

And it has.

Dr.

Fisher offers critical insight into where we are now and where she finds hope in these troubled times.

The discussion is thought provoking, enlightening, sometimes frightening, and often inspirational.

In the end, nobody is coming to save us.

We must save ourselves.

In our communities, with our neighbors, we can make the world we want, but only if we participate in its making.

Dr.

Fisher offers that compass in a map to help point us on the path ahead.

Here's our conversation with Dr.

Dana Fisher.

How are you?

Thank you so much for being flexible this week.

I've got sick kids, you know, this semester.

You know, I know how it goes.

It's.

It's a crazy world we're in right now.

It sure is.

It sure is.

How are you doing?

I'm hanging in there.

Every morning I wake up and I wonder, oh, God, what now?

You know, it's kind of every day it's something new.

I remember when we last spoke, it was sometime last year, before the election.

Yeah.

And you.

We had talked about how, God forbid, Donald Trump gets elected again.

That might be the catalyst for some sort of a climate anthro shift or a risk pivot.

Yeah.

So now that he's been elected, he's been in office for 100 and some days.

What are your thoughts?

Do you.

You know, one of my fears has been, what I've been watching is so many things that are happening with him that the climate movement might be getting suppressed a little bit because everybody's concerned about their neighbor getting sent off to El Salvador or something like that.

Do you see that happening?

Or do you think that what's happening with civil rights and the rendition off the streets is actually going to galvanize around issues like climate?

Why?

So before I wrote Saving Ourselves, I wrote American Resistance, which was documenting the resistance to the Trump administration, its policies during the first.

First administration.

And there, one of the things that I documented was the ways that progressive issues were helping to mobilize what I called the resistance coalition that included groups that were general political groups on the left, as well as groups that were against gun violence, groups that were for racial justice, as well as climate groups and climate groups.

Climate, initially, during the Resistance 1.0, climate was kind of playing catch up in some ways.

It wasn't a central part of the resistance initially, but it became more central to a lot of people's ideas about what they were fighting for as the resistance wore on, as the Trump administration continued.

This time around, what we've been seeing, as much as I thought with American resistance being done, I'm going to step back from spending a lot of time collecting data in the streets, which is how I collected the data for that book.

Well, I've gone back into the streets with my research team, and we've surveyed at three of the.

The three largest protests that have happened since Trump took office.

Well, including the People's March, which was two days before the inauguration, which was the great grandchild of the Women's March, and at all of them.

One of the things we asked, which was consistent with what I did during Trump 1.0, was I asked what was the issue that was motivated, what issues were motivating people to participate.

And what we have found consistently is that across all the protests, be it the People's March, be it the Hands Off Rally that was coordinated in April, or Stand up for Science, which was in March, we have seen climate as one of the top motivations.

To answer the question that you originally asked, climate will not be the unifying motivation, but what we will see is that climate is part of a cluster of motivations that is driving people to participate.

So, for example, okay, at the Hands off rally in April, 66% of the people in the streets said that climate was one of the issues that was motivating them to get out on the street.

That's two thirds of the whole group.

That's great.

That's pretty good, right?

I mean, at Stand up for science, it was 73%.

But that makes sense because the theme there was around science, science cuts, and a lot of that, people were feeling like it was climate data as it is.

It is climate data.

Yeah, right, exactly.

So in a lot of ways, I don't think that that will slow down the progress.

And like, I think, as we said, you know, way back when we talked before, you know, in the four times before Trump came back into office, I said, in some ways, Trump administration, you know, would be terrible in many ways, but would potentially galvanize the left and galvanize what could lead to a mass mobilization.

I think we're seeing that starting to go up.

I think, though, I mean, what I've been documenting with the research we've been doing, is that climate is part of this cluster of motivations and issues that people feel like the Trump administration is ignoring or is exacerbating, if you want to think of it that way.

I mean, certainly, like immigration policy, racial justice.

I mean, actually, I should just look at my list here.

LGBTQIA issues, issues related to labor, issues related to reproductive rights.

I mean, all of these issues are motivating people to come out in the streets.

But when we look at the top issues, climate is, you know, it's, it's one of the higher ones in terms of what people are saying is, is particularly motivating them to come out.

I mean, I would say the number one issue that people are coming out for right now is the federal workforce reduction and the funding freeze.

And the funding freeze is connected obviously with climate, but it's connected with all sorts of data, all sorts of type of projects that our federal government has supported.

So, I mean, and what's also worth noting here is that we asked people, we started asking people after all the cuts started about if the people who were in the streets were working for the federal government or had work, had stopped working for the federal government since January.

Because I was curious about that, you know, once we started seeing these cuts.

And anecdotally, I'll just say that the Washington Post just reported about the fact that we are more than there.

There are more than two times as many houses for sale here in the D.C.

area that then are normally, I mean, and it's actually kind of crazy when you just like when I take my son to school, there are all these houses for sale because there's so many members of the federal workforce who have to give up their houses because they've lost their jobs.

