Contra Trump

 

Our mistake was to think we could row this boat across the acid lake before the acid dissolved it.

We quoted this line from Rebecca Solnit following the victory of Donald Trump in the 5 November 2024 US presidential election in What seeds can I plant in this muck?, a chapter in our series Contra Trump — America’s Empire of Tedium.

Here we introduce Meditations in an Emergency, Rebecca Solnit sums up her view in the following way:

We are in an emergency. The nature of this emergency is pushback against the long emergence of a new, more egalitarian, inclusive, empathic, and aware society, of the way that new ideas and new rights and policies add up to nothing less than a better society. Better when it comes to justice because it protects rights that were previously not even recognized, better when it comes to truth because it includes historically excluded voices, better when it comes to nature, because it recognizes both the elegant intricacy of natural systems and our inseparability from them.

This new society is offensive to an elite who perceive enough for the many as deprivation of the few, who are driven by a mindset of scarcity, a hungry-ghost insatiability for power and wealth. By an inability to perceive how their own moral, spiritual, and emotional poverty is inseparable from the brutality of the unequal society they want to impose to aggrandize that power and material wealth. Who perceive the centuries of affirmative action for white men as meritocracy and the steps to grant more equal access as unfairness. Who while being beneficiaries of unearned privilege imagine themselves as naturally superior even while demonstrating their clownish mediocrity again and again. Who furiously deny the truth that is not only moral but scientific that everything is connected to everything else, which is why they take the facts of climate change as an insult to their notion of freedom as the ability to do whatever they want without consequences.

We preface Solnit’s introduction to Meditations with The Backlash Blues, a poem by Langston Hughes made famous in 1966 by Nina Simone. This is followed by a poem by Frank O’Hara published in 1954, the title of which inspired Solnit’s own title and the text of an email conversation that Solnit had with Erica Chenowet, a professor of public policy at the Harvard Kennedy School who is known for research into nonviolent civil resistance movements.

I first became aware of Chenowet’s work via a TED talk, one that reflected some of the ideas contained in Why Civil Resistance Works: The Strategic Logic of Nonviolent Conflict, a book that Chenowet coauthored with Maria Stephan in 2011. In that talk, Chenowet had observed that: ‘there’s no way nonviolent resistance can work against a ruthless opponent.’ In making this point she cited, among other cases, the repression of the Beijing Protest Movement in June 1989. In the following conversation with Rebecca Solnit another observation that Chenowet makes is salient:

The best study on the subject [of resisting authoritarianism] in my opinion suggests that in the long term, institutions really can’t save us; that civil society and mass mobilization are a more potent check on a backsliding democracy in the long term than relying on institutional checks and balances alone.

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Although a long-term reader of Rebecca Solnit, I am grateful to Linda Jaivin for alerting me to her Meditations.

— Geremie R. Barmé
Editor, China Heritage
10 February 2025

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Introducing Meditations in an Emergency

2 February 2025

We are very clearly in a lot of emergencies right now. They demand action. But action demands thought and thoughtfulness: who are we, what are our values, our goals, our allies, our possibilities, and our powers? What can we learn from those who’ve faced similar crises, what’s distinct about this one, and what equipment is at hand? The title of this newsletter I’m launching today, the lovely oxymoron of “Meditations in an Emergency,” I borrowed from a poem by the great gay poet Frank O’Hara. It felt like exactly the description for what I hope to do here: think for and with you about the emergencies we’re in and what to do about them, to meditate on causes, meanings, openings. Sometimes even in an emergency, or rather especially in an emergency, meditation as gathering ourselves and deepening our understanding is exactly what we need to do.It’s worth noting that the word emergency is built out of emerge, as in to exit or rise out of something, the opposite of merge, when things come together. An emergency is when things come apart—it can be breakage but also opening. and it’s related to the words emergence and emergent. “Emergence is the way complex systems and patterns arise out of multiplicity of simple interactions,” writes Adrienne Maree Brown in her book Emergent Strategy.Here’s why I’m hypervigilant, alarmed, and outraged about what’s happening in the USA right now, heartbroken about the devastation to targeted communities and the climate itself—but far from defeated. We are in an emergency. The nature of this emergency is pushback against the long emergence of a new, more egalitarian, inclusive, empathic, and aware society, of the way that new ideas and new rights and policies add up to nothing less than a better society. Better when it comes to justice because it protects rights that were previously not even recognized, better when it comes to truth because it includes historically excluded voices, better when it comes to nature, because it recognizes both the elegant intricacy of natural systems and our inseparability from them.This new society is offensive to an elite who perceive enough for the many as deprivation of the few, who are driven by a mindset of scarcity, a hungry-ghost insatiability for power and wealth. By an inability to perceive how their own moral, spiritual, and emotional poverty is inseparable from the brutality of the unequal society they want to impose to aggrandize that power and material wealth. Who perceive the centuries of affirmative action for white men as meritocracy and the steps to grant more equal access as unfairness. Who while being beneficiaries of unearned privilege imagine themselves as naturally superior even while demonstrating their clownish mediocrity again and again. Who furiously deny the truth that is not only moral but scientific that everything is connected to everything else, which is why they take the facts of climate change as an insult to their notion of freedom as the ability to do whatever they want without consequences.

