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.
Cited: David Brooks, “What’s Happening Is Not Normal. America Needs an Uprising That Is Not Normal,”NYT (April 17, 2025). This article may not be accessible without a subscription. I encourage you to support the New York Times if you can!
