In Search of Tactics That Win

Why mass protests alone will not stop Trump and we need campaigns that can pull in new supporters AND take down pillars of his regime. Plus, some fresh thoughts on the politics of Israel/Palestine.

One of the most inspiring ways that pro-democracy movements grow their strength is by inventing and spreading ways for the silent majority to make itself both visible and influential. One aspect of this is adopting a common symbol, like the umbrellas that represented resistance for the Hong Kong democracy movement. Another can be elevating a protest by presenting the authorities with a dilemma, like the Polish Solidarity activists who popularized their boycott of state-controlled media by taking their TV sets out of their homes during the evening newscast and walking them in their baby-strollers (there was no law forbidding Poles from taking their TVs for walks). Ideally such actions also go after intermediary institutions that can be moved away from the supporting the regime, giving the movement a tactical victory, raising morale and helping convince more bystanders to join in.

Current polls show that a majority of Americans do not like where the Orange Cheeto is taking the country, even on immigration—a good sign. But polls are just snapshots of passive opinion. The two- or three-thousand people who answered a phone call from a pollster didn’t get called because they were turning their opinions into action. Indeed, most of the time most of us aren’t politically active at all. Hence the old saying: an organized minority can always beat a disorganized majority.

Inside the Defiance, references to “the 3.5% rule” keep surfacing, as if simply getting 11-12 million Americans to protest in the streets would somehow defeat Trumpism. For example, every week on Indivisible National’s “What’s the Plan?” mass Zoom meeting with co-directors Ezra Levin and Leah Greenberg, the audience of several thousand attendees invariably votes up some version of the question, “When are you going to call for a general strike?” The folks who wrote this organizing guide for GeneralStrikeUS also put a lot of emphasis on getting to 11 million strike pledges, complete with nifty charts (like the one below) and an online counter purportedly showing how many people have already committed to strike when the tally hits the magic number.

But building the power to block and reverse Trumpism isn’t just about hitting an attendance benchmark. If 11 million Americans made a human chain across the country, that wouldn’t stop the corruption or the chaos or the Republican Congress. Indeed, as Zeynep Tufekci argued cogently in her book Twitter and Tear Gas, while the internet made it easier to swiftly climb the figurative Mt. Everest of today’s-turnout-was-the-largest-crowd-ever, it has also enabled us to do without building the muscles, skills and knowledge to make a big crowd powerful enough to challenge the powers-that-be. (I’m also struck by how much the General Strike organizing deck reminds me of tech start-ups that promised huge returns to investors once the network effects of amassing X million users kicked in—without ever explaining how they would get the first thousand or ten thousand users to keep using their product after the brief burst of early adopter enthusiasm wore off.)

Don’t get me wrong. It’s great that three million of us came out to say “Hands Off” on April 5, and that hundreds of thousands rallied on April 19 and MayDay. There’s growing social proof in those numbers. Their emergence, along with many more tightly coordinated organizing efforts of staff, alumni, and students, undoubtedly helped stiffen the spines of hundreds of university leaders. And we need more of all of that. (See here for some cautionary notes from Erica Chenoweth, one of the originators of the 3.5% rule, about how to apply it.)

But giant crowds alone do not generate much power. Elon Musk didn’t decide to slink back (somewhat) into the shadows of corruptly rifling through the government’s pockets because three million people marched on April 5. He did so because his company’s sales and stock price were falling, thanks to weekly local #TeslaTakedown rallies targeting his dealerships and intensive social media ridicule and because Democratic voters in Wisconsin proved that his campaign checkbook was toxic by defeating his chosen candidate for state supreme court.

So while the upcoming Unite for Veterans march in DC on June 6 and the nationwide “No Kings” mobilization day of June 14 will again demonstrate the Defiance’s ability to mobilize millions against Trumpism, we still need tactics that both make it easier for people to show their displeasure with the regime AND that put real pressure on winnable targets.

Right now, the main thing most Defiance groups are asking people to do is contact their elected officials (Congress, state) to put pressure on them as constituents. Here in New York, a supposedly blue state, it’s a steep uphill battle to get the Democratic majorities that control both sides of the legislature to even pass the New York For All bill, which would prevent state and local police from cooperating with ICE, so the grassroots power expressed via phone calls and lobbying is clearly not very powerful. Also, asking people to call their reps about multiple bills and issues all at the same time tends to engender confusion and burnout, not a sense of forward momentum and impact.

To wit, I read through the last ten editions of Jessica Craven’s excellent daily newsletter Chop Wood, Carry Water, which is chock-a-block with actions people can take, and in addition to many variations on the above she suggested:

--Donating to Newark Mayor Ras Baraka or writing him a thank you note for his efforts to prevent a new private ICE detention facility from opening.

--Joining in one of Postcards to Voters’ efforts to swing some upcoming local school board races in PA.

