What might a resistance that isn’t futile look like?
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I’ve spent the last couple of months in a deep funk and trust I’m not alone in this. As is true for many here, my last decade has been defined by opposition — resistance to the rise of authoritarianism in general and, more specifically, to the rise of MAGA and Donald Trump.
For that decade’s work to end in abject failure is a bitter pill to swallow.
I didn’t know whether I would write about politics after this election. There was already so much being written. So much and so futile. And so many have tuned out.
But today I woke up inspired. The question that I awakened to is “What’s Left?”
In one sense it meant to me what’s left to do in a society that has rejected democracy and chosen authoritarianism? My personal answer: protect the most vulnerable among us first. To say: “First they came for the immigrants… and I did something.”
But the question also had another meaning to me: What will define the Left in our new political reality?
The Folly of Triangulation
Allowing the Left to be defined as anyone who isn’t Trump did not work. In two out of his three elections, Trump won the Electoral College while pulling the Democratic Party to the right on key issues. And now, once again, there’s talk among the defeated of “moving to the center” — a “center” that, since the days of that great “liberal” president, Richard Nixon, has moved, in fits and starts but inexorably, to the right.
Seeing Kamala Harris embrace fracking on national TV sickened me — it was as if she’d allowed herself to be fracked, broken apart from long-held principles by political pressures. And all to no avail. Trump called her a communist and sold the perception of her as a member of the far Left, even while she bled actual support from the Left as she campaigned on TV next to the Cheneys (as noted repeatedly, and with appropriate despair, by Jon Stewart). So much for triangulation in the Trumpocene.
Here’s a thought: How about standing for something you believe rather than pandering for swing-state votes? If you’re going to be indicted as a communist anyway, the very least you can do is be a liberal. As the Bonnie Raitt song put it, “Let’s give them something to talk about!”
The difference between the offerings of the Democratic Party and the Republican Party needs to be stark. Free health care and a social safety net versus the Republicans’ solution of letting billionaires run wild to prey upon whomever they can.
The Left must be defined, for starters, by what is a staple for the rest of the developed world: free health care and free higher education.
Medical debt and student debt should be as outdated as rabbit-ears antennas on televisions and dial-up internet. As Bernie Sanders has said, free health care is so close to impossible that it’s only been done by every other developed country in the world.
The difference between the offerings of the Democratic Party and the Republican Party needs to be stark. Free health care and a social safety net versus the Republicans’ solution of letting billionaires run wild to prey upon whomever they can.
A Perplexing Election
I would say the choice needs to be as stark as between democracy and fascism, but weren’t we just offered that very choice? You’d think that was stark enough — starker than we’ve ever faced. How much starker could it possibly be? And America chose…
Or did it? To what extent was this election’s outcome a result of targeted voter suppression?
Greg Palast has made videos about a new law in Georgia that allowed for unlimited challenges to other voters by a single voter. I wrote in 2023 about the voter suppression in VIrginia, Texas, Mississippi, and Ohio in just that year — which took decades of voter suppression before that to a new level.
It’s been a standing tactic, and one that has only intensified. Republicans always find more fat on the bone to trim when it comes to purging the voter rolls. And putting ever higher hurdles in front of would-be voters, especially urban voters, voters of color, students, renters, young, and elderly — i.e., the Democratic constituencies.
Trump won several of the battlegrounds by relatively small margins. Wisconsin was determined by approximately 29,000 votes. Nevada by 46,000, Michigan by 80,000, Georgia by 115,000, Pennsylvania by a little more than 120,000.
In Georgia, conservative activists were using a new tool, EagleAI, and the new law, referenced above, allowing unlimited challenges to other people’s votes, potentially thousands of them, by a single voter. In Nevada, nearly 100,000 voters were removed in July, a move for which the state GOP took credit. The predictable prize winner for voter suppression was the great state of Texas, with a purge of 1.1 million voters in the summer of 2024.
