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DEFENDING SOCIETY AGAINST MAGA TYRANNY  
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Jeremy Brecher
January 22, 2025
Socialist Project
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_ Social Self-Defense Has Begun _

, socialist project

 

The resistance to the MAGA juggernaut has already begun at community,
city, and state levels.

* The governors of Illinois and Colorado announced a new coalition
called Governors Safeguarding Democracy, designed to protect
state-level institutions against the threat of authoritarianism.1
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It’s reported that more than 20 states are involved.2
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* Governor Gavin Newsom called a special session of the California
legislature to fund the state’s civil rights, climate action, LGBTQ+
rights, reproductive rights, disaster funding, and protections
shielding undocumented immigrants brought to the country as children.3
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It’s been referred to as “Trump-proofing” California.
* Less than a week after the election, 100,000 people registered for
a call hosted by more than 200 organizations, including the Working
Families Party, MoveOn, and Indivisible.4
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* More than 40,000 people joined a call announcing a new version of
the Indivisible Guide [[link removed]], which played a
crucial role in mobilizing the first Trump Resistance.5
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* Denver mayor Mike Johnston announced he will encourage people to
protest mass immigrant deportations and that he would be willing to go
to jail if necessary.6
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* The Los Angeles city council passed a “sanctuary city”
ordinance to bar using local resources to help federal immigration
authorities. In emergency resolutions the city’s public school
system reaffirmed itself as a “sanctuary” for undocumented
immigrants and LGBTQ students.7
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Denver, Chicago, Boston, Philadelphia, and other cities have also
passed sanctuary ordinances.8
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* The organizers of the largest one-day demonstration in US history,
the 2017 Women’s March, along with many other groups such as Planned
Parenthood and the ACLU, are organizing a feminist People’s March
for January 18, shortly before Trump’s inauguration.9
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* Chicago officials have instituted community trainings designed to
teach people how to spot and respond to immigration enforcement
actions. A local training in mid-November drew nearly 600 people.10
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* San Diego county supervisors voted to prohibit its sheriff’s
department from working with US Immigration and Customs Enforcement
(Ice) on the federal agency’s enforcement of civil immigration laws,
including those that allow for deportations.11
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* The ACLU laid out a program to help cities and states become a
“Firewall for Freedom,” blocking federal efforts to access private
data, limiting cooperation with federal immigration authorities,
banning federalization of state National Guard units, and funding
abortion care and travel to get it.12
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* The watchdog nonprofit Congressional Integrity Project initiated a
“Civic Defense Project” as a rapid response “war room” to
debunk baseless attacks and defend those unfairly targeted.

Some predict this resistance will fizzle. Others expect it to burgeon.
Neither of these predictions can be counted on. What happens with the
resistance to the MAGA juggernaut will depend on what people decide to
do and whether they create means for action that can accomplish their
ends. The purpose of this Prospectus is to contribute to the search
for those means of action.

What Is Social Self-Defense?

Donald Trump and his MAGA supporters will soon control the presidency;
the Congress; the administrative agencies of government; the Supreme
Court; and the US military, intelligence, and security apparatus. He
will be able to call on support from a wide swath of the public and
from a cadre of armed vigilantes and groups organized for violence and
intimidation. He dominates much of the media and is in a position to
intimidate much of the rest. He has the support of a large sector of
corporations and the wealthy. He has a demonstrated willingness and
ability to use not just the legal instruments of government but also
violence and intimidation, criminal methods, and coups. The official
opposition to him within the electoral arena is in many cases weak,
feckless, and discredited. So how is it possible that his domination
can ever be overcome? This prospectus tries to answer that question.

As we saw in the Prologue, there is a movement emerging in response to
the MAGA threat. But is it even possible for this emerging movement to
develop the power it will need to counter a Trump tyranny?

Gandhi once wrote, “Even the most powerful cannot rule without the
cooperation of the ruled.” A Trump tyranny will not be able to
continue without the support and acquiescence of those whose lives and
future it is destroying. It will only be able to pursue its
destructive course if they enable it or acquiesce to it. A movement
can overcome the most powerful regime if it can withdraw that
cooperation.

