2025 Howard Zinn Memorial Lecture Series: John Shattuck

On Dec. 4, 2025, John Shattuck, international legal scholar, diplomat, and human rights leader, was the keynote speaker for the 2025 Howard Zinn Memorial Lecture at Boston University. The lecture, “Resisting Authoritarianism: What the People Can Do,” was held in the Tsai Performance Center.

Event overview:

To learn more about the Howard Zinn Lecture Series, visit Boston University.

TRANSCRIPT OF REMARKS

Note: These remarks have been lightly cleaned up from the autogenerated transcript. There may still be typos and other small errors.

John Shattuck: It’s a great privilege to be here, and above all a great privilege to be invited and an honor to give the Howard Zinn Memorial Lecture this year. Howard Zinn is an iconic figure for many of us, and I’m sure the audience who’s drawn here tonight is drawn as much by him as by the title of my speech. But I think the two actually go together very well.

I never had the privilege of working with Professor Zinn, but it’s fair to say that I can sense him whispering in my ear tonight as I begin this lecture. He had strong views about what I’m going to talk about. His monumental A People’s History of the United States is full of stories of political oppression and resistance. In fact, that’s the entire topic. The most famous, of course, is the American Revolution, which needs no introduction, which I join Howard Zinn in believing has not yet been completed and is still being fought by the people. He urged the people to keep on resisting. And when we organize with one another, he wrote in A People’s History, when we get involved, when we stand up and speak out together, we can create a power that no government can suppress.

So, I want to pay tribute tonight to Howard Zinn’s achievement in getting us to recognize that history in the end is written by ordinary people doing extraordinary things. The introduction to the latest edition of A People’s History points to the core Zinn belief that, and I quote, “Change comes from below, from people resisting and organizing, workers going on strike, consumers boycotting, soldiers saying no to illegal orders,” and that we cannot rely on leaders, but instead have to rely on our individual and collective actions to support the values of liberty and justice for all.

Now, stories of resistance can be found in earlier generations of the people, including, and I’m sure this is true for others, my own family. And we have to face the fact that we were oppressors before we were resistors. The Shattuck family immigrated to Boston in 1641, quite a while ago, and built a small farm on land long occupied by the Wampanoag people. The Wampanoag welcomed the first Shattuck farmer, but later, understandably, resisted the endless takeover of their lands by wave after wave of colonial invaders.

Now, another ancestor of mine, Job Shattuck — yes, you could look it up, Job is his first name, who appears on page 92 of A People’s History — helped lead a resistance movement of farmers in 1786 against what they regarded as an oppressive governing elite in Boston. Job and his farmers had fought in the revolution and they became outraged when their farms were seized by Boston banks and tax collectors after they fell into debt for not having been paid while serving in George Washington’s grossly underfunded army. Job’s farmer resistors were what was known as Shays’ Rebellion, and their resistance spurred the drafting of the Bill of Rights by the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia, including the rights of free speech and assembly and the redress of grievances, all essential to lawful resistance.

Today’s resistors draw inspiration from the Civil Rights Movement with its deep roots here at BU. Martin Luther King studied here and was influenced by the nonviolent resistance philosophy of Howard Thurman and Mahatma Gandhi. It was here that King learned about the moral force of nonviolence that he later put at the center of the great movement of ordinary people doing extraordinary things, like Rosa Parks and the Montgomery Bus Boycott, who resisted oppression by refusing to cooperate with the oppressor.

So, with that introduction now let’s turn to the situation today. We’ll begin with the counter revolution that’s transforming democracy into authoritarianism in the U.S. and Europe. I’ll look at how this got started, review the playbook that the new authoritarians are using, then focus on what can be done to build up the resistance.

We’re now a year into the second coming of Donald Trump as president. Trump has asserted, to be very simple about it, new presidential powers to weaponize the government against anyone who opposes him, to rule by executive decree, to use the presidency to enrich and aggrandize himself, and to act with total impunity in defiance of the rule of law. Now, authoritarianism, a big word, is defined as the assertion of unlimited authority at the expense of freedom. Most white middle class Americans today have not experienced this kind of authoritarianism. And many people in positions of power who should know better are eager to appease a rising authoritarian because they think this will protect their interests.

So before we go any further, let’s look at why appeasement doesn’t work. Maria Ressa, the Philippine journalist who won a Nobel Peace Prize in 2022 for her courageous reporting about a brutal dictatorship in the Philippines, explained it this way: Appeasement will only make an authoritarian stronger. The power of citizens to resist a rising dictator will never be greater than it is today. So to keep rising, an authoritarian must keep accumulating power. And a rising dictator can only be restrained when the people act to reduce his power. This is what began to happen in last month’s elections in New York, New Jersey, Virginia, California, Maine, Georgia, Pennsylvania, Mississippi, and other places. Howard Zinn often observed that the power of the people on top depends on the obedience of the people below. And last month, the people below made clear they wanted to replace the people on top.

Now, an authoritarian who seeks to take over a democracy must first undermine a democratic electoral process that might restrain his power. This is what Donald Trump is trying to do by Republican gerrymandering and voter suppression. The resistance must organize to stop him. Many people don’t realize that the basic elements of the strategy that Trump is following today were written 15 years ago in Hungary by Viktor Orbán, Trump’s favorite authoritarian. Orbán took over Hungary in 2010 by winning a democratic election and then transforming a democracy into an authoritarian state. Orbán is really Trump’s political guide, and the author of the original authoritarian playbook that Trump is following today.

