Link (Archive)
Judging by Donald Trump’s first few days in office, two things are true: The Resistance of 2017 is dead. And we need a resistance more than ever.
Trump is delivering on his campaign full of chilling promises, including mass deportations, retribution against his perceived enemies, blatantly illegal and sloppy executive orders aimed at gutting the government, and more.
Who is going to figure out what the Resistance of 2025 might look like? Most elected Democrats have been some combination of perplexed, complicit, and silent in the face of Trump’s shocking actions. The broader liberal public is cowed and depressed, often tuning out. And complicating matters: While we surely do need to do something to counter Trump 2.0, we need a resistance movement that learns from its mistakes.
What were those mistakes? We’ll get into them in detail. But the first thing we all need to reckon with is the simple fact that the answer to the question “Was the 2017 Resistance effective or counterproductive?” is “Yes.” Public outrage, media coverage, and legal challenges really did put the kibosh on some of the Trump administration’s worst policies, or at least forced them to scale back. Public shame at being associated with Trump kept many business leaders and other influential figures from collaborating with him, stymieing his political and cultural power. Joe Biden was even elected on the fumes of the anti-Trump resistance.
But the 2017 resistance was also incredibly flawed, in ways that can feel almost painfully cringeworthy now. In response to the era of right-wing extremism Trump’s first term ushered in, sometimes the pendulum swung too far in the other direction. This impulse only seemed to grow, not abate, with the conservative backlash to COVID shutdowns and vaccinations making even basic public health tools political volleyballs, and only expanded with Joe Biden in office. Trump really was dangerous, and MAGA really did cost lives. That sense of urgency, though, empowered progressive actors who, though well-meaning, routinely misdiagnosed the problems at hand, stipulated a kind of ideological and often linguistic conformity, and imposed a politics of purity that pushed out rather than pulled in many could-be allies by doubling down on positions far outside of the American norm (there’s no such thing as learning loss from COVID shutdowns; shoplifting is fine; sex at birth is “assigned,” with the suggestion of methodlessness, rather than being identified through a method that proves correct for the vast majority of people on Earth). This was all ultimately alienating for a whole lot of voters and galvanizing for MAGA extremists. I’d even say it opened the door for Trump to return.
Still, it is far too pat, and patently untrue, to say that the mistakes of the Resistance were what gave us Trump 2.0. But they certainly seem to have contributed to both Trump’s reelection and the malaise it has been met with. As activists, politicians, journalists, and average citizens who care about the future of American democracy watch the early days of this administration in stunned horror, the lessons of the first resistance and the years that followed need to be learned—before it’s too late.
But they leave behind different legacies.
The groups that harnessed the power of female rage and channeled it into focused outcomes have made real differences. In response to the #MeToo movement, several states passed important legislation limiting the use of nondisclosure agreements for sexual assault or harassment, and several opened up new windows for survivors to report the abuse they suffered; in response to the sudden interest in political activism, groups including Run For Something rapidly recruited, trained, and supported candidates from atypical backgrounds to run for office—in Run For Something’s case, young people; for others, women and people of color.
But it takes a lot of sustained effort to fuel anger-based reactions. People have lives and jobs and constraints on their time, and eventually, many of them wind up exhausted by the sense that everything is a five-alarm rage-fire. There is also the simple fact that Trump winning a second time around has made a lot of us—myself included, at least on my worst days—start to think, well, if this is what a majority of Americans want, then maybe they should get what they signed up for. (These feelings, thankfully, don’t last once they are met with the reality that the people most hurt by Trump won’t be the ones who voted for him, and a personal moral code that insists all people deserve good lives even if they make political decisions I despise.) It’s easy to see, though, how a first Trump term could be seen as a kind of accidental gamble made by people who didn’t know what they were doing, and worth fighting tooth and nail. It’s a different thing to be faced with a second, chosen by people who can’t credibly say they were clueless.
