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A STRATEGY FOR SOCIAL SELF-DEFENSE  
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Jeremy Brecher
March 18, 2025
Strike! Jeremy Brecher's Corner
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_ Trump’s MAGA juggernaut has many vulnerabilities. But these will
not automatically lead to its downfall. That will require an active
struggle to defend society against the MAGA assault — it will
require in short, “social self-defense.” _

Day Without a Woman San Francisco attendees stand on the steps of
City Hall, holding various signs and a banner reading “Resist”.,
Pax Ahimsa Gethen, Wikimedia Commons, CC by-SA 4.0

 

French Prime Minister George Clemenceau once warned that “generals
always prepare to fight the last war, especially if they won it.”
Conditions in 2025 differ in many ways from those of 2017. Social
Self-Defense against Trumpian autocracy in the new MAGA era will fail
if it is simply a rerun of the first Trump Resistance. Its strategy
will have to pay continuous attention to what the Trump regime is
doing, how people are reacting, and what opportunities for action
those developments open or close.

Trump’s actions and popular response are highly unpredictable, so
his opponent’s strategies will have to be highly flexible. Further,
Social Self-Defense will unfold in the context of the global
polycrisis, which is likely to be marked by “unknown unknowns”
like unanticipated wars, pandemics, and climate catastrophes. We can,
however, look back at past experiences and see what examples might be
worth drawing on and what pitfalls need to be avoided.

The first Trump Resistance was not based on an overall plan or
strategy for the anti-MAGA movement as a whole. It largely grew out of
diverse responses to what was happening – people’s immediate
feelings and needs. With benefit of hindsight, we may be able to be
more intentional today, but we still must recognize the importance of
how people respond to their lived reality.

Social Self-Defense against today’s MAGA assault is already emerging
in many forms, from organizing to protect immigrants from deportation
raids, to noncooperation by government employees with DOGE commands,
to daily lawsuit planning Zooms by Democratic state Attorneys-General,
to raucous confrontations at politicians’ town meetings. Such
pushback has already slowed or halted some early Trump initiatives,
such as the freeze on government grant payments. How can these
beginnings develop into an effective strategy for defending society
against the MAGA onslaught?

The Unfolding of Social Self-Defense

 
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Cult of red hats, August 15, 2019. Photo credit: Marc Nozell from
Merrimack
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New Hampshire, USA, Wikimedia Commons, CC by 2.0.

It is possible that Trump’s actions and the broader MAGA agenda,
despite the harm they are doing to individuals, constituencies, and
society as a whole, will not provoke sufficient opposition to
significantly undermine MAGA power. Induced fear and helplessness,
combined with entertaining circuses and the promise of bread “just
around the corner,” may demobilize even a population being ravaged
by Trumpian devastation. Other factors, known and unknown, may further
help Trump to perpetuate his rule.

Trump’s greatest vulnerability is the harm he is doing to
individuals, groups, the American people, and the global future. The
cold reality of harm is the chink in the MAGA armor. In the abyss of
Nazi rule, the exiled German writer Bertolt Brecht wrote the poem
“In Times of Extreme Persecution”:

Once you’ve been beaten
What will remain?
Hunger and sleet and
Driving rain.

“Who’ll point the lesson?
Just as of old
Hunger and cold
Will point the lesson.[1]
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It is up to those harmed by MAGA to create the means for translating
the experience of harm to people and society into Social Self-Defense.
Defeating Trump requires a shift in power away from him and his
supporters to his opponents. That process depends on cumulative
disillusion and repudiation. Social Self-Defense can play midwife to
that process.

Social Self-Defense is not an organization – it is a set of
practices to be engaged in by myriad organizations, hopefully in close
cooperation with each other. It can draw on both established and newly
emerging organizations, as the first Trump Resistance incorporated
thousands of local self-organized groups, newly emerging national
networks, and long-established national organizations. Social
Self-Defense need not become a single organization or umbrella group.
But it requires that issue- and constituency-based groups expand
beyond siloed practices to act in concert with each other to resist
the Trump agenda.

