Prefatory Note: My choices for 2025 Leader of the Year and 2025 Follower(s) of the Year reflect my political preferences. They are for government that is reasonably democratic and decent.
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I define followers by their rank – not by their behavior. Followers have little or no power, authority, or influence. This contrasts with leaders who have all or most of the power, authority, and influence. Because of this difference, followers usually – though as this post will show they do not always – fall into line.
How do I distinguish between power, authority, and influence?
- Power is A’s capacity to get B to do what A wants by any means necessary, including force.
- Authority is A’s capacity to get B to do what A wants because of A’s superior rank, status, or credential.
- Influence is A’s capacity to get B to do what A wants, usually by persuasion, of B’s own volition.
Followers matter as much as leaders. There is no leader without at least one follower. Moreover, followers matter when they do something, and they matter when they do nothing. If a follower, say, an American who is eligible to vote but does not, it makes a difference. Further, just as there are times when leaders matter more, there are times when followers matter more. Such as in the event of a revolution, when people who are powerless wrest power from people who are powerful.
This year I name not one but four Followers of the Year. I identify four individuals who, despite their relatively low levels of power, authority, and influence have, in 2025, nevertheless have had a significant impact on American politics. Each of the four has challenged their nemesis, President Donald Trump. And each of the four has put a chink in Trump’s generally formidable armor.
My Followers of the Year are in opposition to my Leader of the Year. Trump dominated American politics in 2025, but he did not dominate them completely. Other people played a part – four of which are singled out in this post not because they followed. But because despite their weakness in comparison with Trump’s strength, they resisted. Unlike many other Americans – including many who themselves had large or even enormous reserves of power, authority, and influence – these four had the fortitude to voice their opposition to Trump and to act on it.
The four Followers of the Year are in two pairs: the first two are theorists, the second two are activists. The first two primarily write: they use the written word to try to persuade their readers to see the world as they do. The first two do however also speak. In 2025 they used media to spread their word and make their case. The second two Followers of the Year do not so far as we know now write and only one occasionally speaks in public. What they do is organize. This year they organized massive demonstrations whose source of energy was fierce opposition to the American president.
- Anne Applebaum and Timothy Snyder – 2025 Followers of the Year
Until a few years ago, few people had heard of Anne Applebaum. While her name is still not widely known, she is at the forefront of public intellectuals who came out early and vociferously against Donald Trump. From the beginning of his political career, she worried that he could and would become an authoritarian, a type of leader she knew well because she had studied it at length and in depth.
The same can be said about Timothy Snyder. Snyder too harbored grave doubts about Trump early on. Doubts that similarly grew out of his in-depth studies of leaders who were autocrats and fascists, tyrants and dictators. Additionally, pointedly, years before the time of Trump, both Applebaum and Snyder had the same regional expertise: Eastern Europe including Russia and what had been the Soviet Union.
For decades Applebaum has been in the front ranks of American journalists. She worked at The Economist and The Washington Post; now she is on the staff of The Atlantic. She is also a highly regarded author of, among other books, Gulag: A History, for which she won a Pulitzer Prize. Gulag, nearly 700 pages long, is a dark, relentlessly grim history of Soviet prison camps under the dictatorial, paranoid leadership of Joseph Stalin.
Snyder is an academic, a professor of history, now at the University of Toronto, previously at Yale. He too is author of several books, one of which bears similarities to Applebaum’s volume on the gulag. Snyder’s is titled Bloodlands: Europe between Hitler and Stalin. It too is highly praised and is, as its title suggests, dark, grim.
Given the similarities between Applebaum and Synder – in their personal histories (both have spent long stretches living in Europe); in their professional interests (both have spent long stretches writing about the same region); and in their political attitudes (both are highly attuned to any hint of authoritarianism) – we should not be surprised that both are at the forefront of those who oppose President Trump.
Synder led the charge, beginning early in Trump’s first term to sound a warning. In 2017 he published a small book titled On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century. The book is as its title suggests: a set of instructions on how to stop from happening in the United States what has happened in other parts of the world. Specifically, a slide from democracy to autocracy, even to tyranny. Snyder never mentioned anyone by name in the book – an implied neutrality that might in part explain why On Tyranny has sold remarkably well. Nearly a million and a half million copies since the book was published.
