Ordinary People, Extraordinary Times

Skye Perryman, president and CEO of Democracy Forward, a nonpartisan national legal organization, writes this civic action guide in response to what she identifies as a rapid democratic backslide in the United States under the second Trump administration. Part memoir, part political analysis, and part practical handbook, the book is organized around seven action steps designed to help ordinary citizens reclaim their power during a period Perryman characterizes as an accelerating slide toward autocracy.

Perryman opens by addressing readers directly, acknowledging widespread feelings of fear, exhaustion, and powerlessness. She argues that no external savior is coming and that the responsibility for preserving democracy rests with ordinary people. Action, she contends, is the antidote to powerlessness.

The book's introduction, titled "Forward," grounds Perryman's argument in a catalyzing event. In March 2025, the Trump administration invoked the Alien Enemies Act, a wartime authority last used during World War II, to deport Venezuelan men without due process, the constitutional guarantee that no person can be deprived of life, liberty, or property without fair legal proceedings. Perryman's legal team, alongside lawyers at the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), secured an emergency court order directing the government to turn the deportation flights around, but the administration defied the order. The public response was a sea change: Ordinary people from all backgrounds began mobilizing. Perryman catalogs broader legal battles her organization undertook, including challenges to frozen federal funds, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) operations in houses of worship, and mass firings of civil servants. She traces the emergence of the "No Kings" rallying cry, which originated from a Democracy Forward legal complaint. No Kings Day rallies became two of the largest single-day peaceful protests in American history, with the October 2025 rally drawing more than 7 million people to 2,700 events.

In Action 1, "Stop Spiraling and Pick Up a Shovel," Perryman argues readers must shift from panic to purposeful action. She shares a formative story about her grandparents, ordinary Texans who survived the Great Depression and World War II on a small East Texas farm, who taught her that panicking accomplishes nothing but working together does. She then traces American democracy's backslide across six "spirals": the erosion of voting rights (from Jim Crow, the system of racial segregation and voter suppression that operated across the American South from the 1870s through the mid-1960s, through the Supreme Court's gutting of the Voting Rights Act); the weakening of checks and balances; rising inequality of opportunity; threats to personal freedom; threats to due process; and global trends toward authoritarianism. She introduces "competitive authoritarianism," in which elected leaders exploit institutional weaknesses to consolidate power. Throughout, she includes to-do lists and tip sheets. She cites the late Congresswoman Barbara Jordan, the first Black woman from a Southern state elected to Congress, who insisted the stakes were too high for government to be a spectator sport, and calls for a mindset shift from spectator to agent of change.

Action 2, "Achieve Information Sobriety," addresses media consumption. Perryman defines "information sobriety" as being intentional about how one consumes news, distinguishes misinformation from disinformation, and traces threats to press freedom, from media ownership consolidation (50 companies controlled 90 percent of U.S. media in 1983, compared to six today) to Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán's allies purchasing media outlets until they controlled more than 80 percent of the market. She offers six steps toward information sobriety, including building a balanced media diet, scheduling news consumption, and supporting independent and local journalism.

Action 3, "Begin at Your Front Door," argues the fight for democracy starts locally. Citing French political thinker Alexis de Tocqueville's insight that the strength of free peoples resides in local communities, Perryman notes that approximately half a million state and locally elected officials shape daily life far more directly than 542 federal elected officials, yet local engagement has declined. Drawing on sociologist Robert Putnam's Bowling Alone, which documents falling social connection, she presents six steps for local action, from getting to know one's community to protecting neighbors from federal overreach to keeping dollars local.

Action 4, "Practice Tailgate Accountability," addresses political polarization. Perryman introduces "tailgate accountability," a metaphor drawn from pre-game football gatherings where people of different backgrounds bond over shared interests. She explains how autocratic movements use divide-and-conquer tactics, citing examples from Nazi scapegoating to Russian President Vladimir Putin's use of disinformation targeting African Americans to inflame U.S. polarization. She counters the narrative of an impossibly divided nation by noting that 90 million eligible voters sat out the 2024 election and that Americans across parties share many policy preferences. Her seven steps include finding spaces for cross-political interaction, exploring common ground, and setting firm boundaries against hate.

Action 5, "Get Serious About Fear, Courage, and Joy," examines how autocrats weaponize fear and how ordinary people can respond. Perryman profiles individuals who paid steep costs for maintaining democratic values, including Geoff Duncan, the former Republican Lieutenant Governor of Georgia who refused to help discard 2020 election ballots and faced death threats, and Erez Reuveni, a career Department of Justice lawyer fired for refusing to lie to a federal court. Drawing on Milton Mayer's They Thought They Were Free, which interviewed ordinary Germans who lived through the Nazi era, she warns that incremental concessions can lead to catastrophic inaction. She presents eight steps to build courage, from clarifying values to weighing the cost of inaction. The chapter then argues that joy is essential to resistance, citing examples from the Sarajevo Philharmonic performing 60 concerts during the city's 1,425-day siege in the 1990s to enslaved people finding defiance through music.

Action 6, "Remember the Past, Fight for the Future," examines the courts and argues for bold reimagination of democracy. Perryman traces the Supreme Court's legitimacy crisis through the Senate's refusal to vote on President Obama's 2016 nominee, Trump's three appointments, the reversal of Roe v. Wade, and the Court's expanded use of its "shadow docket," an emergency docket on which decisions are made without full briefing or public explanation. She balances this critique by noting the Court has not always ruled for the president and that hundreds of lower federal courts have provided strong guardrails. She argues the Court has long failed to protect all people's rights, from Dred Scott v. Sanford (protecting slavery) to Korematsu v. United States (upholding Japanese American incarceration). Rather than restoring systems that never served everyone, she calls for reimagining democracy through living wages, technology regulation, election reform, and enforceable Supreme Court ethics codes. She discusses collective action as the essential tool for systemic change, highlighting strikes, boycotts, and mass demonstrations.

In Action 7, "Keep Going: The Only Way Out Is Through," Perryman recalls her grandmother planting magnolia trees on their Texas farm, trees that took decades to grow from bulbs to blooms, as a metaphor for the long-term nature of democratic work. She acknowledges the depth of despair people feel but identifies hopelessness as a key tool autocratic leaders use to consolidate power. She draws on muckraking photojournalist Jacob A. Riis's stonecutter metaphor: A hundred blows without a crack, then the hundred-and-first splits the rock, not because of that blow alone but because of all that came before. She recapitulates all seven actions and closes by invoking U.S. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt's 1936 declaration that "this generation of Americans has a rendezvous with destiny" (17), urging readers to dismiss cynicism, plant seeds, tend to one another, and persist.