--Sharing useful messaging documents.

--Writing letters to the editor.

--Sharing stories about how cuts to Medicaid will hurt people.

--Meeting (and donating) to rising Democratic politicians.

Rogan’s List, another daily newsletter with a similar bent, also emphasizes phone banking and emailing members of Congress and state legislators. But in recent editions it also plugged organizing ICE Watch and community defense groups, boycotting corporations that are withdrawing their support of annual Pride parades and festivals (like Anheuser Busch, Comcast, Diageo and Nissan), supporting TeslaTakedown’s push to get cities and states to divest from Musk-owned companies, backing child care providers’ annual “Day Without Child Care;” and donating to the National Bailout Fund.

What’s important and different about that latter list of actions is that they either build local community power or they focus on specific corporate targets that, by their actions, have decided to support or be complicit in Trumpism. The same can be said for the effort led by Black churches to boycott Target because of its abandonment of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion programs (see TargetFast.org for more info).

For my money, while all of these efforts seem worthy, Avelo Airlines, a budget airline (gift link) that has decided to contract with ICE to fly people out of the country, seems like a very ripe target as well. Defend and Recruit, a Latino community group rooted in North Carolina, is hosting an “Abduction Airlines” mass call Thursday May 22 for people interested in showing Avelo there should be no profit in kidnapping.

We’re at a pregnant moment, where such tactics, if chosen well and then focused on relentlessly, can snowball. I’m keeping my eyes peeled for more examples—What are you doing? What do you think could take off?

Spreading Courage (Continued)

—Alondra Nelson, former director for science and technology policy in the Biden White House, on why she is resigning from the National Science Board and the Library of Congress Scholars Council.

—Rev. Sean W. Rowe, Presiding Bishop of the Episcopal Church, on why Episcopal Migration Ministries, which runs the churches refugee resettlement programs, is refusing to help the Trump regime take in white Afrikaners from South Africa while much needier refugees are being refused, and thus ending its involvement in federally funded refugee resettlement.

—A group of Tesla employees are calling for his replacement as CEO.

A Few Fresh Observations About Israel/Palestine

Longtime readers of this newsletter know that in the months after Hamas’ October 7, 2023 attack on Israel and the subsequent Israeli war on Gaza, I shifted gears and wrote A LOT about that conflict, especially with an eye to how it was fracturing the liberal-left coalition in America. For my own health and also because of the much larger emergency presented by Trump’s re-election, I’ve downshifted and mostly avoided trying to cover that intractable nightmare on a weekly basis. But I’ve accumulated a bunch of open tabs on the topic and want to clear my cache, as they say.

First, while I disagreed with the many people who rushed, almost immediately after October 7, to accuse Israel of “genocide” in its heavy bombing of Gaza, and I still believe the charge has been dumbed down in part because it so delegitimizes the Jewish national project, I agree with Jay Michaelson who writes in The Forward that the explicit use of mass starvation now, which is the Israeli government’s declared policy as it moves to escalate again its insane effort to eliminate Hamas, is genocidal. Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu now says Israel will “conquer and occupy” most of Gaza and far-right ministers like Bezalel Smotrich openly says his goal is to force two million civilians to either starve or flee. This is certainly a declared intent for ethnic cleansing, itself a war crime.

Second, the refusal of many American Jews as well as top Democratic elected officials to speak out against the Israeli blockade of humanitarian aid to Gaza’s population is shameful. A group of 96 House Democrats signed onto a letter last week condemning the blockade as a moral and strategic disaster for Israel, but I couldn’t help but notice that missing among them was my own newly minted Representative George Latimer. (And it’s not like he doesn’t sign group letters—two weeks ago he was one of 24 House members who wrote to the Wikimedia Foundation demanding that it take urgent action to keep antisemitism and “pro-terrorist” content off its platform.)

Third, purity politics is making it extremely hard for decent people to find a viable path through the chasm that has come to divide so many of us on Israel/Palestine. Thus Brad Lander, a fundamentally decent and highly experienced New York City progressive who is running for mayor, who has staked out a nuanced position on the conflict, is being eclipsed by a younger and more doctrinaire leftist candidate, Zohran Mamdani, who insists that his vocal support for the Boycott, Sanctions and Divestment movement is just basic “consistency” about defending human rights and upholding international law. Leave aside the hard political fact that if you support the BDS movement in New York City, you will not be elected mayor, as well as the likelihood that Mamdani’s rise in the polls helps seal Andrew Cuomo’s political revival.