In fact, Steve Bannon declares that quote, “Orbán was Trump before Trump was Trump,” and tells us to study the rise of Orbán in order to understand the rise of Trump. So, let’s do that. The story of Orbán’s rise begins at the end of the Cold War, when the Berlin Wall came down in 1989 and authoritarian Communist regimes were swept out of Hungary and the rest of Eastern Europe. What seemed impossible suddenly happened. The forces propelling democracy suddenly seemed unstoppable. East-West political barriers collapsed. Elections and market economies sprang up. The Soviet Union dissolved and a new global economy began to take over. These changes led one optimistic observer at the time to predict the end of history, with democracy as the final form of government. But, of course, this was too good to be true.

Darker forces were at work and they were producing very different kinds of changes. With economic globalization taking over, companies began moving factories overseas. Market economies began slashing social spending. Economic inequality grew rapidly between the new oligarchs, created by globalization, and the rest of the people. Refugees began flooding into Europe from the Middle East and into the U.S. from Central America. And a huge backlash against the disruptive changes turned into reactionary populism and racist politics. New authoritarians began to emerge in Europe just about this time: First in Yugoslavia in the early 1990s, where Slobodan Milošević fanned the flames of ethnic and religious conflict into the first genocide in Europe since the Second World War; in Russia in the early 2000s, where Vladimir Putin built a corrupt nationalist regime based on a new Russian oligarchy; in Hungary in the 2010s, where Viktor Orbán undermined democratic institutions; and eventually in the U.S. after 2016, where Donald Trump began to emulate Viktor Orbán.

So as David said, I had a front row seat to all this. I was Assistant Secretary of State for human rights in the early 1990s, and I witnessed the genocide in Yugoslavia, and I worked to stop the war. Then as ambassador to the Czech Republic in the late 1990s, I saw the positive side of the decade, the transformation of an authoritarian state into a democracy. Then, as president of Central European University in Budapest in the 2010s, I watched Viktor Orbán turn a new democracy back into an authoritarian state.

What can we learn from this to help us understand what’s happening now in the U.S.? In Hungary, people had been left behind by globalization. The financial crisis of 2008 hit them hard, and many began to feel they were actually worse off than they had been under Communism. Hungarian politics were deeply divided between a rural population and an urban elite who dominated the country. This set the stage for Orbán. In 2009, he began attacking the elites and promising — yes, he did it first — to make Hungary great again. He railed against refugees, calling them a threat to Christian civilization. He vowed to protect Hungarians from foreigners and people of other races and religions. And he created a new tribal identity politics that swept him into power. Does this sound familiar? Orbán’s playbook for accumulating power was deployed in Hungary 15 years ago, and it became the blueprint for Trump’s Project 2025.

Here’s the playbook: Take over your party and enforce discipline by using threats and intimidation to stamp out dissent. Build your base by appealing to hatred and racism and branding minorities and immigrants as dangers to society and demonizing your opponents as enemies of the people. Use misinformation and lies to justify what you’re doing. Use your election to claim unlimited power. Centralize your power by dismantling and replacing the civil service. Redefine the rule of law as the rule by your executive decree. Eliminate checks and balances and separation of powers by taking over the legislature, the courts, the media, and civil society. Create a new oligarchy to fund your party and run the economy, and intimidate and subdue the public into believing all this is necessary and resistance is futile.

This was all done by Viktor Orbán and is now being copied by Donald Trump. When earlier this year Trump began attacking universities in the U.S., I wasn’t surprised. I’d seen this before when I was on the receiving end of attacks by Orbán when I was president of CEU. So why do authoritarians attack universities? Because academic freedom threatens their power to control the national narrative. Orbán targeted CEU because it threatened his narrative about the Holocaust in Hungary. Orbán had made himself popular with his nationalist supporters by declaring that the Holocaust was imposed on Hungarians by the Germans. And he even built a monument at the center of Budapest to commemorate that. But Hungary had been an ally of Germany in World War II, and authoritative academic research showed that Hungarians themselves carried out the Holocaust in Hungary. Orbán demanded that CEU revise this research. We refused and drew a red line to protect our academic freedom. Two other targets of Orbán’s censorship were gender studies and migration studies, subjects later also targeted by Trump at U.S. universities. Again, at CEU, we refused to be censored. We were able to protect our academic freedom because CEU was not funded by the Hungarian government. But other universities were vulnerable, and Orbán brought them under his control.

Today, Donald Trump is trying to do exactly the same thing to U.S. universities. He’s using federal funding of research as a weapon to coerce them to pay penalties for alleged but unproven and unrelated violations of law. And to avoid the cut off of funds, universities are being pressured to surrender their autonomy to Trump. Under this scheme, Trump has made himself the academic dealmaker and chief, a position he obviously relishes. Regulation by academic dealmaking is a total violation of constitutional, statutory, and administrative law. It deprives a university of its right to due process; it violates the university’s First Amendment rights; it circumvents the civil rights laws enacted by the Congress; and it makes new rules for universities in violation of administrative law.

Trump’s dealmaking agreements really are nothing more therefore than the products of a big extortion scheme. Colombia was unfortunate to be the first university coerced into this scheme and other universities later negotiated their own deals. Harvard took a different approach. Bolstered by a healthy endowment, it took what was clearly a risk in challenging Trump’s demands in court. It won all aspects of its case at the district court level. The judge ruled that Trump could not restrict Harvard’s competitive research funding, quote, “in retaliation for the university’s exercise of its First Amendment rights or on any purported grounds of discrimination without complying with civil rights law.”

