The era of “holding our lane” is over: we must now choose between building a single-issue movement or preserving the democracy necessary for any movement to survive.
In America and around the world, fascism is on the rise. From Modi to Orbán to Trump, strongmen are rising to power by promising to restore order to an increasingly chaotic world and bring back the “good times.” If people like Trump successfully cement their grip on power for the next decade, it will make everything our movements are fighting for exponentially more difficult. There are few cases where this is more clear than climate change. Trump and his cronies want to burn the planet so they can eke out the last bit of profit from oil and gas. When hundreds of millions of people are forced to leave their homes because of droughts and storms, they want to build bigger walls.
Everyone reading this knows that. It’s time to act like it. If we stay in our issue lanes and organizational boxes, we’re cooked. In these times, every movement organization needs to ask itself: how are we undermining authoritarianism and building a movement that can engage in mass non-cooperation to grind Trump’s regime to a halt? This doesn’t mean we suddenly stop talking about our issues or running our campaigns –– it can’t mean that. But, it does mean we can’t judge our work on the same old single issue metrics of success. If we’re not all making a dent in stopping authoritarianism, we’re not succeeding.
To be clear –– I’ve spent most of my 20s working on a single issue movement, and I stand by that choice. But the times have changed.
When I was 19, I dropped out of college to run Sunrise’s trainings program. We trained tens of thousands of young people in our plan to win. Often, people would ask, “why do we focus so narrowly on climate change?” I remember making the case countless times: we need to hold our lane and bring in the millions of people who are terrified about the climate crisis, and we will work in alignment with other movements that are doing the same thing. We would talk about the vision for a Green New Deal, which wasn’t just about stopping the climate crisis, but tackling racial injustice and making our country work for everyday people.
But there was a darker undertone. Socialism or barbarism isn’t just a slogan: the climate crisis demands an equitable and just response, otherwise it will create the disorder and scarcity that fascism thrives on. That was the idea behind the Green New Deal: if we tackle the climate crisis in a way that makes everyday peoples’ lives better, it takes the wind out of the sails of fascism. It would make it harder for the fascists to use the many crises to come — ecological, migratory, economic — to scare people into accepting their regime.
A Green New Deal was meant to bolt the door so that authoritarians could not come barging in. That strategy had a lot of promise in 2019.
But in 2025, the door has been kicked down. With Trump’s onslaught on our democracy and communities in full swing, that strategy simply isn’t enough. It feels naive to be building towards big climate legislation in 2029 when we don’t even know if we will have free and fair elections in 2026. Even though climate change has never been more urgent, it’s hard to argue we can organize for climate action (or any issue) without pushing back against authoritarianism now, and hard.
So, what does this look like?
#1 – Non-cooperation.
Trump’s authoritarian assault must be slowed down directly. From the judiciary to everyday people, we all have a role to play in frustrating these authoritarian actions.
#2 – Move the public against fascism
Fascism succeeds because it identifies real problems that people care about, and it promises easy solutions. We must show the people who saw real populist appeal to Trump’s empty promises that he is nothing more than a grifter using them for his own wealth and power, and that he has no intent to solve their problems (and actually that he is responsible for those problems).
#3 Grow the movement
Absorb and engage people meaningfully who oppose Trump and his billionaire agenda, but aren’t actively organizing, whether because they don’t know what to do or don’t believe their actions can make a difference.
#4 – Pitch an alternative
People are dealing with real problems in their lives. The political and economic establishment refuse to acknowledge this, and that lack of acknowledgement is exactly why Trump has succeeded. It’s not just climate change. Housing prices are spiraling out of control. Generative AI threatens to radically reshape the job market and end so many people’s careers. Political violence has so many people on edge.
We need a political movement that understands these problems and has real solutions to them. In each of our single issues, we need to become those movements, or soon we won’t have the right to organize politically anymore. That’s our mission in the coming months and years. See you in the streets.