The Backlash Has Begun
Nationwide protests yesterday show a growing outrage over Trump 2.0.
NPR (“Nationwide ‘Hands Off!’ protests erupt against Trump and Musk“):
Demonstrators gathered across the country on Saturday, many animated by differing issues, but united in opposition to the Trump administration with the single message: “Hands off!”
Organizers said more than 1,300 “Hands Off!” rallies of varying sizes took place on Saturday.
Since President Trump took office in January, various protests have taken place against his administration’s plans and policies — from the mass firing of federal workers to immigration raids to the involvement of billionaire Elon Musk in the federal government.
Saturday’s protests appeared to be the most widespread to date of Trump’s second term.
“There are so many issues,” said Kelley Laird from Rockville, Md., who attended a rally in Washington, D.C., on Saturday. “They’re coming after education, coming after health care, coming after the arts, coming after the press.”
In Boston, protesters gathered to push back against the federal cuts on research and against the arrest of Rümeysa Öztürk, a Tufts University doctoral student who was arrested by federal agents in plain clothes, as member station WBUR reported.
In Sylva, N.C., over 300 people came together to oppose cuts to national parks, education and veteran services, according to BPR News. And in Portland, Ore., several thousand people rallied against what they describe as an “illegal, billionaire power grab” by Trump and Musk, OPB reported.
In D.C., thousands filled the grass near the Washington Monument, holding up signs supporting reproductive rights, LGBTQ rights, Social Security, veterans benefits, and opposing tariffs.
Laird and her neighbors said they formed a group chat after Trump took office this year. They use the group chat, named “Sisters of the resistance,” to coordinate attending protests together and offer support.
“We need to form community to bolster each other up because we have to be in this for the long run,” said Emily Peck, who started the group chat.
Many attendees who spoke to NPR said they felt compelled to show up, because new concerns keep emerging.
“This is first time that I am trying to regularly participate,” said Patty Kim, a retired federal worker, who attended the D.C. rally with her husband. “I felt so frustrated and paralyzed by the bunch of things that are going on that undermine human rights and humanity in this country that I love, that I had to do something.”
Mother Jones‘ Tim Murphy writes, “You Can Stop Asking Where the Mass Opposition Is. It’s Everywhere.”
It is a cliche to begin a story about a rally with a quote from a funny sign, but one small piece of floppy brown cardboard floating down 40th Street in Manhattan on Saturday seemed to capture the mood of this weekend’s “Hands Off” protests against President Donald Trump: “Where do I start?”
You could meet a dozen people and hear at least a dozen different existential threats. Hands off Social Security. Hands off public health grants. Hands off student visas. Hands off women. Hands off trans people. Hands off our tax dollars. Hands off Greenland. Hands off books. Hands off 401ks. Hands off immigrants. Hands off Mahmoud Khalil. Hands off grocery prices. Hands off unions. I even talked to a woman clutching a sign that said “Hands off Libby”—the popular e-reader for public library systems which is now in jeopardy thanks to massive cuts to the federal Institute of Museum and Library Services.
This barrage of grievances offered a snapshot of the new Trump administration’s multi-front war on modernity. But it also got at something essential about the current anti-Trump movement. People weren’t taking action just to protest what the president and his movement represented, but because of visceral fear—real fear—of what he had already done, and that once impossible things were now very much possible. People had lived through a Trump administration before. They were taking to the streets now, in part, because they had not lived through this.
[…]
I spent a lot of time at anti-Trump demonstrations eight years ago, and the aesthetics now are, in a lot of ways, pretty similar to what they were back then. Saturday’s rallies were organized, in part, by Indivisible, the ur-Resistance group of the first Trump administration that grew from a Google Doc into a nationwide network. Cardboard signs displayed straight-from-social media nicknames (Cheeto, Muskrat, etc.) and droll complaints (“I’ve seen better cabinets at Ikea”). Attendees leaned white and boomer. I even saw a few pussy hats.
But if the crowd was similar, marchers I spoke with were responding to a threat they considered considerably more dangerous than the first time around. Trump 1.0 was chaotic and mean and ultimately quite destructive, but it was also—in hindsight—a shell of what it could have been. The administration was filled with a lot of weird guys with short attention spans. “Infrastructure week” became a punchline because it never really happened. But this time around, protestors were stunned by the speed of Trump and Musk’s demolition.
The Atlantic‘s Elaine Godfrey is more muted in “The Cardboard-Carrying Opposition Arrives.”
The opposition arrived in a flurry of painted cardboard.
Until this week, the 11th of Donald Trump’s second presidency, the resistance has not exactly been uppercase R. Any show of dissent by Democratic leadership has been virtually nonexistent, and protests against Trump’s policies have been small and sporadic. Citizen frustration with the new administration has registered nationally as little more than a distant rumble.
Today’s “Hands Off” protest, organized by a coalition of left-wing groups, was an attempt to raise the volume.
[…]
In interviews with some of those gathered today on the National Mall, demonstrators told me that they were under no illusion that Trump or Elon Musk would be much swayed by their anger or creative signage. The point, they said, was to show the rest of America that the opposition exists—and is widespread. “This is not for them,” Gina King, a retired teacher from New York City, told me. “This is for us.”
Her colleague Gal Beckerman declares, “Protest in Trump 2.0 Looks Different.” Writing before the event, he observed:
Today, a coalition of liberal groups under the banner “Hands Off!” is planning hundreds of such actions around the country. This is the kind of activity that has led members of Harvard’s Crowd Counting Consortium, which tracks acts of civil dissent, to conclude recently that the resistance is “alive and well,” with protests “far more numerous and frequent than skeptics might suggest.”
[…]
What this suggests, at best, is a different model of protest movement: highly decentralized, moving at a snail’s pace, more a slog than a resistance. “Something is happening,” the journalist Ali Velshi wrote on MSNBC last week, “a different kind of movement building right now, one that has had steady and sustained momentum.” In The Bulwark, Jonathan V. Last emphasized the strategic advantage of a movement that makes its way from the hinterlands toward Washington.
It is different, but is it better? Is a single protest of 100,000 people equal to 1,000 actions with 100 people at each? I posed this zen koan of a question to Erica Chenoweth, a Harvard professor and Consortium co-director who coined the idea that if any protest movement drew 3.5 percent of a country’s population, it could achieve its goals. (That would equal nearly 12 million people in the United States today.) Does it matter how you get to this figure, all at once or bit by bit? “We don’t really know,” Chenoweth told me, “and conceivably either path produces momentum.”
So far into Trump 2.0, though, the path of decentralized slowness has had a paradoxical effect: It’s giving activists lots to do but is leaving a much larger population of dissenters without an expressive outlet. What makes a disaffected Gen Zer or a busy Millennial parent drop what they are doing and head into the streets is very different from what motivates hard-core protesters to pick up their cymbals. That much larger group needs to feel both the safety and the collective impact that comes with a mass march. “Power springs up between men when they act together and vanishes the moment they disperse,” the philosopher Hannah Arendt wrote in The Human Condition. Most people join protests to express that power, not to emphasize their marginality. And it is precisely this type of action that, in the face of one barrier after another, feels more difficult than it ever did.