This may also be why the organizations that sprouted up around Trump’s first administration, and those that fight for women’s rights and abortion access, are no longer seeing the funding largesse they enjoyed during the initial Trump years and in the immediate aftermath of the Supreme Court overturning Roe v. Wade. Many of these groups are struggling financially, but staying afloat. The reason they aren’t totally foundering is in large part because they created sustainable structures that took inchoate public anger and said, “Here is something tangible to do with this.” And the tangible thing to do was forward-looking and did not require nonstop engagement or anger. Which leads us to Lesson Two.
For a while, the criticism stuck. Those early Resisters really did feel bad, and frankly, for good reason. Sure, a slim majority of white women voted for Trump, and those Trump-voting women were probably not particularly well-represented at the Women’s March. Yes, the racial demographics of the United States mean that the total number of white women who didn’t vote for Trump far exceeds the total number of women of color who didn’t—but the truth is that racism animates every facet of American politics and activism and life, and feminism is no exception. A social justice movement that doesn’t address a racist past and present, and doesn’t fold race into its work and analysis, is a social justice movement doomed to fail.
The problem was with the way this became the main priority. A social justice movement that makes as its highest order of business internal battles over personal righteousness, and that incentivizes call-outs and push-outs and public shamings of those deemed deficient rather than evangelizing and educating and pulling in potential converts, is also a movement doomed to fail, or at least be stuck in a spiral of internecine power struggles and interpersonal dramas.
As we head into Trump 2.0 and hopefully draw people back or newly into action, we should ask ourselves: Do we want to galvanize people, or do we want to shame them for not showing up sooner?
These women have been the backbones of the Democratic Party and various left-of-center causes for decades. They are the women who organize “Souls to the Polls” buses to get voters out on Election Day. They are the women who hold PTA offices and organize phone-banking efforts. And they are the women who pushed their friends to run for office, canvassed like mad for Democrats in the 2018 midterms, and sometimes ran for office themselves.
Their reward was largely derision, except when they were ignored. Leftist podcast bros maligned them from Brooklyn couches. While major newspapers dedicated seemingly endless resources to sending reporters on red-state safaris to talk to locals in diners about how the sock factory closure made them vote for Trump, far less effort was made to understand or even acknowledge the women who were responding most effectively to Trump’s rise. (The few notable exceptions came from feminist journalists.) The women actually doing the work of resisting Trump through electoral processes were largely not hot influencers or cynical tweeters, and none of them were the archetypical Real American white man who works with his hands. They were racially diverse, often suburban, often mothers, not particularly online, and largely middle-aged—a group long considered the pinnacle of uncool and unsexy, the kind of women who might have an “In This House” sign on their lawn and a Home Goods extra-large clock in their kitchen. But these women get stuff done. And their politics—generous in spirit, left-moderate in orientation, materialist in focus—are a lot closer to those of the average Democratic voter than the politics of professional activists and even Democratic staffers. That these women continue to be sidelined and discounted rather than embraced and championed is a massive failure of progressive political action.
The good news is this: You know who really doesn’t tend to get stuff done? The too-online UFC-watching hur-huremotional adolescents who make up the Trump Youth. Resistance Wine Moms may not get glossy magazine coverage. But they get results—if we empower them.
