This Resistance Is Futile.

On the impotence—and ignorance—of the protesting class

The Times published a video yesterday that cheekily instructs Democrats on how to stop Trump: “by boldly doubling down on everything that has never worked before.” The piece features Democrats at their most feckless, febrile, and feeble: there’s a group of Congressmembers chanting incoherently; there’s an unstable-seeming young woman screeching at her webcam; there’s Chuck Schumer.

Aside from making the case that Democrats should try, you know, appealing to people, the video also more or less articulates a sentiment that, at least as I remember things, was hardly mainstream in the early days of the first Trump regime: The resistance is embarrassing.

You might detect the same implication in a video I released last week about an anti-Trump protest I attended on Presidents’ Day. Seemingly propelled by a declaration by an organization called 50501, which aimed to send a nationwide message of popular revulsion at Trumpian autocracy, a consortium of activist groups gathered that afternoon in downtown Manhattan, where they marched and flailed for several hours, their ranks eventually thinning to a gaggle of supposed Communists demanding an end to commerce.

My video features some of the demonstration’s more ridiculous participants, along with others who seemed fairly in touch with reality, if ultimately powerless in the face of it. There were a few familiar archetypes, including a New School professor advocating replacing the US government with “matriarchy” (How? What?) and a Boomer-aged hippie covered in ostensibly peaceful slogans (“Hands off Iran!”).

But most of the people I included not for how weird they were, but for how ordinary. And the dominant theme was that few if any of them still had any real sense of why people like Donald Trump. Instead, when I asked people why they thought he’d been reelected, I often heard a familiar-sounding but I think superficial explanation: racism and sexism—as one participant put it, an “atavistic hatred” of one’s fellow citizens.

I did not vote for Trump, but I spent much of last year in the company of people who did, including non-white people and women (and even some non-white women!), and it strikes me that the people who chalk up his popularity to bigotry are confusing the effects of a handful of his policies with the values of his supporters.

To many liberals, that’s a ridiculous-looking sentence I just wrote: how else should we judge Trump voters if not by the effects of their vote? And—“handful”? Who cares how many of Trump’s actions don’t specifically impact minorities, they might ask, when he inflicts such obvious terror on illegal immigrants and women who value sex without procreation?

What the Trump voters are bigots set doesn’t acknowledge—not on camera, at least—is that while Donald Trump may be a malignant narcissist, he is also enormously charismatic, funny, and (emotionally) genuine.

Can you think of any big-name Democrats who fit that description?

As even mainstream liberal publications like the Times are willing to acknowledge, the moral high ground is no good without actual power. But power will elude Democrats so long as they fundamentally misunderstand what they are up against. If they are serious about saving democracy, they might consider rising to the occasion that democracy demands.

They can only go up from here: