Ordinary People, Extraordinary Times: Skye Perryman's Guide to Reclaiming Power in Trump's America

“The number one tool that autocratic actors have is not voter suppression or gerrymandering. It’s making you feel alone and isolated.” — Skye Perryman

 

Three years ago, the president and CEO of Democracy Forward Skye Perryman came on the show to wonder what our kids will one day ask us about what we did to confront authoritarianism in America. Now she returns with an answer in the form of her New York Times bestselling Ordinary People, Extraordinary Times about how Americans can reclaim their power, fight for freedom, and reimagine democracy.

 

Her diagnosis is pretty dark. Reminding us that America joined the list of backsliding democracies in 2021, Perryman warns that this descent into authoritarianism is rapidly accelerating. But her central argument inverts the gloom. Hopelessness is a feature, she reminds us, not a bug of our extraordinary times. So, rather than voter suppression or gerrymandering, the number one tool that autocratic actors have is making us feel alone and isolated.

 

Thus her call to agency. She prescribes seven actions including what she calls “information sobriety.” We don’t all have to do everything, she says, but everyone needs to do something. She ends where we began three years ago — with the kids. Skye Perryman dedicates the new book to her son as a way, I suspect, of telling him what she has been doing to confront authoritarianism in America. Ordinary people in extraordinary times, indeed.

 

Five Takeaways

 

•       A Generational Threat. Three years of Democracy Forward’s work, summarized from the courtroom: challenging executive overreach by the Trump-Vance administration, fighting book bans, and managing the fallout of Dobbs. America, Perryman notes, has never been immune to anti-democratic movements — they’ve been here since the founding — but this moment is “unprecedented in many ways”: the question is no longer just whether the country can move toward a democracy that works for everyone, but whether it can hold hard-earned gains like equal rights and voting rights at all. The receipts: the United States was added to the global list of backsliding democracies in 2021 — she and Andrew discussed it then — has stayed on it every year since, and the slide is accelerating, driven in part by a Supreme Court that more often reverses rights than protects them: the fruit, she argues, of a multi-decade far-right project against the civil rights movement’s gains. Even thirteen presidential libraries — Republican ones included — have sounded the alarm.

•       Neither Adjunct Nor Partisan. Andrew’s needle — blurbs from Hillary Clinton, JB Pritzker, the late Gloria Steinem, and Stacey Abrams: is Democracy Forward an adjunct of the Democratic Party? — drew her counter-blurb: Michael Steele, former chair of the Republican National Committee, endorsed the book too. The standard, she insists, is conduct, not letters after names: “we will oppose anyone” who strips constitutional rights, threatens journalists, or sends masked ICE agents into communities — and the administration’s agenda harms Republican voters in red towns like her native Waco as surely as anyone. As for the that’s-just-democracy argument — Trump won, deal with it — she calls it “quite an un-American argument” twice over: nonvoters outnumbered the supporters of either candidate in 2024, and America is not a plebiscite but a democratic republic with a constitution. It doesn’t matter how large the majority: “he can’t jail journalists for what they report. He can’t kill Americans in th