How To Reverse The Tide

It's the gap between what's needed and what we have that keeps us up at night.

(Photo by Scott Olson/Getty Images)

Every now and again, a reader will ask me how we get out of all this. What’s the plan? What can I do? What should I do?

One reader posed that question to me in response to Wednesday’s newsletter, and if his note wasn’t unusually thoughtful and eloquent, I probably would’ve responded with the same thing I say to everyone else: If I knew, I would tell you. Or I would have put Off Message on hiatus months or years ago, and spent all my time executing a plan to save democracy.

But I do think it’s reasonable to expect those of us who in some sense oppose Donald Trump for a living—particularly those of us who are political critics as much as strategists, reporters, or issue advocates—to articulate what we think a resistance that meets the moment would look like. We should be able to describe a posture and set of interacting, coordinating entities that would a) give us some peace of mind, and b) make us feel galvanized to participate in a front-footed, vigorous national campaign.

This isn’t the answer I was asked to give. The question was what can people who aren’t key decision makers do to reverse the tide. And the answer is unsatisfying, because it’s the same one you’ll get everywhere: Do what JB Pritzker says. Protest peacefully, record abuses on your phone, share the videos widely. Join organized marches—if you’re a U.S. citizen, the incremental risk of protesting is minimal. You’re likelier to be hit by a falling object or trampled to death at a concert than you are to be targeted for carrying a sign, or being an Indivisible volunteer or anything else. If you’re able, and if it comes to it, engage in genuine civil disobedience, though there’s more danger there: a greater risk of arrest, assault, political harassment.

But my sense is that what costs people like us sleep at night isn’t that we aren’t doing enough. It’s that we’ve lost confidence in the people who are in positions to do more. It’s become fashionable to repeat cliches like “nobody is coming to save us,” and “we’re going to have to save each other.” We surely do need stamina and self-sufficiency, but mantras like these let people in power—people who sought power, and people who have power by dint of wealth—off the hook too easily. They should know what we expect of them.

THIS LAND IS GARLAND

If I were in a room with people like that, I’d say something along these lines:

Think back from a future in which Trump successfully establishes an American reich that immiserates the country for decades, then collapses. We have a third founding. Democracy returns to a much diminished United States. Historians are finally free to scour the archives of the fallen regime, and to assess the actions of the people who had the most power to slow or stop the authoritarian takeover. People like Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries and (before Jeffries) Nancy Pelosi. People like Pritzker and Gavin Newsom, but also people like Joe Biden and Merrick Garland and Gretchen Whitmer and John Fetterman and Tim Cook and Bill Gates and on and on.

Who would come out of that analysis looking good, and who would come out looking bad? Who would emerge as an unheralded prophet, and who would be remembered as the most Chamberlainesque appeaser?

I suspect I don’t have to spell out who’s on which track. But the point of the exercise isn’t really to name and shame—it’s to provide them all a new north star. You are actors in history, you’re writing your own epitaphs.

It’s late in the game, but defeat isn’t foreordained. There’s still time to reconceive of the challenge of resistance as taking the steps and risks that history would regard favorably.

What statement or decision will be this moment’s “peace for our time”? What will be its opposite call, “we must never surrender”? Who will be viewed retrospectively to have understood the challenge correctly? The one who said, “If you come for my people, you come through me”? Or the one who pivoted to health-care subsidies?

A thought experiment like this would hopefully spark a real brainstorm about how to reorient the party and its allied elites for coherent, national-scale resistance. Make legislative caucus leaders start conceiving of their roles more broadly. Sadly, I don’t think they’re thinking along these lines at all.

MATH OF LEAST RESISTANCE

I believe Democrats, and even some close friends of mine, tell themselves something like the opposite. Just keep swimming forward. When Trump breaks the law, sue. Protest peacefully, yes, but don’t make controversy. Ignore everyone demanding more fight in the here and now—they’re liable to push you into a “trap” that will “increase the salience” of crime and immigration. Talk about health care instead.

They also say the public doesn’t care about democracy appeals—the 2024 election proved it. This is a reductive and dubious claim, and belies a stronger one: The greatest error of the pro-democracy cause wasn’t mentioning democracy alongside other issues in the campaign—it was the decision to be blasé about Trump during the 2020 transition and then after the insurrection. To take a path of least resistance; avoid conflict; win his voters over with good policy and happy talk.

Readopting this mindset for his second presidency strikes me as unforgivably risky. But to them it’s the safest play. It’s the way to win the midterms, which will allow us to take proactive steps toward accountability.

And this is unsatisfying for one obvious reason, and several others. Even if this were a recipe for midterm success in some abstract sense, the election is over a year from now. We’ve fallen this far in less than nine months. Think how much worse things will be by then.

The establishment rejoinder goes something like: Well he’s unpopular, his policies are failing, he’s still mindful of Supreme Court rulings. All true. But this, too, is unsatisfying for the same reason: Trump sits on the cusp of a year’s worth of budget autonomy, which he can abuse to subvert elections in so many ways. He may be posted juuust inside the lines of compliance with Supreme Court rulings, but a) that’s because the Supreme Court has shown him incredible solicitude; and b) Trump is a person of deep and low cunning. If your intent is to collapse the Constitution by neutralizing the Supreme Court, do you do it before or after Congress fills your Treasury accounts for a year?

Maybe they stick with this approach, nobody else sticks their neck out, and we pull through. But I would not want to gamble world history on it. It feels grim and dangerous, but in my mind the safer play is to imagine that this all gets sorted out before the midterms. How would you want those forces arrayed if he, say, invokes the Insurrection Act, effectively invalidating the Constitution? Not like this!

STRIKE A COORD

Like what, then?

Readers know I focus a lot of attention on opposition at the congressional level, which is where resistance has been most wanting. They should have withheld their votes for funding this government back in March, and when they finally took the plunge in September, it should have been as an explicit rejection of Trump’s lawlessness.

I suspect a congressional leadership that takes a broader view of its role in a moment like this—not merely to protect frontline members and grow the majority, but to rally the country in opposition—is a predicate for a sufficient national resistance.

Then, making it actually sufficient would require more coordination.

I’d want all elements of resistance—liberal leaders, deep-pocketed democracy defenders, protest organizers, labor-union leaders, Dem party committee heads—to be more formally linked, and committed to mutual defense. They should expect that this administration will start picking them off one by one, starting with the most unsympathetic parties. To the extent they can consolidate their atomized efforts into a much smaller number of entities, they’ll be better situated to resist investigations, raids, harassment.

I’d want someone from within this realm to communicate with the public clearly, in a signal moment—like an Oval Office address, but for an avatar of the out-party—to tell the country that history is repeating itself. Whatever we’ve said, or whatever you’ve heard or think you’ve heard about democracy, this is not hyperbole, and it isn’t about an election. It’s about what we do right now to stop our descent into the horrors we were raised to fight. Barack Obama would be the natural choice, but (no joke, I can’t believe this is our reality) it’d be better if George W. Bush joined him.

I’d want labor leaders prepared to lead citizens in mass work stoppages. I’d want governors like Pritzker and Newsom ready to lead blue-state citizens in a mass tax protest.

And, in an ultimate showdown, I’d want a color-revolution-like presence arrayed around the White House night and day indefinitely, until the regime fell.

If our posture looked more like that, or if I thought we were building toward it, I’d sleep much better. Is that all fantasy? I don’t think so! Logistically speaking, I don’t even think it’d be that hard to put together. But I am not interpersonally or professionally close with the people whose buy-in would be required to organize and sustain it. And to the extent that they’re not bought in already, our first task is to make them so.