We Organized a Trump Resistance Movement — Here’s How We Did It
Austin’s One Resistance is a model for nationwide defiance
by ANDREW DOBBS
This story reflects the author’s opinion and does not constitute the official position of One Resistance. — DEFIANT
On a weekend when millions of Americans protested the illegitimate regime of U.S. president Donald Trump, one of the largest independent demonstrations in the country was right here in Austin, Texas.
The One Resistance rally and march was organized by a coalition of unions, nonprofits and nonpartisan political formations to provide a local, grassroots response to the Trump threat.
From a dead start just after the election in November until the march itself on Jan. 20, 2017, the group managed to organize the largest demonstration in Austin since the beginning of the 2003 Iraq war.
We estimate that 5,000 people marched on inauguration night.
Tens of thousands more than that — at least 40,000 — marched the next day at the local Women’s March, but One Resistance was an entirely local effort, independent of national networks, explicitly independent of the Democratic Party and meant to kick off a sustained effort to develop community self-defense and real resistance to the threats to come.
At a time when all the answers to the question “what is to be done?” seem like things we’ve always been doing, this was something at least somewhat unique. Its opportunities — and shortcomings — contain a lot of lessons about fighting Trump to win.
The effort that became One Resistance began on Election Night. Even before the decisive Midwestern states had been called, a well-respected Austin city hall staffer and community organizer began phoning and texting activist leaders and letting them know to stay tuned for a gathering the next day if Trump won.
The following day, a couple dozen of us came together at an immigrant-rights nonprofits’ offices and shed tears, expressed fear and anger and began very broadly trying to figure out what the fuck we were going to do.
The only thing we agreed on was that we would meet again at the same place and time the next week. The next meeting was even larger, crowding our small trailer.
Across the diverse group — mostly women and people of color, including undocumented and formerly incarcerated people and running the progressive gamut from mainline Democrats to communists and anarchists — there was considerable consensus about the desire for a creative, community-led mass demonstration on Inauguration Day, one that could be the first step toward a grassroots, creative resistance to Trump.
We decided to start working on concrete plans starting in two weeks. The next week was Thanksgiving — and a reminder that we would have to do all of this work with the holidays consuming a huge chunk of our already limited organizing time.
The blow-by-blow of the organizing would be familiar to anybody who has put together a mass demonstration or other large event — identifying networks to tap for turnout, securing spaces and equipment, fundraising for expenses, recruiting speakers, developing a promotion and outreach strategy, etc.
There are important lessons there, but more important are the principles that animated the work and made it possible.
One crucial value we established at the beginning of the effort was that there would be no political parties and no politicians at the event itself. The council staffer who convened the initial meetings called the local Democratic Party leadership and explicitly told them that while they were welcome to participate, they could not endorse the effort.
All of this reflects the root causes of the present threat and what we need to do to have a real chance of surviving it. There were a number of groups and participants in the event that were active Democrats, and we had to remind folks more than once that party bodies were not to be endorsing or taking up space in the organizing.
But many others in the group — and on the left, more generally — know that the Democratic Party has been a graveyard for social movements for generations, the most powerful tool of the ruling class for capturing grassroots progressive energy, disarming it and channeling it into the political projects of corporate technocracy and liberal imperialism.
This, I believe, is a major shortcoming of the more prominent post-inauguration demonstrations, their close association with an institution which is directly responsible for Trump’s election. The Democrats saw the shrinking fortunes of the industrial middle class in the 1980s and the “New Democrat” neoliberal tendency in the party — led by the Clintons — won power and marginalized labor and progressive movements in favor of what they claimed were the more progressive elements of the financial elite.
The result is that, in the 2016 election, once deeply-Democratic parts of the country — West Virginia, much of Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, for example — gave back to the Democrats what the party had given them in the last 25 years. A hearty “go fuck yourself.”
The basic point as far as One Resistance and other anti-Trump organizing goes is that politicians can’t be trusted to save us, only community can. And if we want something different than what we already have, we need new institutions that are independent of the old ones. Especially the Democrats.
None of this is to say that there is no role for politicians in the fights to come, and One Resistance was an important example of what a grassroots progressive elected official is capable of accomplishing.