Trump’s first term was punctuated by a series of monster gatherings: the Women’s March that greeted his inauguration (estimated at as many as 4.6 million people all over the country), the March for Our Lives following the 2018 Parkland shooting (1.2 million), and—dwarfing all previous American protest movements—the Black Lives Matter demonstrations after the killing of George Floyd (anywhere from 15 million to 26 million people, according to polls taken at the time). The Women’s March was highly organized and concentrated, while the protests in June 2020 were largely spontaneous and spread out. But what made all of these significant was the measure by which protest has long been judged: the overwhelming numbers of people who took part.
The BLM protests certainly seemed impactful at the time, drawing sustained attention to longstanding problems. Yet, here we are years later and we’re almost certainly in a much darker place in American race relations than we were the day before George Floyd’s murder.
On Day 1 of his new term, President Trump signed an Executive Order titled “Ending Radical And Wasteful Government DEI Programs And Preferencing.” The next day, he signed another “Ending Illegal Discrimination and Restoring Merit-Based Opportunity.” A few days later, yet another “Restoring America’s Fighting Force,” that targeted, among other things, DEI programs in the Defense Department. He fired the second Black Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff because, obviously, he was a “DEI hire.” He was, after all, Black. QED.
That people are outraged about this and other outrages is all well and good. But I tend to be skeptical of movements that are organized against things rather than for them.
Right now, these protests are easy to dismiss. One imagines 99% of them supported Kamala Harris in the last election and, indeed, have never supported a Republican President. Trump certainly doessn’t care what they think. Ditto most Congressional Republicans and Republican-appointed judges.
We may be close to a tipping point, though. There are strong hints that DOGE is going to start hitting programs popular with Trump voters, including Social Security and Medicare. And the tariffs sure look like they’re about the wreck the economy and put a lot of folks to work. Which will really put a strain on their ability to buy eggs.
It has not yet materialized, though. Looking at the latest polls that provide breakdowns, Republicans still overwhelmingly support Trump’s actions.
The Reuters/Ipsos poll conducted March 31-April 2 shows 70% saying we’re on the Right Track overall, with 49% strongly approving of his job performance and 35% somewhat approving. Still, only 47% think we’re on the right track on cost of living and only 48% on inflation. Those are the only issues where his approval numbers aren’t really high among self-identified Republicans—and even there, the bulk on non-supporters are in the Don’t Know rather Wrong Track camp.
The Economist/YouGov poll (March 30-April 1) is harder to read, since it does the breakdowns the other way: showing which percentage of the responses come from the party rather than vice versa. Still, it’s clear that Republicans overwhelming support the direction in which things are going.
More weirdly, Trump is actually considerably more popular with the country now than he was at any point in his first term.
Indeed, he’s only just finally moved back underwater—a condition he was in all but the first couple of days of his first administration. Like it or not, Joe Biden was considerably less popular much of his term.
Again, though, an economic collapse and/or targeting of popular middle class entitlements could change all of this in a heartbeat. Whether that will finally be enough to get Congressional Republicans to stand up to him is another question altogether.
Until it personally impacts the Maggots that elected him, they won’t care. One missed social security payment will do it. Mess with a Boomer’s money…
Haven’t seen a crowd like that since the NYC Iraq War protest. Which also accomplished nothing.
Like it or not, Biden was considerably more popular than Trump this many days into his term. On Apr. 6, 2021, Biden had a +14.6 approval on RCP. It’s -2.1 for Trump now.
I have never heard of an analysis that compares a president’s approval during his honeymoon period to another president’s approval outside of that period. Trump’s honeymoon is pathetic to a historic degree. But this fact has been woefully unreported by the media, who fall over themselves to grade Trump on a curve like no other president.
@Mike:
Nah, the people like my in laws could be eating cat food and still blame the Democrats.
I’m kinda Blasé about these protests. I mean they are better than nothing and probably a good start, but they took place on a Saturday with what looks to be decent weather. When this gets to be sustained, especially once the violence starts, then we’ll get some where.
This is easy enough for Trump to ignore for now. He was golfing through this and didn’t care. This kinda thing needs to be happening around his golf games to piss him off.
I think everything he was doing before the tariffs was largely popular on the right, especially since a lot fo the consequences are delayed. Trump supporters think all govt workers are lazy so the way the firings were incompetently and harshly handed are a positive for them. Getting rid of DEI, including removing the pictures of every black person and woman doing important stuff in the past is a positive as only white men did the good stuff. Now, even some of the right realize that tariffs are going to hurt them financially. Still, the majority can look within their bubble and find the crackpots like Cass and Navarro telling them it will work out and of course the leader of the cult (of personality) is telling them they will be rich now.
As an aside the Cass person is sort of interesting. AFAICT he has never had a real job in his life. He went from academia straight into politics. Has a BA in economic policy and a JD but has declared himself chief economist of the think tank he runs. Guy is full of ideas and theories he just wants to try out, convinced he is the smartest guy in the world.
Steve
Need to protest the Heritage Foundation and enablers for their implementation of the Hungary playbook.
This isn’t just stupidity at work, or just stooges in control. One layer down is a plan to destroy the liberal institutions that would thwart autocratic rule. Corrosion, corruption of key institutions, and fear are breaking the guardrails.
Backlash. It’s an interesting framing that casts protestors as mere reactionaries. It also quietly assigns all the vision and initiative to one side, and casts the other as merely resistant, stuck, or afraid.
To be sure, there is plenty to react to. To resist. To be fearful of.
But if you look closer, these aren’t just protests, aren’t just responses — they’re assertions. People are showing up not just because they’re upset, but because they’re trying to defend and reaffirm something. They’re marching for things they believe in: fairness, dignity, inclusion, the rule of law.
It’s not merely passive resistance — it’s active participation in shaping what kind of country they want.
And the amazing thing is, these two things–protest and march–can co-occur. Did co-occur. Hopefully will continue to co-occur.
@Beth: I believe it was raining and cold in NYC when they had a 20 block protest. And it was sunny but cold and very windy in the Twin Cities for both the #TeslaTakedown I was at and the HandsOff protest at the state capitol.
As for sustained protests, the #TeslaTakedown protest started in mid-february in Minnesota! My son has been at every one at Golden Valley and my wife and I have been at every one except when we were out of the country. The size of the protests have been growing each week (not counting this Saturday as so many people at the Hands Off protest) and the number of locations where people are protesting has grown from 1 to 4 in the Twin Cities.
Heck, we even had two counter protesters at our protest yesterday at the Tesla dealership in Golden Valley, MN.
@Beth:
Yep. The most effective protest so far was the guy right here in Vegas who torched some Teslas. (Well, him and Luigi Mangione.).
Of course violence bad.
I seriously wonder what would happen if both House and Senate Republicans joined with Democrats to strip away Trump’s ’emergency’ pretext for bypassing Congress in order to lay in these tariffs?