Trump now has another scheme to control universities, a so-called compact with the government. In August, the administration offered preferential funding to any university that agreed to comply with the Trump agenda. In some ways, the compact scheme is even worse than the dealmaking scheme. It’s more intrusive on academic freedom. For example, it requires a university to abolish any academic unit that, and I quote, “belittles conservative ideas,” close quote. And it requires universities to use completely undefined objective standards for admissions, all subject to justice department oversight and enforcement. In a show of collective resistance, seven universities have now declined the compact proposal and two dozen other universities, I’m happy to say, including BU, have signed an amicus brief supporting Harvard’s lawsuit against Trump.

Now, Harvard’s case illustrates an important element of the overall resistance resisting the authoritarian in court. In Trump’s first six months, 337 cases were filed challenging his authoritarian actions. Federal judges ruled against him in 165 cases. And the administration defied court oversight in 57 cases. Trump has repeatedly attacked the federal courts and has often defied their rulings. While the lower federal courts have restrained some of his authoritarian actions, the Supreme Court has yet to rule against Trump in a major case challenging his authoritarian rule. We shall soon see how that turns out.

Before drawing lessons from all this, let’s briefly review the record over the past year of Trump’s actions that follow the authoritarian playbook first written by Viktor Orbán. Weaponizing the federal government to target critics and opponents; defying the Constitution, federal judges, laws, and congressional appropriations; deploying federal troops to cities to intimidate people; using police state tactics to round up immigrants; carrying out mass firings of career civil servants and scientists; coercing law firms and universities to make extortionate payments; challenging the legitimacy of elections and the certification of results; and spreading disinformation and lies to persuade and confuse the public about all of this.

So, enough of what’s happening. Now, let’s talk about how to build up the resistance.

What lesson should we take into account? The first big lesson is that populist rebellions like the ones I’ve been talking about can shake up democracy. Rebellion starts as a reaction to a major series of disruptive events like economic collapse or globalization, and it demands response to its grievances. Where does this lead? It can lead to democratic revival as it did in the U.S. in the 1930s, under Roosevelt during the Great Depression. Or it can lead to authoritarianism as it did in Hungary in the 2010s, under Orbán and now in the U.S. under Trump.

Now, populism can be steered toward democratic revival by building left-right coalitions for fairness on demands like affordability, health care, and housing. There are historical examples of this, like the 19th century farmer-labor coalition that brought together urban workers, white farmers, and Black sharecroppers and led to the progressive movement and the New Deal in the 20th century. On the other hand, there are bad examples of where populism can lead, demanding new leaders to revitalize the economy who support oligarchies, like the 19th century robber barons and the tech titans of today. Oligarchies promote huge economic inequality and tend to support authoritarianism. They must be challenged by the resistance for there to be genuine democratic revival.

A second lesson is that democracy is a patriotic cause and the national flag must be reclaimed. In the Orbán-Trump playbook, the authoritarian hijacks the flag. In some earlier resistance movements, for example against the war in Vietnam, the flag was rejected by resistors as a symbol of the very regime they were challenging. But the flag of democracy is a symbol of the rule of law, of a society built on human rights and freedoms. And flying the flag has been a major feature of this year’s No Kings protests across America. It stands for defending democratic values against authoritarian attack.

A third lesson is that resistance must stop a rising authoritarian from weaponizing the state. Opponents are being attacked with criminal penalties like prosecution, regulatory penalties like tax audits, educational penalties like the denial of research funding, political penalties like harassment investigations, [and] physical penalties like the withdrawal of police or secret service protection. Any institution that’s targeted, for example a university or a law firm or a media company, should resist and not try to appease the authoritarian. And those that aren’t immediately targeted should join the resistance, both to protect themselves and to protect democracy.

Last month’s elections showed that there’s already a high level of political resistance to the Trump-Orbán playbook. Underlying the election results are polls that reveal an overwhelming majority of Americans continue supporting the very values that are under attack by the authoritarian. In the face of Trump’s decrees, Americans report that their most important values continue to be freedom and fairness. A poll by the National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago shows that huge bipartisan majorities endorse as fundamental the right to vote, to equal opportunity, to freedom of speech, to racial equality, and to the protection of personal data.

Support for the values of democracy can jumpstart organizing the resistance. Mobilizing civil society can begin to fill the void left by institutions that Trump has captured, including the Congress, the Supreme Court, and the Republican Party. The challenge is to develop a nonviolent strategy for legally disrupting authoritarian rule. Civil society groups in the U.S. like Indivisible are charting a path for this. Their strategy has five key elements. The first element is organizing local resistance groups from the bottom up in every state, blue states and red, across race, class, generation, and geography throughout the country. The second element is developing networks to reach people in the pillars of society, government, business, labor, law, education, media, culture, religion, to persuade them to stop yielding to the regime’s authoritarian demands. The third element is nonviolent advocacy in support of vulnerable people and institutions targeted by the regime for intimidation, retribution, detention, or extortion. For example, immigrants, universities, media, law firms, public officials and others. The fourth element is using nonviolent tactics to reduce the power of the regime and its enablers — strikes, boycotts, and other forms of economic or political non-cooperation like those that were used in the Civil Rights Movement. And the fifth element is training local resistance groups to avoid violence and to deescalate any confrontations with antagonists or regime supporters.