In the days immediately after Trump’s election amid the flurry of “do-something-ism” that sparked innumerable projects and plans and groups and events, Austin councilmember Greg Casar’s office got word of at least half a dozen plans for Inauguration Day protests.
Casar knew that as an elected official he gets his calls answered quickly and people like doing him favors. As a veteran grassroots organizer accountable to progressive movements, he also had credibility with the groups and individuals organizing these events.
Casar was able to reach out to all of them and consolidate almost all of the demonstrations into the One Resistance event. A separate LGBTQ group organized a rally at the capitol, but in the end that event too was able to complement the One Resistance march, and hundreds of people participated in both.
The key element here was the direction of accountability. The Democratic Party’s dominance in progressive politics and the broad weakness of independent grassroots organizing in many communities means that movements are more often than not dependent on, and subordinate to, elected officials.
In this instance, however, Casar is accountable to movements. He took orders from democratically chosen leaders within One Resistance, taking up little space in the effort. He was a major spokesperson for the group in the end, but this was because the group democratically chose him to be so.
This was not a reflection of any sort of individual moral or political superiority, but the work of sustained organizing over many years that has built powerful, independent, progressive political organizations that can expect their allied elected officials to fall in line with them and serve their interests, not the other way around.
It’s here that we can see a primary task for those asking “what should we do?” The answer is to build institutions capable of securing real power outside of ruling class structures such as the Democrats. Winning elections should not be their primary task, but rather building a base that can support resistance against these structures and their corporate constituency.
Winning elections may be an important tactic later on, but only so that the institutions can leverage official power and political prominence for the sake of the popular movements to which they are accountable.
Among the institutions most responsible for One Resistance’s success were unions and the labor movement. One Resistance meetings were held at the state AFL-CIO headquarters. The social and visual media developed for the campaign were designed by an AFL-CIO employee. Thousands of fliers were produced by unions and union printers. Young labor activists made up a disproportionate share of the group’s volunteer leadership.
Labor-supported nonprofits and political fronts such as Fight for 15, the Workers Defense Project and United Students Against Sweatshops along with political groups with working class priorities such as the Austin Socialist Collective and Democratic Socialists of America were also indispensable to other Inauguration Day protests.
These included student walkouts at the University of Texas and several area high schools, and a strike by fast food workers organized by Fight for 15.
When it comes to institution building, rebuilding the labor movement and empowering workers has to be a top priority. Results don’t lie — working class organizations have a base independent of the major parties and they can move numbers and build leaders capable of truly threatening power.
Now, the problems of the labor movement are well-known. It’s nearly dead in this country. Fewer than 10 percent of U.S. workers are in unions, and in the private sector that number gets closer to five percent. So-called “right-to-work” laws have killed the movement in its former industrial Midwestern heartland.
There are widespread fears in the movement that the Trump Administration and GOP Congress will enact a national right-to-work law, which would strike an insurmountable blow against unions as we know them.
But all of these factors are adding up to a shift in organizing philosophies being carried by a younger generation of labor leaders with very different politics and perspectives than their elders espoused. The younger labor leaders came up in these lean years for the movement, and so they are both unwed to the business-friendly values of their elders and open to organizing models besides collective bargaining.
Raised after the Cold War, they have not been subject to culture-wide anti-communist hysteria and so they know that their movement began not with fights for contracts, but mass direct action that forced employers to bend to workers’ will. They also know that in the era when the labor movement made some of its most significant strides, the state was no friendlier than Trump will be.
I would hate to characterize all the labor folks leading One Resistance as some sort of left-wing labor militancy renaissance — the truth is that these organizers are probably still a minority of their movement, even among young people. But they are significant, and empowering these elements and a resurgent workers movement is key for being able to resist Trump.
It’s also important to recognize the diversity of One Resistance’s leadership, and the key role played by immigrant rights and civil rights groups directly working with the communities most threatened by Trump.
Trump resistance efforts will not and cannot be led by outside saviors — i.e., white liberals — but by the people on the front-lines of his abuses. The rest of us will need to fall in line.