Let’s say it happens, and Congress says to Trump, ‘you want tariffs, it’s gotta go through us.’ How many Republicans would STILL give Trump what he wants? I don’t know but, I think that such a dramatic action by Congress would probably save middle class America’s retirement accounts and investment portfolios, and in so doing, save the GOP’s sorry ass in the midterms.
Look it’s early, the midterms are light years away, and Trump never backs down but …
@Mimai:
In reading the OP article, it occurred to me that the biggest obstacle to getting widespread active resistance to Trumpism is that the people who elected him are from a culture that abhors protest. Marching for causes is something hippy libtard commies do, not something upstanding law-abiding normal people do. Trump’s blue-collar white male base is both emotionally and intellectually ill-equipped to resist authority, even in their own defense.
Unfortunately, as long as the protests are all by people Trump already considered Enemies of the People on inauguration day, they will have no substantive effect. We need to identify substantial blocs of Trump voters who can be mobilized in their own defense; they might come as a group, but they won’t activate individually. Any suggestions?
@Michael Reynolds: Have to disagree. The #TeslaTakedown protests have helped crater the brand image of Tesla worldwide, causing falling Tesla sales and a falling Tesla stock. This is putting pressure on Musk that ended up with him nearly crying about how unfair that Gov. Tim Walz was happily pointing out the fall in Tesla’s stock.
Be kind of karmic for Trump’s Tariffs to crater the market further so that Musk faces a margin call.
@DrDaveT: The pictures of the Hands Off protests yesterday at The Villages!!! really surprised me. It may be that the threats to Social Security/Medicaid/Medicare plus the market crash are starting to reach some of these folks.
https://bsky.app/profile/mollyploofkins.bsky.social/post/3lm3nj5qew227
@DrDaveT:
At this point all these national rallies accomplish is to encourage Democrats. We need, in effect, outside agitators to work within localities to protest specific policy issues. Farmers who can’t sell soybeans, for example. The MAGAts won’t be part of anything national, they’ll have to be brought along, issue by issue. And the protests should be against Musk, their local Congresspeople, and then Trump. The local Congressperson/Senator is the more important target if Musk moves out of the picture. But these local protests should not be confined to R+5 or R+10, we need action in the R+30 districts, too, not for the win, but as a launchpad for widening out from the initiating issue.
Build from local and specific. Establish a MAGA-lite demo willing to at least consider that Trump is the problem. We don’t need MAGAts to join us, we just need to diminish their enthusiasm and raise their doubts.
At the national level craft ethics legislation. Nothing extraneous, just ethics in government, a bill so short it would fit on a flash card, a bill so short and to the point that every Democrat who gets near a camera should be able to spout it verbatim.
Then win the House in 2026. Haven’t looked at the Senate map yet.
A while back I saw part of an interview with Trump from 1987 on Larry King, and what struck me is how little his basic worldview has changed in 40 some years. Commenting on both the trade deficit and federal budget deficit, he stated that the US was getting taken advantage of by other countries because its leaders were stupid.
Trump’s conception of deal-making has always been zero sum: there’s always a winner and a loser, and the goal is to make sure you’re not the loser, which means every deal comes down to who successfully tricks whom. The notion of mutually beneficial agreements, an absolutely essential component of international relations, is totally alien to his thinking. That’s because he views everything through the lens of what he’s always been, a con artist.
The result is that whenever he’s not in power, he says US leaders have become the marks, and when he’s in power, he says he’s made everyone else into marks. He never explains why this is so, it’s all just a simple matter of putting one’s faith in him as the master dealmaker. In reality, this makes him into the ultimate mark, because world leaders are not, as a rule, quite as naive as the people who purchased Trump Wine or enrolled in Trump University.
That’s what makes the cognitive dissonance of his supporters so easy. While there has long been a contingent on the right that has been skeptical of free trade (Pat Buchanan being one notable example), the level of tariff-making he’s engaging in now has essentially no precedent in any version of conservative or right-wing ideology prior to Trump’s entry into politics. It’s true that Republicans in the early 20th century tended to support tariffs. But that was before the rise of the modern global economy, and for conservatives eager to shift blame for the Great Depression away from the laissez-faire policies of the Republican presidents of the 1920s, Smoot-Hawley has long been one of their prime targets.
Trump’s backers have for years been trying to cast Trump’s approach as part of some kind of neo-isolationism (Bannon calls it “economic nationalism”) where tariffs are a tool for pounding other countries into submission, in what amounts essentially to a game of chicken that Trump is presumed to excel in. In MAGA-world it’s a game Trump can never lose, since the entire cult is built on the premise that Trump never loses. Anything bad that happens (anything bad enough for them to notice or care about, that is) is someone else’s fault, whether it be Biden or the Deep State or even a member of Trump’s inner circle (which is the closest they ever get to criticizing Trump himself). When reality is defined around one man’s infallibility, the capacity to restructure their thinking has no limits.
I keep coming back to the question: what does it mean for a protest or march to be effective?
Some of my research involves designing and executing clinical trials. Thus, I can’t help but think of protest/march as a kind of intervention.
If that’s the case, then what’s our primary outcome? Policy change? A measurable shift in public opinion? Voter turnout in the next cycle? And what’s the time frame — weeks, months, decades?
And even deeper: what’s the mechanism? Is it about changing minds? Energizing supporters? Signaling collective resolve? Drawing media attention? Reframing the narrative?
We often debate whether a particular protest was “effective,” but rarely specify what the intervention was meant to do. What is our implicit theory of protest/march?
Without an explicitly defined outcome measure(s) and theory of change, it’s easy to default to vibes — either “it felt powerful” or “nothing changed.”
I just want to add this about #TeslaTakedown to respond to Mimai. The BIGGEST Tesla bull/defender, Dan Ives, has just released a new report on Tesla and cut his price target for the stock from $550 to $315.
“.. the brand crisis tornado that has now turned into an F5 tornado. We now estimate Tesla has lost/destroyed at least 10% of its future customer base .. and this could be a conservative estimate.”
He is estimating 20% loss of customers in the EU.
This, plus the stock price, are the markers of these protests’ successes.
https://bsky.app/profile/carlquintanilla.bsky.social/post/3lm5vk6emmc2a
@al Ameda: Last I paid attention to the issue, April 3 (IIRC), the Senate has already proposed rolling back Trump’s tariffs and the Speaker of the House has pledged that the House will refuse to consider it. As always, happy to be cited as wrong on this issue.
@Daryl:
@Kylopod:
RCP made a very lawyerly statement, true, but misleading. The Iraq war protests were woefully underreported by an MSM wrapped up in the drumbeat for war. And yesterday’s protests are reported, but not in proportion to their size and ubiquity. Maybe we need some drums and tricorns. Or maybe Soros could hire some PR flacks from Americans for Prosperity (sic).
I’ve also been thinking about protest/march not just as an intervention, but as a signal — not necessarily to change the minds of hardened Trump supporters, but to move the people who are movable.*
There’s good evidence from behavioral science (eg, campaigns to reduce household water or electricity use) that people adjust their behavior when they learn what others around them are doing. It’s not persuasion — it’s norm calibration.
