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RESISTANCE 2.0  
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Robert Kuttner
November 12, 2024
The American Prospect
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_ Both the circumstances and tactics will necessarily be different
from the anti-Trump resistance of 2017, and there is little room for
error. _

At this year’s Women's March near the National Mall in Washington,
November 2, 2024, Candice Tang/SOPA Images/Sipa USA via AP Images

 

In late 2016, progressives, ordinary citizens, and outraged women
began organizing a resistance to President Trump. It began with the
epic Women’s Marches of January 2017. Grassroots groups, some of
them organized spontaneously through networks like Indivisible and Run
for Something, set in motion a process that led to Democrats winning
the House in the 2018 midterms, as well as making gains in state and
local offices. Democracy was energized. And a Democratic House then
served as another restraint on Trump.

This time will be harder. After November 2016, Trump’s victory
seemed like a tragic fluke, an anomaly. Now, it’s all too clear that
it was not a one-off. Trump and his allies have become the tribunes of
widespread discontent that should have been championed by a left
party, a process of default that has been incubating for decades as
the Democrats became a weird coalition of well-off professionals, woke
cultural leftists, and Wall Street billionaires, while the economy
deserted working people of all races.

In his first term, Trump also needed some time to figure out the
levers of power. For his senior officials, Trump hired corporate and
military people who sometimes operated as restraints. This time, he
will hire compliant stooges.

For the moment, Democrats and commentators are mired in what is
probably a necessary (but hopefully brief) period of recrimination.
There is a lot of truly stupid commentary to the effect that Democrats
ran too far to the left. This conflates the cultural left with the
economic left.

There are hard conversations to be had about how to make Democrats
less electorally vulnerable and subject to ridicule on cultural
issues, without jettisoning compassion and solidarity. But there is no
doubt that on pocketbook issues, Kamala Harris fell way short of
anything resembling credible economic populism for workers.

It’s still early, but we need to quickly get past the Kübler-Ross
stages of denial and grief, and above all to reject the final
stage—acceptance. To contain Trump’s threats to democracy and
rebuild credibility with workaday voters looking forward to the 2026
midterms, we need hard thinking and strategic work on two fronts.

REAL POPULISM VS. FAKE POPULISM

Trump made promises to “fix” all that is broken in the economy and
to make life better for working people. Harris’s response was
intermittently plausible, but too often it was unfocused and
uncompelling. But with Trump in the White House, his actual policies
are likely to worsen economic life for ordinary Americans.

To the extent that people all over the world are angry at incumbents,
Trump will soon be the incumbent. If Republicans end up with majority
control of the House as well as the presidency, the Senate, and the
courts, the consequences are all on them.

Unhappiness with inflation, fairly or unfairly, hurt Biden-Harris.
I’ve written about how several Trump proposals, from tariffs to huge
budget deficits to ending containment of monopoly pricing power to
deportation of low-wage service and farmworkers, are likely to worsen
inflation
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If Trump follows through on anything like the scale of budget cuts
that he and Elon Musk proposed, working people will experience them as
increased out-of-pocket expenses for health care, child care, home
care, and more. If Trump tries to repeal or slow outlays under various
Biden infrastructure programs, that will sandbag regional economies. A
lot of COVID-related federal aid to states and localities will expire
this year, leading to service cuts or tax increases, even without
additional cuts.

After a year or two of Trump, workaday voters are likely to be in an
even more sour mood than they are now. Progressives and Democrats need
to keep precise track of all of this and hang it around Trump’s
neck. We need to drive wedges in the Trump coalition.

But that’s not sufficient. We also need a strong and affirmative
program. With Democrats divided on the causes of their blowout defeat
and a vacuum at the top of the party, that may well need to come from
outside.

One idea I’ve been hearing is a Contract With America’s Working
Families. It can be used to sharpen contrasts with Trump and embarrass
Trump with his own constituencies—how come Trump isn’t offering
this?—and to position progressive Democrats with a theme for 2026.

A Contract With Working America could include more secure health
coverage, paid family and medical leave, higher minimum-wage
protections, regulation of gig work, restoration of family allowance
payments, better and more affordable child care—all paid for by a
fairer tax system. It could become a framework for other policy ideas,
at both the state and national level, reviving the role of Democrats
as the party of the working class and the vulnerable middle class.
Success on this front will be the best rejoinder to those who counsel
that the Democratic Party needs to move to the right.

Last Thursday, MoveOn, Indivisible, the Working Families Party, and
200 other groups organized a livestream planning session. It attracted
about 140,000 participants. Here’s Maurice Mitchell on that Zoom
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Mitchell, the Working Families Party director, said in a statement,
“It may not seem like it, but today is the beginning of the end for
the Trump era and the MAGA movement. Donald Trump has no solutions to
address the needs of working-class people in this country. And we know
that when he tries to implement his agenda of more tax cuts for
billionaires, gutting health care, deporting millions, and supporting
war crimes with public dollars, people will rise up.” But as
Mitchell made clear, that depends on whether progressives organize
around these themes.

