Your Plan to Resist Trump Is Dumb and You’re a Wimp
Grow a spine, liberals — fight like you mean it
by ANDREW DOBBS
Here’s a quick test for determining whether a proposed response to Trump is pointless or not: would the folks proposing it be doing more or less the same thing if Florida senator Marco Rubio had won the presidential election?
If the answer is yes then that either means that Trump and Rubio — or any other mainstream conservative — are essentially the same sort of threat, or that the project before you is non-responsive to Trump’s threat because it is designed for a very different kind of situation. It is guaranteed to fail.
Because Trump is not normal — remember how important it is that we not normalize him? — these fine-for-Rubio-or-Scott-Walker plots are wastes of time. They presume that Trump’s plans are like those of typical GOP politicians and presidents, and that he’s susceptible to the same sorts of limitations and pressures to which they would be susceptible.
But his plans are very different, and he has very different ambitions and fears, making these plans completely useless.
These proposals are proliferating right now, but one seems to have risen above the rest at the moment, the “Indivisible Guide.” Composed by former Democratic congressional staffers, it claims to provide a concise but comprehensive game plan for recreating the Tea Party, but this time for the good guys.
Maybe it’s because there are few titles more descriptive of a self-righteous and unearned sense of superiority than “congressional staffer,” and few entities less effective in liberating the oppressed than congressional Democrats, but these authors have created a document that is deluded about history and promoting actions wholly inappropriate to the conditions at hand.
The Indivisible Guide is pointless bullshit.
“The authors of this guide are former congressional staffers who witnessed the rise of the Tea Party,” the guide begins. “We saw these activists take on a popular president with a mandate for change and a supermajority in Congress. We saw them organize locally and convince their own (members of Congress) to reject President Obama’s agenda. Their ideas were wrong, cruel, and tinged with racism — and they won.”
They then present the rest of the guide as a means of recreating that wrong, cruel, racist victory on right, compassionate, liberal terms. The guide goes over how to organize small local groups to keep track of your members of Congress and hector them with questions at public events, town halls, social media and in their offices until they fold to public pressure and Trump’s policy agenda is thus defeated.
As far as a guide for grassroots lobbying of Congress goes, it is excellent. They make some assumptions about the historical experience of the Tea Party, however, that are seriously wrong.
First and most important is the notion that Obama had a progressive agenda that failed because of Tea Party pressure. In reality, Obama had a clear path to accomplishing the most progressive reforms his electoral base demanded — universal publicly-funded health care, direct assistance for foreclosed homeowners, criminal accountability for bankers and for Bush administration wrongdoers, among others — but Obama himself never really wanted to do these things and they didn’t happen because he and congressional Democrats, not the Tea Party, blocked them.
It is important that we do not allow the Indivisible Guide authors obscure this fact. Just after Obama’s inauguration Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner launched a response to the economic crisis that Washington Post reporter Matt Stoller called “a wholesale attack on the American home (the main store of middle-class wealth) in favor of concentrated financial power.”
“A financial system in collapse has to allocate losses,” Stoller explained. “In this case, big banks and homeowners both experienced losses, and it was up to the Obama administration to decide who should bear those burdens. … Rather than forcing some burden-sharing between banks and homeowners through bankruptcy reform or debt relief, Obama prioritized creditor rights, placing most of the burden on borrowers.
“This kept big banks functional and ensured that financiers would maintain their positions in the recovery. At a 2010 hearing, Damon Silvers, vice chairman of the independent Congressional Oversight Panel, which was created to monitor the bailouts, told Obama’s Treasury Department: ‘We can either have a rational resolution to the foreclosure crisis, or we can preserve the capital structure of the banks. We can’t do both.’”
Obama, of course, chose to preserve the capital structure of the banks at the expense of their debtors — mostly middle-class homeowners.
The Indivisible Guide’s authors avoid the fact that the Tea Party was initially inspired not merely or even primarily by an antipathy against Obama, but rather by a resentment against government collusion with elite financial interests.