But they are few and we are many. A coup, which is what we are having this week, is never the end of the story: all across the world we can find examples of how people resisted kings and dictators and wrote the next chapter themselves as civil society. I’m here to coauthor those chapters with you here in the USA. And we will be writing them soon. This coup stands out for its stupidities. The belief that nothing is connected to anything else is idiotic; right now we’re seeing it as the inability to understand consequences. Which I think is part of not understanding that everything is connected and that true power comes through alliance and persuasion, not attack and isolation. Not understanding that alienating relationships with other nations weakens this nation and its economy, that Greenland is part of Denmark, politically, which is part of NATO and the EU, and you fuck with them at your peril. That tariffs against Canada and Mexico are not primarily punishments of those countries; they are punishments of American people and industries and are already incurring retaliation. That attacks on immigrants are also attacks on the crucial industries that depend on immigrant labor. They do not understand what the federal government does, how healthcare and environmental protection at home and across the world protect the whole, including the economies that their wealth is inseparable from, how wrecking the economy will put them at odds with even many among the wealthy and powerful.

They do not understand that the reason they need to be authoritarian is because they are at war with the will of the people (not all the American people, of course, but a whole lot of us). Much of what they are doing is wildly unpopular and will only become more so. They do not understand power itself, and the limits on theirs. They do not understand that they cannot strong-arm all of us into abandoning our beliefs, values, commitments, and knowledge. Jason Stanley writes in his book How Fascism Works, “Fascist ideology conflicts in principle with expertise, science, and truth.” Authoritarians see fact, truth, history, science and law as rival systems of information and power that they must vanquish so that they alone can rule. One way we resist and check that power is by holding onto and speaking up about fact, truth, history, science and law, as well as preserving our independence of mind and pursuing good sources of information and analysis outside the propaganda hose. A sad part of the state of things is that a lot of powerful institutions, including major news media, are watering down the truth or amplifying the lies as they genuflect to power or just operate within their own elite worldviews. Which is why so many of us have turned to other sources–including newsletters like this one.

No one knows what happens next. But I do know what happens next can and must be in part what we do next, in a thousand ways, depending for each of us on our situations and resources. On how we find solidarity and understand possibility. I say this not as a promise that it will happen of its own accord, only as a belief that there are possibilities in the face of this would-be dictatorship. There always are. I’m here to explore them and act on them with you. We are in an emergency right now. That emergency is, as I said above, an attack on the long emergence of a new society, and I do not believe they can stop it no matter how much they harm it. Trump’s promise all along, to “make America great again,” has been a promise to make time run backward, to restore the old inequalities, repressions, hierarchies, and silences, to make most of us shut up and knuckle under.

Time does not run backward. And we do not have to surrender.

