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Over the years, when discussions among friends have turned to what would you do at times of challenge and controversy, such as a Trump presidency, the recourse has been one of frustration. Move to Canada. Have your passport current and ready.
It is conceivable, if not likelier than not, that Trump will become president again. From all indications, if that comes to pass, his presidency will be more dire, draconian and autocratic than fathomable. Read his lips. His words, as documented by Axios:
• "Defund any school with a vaccine or mask mandate." • Impose the "largest domestic deportation operation."
• "Protect innocent life."
• "Investigate every radical out of control prosecutor."
• Reimpose the "Trump travel ban."
• End the "insane electric vehicle mandate."
• Initiate "ideological screening on all immigrants."
• Ensure "immunity for our law enforcement"
• "Obliterate the deep state."
He has pledged each of those measures, at least 5 times or more, again according to Axios.
Or watch a handful of videos:
- Trump on immigrants and deportations
- Trump on climate change
- Trump on Ukraine and NATO
- Trump on Project 2025
Project 2025, the transition report blueprint for Trump’s presidency that is spearheaded by The Heritage Foundation, as summarized by the Washington Post, would:
“Remake the federal workforce to be political: Instead of nonpartisan civil servants implementing policies on everything including health, education and climate, the executive branch would be filled with Trump loyalists…Give Trump power to investigate his opponents: Project 2025 would move the Justice Department, and all of its law enforcement arms like the FBI, directly under presidential control….Crack down on even legal immigration: It would create a new ‘border patrol and immigration agency’ to resurrect Trump’s border wall, build camps to detain children and families at the border, and send out the military to deport millions of people who are already in the country illegally (including dreamers)….Slash climate change protections: Project 2025 calls for getting rid of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which forecasts weather and tracks climate change, describing it as ‘one of the main drivers of the climate change alarm industry.’”
Trump is distancing himself from the frightful specifics of Project 2025. He’s no dummy demagogue. Fascism for the people and the power of positive bullying go hand in hand with bluster mitigated by practiced denial and buoyed by drumbeats of propaganda.
The Post’s summary tries to comfort the easily distracted public by noting that “some of these ideas are impractical or possibly illegal. Analysts are divided about whether Trump can politicize the civil workforce to fire them at will. And the plan calls for using the military to carry out mass deportations on a historic scale, which could be constitutionally iffy.”
That is not how dictatorships work when the judiciary has already been coopted, and Republican voters, public officials and media platforms have fallen under a toxic spell. Trump is a master dogwhistler and MAGA supporters are obedient, angry companions. It is ironclad.
Remember the titan. Trump got the votes of more than 62 million people when he defeated Hillary Clinton for president in 2016; he got more than 74 million votes when he lost to Joe Biden in 2020.
Instead of shaking our heads in wonderment at how a deranged demagogue could have the support of millions and millions of Americans, do some basic math in assessing your fellow Americans.
Among us are segregationists whose response to the end of slavery during the end of the 19th century and most of the 20th century was to impose Jim Crow laws and fight civil rights legislation and protests with seething anger, fists in the air and bulldogs.
Count off the isolationists and Nazi sympathizers during the 1930s and World War II who linked arms to foment anti-Semitism.
Add in the anti-Communists of the 1950s and ‘60s who were the thought police of that era. They cancelled culture through blacklisting that got people fired and rendered them unemployable.
Don’t forget the White and Christian nationalists who use immigrant-phobia to keep the country from slipping into the clutches of the other.
Toss in the anti-abortion activists whose beliefs and methods have spilled over to instill fear in women and doctors who aren’t even contemplating abortion.
Hail to Huey Long, Bull Connor and Lester Maddox, hail to Charles Lindbergh and Father Charles Coughlan, hail to Joe McCarthy and hail to Donald Trump. Leaders with bullhorns and bully pulpits matter.
So do the offspring of ardent segregationists, isolationists, Nazi sympathizers, anti-Communists, White and Christian nationalists, anti-abortion activists. Take out a ledger. Subtract the many, many offspring who have disassociated from their parents and their beliefs. On the other side of the ledger, account for the biblical fruitfulness and multiplication that has repopulated each generation with revitalized venom.
If you did some simple addition allowing for overlap in the millions and margins of error, you’d still have 50 million + people who constitute the willing followers of Fascism Trump-style. It is intoxicating.
Trump is not a stand-alone nemesis. His legions are legion. They have a push-pull relationship and they mean business.
As Project 2025 sets out in its opening paragraph [emphasis theirs]:
“It is not enough for conservatives to win elections. If we are going to rescue the country from the grip of the radical Left, we need both a governing agenda and the right people in place, ready to carry this agenda out on Day One of the next conservative Administration.”
Project 2025 is driven by a 180-day playbook. Whether it’s Trump’s agenda or Project 2025’s playbook or a marriage made in heaven forbid, there’s work to do over the next four months to defeat Donald Trump.
There’s also work to do to organize for the resistance if he were to win. I’m not moving to Canada, as fond as I am of the place.
So what to do and how to go about it?