Yeah, that's, that's sad.

So it's very, very sad.

But so when I, you know, going back to the data, 16% of the people at the Standup for Science Day of action and 16% of the people at the Hands Off Action in April reported being working for the federal government, but being out in the streets supporting those rallies that were expressing dissatisfaction and pushing back against a lot of Trump's policies, but they also were motivated by climate.

And that's the thing I think is really interesting here is the way that we see the configurations of left leaning ideals and issues that people are mobilizing around.

And I think that as we see we have two more big actions that are already scheduled that are coming in June.

And as we see more and more of them, I expect that we're going to continue to see this coalition which in the past we called the Resistance Coalition.

That's what I talked about in my last book.

I don't know what to call it yet, but I can tell you that we're seeing people coming out again and again and we're seeing them push back in all sorts of ways.

And climate is absolutely one of the motivations.

I would expect also that as we get closer and closer to hurricane season and wildfire season.

Today on npr, I heard that there are.

I forget the number.

It was a remarkable number of wildfires already happening, already aflame here in the United States.

And that will continue through summer.

It's early for wildfire season.

And the report was all about how there have been heat waves, you know, like South Dakota had the warmest day it's ever had on record or something this past week.

Yeah.

And so it's been hot and dry across the country.

And then they said, you know, in fact there are already a number of wildfires, which is quite early in the year for that.

But we're heading into summer.

And so we're going to see lots of different types of climate exacerbated disasters happening.

Yeah.

Not only do we no longer have the same type of workforce available to support disasters across the country because of FEMA cuts, AmeriCorps cuts, National Park Service cuts, and across US service cuts.

Right.

So we're not going to have people helping in communities.

But in addition to that, as these, you know, these climate shocks come, I think a lot of the people who are pushing back are going to start being like, yeah, climate needs to be addressed.

And so I would expect that we're going to see the percentage of people in the streets who say climate is the top issue for them that will go up as people get, you know, experience the climate crisis firsthand.

Yeah.

And that makes sense.

A couple of weeks ago, I was at the Environmental Society of Environmental Journalists conference and in Arizona.

In Arizona, I was, I was at an event here in D.C.

and a number of people were just coming back from it.

They said it was wonderful.

Yeah, it was, it was a very interesting juxtaposition for me because the last conference I went to was two years ago when all of Biden's IRA money was flowing into clean energy.

And this time it' Save the data.

You kind of alluded to this is that the defunding of like NOAA and the weather service and meteorological forecasting is being defunded.

And so these hurricanes and these tornadoes and all these extreme weather events will have even more extreme impact because of the lack of preparation.

Right.

I mean, my understanding is that not only have the people who do this kind of monitoring been cut across the, the federal government in the federal workforce.

In addition to that, my understanding is that any warnings that exist, the administration has now announced will only come out in English.

So non English speaking communities, no matter what language they speak.

But there are pockets of people who are not very comfortable with English across the other country, they will not get those warnings.

Like I have a.

One of my co stocks family is predominantly Spanish speaking, lives in Texas, in the area where they get hit with hurricanes quite a bit.

And you know, she said, well, now she'll get the alerts and she'll have to call her mom because her mom won't be able to get the information.

That I, it just boggles my mind.

I mean, why all these different things?

What's the purpose?

Just to be mean?

My, my answer is that, you know, it's very clear that the Trump administration came in with a platform of white supremacy.

And if you look at the DEI programs and the way that they have treated DI programs across universities, across research institutes, across the federal government, and I think part of that language also is connected to these perspectives that are very much privileged towards English speaking white communities.

Right.

I mean, and if you just look at the immigration policy, we just accepted a whole bunch of, you know, white, African, whereas people who are coming and fleeing like war and famine and all these horrible things in other parts of the world who actually need to leave for their livelihoods are being denied entry into our country or being sent back.

I mean, there are all those stories of people going in for their green card meetings, they've done all the work and are being deported.

So I think that it's really hard not to notice a clear pattern here.

Right, right.

I saw, I think it was Worcester, Massachusetts.

Some mother was being taken away in front of her teenage daughter and baby and the neighbors were coming out.

And I was curious, neighbors are coming out, kind of, you know, show us a warrant.

What are you doing?

And these are just average folks.

It seems like that might be kind of a catalyst when they, when neighbors see their neighbors being taken away, that, that's kind of grow this resistance for sure.

I mean, I think that's, you know, universities where students have been taken, you know, particularly student activists have been targeted on a number of campuses, although most of them have been released since because, you know, because the courts are not allowing this kind of thing to happen.

But I think that places, I mean, you know, it's, in some ways it's a generalization of some of the arguments I make in saving ourselves, which is that when people start to experience these shocks, be they climate shocks or, you know, social shocks firsthand, people then respond.

Yeah.