So today, grassroots organizations like Indivisible, Public Citizen, and 50501 are connecting neighbors and organizing them into thousands of local groups across the country. The groups meet regularly and plan actions like lobbying officials, commenting on social media, criticizing authoritarian policies, displaying resistance signs, and hosting teach-in sessions. These local groups then coordinate with state and national mobilization activities to carry out nationwide demonstrations like the three No Kings protests this year in which a cumulative total of about 15 million people participated in cities and towns in every state across the country. While these demonstrations may seem at first to be performative and symbolic, their impact over time has been to activate civil society and train people to form networks to implement the resistance strategy of mass protest, victim support, regime defection, peaceful non-cooperation, and de-escalation training.

Now, courage is contagious, and it’s no accident that the very large turnouts for last month’s off-year elections came after the huge national protests of the spring, summer, and fall. Let me give you just a few examples of lawful, nonviolent, resistant actions that are being carried out right now by local groups across the country. Here in Boston on December 16th, the anniversary of the Boston Tea Party, a Boston ICE Tea Party is being organized to dump ice into the Boston Harbor to protest Trump’s attacks on immigrants. You could sign up for that. Other examples include witnessing and filming mass roundups, organizing neighborhood watches and immigrant assistance groups, boycotting companies and banks that contract with ICE, [and] boycotting media companies that give into authoritarian pressure to cancel speakers like Jimmy Kimmel based on the content of their speech.

Then there are examples of courageous individuals who are resisting both at the national and the grassroots level. Former military members of Congress filming a video reminding officers and troops of their duty not to obey illegal and unconstitutional orders; a high school baseball coach in Harlem stopping government agents from randomly interrogating his players; parents patrolling schoolyards in D.C. to protect students and other parents in raids by ICE agents; university presidents refusing to sign Trump’s compact conditioning federal funding on a university’s giving up academic freedom; journalists reporting on National Guard troops in Chicago, Portland, D.C., and Los Angeles despite threats to them and their families.

Now, resistance can succeed. Research by my Kennedy School colleague Erica Chenoweth shows that when three and a half percent of a country’s population is mobilized for continuous protest activity, the resistance begins to work. Recent international examples are South Korea, where mass demonstrations two years ago led to the impeachment and removal of an authoritarian president. Brazil, where a broad-based and well-organized opposition defeated an authoritarian president just two years ago, who then tried to overturn the election by attacking the capital and was convicted this year of attempting a coup. Poland, where a coalition of pro-democracy opposition parties organized a record-breaking voter turnout in 2023 to defeat an authoritarian regime that was following parts of the Orbán playbook. Guatemala, where an anti-corruption candidate last year was elected president and successfully resisted several coup attempts. And Bangladesh where democratic reforms are now underway following the defeat of an authoritarian government.

So resistance is not easy. It takes time, discipline, a willingness to take risks, and close attention to the specific circumstances of a country facing internal authoritarian attack. In the U.S., this means having a mobilization strategy that operates simultaneously on two levels. First, defending the electoral process and winning elections like the ones last month and the midterms next year. And second, equally important, resisting by organizing non-cooperation and persuading prominent people in the mainstream pillars of society to stop trying to appease the dictator.

Authoritarians accumulate their power by planning and implementing detailed strategies for weakening democratic institutions. Trump’s Project 2025 is a blueprint for this in the U.S. It’s the product of years of close coordination among far-right think tanks headed by the Heritage Foundation, and constant contact with authoritarian leaders like Viktor Orbán. Sophisticated far-right planning creates a major challenge for the resistance.

So here are six guidelines for what must be done to overcome this challenge.

First, resistance movements must avoid what we might call circular firing squads and getting mired in their own internal disputes. Building a coalition to resist an authoritarian requires a shared goal and a commitment to set aside differences so they don’t get in the way of achieving the goal. The perfect should not be allowed over to become the enemy of the good. An internal disagreement, for example, over whether to end a government shutdown shouldn’t be allowed to get in the way of spotlighting the authoritarians actions that caused the shutdown in the first place. The importance of putting aside differences is well illustrated by the growing resistance movement to Orbán in Hungary. This year, for the first time in 15 years, a broad coalition of Hungarian opposition groups has come together around a single unifying candidate who is now polling ahead of Orbán for next year’s presidential election.

A second rule is that resistance movements must avoid stagnation. Resistance can get trapped in cycles of mobilization without achieving change. Movements that rely exclusively on social media organizing and street protests are often unable to sustain their momentum when an authoritarian steps up repression. To be successful, a movement has to build a durable base at the local and state level and deploy a full range of nonviolent tactics to challenge the regime and encourage its supporters to defect. For example, witnessing and publicizing the violent roundups of immigrant workers and their families, which is being done now by thousands of local groups of Indivisible, is clearly contributing to the growing public opposition to ICE roundups, as have lawsuits challenging these actions and community efforts to support the affected families.

Third, resistance movements must have a positive message beyond anti-authoritarianism. Authoritarians claim legitimacy by appealing to the public demand to make things work. In response, the resistance must develop a credible message and policies about fixing things that aren’t working. For example, by delivering affordability as the winning candidates did in last month’s elections. The movement must call for effective reforms and not simply defend a broken system where it was once democratic.

Fourth, the resistance must control its narrative and fight disinformation by constantly innovating in a changing media environment. Authoritarians today seek to control the media in order to crowd out and contradict resistance messages. To be successful, the resistance must develop new media strategies and methods of communication in order to control the narrative of democratic change. This is what Mamdani did in this year’s elections campaign. And this is how the funny animal costumes from Portland that went viral in the October protests completely undercut the authoritarian narrative that the resistance was turning violent.