Protests/marches, in that sense, might function less like a direct argument and more like a public display of how many people care, and how intensely. That can shift the perception of what’s mainstream, what’s at stake, and what’s acceptable to question.
So maybe the mechanism isn’t “conversion” so much as contagion. Not about flipping the other side, but nudging the unsure, softening the leaners, and emboldening the quietly concerned.
*To be clear, I do in fact believe (based on human psychology) and know (based on interpersonal experience) that there are movable people who voted for Trump.
@DrDaveT:
Probably. The post notes that “several thousand” protesters gathered in Portland, OR, for the Hands Off event. Sadly, Portland is already famous for torching downtown during BLM and had ~340,000 of its citizens vote for Harris compared to ~85,000 for Trump. It’s not likely that protests in Portland will create much of a groundswell.
I would suggest that LIV cancelling at Pumpkin Ridge would have more of an impact, but Pumpkin Ridge isn’t prestigious enough to attract an LIV match anymore. Even Trump courses only got one this year–at Doral, where he’s spending the weekend.
@gVOR10: @Daryl:
@Kylopod:
News media have limited resources and a strong preference for clickbait. Trump supplies clickbait, as do Musk and RFK Jr. Then, after the Trump/Musk/Wormbrain news comes the human interest stories that also draw clicks. 90% of media time/space is thus engaged, leaving maybe 10% for ‘us.’
This is why it urgent to craft a message and try at least to impose some message discipline. If you see a picture of a protest and you see signs pushing five different agendas, you got nothing but vague discontent. That same protest, all behind one attractive message, is a different animal. Corruption and Billionaires would be my choice, because Trump will not stop being corrupt and he won’t stop favoring billionaires.
Trump has betrayed his faithful voters by siding with the billionaires and lining his own pockets. It’s not that MAGAts were wrong, you see, they were right but then they were betrayed.
I’d like to see think pieces showing tariff effects on individuals. Joe’s plumbing, put out of business, his kids have to drop out of college. That kind of thing. And the first person who starts in with ‘this is even worse for [minority]’ gets a punch in the nose.
@Just nutha ignint cracker:
Oh, you’re exactly right, but if the freefall persists, and the DJIA goes to say 30,000, or some thing like that, even hapless Mike Johnson might find himself being chased down the corridors of the Capitol by a few Republican legislators
@Michael Reynolds:
YES YES YES.
This has been bothering me for a while now. Many people are upset and angry, but it’s incredibly fractured anger. That is very, very hard to work with to develop any kind of messaging strategy, and it given the Democratic propensity to get bogged down in details, it could end up being a big big problem in the midterms.
I’ll also say that I do not think violence is a good idea. This cast of characters seems really, really ready to declare martial law.
@al Ameda: I misunderstood your point. By the time that the Dow drops another 8 or so thousand points, it’s possible that the tariffs will have already done all the damage they’re going to do. Granted, wrecking the US economy (with the accompanying global impact) in 30 or so days will be a remarkable feat. But this is Murka we talkin bout. We’ve done this bad during my lifetime.
@Michael Reynolds: @Jen: The “Hands Off” slogan (I keep thinking “Hands Off Across America”) is a pretty good first step. Frankly, it’s a more cohesive message than the first-term resistance movement at this stage.
Of course, there is always some level of vagueness to social and political movements.
@Mimai:
I have a similar view of the word “radical”. Ex.: to me the term “radical right” is an oxymoron. Not the literary kind.
@Kylopod:
Required for the territory. The more planks to an agenda, the narrower the pool of potential allies.
From James’ OP:
I believe it a mistake to conflate positive polling with Republican support for Trump’s actions.
First, Republicans don’t generally know what Trump’s actions are or what the effects of those actions are right now, let alone into the near future. If they are paying attention at all, they are getting their news from Fox, OAN, or Newsmax. Any negative effects are being downplayed and the vague message that Trump is great and wise is all they are hearing. Rank & file Republicans don’t know what Trump’s actions are.
Second, to the extent that they can see the impacts of Trump’s actions, they aren’t (as @Beth notes) ready yet to abandon their tribal loyalty and find fault with Dear Leader and his party. For many, they would rather sink with their GOP then admit error. Rank & file Republicans still think Trump is “winning” and that’s what they want.
It’s going to take a lot more real world troubles and protest to shake people of their misinformation and partisanship. The Hands Off protests are a good start, but they can’t be a one-off.
@Kylopod: @Jen:
Disagree. Hands off what? I don’t have an answer, neither does anyone else, it’s a catchall that takes ‘vague’ to new heights or depths. A message is ‘jobs,’ or ‘inflation’ or ‘crime,’ or ‘peace,’ or ‘corruption.’ (Or, ‘woke,’ or ‘DEI,’ or ‘immigration.’)
In order for a message to work coming from a diverse party, various constituencies need to lay back. Pushing ten issues is pushing nothing. You sell Häagen-Dazs, you don’t sell the family of Nestlé food products.
@Michael Reynolds & @Jen:
I’m going to respectively disagree, but mostly as I would characterize what I saw in the Hands Off protests yesterday as broad rather than vague discontent.
Trump won in 2024 on a “Biden/Harris is bad” message that was deliberately unspecific about how the country was going in the wrong direction. Big and broad discontent undercuts the “Trump as a winner” messaging the GOP base is sustained by.
Specifics can come later. “Things are worse in America today” is enough now to demoralize the MAGAts.
@Kylopod: I’m not wild about “Hands off,” I’ll admit. IMHO, there needs to be a single binding element. “Hands off” lacks depth, and worse yet, it can be weaponized by the opposition. (e.g., The “nanny state” people are telling us “hands off”? Why don’t they keep their hands off our money/our land/our freedoms, etc.)
Something will surface in time, and if this works for now, fine. But I’m not sold on this as a unifying rally cry.
@Michael Reynolds:
Democracy.
@Mimai:
This is a good question. I am pondering it. I can list some criteria, but I don’t know how valid they are.
1. Attendance. Just getting people to participate is a goal. It has political weight.
2. Message. What is the message of the protest? How many people who attended can articulate that message in a brief, clear message? How many people who didn’t attend can articulate that message?
3. Political impact. How many elected officials have taken note of the proceedings? Both with approval or disapproval. Bearing in mind that bluffing is a staple for politicians, this can be hard to evaluate. The MAGA team is taking the “ignore them” route now, but are they really ignoring them? They probably need to get larger and/or more sustained to break through.
Maybe there’s more criteria.
The Occupy movement did very well on message. Maybe not as well on the other two. BLM was good on all fronts. There’s a saying, often attributed wrongly to Ghandi:
“First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.”
We are in the “then they fight you” stage. I’m pretty sure that taking down pictures of Jackie Robinson was not something that a plurality of voters wanted. But certain people are pretending that’s what they wanted.
@Michael Reynolds:
But, you can sell Häagen-Dazs as the superior ice cream without using a specific flavor to make your case. I believe that is the more appropriate analogy.