And it's the personal experience of it, it's the observation of it, the witnessing of this kind of violence, repression or environmental degradation that mobilizes people to take action.

The question Is once we get to a point where the majority of the population has experienced this, what's savable and what's not?

I mean, can we say, can we stop climate change at that point or we will be too far gone?

Or can we save our democracy at that point, or will it be too late?

And those.

You know, a lot of the talks I've been given in the past few months have been called saving ourselves in times of crisis or during a poly crisis.

Because what I see is that the crisis to democracy is just exacerbating a lot of these inequalities and all of these issues and mechanism that I talk about in the book.

What's.

What's on the other side, it seems I, I think calling it a cult is reasonable.

Well, I mean, I wanted to make one comment about polycrisis.

What I think is really interesting is those of us who are in the environmental world or study the environmental world are very comfortable with polycrisis.

I've done it.

I did a series of talks in sociology and social science departments this past spring.

And it was really interesting how nobody has been talking about polycrisis, which is so surprising to me because since I'm right in the world that looks at the social side of the climate crisis and environmental degradation, I see it everywhere.

Because the polycrisis is a big theme in a lot of the environmental literature.

And it's so interesting how it's not.

It hasn't spread, although, you know, I guess that's something that I'm working towards spreading now.

Because that's good.

That's good.

Because I think I was just going to say it seems like issues like climate change or biodiversity or whatever, they get siloed and they're not seen, they're not seen as interrelated.

Right.

But they, they absolutely are.

And that's.

Yeah, that's where we have to think about it.

With regard to your other question about what we would call the, the opposite of the resistance, those, you know, the people who want to buy.

Buy Teslas right now, those people mean historically, we would call them a counter movement to the resistance, or we would call the resistance a counter movement to white supremacy.

Is it, is it fair to call the people who are continuing to support the MAGA movement to be white supremacists?

And, you know, that's not, that's, that's outside of my area of expertise.

I think that there's an argument to be made because even if people may not be white supremacists themselves, they are supporting and facilitating a white supremacist ideology to permeate and to take over a country.

What else could we call?

I mean, some people are calling them, you know, calling them maggots.

Right.

I mean, the long movement.

Yeah.

You know, I don't know.

I think somebody is going to coin a good phrase and it's going to end up being the thing we all use.

But I don't know.

I don't know who's going to do it, but there's certainly an opportunity for it.

Yeah, yeah.

What, what do you think it would take for.

I suppose it's a spectrum.

The mag.

Maga.

I call them maga hats.

It's a spectrum.

So there's some that are just died in the every.

They have their Trump flags and their pickup trucks and that sort of thing.

I've learned that kind of the analogy would be my climate trolls that are on my website.

You know, there's no point in trying to engage with that.

But there are some others that I don't know why they.

Maybe the economy or the price of eggs or whatever prompted them to, or they just couldn't get their head around.

Kamala, I don't know.

How far do you think Trump can take his agenda before people that are not people like, like me and you that understand what's happening are already pushing back, that will maybe not join the resistance, but understand that Trump's got to go?

Well, we're starting to see a lot of dissatisfaction from people who are ideologically right leaning, specifically those who have connections to work with the federal government or benefit from the federal government.

And that's people that a lot of veterans are starting to wonder because there are cuts at the VA's.

Yeah.

Anybody who is reliant on Medicaid or Medicare, as those people who rely on them start to realize that their benefits are being cut, they're going to wonder about it.

What's interesting to me is so far I work in D.C.

i live right outside the District.

I continue to do a lot of work with folks in a number of agencies, although more than 75% of all my collaborators in the federal government, all of whom are scientists, have left the federal government at this point, most of those offices have been shut down.

For me, I see it in my community.

I see it in the houses for sale, literally in my community, but also my community of the people that I work with.

I think that once other people in other communities start to experience it, I think we're going to start to see that.

I mean, I know that I'm starting to hear from people who did support Trump who are now very unhappy about it.

I mean, I have heard some reports.

This isn't really what I study, but I have heard some reports from people like, particularly in, like the Latino community, who were told that.

That Trump would not go after their specific community or that they would be safe because they had green cards, because they had citizenship.

Right.

And we're seeing that nobody is safe.

So I think, as, you know, as more and more people again start to feel the risk that is being driven by this administration, I think the support will continue to go down.

I mean, and that's going to be even more worsened as the economy falls apart.

It's unclear to me.

I've heard from economists, I am not an economist, about the effects of the tariffs, these broad, sweeping tariffs that we're experiencing and the degree to which it's going to be perceived by us as emptiness on shelves.

And I know the president has comment about how many dolls do you really need?

Right.

But, you know, okay, fine.

But it'd be nice for everybody to be able to buy eggs.

Yeah, yeah.

I'm noticing it in terms of milk already here in the D.C.

area.

So, you know, so I think that as we start to see that our shelves are not as plentiful and prices go up, a lot of people are going to be very unhappy with that.

Yeah.

