No. of Recommendations: 2
Earlier reflections on the Resistance brushed it off as embarrassing pap. But such dismissals now risk ignoring the possibility that earnest outrage, at the right place and the right time, is itself a powerful tonic against the corrosion of American democracy.
I think that's probably wrong. And for the same reasons that "Resistance" failed.
The U.S. isn't a Parliamentary system. We're a Presidential system. One of the main differences is that whoever wins the Presidential election gets to be President for the next four years. There are no "no confidence" votes, no shifting parliamentary majorities, no changing coalitions that can change who the Executive is. It is, and will remain, whoever won the last election until the next one.
Protests can convey a message quite powerfully - but if the message is, "We don't want Trump to be President," it's futile and fruitless one. A protest that conveys a message against a particular policy or set of policies can be very useful in demonstrating political support/opposition for those policies. But a protest against the person of the President is pointless. Worse, it isn't a tonic against the corrosion of American democracy, because the possibility of having someone you abhor be elected President and then having to live with it is the core essence of democracy. Democracy doesn't just depend on how the winners act. It also depends on how the losers act, and whether they acknowledge that their side is not the only one that has the right to power.
That doesn't mean ceding the argument, but it does require ceding the office. Which makes protests against the occupant of the office, rather than discrete policies or practices, kind of pointless and easily dismissed as sour grapes.
Which is a long-winded way of saying that these kind of "we oppose everything" protests are very unlikely to accomplish anything. An arrow penetrates because all of its force is concentrated to a single, tiny point - these protests are not. That allows them to be the largest protests in U.S. history (if they get there)....but so what? The people in power already know that millions of folks don't like Trump, the Republican Party, or their overarching platform - so being able to turn out large numbers of folks against those things generally doesn't accomplish very much. It's mostly when you can turn out a very large number of people about one thing (or a small discrete set of things) that you have a meaningful opportunity for change....