The result wasn’t a stronger resistance. It was a Democratic Party that wound up carrying the baggage of various interest groups and various big-only-on-Twitter fringe ideas, and a MAGA movement that was able to harness the frustration that came from being bullied out of what felt like obvious common-sense conclusions: That gender as a self-defined identity may butt up against what the vast majority of people understand to be the biological reality of a male physical advantage in sports; that the rapid increase in minors seeking gender-affirming care might be a complex dynamic worthy of careful research and response; that a huge influx of immigrants into cities already struggling with unaffordability, housing shortages, and homeless crises really can be destabilizing; that people don’t like public disorder and don’t like seeing the rules of decent public behavior brazenly flouted, no matter how many times you tell them that crime is down; and so on. MAGA leaders, of course, did not actually draw any of these moderate or sensible conclusions. But they did position themselves as speakers of popular but stifled truths. Democratic officials didn’t universally take on these largely unpopular positions, but they were stuck with them anyway, because in today’s political environment, Democrats are judged not just for what they do and say, but for what self-identified liberals more broadly do and say. And what a lot of the loudest voices on the left were saying—what they were actually often insisting all political fellow-travelers agree with—struck many voters, including many liberals, as false, frustrating, or simply bizarre. But the social costs of pushing back were high, and the stakes of doing anything we were told would empower the MAGA right felt higher still, so many of us went along—and inadvertently empowered the MAGA right.
That means making space for the radicals who see things as they could be and push the movement forward, without ceding the whole movement to them just because they can lay claim to being the most ideologically untainted. It means accepting that sometimes the perfect can be the enemy of the good, that some progress is better than no progress, and that in a democracy, you don’t always get what you want (or even need). It means remembering that pulling in more people is preferable to alienating them. It means making space for different ways of getting stuff done, from the standard-issue moderates and liberals who want to use existing systems to make incremental change to the remake-the-system firebrands who demand big changes, including to broken processes. This doesn’t mean giving everyone equal say and airtime, but it does require understanding that progressive movements succeed when there is some push-pull on both strategy and ideology. At their best (which is hard to achieve!), the maximalists and radicals can prevent progressive politics from stagnating and leaving behind those with less power; by staking out a farther-left position, they can make the standard left-liberal one seem more reasonable and therefore make it more achievable; they can push broader public opinion leftward. And work-within-the-system liberals can take progressives tangibly closer to where we want to be.
This lesson is true of political coalitions, too. Understanding both Democratic and Republican voters are part of a broader ecosystem of beliefs and strategies—rather than concluding that, say, all Trump voters are motivated by a singular kind of bigotry, even if yes, a lot of Trump voters are motivated by various bigotries—can help Democrats peel off the voters who aren’t crazy extremists. And it can help to push back against claims that Trump’s win also earned him a mandate.
The ”everything is about everything” view of activism isn’t just unnecessarily alienating—it’s exhausting, and it can destroy the ability to effectively organize. As we’re seeing now, with the Trump White House strategy of “flooding the zone” with so much bad stuff the average person cannot keep up, expecting everyone to care about everything everywhere all at once is simply not tenable. Going forward, progressives may be better off if we individually pick a small handful of issues we care about most and really dig in: following them closely, cultivating some expertise, contacting our political representatives about them, donating money, and spending our time on them. The other option—being a political dilettante who tries to keep up with an intentionally discombobulating barrage of actions—is a recipe for overwhelm, which is in turn a recipe for inaction. And that is exactly what this Trump administration is hoping for.
That doesn’t mean that any given individual can’t focus on, for example, Gaza and abortion as two of their top issues. It is to say that time may not be best spent, say, insisting that every abortion rights organization take a position on Gaza, any more than it would be all that productive to demand that Palestinian human rights groups issue statements of support for abortion rights in America. On the other hand, it is perfectly possible to pair issues together when it comes to critiquing the other side. It would be a great use of time to focus on the Trump administration’s horrific cuts to foreign aid, including to basic reproductive health care for women overseas and to Palestinians broadly, when their entire territory has been leveled and they desperately need help rebuilding from a war America underwrote.
It is one thing to understand how a matrix of identity categories shapes different people’s experiences, the basic principle underlying the concept of intersectionality. An abortion fund for women in conservative states is going to be serving a population that is disproportionately Black and poor; understanding the complex needs of that population is crucial for their work, and those needs won’t be understood if volunteers and donors see barriers to abortion access through the lens of white upper-class women. It’s another, though, to insist that every progressive cause must also be about or at least address every other progressive cause, even if oppression is an overarching theme.