Fifth, the resistance must engage people across differences and avoid creating its own silos. Ultimately, the most important challenge for the resistance is to reach beyond self-selecting activists to engage people across their political differences. Demonstrations are essential for energizing the base, to be sure, but demonstrations can polarize and push people away who might otherwise be persuaded to join. This means having a respectful conversation and creating trust beyond the protest megaphone and outside of the protest.

Finally, and above all, the resistance must respond to the populist demand for fundamental reform. History shows that populist movements can become engines of democratic transformation. It’s crucial to listen to populist voices, to understand their disaffection, their grievances, and their demands, and to respond by projecting a vision and policies for a fairer democratic system that gives people the power to shape and adapt to change.

Last summer, in a local resistance meeting that we organized for Indivisible, a volunteer fireman stood up and told our group that Trump is asking some of the right questions, but his answers are all wrong. The ultimate task of the resistance is to respond to the questions and to give better answers.

After Martin Luther King, two of the greatest resistors of our time were Václav Havel and Nelson Mandela. After their long courageous struggles against great odds, they achieved what had seemed impossible, taking down Communist dictatorship and racist Apartheid. They were each asked how they did it. Havel’s answer was modest and straightforward. He said, “We did what we could, and when we did what we could, we found we could do a little more. So, we did a little more.” Mandela’s answer was searingly direct. “It always seemed impossible until it was done.”

Six decades ago in a speech in South Africa, the original Robert Kennedy described the ultimate power of resistance in extraordinary words you may have heard but are worth repeating now. “Each time a person stands up, he sends forth a tiny ripple of hope. And crossing each other from a million different centers of energy and daring, those ripples build a current that can sweep down the mightiest walls of oppression.” So that’s what the people can do today.

Glick: Thank you. We’re going to do a few minutes of Q&A. There will be mics at the front of both aisles here. So just come on up. We’ll try to keep questions concise in the spirit of the evening so that a number of folks can contribute. Then we will adjourn for a reception in a few minutes.

While people are thinking of their questions, maybe I’ll start with one just to get us started. In doing my research, which was modest, I got the sense, and I got it again tonight, [that] you’re fairly optimistic in some ways about the ability of Americans to unify around shared values and to resist. I’m curious how your level of optimism has evolved since the book, or since the beginning of the Trump administration. Maybe even if you have one reason that you’re more optimistic than you were and one that you’re less, maybe more pessimistic?

Shattuck: I wrote a book in 2022, which was basically how it was that we could resist what was then not particularly problematic but was sort of the general climate of civil rights in America was really falling. Two-thousand and twenty-two was a time of some degree of optimism. There was a whole lot of polling that was being done about the way in which American values were really being endorsed by at least 60 percent or thereabouts of the population.

Then along came Donald Trump. So, if you want to do a graph of my optimism, it certainly slipped down as I’m sure everybody else’s did at that particular point. I think the crisis that we’re in now is a much deeper and longer range one. It’s not something that’s just a question of this particular person or even this particular regime. However, my optimism began to be restored, at not the same level that it had been before, but it began to be restored when I discovered an organization called Indivisible. A number of whose representatives are here tonight, and I welcome them. Thank you for coming. Also several other grassroots organizations [like] Public Citizen, 50501, etcetera. These are people who are really working day in and day out to implement the values that polls were showing even in 2022, and I referred to them in my remarks, 60 to 70 percent of Americans still supported basic propositions like the right to vote, equal rights, at least on the basis of race, as well as gender, as well as LGBTQ. All of those played quite well.

When Indivisible began to organize and all of these activities began to emerge around the country, I realized this was not Hungary. I had been in Hungary and Hungary, as you’ve heard, was really captured by Viktor Orbán. It was a young democracy to be sure. It had just really started after the end of the Cold War, so there weren’t any deep roots of democracy. But there was almost no real civil society in Hungary, so Orbán has succeeded in Hungary in the way that I do not believe Trump or any of the other elements of his regime will succeed in America, because I think the depth of our civil society represented by these grassroots organizations that I mentioned now is really quite remarkable, and I don’t think it has receded as a result of what’s going on.

The one cautionary word which I will say to myself as I assess my levels of optimism is that we are very naive. I tried to say that remark in my speech. We’ve never had an experience like this, unlike virtually all the other countries, certainly the countries of Eastern Europe which have gone through fascism and communist authoritarianism over the last 75 years. We haven’t had that experience, and therefore a lot of Americans are still really asleep, or those that aren’t asleep are saying that we ought to be able to get along with this regime that we’re in now. I think I’m increasingly of the view that the civil society doesn’t believe that, and that’s what Indivisible is all about. So, I think if we wake up and come to understand some of the things that I was describing here, including the roots of it that go way out into Europe and are not simply some blip that happened here in the United States, then I think we can be optimistic. I do not think the future belongs to this kind of regime in the United States.

Glick: Great. Thank you. Let me ask one more quick one inspired by the end of your comments there. You obviously were not naive when you went to Hungary. You were an expert. You had decades of experience. What most surprised you nevertheless being on the ground, if anything?