Fourth, purity politics has also made it hard for principled progressives to criticize the so-called pro-Palestinian student protestors who have tried to revive their encampment movement at elite universities in recent weeks. The Nation ran a story recently decrying Columbia’s tough crackdown on 78 members of the Columbia University Apartheid Divest coalition who flooded into Butler Library during finals week and renamed a room after a Palestinian writer and martyr, Basel Al-Araj. The story made no mention of the fact that Al-Araj was an advocate for armed resistance, or that the statement CUAD distributed to justify its action made fantastical claims about how its action was somehow advancing the worldwide “armed struggles of oppressed peoples” against Israel and US imperialism.

I’m all for free speech and even speech that offends me, but anyone interested in constructing a sensible alternative to corporate dominance of our politics ought to also be able to say that this kind of rhetoric, which de facto aligns itself with whatever violent fundamentalist cult chooses to call itself anti-imperialist, is stupid. It leads to people holding signs on campus like “Israel Deserves 10,000 Oct 7ths” and posts from Jewish Voice for Peace (!) chapters stating that “death to israel” is not just a threat…it is a moral imperative and the only acceptable solution. May the entire colony burn to the ground for good.”

I don’t think it’s a coincidence that some students who used to organize and participate in encampments organized by chapters of Students for Justice in Palestine are not just voting with their feet and staying away, they are recoiling from an internal culture that is increasingly shrill and dismissive. See, for example, this article in Swarthmore’s student newspaper, which quotes several ex-SJP activists about their disillusionment. “At times, I feel that SJP is conducting a sort of LARPing [live action role playing], drawing the proximity of their own experiences and those of Palestinians in Gaza as close as possible, in order to justify aggressive, militant action,” said “Charles,” formerly an active participant in 2023 and 2024 campus protests. They also said those not willing to participate in these escalated actions are often derided and referred to as “cops, pigs, piggies, klansmen, crackers, Zionists” or “pussy-ass bitches.” Lovely.

It's also infuriating and worrisome to see how illiberal a big chuck of the Jewish community has become, allowing its fear of antisemitism to be turned into a political weapon of the MAGA right. I’m still a member of the “Mothers Against Campus Antisemitism” Facebook group, which is more than 60,000-strong, and I’ve watched how most of its active members have cheered Trump’s abductions of Palestinian students and cancellation of billions in funding for various universities. A vocal minority of members do regularly speak up in dissent, but the group’s founder Elizabeth Rand and other admins have made pretty clear they like what Trump is doing in the name of fighting antisemitism. As Ginia Bellafante recently reported (gift link) for The New York Times, Rand is urging her group’s members to file complaints to ICE against students and faculty accusing them of support Hamas, in the hopes of hastening their deportation. Even the news that Trump is accepting a $400 million bribe from Qatar, which is openly allied with Hamas, hasn’t shaken the faith that the MACA crowd has in him. (Though it is delicious to see rightwing influencer Ben Shapiro attack Trump over “Qatargate” when, if I’m not mistaken, Shapiro has never mentioned that Netanyahu’s top advisers are also ensnared in the same corruption.)

There is a new McCarthyism afoot, as MSNBC’s Chris Hayes recently pointed out, as Trump “is attempting the full force of the government to punish those who disagree with its support for Israel’s war.” As Alex Gourevitch points out in an important essay in the Boston Review, campuses have long tolerated encampments for other causes as well as the posting of disturbing images--for example, by the Genocide Awareness Project in its long-running campaign against abortion rights. (He also makes some very challenging points about the exhaustion of the whole “safety” framework that has come to dominate discussions of speech issues on campus, which is beyond the scope of what I want to cover here but well worth wrestling with.)

If you want one thing to read that puts much of this in larger context, make that Eric Alterman’s New Republic essay “The Coming Jewish Civil War Over Donald Trump.” It’s been clear even before October 7 that the politics and values of the majority of American Jews were in collision with the politics and values of most Israeli Jews, and with Trump and Netanyahu operating from the same playbook, those tensions are only getting worse. All that said, I suspect that even with some portion of the younger generation divorcing themselves from any connection with Israel, most American Jews are going to stand by their support for democratic values there as well as here. That’s because we know that eliminationism is anathema—it was wrong when it was applied to us by the Nazis, it is wrong when it is applied by the Israeli rightwing to Palestinians, it is wrong when Hamas applies it to Jews, and it is wrong when it is applied by Trump to immigrants, transgender people, Muslims and dissenters.

Department of Self-Promotion

—I’m doing a Substack Live conversation with Susan Wagner of The Grassroots Connector (yes our sites are cousins) tonight at 8pm.

—I have an essay titled “Why Tech-Enabled E-Democracy Often Fails: Lessons From Barack Obama’s Presidency,” in a new publication of McGill University’s Centre for Media, Technology and Democracy called “Deliberative Approaches to Inclusive Governance.” Other authors include Claudia Chwalisz, Liz Barry, Deb Roy, Lawrence Lessig and Audrey Tang.

—I was on Andrew Xu’s Frames of Space podcast a few weeks ago talking about government protest and American authoritarianism.