Trump is going to do a bunch of unpopular stuff. And it is true that a majority of voters cast their ballots for him, and many of them knowingly voted for his politics of cruelty. Progressives need to grapple with that reality: A lot of Americans actually want to buy what Trump is selling.
But many didn’t bother to really read the product description, and they’re going to be unhappy when they see what they’ve gotten. In the sealed media universe of the MAGA right, ranting about transgenderism and cultural Marxism and DEI is the norm, even though it’s totally illegible to average Americans, and frankly sounds insane. But cutting off federal government money for things like transportation, health care, and education? Pulling the U.S. out of the World Health Organization and functionally suspending the work of the National Institutes of Health? Ending birthright citizenship by executive decree? Yanking undocumented toddlers out of day care, ripping parents away from their U.S.-citizen kids, allowing for discrimination against women and racial minorities, and criminalizing parents who seek gender-affirming care for their trans children? This stuff, while popular among MAGA men on X, is broadly seen by normal people as monstrous, and it’s where progressives and Democrats can turn the tables, gain the upper hand, and quite literally save lives.
They’ll have the best luck if they pull in the widest swath of support possible—and if they learn from the very recent past.
Can We Resist Better This Time?
Judging by Donald Trump’s first few days in office, two things are true: The Resistance of 2017 is dead. And we need a resistance more than ever.
Trump is delivering on his campaign full of chilling promises, including mass deportations, retribution against his perceived enemies, blatantly illegal and sloppy executive orders aimed at gutting the government, and more.
Who is going to figure out what the Resistance of 2025 might look like? Most elected Democrats have been some combination of perplexed, complicit, and silent in the face of Trump’s shocking actions. The broader liberal public is cowed and depressed, often tuning out. And complicating matters: While we surely do need to do something to counter Trump 2.0, we need a resistance movement that learns from its mistakes.
What were those mistakes? We’ll get into them in detail. But the first thing we all need to reckon with is the simple fact that the answer to the question “Was the 2017 Resistance effective or counterproductive?” is “Yes.” Public outrage, media coverage, and legal challenges really did put the kibosh on some of the Trump administration’s worst policies, or at least forced them to scale back. Public shame at being associated with Trump kept many business leaders and other influential figures from collaborating with him, stymieing his political and cultural power. Joe Biden was even elected on the fumes of the anti-Trump resistance.
But the 2017 resistance was also incredibly flawed, in ways that can feel almost painfully cringeworthy now. In response to the era of right-wing extremism Trump’s first term ushered in, sometimes the pendulum swung too far in the other direction. This impulse only seemed to grow, not abate, with the conservative backlash to COVID shutdowns and vaccinations making even basic public health tools political volleyballs, and only expanded with Joe Biden in office. Trump really was dangerous, and MAGA really did cost lives. That sense of urgency, though, empowered progressive actors who, though well-meaning, routinely misdiagnosed the problems at hand, stipulated a kind of ideological and often linguistic conformity, and imposed a politics of purity that pushed out rather than pulled in many could-be allies by doubling down on positions far outside of the American norm (there’s no such thing as learning loss from COVID shutdowns; shoplifting is fine; sex at birth is “assigned,” with the suggestion of methodlessness, rather than being identified through a method that proves correct for the vast majority of people on Earth). This was all ultimately alienating for a whole lot of voters and galvanizing for MAGA extremists. I’d even say it opened the door for Trump to return.
Still, it is far too pat, and patently untrue, to say that the mistakes of the Resistance were what gave us Trump 2.0. But they certainly seem to have contributed to both Trump’s reelection and the malaise it has been met with. As activists, politicians, journalists, and average citizens who care about the future of American democracy watch the early days of this administration in stunned horror, the lessons of the first resistance and the years that followed need to be learned—before it’s too late.
Lesson One: Outrage is powerful, but it’s not an unlimited resource.