But how can that power be concretely realized? There are several ways
that resistance to Trump’s MAGA regime can exercise significant
power:

* _Constituent power_: the ability of a mobilized electorate to
influence leaders whose own power depends on election,
* _Protest power_: the ability of masses of people to demonstrate in
large numbers and be willing to act with those who share their views,
* _Disruptive power_: the ability to exact costs on powerful
institutions by disrupting their functioning through civil
disobedience, strikes, and other forms of direct action,
* _Social strikes_: the mobilization of an entire society to
withdraw support from a regime in order to bring it to an end through
a nonviolent uprising or “people power.”

There are no guarantees that such power can be mobilized in a way that
will contain the Trumpian onslaught, let alone bring it to an end.
Trump and his coterie appear to be committed to permanent rule by
their followers and their ideology. To accomplish that they need to
destroy all possible barriers to their domination. They must break
down the institutions of democracy that might stand in their way, for
example, by restricting the right to vote. They need to eviscerate the
institutions of law, medicine, civil service, journalism, and other
relatively independent bases of potential opposition. They have to
prevent economic actors, including corporations and unions, from
pursuing their own self-interest rather than conforming to the
regime’s demands. They need to intimidate and silence those who
might expose their lies and abuses. They must demolish political
obstacles, not only from within the Democratic Party, but within the
Republican Party as well. They need to paralyze the population with
fear and entice it with the promise of a better life, or at least with
bread and circuses.

While this program for MAGA domination promises enormous power, it
also presents enormous risks to its perpetrators. By making almost
every individual and constituency a potential victim of its onslaught,
it is also likely to generate a vast, diverse, and potentially unified
opposition. Its program is an attack not just on one or another group,
but on society as a whole – on the very practices and relationships
that allow us to live together in a peaceful and constructive way.
They are undermining the foundations of a free and ordered society.
They are dismantling the basic practices that make life something
other than a war of all against all. And they are hell-bent on
destroying the natural conditions on which our life on earth depends.

The MAGA regime threatens immigrants, African Americans, Muslims,
workers, women, children, the elderly, the disabled, LGBTQ+ people,
all who depend on government for their health and wellbeing, and the
environment on which we all depend for our very existence. Indeed, it
threatens all that holds us together as a society. The resistance to
that onslaught is therefore not just the defense of one or another
group but a defense of society, indeed of the very possibility of
society. We the people – society — need to defend ourselves
against this threat and bring it to an end. We need what resisters to
authoritarian regimes elsewhere have called “Social Self-Defense.”

The term “Social Self-Defense” is borrowed from the struggle
against the authoritarian regime in Poland forty years ago. In the
midst of harsh repression, Polish activists formed a loose network to
provide financial, legal, medical, and other help to people who had
been persecuted by the police or unjustly dismissed from their work.
Calling themselves the Committee for Social Self-Defense (KOR), they
aimed to “fight political, religious and ideological persecution”;
to “oppose breaches of the law”; to “provide help for the
persecuted”; to “safeguard civil liberties”; and to defend
“human and civil rights.” KOR organized free trade unions to
defend the rights of workers and citizens. Its members, who insisted
on operating openly in public, were soon blacklisted, beaten, and
imprisoned. They nonetheless persisted and nurtured many of the
networks, strategies, and ideas that came to fruition in Solidarity
– and ultimately in the dissolution of repressive regimes in Poland
and many other countries.

Social Self-Defense is the protection of that which makes our life
together on earth possible. It includes the protection of the human
rights of all people; protection of the conditions of our earth and
its climate that make our life possible; the constitutional principle
that government must be accountable to law; and global cooperation to
provide a secure future for people and planet.

In the face of MAGA assault, protecting individuals, groups, and
society as a whole go hand in hand. The attacks on individuals and
groups are a threat not only to those directly targeted but also to
our ability to live together in our communities, our country, and our
world. It is a threat to all of us as members of society. Protecting
those specific constituencies who are most threatened is essential for
protecting our common interests as people. Social Self-Defense means
defending those who are threatened as a way both to defend them from
injustice and to defend our common interest as people – as members
of society. Social Self-Defense means we’ve got each other’s
backs.

Historians emphasize that there were great political divisions among
the KOR activists who first developed the idea of Social Self-Defense.
But they were able to act together around the agenda of resisting the
Polish regime’s attacks on workers and society as a whole. The
individuals and groups who oppose the Trump agenda are as diverse as
the targets that agenda threatens. Trump and his supporters have the
potential capacity to play them off against each other and to make
deals with them one by one. There will be enormous pressures on
advocacy organizations, movements, parties, and even activists
themselves to sell each other out.