As a Jew whose grandparents were slaughtered in a Nazi concentration camp, I’m sensitive to the direct consequences of the demonization of the other and to the Righteous role models whose selfless sacrifices in resistance saved Jews from capture and death.
If peaceful protesters are arrested, would I and others join in to swell the ranks to make arrests less feasible? If immigrants are rounded up for deportation, would I and others hide people in our homes? Would I and others seek out churches, synagogues and mosques for sanctuaries, solidarity and moral guidance? Do undergrounds form organically?
I’m in uncharted territory here.
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9 comments:
Jack: Although the subject is difficult to get one's head around, it is, as you suggest, worth thinking about. If you've never perused "A Force More Powerful" by Ackerman and Duvall, take a look: there have been nonviolent resistance movements that were able to be effective in very difficult circumstances, but obviously people have to be ready to step up. Russian dissenters are doing this all the time.
I suppose I would have opted for Canada - during the Viet Nam conflict - if I had not gotten a student deferment, rather than conscientious objection, but I am probably too old to pick up stakes and head north - however, I did renew my passport (not for that purpose but it might come in handy).
Hope your essay sparks some responses and then you can start a discussion.
Elliot--Thanks. I'll check out Ackerman and Duvall's book.
Jack, do you remember our conversation on the way back from the Grinnell reunion a couple of years ago. I have been thinking along the same lines as your post for the past couple of months. I know I wouldn't leave the country, and I feel like we are sitting and watching a rhyming of events from the early 30s in Germany. I find myself even entertaining a conspiracy theory about the assassination attempt from the weekend as something potentially staged by Trump to increase his already increasing support. And here we sit waiting while Democrats fight like idiots over their nominee while a madman who has persuaded the angriest, most unthinking, anti-Semitic, phobic, isolationist, White Nationalist, Evangelical, segregationist, Fascist, and to quote Hilary Clinton, downright "deplorable" members of our society to support him no matter what he may do. I feel like we should start thinking about and possibly devising a plan to organize and resist a government completely under MAGA control just in case.
Hey Jack! I, also, have no personal playbook for resistance beyond voting. Your enumeration of the various authoritarian-favoring population subgroups crystallizes the situation. Our national ideological division is deep and longstanding. The rift will not heal or diminish. So, what to do? Though fantasy, I favor divorce with visitation rights and trade agreements. Sure, drawing new nation boundaries would be a challenge. Each person/family would choose to stay with adversaries or move to join their tribe. For sure, there would have to be tax subsidies to help people move. Money well-spent IMO. Everybody would have beaches and mountains to visit. Libs get east & west coasts; conservatives get FL and the Gulf. Libs get the southern Rockies and Sierras; conservatives get the southern Appalachians and Ozarks. This could work!
Thanks for sharing these bleak but unfortunately realistic thoughts, Jack. I would add that any fanciful projection of a potential role in the “resistance” depends on not being in the gulag yourself. You and many others are assuming that our white privilege will keep us safe while they round up their “bad” guys. It seems likely we won’t be in the first wave but given the lessons of history, as you point out, Jews and radicals may not be far behind. (As Niemoller confesses in “First they came……Then they came for me….) There are hundreds of thousands of exterminated, apparently assimilated German Jews who wished they had heeded the warnings and left when they could, before borders closed, assets confiscated, and passports revoked. Where to go is, of course, a huge open question. Why would Canada want us, especially in our sexagenarian and septuagenarian demographics.
More directly to your point. Resistance in and to a fascist state is not academic. How many of your friends and family members would you be willing to see die or suffer physically, financially, socially to protect your role in the resistance? How much torture do you think you could withstand before divulging the names of your co-conspirators? For me, not much I am pretty sure. Sure, I’d want to do something but thinking through what they’re telling us they’ll do I’m not sure resistance is a realistic option.
Hello Jack,
Thanks for the powerful framing of the situation, which is indeed dire. Your piece is a very persuasive and vivid exercise in paranoia run wild. You evoke the ghosts of “Huey Long, Bull Connor, Lester Maddox, Charles Lindbergh, Father Coughlan, Joe McCarthy and Donald Trump”. The list is long, creepy and far from complete. Still, we ultimately got through all those people except the last, didn’t we? And the last one, when actually in charge, managed to lose the populace that elected him. The nightmare scenario is very dramatic, but if the Dems lose the election, I bet you will get up off the mat, dust yourself off, honorably acknowledge the loss, and get back to work.
Mike-- You got me thinking. I added this self-reflective question to the piece - Would I be willing to be arrested myself if the arrests resulted in long periods of incarceration?
Tom-- None of the long and creepy list became president, so we got through them. Trump did become president and we got through him too,though he's a revitalized and more vindictive Trump. All this has me recalling your brother Chris' book, Blowback: America's Recruitment of Nazis and Its Effects on the Cold War.
Amy--Sure do recall our chat.Seems neither of us can move on from it.
Jack, with Kamala Harris as the nominee things seem more hopeful although I lost considerable respect for how the Democrats treated President Biden whom I revere. However, if the unthinkable were to happen, after much soul-searching, I would act as you suggest in your second-to-last paragraph. Otherwise, I suspect I wouldn't be able to live with myself.
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