In 2018, Michelle Alexander wrote a powerful essay that’s stayed with me as a touchstone. She wrote that we are not the resistance, they are. She used the metaphor of rivers and dams, to say we are not trying to dam the river of change they are: “Donald Trump’s election represents a surge of resistance to this rapidly swelling river, an effort to build not just a wall but a dam. A new nation is struggling to be born, a multiracial, multiethnic, multifaith, egalitarian democracy in which every life and every voice truly matters.” And less than a month ago, Anand Giridharadas wrote a similar essay on his (highly recommended) newsletter The Ink, with the ringing title “January 6 was a revolt against the future. The future will prevail.” He writes, “We must understand that what we’ve been living through is backlash. Backlash. It’s not the engine of history. It is the revolt against the engine of history.” I’m with them. You can dismantle the institutions, violate the law, attack the vulnerable. But you can’t convince most of us we don’t deserve our rights or our democracy; you can’t convince us to forget what we know.

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Source:

• Rebecca Solnit, Welcome to Meditations in an Emergency, 2 February 2025

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The Nature of Our Power:

A Conversation with Political Scientist Erica Chenoweth

Rebecca Solnit

8 February 2025

“The best study on the subject in my opinion suggests that in the long term, institutions really can’t save us; that civil society and mass mobilization are a more potent check on a backsliding democracy in the long term than relying on institutional checks and balances alone.” That’s what political scientist Erica Chenoweth told me when I asked them if we could have a conversation (by email, below in full) about the current constitutional crisis/coup attempt and what we can do about it. Chenoweth is a hugely influential scholar of nonviolent social change, best known for their empirical research that not only documents what makes civil resistance work but demonstrates that it works, often extremely effectively. They direct the Nonviolent Action Lab, which studies how people have built movements and developed strategies to resist authoritarianism successfully and documents how nonviolence can be effective. There’s no one I wanted to hear from more in this constitutional crisis, and I’m grateful I can share their insights with all of you.

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Rebecca: When you look at what Musk and Trump are doing that is illegal because it’s beyond the powers granted to the administrative branch, and damaging longstanding institutions and relationships, what does that tell you about their understanding—or lack of understanding—of these systems and entities and the nature of power?

Erica: It tells me that they believe—and fear—that they cannot implement their policies and plans without the cooperation, obedience, and help of people in various pillars of support. This is a key insight about the nature of power repeated by Hannah Arendt, Gene Sharp, George Lakey, and others, and which underpins many theories of nonviolent action and civil resistance. Indeed, what Trump and Musk seem to have learned during the first Trump administration is this: subverting institutional checks and balances, subordinating key agencies, ignoring Congress’s law-making authority, dominating the media and information environment, and eliminating oversight and accountability—in other words, pulling off a power grab—is required to achieve their agenda. When you see what autocratic leaders try to eliminate, you get clearer on what constrains or threatens them—and why these systems, procedures, institutions, and the dedicated civil servants within them are so important to protect.

Rebecca: What powers do you see to oppose and shut down this coup attempt, in the legislative and judicial branch of the federal government, states, but especially in civil society? What do you hope to see civil society do in response? Are there particular tactics of civil resistance that seem useful or relevant in this moment?

Erica: Among the most urgent work in a moment of potential backsliding is to both protect the most vulnerable people from direct harm, while also upholding the rule of law. If you don’t defend the rule of law, you lose it, and the terrain becomes much more uncertain and treacherous. Most urgently, this means filing suit against every move that appears to be illegal and/or unconstitutional. We are seeing some of this happening already with regard to the executive orders and some of the firings of inspectors general, etc., but many more such cases would be needed for the federal courts to fully exercise their authority to contain executive power.

Despite a conservative Supreme Court, my bet is that the courts will still be more reliable checks on executive power than Congress in this moment. Trump doesn’t seem to care if his executive orders are ultimately ruled illegal or not, likely expects the court challenges, and likely expects to win some and lose a lot. But we should certainly care about what the courts say, because complying without court rulings otherwise de facto expands his power.

More generally, I hope to see deeper cooperation and coordination in civil society than we have achieved before, to develop an effective power-building strategy to meet the current challenge. There are of course numerous organizing tools and civil resistance tactics that might be relevant to such a strategy, but ideally the strategy would inform the sequence of tactics (and not the other way around). And when it comes to protecting people, your own work has shown all of the creative ways that people figure out how to provide for and care for the most vulnerable during a crisis, including a political emergency.