@Kylopod: Trump is beginning the fifth year of his presidency. He’s not in a honeymoon period. And, as noted in the OP, he’s more popular now than in his first term. It baffles me but it’s nonetheless true.
@Kurtz:
Haha, yep! But the alliteration and cadence are, um, effective. Witness: Loony Left
As someone who participated in a protest, a lot of y’all are missing the point. It’s not to persuade the Trump Administration of anything (which would not happen anyway), or Trump partisans.
It’s to show craven Democrats and Democrat-led institutions, including universities and BigLaw, that they in fact have a large constituency that is incredibly pissed off at their cowardice.
It’s also to demonstrate visually that we have *each other’s* backs even if the walls feel like they’re closing in.
Finally, it’s to demonstrate to onlookers and non-voters that there’s more dissent and strength in numbers than the media lets on.
Is it a replacement for actual day-to-day organizing on issues? Of course not. But many of us at the protests are doing that too.
@Michael Reynolds:
I believe it is a shortened version of “Hands off all that shit, motherfucker.”
Ok, seriously, this administration really is putting their grubby little hands on everything, so a generic hands off does kind of resonate. And it is shorter than “stop actively trying to destroy the following 413 different government operations and programs, and others which we might have not noticed yet.”
Message focus – the Lefty Democrats have a bad habit of Everything Bagelism all the time
You guys f-uped this past fall with focus on stuff that basically you guys care about but was not selling outside. Democracy blah blah.
Focus on some core messages that have big and broad appeal and easy to grasp
– Economy messages, inflation messages,
disruption of basic social services
(Soc Sec, veterans services – the core stuff that has big appeal, not lefty touchy feely marginalised stuff)
– hands of Soc Sec, works
hands off Veterans works
– hands off our economy might work too maybe
– Where’s the Beef on Inflation maybe although maybe too 80s
Not any of that stuff that polls say are popular (immigration, roll-back of Woke-DEI)
@Tom Strong: Universities and law firms are not supposed to be “Democrats” institutions so that’s really part of the problem of why they are in trouble.
until you win elections, “resistance” is pretty meaningless
There’s no power except if you win elections. Win damn elections. And win damn elections in more of the country consistently. I don’t like the Democrats but I sure dislike Trump and this crap more
@Tom Strong:
When’s the last time protests actually achieved a goal? That’s not a snark, I’m curious.
BigLaw can count, they see the numbers, they know we’re half the country. They DGAF because they work almost exclusively for BigMoney, and a threat from BigMoney scares BigLaw a whole lot more than people carrying signs. BigMoney told BigLaw to bow down to the new mob boss if they wanted to go on billing $1000 an hour.
Disney/ABC rolled over, and they can count too, they know the audience, they know libs and progs have money to spend, but they paid Trump off and will continue to do so. And it’s hard to think of a Bluer corp. than Disney. Paramount is also about to roll over. Universal unloaded MSNBC which now has a very uncertain future. The Hollywood Left surrendered.
Virtually every company in the country instantly walked away from DEI, and it’s not because they don’t know Democrats still exist. They know we’re here, they’re just not scared of us. We need them to be scared of us, and for that we need a message and a unity of purpose that scares them. And by them, I mean specifically billionaires like Musk and Thiel and Zuck and Bezos and Ellison the Younger, and Soros and Iger and Mark Cuban, too.
@Beth had it right: When this gets to be sustained, especially once the violence starts, then we’ll get some where. I’d prefer the violence to be implied rather than made real. But MAGA and Trump scare people, and we don’t. If our message amounts to, ‘make it all go back the way it was,’ we got nothing. That’s the past, the fight is to shape the future, and the future starts from where we are, not where we were.
We need a future-facing narrative and we don’t have one.
@Mimai: This is my assertion as well. I was hesitant to go – to expose myself to danger and counterprotestors and ??? But I went. And it was GREAT! And thousands of others had a great experience as well. And there was no pushback. And there are no ramifications. And we feel empowered. And my neighbors & I are more likely to call Congress now and make demands.
It’s those downstream effects that are the real impact. Every member of the House has to run again in 18 months.
Protests/marches often look loud but ineffective from a distance. But historically, they’ve played major roles in shifting laws, norms, and political will.
Civil Rights movement. Marches, sit-ins, and mass mobilization helped push the Civil Rights Act and Voting Rights Act through a gridlocked Congress.
ACT UP. Protests “forced” the FDA to accelerate AIDS drug approval timelines and rethink clinical trial ethics.
Vietnam War. When middle America started marching, political pressure mounted and the cost of staying in the war changed.
BLM. Cities across the US reformed use-of-force policies, cut contracts, and passed new accountability laws — measurably, not symbolically.
Arab Spring. Toppled governments in Tunisia and Egypt.
Women’s Marches in Poland. Led to the reversal of some anti-abortion laws.
Now, it’s fair to say that protests/marches weren’t the only factor in these changes. There were lawsuits, lobbying, elections, etc too. But no one* is saying that protests/marches are the only thing. Or even the most potent thing.
Even still, protests/marches are often what puts issues on the agenda, raises the political temperature, and shows that passivity is not the right option.
If we’re going to demand perfect causal attribution, we’ll be waiting forever. Social change isn’t a lab experiment (though I do wish we specified our terms, see previous comment).
And protests/marches are often the spark. Sometimes the kindling too.
*Ok, some people say this, especially when erecting a strawman.
@Michael Reynolds:
I can see your point here, but I’m wondering what this would look like in your opinion.
To the extent that Trumpism in the US and authoritarianism across the globe is on the rise, it isn’t due to the appeal of a future-facing message. They’re selling a Mythic Past straight out of the fascist playbook Dr. Taylor has shared with us at OTB. “Great Again” are the operative words in MAGA even though the movement is deliberately vague on the questions of “great for whom and when?” Those specifics make the message harder to sell, so they are left out of the pitch.
To hear my 20-something kids tell it, they were happy enough with American values. Certainly progress could be made faster, but fundamentally the arc of the moral universe was bending enough in the right direction in a general sense for my younger sons and their peers.
So for a message to combat the opponent’s current message, what would a “future-facing narrative” entail that would make it better than “the Mythic Past you’ve been sold is BS” and we ought reclaim all that was good before the MAGAs fracked it all up?
@Scott F.:
I don’t think counterpunching their message would be my preference. Let their message wither on the vine – they have no new model (just like Tesla) and the economy is going to do what it does. If SS checks are disrupted, if we see high inflation, or stagflation, that will do its damage. But if you intend to lead people out of a swamp, you need them to believe you know where you’re going. Project 2028.
It’s time to tax wealth, not income, wealth. The billionaires need to be de-normed, shamed and taxed. I know all the arguments about how hard it is to tax the rich, but we do manage to tax their real estate. We are almost unique in having a worldwide reach for tax collection. Set a very generous floor: say 10 billion dollars. Above that we start to levy a confiscatory tax rate on stocks, bonds, cash accounts, crypto, yachts, houses, art, etc… If we can assess income taxes on Americans living abroad, we can do the same with wealth and use that wealth (cash, property, stocks) to fund programs that help regular people.