Shattuck: Well, I don’t know whether there are any people out here who are bikers the way I am, but Budapest is a great biking city. That surprised me. So I was glad to discover that. I was very glad to discover that. It gave me a nice diversion. I’d go off on my bike and think, “My god, what’s happening here?” I shouldn’t have been, but I was still surprised by the weakness of the civil society organizations. We sort of take them for granted. Look at all the organizations we have, including all the ones that are actively involved in litigation, the ACLU, civil rights groups, etcetera. There are a few courageous Hungarians who are doing that kind of work. But having lived as Hungarians did through this very repressive period, civil society really hadn’t gotten an opportunity to grow back, and that did surprise me. It did. I was not heartened by that.

Glick: Great. Thank you. All right, let’s start over here.

Audience question: Thank you. There are so many questions. The strategy that you are promoting seems to me [to be what] Indivisible is promoting, [which] is let’s work through the elections. Let’s get our strength together. We’ll demonstrate through the elections and work towards 2026, and maybe we’ll take back. Meanwhile, tens if not hundreds of thousands of people are being rounded up, shoved into concentration camps, and deported. Civil society, as you said, is being ripped up.

Trump is sending troops into city after city. Sections of Chicago are a war zone. In the face of all this, the idea I think of waiting until 2026 and hoping that Trump and the fascists who are in power now will abide by the elections even if they lose them seems pretty far-fetched to me. In response to that, what I was passing out outside, some of you saw me, is the call from Refuse Fascism to take that powerful grassroots movement that you spoke to, and the tens of millions of decent people in this country who hate what they see going on, and focus it on bringing people to D.C. and demanding that this regime be removed. That is what they did in South Korea, if you want to talk about one example of going up against guns and tremendous courage. So I think we need to speak to that. Yes, the grassroots movement is all around the country, but why not bring it to D.C. to demand that this regime — which has been illegitimate from day one, breaking every constitutional rule you can imagine — should not be removed from power now. And if you brought that to D.C., I guarantee you that there would be splits in the powers that be that could very likely end this for us, end this horror. So, I’d like you to speak to that if you could. Thank you.

Shattuck: Well, that’s very good. You sound like a veteran of the demonstrations that I was also a veteran of, and against the war in Vietnam, etcetera. I was involved in organizing one of the largest demonstrations, along with many other people by the way, in October and November 1969 against the war and it was the strategy to bring people to D.C. You’re right, it’s an interesting proposition, but I disagree with you about whether that would be as successful as you’re suggesting it might be. The countries that I’m referring to in my remarks — South Korea, Bangladesh, etcetera — are relatively small and certainly not as well organized as we are in a sense. I think the biggest danger of having a sort of D.C. strategy of protest is that it’s likely to be turned into a police confrontation which would then give the authoritarians the Insurrection Act and all the other things they’re trying to do, dispersing this around the country, which is what I think Indivisible and these other groups strategy is, is the right thing to do because there are so many places now which are rising up, and for their own size they’re actually producing very large numbers in terms of the population of the cities in question. This is a tactical answer to your question.

I don’t disagree with you about the terrors that are being conducted in terms of people being rounded up. We could spend a good deal of time talking about what ICE is up to, and I think it’s horrific. It’s also very unpopular, by the way, and as I said in my remarks, the more we shine a spotlight on ICE, the less popular these roundups are. People would like to see some high degree of border control and they’d certainly also like to see, or [are] willing to see, the deportation of people who have engaged in violent criminal conduct and have been convicted for that.

A review of ICE activities in Massachusetts came out just this morning. Only 1 percent of the people rounded up by ICE had violent criminal records. One percent. Sixty-eight percent had none, no criminal records. This is not popular. And by shining a spotlight on this we are gaining more and more momentum in the public. So that’s my answer.

Audience question: Thank you very much. My question is really on your thoughts. When I look at dictatorships, authoritarian regimes, some have been in existence for decades. You look at North Korea, Russia, etcetera, all over the world. What I understand — you can correct me if I’m wrong — is they use military power to maintain their power. And it’s really hard to resist that because I see there’s no resistance in Russia that’s been successful for a very long time. We can go through several countries where no resistance has been successful because the dictatorships are so strong. So, I wonder what your thoughts are if we’re faced with a regime that’s basically going to ignore laws and constitutions and rule by military force. What are your thoughts on how resistance can overcome a power that relies so predominantly on physical military force?

Shattuck: Well, I’ll give you a short answer. Certainly we are not at the stage of authoritarianism whereby it is entirely military force that is holding it together. Not yet. I’m not saying it couldn’t happen. I think Václav Havel and the other great dissidents and leaders, [Alexander] Sokurov and others of the resistance against the Soviet regime and all of the satellite countries organized, they had to do everything secretly. There was a lot of jeopardy that they were in. Fear was rampant in the population. People were not willing to participate in the resistance because they were fearful of what would happen to them. So it becomes that much more difficult.

I keep referring to public opinion, and I do fall back on it probably more than I should in some ways, but I think the public has got to really understand that the issues of deployment of military, particularly National Guard troops from states other than the ones in which they’re being deployed, is probably the single most dangerous authoritarian action that’s going on today. And we need to take as much action as we can to resist that. There’s litigation that’s being conducted. Some litigation has been successful in D.C., and pushing back. The spotlight needs to be shown on this. And frankly, I think the seven members of Congress, I guess former military members of Congress, who have just done the video urging people in military positions not to follow illegal orders is exactly the kind of thing that we need more of. I was glad to see these members stand up, and I think they need to be supported, and I think they are getting a lot of attention. There’s no easy answer to what you do if there’s a full scale military occupation and nothing can move other than by virtue of being allowed to cross the military, which you can’t do.

