What's happening in Minneapolis is more than just activism or protest – it's dissidence. When ICE's opponents took to the streets, they defied easy categorization. Is it resistance? Political opposition? None of these terms quite capture what we're seeing: people putting their own bodies on the line to care for immigrants and impede the operations of a paramilitary force in their city. As my colleagues have coined, maybe this is "neighborism" or a movement for "basic decency." I like how an elderly couple named Dan and Jane explained their motive for joining the effort: "humanist."
Dissidence is not revolution; it's not even political opposition. It's something much more elemental. Emerges in environments where power, usually government power, tramples on the basic conditions of life as people know and value them. We recognize what this means in Minneapolis: People don't like to see their neighbors terrified and rounded up. They don't like masked men with guns acting with impunity. They don't like their children being too afraid to go to school.
Unlike the "pussy hat" protests that immediately followed Trump's first inauguration, the reaction of regular people in Minneapolis is not fundamentally about an ideological or policy disagreement with the administration. The movement that has arisen on the city's frigid streets is about defending what any reasonable American would call "normal" – the expectation of a life without the threat of violence and coercion.
This is when the dissident has always stepped in. Since Trump's first term, historians have been furnishing us with analogies from the past to help explain our unprecedented political reality – many more people now feel comfortable uttering words such as authoritarianism, even fascism. But when it comes to the mindset and actions necessary to stand up to these forces, the past also provides precedents – and role models – that we shouldn't ignore.
For as long as tyranny has existed, there have been people who resist the pressures of conformity or even the natural instinct toward self-preservation in order to say "no." The dissidence of Minneapolis reminds me of the Argentinian mothers who found themselves in an impossible situation during the military junta of the late 1970s. Their children, deemed "subversives" for their work with the poor or their leftist politics, were abducted in the middle of the night, disappeared without explanation.
The most obvious choice for each of these mothers was to keep quiet, to avoid drawing attention to her family. But some refused to do so. They started searching and asking questions, and eventually they joined together to stand week after week, year after year, outside the presidential palace with signs that read Where are they?
Today's dissidence also reminds me of the Underground Railroad. Think of what this network of liberation demanded: all of those innkeepers, church deacons, farmers, and housewives risking violence and potential arrest in a country that was, as Frederick Douglass put it, "given up to be a hunting-ground for slaveholders." In an environment of terror – the Fugitive Slave Acts made harboring a runaway a federal crime – these individuals conducted their own moral calculus: Slavery was an abnormality, one worth obstructing in any way, at any cost.
This is not a history of people practicing politics or fighting for regime change. It's, in fact, humanist. These people are not looking to replace one governing order or ideology with another. They're fighting an incursion, reacting to a violation of humanity, and deciding to do something about it.
Another dissident comes to mind – a familiar if anonymous one. Most people assume that the man in that famous photo from 1989 who stood in front of a line of tanks near Tiananmen Square was trying to block them from crushing the democracy protests. And that may have been his intent. (No one ever learned his identity or his fate.) But I see something else in that lone figure carrying two shopping bags: a man who is perhaps heading home to prepare dinner, who has a recipe in mind, who has been planning what music to listen to on his cassette player that night and remembering the details of a conversation with his wife, when four tanks suddenly appear in his path.
They're blocking his path, not the other way around. The dissident insists on continuing his journey home. He refuses to move out of the way.
The dissident who probably thought most about what it means to be a dissident was Václav Havel, the Czech playwright who, in 1989, became the first democratically elected president of his country. Havel understood dissidence, at its inception, as not being political at all; he considered it, rather, "pre-political." It could emerge from wanting to play strange music, wear one's hair long, speak one's mind, defend one's economic interests, or protect vulnerable neighbors.
When you are not allowed to assert these core aspects of who you are – to be a fully autonomous human – you face a choice: Either abandon those parts of yourself, or refuse to and become a dissident. One of Havel's greatest achievements was Charter 77, a petition – and then a movement – that became a sustained opposition to the Communist regime.
But he was always quick to point out that what launched the wh