They do acknowledge that Tea Party groups began “in response to the 2008 bank bailouts and President Obama’s election,” conveniently highlighting a policy enacted by Bush and not Obama. But a basic class analysis of the Tea Party — workers mostly without college degrees but with incomes which allow for home ownership, putting them on the more precarious end of the middle class — would indicate that these folks had a powerful material motivation. A fear that they would lose their homes and most of their wealth.
Had Obama prioritized bailing out families instead of bankers could he have won these folks over? We’ll never know because he never tried, and it wasn’t Tea Party agitation or phone calls to congress members that stopped him, it was his loyalty to the ruling class — a source of populist resentment that the Indivisible Guide totally ignores.
They do somewhat acknowledge the Tea Party’s cultural character — disproportionately rural and exurban and white — by way of calling out its racism. They say the Indivisible Plan is “a similar resistance to the Trump agenda — but a resistance built on the values of inclusion, tolerance and fairness,” as opposed to bigotry.
The presumption here is that the Tea Party’s success was not a function of its racial resentment. Yet its concrete power was rooted in two conditions that the Indivisible Guide glosses over. First, while Congress had a big Democrat majority in 2009, many of those seats were majority-white, GOP-leaning or at least GOP-competitive seats that Democrats had nabbed in the wave elections of 2006 and 2008.
Second, the Tea Party found its greatest ultimate power in GOP primaries, knocking off numerous veteran politicians and wrecking heir-apparent successions around the country.
White insecurity has been the primary issue in GOP politics since at least the time of the Tea Party’s rise — arguably since Goldwater and Nixon — and Trump’s movement simply made it explicit. The Tea Party was able to threaten GOP lawmakers because they were the voice of that fear.
They were even able to press swing-seat Democrats, and it was this expression of the priorities of the Unites States’ most powerful political constituency — white people, especially white men — that made the Tea Party’s phone calls and town halls and office visits so effective.
The Indivisible Guide is naive to think that the connection between the tactics, the racism and the effectiveness of the Tea Party are all independent of one another, available for picking and choosing by other movements that don’t have such an obvious white supremacist element.
Environmentalists call and bug lawmakers about climate change, feminists pick on them about abortion access and working people and their allies demand single-payer health care. None of these efforts have succeeded as significantly as immediately as the Tea Party did, because they went against the grain of the dominant powers of our society and the Tea Party went with them.
Still, the Indivisible Guide does have a fantastic strategy for blocking a policy agenda under conventional circumstances. Unfortunately, Trump is not conventional. He cares very little about policy and his policies are not his greatest threat.
Trump clearly has almost no grasp of any complexities of federal policies of any sort. His primary threat is that he is inspiring and empowering a social movement of open race-hatred and violence. Most progressives organizing or writing online have gotten messages to the effect of “just wait until Trump is in charge and then we will kill you.”
How will the Indivisible Guide affect this in any way whatsoever? If its proponents spend a bunch of energy writing letters and making calls and stop, say, Social Security privatization but at the same time Trumpites burn down half the black churches in the country — is that a “victory”?
They could maybe press Congress to do something about the church-burnings — though this would be a positive policy position and they say that their followers should be “purely defensive” — but what’s to stop the fascists from targeting the letter-writers? Seems like a different guide might be necessary at that point, and that they would have wasted a lot of time and energy focused on the wrong thing to that point.
This goes to another crucial difference between this time and the Tea Party moment — who is on what side. Liberalism rejects the idea that our society has fundamental conflicts within it and suppresses the class struggle in particular.
As a result, it assumes that not only is universal policy consensus possible, but that this is the goal of all policy-making. This is why liberals always say things like “the things that unite us are more important than the things that divide us,” and why they always try to argue that you actually agree with them without realizing it.
It’s why Democrats always need Republicans to like them and approve of them.
One consequence of this is that when the Tea Party confronted members of Congress with a real conflict between their interests and those of concentrated financial power distorted through the lens of racial and cultural conflict liberals ran away and denied the whole thing from a safe distance.
The Tea Party did the stuff in the Indivisible Guide and liberals never mounted any kind of meaningful movement response.
