How to Break the Grip: Resisting Authoritarianism from Below

Why Real Resistance Begins Where We Live, Not in the Halls of Power

When governments fail and courts look the other way, the machinery of harm doesn’t stop. It changes form. Power isn’t only exerted from the top through laws or leaders. It circulates through paychecks, utility bills, prescriptions, food shelves, and data plans. It embeds itself in routines, masked as necessity or convenience. That is where the system finds its grip. And it is where we can begin to break it.

This isn’t about purity politics or the fantasy that consumer choices alone can remake the world. But in a society where state and corporate interests are increasingly fused, and where governance is outsourced to firms that answer to no one, daily life becomes politically charged. Not just how we vote, but where we bank. Not just what we protest, but whom we pay.

Start with attention. The social media platforms that feed extremism don’t just profit from polarization—they depend on it. They capture time, track behavior, and reinforce outrage. Disinformation becomes profitable. Dissent becomes background noise. But attention, too, is a resource. Withdrawing it isn’t retreat. It’s strategy.

Money is no different. The largest banks are deeply entangled with fossil fuels, surveillance tech, and private prisons. Their power comes not only from capital, but from our inertia. Credit unions, local banks, and cooperative lenders don’t just offer alternatives. They redistribute capital without concentrating control. That is not symbolic—it’s structural.

Where we shop follows the same logic. Every dollar sent to Amazon or Walmart feeds systems built on union-busting, algorithmic pricing, and precarious labor. These are not just companies. They are infrastructures of dependency. Redirecting our spending toward local economies and reuse networks begins to rebuild autonomy. It won’t dismantle oligarchy, but it weakens its grip.

Labor remains one of the few forces authoritarian regimes fear. That’s why so much effort goes into dismantling protections, vilifying unions, and isolating workers. But mutual aid, strike funds, food sovereignty, and housing defense aren’t fringe projects. They are civic infrastructure—how people govern themselves when the state no longer serves them.

Anthropologists have long emphasized that power often works through the ordinary. It embeds itself in cultural habits, expectations, and silences. Political ecology shows how material systems—energy, land, food, waste—are shaped by power, and how people resist not just through protest but by reshaping those systems. These perspectives remind us that legitimacy is not declared from a podium. It is maintained in daily life, where myths about wealth, merit, and efficiency become common sense.

Media, too, reinforces this terrain. We’re not just governed by politicians, but by the stories that justify their rule. Fox News, Meta, and algorithm-driven echo chambers are not outliers. They are part of the system. Subscribing to independent journalism or supporting local watchdogs might feel small—but that’s how the fourth estate is rebuilt.

Public life has been deliberately eroded. Charter schools, privatized transit, and surveillance contracts with corporations aren’t about efficiency. They’re about control. As public goods are turned into commodities, citizenship is reframed as consumption. Public libraries, broadband co-ops, and transit systems may seem mundane, but they are among the last shared spaces of civic life.

Authoritarianism thrives on disconnection—not just from each other, but from memory. Precarity and privatization now feel inevitable, but they were manufactured. The neoliberal project has reframed governance as administration, citizens as consumers, and accountability as customer service. To organize locally—around housing, energy, food, or education—is not to turn away from politics. It is to relocate it. The deeper the local roots, the harder it becomes for state or corporate power to impose their designs.

We also need to challenge the myths that justify the current system. That billionaires are visionaries. That wealth signals virtue. That “philanthropy” excuses exploitation. These are not harmless stories. They demobilize resistance and mask injustice. Dismantling them is part of reclaiming political imagination.

This doesn’t mean abandoning electoral politics. On the contrary, it means defending what remains. Voting rights, election transparency, and grassroots candidates matter—not because they’re sufficient, but because they’re still recognized as legitimate.

We also need to invest in the long haul. In the slow, vital work of care, repair, and mutual navigation. Teaching, organizing, mentoring—these aren’t extras. They are how alternative futures take root.

The law will not hold the powerful accountable. Sovereign immunity protects them. Courts excuse them. Media forgets them. But we don’t have to. The question is not whether we can sue them. It’s whether we will name them—locally, publicly, persistently—and whether we can build enough solidarity to make that naming matter.

Authoritarian systems don’t usually collapse. They are hollowed out, outgrown, and left behind. That work begins, always, where we live.

Suggested Readings

Oreskes, Naomi, and Erik M. Conway. 2023. The Big Myth: How American Business Taught Us to Loathe Government and Love the Free Market. New York: Bloomsbury Publishing.

Patel, Raj, and Jason W. Moore. 2017. A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things: A Guide to Capitalism, Nature, and the Future of the Planet. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Solnit, Rebecca. 2004. Hope in the Dark: Untold Histories, Wild Possibilities. New York: Nation Books.

Taylor, Astra. 2023. The Age of Insecurity: Coming Together as Things Fall Apart. New York: House of Anansi.

Taylor, Keeanga-Yamahtta. 2016. From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation. Chicago: Haymarket Books.

Teachout, Zephyr. 2020. Break ’Em Up: Recovering Our Freedom from Big Ag, Big Tech, and Big Money. New York: All Points Books.

Vélez-Ibáñez, Carlos G. 2025. The Rise of Necro/Narco-Citizenship: Belonging and Dying in the National Borderlands. Tucson: University of Arizona Press.

Zuboff, Shoshana. 2019. The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power. New York: PublicAffairs.