Rebecca: What are the precedents you think of and what do they tell us about our possibilities and powers in this crisis? Are there coups and crises in other times and places to look to to understand how to respond to the one we have going on here and now?

Erica: The deconsolidation of American democracy places the U.S. within a broader global trend—a 15-year democratic recession that some have called the “Third Wave of Autocratization.” This means that there many contemporary cases with lessons to learn. And of course we have hundreds of cases from history that provide valuable lessons—including emancipatory campaigns in the US—about how to defeat both backsliding and even full authoritarianism through civil resistance. The best study on the subject in my opinion suggests that in the long term, institutions really can’t save us; that civil society and mass mobilization are a more potent check on a backsliding democracy in the long-term than relying on institutional checks and balances alone.

Last night I was re-reading a paper that Zoe Marks and I wrote in 2022 about how U.S. civil society might prepare for a moment like this, based on our analysis of those lessons. To defend democratic principles and improve upon US democracy, we concluded that we would ultimately need to build what the successful democracy movements of the 20^th century were able to create: a united democratic alliance. This would involve a coalition of pro-democratic grassroots and grasstops [high profile] civic groups, political leaders, business leaders, faith leaders, unions and workers’ groups, and the like, working in concert at the local, state, and national levels to build and implement a strategy for expanding democracy in the US. An effective strategy would combine legal, institutional, and civil resistance methods to advance the pro-democratic agenda. It would spell out a positive and optimistic vision for the country, rather than a defensive strategy. It would be disciplined and resilient to inevitable setbacks, and it would mobilize mass protests or strikes as it saw opportunities to turn its power into tangible leverage.

There are many concrete capacities that might go along with this – from a more robust and sophisticated way of communicating information to popular education to gathering and vetting information to inform and update strategies to providing mutual aid to creating alternative institutions that build parallel power. Successful democracy movements of the past have found ways to build these capacities under authoritarianism, even if they weren’t engaged in constant street protests over the life of their movement (they mostly weren’t). There are some wonderful formations already engaging in such work, but I hesitate to name them here so as not to make them targets….

Rebecca: What are some of the tactics, strategies, examples we can look to? People are eager to figure out what to do, what power we have, how to exercise it, and while there are a million to-do lists and calls to action and ideas out there, I think people would really benefit from tested methods and concrete examples.

Erica: There are so many cases. Off the top of my head, in Serbia in 2000, Slobodan Milosevic called for a snap election to shore up his power in the midst of an economic crisis after years of war, as well as growing protest and discontent. Civil society groups seized the opportunity and convinced dozens of opposition parties to unite behind a single unity candidate to challenge Milosevic. The opposition candidate won in the first round, but Milosevic fraudulently claimed victory. Anticipating this outcome, the movement had organized parallel vote counting and, through some independent media outlets they have cultivated, communicated the accurate outcome nationwide. They called for mass demonstrations in Belgrade, drawing in people from all over the country and all walks of life. Loyalty among Milosevic’s security forces collapsed under this political pressure, and he resigned.

In South Africa in the 1980s, there was no possibility of ending the apartheid regime through elections, as black South Africans could not vote. Despite the African National Congress (ANC) having been banned, over many years a coalition of trade and labor unions, journalists, civic groups, faith groups, and local community networks built a broad and powerful coalition that challenged the white supremacist apartheid regime. The coalition built the capacity for mass mobilization, mass noncooperation, and mutual aid—even under sustained martial law, repeated roundups, and lethal repression by the apartheid regime. They adopted a strategy of building economic pressure on status quo elites and to make the necessity of democratic reform inescapable. Toward the end of the campaign to end apartheid, black townships demonstrated their economic power by engaging in general strikes and well as consumer boycotts against white-owned businesses. Combined with international sanctions and multinational corporations divesting from their holdings in the country, the business sector challenged the pro-apartheid National Party to reform itself and come to terms with the opposition. A reformer, F. W. deKlerk was elected to lead the National Party, the ANC was unbanned, Nelson Mandela was released from prison, and an interim constitution was negotiated, leading to a full democratic transition. (There is a reason why Elon Musk is trying to reshape the narrative about South Africa today, erasing the country’s astonishing path out of white supremacist authoritarianism).

