I'm Charlie Sykes.

Welcome to The To the Contrary Podcast.

There is a new book that argues that dissidents are not extraordinary superheroes, but ordinary people who align their actions with their inner moral truth because they ask themselves, can I live with myself?

A question that quite frankly a lot more people should be asking these days, don't you think?

And joining me on today's podcast is the author of that book, Gahl Beckerman, a staff writer at the Atlantic Magazine,

and the author of the new book, How to Be a Dissident, which again, I mean, it hits home because not only are

many of us dissidents, but it does occur to me that we may have to be dissidents for a lot

longer. I mean, there's a lot of people who are saying, you know, we're going to get through

this, the fever is going to break. And then there are

those of us who have these moments where we think, this could last a very long time. And so the

question, how to be a dissident, takes on more than just momentary relevance. So tell me why you

wrote this book right now, what moment you think you are meeting?

Well, you know, the real immediate impetus for the book was a feeling that I had and that I know a lot of people shared with me in the first months of Trump's current term.

When suddenly we saw these very powerful, you know, institutions,

people, you know, in American life, you know, prestigious law firms, academia, media executives.

I mean, we all sort of remember this cascade of stories of people who were bending to exercises of executive power that, you know, I had never seen,

uh, in my lifetime quite exercise like that. Uh, and, and I had a sort of a reckoning moment where I

thought, oh, wow, we don't really know in America how to deal with this. We, you know,

in spite of the fact that we have this self-conception of being

these rugged individualists who aren't going to do what we're told to do, we're going to do what we want

to do, that really wasn't what was happening among the most powerful people in the country.

And so I did what I always do in these instances, which is sort of searched outside of my immediate context.

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