Trump’s first election shocked and angered many people—especially women. Here was a man who stood accused of sexual abuse and harassment, who insulted women in the most vulgar of terms, and who had boasted about grabbing women’s genitals, and he still won. The Women’s March, the #MeToo movement, the crush of women who ran for office in the 2018 midterms: These were all powerful female-led responses to Trump.But they leave behind different legacies.
The groups that harnessed the power of female rage and channeled it into focused outcomes have made real differences. In response to the #MeToo movement, several states passed important legislation limiting the use of nondisclosure agreements for sexual assault or harassment, and several opened up new windows for survivors to report the abuse they suffered; in response to the sudden interest in political activism, groups including Run For Something rapidly recruited, trained, and supported candidates from atypical backgrounds to run for office—in Run For Something’s case, young people; for others, women and people of color.
But it takes a lot of sustained effort to fuel anger-based reactions. People have lives and jobs and constraints on their time, and eventually, many of them wind up exhausted by the sense that everything is a five-alarm rage-fire. There is also the simple fact that Trump winning a second time around has made a lot of us—myself included, at least on my worst days—start to think, well, if this is what a majority of Americans want, then maybe they should get what they signed up for. (These feelings, thankfully, don’t last once they are met with the reality that the people most hurt by Trump won’t be the ones who voted for him, and a personal moral code that insists all people deserve good lives even if they make political decisions I despise.) It’s easy to see, though, how a first Trump term could be seen as a kind of accidental gamble made by people who didn’t know what they were doing, and worth fighting tooth and nail. It’s a different thing to be faced with a second, chosen by people who can’t credibly say they were clueless.
This may also be why the organizations that sprouted up around Trump’s first administration, and those that fight for women’s rights and abortion access, are no longer seeing the funding largesse they enjoyed during the initial Trump years and in the immediate aftermath of the Supreme Court overturning Roe v. Wade. Many of these groups are struggling financially, but staying afloat. The reason they aren’t totally foundering is in large part because they created sustainable structures that took inchoate public anger and said, “Here is something tangible to do with this.” And the tangible thing to do was forward-looking and did not require nonstop engagement or anger. Which leads us to Lesson Two.
Lesson Two: Turn anger out, not in.
The less effective methods of harnessing rage involved not just fuming, but turning that anger into an identity, a psychodrama, a cudgel, and a tool of self-righteousness to be wielded not against Trump and those who enabled him but against people who might otherwise actually be allies. The moment I felt the first churning sense of uh-oh about the sustainability of Trump-fueled righteous female rage was when a photo went viral of a man standing at the Women’s March with a sign lecturing the marchers: “I’LL SEE YOU NICE WHITE LADIES AT THE NEXT #BLACKLIVESMATTER MARCH, RIGHT?” It wasn’t enough that thousands upon thousands of women (and some men) had turned up in what was at the time the largest single-day protest in American history; the message was that too many women hadn’t been radicalized sooner, that by marching for women’s rights and being white they were demonstrating their fundamental deficiencies, that there was something inherently suspect about women behaving in their own self-interests rather than first advocating for others, that the solution was not action but self-recrimination. The reaction to the sign was not eye-rolling or dismissal or even well-earned annoyance at a man showing up to a march for women’s rights to lecture those women about doing it wrong (though: the audacity!). It was to turn the spirit of that sign into a whole movement-wide vibe. The task became less about fighting the bad guys and more about fighting whatever internal badness might be lurking within people trying to be good.For a while, the criticism stuck. Those early Resisters really did feel bad, and frankly, for good reason. Sure, a slim majority of white women voted for Trump, and those Trump-voting women were probably not particularly well-represented at the Women’s March. Yes, the racial demographics of the United States mean that the total number of white women who didn’t vote for Trump far exceeds the total number of women of color who didn’t—but the truth is that racism animates every facet of American politics and activism and life, and feminism is no exception. A social justice movement that doesn’t address a racist past and present, and doesn’t fold race into its work and analysis, is a social justice movement doomed to fail.