And, of course, there are examples from our own country, where over the past 125 years, every major expansion of the franchise, and every major achievement in civil rights and/or social, economic, or environmental justice, was fought for and won by some form of a people-power movement—whether that was the labor movement, the Suffragists, the Civil Rights Movement, the farm workers’ movement, the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT UP), the movement for the rights of people with disabilities, the environmental movement, or even the effort in 2020 to Protect the Results after Trump fraudulently claimed an election victory.

There are countless tactics and strategies available, though there is no cookie-cutter recipe to apply in any one case. But I think one main lesson that emerges is that, in order to have the capacity to develop winning strategies and tactics, a broad-based coalition is really vital. Focusing on building that capacity, those connections, and that coalition around shared values, from the neighborhood to the national level, would be very useful.

Folks can gain knowledge, hope, and inspiration from lots of prior democracy and/or anti-colonial movements. A good place to start is the documentary series A Force More Powerful, with short and informative segments on the Salt March in India, the Nashville desegregation campaign in the late 1950s, the anti-apartheid movement in South Africa, Danish resistance against Nazi occupation, the Solidarity movement in Poland, and the anti-Pinochet movement in Chile. Many of these are relevant to our current moment, and I’d recommend watching them again (here and here) even if folks have seen them before. Another documentary highlights the role of the youth movement Otpor in Serbia’s Bulldozer Revolution. For many years, George Lakey has been co-creating with students a database of nonviolent campaigns of many different types, and there are detailed descriptions of the methods used. And, of course, there are many resources available at the International Center on Nonviolent Conflict, the Albert Einstein Institution, Training for Change, Beautiful Trouble, and beyond.

In a conversation I had with the late Rev. Dr. James Lawson about ten years ago, he told me that when he was planning and preparing for the campaign to desegregate Nashville, he had very little material to work with: “only Gandhi’s autobiography and the Bible.” He said something like, “You all have books on strategy, training manuals, institutes that specialize in teaching and study, and hundreds of historical examples to draw from. You are lucky!” People have agency, no matter what happens. And knowledge is power.

A footnote of sorts: Erica’s 2014 Ted Talk on what became known as the 3.5% principle– the percent of a population it takes to succeed at nonviolent regime change–is still worth watching at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YJSehRlU34w&t=2s. The figure of 3.5% comes from their earlier research on nonviolent social change, but they caution me that people have taken the (now much cited) 3.5% figure as a talismanic fact rather than an average. Here’s some key points from their 2020 “cautionary updates” study:

“The 3.5% figure is a descriptive statistic based on a sample of historical movements. It is not necessarily a prescriptive one, and no one can see the future. The 3.5% participation metric may be useful as a rule of thumb in most cases; however, other factors—momentum,organization, strategic leadership, and sustainability—are likely as important as large-scale participation in achieving movement success and are often precursors to achieving 3.5% participation rule, and that the rule is a tendency, rather than a law. Large peak participation size is associated with movement success. However, most mass nonviolent movements that have succeeded have done so even without achieving 3.5% popular participation.” They further add that these movements in the study had the goal of “overthrowing a government or achieving territorial independence. They were not reformist in nature, and they had discrete political outcomes they were trying to achieve that culminated in the peak mobilization that I counted. Because of this, we cannot necessarily extrapolate these findings to other kinds of reform or resistance movements that don’t have the same kinds of goals.”

I asked Erica one more question:

Rebecca: And finally, the Crowd Counting Consortium did extraordinary work, notably by quantifying the huge size and geographic distribution of anti-Trump marches known as the Women’s March of January 21, 2017. Will it be back in action for anti-Trump/anti-Musk protests at present? 

Erica: We have been continually producing data on protest, counter-protest, and police response since the first Women’s March in 2017. We will continue to do so as long as we’re able. See here and here.

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Source:

• Rebecca Solnit, The Nature of Our Power: A Conversation with Political Scientist Erica Chenoweth, Meditations in an Emergency, 8 February 2025

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