What Can Be Salvaged — and How?
Whether or not Trump’s victory was the result of voter suppression and/or, even more troubling, possible electronic interference with and manipulation of vote tabulation, doesn’t change the fact that we once again have a president with clear and open aspirations of authoritarianism. But whereas after 2016 there seemed to be a chance the Supreme Court would check his authority, his three additions to the court have made it all but a blank check.
The twisted logic behind their most recent rulings has many legal scholars believing the MAGA court majority to be bad-faith actors, while the public’s faith in the judiciary has dropped to an all-time low. As a lawyer, I find it particularly dispiriting to know that there is no rule of law at the top of the food chain, just power brokers.
And without law, without the guarantee of meaningful elections, without a leadership that makes it clear what the Left means other than being anti-Trump — what’s left?
For me, what’s left is fighting for the most vulnerable within what remains of the system, and advocating for the “leftist” principles that continue to thrive in the truly free countries such as Iceland, Norway, and much of Western Europe. Free health care, free education, and freedom from chemicals and pollutants that are dangerous to our health.
Although the United States of America was the start of modern democracy, it’s not the perfection of it. There have been numerous countries that have developed freer and better-constructed democracies since our Constitution was drafted in the 18th century.
We might begin by taking an inventory of what still works in our nation on the brink, how its enduring strengths can be exploited to fend off those who are seeking to destroy it by exploiting its weaknesses.
Has the hubris of American exceptionalism been hit hard enough for the public to realize that our system of democracy was already broken and just waiting for someone with Trump’s monstrous talents to exploit the loopholes? And will this realization lead to a better system, a freer society, and a better democracy?
One can only hope so — eventually. For now, there is only belief in that future and hard work.
Protecting the Vulnerable
As a practicing attorney, one way I resisted some of the worst of the first Trump term was taking on asylum cases pro bono, even though I’d never done asylum law before. One result was a transgender woman receiving asylum, something I will always be proud of.
Now once again people here without status or seeking asylum at the border will be the most vulnerable and the first victims of the revived reign of terror. So to all my readers who need a focus and a positive thing to do in the wake of the election, in anticipation of American fascism, that is an area that needs your support, your energy.
An asylum seeker, by definition, is someone saying under oath they run the risk of death and torture if they are deported back to their country. Granted, the process is imperfect and may be subject to abuse, but the vast majority of the cases are genuine and the consequences of deportation deadly. For Trump and MAGA, who view immigrants as “vermin,” it seems clear that the cruelty is the point.
In the face of that cruelty — to asylum seekers and to all without the power and money to protect themselves — is there anything to be done? What might a resistance that isn’t futile look like?
Leveraging What Still Works
We might begin by taking an inventory of what still works in our nation on the brink, how its enduring strengths can be exploited to fend off those who are seeking to destroy it by exploiting its weaknesses.
The words that can still be written and said, the ideas and criticisms expressed. The sources of power, policy, and governance not under federal sway. The vast wealth and resources in possession and control of those who depend on and still believe in democracy — both for its own sake and for the benefits it confers on them and their enterprises.
And ultimately, perhaps, the latent common sense of a people who may simply not have believed the stove to be hot without first touching it.
Global examples of effective pushback are beginning to be seen, from Poland to Hungary and even Turkey. The Arab Spring faced worse odds. The czars were ousted in Russia. It is conceivable there will come a time when neither an authoritarian like Trump nor the billionaires that have flocked to him are still pulling the levers of power in the US.
Much, if not everything, will depend on the state of our elections — whether they are truly free and fair, whether voter suppression and vote count manipulation can be eliminated as outcome-influencing factors. And this points to yet another “thing to be done,” another crucial front of battle for those willing to engage.
Doug Ecks is a lawyer and writer. He holds a JD from the University of California, Hastings and a BA in philosophy from California State University, Long Beach, Phi Beta Kappa. He also writes and performs comedy as Doug X.