Audience question: I have a three-part question, but each part is really short. First, why do you think the majority of the Supreme Court has been so differential and compliant? Second, is there a tipping point that might change that? And third, what might that tipping point be?

Shattuck: Good questions. Let’s go to the third part of your question first because it answers all three of them. The Supreme Court has yet to be directly defied. It also hasn’t directly ruled against Trump, as I said. So in a sense, it’s untested. I think the tipping point I would hope is if Trump refuses to follow an order of the Supreme Court. That goes to the basic exercise of his authority. The same way, for example in the Nixon administration, when President Nixon was ordered by a vote of 8 to nothing of the Supreme Court to turn over all of his tapes. Had he defied that order, that would have been a tipping point. Obviously he didn’t defy the order and it was 8 to nothing against him and then they proceeded to impeachment.

Anyway, why is the court where it is? Well, it’s a long story. A lot of it has to do with effective political court packing which has occurred. In other words, look at the way in which Amy Coney Barrett got onto the court at the very last minute, sort of sneaking through because she was being promoted not only by the administration, the last administration before Biden, but also by the Senate Republicans. There’s a whole lot of politics around that. There’s also the doctrine of originalism, which is another very dangerous doctrine that’s being brooded about in the Supreme Court, which is that basically you have to follow exactly what it was that the Constitution meant at the time that it was adopted, and no way in which it can be effectively looked at in the context of the contemporary society. That’s another reason why the court is backed up. But the most important question is what will they do if they’re defied. And my dear friends who are much more active in litigation, like Nancy Gertner, could probably answer that question better than I can. I’ll ask her later.

Audience question: I’m a student named Oliver Zinn. But my being a left-wing history major is a coincidence. Unfortunately, no relation to Howard Zinn, although I have read his book and it’s a great influence on me. My question is, earlier you spoke about the importance of Democrats getting around an important leader, a key leader, to really challenge Trump, and you used examples [of] countries [where this was] successful. But I think when I hear that, well, didn’t we do that under Hillary Clinton? And didn’t we do that again under Joe Biden? Which worked out to an extent, but ultimately his administration, I think, was a failure because of the reverses that we’re seeing of Trump, and then Kamala Harris again. I also think that Kamala Harris, whom I think a lot of us settled for, was actually very right on immigration. In fact, she tried to act as if she was harder on it than Trump. That was the look she was going for. So, I would suggest that maybe what we need is truly not just any leader to rally behind, but someone who’s really transformational, like a 21st century FDR. Someone who can really fight for effective change in this country, a transformation of it that goes beyond just something better than what the Republicans currently are.

Shattuck: I completely agree, and that was really one of my main points toward the end of my talk. Thank you for making that point. I think we need real reform, and we need to respond to the demands that are being made by people with genuine grievances. Everybody has a genuine grievance, but certainly the populist framework within which Trump emerged was a framework of grievance, and grievance at the way in which the system was working. Now, we also need to do this through the democratic process, and I think that’s underway. There are a number of candidates who might fit that bill. But, I would say right now I don’t think we’ve seen the likely presidential candidate yet.

Audience question: Hi, professor. I just have a brief question and also a question about Zohran Mamdani’s meeting with Donald Trump. Zohran met Trump recently, before Thanksgiving, and I think it was really interesting and the video clips of that meeting went viral on the internet. They just denounced each other like before the meeting. Zohran called Trump a fascist and Trump called Zohran a communist, and also declared that he’s more good-looking than both Zohran and Zohran’s wife. The drama before the meeting was ridiculous. But during the meeting and also after the meeting, it seems like they had really worked out something and they had an interesting solution. Trump was kind of chilled with Zohran and also didn’t mind Zohran calling him a fascist during the interview, which I think was ridiculous. He also tapped Zohran. I don’t understand why. Also, can you tell us what’s Trump’s strategy, what did he try to do, and also what’s Zohran trying to do?

Shattuck: Well, I can tell you what Zohran was trying to do better than I could tell you what Trump was trying to do. Zohran Mamdani clearly needs some support from the White House. He’s the mayor of New York and he’s got to do everything he can to try to sweet talk Trump. Trump, on the other hand, I think was so at odds with everything that he’d been saying that I have no real explanation for it other than it was great theater, and thank you for very effectively summarizing how great it was.

Audience question: Thank you so much for a wonderful talk. I’m the head of legal for a tech company and I don’t know if you’ve heard of G[eneral] C[ounsels] United, but there’s a whole group of general counsels who believe in upholding the rule of law and who are effectively punishing the law firms that capitulate it. But that’s very small, right? Because we’re really going after the power of the purse for lawyers. But it’s kind of offensive that lawyers aren’t upholding the rule of law at big law firms. So, I guess my question is: Historically, where have you seen this . . . we’re not the oligarchs, we’re not the billionaires, but we control the purse to the lawyers that are really the ones who can do huge pro bono work and everything else. Is there any historical precedent that you can think of for what we’re doing by trying to punish those in power who have capitulated on a business level?

Shattuck: Well, I need to know a little more. When you say punish, I’m not sure I understand.

Audience question: We’re not going to hire them.

Shattuck: Ah, I see. Okay. Yeah. Is there a precedent for that? I can’t say that I can think of one off the top of my head. On the other hand, I think it’s an effective use of what is effectively a kind of boycott approach, and it is disruptive and it’s sending a message that appeasement is not only ineffective, but it can cause you trouble. I think the law firms as you know that have resisted or have refused to give the payments that Trump was insisting upon have actually been doing quite well in terms of their own reputations. The ones that caved in, as you say, have suffered as a result. So, there’s clearly a market message in that, and it’s a good message I believe. But I can’t think of a precedent for that.

