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Life feels really hard right now. Every day brings another crisis, another headline that makes it nearly impossible to know where to turn or what to do. The sheer pace of events—the attacks on institutions, the chaos in our politics, the constant churn of outrage and the real harm to our daily lives—leaves people exhausted and defeated. For some, democracy has never been a success, and the threat of losing it seems meaningless. Soon, we stop believing, stop trusting in systems or each other. We give up. But surrender is exactly what authoritarians want. When we’re too overwhelmed to see how the pieces come together, it becomes easier for them to normalize the unacceptable and push democracy further to the edge.
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This pattern of events was the heart of my conversation this past weekend with Karen Tumulty from The Washington Post [ [link removed] ]. We talked about the whiplash Americans feel—first, it’s mass firings of civil servants, then threats against the press and our schools. Now, it’s military occupation, migrant roundups and devastating acts of political violence. Each outrageous act gets its fifteen minutes, then disappears into the chaos of the news cycle. But none of these events are random; they are pieces of a larger pattern.
As I told Karen:
“This is an existential fight about the nature of democracy in the United States of America, and if we think of it as anything less, we are misreading the moment.”
That’s why I’ve been bringing the 10 Steps to Autocracy and Authoritarianism into every space I can: on television, in print, in podcasts, on Assembly Required [ [link removed] ], and here in Assembly Notes. But for us to defeat their clear playbook, we need to spread the word. The 10 Steps need to start showing up in interviews with organizers, in classrooms facing cuts, in faith spaces sheltering the marginalized, at town halls, on picket lines, and in kitchen-table conversations. Because without a picture we can identify, people see these attacks as disconnected outrages. With the right framework, though, we can each connect the dots and recognize a playbook designed to entrench authoritarian power. And strip us of our own.
In the coming weeks, I’ll be breaking down each of the 10 Steps to Autocracy here—what they look like in practice and why they matter. But I don’t believe in identifying problems without offering solutions and how we can help. That’s why we’re also going to dive into the 10 Steps to Freedom and Power. We’ll lay them out and walk through how we can fight back.
Thanks for reading Assembly Notes by Stacey Abrams. Authoritarianism thrives in silence, so please share this post to help break through the noise.
Being part of the 10 Steps campaign isn’t about another warning to read and file away. It’s a guide to what’s wrong and what they’re doing to our communities. It’s a toolkit to carry with us as we talk to our families about why times are tough, but we’re tougher. The 10 Steps campaign is a call to action on how we challenge our leaders, how we organize in our neighborhoods and how we make sense of the incomprehensible.
Authoritarianism creeps into daily life in terrible bills and cruel decisions. Democracy can only prevail when we prove it can deliver in big and small ways. Their strategy to destroy our way of life is everywhere now. Let’s make sure the fight for freedom and power for us all is everywhere too. All it takes is 10 Steps.

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