It's interesting you mentioned empty shelves.

I'm into audio.

I was actually trained as an audio engineer and so I was looking for a microphone to replace this one here and went to the site that I go to for that sort of thing, Sweetwater Sound.

I'll give him a shout out.

And so anyway, I had the mic.

I wanted a Shure microphone and it's unavailable.

It's on backorder.

So I looked and it looks like all their Shure microphones are on backorder from China.

Shure is an American company and I would imagine they're probably made in China.

Most of that stuff now is made in China.

Yeah.

I have a friend of mine who does electronics parts, so he provides it for electricians.

And he basically was.

He was just visiting this weekend and he was saying that he actually has had to go to Europe to try to find where he could get the equipment that he usually brings in from China because he can no longer bring it in and he has to find somebody for wholesaling it because otherwise he won't be able to supply to electricians anymore.

So I think that there's some really interesting.

Yeah.

Potential disasters we're about to experience.

But, and many of them are not driven by climate change per se.

Right.

I feel like.

But my, my personal interpretation is that as we start to see this poly crisis unfold, climate change is going to be right in the middle of it.

Especially as we hit summer, especially as hurricane season picks up.

We here in the D.C.

area are having a very warm spring.

We just, we just had our first atmospheric river we've ever experienced here.

Oh, really?

Yeah.

I felt so lucky.

I understand now a little better what's going on.

Yeah, yeah, it's, it's been quite wet.

I'm not sure if any of my plants that I planted over Mother's Day are going to survive, which is unfortunate.

That's too bad.

Well, but you know, anyways.

Yeah, yeah, you know, it's, it's interesting because the weather is changing and you know, there are reports now about, you know, 1.5 and all of the models say we need to now hit overshoot.

Right.

Or we get to it.

We're over in terms of our carbon budget, but then we drastically reduce it.

And all the policies that the Trump administration are pushing very quickly will do the exact opposite of that.

Right.

So then the question, you know, so then that will just lead to everything getting worse, faster, more extreme weather, more extreme storms.

Yeah.

Along with all the other problems.

Yeah, that's the problem.

It's so frustrating.

I was in Paris in 2015 for the COP21 and, and that was the one moment I thought, oh, wow, okay.

The world has come together.

You know, it was all aspirational.

I knew that.

And the devil's in the action.

And, and to be now we're looking at COP 30 and 10 years later.

10 years later and more and more.

It's just like a show for the fossil fuel industry.

Yeah, they've, they've got their, their hands in it now.

And with Trump, you know, he's pushing for coal.

I don't.

He, I.

Cole's not going to come back.

I mean, I mean, I think that we, we know all about, we know about stranded assets and we know the reason why, you know, once the investment is made into a natural gas fired power plant or something else, the idea of switching back to a coal fired power plant after they've been transitioned and decommissioned, that's a 30 year commitment.

And I don't know that Trump can really make that commitment happen in the amount of time that he has here in office, but he certainly can slow down any transition away from natural gas.

And I think he's doing everything he can with regard to that.

Yeah.

And he's providing a lot of COVID to, to fossil fuels and the fossil fuel industry.

He's opening up new public lands.

Yeah, right.

Yeah, it's.

Oh, it's so disheartening.

As far as federal workers, my dad was, he's passed a couple years ago, but he was in for most of his career in the federal government in environmental services.

And I'm just thinking, first off, I'm glad he's not here to see this.

It'd be like his work, his life work just being erased.

And I'm pretty sure if he was still in the workforce, he would have been let go.

I've been following a subreddit, federal worker subreddit and oh yeah, there, and there's.

A lot of, there's a lot of turning towards thinking about taking advantage of all the guns we have in our country on that subreddit.

I don't know if you've been noticing that.

So that's an interesting point.

What I, I've asked other people how, what their thoughts are.

Are we heading toward a civil war?

And maybe that's over the top calling it a civil war, but is it, I mean, are we heading something like that?

I'm going to answer that in a couple different ways.

As we got towards the election in November, I was preparing to do a survey with my team and I just started to get this feeling that I had a feeling that if Trump didn't win, it was going to be an extremely close race.

So I decided that the two weeks before the election, we decided to do a nationally representative survey.

So we used, we worked with YouGovia and we fielded a survey.

And one of the questions we asked on it was this question that the American Value Survey uses frequently.

We adapted it slightly, but the question is, because things have gotten so far off track, Americans may have to resort to violence in order to save our country.

And it goes from strongly disagree to strongly agree.

So that's the question.

It's a standard question.

The American Value Survey has historically found that while support for violence has gone up, it's been almost exclusively among right leaning individuals, which, you know, is what we would expect.

So that's what I expected we would find.

Yeah.

What we found instead was that left leaning individuals were much less supportive of it, but they were at 16%.

Right.

So not super low.

This is right before the election.

And I decided to keep that question on my survey that we were asking in the field at these protests and the protest just Just to, you know, for anybody listening to know we're not talking about radicals here.