We’ll need some international diplomacy, convince other countries to play our game, with offsets that could also benefit French, Cypriot, Greek, Malaysian, whatever holdings. We forced the world to open their banks to us, we have reach, we have leverage, and if we set it up right, we’re helping fund French, Cypriot, Greek, Malaysian governments.
But IMO the centerpiece should be anti-corruption. The Trump government is cruel. . . no one cares. It’s incompetent . . . people assume government is incompetent. And it’s deeply corrupt. . . and corruption bothers people. A corrupt regime being fattened up by sleazy billionaires while regular people lose jobs and see their 401K’s dwindle, that has some power. The billionaire president lines his pockets while his favorite billionaire fucks up your life? I think that’s pretty good.
The future we offer is not a restoration, it’s a revival of civic virtue, common decency and honesty. Billionaires Out.
@Michael Reynolds: ” They know we’re here, they’re just not scared of us.”
I understand your take and basically am in agreement with it. But I think we see these protests differently. You see an end in itself — which if it were the case would be as useless as you believe. I’m more with Tom Strong above — this is a first step. An introduction.
One reason that Disney and the law firms and the universities are all willing to bow down is because they take their built-in audience for granted. They’ve got us, we’re not going anywhere, so they can expend all their effort making MAGA happy.
Before any moves can be made to the contrary, they’ve got to know that there is a huge and growing mass of pissed-off people — and that we’re not just going to go along with everything that’s happening.
And yes — everything you’re calling for has to come next. The future-facing message most of all. But that message will mean nothing without that unity of purpose, and these demonstrations exist to show them that there is indeed a huge and growing unity… and to show those on our side that they are not alone, and that there is a greater whole to join.
Are these demonstrations going to change anything on their own? Of course not. But they’re a first step — I think a necessary one. The mistake that BLM and Occupy made was to decide that demonstrations were a force in themselves, that building little tent villages would somehow bring about political and economic change.
I don’t think anyone — well, anyone in a position of importance — is thinking that way now.
And if it turns out they are, I will happily join you in a strenuous round of hippie-punching.
@Mimai: “If we’re going to demand perfect causal attribution, we’ll be waiting forever.”
I’m with the Bulwark gang on this — don’t wait to figure out the perfect thing to do, do something now. Most of it won’t work, but some things will, and then keep on doing those things.
(To their credit, they admit that they save do something, but when Chuck Schumer does something cringey they mock him for weeks and promise to be a little better in the future…)
@Jen: “Hands Off” is meh. It doesn’t define an enemy–and the collective has only shown it’s capable of galvenizing against a common enemy. Trump is insulated for the moment in being a good enemy. Oligarchy is an academic term (as is Democracy which is why “Democracy is on the ballot ” was a flop). Billionaires, nepotism, and corruption are the best picks to go with right now.
I understand why Hands Off seems logical, but it’s not a slogan that will go viral. Plus, right or wrong, most Americans believe the Fed Gov needs reforming. Hands Off is a dismissal of that. Democrats do not have to challenge every fact. You can agree that the Fed Gov needs reforming (even if you don’t believe that it does) and plug whatever you want into the reform category. I will tell Trumpers that Damn right DOGE needs to make the Gov more efficient–we have aircraft near misses everyday now. We probably need more Controllers and technology before something happens that will tank the airline industry.
These people are radicalized but only have the approved anecdotes provided by the cult. For every 300 year old SS recipient they can cite. 5 other tangible things can be cited that acknowledge their idea that reform is necessary, but bend the prescription towards common sense.
I’ll say this about the Iraq War protests–nobody in the Bush administration bothered to make a spectacle of targeting Ivy League students here on a visa who were out marching. George W Bush said watch my drive. He was confident and didn’t care at all about the liberal protesters. Twenty years later, the Republican who remain can’t pull that off. Trump would have been happier out of misery with an assassin’s bullet in his brain. JD Vance can not have sex with his wife without fantasizing about humiliating a liberal classmate at Yale Law who thought he was a phony. If faced with sustained opposition on the streets, they will build these protests into a vast conspiracy against them based on the same logic as a gang database which sends guys with autism awareness tattoos to gulags.
The real roadblock are the Democrats in power, who have talked themselves into a position which no longer exists in America. They really take Republican grievances seriously. (With Israel, they have the same grievances.) And if protests expand to academics, students, and others camping out in DC near the Washington Monument this summer, I think there’s going to serious violence. The cop industrial-complex is mostly infantile morons who can’t fight man-to-man, are unable to read, and understand protest through the lens of telling the truth about dad abusing mom.
One of the things I like about “Hands off” is that it emphasizes freedom from government overreach. For too long the right has coopted that theme despite their many efforts to intrude into people’s private lives, and we are in the right moment to reclaim it because we’re getting a very clear picture of what the right’s agenda means in practice. Even many libertarian types who are sympathetic to the idea of reducing the size of government realize what a farce DOGE has made of the concept, the equivalent of chopping someone’s arms off in the name of helping them lose weight. Not that the message should be aimed at libertarians–far from it. These protests are always going to be primarily comprised of liberals and progressives, as they should be. But it’s about time we make a case for the Democratic Party in the name of protecting individual liberty, and we have the opportunity to do that while also giving people an appreciation of the bureaucracy, something the right has spent generations villainizing and distracting from the true sources of corruption, the oligarchs.
@Michael Reynolds:
Thanks. I like “revival” versus “restoration” a lot. It’s a subtle difference, but the positive implications of making something alive out of something that’s presumed dead has resonance. I’ve been lamenting the death of shame and the end of the Rule of Law at OTB since November and “reviving” these bastions of American value could have some power. Having a villain in your messaging is important too and billionaires are well suited.
@Michael Reynolds:
Most recently: South Korea.
Which yes, is not the US. But that’s part of my point. Our muscle for building solidarity in the US has atrophied badly. It is even worse at the elite levels, which is why the universities and legal firms are stabbing one another in the back instead of holding together.
That’s where your counting analysis doesn’t hold up. The money situation for universities is much, much worse if Trump can bleed them dry one by one than if they stand up for each other. But they can’t play the prisoner’s dilemma game, because they haven’t maintained that muscle. Same for BigLaw, and same frankly for the Democratic Party, especially in the Senate.
We need to rebuild that muscle, and exercises like this weekend are a way of doing that. It is, frankly, baby steps. But it is better than backseat driving from comments in a blog (something I am guilty of, too).
@Michael Reynolds:
FWIW I agree with this (and my sign at the protest was about corruption)
I didn’t like the “Hands Off” branding. I’ve been using “No Kings” – really encompasses the theft/corruption/oligarchy and the varied other lawlessness (generally taken against foreign residents, but also implied to be available to use against citizens). No Kings calls back to the Revolution. It underscores the need for actual checks on power – as much a demand on Congress as a call opposing the president. It says that the Judiciary is here for a reason, that we will demand that the law be followed. It properly asserts that the president is subject to those laws.
