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The goal of autocrats isn’t simply to take power — it’s also to dismantle the places people go when power wrongs them. Step 8 is about eroding the scaffolding that protects rights and offers recourse: legal aid groups, public defenders, universities that teach critical thinking, civil-society organizations, watchdog NGOs, and community centers. Strip away those supports and you make abuse feel inevitable and irreversible.
Let’s start with the law.
Independent legal organizations, state attorneys general, and civil rights clinics are often the last line of defense for those targeted by abusive policies. Whether it’s waves of federal firings [ [link removed] ]or dramatic cuts to government funding, illegal immigration detentions or spurious attacks on DEI programming, lawyers serve as the xxxxxxs against unfettered authority. Authoritarians know it, and they prepare. In Hungary, Victor Orbán understood this potential check on his reign, so he consolidated legal dominion as a means to undermine democratic institutions — what came to be known as “rule by law.” Brazilian leader Jair Bolsonaro instructed government attorneys to unravel his election by drafting a legal plan granting him extraconstitutional authority. But well-prepared attorneys can meet them and push back hard. Starting with the first round of federal worker terminations in the spring of 2025, attorneys in the U.S. served as the most vocal opposition, challenging the current regime and forcing the Supreme Court to lay bare its prejudices. From suborning racial profiling [ [link removed] ] to the private theft of public data [ [link removed] ], lawyers from unions to nonprofits to state attorneys general have been responsible for pushing back against a naked attempt to undermine the rule of law. Victory isn’t guaranteed, but the fight matters.
More quietly, public defenders have been on the ground, supporting those swept up by unjust accusations. The range of abuses by this regime boggles the mind, and their arrogance began with suing law firms to force them into silence, or better yet, complicity. Yet, despite the lopsided record thus far, lawyers and their allies have stood firm. They understand that these legal challenges are vital records of the march of authoritarianism — a power grab being met by the necessary refusal to comply. When ordinary people become pawns to those who seek to strip personal liberties and quash constitutional rights, courts serve as a testing ground for what is true. Autocrats despise guardians of the rule of law, and they invariably seek to neutralize their capacity.
Then look at knowledge and accountability.
Yet, undermining the law is only one part of the equation. Universities, think tanks, and research centers create the expertise that exposes wrongdoing and suggests alternatives. When campuses are defunded, curricula censored, scholars fired, or research labs closed, the capacity to hold leaders to account shrinks. Book bans, gag orders, and attacks on tenure are calculated moves to narrow the range of acceptable inquiry and to silence inconvenient facts. Anti-intellectualism, a coveted currency of the authoritarian, becomes more likely to flourish.
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Non-governmental organizations (NGOs) like civil rights entities, community groups, legal clinics, unions, immigrant rights groups, and LGBTQ+ centers do the day-to-day work of protecting people and building collective power. They help victims navigate bureaucracy, organize relief after disasters, and keep pressure on officials to do their jobs, even when they seem hard. When these groups are criminalized, starved of funding, or forced to operate under hostile rules, the social infrastructure that buttresses our communities collapses. People become isolated, afraid, and less able to push back.
This tactic appears again and again.
Authoritarians go after any entity that teaches dissent, they threaten watchdogs, and issue edicts [ [link removed] ] that make organizing a risky endeavor. Philanthropies that fund these essential activities become targets themselves [ [link removed] ]. This regime has issued executive orders calling for IRS audits, and it’s a blatant attempt to make resistance costly and rare. Earlier this year, on our podcast Assembly Required [ [link removed] ], we discussed how our institutions of higher education are pivotal to shaping an informed, innovative, and engaged society, what’s at stake, and what academics and their allies can do to push back. We also talked about how students are weathering this storm.
When support systems are weakened, the consequences are practical and immediate. A family denied emergency assistance has nowhere to turn. A whistleblower with no legal counsel stays silent. A student whose campus was muzzled cannot investigate abuses. The erosion accumulates in human suffering, and it does so quietly: fewer headlines, fewer rallies, but more people left unprotected.
So what can be done?
Our response must blend the structural and the grassroots. Financially support the organizations focused on bringing cases before the courts, not because they will win but because silence is consent. Protect academic freedom — defy book bans and curricular changes, support student protest and educators’ calls for public support. Support civil society groups by showing up and asking how you can help. Ask your local elected officials how they intend to protect the organizations doing good work where you live. Don’t accept non-answers — demand they push for public resolutions and other policies that refuse to participate in politicized purges of organizations doing public interest work.
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Step 8 is critical to their long game: dismantle the civil society supports now, and tomorrow dissent will be too costly or too lonely to sustain. The antidote is the long game of our own: defend our existing institutions, protect the people who staff them, and treat the protest, legal work, academic freedom and mutual aid as forms of national security. When the lawyers, teachers, organizers, and caregivers are protected, democracy has reserves. When they are left exposed, we’re one step closer to a permanent fall.

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