The problem was with the way this became the main priority. A social justice movement that makes as its highest order of business internal battles over personal righteousness, and that incentivizes call-outs and push-outs and public shamings of those deemed deficient rather than evangelizing and educating and pulling in potential converts, is also a movement doomed to fail, or at least be stuck in a spiral of internecine power struggles and interpersonal dramas.
As we head into Trump 2.0 and hopefully draw people back or newly into action, we should ask ourselves: Do we want to galvanize people, or do we want to shame them for not showing up sooner?
Lesson Three: Boring normie middle-aged women are the Democratic Party’s most potent force—and are far closer to the median voter than the staffers of progressive advocacy organizations or Democratic politicians.
The most effective Resisters were also those who were most mocked by social media leftists, most overlooked by the mainstream media, and most lectured by the professional activist class: boring, normie middle-aged Wine Moms.These women have been the backbones of the Democratic Party and various left-of-center causes for decades. They are the women who organize “Souls to the Polls” buses to get voters out on Election Day. They are the women who hold PTA offices and organize phone-banking efforts. And they are the women who pushed their friends to run for office, canvassed like mad for Democrats in the 2018 midterms, and sometimes ran for office themselves.
Their reward was largely derision, except when they were ignored. Leftist podcast bros maligned them from Brooklyn couches. While major newspapers dedicated seemingly endless resources to sending reporters on red-state safaris to talk to locals in diners about how the sock factory closure made them vote for Trump, far less effort was made to understand or even acknowledge the women who were responding most effectively to Trump’s rise. (The few notable exceptions came from feminist journalists.) The women actually doing the work of resisting Trump through electoral processes were largely not hot influencers or cynical tweeters, and none of them were the archetypical Real American white man who works with his hands. They were racially diverse, often suburban, often mothers, not particularly online, and largely middle-aged—a group long considered the pinnacle of uncool and unsexy, the kind of women who might have an “In This House” sign on their lawn and a Home Goods extra-large clock in their kitchen. But these women get stuff done. And their politics—generous in spirit, left-moderate in orientation, materialist in focus—are a lot closer to those of the average Democratic voter than the politics of professional activists and even Democratic staffers. That these women continue to be sidelined and discounted rather than embraced and championed is a massive failure of progressive political action.
The good news is this: You know who really doesn’t tend to get stuff done? The too-online UFC-watching hur-huremotional adolescents who make up the Trump Youth. Resistance Wine Moms may not get glossy magazine coverage. But they get results—if we empower them.
Lesson Four: Don’t react to bad policy by pinging way into opposite-but-unpopular policy.
Perhaps the biggest failure of the 2017 resistance was in its eventual insistence that everyone participating take on particular and often fairly unpopular positions or be deemed bad/fascist/otherwise problematic. This gave the sense that Democrats and the broader left supported all sorts of unpopular stuff—even as elected Democrats didn’t necessarily sign on. This often happened in righteous reaction to Trumpian or right-wing awfulness, and tended to start online. The Trump administration’s attacks on trans people, for example, were brutal and ugly, and in response many on the left took up the position not just that the dignity and legal rights of trans people must be defended, but that anyone who voiced a question about potential athletic advantages held by trans women in women’s sports or gender medicine for minors was carrying water for a hideous right-wing agenda. Trump’s Muslim ban, child separation policy, border closings, and attacks on immigrants were so brutal and ugly that the response was not just to defend immigrants’ rights, but to insist that there was no immigration problem at all, and anyone who believed there was must simply be a bigot—even well into a Biden administration that saw enormous upticks in illegal border crossing and American cities overwhelmed by desperate undocumented people. Trump’s attacks on the Black Lives Matter movement, his tough-on-crime stance, and the MAGA backing of police officers who killed