No Kings. That’s where I’m at these days.
Democrats lost the election and don’t have much power at the federal level. That limits options and should be a reminder that winning elections is pretty important.
A couple of thoughts:
– Do what’s necessary to win decisively in the mid-terms and 2028 and plan for that. This is the most important medium-term goal for Democrats. Don’t just assume you can bet on Trump’s unpopularity to carry the day. That thinking is what got Trump elected. One can’t ignore the fact that Democrats are still, at this time, less popular than Trump, which is a very low bar.
– Dems are understandably demoralized – this is one of the few times when intra-party virtue signaling is actually productive. Demonstrations like “hands off” will not be decisive on their own and unlike some of the comments here, I don’t think the details matter. IMO they are important for Democrats in maintaining morale, cohesion, and a media presence and focus that can be built on. Any successful movement will have demonstrations; they are an important enabler, not an end in and of themselves. It’s good that these demonstrations have been mainstream and normie without the crazies poisoning the well.
– Don’t do violence and vandalism, and don’t promote or excuse it – it is for losers. Promoting Mangione the assassin or Tesla vandalism is ultimately counter-productive in the best case. The political realignment has made Democrats much more the normie party, and normies don’t like that shit for good reason.
– Part of the current problem is that Republicans are mostly united (even if that unity is shallow), while Democrats and anti-Trump forces are divided and not coordinating well. It’s been disheartening to see organizations acquiesce to the Trump admin’s demands instead of standing up to the bully, and that will continue to be the case as long as the various targets are islands that can be picked off individually.
– Related to that is the need to embrace federalism; it’s a foundation of our system. That means it’s important not to ignore political activities at the state and local levels, and coordination between states will be important in opposing the excesses of the feds under Trump. The reality is that most of the federal government’s power and authority isn’t direct – it’s mostly tied to the strings that come from federal funding and the associated regulations. States, especially if they unite and coordinate, have significant latent power.
– While it’s important to oppose the excesses of the Trump administration, it’s also important to allow democratic accountability to develop and work. As Mencken said, “Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want and deserve to get it good and hard.” Trump and the Republicans won. Their bad ideas, policies, and actions that aren’t illegal or unconstitutional need to be allowed to develop and emerge. Democrats should be clear in explaining why they are bad. When those policies culminate into real-world bad effects, the Democratic political message will be all the more powerful.
– Finally, it’s not enough to oppose what Republicans do. Democrats need a coherent, rational, positive message that appeals to the necessary constituencies that can consistently win elections. It should be obvious at this point that appealing to the donor class and unrepresentative activist base and ignoring some of the weaknesses and unpopularity of Democratic policy and governance doesn’t achieve that. For too long Democrats have tried to rely on various forms of “Trump is bad” messaging and wrongly assuming that is enough to generate Democratic support.
@Andy:
I just want to point something out here. You know who the “activist base” so many here like to shit on is? It’s me, I’m the activist base. I’m a life long Democrat and my activism is centered on trans rights.
Do you know how I go about my activism? I talk to people. Over and over again. “Hi, I’m Beth. See, I’m not some scary shameful weirdo. I’m just like you.” You know what makes my job impossible? Democrats running from us. Siding with bad faith Republican bullshit instead of fighting for us. Trans sports bans have nothing to do with “fairness”, it’s about excluding us from public life. Healthcare bans are about torturing us so that we hide. So on so on.
When Democrats don’t fight for us it sends two signals. The obvious one is that trans people aren’t worth fighting for. The subtle one is that Democrats won’t fight for “me”. The “me” being whatever identity group you fall into.
Now I know Reynolds says that there is no such thing as identity. But it’s there and it’s real, even if white men don’t get their faces rubbed in it like queer people, or black people.
Hell, the Reynolds non-identify model has allowed people like Tate and Peterson to step in and create a horrible identity for young men.
You can look at other areas of activism too. Take Student loans for example. We all know that the way student loans are currently structured is a scam. I am an attorney and I have student loans I will never be able to repay because it’s simply not possible to. If I were to even try I would end up paying the principal several times in interest. This scam is a choice to enrich exceptionally wealthy people at the cost of the middle class. When you shit on the student loan activists and tell them “you took out the money, you have to repay no matter what”, you’re telling them the scam is more important than the dream of starting a family and having a decent life.
The same goes for the climate activists. And so on.
This is ultimately why BLM and Occupy failed, because the comfortable told us activists that they wouldn’t fight for us or with us, they withered away.
This is why I’m ultimately blasé about these protests. I’ve been begging people to join with us for years. Trans rights activists have been begging and fighting for years and we’ve been derided as activists and blamed for everything. Trans people warned you. Black women warned you. Gay people warned you. Disabled people warned you.
You called us activists and ignored us. You lost your sons and you ignored us. You let the Republicans radicalize and you ignored us. You refused to fight with us and now you deride us as activists again.
On November 5, the U.S. put a gun to its head and blew its brains out. We killed the world order that put us at the center and made us rich beyond belief all because a few people wanted it all, and because it was unacceptable that the individual many asked for anything. Rights, healthcare, stability, bodily autonomy. This was all unacceptable and you refused to join with us and fight for it.
It’s 9:24 in London as I type this on my iPhone. The best I can tell the world economy is crashing because a deranged asshole got on the internet and told the world “I’ll fuckin do it again”, just like I predicted. Ask JohnSF if you don’t believe me, but the world will not allow the U.S. to be the center anymore. It will not give access to banks to tax our rich. It will not allow us to dictate trade terms. It will not bend to our demands to do away with VAT. The American world ended.
I will not fight for it to return. I want something better for myself. I want something better for my kids. And you. And your kids.
I’m an activist because I believe we can do and have better. Shit on us all you want. Just understand just exactly who you are shitting on.
@Kylopod:
New Hampshire is the tacit home of the Free State Movement. We have a LOT of libertarians in this state, and I am not seeing them rebel at all over DOGE’s moves, in fact they’d be happy for it to go further. They want government gone.
This is an *incredibly* important point that everyone should sit with for a bit. Building a movement means getting people to follow you. Right now, the Democratic Party is less popular than Trump.
Michael, a fanatic is somebody who won’t change his mind, won’t change the subject, and and won’t give it a rest.
People are pulling together mass movements, and you are standing ion the sidelines b*tchimg.
@Barry: Michael of course is able to defend himself, but I don’t look at it as standing on the sidelines b*tching (perhaps because I agree with him). It’s more about asking how to harness/extend the mass movements, and carry that into electoral success. Because nothing else matters. We can have the biggest, most ardent protests ever and it won’t matter if we can’t effect an outcome at the ballot box.
We should absolutely be taking heart that the protests were large. Can that energy be sustained/built upon for another ~20 months? That’s hard, and that’s why I’m concerned about the stickiness of “Hands off.”
The Heritage Foundation people have been working on this for a long time. They know that making changes EARLY is key. Some people will forget. Others will get used to the new normal.
Sustaining anger until the next election cycle is going to be hard.