94 of the people in the streets reported voting for Harris.

Right.

These are Democrats.

They identify as some sort of left leaning or moderate.

Very few people identify as right leaning who come out to these events, at least so far.

But maybe as things change, that might change.

So I started asking this question and what's really interesting is at the People's March, which was two days before the election of Donald Trump, 33% of the people in the crowd said that they believe that political violence may be necessary to save our country by the time we hit March.

So we're what, two months into, well, not quite too much in because it was early March.

35% of the people in the crowd reports that's over a third of these people, again, all Democrats, all, you know, left leaning, mainstream 16% and work for the federal government.

And then at the Hands Off Day of Action, which was a larger mobilization, they're estimating around 3 million people across the United States mobilized for this.

And it was organized by this coalition that included Move on and Indivisible.

So these are like mainstream left leaning organizations.

Again, 35% of the people on the streets said that they believed that political violence may be necessary to save our country.

I'm heartened that the number didn't go up again.

I'm not sure that that number is going to stay down, but that is a remarkably fine number on the left.

That's the highest anybody's ever recorded.

Now, these are not representative of the general public.

These are representative of people who are so concerned they're out in the streets.

Again, 16% of them work for the federal government.

And this goes back to that Reddit question that you had.

One of the things that I think is very interesting, and I spoke with a number of my colleagues about this who were in the federal government as they were starting to feel like they were losing their jobs.

You know, military service, people who serve in the US Military historically have had a fast pass into the federal government for jobs.

And as a result, we see that people of the servant in our military are overrepresented in our federal workforce or have been historically.

Any of these people were talking, at least one of my colleagues over the National Park Service was pointing out in the subreddit there, she was talking about how many people who were in the National Park Service who had served in wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, et cetera, had served in the military, said, you know, I was required to use my gun to protect Democracy in other parts of the world, and I might be required to do it here.

And we're starting to see that kind of language.

I mean, I.

So we've been looking at information on Reddit.

The other thing I've been looking at and I have my team doing is we're monitoring signs at these protests, even in D.C.

and it's amazing to me the degree to which we're starting to see more and more signs in support of Luigi, the guy who murdered the head of healthcare on the streets of New York City in plain daylight.

Yeah.

So there's all these Save Luigi signs.

He's become a folk hero.

And then also at Hands off, there were all these very violent depictions of Trump that people were carrying around on the sides.

It was really interesting because I even, I noticed this, and I actually include this in a talk that I've been giving lately, pictures of, like, these people who are protesting, they're smiling, and they're holding a poster that shows Trump being murdered, which is, you know, remarkable.

And I have to say, you're right.

I've been studying protests, and I've been serving protesters in the streets for over 25 years.

Yeah.

I have never seen that kind of a violent depiction in the crowd on a sign, and I certainly have never seen it by somebody who's smiling while holding that sign.

And those are quite common at this most recent one.

So by the time we hit the next big action in June, and the first one is being organized by a group of veterans because of all these veterans benefits that are being cut, and the risk of veterans and veterans who work in the federal workforce is being organized by a number of people who supported people who had worked in Afghanistan.

And then right after that, there is a broad coalition of groups that are coordinating this no Kins Day of action, which is, I think, the 14th of June, I would expect that we're going to continue to see that.

I also, you know, I wonder the degree to which there's going to be more support for political violence as things get worse and worse, but in terms of what language I would use to describe it.

So there are a number of political scientists who study political violence in all sorts of ways.

I mostly, I study peaceful activism.

Right.

So I, I usually draw the line and we get to, you know, nonviolent civil disobedience.

Sure.

But I don't really study violent acts because that hasn't been in my, you know, in my toolbox.

But I'm starting to think I need to.

And, you know, certainly the question that I'm using.

It's a nationally representative.

It's a, it's a national survey question.

It has been used for a long time so we can watch trends.

Is it the best way to measure whether people are going to be violent?

No, but it does show sentiment.

A lot of times people who talk about activism talk about the Overton window shifting.

Right.

What are people willing to do for activism?

When there is a common sense across left leaning Americans that political violence may be necessary, it suggests that the overturn window with regard to violence is shifting and that's a very dangerous place to be.

Does that mean that we will see civil war or does that mean we will see a couple of Luigis?

I mean, there's lots of calls online for more and more Luigis.

We haven't seen it yet.

And I have to say that I'm very happy that we haven't seen violence break out.

I actually was saying to my students, I'm surprised that we haven't seen it break out yet because so many people are losing their livelihoods.

I mean, the more people feel desperate, the more likely they are to get violent and also when they feel oppressed.

So we are right now seeing both of those things going up, people losing livelihoods and regression.

So, yeah, yeah.

So that's where we are.

It's not a good place to be.

That's pretty alarming.

But it makes sense to me.

People are being pushed into desperation.