Social Self-Defense is a means to unify ourselves around mutual aid
and around our common interests. It defines Trumpism not only as a
series of separate threats to different sectors, constituencies, and
policy agendas but also as a unified – and therefore unifying —
common threat. It allows us to use each action and campaign against
one or another Trumpite abuse as a way to strike a blow against the
MAGA project as a whole. Social Self-Defense does not annul but does
transcend the rivalries of Democrats vs. Republicans and of Left vs.
Right. It is a framework that can help unify those who should be
acting in common to overcome the MAGA juggernaut.

It thereby provides a basis for solidarity.

This prospectus draws on a range of historical experiences to explore
possible modes of action for overcoming the MAGA assault on society
– ways of implementing Social Self-Defense:

* The Prologue, _Social Self-Defense Has Begun_, describes the
initial stages of Social Self-Defense in the MAGA era.
* This Introduction, _What is Social Self-Defense?_, presents an
overview of Social Self-Defense against the coming Trump autocracy.
* _What We Must Prepare For_ describes some unpredictable but
threatening possibilities for Trump’s rule.
* _Social Self-Defense in the First Trump Regime_ recounts the
history of the first Trump Resistance and draws some positive and
negative lessons for the future.
* _Strategy for Social Self-Defense_ lays out a strategic assessment
and strategic guidelines for resisting and overcoming MAGA.
* _Electoral Opposition_ analyzes the opportunities for utilizing
the remaining institutions of democracy for Social Self-Defense.
* _Non-Electoral Opposition_ explores the potential for an
opposition based in civil society that goes beyond the limited and
sometimes ineffectual opposition that is likely to be provided in the
electoral arena.
* _The Social Strike_ examines the role of and possibilities for
civil resistance through “people power” to MAGA coups and other
direct threats to democracy.
* _A Constructive Program for Social Self-Defense_ suggests the role
that the Green New Deal from Below and other constructive programs at
the grassroots level can play in building Social Self-Defense and
providing inspiration for defeating tyranny through social
transformation.
* _What Social Self-Defense Is Defending_ lays out the fundamental
principles that must be defended if our life together is to be
anything but nasty, brutish, and short.

The future course of the MAGA juggernaut and the response to it are
highly unpredictable. Strategies to address it must evolve rapidly to
meet changing realities. They will be the work of many hands. This
prospectus offers gleanings from historical experience that may be
helpful for people doing that work. •

This article first published on the ZNetwork
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website. The full PDF (50 pages) is available here
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Endnotes

* “Governors Safeguarding Democracy
[[link removed]],” GovAct.org, November 2024.
* Tim Dickinson, “The Battle Against Trump 2.0 Begins in the
States
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Rolling Stone, December 17, 2024.
* Lauren Gambino, “Democratic leaders across US work to lead
resistance against Trump’s agenda
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The Guardian, November 16, 2024.
* Sarah D. Wire, “The Donald Trump resistance is ready for when
Democrats are done grieving
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USA Today, November 22, 2024.
* Ibid.
* Edward Helmore, “Denver Mayor says he will urge protests against
Trump’s mass deportations
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The Guardian, November 23, 2024.
* Bernd Debusmann Jr, “Los Angeles declares itself an immigration
‘sanctuary’ [[link removed]],”
BBC, November 19, 2024.
* Adrian Carrasquillo, “Immigrant rights groups gear up to fight
Trump mass deportation plan
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The Guardian, December 13, 2024.
* Mimi Montgomery, “Women’s March plans to protest Trump’s
second presidency in D.C.
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Axios, November 8, 2024.
* Rachel Leingang, “Sanctuary cities respond to Trump deportation
plans: ‘We’re preparing to defend our communities’
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The Guardian, November 29, 2024.
* “San Diego sheriff says she won’t honor county’s
‘sanctuary’ immigration policy
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The Guardian, December 11, 2024.
* Anna Kutz, “ACLU: Officials should enact law ‘firewall’
ahead of Trump 2nd term
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News Nation, December 13, 2024.

Jeremy Brecher is an historian, author, and co-founder of the Labor
Network for Sustainability. A new edition of his most recent book,
Climate Insurgency: A Strategy for Survival
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is available at his website.

* Trump
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* anti-fascist
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