Noted milquetoast conservative commentator David Brooks proclaims, “America Needs a Mass Movement—Now.”
His premise:
Other peoples have risen. Other peoples have risen up to defend their rights, their dignity, and their democracies. In the past 50 years, they’ve done it in Poland, South Africa, Lebanon, South Korea, Ukraine, East Timor, Serbia, Madagascar, Nepal, and elsewhere.
[…]
Such uprisings are not rare. For their 2011 book, Why Civil Resistance Works, the political scientists Erica Chenoweth and Maria Stephan looked at 323 resistance movements from 1900 to 2006, including more than 100 nonviolent resistance campaigns. What Chenoweth and Stephan showed is that citizens are not powerless; they have many ways to defend democracy.
For the United States, the question of the decade is: Why hasn’t a resistance movement materialized here?
Looking at the original article on which Chenoweth and Stephan’s book was based, I see that the 323 cases were drawn from the Nonviolent and Violent Conflict Outcomes (NAVCO) data set, which
contains a sample of resistance campaigns based on consensus data of scholars of both violent and nonviolent conflict. Resistance campaigns include campaigns for domestic regime change, against foreign occupations, or for secession or self-determination. Omitted from the data set are major social and economic campaigns, such as the civil rights movement and the populist movement in the United States. To gain inclusion into the NAVCO data set, the campaign must have a major and disruptive political objective, such as the ending of a current political regime, a foreign occupation, or secession.
That’s a pretty high bar. Compare that to the list of offenses that Brooks believes should spark such a campaign here:
The second Trump administration has flouted court decisions in a third of all rulings against it, according to The Washington Post. It operates as a national extortion racket, using federal power to control the inner workings of universities, law firms, and corporations. It has thoroughly politicized the Justice Department, launching a series of partisan investigations against its political foes. It has turned ICE into a massive paramilitary organization with apparently unconstrained powers. It has treated the Constitution with disdain, assaulted democratic norms and diminished democratic freedoms, and put military vehicles and soldiers on the streets of the capital. It embraces the optics of fascism, and flaunts its autocratic aspirations.
For most Americans, these transgressions are quite literally invisible. I live in the DC suburbs and haven’t seen a single National Guardsman or ICE agent. If I weren’t an avid consumer of the news, I would have no idea any of this was happening.
Looking at Trump’s approval ratings, the American people seem to be unfazed by it all.
Here’s an aggregation of his approval ratings in today’s NYT:
Nate Silver shows similar numbers:
Sure, Trump is considerably underwater, with more than half the country disapproving. But he’s actually more popular now than he was at this point in his first term:
Indeed, as Silver notes,
As of today, Trump has a net approval rating of -8.4. Compare that to one week ago (-9.3), two weeks ago (-9.4), and three weeks ago (-7.5) and you’ll notice a remarkable lack of long-term movement. The percentage of Americans who strongly disapprove of Trump is also down from its peak of 44 percent on September 30th to a more normal (for Trump) 42.5 percent.
It’s the same story for the issues we track. Trump’s approval on immigration has been hovering around net -5 since late September, and he’s stuck around net -16 on both the economy and trade. To be clear, these are bad results for Trump. His handling of the economy this time around is substantially less popular than his term one approach. But when it comes to overall approval, Trump is still more popular now than he was eight years ago (net -8.4 vs. -16.7).
For the mass public, then, this is all just noise. We’re hyper-polarized. The days of Presidents getting significant approval from supporters of the opposite party are long behind us.
Looking at the RealClearPolitics aggregate, which tracks all the way to the beginning of Trump’s first term,
we see fluctuation within a rather narrow band. Trump seems to have a floor of something like 36 percent approval and a ceiling of maybe 51. That just doesn’t seem like a country ripe for mass uprisings.
Indeed, Brooks seems to acknowledge as much:
To beat a social movement, you must build a counter social movement. And to do that, you need a different narrative about where we are and where we should be heading, a different set of values dictating what is admirable and what is disgraceful. If we fail to build such a movement, authoritarian strongmen around the globe will dominate indefinitely.
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Successful movements are microcosms of the society they hope to create. An anti-MAGA movement would have to be a cross-class movement, one that joined members of the educated class with members of the working class, shrinking the social chasms that gave rise to populism in the first place.
Successful movements mobilize the people who already agree with them—but they also focus on persuading those who don’t. Occasionally you’ll hear a Democratic politician say they are going to “fight” for their side. Much of the time, that just means the politician is going to say what their base already believes, only at a higher volume. That’s mostly useless. Large anti-Trump rallies attended exclusively by NPR listeners in blue cities do not impress rural voters.
The opposition has spent a decade banging the “Trump is awful” drum, largely failing to persuade those who didn’t see that for themselves. And even many who agree nonetheless prefer Trump to the alternative. It’s not obvious to me what fixes that.
Thus far, the current standoff over extending temporary ObamaCare subsidies does not seem to be doing the trick.