Applebaum’s clarion call came a few years later, in 2020, in a book titled, Twilight of Democracy: The Seductive Lure of Authoritarianism. Unlike Snyder’s it was not so much an instruction as an exposition of, to quote the title of a chapter, “how demagogues win.” Applebaum pointed out that to remain in power not all dictatorships rely on mass violence. Instead, some depend on “a cadre of elites to run the bureaucracy, the state media, the courts, and, in some places, state companies.” These elites defend their leaders at all costs “however dishonest their statements, however great their corruption, and however disastrous their impact on ordinary people and institutions. In exchange, they know they will be rewarded and advanced.”
Both Applebaum and Synder continue their mission not just as writers and speakers, but as activists out to reach large numbers of people. They post blogs and appear on podcasts, and both can be seen regularly on television. Neither are likely ever to have power. But they draw on their authority, their intellectual authority, to exercise influence.
- Leah Greenberg and Ezra Levin – 2025 Followers of the Year
Unlike Applebaum and Snyder, whose names are known to some people, Leah Greenberg and Ezra Levin are names known to nearly no people. Which seems on their part to be deliberate. By remaining in the background, they foreground Indivisible. What, you might ask, is “Indivisible”? It is an organization that, according to its website, defines itself as a “grassroots movement … with a mission to elect progressive leaders, rebuild our democracy, and defeat the Trump agenda.” For now, though, Indivisible’s mission is more single tracked. It is to resist Trump. It is this resistance that has, in the last year, motivated astonishingly large numbers of people to join its cause.
Indivisible insists that it collaborates with other, likeminded groups and organizations. Still, it is Indivisible that stands out. As do the two people who founded Indivisible and continue to lead it. Leah Greenberg and Ezra Levin came out of nowhere, or so it seems. Unlike Applebaum and Snyder who had authority based on their academic credentials, Greenberg and Levin had nothing. Initially certainly, no power, no authority, no influence. They met as undergraduates at Carleton College; some years later (in 2015) they married. Along the way they collected graduate degrees and worked several jobs. But when Donald Trump was first elected to the White House, they found their calling. They (and two other people) were so incensed, so concerned, that they drafted and posted an online document titled, “Indivisible: A Practical Guide for Resisting the Trump Agenda.” Their Guide went viral and a movement was born.
If Trump not been reelected, it’s not clear that Indivisible would have had much of shelf life. This is not to say that the organization had no early successes, it did. Moreover, after the election of Zohran Mamdani as mayor of New York City it seems possible progressivism has a future in American politics. Still, Trump was reelected which explains why Indivisible was invigorated in a way its cofounders could never have imagined.
I refer to the astonishing turnout for No Kings Day – an initiative that Indivisible spearheaded More than any other group or organization, Indivisible is responsible for the successes of two No Kings Day protests both of which took place in 2025. The first was in June when some 5 million people took to the streets to demonstrate against Trump. The second was in October when the number of ant-Trump protesters climbed to over 7 million. By no means did all those who took part support Indivisible’s progressive agenda. But what Indivisible did was first to organize and then to implement a remarkably impressive demonstration against the American president. The No Kings Day protest in October was either the largest or among the largest protests ever in American history.
Anne Applebaum married a Polish diplomat, so in 2103 she became a Polish citizen. Still, she was born in the United States and remains also an American citizen. Timothy Snyder spends a good deal of time in Austria and in 2024 was granted Austrian citizenship. Further, as mentioned, in 2024 Snyder moved from the United States to Canada. Still, he too was born in the United States and remains also an American citizen.
So, for the purposes of this post I consider that Trump is leader of Applebaum, Snyder, Greenberg, and Levin – and that they are his followers. All four are Americans which means that so long as Trump is American president they have no choice but to follow his lead, whether to impose tariffs, bomb boats off the coast of Venezuela, decimate the civil service, or demolish the East Wing of the White House. What distinguishes these four is that while each is obligated in most ways to follow the president’s lead in both domestic and foreign policy, each has found a way, an important way, simultaneously to resist him.
Which goes to show that while most of the time followers follow, sometimes they do not. Sometimes they resist – and sometimes the consequences of their resistances are significant. In which case – not to complicate your life – followers become leaders. As did, to take a supreme example, Martin Luther King, Jr. He began his campaign for civil rights as a follower, as a righteous resister, and became in time himself a leader.