unarmed Black men and women fomented a righteous protest movement and crucial policy changes to America’s too-punitive system of mass incarceration—but in many left-leaning circles, people who complained about crime were derided, and porch pirates, turnstile-jumpers, and shoplifters were justified (and anyone who objected to theft was branded a busybody privileged Karen).The result wasn’t a stronger resistance. It was a Democratic Party that wound up carrying the baggage of various interest groups and various big-only-on-Twitter fringe ideas, and a MAGA movement that was able to harness the frustration that came from being bullied out of what felt like obvious common-sense conclusions: That gender as a self-defined identity may butt up against what the vast majority of people understand to be the biological reality of a male physical advantage in sports; that the rapid increase in minors seeking gender-affirming care might be a complex dynamic worthy of careful research and response; that a huge influx of immigrants into cities already struggling with unaffordability, housing shortages, and homeless crises really can be destabilizing; that people don’t like public disorder and don’t like seeing the rules of decent public behavior brazenly flouted, no matter how many times you tell them that crime is down; and so on. MAGA leaders, of course, did not actually draw any of these moderate or sensible conclusions. But they did position themselves as speakers of popular but stifled truths. Democratic officials didn’t universally take on these largely unpopular positions, but they were stuck with them anyway, because in today’s political environment, Democrats are judged not just for what they do and say, but for what self-identified liberals more broadly do and say. And what a lot of the loudest voices on the left were saying—what they were actually often insisting all political fellow-travelers agree with—struck many voters, including many liberals, as false, frustrating, or simply bizarre. But the social costs of pushing back were high, and the stakes of doing anything we were told would empower the MAGA right felt higher still, so many of us went along—and inadvertently empowered the MAGA right.
Lesson Five: Seeing progressive politics as a diverse ecosystem works far better than demanding ideological uniformity.
The above lesson—don’t insist on the most maximal position—is an important one for getting stuff done. But there’s a caveat: Don’t insist on total movement conformity, whether that’s coalescing around the moderate and popular but not progressive enough, or the extremely righteous but extremely unpopular. Social movements, and progressive politics more broadly, function best when understood as ecosystems, rather than purity contests or singular One Best Way efforts.That means making space for the radicals who see things as they could be and push the movement forward, without ceding the whole movement to them just because they can lay claim to being the most ideologically untainted. It means accepting that sometimes the perfect can be the enemy of the good, that some progress is better than no progress, and that in a democracy, you don’t always get what you want (or even need). It means remembering that pulling in more people is preferable to alienating them. It means making space for different ways of getting stuff done, from the standard-issue moderates and liberals who want to use existing systems to make incremental change to the remake-the-system firebrands who demand big changes, including to broken processes. This doesn’t mean giving everyone equal say and airtime, but it does require understanding that progressive movements succeed when there is some push-pull on both strategy and ideology. At their best (which is hard to achieve!), the maximalists and radicals can prevent progressive politics from stagnating and leaving behind those with less power; by staking out a farther-left position, they can make the standard left-liberal one seem more reasonable and therefore make it more achievable; they can push broader public opinion leftward. And work-within-the-system liberals can take progressives tangibly closer to where we want to be.
This lesson is true of political coalitions, too. Understanding both Democratic and Republican voters are part of a broader ecosystem of beliefs and strategies—rather than concluding that, say, all Trump voters are motivated by a singular kind of bigotry, even if yes, a lot of Trump voters are motivated by various bigotries—can help Democrats peel off the voters who aren’t crazy extremists. And it can help to push back against claims that Trump’s win also earned him a mandate.
Lesson Six: Everything does not have to be about everything.