And to add to that, just one other point is just the fact that in addition to people being pushed into desperation, remember that a lot of the normal institutional channels we historically have to express our dissatisfaction are being close to us.

And there are many fewer ways that you can resist participate or, you know, or, or lobby or voice your concerns.

In Trump's America, then we could even do 100, what is it, 25 days ago, or whatever it is.

Yesterday there was a protest at the, you know, at the Capitol while RFK Jr.

Was giving testimony.

You may have seen it.

You know, was it Ben?

Ben and Jerry's was protesting.

I mean, but there were a number of people who were protesting and they were just, they were peacefully yelling.

So they were disrupting, but they were not being violent and they were aggressively pulled out.

There's some really disturbing video there and I've seen videos like that for people who were peacefully protesting in all sorts of ways lately, so.

And also, the more people who are being peaceful are met with repression, oppression and violence.

Yeah.

The less likely they are going to be to stay peaceful.

Yeah.

Which, you know, it's problematic.

Yeah, it seems like that the repression, the authoritarianism, the.

I don't know another word that might be loaded.

Fascism.

They're pushing people.

Like you were just saying, people are peacefully protesting.

They're.

They're roughed up.

So it, it increases the resistance, and then there's more escalation.

Escalation is the word.

Yeah.

The problem.

I mean, and, and some people have made comments to me about this that perhaps that's what Trump wants, because then the administration can declare martial law.

Although I can just say that, you know, historically, if we look at countries that are, are backsliding from democracy, when there is martial law declared, it frequently doesn't end well for those in power.

So, yeah, I think it will likely trigger more violence and more, More resistance rather than less.

That is not America.

That is not the America that I want to live in.

But as you know, as a social scientist who studies this stuff, that might be the America we get.

The one thing I would just say, and we talked about this when we, we spoke last time, is that as things get worse and worse across this poly crisis, there are more and more opportunities to think about the world that we want to live in in terms of our democracy, in terms of equity, justice, and climate.

And so what I am very hopeful about, to the degree that I continue to be hopeful, is that those folks who are thinking about how we get to systemic changes to save our country, to save America, to save democracy, to save our environment, and to save the world that we live in from the climate crisis, there are these opportunities to envision the world that we want to live in.

Yeah.

And, and I think that that's something that I hope everybody is spending a lot of time thinking about because, you know, it's a lot easier to, to fulfill the promise of America when you know what you want America to look like.

Right.

And most of the people, I can tell you, who are out in the streets protesting the Trump administration, their policies, they want to imagine an America that has diversity and embraces and celebrates our diversity, rather than limiting our diversity and deporting people illegally and stopping people from having the ability to study about differences and reconciling the violent histories that we have in our country.

I mean, but shutting our eyes and holding our ears is not going to make the climate crisis go away, but it's also not going to make America great.

Yeah.

When I was at this conference a couple weeks ago in Phoenix, I met a, a young student from Nepal, international student.

He's studying in.

Well, I'm not Going to mention where he's studying?

I don't.

But he's studying here in the United States.

And I asked, how you doing?

And first thing he says, well, thank you so much for asking.

He's obviously, you know, he feels he's going to be okay.

He.

He.

He has a undergraduate in sociology and he's studying journalism.

And I go, oh, my God.

You know, that's two things you don't want to be studying here in Nashville State.

It's true.

But we need it so badly.

Right?

I mean, that's the thing.

It's just, I mean, you know.

Yeah, we're just.

It's crazy times, and we haven't even.

I mean, we haven't spoken about what's happening on university campuses.

But I would just say, you know, I don't.

I am the chair of the Political Sociology section of the American Sociological Association.

So that means that I.

We have our annual meeting, and I run and coordinate the.

All of the events and all, you know, all the panels.

We have around 800 and some members, but we have a lot of.

Even though we're the American Sociological association, we have a lot of international participants in our conference.

We have a lot of international members.

And I'm getting emails every day from people saying, I'm not coming to the cut to the United States.

I either I can't come or I won't come, or I'm afraid to come.

And it's just, you know, we're seeing so much of the kind of isolation that is not good for our country and is certainly not good for science.

And it's just really sad.

This guy, for him coming to America and studying.

It's what made America the shining city on the hill was its call for people that wanted to learn.

And now it's like he's come to one America and all of a sudden he wakes up and he's in another America.

He feels it's hostile to him.

You know, he's.

Yeah, it's.

Right.

It's stark, you know.

A book I wanted to get your idea.

A book I'm reading the Fourth Turning.

Yeah, I've heard of it, but I haven't read it.

So his theory is that history moves its human cycles basically 80 to 100 years, a long human lifetime.

And each generation has an archetype, and there's four turnings about 20 years apart.

And the fourth turning is the crisis turning.

And the last crisis was about 80 to 100.

You know, World War II, Germany, 30s, 40s.

We came out of World War II, and it was a new world order.

And so we're coming into another phase like that.

And you were mentioning how.

What sort of America do we want?