Trump’s supporters are not like this. Reactionary ideology rejects the liberal consensus and then obscures the basic conflicts in liberal society so much that it ends up seeking out combat for its own sake. The Indivisible Guide never once acknowledges or anticipates that its acolytes might show up to a town hall meeting and be outnumbered by Trumpites who are ready to fuck them up.
It doesn’t admit that if GOP members of Congress start to cave to Indivisible club people, they might end up getting a bunch of Trump people organizing a counter movement and threatening them with consequences a lot worse than losing elections.
Even if they rein it in and keep it electoral, a majority of Congress has a lot more to fear from reactionaries than they do from liberals — and the only chance the Indivisible folks have is if the other side decides to sit out the whole thing.
It is incredible that these presumed political leaders would ignore such a possibility. Their assumption seems to be that the Tea Party didn’t have anything like that happen and this is based on the Tea Party so that won’t happen this time. They foolishly pretend that the conditions aren’t completely different now. In this regard this guide is dangerous and might get some good citizens seriously hurt or killed.
I’m sure that the Indivisible people would respond by saying, “Aha! As tragic as that would be, the media would show this and it would make them look terrible and we would win the battle in public opinion.”
But what realm of delusion and ignorance do you have to live in to think that the press is going to save any movements, or that it has any broad and universal authority at this point? Before our very eyes the most authoritative elements of the press have embarrassed themselves with an obsessive coverage of salacious and under-warranted reports about computer hacking and pissplay, all in an open attempt to oppose the president-elect.
This may be out of a well-placed sense of duty they feel to stop fascism from coming to power, but the result has been a final nail in the coffin of media credibility after two-plus decades of budget cuts, credulous warmongering, financial and geographic consolidation and the proliferation of more entertaining, less accountable alternative sources.
The press let economic pressure, hubris, and cynicism drive it toward playing with Trump’s fire early on — and now it has burned out of its control. The Indivisible Guide was written in a fantasy land where this hasn’t happened.
Indeed, more than a dozen times it tells readers to alert the media or post their activities on social media. In this era of informational balkanization they will only be talking to themselves. If Trump succeeds in his outright threats to suppress media sources he doesn’t like — the sort of thing his key supporter Peter Thiel has already done, remember — this trend will accelerate very quickly.
Violence against them might not be reported on at all, or it may just be a subject of cable T.V. debate between bloodthirsty Trumpite talking heads cheering it on and pathetic liberal foils sad about it but wondering if maybe the troublemakers didn’t bring it on themselves. Either way it wouldn’t have any sort of impact that the Indivisible Guide intends.
So if the Indivisible Guide assumes that politics works differently than the way it does and that Trump is somebody that he isn’t and that the future will be a way that it won’t be, what’s the alternative?
The simplest answer to this question is that the alternative cannot be liberal. There are two things that non-liberal solutions will acknowledge. First, that the institutions that brought us here — the Constitution, electoral politics, NGO campaigning and both major political parties, etc. — cannot bring us out.
And second, that we are not “indivisible” as a society. That there are basic conflicts of interest inherent to our way of life that can only be solved with one side decisively defeating the other.
The solutions we need will pick sides and use unconventional means to materially disrupt their opposition until that opposition is permanently cut off from power. There’s a name for such a movement — the resistance.
Lots of folks are throwing that word around right now — most ludicrously Keith Olbermann — but the commitment it will require is something many of them will shirk sometime in the next several weeks when it becomes clear just how invulnerable to liberal tactics Trump and his regime will be.
One thing should be very obvious at this point. We would not be talking like this if Rubio had won. A really well-constructed guide at lobbying your member of Congress like the Indivisible Guide would be perfect for that situation, but for ours it is inappropriate and harmful.
You don’t write letters to fascists. You don’t call their office on the phone. You don’t badger them at town halls. You organize and you fight them by any means necessary.
That’s what it is called for today, and it will take a lot more courage than any Tea Partier or your average congressional staffer could ever imagine to make it happen.
Stay defiant.
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