Americans face an unprecedented and unlooked-for political emergency. We must band together to save ourselves and the nation from a dark future. In such a situation, we can expect new leaders to emerge, but it falls on us collectively to unite to preserve our autonomy and right to self-determination.
KEY MOMENTS
Imagine you’re on a plane a madman has hijacked: this is our political situation (0:03) In the present situation, none of us can expect to have a separate fate; we must band together (1:15) We must set aside normal ways of proceeding for the sake of unity (2:30) In an unlooked-for emergency, plans and leaders tend to emerge spontaneously.(3:00) As in the years prior to the Civil War, party warfare has marginalized many capable leaders. (3:55) Fortunately, our nation is full of capable people who care about others and the rule of law.(6:30) One whole party, the Republicans, has proved itself incapable of standing up to the president and demanding that he respect Congress and the laws created by our best minds over the years.(7:00) As a consequence, we are headed into a very dangerous situation.(8:00) I implore you to band together with others to limit the harm.(8:25) A strike against one American is a strike against all. (8:55) The consequences of allowing this situation to unfold unchecked are grim. (9:30)
Donald Trump is a bulldozer: He pushes ahead, then stops and backs up, only to push again. His many-sided assault on Americans and American greatness goes ahead in fits and starts, but on it goes. His party and a constellation of loyalist hacks constitute the machine. The destruction is general and all around. Free speech, the regulatory state, time-honored alliances and trade relations, hunger relief, egalitarianism, ideals of excellence in thought and culture: all are being struck with astonishing speed. The challenge is to sabotage the bulldozer, when one has only words and can’t get anywhere near the thing.
This is no time for parochialism or single-issue politics. The president’s broad-scale attack on ideals and institutions requires that Americans unite in opposition, a broad-based opposition that transcends party and focuses on what we as a nation, and as citizens, stand to lose. As David Brooks wrote in a recent column,
It’s time for a comprehensive national civic uprising. It’s time for Americans in universities, law, business, nonprofits and the scientific community, and civil servants and beyond to form one coordinated mass movement. Trump is about power. The only way he’s going to be stopped is if he’s confronted by some movement that possesses rival power.
Sound daunting? The fact is that “white-collar resistance” is in our DNA. Standing up for freedom and against that which would enslave us, is the backbone of American history. Generations of thought-leaders and old-time influencers articulated the aspirations that formed us into a nation and empowered us to throw off monarchical rule. Federalists like Madison and Hamilton used the power of the pen to galvanize sentiment in favor of the Constitution. Nineteenth-century writers and preachers, including such figures as William Garrison, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Frederick Douglass, waged a campaign of conscience that ultimately led to slavery’s abolition. Martin Luther King, Jr., though witness to racial violence and confronted with mortal peril every step of the way, persevered in a brilliant moral quest to strike down Jim Crow and enshrine black equality in American law.
What all these campaigns show is that when enlightened Americans band together for the sake of good, the good prevails. Moreover, civil dissent is a moral necessity when officialdom willfully violates deeply held political and spiritual values to which the population adheres. This is why the Bill of Rights was amended to the US Constitution: to protect us against, and empower us to oppose, federalism gone awry. Moralists, intellectuals, and private citizens have often been called on to “bend the arc of history,” their voluntary initiatives bringing our systems back from moral bankruptcy, closer to the foundational dream of liberty, prosperity, and domestic calm.
It’s hard to accept that Trump and his project 2025 etc. are calling us to such an amorphous and momentous endeavor. After all, isn’t this why we have parties and leaders? Yet, when we look back, the answer is that sometimes leaders and parties fail, when the measures they embrace threaten to degrade or trammel citizens or take us down a perilous trail. So, Jefferson at home, hearing about the Missouri Compromise in 1820, likened it to a “fire-bell in the night.” Despite the apparent tranquility of his private life, the retired statesman heard a mortal alarm portending political disaster, ringing far away. Something very similar is happening now. Each of us must hear the fire bell and join the bucket-brigade, before our great federal system smolders and implodes.
The bloodless transformation of our government into a harmful instrument of power is surreal. The people’s obligation to object to the executive’s abuse of his power is one we’ve never been called to on this scale. Normally, we rely on Congress to check the president through the power of impeachment and to assert its authority as a law-making body vis-a-vis the president, whose proper role is to execute and abide by Congress’s will. This isn’t happening. Instead, governmental institutions are being gutted and the president is forcefully intimidating universities, broadcasting companies, newspapers, and prominent individuals who together uphold our civil liberties, maintain civil society, and keep us informed.
Kim Scheppele is an American sociologist who studies authoritarian regimes and those who oppose them. She points out that Americans are relatively disadvantaged because they have never experienced authoritarianism before. They differ from the Poles, for example, whose history of subjugation over the centuries has served them well. When the independence of their judiciary was threatened in recent years, Poles immediately took to the streets and averted an erosion of the rule of law.
Our power to resist Donald Trump’s authoritarian tendencies will never be greater than it is right now. As Trump indulges his appetite for absolute power and makes a kleptocracy out of “the land of the brave,” will Americans sit by?
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What is a touchstone? It’s a special rock mineralogists use to determine whether a shiny object is really gold. Metaphorically, a touchstone is anything that helps distinguish between what is truly excellent and what’s counterfeit. Intellectually, touchstones illuminate what’s wrong with Trumpism and how to oppose it incisively, in a way that’s appropriate and principled.
Touchstones recall what’s best in our political tradition and galvanize us to reject the fake, crude representations Trump constantly spews. At present, American politics is a battle between his word and ours. We must prevail against a leader who is un-American and mean.
Here’s political historian Timothy Snyder in late February, outlining why Trump’s position on Ukraine is so damaging to our position in the world, and so unwise. Trump’s public denigration of Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy showed a willful disrespect for our own revolutionary tradition and, indeed, for the values of the entire Western world. Disdaining European friendships intrinsic to our security and prosperity, Trump has inexplicably cottoned to a pro-Russian narrative, subverting American ideals of self-government for the sake of a repressive foreign power bent on weakening us.
No matter what Trump claims, his radical positions on Ukraine and on trade are deeply damaging to our international relationships and US stature in the world. His policies weaken the nation and harm its citizens. He relishes driving the US into isolation–a situation that benefits only himself but not us.
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In this series of brief posts, I’m sharing “touchstones” of political opposition that I find inspiring and reassuring. Everyday, the Trump administration furnishes fresh cause for patriotic outrage. The situation is unprecedented, requiring that patriots everywhere fashion new, peaceable responses appropriate to the time. We can’t delegate this work to the nation’s ostensible leaders. They, too, are confused, be-nighted; some appear dangerously incapable of doing the right thing.
Only broad, peaceful, nonpartisan opposition can change the disposition of our legislatures and limit the harm that Trump is inflicting on the American people and our national identity.
In these circumstances, we can derive strength from the example of forebears who relied strictly on reason, principle, and conscience to oppose that which would rob humans of their natural dignity, their God-given rights.
I encourage you to listen to what Marianne Williamson has to say. The courage to stand up and speak out comes from being in touch with your own conscience, your own in-dwelling sense of goodness, your own inner light.
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