The success of Social Self-Defense will depend on combining civil
resistance in social institutions and the streets with political
resistance in the institutions of governance. It will take months or
years for the Trump regime to eviscerate, coopt, or eliminate all the
institutions that might resist it. There are still courts,
legislatures, local and state governments, legal, medical,
educational, labor, media, and other civil society institutions.
Social Self-Defense can be pursued in part through supporting and
strengthening those institutions willing and able to resist Trumpian
tyranny. While there is at present little opportunity for an “inside
game” that attempts to influence the Trump administration from
within, cooperation with anti-Trump politicians and institutional
leaders where they exist is essential to the success of Social
Self-Defense.

The Trump regime started with a furious flurry of actions designed to
provide red meat to followers and put opponents off-balance. Social
Self-Defense needs to respond in ways that make it clear that Trump
cannot simply have his way unopposed. Even if many of his initial
moves can’t be halted, it is important to show that they cannot be
imposed without opposition. As his intentions become manifested in
actions, it is necessary to oppose them and show the harm they are
wreaking, by means of legislative action where possible and through
action in the streets. It is necessary to pressure Democrats to expose
and fight MAGA policies and to present an alternative to Trumpism that
has wide popular appeal rather than just representing the interests of
a different faction of the plutocratic class. Opponents based in civil
society outside the electoral system can strengthen their performance
of these tasks by drawing together a non-electoral opposition, the
subject of a later Commentary in this series.

MAGA forces will undoubtedly continue and expand their longstanding
efforts to cripple opposition in the electoral system through voter
suppression, intimidation, gerrymandering, and similar anti-democratic
techniques. These efforts will continue to be challenged in the
electoral system, in the courts, and by direct action. The success of
the two sides will be hanging in the balance. The result of successful
resistance may be a period of dual power, in which Trump remains in
office but is unable to implement his agenda because of popular
opposition.

In the event that the electoral system is still functioning as more
than a rubber stamp for MAGA power, the 2026 elections will provide a
major opportunity to end MAGA hegemony, as I will discuss in a later
Commentary in this series. Both direct and electoral action should aim
to dramatize the harm MAGA is doing, expose the illusion of its
invincibility, and project a positive alternative. The aim is a
massive repudiation of Trump and the MAGA agenda. If the Republican
Party loses control of one or both houses of Congress, that will put a
powerful brake on the MAGA juggernaut.

Conversely, if the Republican Party remains in control of the
presidency, the Supreme Court, and both houses of Congress, it may be
well on its way to establishing a long-lasting authoritarian
para-fascist regime led by an autocratic dictator. Under those
circumstances, Social Self-Defense will depend primarily on action
taken outside the electoral arena.

Sometimes those in power come to be despised by a large proportion of
the population, but political repression and the gutting of the
institutions of democracy make elections and other normal democratic
procedures ineffective as vehicles for eliminating them. Under such
conditions, people in many parts of the world have turned to mass
nonviolent popular uprisings, sometimes referred to as “people
power” or “social strikes,” as I will discuss in a later
commentary. Such mobilizations have removed authoritarian regimes in
such countries as Poland, the Philippines, Serbia, and most recently
South Korea. They represent the ultimate power of Social Self-Defense,
with an entire society withdrawing cooperation and support from a
regime and making its continued rule impossible. They often grow out
of previous forms of Social Self-Defense. The developing resistance to
MAGA para-fascism should aim to lay the groundwork for such action
should it ultimately become necessary.

The end-game? Sooner or later replacement of para-fascism by democracy
will need to be ratified by free elections.

The next commentary in this series will discuss strategic guidelines
for Social Self-Defense.

[1]
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Bertolt Brecht, “In Times of Extreme Persecution,” in _Poems
1913-1956_. Methuen New York:, 1976.
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By Jeremy Brecher · Launched 2 years ago
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* Social Self Defense; Resistance to Trump; Anti-Maga;
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