It's time to bring back #TheResistance

I mean it. Mostly. Read on.

Welcome to a Monday morning edition of Progress Report.

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On that note, I’ve got a piece that should hopefully provoke some thought and perhaps initiate some action — even if those things happen after an initial hard eye roll or two. I’m making myself very vulnerable to future owning with this one, so do me a favor and read the whole thing and let me know what you think.

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Nostalgic for the bad old days

I can’t believe it’s come to this, but I mean it when I say it’s time to bring back the #Resistance.

It’s an article of faith in many corners of the political internet, including the ones where I work and spend too much time, that the popular pushback mounted against Donald Trump during his first term in office, loosely known as the #Resistance, was a failure. Even worse, it’s largely accepted that the term is cringe, the battle cry of the embarrassingly earnest and dangerously naive, a hashtag used by the well-off white liberals who treated Hamilton as revolutionary text and seeing it live as an act of defiance topped only by retweeting the latest barn-burner from their favorite MSNBC host.

It’s not just a cynical minority who feel this way, either. This view has become so broadly a pervasive that even Lin Manuel-Miranda poked fun at it last night on Saturday Night Live.

Nowadays, the #Resistance is weighed down by its with association with grifters like the Lincoln Project and certain liberal influencers, the delusion that establishment figures like Robert Mueller would save us, and finally the failures of the Democratic leaders who benefited from the movement. Trump won again, the logic goes, so obviously any resistance was a flop, right?

But there’s another reality that has long been buried by the chaos of the past six decades: the #Resistance was successful, at least in its initial and most cohesive objectives. Motivated organizers helped Democrats flip the House, win back state governments, and break supermajorities. They passed key ballot initiatives, rebuilt political systems, and educated a new generation of activists. And then they defeated Trump, even as Democratic leaders began shanking the left.

The revolution was never going to be led from $400 Broadway seats, even if the show was about the American Revolution, but the energy and impetus of even that elite corner of the universe is enviable compared to the void of this moment.

The past is prologue

To be fair, it’s hard to blame people who feel despair right now. Not only is Donald Trump back in power, he seems more powerful. He won the popular vote this time, remade the GOP in his image, and commands complete loyalty from businesses and billionaires who once disdained him. His greatest failure has been warped into an advantage, as the pandemic that killed over a million Americans also turned millions more into fanatical conspiracy theorists. Plus, though the right has gone scorched earth in its culture wars, Trump still gained voter share with just about every demographic.

Yet, despite of all those miserable developments, the 2024 election was not a political revolution, and while demographic shifts should be deeply concerning, there’s still a chance to prevent it from even heralding a major realignment.

The popular vote was decided by just 1.5% despite Harris receiving six million fewer votes than Joe Biden, the sign of a discouraged and depressed electorate. Polls and exit surveys indicate that both the 2016 and 2024 elections were ultimately about the anger of middle and working class Americans left behind by a stratifying economy, with other issues — including backlash to immigration — flowing from there. And Democrats, clueless to the national mood, ran functional incumbents, anti-populists anointed by the party’s elite and promised four more years of their predecessor’s policies. (Of course, gender also played a role.)

In fact, Democratic candidates generally over-performed Kamala Harris, winning Senate and House elections, as well as holding on to legislatures, in states that the vice president lost. Even in states like Ohio, where they lost Senate races, populist candidates way outperformed Harris.

None of this is to say that the November catastrophe was simply a matter of Democrats screwing up the top of the ticket; there are real fundamental issues facing the party. The point is that as dismal as it is that Donald Trump is back in the White House, the American people have not yet turned irrevocably to the right. The only way that will happen is if Democrats — and more critically, their grassroots — forgo the chance to mount a serious pushback and instead acquiesce out of short-sighted political fear and exhaustion.

There is no mandate, so don’t help Trump create one

Democratic leadership has been absent at best since Trump won this last election, and posts like this, from Rep. Hakeem Jeffries, confirms that they will be of little help going forward. What’s even more damaging is when mainstream and even progressive Democrats act out of political expedience and wind up foolishly legitimizing bad wars in the Middle East, Nazis like Elon Musk, and domestic terror.

Take the Laken Riley Act, which received 58 Democratic votes between the House and Senate. This is a law that allows for the detainment of legal residents and deportation of people not found guilty of a crime, and those votes will simply make Democrats seem like hypocrites when they join the outcry once ICE begins kidnapping children from school and church.

And there will be outcry, because allowing ICE to raid schools and churches, like so much of what Trump is pursuing, is very unpopular. A new poll found that 64% of Americans oppose arresting undocumented children at school, with just 18% in favor of the barbaric practice.

The poll also found 57% opposition to arresting undocumented adults at church, with a mere 20% in favor of raids during mass. Support for mass deportations of undocumented people who have not committed crimes, after all Trump’s rhetoric, is still at just 37%.

It’s a similar situation for ending birthright citizenship, which another recent poll found opposed by 51% of Americans and supported by just 28%. There’s no doubt that the numbers would crater even further once it became clear to people how many of their neighbors, co-workers, teachers, doctors, and extended family members would be endangered.

We aren’t talking hypotheticals, either. The Trump administration just issued quotas to ICE officers in order to ramp up the shock and awe campaign and terrorize more innocent people.

From slapping tariffs on friendly nations to easing pharmaceutical companies’ path to further jacking up the cost of drugs, there is nothing that Trump is pursuing right now that is supported by a majority of Americans. The White House may be having a load of fun, but they’re overplaying their hand. Dr. Phil hosting immigration raid specials is not what Americans signed up for.

They elected Trump because people thought he would bring down their monthly bills, and now he is spending his political capital on pausing cancer research at the National Institute of Health. They thought he’d bully health insurance companies into lowering costs, yet he is primed to cut Medicaid to give huge tax breaks to the wealthiest people in this country.

The backlash must come from the bottom up

Liberal America was an absolute mess after the 2016 election. Democrats lost upward of a thousand legislative seats during the Obama years, Republicans had gerrymandered key swing states into uncompetitive banana republics, and the presumption of all those diner dispatches was that middle America would be out of reach for generations. There was almost zero reason for any kind of optimism, but millions of shocked voters became newly minted activists because they were angry and knew that something had to be done.

Whether you want to use the hashtag itself, that urge to resist is what fueled the initial virality of a wonky Google Doc by a pair of former Congressional staffers, then inspired hundreds of thousands of people to form or get involved with the confederation that it produced. Indivisible had nearly 4000 local chapters within a few weeks of Trump’s initial inauguration, many of them formed in parts of the country otherwise devoid of progressive — or even Democratic — political infrastructure.

People who’d never done more than vote became dedicated organizers, whipping up protests and building networks out of similarly inexperienced friends and family. They packed town halls, texted and phone-banked, and learned the nuances of local laws and parliamentary procedures. These new activists overwhelmed Republican lawmakers, bringing such intensity to what were once sleepy local events that by that spring they were being credited with saving Obamacare on their own.

Those activists, along with the volunteers from MoveOn and lots of other freshly energized groups, then turned their focus toward elective politics, beginning the long climb back to majorities in many statehouses. Some ran for office, others raised and donated money, and many more turned their focus on local offices, where real tangible change was most possible and immediate. I know this because I started this newsletter in late 2017 and despite having little political experience, was able to raise millions for progressive candidates and causes.

I stress progressive because along with trying to flip legislatures, I was one of many new activists who dedicated themselves to helping primary challengers to corrupt and inept Democrats. The Squad began its ascent in 2018 by taking out lousy Democrats, New York finally overthrew its conservative state Senate, and a blitz of ballot initiatives raised the minimum wage, fortified voting rights, enacted criminal justice reform, and expanded Medicaid even in red states.

Those wins are essential to hold up today as examples of what’s possible even during dark times, because there are all kinds of populist policies that we can pursue and turn into political flashpoints, from workers’ rights to price-gouging to affordable housing. Americans still largely agree with progressives on the issues that actually impact them.

Democrats’ leaders discouraged those policies and politics, and they’re still doing so in many cases. This sabotage takes many forms, including doing nothing to stop big money PACs from warping primary elections, prioritizing ancient seniority in House caucuses, and uplifting a class of socially inept bloggers with long track records of getting everything wrong. Watching it play out, there is understandably precious little appetite to fight on many Democrats’ behalf. We’ve seen up close that fighting for “blue no matter who” and calling it a day when that battle is won often leads to disappointment and resentment. In this case, party leaders rolling over for Trump has an enormously depressing effect.

The answer is not to give up, but to run primary challenges, which always energize the grassroots. Lessons have been learned, and I’m willing to bet many of the #resisters who happily voted for centrist, corporate-sponsored Democrats will be up for exploring a new path.

Any energy is happening in local organizing, where people are training immigrants and community members on how to keep one another safe from raids, trying to maintain victories on abortion and minimum wage amendments, and organizing unions. The movements are largely atomized, so I’m making it my priority to find and uplift as many as possible, so that people can learn where to join in.

This time around, the change cannot end at a shift in which party establishment holds ostensible power. The goal has to be a total reimagining of the political system that twice permitted Donald Trump to be elected President of the United States. But none of that will happen if the spark that drove the initial round of #TheResistance stays extinguished. We don’t have to buy tickets to Hamilton, but I’d take the enthusiasm of those who did.

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