One of the more bizarre dynamics to emerge during the anti-Trump resistance—one that exploded during the Biden years—was a sense that progressive organizations and even workplaces and various nonpolitical institutions must take a stand on whatever problem the loudest activists demanded be addressed. This is how you got local theater groups and funds meant to provide abortions for poor women in the South having meltdowns over how to correctly address Israel’s war in Gaza—an issue of great importance, but not one that falls within the obvious mission of most U.S. organizations and institutions. Within progressive spaces there are going to be disagreements over various policy issues, and it’s wise to let, for example, pro-choice women organize for abortion rights in conservative states without also requiring they fall in line on even a very urgent (but very much not directly related to abortion access in conservative U.S. states) foreign policy issue, even if one can make the case that these things are both feminist issues or even reproductive rights issues.The ”everything is about everything” view of activism isn’t just unnecessarily alienating—it’s exhausting, and it can destroy the ability to effectively organize. As we’re seeing now, with the Trump White House strategy of “flooding the zone” with so much bad stuff the average person cannot keep up, expecting everyone to care about everything everywhere all at once is simply not tenable. Going forward, progressives may be better off if we individually pick a small handful of issues we care about most and really dig in: following them closely, cultivating some expertise, contacting our political representatives about them, donating money, and spending our time on them. The other option—being a political dilettante who tries to keep up with an intentionally discombobulating barrage of actions—is a recipe for overwhelm, which is in turn a recipe for inaction. And that is exactly what this Trump administration is hoping for.
That doesn’t mean that any given individual can’t focus on, for example, Gaza and abortion as two of their top issues. It is to say that time may not be best spent, say, insisting that every abortion rights organization take a position on Gaza, any more than it would be all that productive to demand that Palestinian human rights groups issue statements of support for abortion rights in America. On the other hand, it is perfectly possible to pair issues together when it comes to critiquing the other side. It would be a great use of time to focus on the Trump administration’s horrific cuts to foreign aid, including to basic reproductive health care for women overseas and to Palestinians broadly, when their entire territory has been leveled and they desperately need help rebuilding from a war America underwrote.
It is one thing to understand how a matrix of identity categories shapes different people’s experiences, the basic principle underlying the concept of intersectionality. An abortion fund for women in conservative states is going to be serving a population that is disproportionately Black and poor; understanding the complex needs of that population is crucial for their work, and those needs won’t be understood if volunteers and donors see barriers to abortion access through the lens of white upper-class women. It’s another, though, to insist that every progressive cause must also be about or at least address every other progressive cause, even if oppression is an overarching theme.
Lesson Seven: Work your advantage.
One thing is guaranteed: Trump and MAGA will overplay their hand. Doing so will unleash extreme suffering; a lot of people, from those deprived of basic health care to those deported to places where their lives are at risk, may not make it through the Trump years. It is hard to overstate the stakes here. But there is a clear way that this will go, and that way is toward backlash. An anti-Trump resistance needs to seize that advantage.Trump is going to do a bunch of unpopular stuff. And it is true that a majority of voters cast their ballots for him, and many of them knowingly voted for his politics of cruelty. Progressives need to grapple with that reality: A lot of Americans actually want to buy what Trump is selling.
But many didn’t bother to really read the product description, and they’re going to be unhappy when they see what they’ve gotten. In the sealed media universe of the MAGA right, ranting about transgenderism and cultural Marxism and DEI is the norm, even though it’s totally illegible to average Americans, and frankly sounds insane. But cutting off federal government money for things like transportation, health care, and education? Pulling the U.S. out of the World Health Organization and functionally suspending the work of the National Institutes of Health? Ending birthright citizenship by executive decree? Yanking undocumented toddlers out of day care, ripping parents away from their U.S.-citizen kids, allowing for discrimination against women and racial minorities, and criminalizing parents who seek gender-affirming care for their trans children? This stuff, while popular among MAGA men on X, is broadly seen by normal people as monstrous, and it’s where progressives and Democrats can turn the tables, gain the upper hand, and quite literally save lives.
They’ll have the best luck if they pull in the widest swath of support possible—and if they learn from the very recent past.
I fucking doubt it. Daycares have months long wait list in most areas, and cost over $1000 per month. If illegal beanlets are in daycare, a normal person would wonder how they got there, and who's paying for it. Yet another scarce resource pushed way past the breaking point.