Because it seems like whatever Trump gets away with, he's going to leave.

America changed.

Oh, for sure.

I mean, there's.

I.

I have just a lot of Dubai on the federal government.

He.

At this point, they can't put back all the things that have been lost already.

Right, right.

We're right.

And here, so far from the end of this term.

Yeah, I know.

I mean, it's interesting because I was.

I forget who I was talking to.

And it was right around the 100th day, and they were like, oh, yeah, well, you know, the Trump administration, we're almost done.

And I was like, we have.

I wish.

I mean, we have.

We have 365 days a year, except for that one year where there are 366 days.

Yeah.

There's a ways to keep.

Yeah.

Well, my fever dream is that the midterms come, it's a massive blue wave, and he gets impeached and.

And convicted.

Finally, some consequences.

But that's my favorite dream.

So, I think, you know, I mean, well, I'm.

I'm hopeful for the next election, if we actually can have Democratic elections.

I'm not convinced that.

I'm not convinced that we'll.

We'll be there.

And it's funny because I did a podcast a while a while ago, and they were like, oh, let's talk about what do you expect for the election?

Sounds like a.

What do I expect?

The elections.

I expect that we may or may not have them.

I mean, I'm not sure.

Not confident at all.

Yeah, so it was interesting because, I mean, I've never felt like that before.

I mean, a lot of.

I do a lot of work around electoral engagement as part of what we do in politics, so.

Yeah, I mean, it's just.

Yeah.

Before the election, I.

I was getting every day texts, you know, give $15, $5, and I finally.

I gave a little bit of money, but I finally asked you more for more.

Yeah.

And now it's happening again.

And my reaction is my $15 is not going to make any difference, leave me alone kind of thing.

Yeah, I mean, I am.

So I wrote.

My second book that I ever wrote was called Activism, Inc.

And it was published in 2006.

That makes it 19 years old now, which makes me feel very old.

And it was all about.

The subtitle of the book was how the Outsourcing of Grassroots Campaigns is Strangling progressive politics in America.

And in it, I talk about the ways that the left and the Democratic Party have leaned in to what we call instrumental politics, which is basically using individual voters, left leaning citizens, and particularly young people as replaceable cogs in a machine where they have no autonomy and they have no power within the machine.

They just are used to service very limited purposes, to provide $15 or to plop into a community and knock on a certain number of doors of strangers during the election.

And that's basically it.

And what I said back then is that that will fail when it runs into a political machine that actually engages in local politics.

Yeah.

And we saw that happen in the 2024 election where the Trump machine, the campaign actually invested in, even in communities of color in terms of laying a groundwork and having people connected in the communities there.

Whereas the Democrats had this calculation, oh, if we have this many people from blue states drop in and knock on strangers door in red states or do random dialing or texting in red states or purple states, we'll be fine.

We'll hit our numbers and that will yield the results.

And it just doesn't work when you're fighting against local relational politics.

And that's what I said back then.

And I, you know, and then in, you know, in American Resistance, I picked back up the same theme because it continued to be an issue, this infrastructural deficit on the left in saving ourselves.

Instead of talking about that, I really spoke about the need for cultivating resilience in your community and building community ties.

And I talk about it there because we know the climate shocks are going to come.

We know they're going to hit more, you know, more frequently and they're gonna hit with more severity because we're not doing what we need to do for a climate crisis.

And when they come, you cannot count on random people on the Internet to help you out.

You need to be able to count on your friends and neighbors.

Right, Right.

So you better invest in them.

And so that was the argument I made there.

But now during, you know, In Trump's America 2.0, having those types of community ties can do so much more than just prepare us when climate shocks come.

It can help us to weather this polycrisis of democracy, and it can also help us to push back to power in our communities.

And what I would argue is that rather than helping to win elections in other states, you should be building a real capacity to win elections and win the issues you care about in your community.

There are so Many climate issues that we can address in our local communities that don't involve whether or not we meet our NDCs for the Paris agreement.

Because let's be honest, we are never meeting those, meeting those commitments.

Right now.

It's not going to happen.

So anybody who's like banging their head against the wall trying to change that should stop and focus on your community because there's so much we can do.

Yeah.

And it makes, it makes our democracy better.

It makes your community better.

It makes, you know, research shows it even makes you a happier person if you do that.

Yeah, we're all on our screens.

There's the local community in terms of climate, that's a way to maybe get people that aren't really, you know, climate change, it's, you know, woke or whatever, working within their communities and their local environments.

You don't even have to use the word climate, but you can do something that will help the climate for sure.

I mean, they can do like, one of the big things in my community is about, you know, putting in more non permeable surfaces because we get a lot of extreme storms or bigger storms because of climate change.

It affects trees, affects houses, it affects, you know, infrastructure of all sorts.

So just like those kinds of tasks, you don't need to talk about climate at all.

We need to do something because otherwise flooding will take out our roads, will take out our electricity.

