The Defiant Resistance Speech An American Should Have Given

There's power waiting to be claimed by an ambitious political figure who makes this his or her cause.

(Photo by Julia Demaree Nikhinson - Pool/Getty Images)

Reflecting on the past year in history conjures many searing memories, most of them bad.

I can remember sign posts we’ve passed along the road to dictatorship, and several acts of worthy resistance—mostly undertaken by regular people, some by liberal elites.

But of all the words spoken in opposition to, or aghast at what’s happening in the United States, only one set of remarks has rattled in my head day after day, for going on a month now.

We are under attack from outside. We are under attack from enemies of democracy. We need to recognize this.… When propagandists from authoritarian regimes attack our public spaces and social networks with disinformation, we are under threat from outside. When authoritarian regimes come to spread their messages, we are threatened from outside. But we would be very naive not to see that from within, we are turning against ourselves….

We have allowed a democratic public space to develop where everyone is hooded and anonymous, where the rule is that you have to insult others if you want to be popular, where you don’t know, in this public space…whether you are dealing with real people or fake people, and where you give equal value to someone who shouts much louder and tells you: ‘This vaccine is not a vaccine. What you are telling me is false and spreads the worst kind of misinformation.’ We live in a public space that looks like this. How can you expect there not to be immense democratic fatigue and people increasingly heading towards nervous breakdowns? I will put it more bluntly. We have been incredibly naive in entrusting our democratic space to social networks that are controlled either by large American entrepreneurs or large Chinese companies, whose interests are not at all the survival or proper functioning of our democracies….

Look at the epidemic of mental health issues and eating disorders among our teenagers and young people. It is entirely correlated with the emergence of these social networks. We have allowed public spaces to develop where everything is done to prevent reason, since, ultimately, the order of merit is that emotion is superior to argument and that negative emotion is superior to positive emotion. This is a complete bias towards our democracies going to extremes, towards noise and fury prevailing over reasoned argument, towards music quickly disappearing to make way for shouting, and towards algorithms designed to promote cognitive excitement, overreaction, and the volume of what we like or dislike, again favoring extremes, because at the heart of these models is the monetization of your presence in order to sell it to advertisers.

We did not design our democracies for this. We are a long way from the democratic agora of antiquity. And so, if we Europeans do not wake up and say, ‘We want to take back control of our democracies,’ I can tell you this: within 10 years, all those who are playing on or with this [digital] infrastructure will have won. And we will be a continent, like many others, of conspiracy theorists, extremists, noise and fury. If we believe in democratic order, let us put science and knowledge back at the heart of things, let us put scientific authority back at the heart of things, let us put culture, education and learning back at the heart of things, let us protect our teenagers and young people from these social networks, let us give these social networks rules so that they have, in a way, the same rules as those of the democratic space, meaning that there are no hidden people, meaning that there are no fake accounts creating false excitement. And let us enforce the same rules. When you have a newspaper, you are responsible for what is published in it. When you have a social network, you must be responsible for what is published on it. Otherwise, racism, anti-Semitism and hatred of others will triumph on our continent. We have the means to rebuild a 21st-century democracy. We just need to take that leap. It’s up to us to do it.

You’ll notice from the text that this isn’t an internal critique. It’s from a speech Emmanuel Macron delivered in Germany a few weeks ago.

I found it striking for many reasons, including because of who delivered it and where—and because it is true, urgent, and conservative in the only remaining laudatory sense of the word. Also: because I can’t recall anybody of stature and ambition in the United States saying anything remotely this clarion.

The closest contender would be Joe Biden, who echoed Dwight Eisenhower in his own farewell address: “an oligarchy is taking shape in America of extreme wealth, power, and influence that literally threatens our entire democracy, our basic rights and freedoms, and a fair shot for everyone to get ahead…. President Eisenhower spoke of the dangers of the military-industrial complex. He warned us then about, and I quote, ‘the potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power….’ Six decades later, I’m equally concerned about the potential rise of a tech-industrial complex that could pose real dangers for our country as well.”

It’s odd, because a critique and warning and campaign along the lines Macron drew—about the dangers of American technological elites; their alliance with fascists and conspiracy theorists; and their product suite of social media nicotine, speculative cryptocurrency instruments, and invasive artificial intelligence—would be well received. Whoever delivered it would get a lot of mileage, its prescience would serve as a renewable source of political energy.

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Every now and again a political figure catches lightning in a bottle and becomes empowered. Their envious peers line up behind them to grasp for the same lightning, but mostly come up empty.

The problem is that most politicians have nowhere to go. The illuminated paths to advancement lead nowhere.

