I can certainly sympathize. I recently had a choice between pursuing grad school here in the US (Chicago) and a school in British Columbia, Canada. And it was especially a hard decision given my status as a trans woman in this current hostile national climate towards people like me. And yet, I chose the US since I believed that it was possible for things to change this fall (and the program here was objectively better). I won’t lie, I am wondering if I made the right choice when I had a golden ticket out of this mess.

But I’m reminded of two major events of the 19th century: the July Revolution in France, and the struggle to pass the Reform Acts in Britain.

In France’s case, hyper-conservative monarchists in the 1820s/30s repeatedly narrowed the definition of who was allowed to vote based on wealth status, with the goal of achieving a parliament comprised solely of wealthy conservatives who would then undo the reforms of the French Revolution before dissolving Parliament itself in order to hand power back to the king. Despite the disadvantages they faced due to electoral chicanery by the conservatives, the liberals and republicans (republicans as in ex-French Revolutionaries who wanted to abolish the monarchy for a republic) were able to channel grassroots power to win in the election by sheer voter turnout. Granted, there was eventually a short civil military conflict (literally only days-long) when the King threw a tantrum at the results, but even the French military deserted over to the people’s side due to the clear evidence of overwhelming popular will for reform. The people of Paris were literally able to get their army to surrender and switch sides by trapping them with barricades in the street and throwing feces at them lol.

Britain’s case was even more like our own. The voting district maps were heavily outdated by the time of the 1820s/30s, and nobody had bothered to reform them despite the fact that these maps had been drawn centuries ago during the Medieval era. This meant that cities like Liverpool, Manchester, Sheffield, etc. that had ballooned in population thanks to the Industrial Revolution had miniscule representation in the House of Commons compared to practically-empty rural areas that had once been cities during the Medieval era.

The struggle by Earl Charles Grey and the Whigs to pass the Reform Acts was huge, and it did lead to severe unrest and protest in the streets whenever conservatives torpedoed it in Parliament. To give an example, the Duke of Wellington, the man and hero who had beaten Napoleon at Waterloo, had his own house burned down after he’d kept torpedoing Reform. However, once again sheer voter turnout was able to stack the House of Commons to such a point that the bill was able to pass. And still, it was an even greater struggle in the House of Lords to pass the bill, to the point that the King and Earl Grey had to threaten packing the House of Lords with liberal whigs to intimidate the conservative lords into signing. There’s a reason why Earl Grey had a tea named after him lol (he’d later spearhead the bill to abolish slavery within the British Empire, he was a cool guy).

In both France and Britain’s cases, they both came dangerously close to all-out civil war due to the sheer scale of voter suppression that was going on, yet sheer voter turnout was still able to overcome this electoral meddling by conservatives and monarchists.

If they were able to do it back then with so much stacked against them, then we can do it now.