Which brings us to the most controversial word in U.S. politics today. Resistance. One Resistance took it up in its very name, and early on organizers sought to warn organizations that joining would mean truly fighting to protect communities in a confrontational way.
In the end, however, on a day when more than 200 demonstrators were arrested in Washington, D.C., and others smashed windows and took the fight to the streets in cities around the country, One Resistance not only experienced no arrests or other incidents, it actually collaborated with local police in the name of “safety.”
This was a profoundly controversial decision by organizers, because for the most vulnerable families in our community the police are not safe. The police incarcerate, deport, evict and kill their friends and loved ones.
The initial visioning for the event, however, stressed a desire for multi-generational participation, a “family friendly” character. The immigrant rights leaders in the organization in particular were also adamant that the march minimize risk of arrest. Police collaboration was decided upon as the best strategy for preventing arrest and assuring the family friendliness of the event.
There is a logic here despite a long history of police violence against families and unjustified arrest, and in the end those of us on the other side of the argument didn’t feel qualified to push back against these community leaders. But among those of us fortunate enough to do full-time organizing there is a persistent and — frankly — unavoidable risk of gatekeeping for our constituencies.
Our positions become one of deciding first what information and resources reach the communities we serve, and then of deciding which voices within our communities get represented in the spaces where we are advocating.
No community is entirely uniform, and there is always a diversity of opinions — there are undocumented folks who probably wanted to riot and parents with children joined up with the Black Bloc-style Antifa formation in the march — but there often ends up being a uniformity of leadership positions in the end that necessarily leaves out some of those perspectives.
I think that every progressive or radical professional organizer recognizes this risk. In the end, real resistance will not be safe, family friendly or “peaceful.”
This doesn’t necessarily mean resisters have to be violent, but they do have to be disruptive. How can “resistance” mean anything other than forcing the powers-that-be to stop doing what you don’t want them to do? You either force them into a calculation where the consequences of pissing you off are worse for them than the consequences giving up their goals — or you physically prevent them from being able to carry them out.
The ultimate goal of the ruling class is to make money, so most immediately resistance will mean disrupting commerce and normal business. Beyond that it will require a community-by-community assessment of power in those places, how it is organized, how it moves, how it connects to the Trump regime and where the strategic points of intervention may be found to disrupt it.
If One Resistance does continue — and that was the plan all along — this assessment will need to be a primary task.
Even if it doesn’t persist, though, One Resistance’s most immediate impact was to show off — to literally demonstrate — a community-wide mass base for organizing that can support resistance, even if all those who support it may not be able to join the most high-stakes struggles.
It also extended the skills of mass mobilization to new people and organizations. This is vitally important because institution building takes too long to accomplish the most important goal before us right now — the immediate removal of Trump and his entire regime from power.
These institutions are necessary for a full social revolution that can both remove the Trump regime and the conditions that made Trump possible. A merely political revolution, however, is possible with many fewer moving parts than, say, the Arab Spring or the Ukrainian uprising demonstrated. Mass protests forced states from power. That could happen here, too.
The demonstrations during inauguration week created networks and knowledge bases that could make those sorts of rebellions more likely in the future. While we are building long-term institutions, we can also cultivate community ties and communication systems that we can activate for mass mobilization when the opportunity and demand arises.
If we do this successfully, we might not have to wait until 2020 to get rid of Trump, even if the same ruling class that he serves might still be dominant — for now.
Building independent institutions with grassroots political power, rooting these institutions in a newly organized working class, pushing these institutions past the gatekeeper nonprofit model, making them directly accountable to the communities they come from and building capacity for mass-mobilization to force the ruling regime to abandon its plans to harm us and our loved ones — this is what resistance means.
One Resistance took important steps in this direction and illuminated some of the possibilities and perils involved.
It was a good start. The turnout we saw on inauguration night — not to mention the even bigger numbers the day after and in cities across the country — prove that the capacity exists to get it done. If it doesn’t happen, it will be because we fail to do the work to make it happen, or because we get crushed along the way.
The good news is that for One Resistance at least, it was a lot of fun — and deeply rewarding. The real fun and the real reward will be when we win it all. Let’s not wait until 2020 for that pleasure.
Stay defiant.
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