The way to win in the global fight for democracy is to think locally, according to Skye Perryman, president of Democracy Forward.
In a keynote address to a summit on religious freedom in public schools held in Dallas Sept. 15, Perryman said the anti-democratic movement threatening America today is part of a global problem.
“If you look at it globally, you find we are just part of a statistic now, a statistic that has got to be reversed,” she said. “The question last November was not whether we were going to be able to propel ourselves to some place we’ve never been before. It was whether our backsliding democracy was going to slow down its backslide and maybe be able to turn around or whether our backsliding democracy was going to move into a rapidly accelerated autocracy.”
With Donald Trump’s election as president and his allies gaining control of both houses of Congress, “We know where we are,” she said. “And so whatever you consider yourself —liberal or conservative or moderate or independent — it doesn’t matter. This is for all the marbles, and this is a global democracy fight.”
“This is for all the marbles, and this is a global democracy fight.”
Democracy Forward has been at the forefront of suing the Trump administration to stop its efforts to dismantle democracy and implement the goals of Project 2025. Despite appearances, those hundreds of lawsuits mainly are successful, she said, and are slowing the administration’s agenda.
The Trump administration’s “acceleration into autocracy” follows a playbook used similarly around the world, she said. “Whether you were here or whether you were across the world, whether you were living in 2025 or whether you were living in the 19th century, it’s a similar attempt to divide people, … demonize people, get people to deny their common humanity, convince people that somehow we don’t all want our kids to go to a good school.”
The global movement attempts to “pit people against each other” and “build distrust in other people to burn and ban books, to attack universities, to attack lawyers and judges, and to engage in disinformation.”
Thus, what’s happening in the U.S. isn’t new, she said. “That’s been the playbook for some time and it’s a common playbook.”
Defeating these attempts to establish authoritarian rule will not happen through the perfect legal case, she advised. “There wasn’t a single legal case that was going to take Germany out of where it was in the ’30s. They had good lawyers, too, who cared a lot, right? There isn’t a single politician who is going to be elected to get us out of where we are.”
Instead, “the fight for democracy is a local fight,” Perryman advised. “It is a local fight with profound global consequences.”
“It is a local fight with profound global consequences.”
Every local attack — “every time someone comes into your school and tries to pit you against someone or tries to remove a book or tries to suggest that maybe if we could just all agree that we’re all going to think the same way” — is an attack on global democracy, she warned.
“That is an attack not only on you and your community and our values as Americans who value democracy. It is an attack on a global democratic system, and we see it everywhere.”
She added: “The true champions of this moment are people who are here in this room in local communities. … They look like us and they look like our communities. They’re not the face of a big powerful senator or of a Supreme Court justice. They are people doing this work.”
On the education front, the American Federation of Teachers is one group that has mobilized local support, she said. “We have blocked attempts (to stifle schools) because educators have shown up and parents have shown up in court every single day, even in this environment.”
Among the wins of Democracy Forward and the AFT was a lawsuit to block what came to be known as the “Dear Colleague letter,” which Perryman called “a ransom letter to educational systems across the country saying, ‘If you don’t agree with the president’s view on civil rights, you don’t get your federal funds.”
Democracy Forward fought that threat by the Trump administration and won, she said. “We won before a judge President Trump himself appointed.”
The symposium was organized by Interfaith Alliance and co-sponsored by 20 other organizations.
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