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America Needs a Mass Movement--Now (David Brooks)
https://archive.ph/63IUp#selection-769.0-769.33https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2025/11/autocracy-resistance-social-movement/684336/
October 14, 2025,
For the United States, the question of the decade is: Why hasn’t a resistance movement materialized here? The second Trump administration has flouted court decisions in a third of all rulings against it, according to The Washington Post. It operates as a national extortion racket, using federal power to control the inner workings of universities, law firms, and corporations. It has thoroughly politicized the Justice Department, launching a series of partisan investigations against its political foes. It has turned ICE into a massive paramilitary organization with apparently unconstrained powers. It has treated the Constitution with disdain, assaulted democratic norms and diminished democratic freedoms, and put military vehicles and soldiers on the streets of the capital. It embraces the optics of fascism, and flaunts its autocratic aspirations.
I am not one of those who believe that Donald Trump has already turned America into a dictatorship. Yet the crossing-over from freedom into authoritarianism may be marked not by a single dramatic event but by the slow corrosion of our ruling institutions—and that corrosion is well under way. For 250 years, the essence of America’s democratic system, drawing on thinkers going back to Cicero and Cato, has been that no one is above the law. Public officials’ first duty is to put the law before the satisfaction of their own selfish impulses. That concept is alien to Trump.
Although Trump’s actions across these various spheres may seem like separate policies, they are part of one project: creating a savage war of all against all and then using the presidency to profit and gain power from it. Trumpism can also be seen as a multipronged effort to amputate the higher elements of the human spirit—learning, compassion, science, the pursuit of justice—and supplant those virtues with greed, retribution, ego, appetite. Trumpism is an attempt to make the world a playground for the rich and ruthless, so it seeks to dissolve the sinews of moral and legal restraint that make civilization decent.
well said!
skip to near the end.
The old Populist Progressive alliance was economically left, socially center right, and hell-bent on reform. A contemporary version of this alliance would likely turn out to be the same. This has the benefit of scrambling outdated 20th-century categories of left and right, and could help promote the notion that we are one nation, culturally cohesive but economically and demographically diverse. It rejects the Trumpian idea that we are sentenced to an endless class or culture war.
I am not one of those who believe that Donald Trump has already turned America into a dictatorship. Yet the crossing-over from freedom into authoritarianism may be marked not by a single dramatic event but by the slow corrosion of our ruling institutions—and that corrosion is well under way. For 250 years, the essence of America’s democratic system, drawing on thinkers going back to Cicero and Cato, has been that no one is above the law. Public officials’ first duty is to put the law before the satisfaction of their own selfish impulses. That concept is alien to Trump.
Although Trump’s actions across these various spheres may seem like separate policies, they are part of one project: creating a savage war of all against all and then using the presidency to profit and gain power from it. Trumpism can also be seen as a multipronged effort to amputate the higher elements of the human spirit—learning, compassion, science, the pursuit of justice—and supplant those virtues with greed, retribution, ego, appetite. Trumpism is an attempt to make the world a playground for the rich and ruthless, so it seeks to dissolve the sinews of moral and legal restraint that make civilization decent.
well said!
skip to near the end.
The old Populist Progressive alliance was economically left, socially center right, and hell-bent on reform. A contemporary version of this alliance would likely turn out to be the same. This has the benefit of scrambling outdated 20th-century categories of left and right, and could help promote the notion that we are one nation, culturally cohesive but economically and demographically diverse. It rejects the Trumpian idea that we are sentenced to an endless class or culture war.
My Opinion: I think that the barnstorming of the nation by Senator Sanders and Representative Ocasio-Cortez in deep red districts to great applause shows that the division that the wealthy create on (mostly) racist issues to "divide and conquer" can be turned on its head when their scheme is made clear (I do that in many graphics that I post)
Not everyone, but "just enough"
And of course, Epstein could rise from his grave to shake things up, and expose the hypocrisy and moral rot of the ruling class.
8 replies
= new reply since forum marked as read
= new reply since forum marked as read
On edit. It just turned today.
