Stacey Abrams’s campaign to fight authoritarianism gains steam: ‘We are a force multiplier’

Stacey Abrams, the former Georgia gubernatorial candidate, will announce on Thursday that the campaign she launched last year to fight authoritarianism in the US has attracted dozens of new partners, representing millions of voters, to form a coalition. Abrams, a Yale-trained lawyer and former minority leader of the Georgia house, was the first Black woman to win a major party nomination for a gubernatorial race in 2018. After her second loss to Brian Kemp in 2022, she receded from the spotlight, taking a teaching position at Howard University in 2023. In the wake of Donald Trump’s re-election, she launched 10 Steps, an initiative to organize and mobilize opposition to the threat to democracy posed by authoritarian policies in the administration and the Republican Party.“We know that there are people who are angry, who are afraid, who are uncertain,” Abrams said. “They recognize that there’s a problem, but now they need to take action, and the challenge has been that while there are lots and lots of people and lots of groups out there, finding them is hard, and understanding how you fit is difficult.“We are serving as both a wayfinder – how you get there – and a force multiplier: how we connect and how we build this larger momentum.”Before activists can consider big, theatrical acts of resistance like a general strike, groundwork has to be built, Abrams said.“A general strike is a tool, but we have to remember that those tools are parts of what has to happen, and I don’t want us to be so fixated on the cinematic moments that we ignore the infrastructure pieces,” Abrams said. “What is so insidious again about this authoritarian rise is that it is latching on to component pieces that we are already so used to. We are not prepared for them to be weakened. We didn’t expect that during the shutdown, they were going to starve children and the elderly and the disabled in order to refuse and avoid giving access to healthcare.”The coalition contains names familiar to activists like Democracy Forward, Indivisible, MoveOn and Run for Something. But Abrams has also brought in a wide tranche of civic groups with lower public profiles, like New Disabled South, Red Wine and Blue, UnidosUS Action Fund and Gen-Z for Change.“Gen Z rejects the idea that we have to sit by and watch as our country descends into authoritarianism,” said Cheyenne Hunt, executive director of Gen-Z for Change. “We will not be bystanders as our democracy is assaulted in broad daylight. We’re proud to join the 10 Steps campaign and so many other partners to give young people the tools to take back the democracy and the America that we were promised.”Abrams launched the 10 Steps campaign last year to raise alarms about the threat of authoritarianism in the US, and to provide an organization framework for resisting authoritarian government.By her measure, there are 10 steps an authoritarian takes to seize power, like attacking the media, normalizing violence and gutting the government. The United States is contending with at least nine of those steps right now.“We are in an authoritarian regime,” she said. “This is defined as competitive authoritarianism. We have been demoted on the democracy index, and our nation no longer abides by the rule of law as a basic premise.”But there are also 10 steps to defeating authoritarianism, she said, and two of those steps are organizing and mobilizing.“The campaign is to bring together these organizations that span all of these issues so that we can form this national infrastructure, not just for resistance, but for reclamation,” Abrams said. “And to make certain that’s rooted in local community, because what they’re doing at the top only sustains itself if we decide there’s no alternative.”