So we got to do that.

And the best way to do that is to work with, you know, your neighbors and people in your communities.

Yeah.

So to bring our surround full circle, we were talking about how, you know, Trump gets elected, maybe that'll be the, the catalyst for change.

Do you, are you hopeful that we can meet this moment?

I, I continue to be hopeful we can meet this moment.

I, but I said like, as I say, in the end of saving ourselves, the big question is how quickly we can do it and how many lives will be lost in the process.

And I think we are now, we are in it.

We are in, as I, you know, as I say, I'm apocalypse and I'm an apocalyptic optimist.

We are in the apocalypse right now.

And how, how far we go down that road is not really going to be determined by Donald Trump or his administration.

All the Fox News people who are not in his administration.

Right.

They're not the ones who get to decide that.

We have to decide that.

And I believe in the promise of America.

I sound, I mean, it's funny because I, I've become increasingly patriotic, which is kind of weird given all the things that are going on in our country, because, you know, but I think that we have so much to give, but we.

We have to give it.

We can't just sit around watching Netflix and think somebody else is going to do it.

Because there's one thing that we all should know by now is that anything that you want to see in America, you need to manifest it yourself.

You need to set it out there and do the work, because nobody's coming and do it for you.

This is not a time for free riders.

And so I am hopeful because I do believe that people will rise up.

And I think that there are so many policies that are being implemented right now that are so terrible for so many people and so many communities in the United States that people are on the verge of rising up.

I know a lot of people are feeling anxiety, depression, dismay, despair even.

One of the things we know from research, and my research has talked about this quite a bit, is that, you know, you're gonna feel despair and anxiety.

I mean, if you're not feeling it right now, I would love you to explain to me how you're doing exactly the daily Right.

But what we know from research is that when people feel anger, it actually gives you a sense of reason, and it gives you the motivation to get involved.

And so people who, you know, we're always told, particularly women, are told, you know, don't get angry, but don't want to be one of those angry women.

I say get furious.

Everybody should be furious about what's happening to our country.

Everybody should be furious about the fact that you can't go to national parks anymore.

The national parks are being sold off, and if you go to a national park, you better not have to use the toilet because they fired all the people who are in charge of cleaning the toilets.

I mean, it's crazy what's happening in our country.

So it is a wonderful time to be angry and to think about what is the thing that, you know, you have to, you know, prioritize what are the most important things.

But many of them will be connected with climate change.

I mean, it's unfortunate, but it's also true.

And it also provides opportunities to start to think about solutions.

And if you think, like, if we try to figure it out and we think, oh, well, Trump administration and what they're doing at the federal level, it's overwhelming.

But the thing is that it's very hard.

I mean, it's very hard to make change at that level, even when there are Democrats in the White House and Democrats in the Congress.

But if you take it down to your community level, it's a lot easier to start thinking about.

You know, this.

This intersection always floods when there's a storm.

What do we do about it?

Yeah, exactly.

How do we, you know, we have a bunch of these buses that are spewing diesel fuel and, you know, asthma rates are going up.

What do we do about it?

Well, Mom's Clean Air Force has some great answers for that one.

I mean, we have some electric school buses here in my community.

I love them.

Right.

I mean, and they're just there.

There are all of these things that we can start with, and we can work with neighbors to do it.

And I think that that is.

That's where we should be right now.

So I am hopeful that people are going to heed the call and are going to push back to this power and this poly crisis.

I am hopeful that we can do it in enough time that not too many lives are lost.

I don't know how quickly we can do it, but I really hope so because we need one another more than we ever had before.

That's a good way to.

To wrap this up.

We need each other.

And like you say, we're in the apocalypse.

We're here, and we have to maintain hope.

Hope.

Hope is when we stop fooling ourselves.

And.

And we can't fool ourselves that it's all going to be okay if, like you say, we just sit and watch Netflix.

We have to get engaged in our communities and be the change we want to see.

Exactly.

Be the change you want to see in the world, and then you can go home and watch Netflix.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

That.

There's time for both.

Yeah, exactly.

That last podcast, which is just me talking, and it was May is mental health month, and so I was talking about how these are the times of fear and loathing and how we can find peace of mind, go out for a walk, look at the trees.

You know, just kind of center yourself.

Be a human being instead of a consumer.

Yes, for sure.

These are all good points.

Yeah.

So, Dana, thank you very much.

It's always great talking to you, and I really appreciate the work you're doing.

Well, thank you very much.

It's great to be here.

Thank you for having me.

Again, thank you for also being flexible during these crazy, trying times, but I look forward to seeing, you know, seeing what comes next.

Yeah, we'll see what comes next.

Bye.

There's always more we can do to stop climate change.

No amount of engagement is too little.

And now more than ever, your involvement matters.

To learn more and do more, visit globalwarmingisreal.com thanks for listening.

I'm your host, Tom Schueneman.

We'll see you next time on Global warming is real.

Sam.