BACKSTORY 55.3 - Are We Answering the Call of Our Times?
Written by SP Editor
In a recent one-month period, I found myself in Romania, Bulgaria, Italy, Malta, England, and Belgium, as well as the United States. Everywhere, the question was raised, sometimes softly and at other times stridently: what are we doing to oppose Trump and his administration taking the United States into previously unimaginable darkness? On reflection, I found my answers somewhat lame and on the order of, “doing our best,” “doing what we can,” or similar grabbing at straws. Whatever we are doing individually and collectively, it’s not enough, and it’s not working.
No matter our personal or political expectations about a second Trump administration or even our examination of the Project 2025 documents (see Social Policy 55.1), I don’t think any of us believed, on the record of Trump’s first term, that it would be this bad or as comprehensive as his attack on all democratic institutions and norms has been thus far. Nothing seems to be stopping the excesses of the administration. The highest court is abetting them and even as lower courts attempt to slow the tide, they are being ignored. Now, in the wake of the Kirk assassination, it may get even worse. Irrationally and without evidence, Trump and his people are announcing an attack on the “left,” whatever that might entail and whoever he means in his anger vengance.
We are being steamrolled. We are disorganized and gobsmacked. The right seems organized, institutionalized, resourced, and aggressive. Whoever and whatever this “left” might be, it seems like it’s none of those. There have been marches, editorials, lawsuits, principled resignations, and the like, that might be called resistance, but thus far seem ineffective.
Yes, we should have seen this coming. The surge of the right has been a state by state phenomenon for some time, so books will be written about how we should have foreseen this prospect. I still argue that this is sui generis to Trump, but I’m no longer sure. It turns out our democracy and institutions are incredibly weak and with judicial assistance, easily overwhelmed and taken over. The Democratic Party is hardly a party of the left, but as an alternative it is in disarray, groping, and leaderless. The party is unable to protect the people, and people sense its weakness, even while lacking an alternative.
Unions in other countries would have acted as a buffer, but in the USA, we seem divided internally with too many members supporting the Trump team, some of our leaders compromised by parochial interests, and all collectively unable to step into the progressive leadership void that we need. Institutional labor has stood by impotently watching as one-million federal workers have lost collective bargaining protection and the American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE) has been decimated. Compare this to the support of a small, conservative union of PATCO air traffic controllers when attacked by President Reagan. Comparatively, there seems relatively little protest and solidarity, and certainly no calls for general strikes, mass demonstrations, or anything of the kind.
Efforts to raise massive levels of money seem to focus largely on legal actions. The most effective work has been local resistance to deportation. People seem ready to act, but nationally weak and fragile.
This is where we are, like or not. The first step in rebuilding has to be to recognize the reality. We’re not at fighting strength. We’ve been beaten like a dog. The midterms won’t save us, even if a house of Congress flipped. We need a real plan about how to resource and organize to build peoples’ movements and institutions from the ground up without fear or favor, and we have to do it differently than we have done before. The jury is in. Whatever we thought would work was wrong, and what we were doing, didn’t work. We need to salvage what we can and go from here. It’s going to be a long road, so we better get started, even while we hunker down in horror at the endless assault now.