You could elect a golden retriever mayor and that’s how I know we can defeat fascism.

This has been done: Idyllwild, California has had a golden retriever named Max as its honorary mayor since 2012.

The dog-mayor title is honorary, but the offices where the winner signs budgets and certifies elections are filled by the same instrument, a ballot.

There are plenty of gatekeepers between a candidate and that ballot, parties, donors, filing rules, name recognition, but the ballot decides in the end, and the smaller the race, the less power those gatekeepers have, because their tools are money, party machinery, and media attention, and a race for county clerk seldom attracts any of the three.

Your tools work at that size: you can knock every door in your precinct yourself, a few hundred convinced neighbors decide a race that small, and an ad cannot do what your neighbor or your coworker does by talking with you in person.

A propaganda apparatus built on billions of dollars, cable networks, and algorithmic feeds can be defeated by people talking face to face, and there is something uniquely beautiful in the fact that this very human thing still has so much power.

Voters can overrule the gatekeepers even at the top of a state’s ballot: in 1990, Alaska elected a governor from a party that advocated seceding from the United States.

That is the magic of democracy. You can elect a golden retriever, you can elect a secessionist, and you can vote yourselves a millionaires tax, because Massachusetts already did: a 4 percent tax on every dollar of income over a million, passed at the ballot box in 2022, now pays for free school meals for every public school kid in the state, and the revenue, more than a billion and a half dollars a year, has come in above projections.

An Indivisible chapter and the county Democrats can put their stamp on whatever they want once elected.

We need our mayors and our city councils and our state reps. Send them to the state house demanding universal healthcare, and send them to the council chambers ready to build Vienna style public housing.

Coup where you can.

What does that mean?

Take power.

We have to take power, because the oligarchs certainly won’t give us any.

But your town?

About 90,000 local governments operate in this country, and democracy really shines brightest in its smallest increments.

In a race decided by a few hundred votes, you can knock more doors in a weekend than the entire margin of victory.

And the wins are already on the books. Missoula, Montana took its water system away from a private equity firm and won at the Montana Supreme Court, and SeaTac, Washington passed a fifteen dollar minimum wage before any other American city, and the margin was 77 votes.

Seventy-seven votes.

The last full federal count found 513,200 elected offices in America, about 96 percent of them local, and a majority of local races have a single candidate.

A council seat in a small town is three or four hundred votes, door knocking wins about one vote for every fourteen people you talk to, and the arithmetic comes out to a few thousand doors, a few weekends, and a seat.

One piece of advice if you run, or if you knock doors for someone running. Both parties will hand you a walk list with houses already crossed off, because a database decided those people don’t vote.

Knock on every door.

A house no campaign visits votes less, so the next list skips it again, and a good deal of the discouragement in this country was manufactured at exactly those skipped doors. You can end that on your own block.

I love democracy, and it grieves me how many people have been talked out of that love.

We founded a nation on Enlightenment ideals, and the ideals were themselves a rebirth: the printing press put ancient Greek and Roman arguments back into ordinary hands, and out of them grew self-determination, the rights of human beings, the consent of the governed.

How incredible.

Somehow we went from “Give me liberty or give me death” to “Give me a $5 campaign contribution and I’ll write another strongly worded letter.”

Well, “give me a break,” because I am here for liberty and justice, and so are you, and so are millions more Americans.

So what do we actually do? You knock on doors and you evangelize ideas to your neighbors: here is an idea, can I tell you more?

That, repeated and continually growing more sophisticated, growing stronger, until things are better.

We became our own nation in no small part because a fifth of the colonists, by one estimate, read the same forty-six page pamphlet or heard it read aloud, Common Sense, Thomas Paine arguing to ordinary people that they could govern themselves without a king, and those ideas were argued out loud in taverns before they were signed in Philadelphia.

Abolition took eighty-nine years from the Declaration. People were born into the movement, gave their whole lives to it, and died of old age with slavery still legal, and the work they handed down ended slavery anyway.

Do you think the robber barons built organized labor? People talking to their coworkers built it, shop by shop and meeting hall by meeting hall, until the eight hour day existed.

If you cannot get a DSA member or a libertarian onto your city council, you will never get one into the Oval Office, and the climb might take a decade.

Do you believe in your values enough to spend your life advocating for an idea that betters humanity, knowing the win might arrive after your lifetime?

Is freedom not worth it?

Is justice not worth it?

The two parties do not use power the same way. Republicans act, and the litigation follows.

In his first week back, Trump fired seventeen inspectors general in a single Friday night, and the opposition answered with lawsuits, roughly 900 of them so far, and the injunctions arrive after the thing is already done, and the inspectors general are still fired.

Civil suits don’t stop a coup.

One side treats power as a thing you use and then defend; the other treats it as a thing you request. The rulebook is silent for both parties, and only one of them acts on the silence.

If danger moves more rapidly than ambition, then we are doomed to lose.

Run for a local office. The offices are more powerful than we say, and Republicans have been proving it: an elected state education board in Texas put a Bible-infused curriculum into public elementary schools by a vote of eight to seven, and the ban the Supreme Court used to end Roe v. Wade was passed by a state legislature, Mississippi’s, in 2018, four years before the ruling. County clerk, school board, water district, dogcatcher: each one comes with decisions, and decisions are power, chances to make things better for the people in your community and more difficult for the bad guys.

In much of the country the clerk’s decisions include the election itself: whether ballots are paper, how the count is conducted, who certifies the result. In Michigan in 2024, 93.8 percent of clerk and treasurer races went uncontested, and if you are afraid for the next election, that fear has a filing deadline.

Write the best law you can and pass it, and if somebody sues, that means the law affected someone with the money to fight.

The Supreme Court has ruled, three separate times, that the federal government cannot order state or local officials to carry out federal programs, which is why an ICE detainer is, legally, a request. There are about 135,000 federal officers with arrest authority and about 700,000 state and local police, which means federal enforcement happens where local government agrees to help. Cities and counties adopt those policies by council and commission vote, and once you are in office, you cast one of those votes.

If a court eventually tells you to stop, that is the day you decide how much you feel like listening. I will have more to say soon about what I call the make me doctrine.

None of this comes from the top, and we are not going to fix it with a different president. It comes up from below: activists become council members, council members become mayors, and mayors and state reps become governors.

That is what the change looks like, the coup climbing upward, seat by seat, until the tyrants are fighting tens of millions of the public and tens of thousands of city council members and state reps and school board members at once. Win that layer and better senators and better House members follow, because the candidates come from somewhere, and now they come from us.

Even if they tamper with the elections above us, the offices below are still decided in 90,000 separate places, one filing deadline at a time. A president cannot grant you any of this and cannot take it away, because it was never theirs.

About 89 million eligible Americans did not vote in 2024, and calling that apathy is a lie. Election day is a Tuesday and not a holiday, the polls close while people are still on shift, thirteen states closed 1,688 polling places in the six years after the Supreme Court gutted the Voting Rights Act, and 4 million Americans are barred from voting outright over a felony conviction, under laws many of which date to the years after Reconstruction. That abstention was manufactured, and the fault belongs to the people who built the barriers, not to the people the barriers stopped. That is part of our battle; to overcome a rigged game because the cost of a loss is existential.

Here is a small thing I do when I do not feel like doing the work, since I do have the vote and the hours. I tell myself that if I do not do it, then my demographic does not do it. If I stay home, people like me stayed home, and if I knock a door, people like me knocked a door.

It gets me out the door.

The formula that guides my own activism is what has become the Existentialist Republic’s system titled Educate, Activate, Recruit, Repeat.

So take the seat, any seat, and run it differently than anyone has: do what is right, do what is moral, do what the people demand, and let MAGA whine about it somewhere else.

That is the coup. You take power wherever you can get it, and you wield it for the people.

Even when that power is your voice, your story, and your heart. That is enough.

Coup where you can and the coup starts in you.

If you want a full length book covering the methods you read in our daily articles, check out Toppling Tyrants: A Field Guide to Dismantling American Fascism — physical copy / free download

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THE CALL TO ACTION

Category: ICE accountability.

Difficulty Rating: 1/10. One email, five minutes, and the message is already written below.

Who you are contacting: your governor and your state attorney general. Find your attorney general at naag.org/find-my-ag and your governor at nga.org/governors.

What you are asking for: demand they say it, publicly: if ICE agents violate our rights, we will charge them criminally, whether it’s First Amendment or murder. There is no law of the land that gives the federal government carte blanche for criminality.

Four ways to deliver it. Pick one.

Email. Paste the message into each office’s contact form with your name and address.
Call. Read it to the staffer who answers.
Fax. FaxZero sends five free faxes a day from your browser.
Print it and mail it.

The important part: if they send you a form letter, or a reply bragging about civil suits, you respond. Say “weak non-answer, thanks for nothing” in your own words. You don’t owe them a professional response. They do owe you though, they should be doing the job they were elected to perform.

THE MESSAGE

Governor [name] and Attorney General [name],

My name is [name], I am a [profession] and your constituent in [city].

Say it publicly: if ICE agents violate our rights, we will charge them criminally, whether it’s assault, kidnapping, or even murder. There is no law of the land that gives the federal government carte blanche for criminality. Resign if you aren’t up for the task of enforcing the rule of law.

[Why this matters to you, in one sentence.]

[Your name], [your address]

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Civil Suits Don't Stop a Coup. So What Does?

THE CALL TO ACTION

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