The Weekly Sift

Recovering from the disillusionment of the election is taking longer than I expected.

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Many articles are being written about how best to resist the incoming Trump administration and its expected assault on democracy and human rights. I had planned to write a post curating those articles for you, picking out the best ones and summarizing their advice. Unfortunately, I’ve bookmarked more of them than I’ve read, and I haven’t given the ones I’ve read enough serious thought.

That lack of motivation has forced me to admit something about myself: I’m not ready to resist yet. I hope I will be soon.

Everybody’s absorbing the reality of the election at their own pace and in their own way, I suppose. Prior to the election, I advised my readers over and over again not to speculate about what would happen. Like many advice-givers, I almost listened to myself. I refused to anticipate and dwell on either the thrill of victory or the agony of defeat. (I’m dating myself: When I was growing up, “the thrill of victory and the agony of defeat” was the well-known catch-phrase of ABC’s Wide World of Sports.) And yet, deep down, I stubbornly refused to believe the American people would do this. Even at the lowest points, like after Biden’s disastrous debate, I would think about a second Trump administration and think, “No. That can’t happen.”

In retrospect, my faith in the good judgment of the American electorate looks like the faith of a wife who is certain that her husband won’t ever cheat on her, or a child who is sure Dad will never go back to drinking, because it led to so much pain the first time.

But here we are.

I had imagined I was living in an early British detective novel, where Sherlock Holmes or Miss Marple would eventually figure everything out and justice would triumph. Instead, I woke up in an American detective novel by Dashiell Hammit or Raymond Chandler, where the Powers That Be have known all along who the murderer is, but see no reason to do anything about it.

Here we are.

Many of my friends have reported periods of anger, which I haven’t experienced yet. Maybe that’s still coming or maybe I’m just not built that way. Instead, I’ve been living with a deep sense of disappointment. I don’t anticipate any satisfaction coming when Trump voters lose their health insurance or see his tariffs reignite inflation in their grocery stores. When Trump-supporting Hispanics have their naturalization revoked or see their birthright citizenship denied, I don’t expect “I told you so” to taste delicious in my mouth. It will be a sad day, even if they did it to themselves. They are my countrymen, even if my country tells me otherwise.

But I’m still not ready to construct my resistance strategy. I hope I will be soon. Andrea Pitzer is right about this much: Most countries that experienced a fascist takeover didn’t enjoy the luxury of three months to plan. But one of those months is gone already. The clock is ticking.

I can tell I’ll eventually come around. One weird aspect of my psychology is that I’m aware of a subconscious personality who communicates with me — and occasionally critiques my behavior — through my brain’s musical soundtrack. (I noticed it my senior year in college, when I was trying to keep a relationship from getting too serious because I anticipated it ending with graduation. All spring I unaccountably found myself humming “Frosty the Snowman”.)

Lately it’s been playing a song I haven’t heard in years, maybe decades: Graham Nash’s “Chicago“, which he wrote in response to the Chicago 7 trial. It’s aimed at someone Nash wants to “come to Chicago” to protest, and hopes that the listener isn’t like Jack, who won’t help “cause he’ll turn the other ear”. And he envisions this:

We can change the world.
Rearrange the world.
It’s dying to get better.

I wonder.

In my uninspired wanderings through resistance articles, I have noticed a few things, which I’ll pass on in lieu of a better post in some future week.

The simplest advice has been repeated by many people, so you’ve probably heard it already: Timothy Snyder says “Don’t obey in advance.” In their formation phase, authoritarian regimes wonder what they can get away with. When people anticipate the regime’s demands and comply before they’re asked, they teach the government what it can do. We’ve seen simple examples already: When the Washington Post and LA Times owners torpedoed their editorial departments’ Harris endorsements, they signaled to Trump that he can control the press through the government’s influence on the owners’ other businesses. Seth Moulton — my congressman, sadly — has already offered that many Democrats are willing to surrender trans rights without a fight.

Other examples are more local, like libraries that remove LGBTQ memoirs or non-White fiction before anyone demands it, or sociology departments that voluntarily pare back their programs to avoid discussing White supremacy.

The other thing I’ve been struck by is the importance of perception. The power of an authoritarian regime rests more on belief than on institutional power or even guns. No one resists because everyone believes that (in the words of Star Trek’s Borg Collective) “resistance is futile”. But if enough people believe resistance isn’t futile, then it’s not.

That’s why Trump and his people are working so hard to assert that his sub-50% showing in the election is a “mandate” or even a “landslide“. But if you voted for someone other than Trump, you belong to the majority. And there’s certainly no mandate for implementing Project 2025 policies, which he explicitly denied during the campaign.

Similarly, we can expect a Day One shock-and-awe campaign, where it will seem as everything is happening at once: mass deportation, attacks on abortion rights and trans rights, tariffs, oil drilling on public lands, rolling back environmental regulations, firing civil-service workers, and so on. Trump and his people will make it sound as if these are all done deals — it’s happened already, get over it.

But in fact it won’t have happened. Most of his Day One moves will be challenged in court or require agreement from Congress, either of which will (at a minimum) take time, and may result in significant revisions or even reversal. Every delay means that less gets done, and the secret to saving American democracy is making sure that Trump doesn’t finish it off before the next elections.

So one of the worst things we can do is be defeatist, and claim that democracy is already lost. That does Trump’s work for him.

A George Orwell quote from 1946 is relevant here:

Power worship blurs political judgement because it leads, almost unavoidably, to the belief that present trends will continue. Whoever is winning at the moment will always seem to be invincible. If the Japanese have conquered south Asia, then they will keep south Asia for ever, if the Germans have captured Tobruk, they will infallibly capture Cairo; if the Russians are in Berlin, it will not be long before they are in London: and so on. This habit of mind leads also to the belief that things will happen more quickly, completely, and catastrophically than they ever do in practice. The rise and fall of empires, the disappearance of cultures and religions, are expected to happen with earthquake suddenness, and processes which have barely started are talked about as though they were already at an end.

Trump’s overthrow of democracy has barely started. We can’t let him pretend that it has already succeeded.

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Perry Bacon‘s list of things to do or avoid doing is well chosen. The gist: Get involved in something beyond electoral politics, like union, a local issue-oriented group, or a politically committed liberal church. (After initial skepticism, Perry is a UU now. Welcome!) Don’t obsess over political news or Democratic strategy.