In Donald Trump’s first term there was Sally Yates, and Michael Avenatti (LOL) and a series of lesser resistance heroes. And then there was Adam Schiff.

It’s been lost to history, because Republicans acquitted Donald Trump, and because of everything that’s happened since. But Schiff also caught lightning in a bottle when he rose to the occasion in 2019 and 2020 as House Democrats’ first impeachment manager.

By the end of the process, Schiff was a household name, with a social-media follower count in the millions—mostly comprising grateful liberals.

The writer Jonathan Chait gushed, “As a feat of political rhetoric I have never seen anything close to what Schiff has done in the impeachment trial,” and it wasn’t really an exaggeration. It was understood, correctly, as a remarkable feat of persuasion that Schiff convinced Mitt Romney, a member of Trump’s party, to vote for Trump’s conviction.

On a different timeline—if Democrats had been positioned to impeach Trump a year earlier, or if Trump had won re-election in 2020, Schiff would have become a formidable presidential candidate. But by January of 2020, the Democratic primary was already almost over. Joe Biden beat Trump several months later, and by 2024 memories had faded and circumstances foreclosed such a candidacy.

Schiff did parlay his prophetic warnings into a promotion. He now represents California as a senator, and so among his other liabilities, he is at least somewhat solicitous of big tech. He voted for the GENIUS Act and says he’s “proud” of “what’s come out of…the Silicon valley, home to some of the most incredible tech innovation.” He could not credibly deliver an American version of Macron’s cri de cœur. His moment of glory, as most such moments in politics, was poorly timed. The lightning discharged and vanished quickly.

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Barack Obama serves as an exception.

When he became a national figure, he carried none of the baggage of the Washington Democratic establishment, and managed to distinguish himself from it with prescience of his own. In 2002, as an Illinois state senator, he articulated a view that almost every ambitious national Democrat would eventually regret not having adopted on their own. “I don’t oppose all wars,” he said. “And I know that in this crowd today, there is no shortage of patriots, or of patriotism. What I am opposed to is a dumb war. What I am opposed to is a rash war. What I am opposed to is the cynical attempt by Richard Perle and Paul Wolfowitz and other armchair, weekend warriors in this administration to shove their own ideological agendas down our throats, irrespective of the costs in lives lost and in hardships borne.”

State senators don’t make nightly national news, so this was less like catching lightning in a bottle than like sowing and reaping a harvest.

Obama was fortunate to rise at a time when the Democratic establishment was still grappling with its shortsighted Iraq war bandwagoning, and progressives’ main litmus test was consistent war opposition, rather than anything pertaining to social welfare. Everyone left to center and even well beyond was willing to give Obama a close look.

Democrats today don’t necessarily need a Barack Obama-like figure to help them flush old memories and reset the party’s image. Joe Biden certainly didn’t do that for the party in 2020, and he won that election handily. By 2028, someone similarly uninspired may well be able to win the presidency, just as Hillary Clinton would probably have won the 2008 election if she’d managed to defeat Obama for the nomination.

But they could really use one! Someone who could see around corners and speak prophetically. Someone who was brave where party leaders have been craven. Someone unassociated with their failures.

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Right now, most of the energy in the pro-democracy movement is bound up in fighting Trump. If you ask Democratic voters who they favor to lead the party into the next presidential election, they’ll frequently name figures they couldn’t have known much about until a few months ago.

It’s not just people who’ve had universal name recognition for many years, like Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio Cortez and Pete Buttigieg, it’s also statewide leaders like Gavin Newsom and JB Pritzker.

But the distinction between them all, on this score, isn’t super sharp. It’s not like the lead up to the Iraq war, when all Democrats had a moment of choosing, yes or no. Everybody in Democratic politics opposes Trump, they just disagree as to tactics.

Of all these contenders, Sanders has by far the greatest claim to prescience, in his old and oft-repeated warnings about the dangers of wealth concentration and deregulated elections, the risk that inequality would beget oligarchy and crush political freedom. He has been vindicated both tragically and spectacularly.

But Sanders is 84 years old. And his critique is ultimately more of economic injustice than of the social, cultural, and psychological impacts of the “innovations” the oligarchs are foisting on society. If power can be wrested back from them, there will need to be a re-leveling of economic and democratic power. But I suspect the loudest clamor will be to save us from the poisons we’ve ingested or been force-fed.

That’s ultimately the question propelling this essay: What will we, the public, be clamoring for new leaders to do? What will be “end the Iraq war,” but for 2029?

Obviously we can’t know. It may ultimately stem from events that haven’t happened yet. But if I had to bet, I’d bet on this.