@Jen: You think sustaining anger is a problem? With the destruction of our voting rights and retirement funds I honestly don’t think anyone will forget. Trump’s idiocies are continuous and certain to be more fascist as time goes on.
I swear, if half the people commenting here had been around in 1942 they would have called Doolittle’s raid on Japan a publicity stunt that had no real military effect on the war, cost us a squadron of B-25s, many lives and was therefore an utter waste.
But the Japanese saw it differently. The myth of the inviolability of their homeland was destroyed in a very public way, causing a major reconsideration of homeland defense and siphoning resources from their future attacks. We really don’t know yet what the effect of seeing 3.5 million “enemies from within” marching and protesting proudly (and unobstructed) last Saturday, but it could not have been very popular show in the White House, and also demonstrated that opposing Trump in public isn’t dangerous (yet).
And how about the notion that all the debate about what to do in this thread is simply useless? Maybe at this point showing up on the streets to remind people that we’re not going anywhere is the best we can do? Trump will go down, but it won’t be us that does it. Like Caligula, he will be dealt with by his own Praetorian Guard. Too many rich Republican oxen being gored by now, and the roars of discontent are already being heard. Trump can only cost them so much money before he is out. It sucks that we don’t have any real power at the moment, but Trump is no Hyman Roth. As soon as he stops making money for his partners, he’s gone. It’s the transactional reality.
@Fog: I’m coming at this problem with a very specific background. I’ve worked in campaigns. I know full well that the average voter is more focused on their day-to-day existence than being angry at this administration.
Most people don’t zero in on problems until they see it affect those around them, or themselves. I’ve seen this play out over and over (although admittedly, not with someone like Trump).
They are going to need to see A (their daily challenges) directly connected to B (Trump’s policies) in order to change votes.
If not, it all goes under the “well, government is getting too big and he’s at least doing something about that.”
It will take a big disaster and FEMA unable to respond (or something similar) for people to really get the role government plays.
@Fog:
If such existed.
He has been careful to follow his role model Putin and surround himself with loyalists, toadies, sycophants.
Only Congress can remove him, and there are too many Republican cowards and true believers and people who have *other objectives* to get to 2/3 of each house anytime soon.
*other objectives* would be, as example, the Mike Johnson goal of a Christofascist theocracy.
@Barry:
Sitting on the sidelines bitching is the mission statement for OTB. It’s also a pretty fair description of protests, though that is usually standing on the sidelines. What I am trying to do here is get people to think seriously about winning the future.
@Tom Strong:
Here’s what I’m doing. I contributed in excess of $50,000 in this last campaign cycle. I’m one of the founders of a below-the-radar group that spends money at the state capital level. Going forward I’ll continue to support that group, as well as contributing to AOC. I also, tangentially, support one trans woman, my daughter, and have offered a backstop for my trans neice and my daughter’s trans girlfriend.
I’m also beginning to pitch Middle Grade and YA book series which will – subtly, no sledgehammers – hopefully begin to shape young minds for the times ahead.
Now, I could have stood outside waving a sign the other day, but from each according to his ability. I don’t like crowds. I am never happy being ‘part’ of anything. So I do what I can do: I write checks. And I write books. And I try, here at OTB, to get Democrats to think about defining the future and preparing to fight more effectively.
@Beth:
Thanks for your lengthy comment, Beth.
The hard reality is that all the things you cite – particularly trans rights, BLM and immigration (which you didn’t mention, but others did in this thread), have all become less popular. You say people ignored you when the opposite is true – the Democratic party and the institutions that are most influential at the commanding heights of the culture embraced and promoted activist positions on these and other issues. And yet, across the board, public popularity and support for the activist positions fell, even among Democratic constituencies. The activist community seems to blame everyone else but themselves for that reality.
The nature of small d democratic politics is that you need votes to win, and to get votes, you need a sufficient level of public support. Democratic politicians largely embraced what activists wanted, those positions became significantly less popular, even among Democrats, and that hurt Democrats politically. If the role of activists is to increase support for a position or issue, how is it not a failure when things go in the opposite direction? Why should activists not be criticized for failing to succeed at what is supposed to be their core mission, which is convincing others to support their views?
Maybe to you, that is “shitting” on the activist community, but the facts about the failure to maintain, much less increase, support on all these issues speak for themselves.
@Michael Reynolds:
I don’t like crowds either. I think what you’re doing is productive, and you’re right that not everyone needs or should have the same focus.
I’m also putting my efforts at the state level and at my Republican congressional representative. This is still a GoP district, but the advantage has fallen to R+5. Trump’s policies have had a lot of negative effects here, and the “backlash” is real and needs to be taken advantage of.
@Beth:
The central problem with activism is that activists are right about Americans. Mainstream America lives on its knees. It always has, it always will. That’s why Obama can say for people to resist or whatever the hell he’s saying, but he can’t say that you have a moral obligation to quit ICE if you work there. We believe in morality for faraway places like Nazi Germany, but here, in the homeland, it’s all transactional rhetoric and sounds like an endless litany of morons telling you obvious truths about voting numbers.
To me, trans rights was the canary in the coal-mine. It would have been one thing if tons of trans kids started detransitioning. But they didn’t. These kids made bold brave decisions to listen to who they were, and they survived. And instead of taking that into account, the entire anti-trans movement grew stronger because of this fact. The endless bloated ranks of centrist Democrats really started getting concerned about trans care because the people who received it were happy.
@Jen:
…which is every bit as stupid a thing to want as the 7-year-old who wants his parents dead because they make him eat broccoli.
I am coming to the conclusion that the long, coordinated GOP attack on education had as its primary purpose making lots of Americans dumb enough to want government gone.
@Andy:
I will stick solely to trans issues for this response because this one I know backwards and forwards. I can tell you without a doubt that neither the Democratic Party nor society at large accepted the “Trans Activist” position. With one exception, the changes to the insurance industry and Medicaid/Medicare. That’s the only battle we won.
I’ve talked here about how impossible it was to transition prior to that. That’s our only victory. Even prior to the rightwing lie machine it was virtually impossible to change our birth certificates in many states, even Blue states. Now, we were getting somewhere. We had some actual momentum. But we are a tiny tiny minority. Exactly how are we supposed to outcompete the right wing smear machine? Especially when people like Gavin Newsom shit on us?
Entertain me for a moment please. What should we have done differently? Should we have accepted some sort of separate and unequal position? Should we accept being isolated to the fringes of society? Good for sex work and a laugh and nothing else?
What should we have done or will you at least be honest and just say we’re disgusting and deserve this. Be honest or are you a coward?
@Modulo Myself:
This needs to be repeated.
@Modulo Myself:
This needs to be repeated.
@Beth:
The first thing I would recommend is not assuming that everyone who disagrees with you thinks you’re disgusting or only deserve to be a sex worker or any of the other pejoratives I’ve heard over the years. It’s that kind of attempt at moral bullying that is completely ineffective and has demonstrably failed over the last half-decade, if not longer.
Yes, you are a tiny, tiny minority which is why you can’t afford to alienate people who are with you on some things but not others, and yet that’s what too many activists do.