March 16 Blog: How Democracies Survive and Let’s Mess with Texas!

Dear Friends: 

The pace of authoritarian efforts to destroy our democracy is picking up, and so is the pace of the Resistance, particularly in Virginia.

Virginia has the potential to pick up 4 Democratic House seats with the April 21 referendum on redistricting. Virginia is uniquely positioned to fight back against the MAGA effort to gain an advantage in Congress through off-cycle redistricting. We must get every vote we can to pass the amendment. The Regime began this battle with unfair redistricting in Texas and is playing dirty already in Virginia, sending out deceptive flyers mailed by a non-existent PAC that are meant to look like they come from the Democratic party telling voters to vote no on the referendum. The money is pouring in to try to prevent our win, but people power is stronger than money in getting people to vote as recent elections have shown across the country. We have to all use our people power to tell every Virginian we can to vote “YES.”

You can help by talking to any Virginian you know and tell them about the election and to vote “YES.” Early voting in Arlington has started weekdays at Courthouse. (I’ve already voted and so has my mother.) You can join folks knocking on doors: “Virginians for Fair Elections: Arlington Canvassing!” Sign up here: https://www.mobilize.us/virginiansforfairelections/event/910814/

Join us on the Fairlington bridge M-W-F from 5:00-6:30 pm (new hours after the time change). One banner says: “MESS WITH TEXAS, VIRGINIA VOTE YES,” along with our other messages, including those to promote No Kings 3 on March 28.

The third NO KINGS on March 28 is on track to be the biggest mass demonstration yet. We’ll be on the Fairlington bridge from 10:00 am to Noon. For those of you joining us for the first time, we demonstrate on the Fairlington 395 Overpass, South Arlington. There is parking north of the bridge at the STEM school and old fire station, 3120 S Abingdon St, Arlington, VA, 22206.

A number of us will join the “Hands Across Arlington” event, which WOFA is leading on the 28^th from 1:00 – 3:00 pm up and down Glebe Road for miles. You can sign up for where you want to stand. People will be holding signs and standing up for Democracy, and the event was featured by Indivisible on this week’s national call.

All these activities alone will not save our democracy, but each action is an important building block. As the pace picks up, I recommend listening to this episode of Chris Hayes about pathways to democratic survival. We’ve all been talking and listening and fretting about how democracies fail and die. Hayes talks with Zack Beauchamp about how democracies survive.   It is sobering, but it offers hope in this discussion of how democracies were saved in Brazil, Poland and South Korea. 

One conclusion that rings true is that autocrats fail when they cannot hide what they are doing.  There is a tendency for people to ignore things and go along, which we have been seeing in our nation. Some have said that this means people do not care about democracy. But they do. If the autocrat is obvious and democracy is clearly at risk, people will resist a lot. People actually do care quite a bit about democracy. We saw this when the Regime went too far in Minnesota, making it impossible not to see what the Regime intends for all of us.

The bravery of the people of Minneapolis is analogous to the bravery of the people in Seoul, South Korea, where common people came out and physically blocked those with guns who were trying to prevent the elected representatives from entering the legislature and restoring the elected government.

Happily, at the moment, we do not all have to be like the people of Minneapolis or Seoul, but we need to continue to pick up the pace of resistance by passing the Virginia referendum on April 21, coming out for No Kings 3 on March 28; and getting involved in more activities than each of us has been doing so far. 

May Day is looking like the next national day of resistance and will probably be a national boycott. Everything the Resistance is now doing is helping us all get ready for the November elections, when the Regime will do everything it can to prevent free and fair elections. At this time in 2025, the precursor to No Kings had not even happened and people were asking us what we were doing on that bridge. And, there were articles about how Trump wouldn’t be so bad. 

I discussed this evolution and more with Dana, the founder and organizer of the national Visibility Brigades, on the “Rise and Resist” podcast. In January 2025, Dana and his team were on one bridge in Paramus, New Jersey. There are now almost 400 visibility brigades across the country and more keep joining. The podcast starts with some national news, but gets to me and Dana pretty quickly. I think you might enjoy hearing how the Brigades started and how they are working around the country. It’s a good window into how grassroots work.  This is a scary time for our nation, but it is also exciting and inspiring. Everything the Resistance is doing feels like such an appropriate way to remember, honor and protect what happened in 1776.

Yours in peaceful resistance,

Libby