The Writers for Democratic Action present…

Resisting the Right: How to Survive the Coming Storm (OR Books)

Resisting the Right is a handbook for how to survive a right-wing autocracy in the United States.Frighteningly, that scenario looks increasingly likely.

The victory of a Republican, either Trump or another far right candidate, in the November 2024 presidential election could be a prelude to the destruction of America’s democratic system, making a subsequent change of power almost impossible.

That, Robert Edwards argues in this powerful and necessary intervention, is an eventuality for which we must prepare now.

Resisting the Right fast forwards past the ebb and flow of daily politics to a long-range preview of life under such an autocracy. It is structured as a practical guide, setting out how such a regime can be combatted using political action, civil disobedience, economics, cyberspace, traditional media, social media, the arts, and even our personal relationships.

Edwards, a former US Army intelligence officer who now works as a successful screenwriter, draws on his military training to assess “the threat,” combining it with a storyteller’s imagination to play out possible scenarios to their logical conclusion.

In a year when the future of America democracy teeters on a knife edge, the urgency of Resisting the Right could not be more acute.

Robert Edwards was previously an infantry and intelligence officer in the US Army. A winner of the Nicholl Fellowship from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, he has written numerous screenplays for all the major studios, directed the feature films Land of the Blind starring Ralph Fiennes and Donald Sutherland, and When I Live My Life Over Again (aka One More Time) starring Christopher Walken, and produced the documentaries Sumo East and West and The Last Laugh with his wife Ferne Pearlstein. He writes The King’s Necktie, a blog about politics.

James Carroll is the author of twelve novels, and nine works of nonfiction. For twenty-three years, he wrote a weekly op-ed column for The Boston Globe. He has received the National Book Award, the PEN Galbraith Award, and the Scripps Howard Journalism Award. He is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences.  His most recent book is The Truth at the Heart of the Lie: How the Catholic Church Lost Its Soul (Random House, 2021). He lives in Boston, with his wife the writer Alexandra Marshall.

We are writers, readers, editors, and booksellers, standing together to champion democracy everywhere, and the institutions that embody and protect it.  We defend civil liberties: the right to vote and have our votes counted, to gather and protest, to write and read, and to access learning that informs and enriches the lives of citizens.  We battle censorship in all its guises.  A nation can only be strong if it invites a multitude of perspectives into its decision-making process, educates its citizens, and treats the least of them as equal in value to its most powerful.

WRITERS FOR DEMOCRATIC ACTION presents Robert Edwards in conversation with James Carroll