Some progressive measures, such as a higher minimum wage, were
approved by referenda in red states such as Alaska and Missouri.
Voters in those states plus Nebraska also approved paid sick leave. In
2024, there was nothing wrong with core progressive themes; the
problem was the messenger. In 2026, the Republicans will have a
national personification of their increasingly unpopular policies in
Donald Trump, who may be wearing out his welcome, while Democrats will
have local faces.

We sometimes hear that the Democratic bench is thin. But below the
national level, Democrats didn’t lose a single legislative seat in
Pennsylvania, and they gained seats in several legislatures, including
Connecticut and Wisconsin, outperforming Harris.

And some of the messengers may have to come from outside the party. In
Nebraska, independent Dan Osborn with a working-class narrative ran 14
points ahead of the national ticket.

That network from 2017 can be reactivated, and more. Trump won in part
because people doubted that electoral politics or the Democratic Party
could change their lives for the better. “Cynicism is the number one
tool of the authoritarian playbook,” says Joe Dinkin of Working
Families, “to make the people cede their power.”

With no obvious national Democratic leader, it would also be smart for
progressives to spotlight and elevate people like the UAW’s Shawn
Fain, who can personify and articulate a working-class politics far
better than Trump can fake it. I vividly remember watching a
lackluster Joe Biden on the UAW picket line beside a powerful and
compelling Fain, and thinking: If only Fain were the candidate. We
need more national working-class heroes.

RESISTING DICTATORSHIP

Of course, the idea that Trump and the MAGA Republicans will be as
electorally vulnerable in 2026 as they were in 2018 rests on the
premise that we will still be a functioning democracy. Trump has made
all sorts of threats to govern as an autocrat. He will carry some of
them out. But elections are run mainly at the state level. Despite a
lot of worries, Trump and the Republicans gained ground in 2024 not
because elections were rigged or voting suppressed but because
Democrats failed to deliver a compelling message.

Trump and his MAGA allies will undoubtedly try to fiddle with voting
in 2026. But if pro-democracy groups do their jobs, for the most part
even Republican judges have been unwilling to collude in crude
vote-rigging. (The long-term process of voter suppression
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a bigger problem. According to the Brennan Center, if there had not
been multiple forms of voter suppression tolerated since the Voting
Rights Act was deliberately crippled by the Supreme Court in 2013,
about nine million more votes would have been cast in 2020, most of
them favoring Democrats.)

Much of the resistance to Trump will be done through the courts. As
compromised as the courts are, litigation can slow Trump down. The
ACLU struck exactly the right tone in a full-page ad. It said, in
part, “Dear President-elect Trump: We are the ACLU, and we’re not
moving to Canada. So rest assured that when you target immigrants,
dissidents, and your political opponents, we will challenge you—in
the courts, at state legislatures, and in the streets. Surely, you
remember the landmark lawsuits we won against you on family
separation, the U.S. Census, and immigrants’ rights—some of which
were decided by judges you appointed.”

A key set of fortresses is government at the state and local level.
Democratic attorneys general have been having strategy conversations.
Massachusetts AG Andrea Campbell put out a statement declaring,
“President-elect Trump has told us exactly what he intends to do as
President, and that we need to believe him and to be ready for the
challenges ahead.” State AGs are organizing to resist Trump’s
incursions and instigations, including rule of law, political
violence, hate and discrimination, reproductive rights, LGBTQ rights,
and immigrants’ rights.

In California, Gov. Gavin Newsom called a special session of the
legislature
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strengthen the state’s legal defenses against the incoming
president. During Trump’s first term, Golden State officials filed
at least 120 lawsuits challenging the administration’s actions and
passed a law limiting local authorities’ cooperation with federal
immigration officials. There will be more such laws and executive
actions, as the federal government under Trump tries to countermand
reproductive rights and other rights protected by states. This
concerted action may not succeed in every case, but courts at all
levels are still functioning and it will slow Trump down.

A crackdown on immigrants will be especially tricky, both for Trump
and for his opposition. Trump has threatened mass deportations; that
will produce massive pushback from his Republican business
constituents who depend heavily on migrant workers. In practice, Trump
may count more heavily on “self-deportation” by frightened
migrants, and on greater border controls. Though support groups may be
contemplating civil disobedience, too much of this would play into
Trump’s hands and give him an excuse for mass arrests.

The most important challenge now is for the opposition to be unified
and strategic. Trump will be vulgar, irritating, impulsive,
adolescent, narcissistic. The prospect of such a man wielding state
power is terrifying. But that’s a distraction from the serious work
ahead.

_Robert Kuttner is co-founder and co-editor of The American Prospect,
and professor at Brandeis University’s Heller School._

_Used with the permission © The American Prospect, Prospect.org
[[link removed]], 2024. All rights reserved. _

_Read the original article at Prospect.org.:
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