Glick: I really hope we’ve been part of a historical movement.

Shattuck: Well, I think Indivisible is very pleased with it.

Glick: All right, five more minutes. Why don’t we try to take two more over here at the same time, both concisely, and John will do his best to answer them both simultaneously, or avoid the parts he doesn’t want. Then we’ll do the same over here, and then we will adjourn.

Audience question: I think my big question is given the current political climate as a young person who’s essentially had my formative years under Trump, being stuck in between really different sources of extremism and loss of faith in democracy in itself, how can I restore my faith in democracy in a way? How can I convince people who don’t believe it that democracy is worth saving?

Shattuck: Well, that’s a very good question. I think you can actually enter into a dialogue with them. What exactly is it? I mean, it’s not the theory of democracy, but it’s many of the institutions that are broken. And in that sense, as I said in my talk, we need to listen and process what these critiques are. Democracy is not simply defending the Congress because it’s been captured by Trump and therefore it needs to be recaptured, or defending any other institution that’s otherwise broken in various fundamental ways, which is causing people to resist democracy and turn it down.

How can you restore your faith? I think you can restore your faith by trying to understand what fundamental changes are needed to, after all, bring back something that is so fundamental. Democracy, at least in theory, is about taking control of your own life and having some involvement in decisions that are being made about you. That is what democracy is. In the old town meeting days, that may have been possible. How can we rebuild it? I take that as your own task. That doesn’t mean you’re going to rebuild it, but you’re going to try to figure out what reforms you think are necessary.

Audience question: Thank you. We often speak about defeating Trump and authoritarianism by existing democratic institutions and practices. But the question that I have is, is it really possible? The Supreme Court is governed by a conservative supermajority which just now has cleared a way for Texas lawmakers to use the gerrymandered maps in the next midterms. Republican’s gerrymandered maps deny voter protection and voter rights, and it becomes increasingly harder and harder to believe that it is possible to defeat the Republican Party by the ballot. Even if Trump or Vance or any other Republican contender is gone by 2029, the Republican Party and all these institutions will remain. Fox News will remain. The media empire that fuels this hatred will remain. So, is it really possible by democratic, peaceful means to defeat Republicans?

Shattuck: Gerrymandering is a tricky business, and I’m now getting into the technical side of it because I agree with you that it’s a power grab. No question about it. That’s certainly what the Republicans are trying to do. However, gerrymandered districts become more difficult to defend than by Republicans. What’s just happened in Tennessee, I believe this was a gerrymandered district which was overwhelmingly pro-Trump. The Democratic candidate now did much better, partly as a result of everything that’s going on that we’ve been talking about, but I believe also partly as a result of the gerrymandering, which meant that there were more Democrats in that district who had been spread out to accommodate the gerrymandering. So this is not a defense of gerrymandering, but it’s an answer to your question. It’s not inevitable by any means that even with a total and successful gerrymander, which I don’t think will occur. I think there is plenty of resistance going on. Some states are resisting doing it. You probably saw Indiana, for example, [and] I believe Kansas. Then also Democrats are doing it in response. I believe it’s a stupid and dangerous war of tactics, but I don’t think it’s necessarily going to lead to long-term success for the Republicans. Quite the opposite. I think it may actually be their undoing.

Audience question: It was in the media this week that Walmart has had a plan to essentially challenge the tariff regime in the administration. And if I had to guess, there’s probably not a great amount of sympathy for Walmart in this room, but it seems to me somewhat remarkable and somewhat perhaps even hopeful that an organization like them can take on the regime in this way. I was wondering if you had any thoughts about that.

Shattuck: Just a very quick answer. I think it’s an example of the complexity of these pillars that I was talking about in my remarks. The pillars are not holding up the regime. Some of them are actually, even though they seem to be friendly to the regime — and this is a pillar where Walmart is a major part of the business community — is now doing something that is contrary to the interests of the regime. So I commend Walmart in this respect. There are other aspects of it that are problematic, but this is exactly what we need to develop a more effective resistance.

Audience question: You spoke to the need to not create encircled firing squads where we get confused on ideology, like purity politics. At the same time, the Democratic Party is wildly unpopular. Do you think that there needs to be a transformation of the Democratic Party that involves removing its current leadership, that doesn’t speak to the many issues that really are driving this rise in populism and the rise in authoritarianism?

Shattuck: I think there needs to be a total revision and rebirth of the Democratic Party, and it is actually developing at the local level. I think the Democratic Party, depending on where you are, is going to reflect the politics and the opportunities of the candidates who are being put forward. Mamdani is not the same as the new governor elect of Virginia or New Jersey. So yes, I think to the extent that the Democratic Party tries to put a straightjacket on itself across the country — which is what it had done in the past, and certainly was doing in the latest election in 2024 — I think to a large extent it’s very ineffective and very unpopular. However, to the extent that the Democratic Party can emerge from the grassroots just as the Indivisible grassroots organization is emerging from all these localities, then I think it can succeed in the old-fashioned [way of] “let a thousand flowers bloom.” That’s the way opposition can be developing. It needs to be a big tent with no circular firing squads. A terrible metaphor, but I’ll leave it at that.

Glick: That’s a great place to end. Thank you, Ambassador.