Bottom-up, grassroots, local activism. That, said Leah Greenberg, a co-founder of the Indivisible movement, is needed to halt “this immediate crisis of a would-be authoritarian trying to consolidate power, this political movement that is oriented around trying to secure minority rule in America.”
Ms. Greenberg was one of three panelists at the first Hamptons Institute program of 2026, “No Kings and More — Carrying Forward the Spirit of the Revolution,” on Monday at Guild Hall in East Hampton. With her were Ezra Levin, her Indivisible co-founder and husband, and Carlos Eduardo Espina, a digital organizer and advocate for immigrant rights.
The discussion, moderated by Margaret Hoover, a political commentator, host of the “Firing Line” public affairs television show, and former White House staffer, focused on how collective action can successfully oppose authoritarianism, with the midterm elections approaching amid growing indications that the Trump administration will take extreme measures to maintain a Republican majority in Congress.
Former congressional staffers who co-founded Indivisible, which provides training, research, and coordination for effective civic participation, Mr. Levin and Ms. Greenberg have seen their organization grow to some 3,300 local affiliates in “just about every congressional district in the country,” Mr. Levin said. Indivisible is a primary organizer of the No Kings protests, the latest of which drew more than eight million people to more than 3,000 events, according to Mr. Levin.
Last year, Mr. Espina, who is 27, had 942 million unique views on his media channels, Ms. Hoover said. As a Spanish-speaking high schooler in Texas, he began tutoring and mentoring children who had fled countries including El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras, “and realizing that there was really a lot of injustice going on,” he said. When the Covid-19 pandemic forced his last months of college to be completed remotely, “I got the idea to take my social work and activism online.”
Those organizing in their communities are often white women over 40 “from a certain socioeconomic demographic,” Ms. Hoover noted, telling Mr. Levin and Ms. Greenberg that “you guys need Carlos’s people.”
“We overestimate how much the average person pays attention to politics every single day,” Mr. Espina said, but apathy isn’t the reason: Many of his followers perform manual labor or work very long shifts. “If I was in their position, I probably wouldn’t want to go home and listen to Donald Trump all night,” he said. “I’d probably want to watch soccer and pay attention to other things.”
To meet people where they are, he ties politics to culture. As an example, “I made a video about how the U.S. became the first country to host the World Cup and then bomb another country that was also playing in the World Cup. . . . A lot of the work, before I can tell someone to go protest, is educating them about what is actually at stake,” which he called a constant work in progress.
Ms. Hoover asked the panelists what separates lasting democratic participation from momentary political anger.
Simply protesting is not enough, Mr. Levin said. “The goal is change.” The unit of activism is the group, not the individual, he said. Indivisible has lasted 10 years “because people have formed communities all over the country that sustain themselves.” They are the true leaders of the movement, he said, “and it means that you cannot just show up on a Saturday protest,” but rather “develop an entire campaign plan to replace your elected officials, or start a mutual aid hub, or connect with immigrant rights groups on the ground, and build something meaningful and lasting.”
“So much of what separates movements,” Ms. Greenberg said, “is whether they successfully imbue in people the leadership and the agency to feel within their own power to make change. . . . People are going to make decisions based on their specific circumstances, based on their town, their county, what is most strategic to do where they are. They’re going to know more about that than we will.”
What Indivisible can do at the national level, she said, is “craft national strategies that help us be more than the sum of our parts, in ways that help people feel that they’re part of a collective national movement.”
“Some of the most powerful things I’ve seen over the past year and a half,” Mr. Espina said, “is when people who know each other realize that they have a lot more in common than they have in difference.” Knowing those around you “will fundamentally change the way you view the world, but it’ll also help you understand how you can actually help others.” Mutual aid, a peer-to-peer exchange of resources and services among community members, “is the most impactful thing in this moment,” he said. “Meet your neighbors, meet your friends. But not just that: When you go to a restaurant, talk to the staff. . . . Just have conversations with people and you’ll learn a lot about the world.”
But the immediacy of the threat to democracy requires urgent action, Ms. Greenberg said, and the 400-plus organizations that have participated in No Kings rallies are at present discussing “what is necessary to ultimately ensure that democracy is respected in an election where we are fully expecting an enormous series of attacks on the freedom to vote and to have that vote counted.”
“We are on track to demolish him electorally in November,” Mr. Levin said of the president. “We should all internalize that and we should expect that. That is what we’re building toward. He is going to do everything in his power to prevent that from happening.” Along with gerrymandered districts, he predicted voter suppression, the seizure of ballot boxes, spurious lawsuits, and “trying to inject as much chaos into the process as possible. We can’t control what he does. . . . What we can control is what we do to organize, down to the ground, to prevent him from being successful.”
Ms. Hoover asked if the panelists were hopeful that enough people would act as the signers of the Declaration of Independence did 250 years ago, pledging their lives, fortunes, and sacred honor.
Mr. Levin pointed to Minneapolis. “Two days after we saw Alex Pretti murdered in the streets of the Twin Cities,” he said, “you could think that a natural reaction to seeing one of your community members murdered for standing up for their own rights and their neighborhood would be to slink back, to let this moment pass, and not be targeted. What we saw were 200,000 people joining #EyesOnICE training to learn specifically what to do in response to ICE when they come to your community. The courage that we are seeing in response to the atrocities being committed by this regime is astounding, that the ugliest, most vicious kinds of policies you can imagine coming out of this administration are being matched with this beautiful display of neighborliness and humanity and caring and bravery.”
Many who voted for Mr. Trump, he said, “didn’t think they were going to get this.” Rather than shunning them, he said, they should be welcomed. “Right now, we’re aligned. We want a democratic republic, not a fascist system of government, and we’re going to organize together until we get that.”
The message of Monday’s discussion “was really strong about finding in each community what works, which is something we continue to wrestle with,” said Katherine Stahl of People for Democracy East Hampton, a chapter of the Indivisible movement, “and that the purpose of the protest is to bring joy and solidarity, but also to find what can generate longer-lasting change and connection within communities.”
