I think that Trump is a Putin-style dictator, i.e. maintain a facade of democracy while actually ruling as an autocrat.
He isn’t there yet, but the slide is likely to accelerate after the midterms. By then, the GOP will be completely Trumpified; the last of the establishment rats either retired or primaried.
To me, Congressional resistance is almost entirely symbolic; the Dems don’t have the numbers.
Which doesn’t mean that it’s worthless, but it does mean that it is primarily useful for motivating the base and raising issues. See Bernie’s Yemen bill or his Medicare For All push for examples of that in action.
The establishment Dems have been worse than useless in Congress. They aren’t just failing to resist, they are actively collaborating. Almost all of the Dems voted for the massive expansion in military funding; almost all of them voted for the Surveillance bill; most of Trump’s criminal cabinet was confirmed with Democratic votes; etc.
The more important side of what the Democrats could do is with the mayors and governors. They have the power to restrain the police and National Guard, resist ICE and provide emergency support to communities like Houston, St Louis and Puerto Rico.
Unfortunately, most of them are corrupt authoritarian scum; see the month-long St Louis police riot for an example of this. All of that happened under a Democratic mayor, who is thoroughly in the pocket of the Klan-linked St Louis police union.
Hashtag Resistance is a bit of lefty Twitter slang, referring to people who claim to be opposed to Trump while not actually doing anything meaningful to resist. Those folks are mostly middle-class white establishment Dems with #resistance in their Twitter bio.
They might show up for a white middle class symbolic demonstration (e.g. the Women’s March) once or twice a year, and they loudly advertise their opposition to Trump on Twitter, but that’s about it. The worst of them spend their time online ranting about how HRC’s defeat was all the fault of Bernie Sanders and/or Susan Sarandon.
What I’ve been arguing since the start: revolution.
Massive, sustained, non-violent disruptive protest, aimed at jamming the gears of the national economy and bringing the country to a halt. A general strike, maintained until the government falls.
Rule of law is worth restoring, but only if it comes with reform. The pre-Trump status quo was already (a) murderously oppressive to Black/Muslim/Latinx Americans, and (b) catastrophically destructive to the rest of the world.
From outside the USA, or from the perspective of the American underclass, Trump’s administration is not hugely different from those that preceded it. It’s just the same old America with the volume turned up a bit.
I don’t think that resistance is futile, but I also don’t think that the establishment Dems or their white middle-class base have been doing anything to meaningfully resist. If your demonstration doesn’t upset the authorities, it isn’t a protest: it’s a parade.
Get in the streets, make noise, block traffic, and keep it up for as long as necessary. Shut the country down.
—
I’ve been saying from the start that I don’t see an electoral solution to Trump. Voter suppression, gerrymander, disenfranchisement, and a bit of straight-up fraud if necessary. Fascists are counting the votes.
The only way to overcome that would be through overwhelmingly massive turnout from the working class nonvoters of the red states, which might have been a possibility if the party had wholeheartedly supported Bernie’s reform push.
But they haven’t; the Dem establishment has not learnt a damned thing from their defeat, and has spent most of the last year focused on sabotaging Bernie and protecting their own positions. They have made it clear that they would prefer to stay as the loyal opposition to Trump rather than allowing the real left to gain power.
—
The situation is not hopeless. But the solution is not as easy as going to a ballot box every few years. A revolution is required.
