Is the “Resistance” Over? It's Just Getting Started.

Why obituaries for opposition to Trump are premature. Plus an update on the DNC chair race as it comes into final focus, and more on why Elon Musk's extremism shouldn't be excused or ignored.

It’s early days, but I think I already have my nominee for dumbest big political take of 2025. That would be

Ross Barkan

’s January 25 essay in The New York Times Magazine, “Goodbye, ‘Resistance.’ The Era of Hyperpolitics Is Over.” (gift link) Barkan, who is usually an astute observer of New York state and city politics, is in way over his head here, claiming omniscience about the entire national political mood when no such thing is possible. But his piece is worse than that—it doesn’t just assume that the relative lack of visible protest to Trump’s second inauguration is a sign that “policies that were decried as fascistic in Trump’s first term are gradually being embraced.” He dares to make an even bigger claim and asserts that the high level of political engagement we saw from 2017-2020, which he calls “hyperpolitics,” is definitively over.

There are so many things wrong with Barkan’s essay. For example, he claims that today’s “chatter about deal-making” with Trump from Democratic lawmakers is a radical departure from eight years ago, writing that “Senate Democrats who said similar things in 2016 [sic] tended to be drowned out by those promising resistance.” In fact, in 2016, of course, Democrats thought they were on the verge of a Hillary Clinton presidency and then, shellshocked by Trump’s upset win, in 2017 they were mostly hoping to cut deals with him on infrastructure—until organic grassroots pressure implanted spines in many of them.

Also, how do you write a whole think piece about the trajectory of American politics over the last ten years and not even mention the word Covid?

But the biggest flaw in Barkan’s analysis is his assumption that a lack of visible protest means that the 75 million Americans who voted for Kamala Harris, or, to take a harder more committed core, the 7 million who made $1.5 billion in campaign contributions in the last three months before the election, have now disappeared or turned into Trump fans.

Here’s the thing: People learn. And movements learn. Collectively, we’re not doing the same thing as in 2017 because we all went through those years, saw what worked or didn’t, and we’re adjusting. Also, the conditions for effective organizing are also changing. Massing outside the White House right now as a cranky old man who pardons violent insurrectionists and cancels the security details of some of his political enemies pumps his chest wouldn’t be the smartest move, would it? Likewise, much of the frenzy of activity that Barkan recalls from 2017 as “hyperpolitics” was generated by newly activated people who were desperate for “something to do.” It took a while, but many eventually found very effective uses for their time and energy. Why should we assume that things are different now?

Contra Barkan, “accommodation and acceptance” are not “the new watchwords.” Instead, what is happening now in response to Trump’s return is, yes, quieter, but in no way represents acquiescence. People aren’t marching in the streets or wearing pink pussy hats, but they are meeting in living rooms and in Signal groups, watching closely and organizing actions that can most immediately respond and offer relief, if not pushback, to the worst of the new administration’s initiatives. Given the potential for abuse of authority by federal agencies or local ones, activists would be stupid to be putting out press releases explaining how they are quietly pressing elected officials and local government to protect the rights of immigrants, for example.

That said, some of the early pushback has been visible, like how grassroots activists managed to shift the votes of dozens of House Democrats in December when they were considering a bill to let the Treasury Department shut down nonprofit organizations without due process. Leah Greenberg, the co-founder of Indivisible, says they have seen 260 new local chapters form and register with the national organization since November. “All of the groups that are having in-person meetings post-inauguration are reporting big surges in attendance,” she tells me. “My working analysis is that everybody skipped the period of shock and symbolic shows of disapproval and moved straight into organizing.” Click here for a short video of 600 Indivisible activists meeting in Chicago over the past weekend and tell me if this looks like accommodation and acceptance.

Similarly, the Democratic candidate recruitment organization Run for Something reported that 1400 people signed up for their introductory organizing call last week. Unfortunately, mentioning these developments would also mess up Barkan’s neat little narrative frame. Shame on him for not knowing about them or not bothering to find out, or for wanting to rise a little higher on the greasy pole of media fame by attempting to be among the first to evoke some new “conventional wisdom” into existence. In fairness, what media critic Jay Rosen calls “The Church of the Savvy” lives on in the editorial offices of the New York Times; for all I know Barkan wrote a more nuanced piece but his editors wanted to make this statement and got him to agree. Either way, his essay will not age well.

Still, Why Aren’t Things Hotter?

Barkan does make one relevant observation about the state of the Democratic party in the current moment, noting that the current contest for the leadership of the Democratic National Committee has been remarkably “tame” compared to eight years ago, when backers of Bernie Sanders and Barack Obama clashed “in a seismic struggle” over whether Keith Ellison or Tom Perez should take the reins. As I noted here last week, the differences between the two leading candidates today, Ben Wikler, the Wisconsin state party chair, and Ken Martin, the Minnesota party chair, are far more subtle. Either way, though, it’s true that grassroots Democrats aren’t as engaged in the DNC election as they were in 2017.

Why not? A few reasons. Even though the national chair of the DNC will have a big, visible role in responding to Trump, they’ll only become a household name after winning the race. Just 448 DNC members get to vote on the decision, and until a few weeks ago, when I published the full list, many of those people were invisible. And unlike in 2017, when the Sanders challenge to Clinton was still reverberating in Democratic circles across the country, the smothering of any intra-party opposition to Biden throughout his term means that grassroots Democrats never went through the organizational and ideological sharpening that primaries generate. So it’s not surprising the DNC contest this time is more amorphous.

But there’s one more reason, I think, that both the DNC race and Democratic politics in general seem so placid right now. This post on Bluesky sums the problem up well:

Of those four responses by Democratic leaders to the many outrageous things that have happened in just the first week since Trump’s inauguration, only one of them is memorable. Schumer’s feeble post had 395 likes as of yesterday afternoon. Booker’s had 435. Jeffries’ had 4,200. AOC’s had nearly 150,000.

The DNC has held three online forums showcasing all the people running for its different offices; cumulatively they’ve averaged less than 8,000 views per event. If you don’t think it’s possible for a relatively unknown Democrat to electrify a DNC audience with just a few sentences, watch how Howard Dean did it.

Parsing the DNC Chair Race

I’ve been keeping a running tally of public endorsements by DNC voting members in the chair race, which you can see here (third and fourth tabs). The vote will be this Saturday. As of Tuesday morning, Martin was leading Wikler 151-45, though two of the voters he has claimed –the state chair and vice-chair of Maine’s Democratic Party – have since been replaced by new officers. Former Maryland governor Martin O’Malley had claimed 17 endorsements and former Bernie Sanders campaign manager Faiz Shakir had cited none (other than himself, as he is an at-large member of the DNC).

It would appear that Martin is coasting to victory, riding on the solid backing of the state chairs and vice-chairs of 30 state Democratic parties, plus many of their state-elected voting members. Publicly, he has claimed to have the support of 200 DNC members, putting him within reach of the 225 needed to gain a majority. But as of last night, Wikler said his current count stood at 183. He’s gotten the backing of several major unions (AFSCME, AFT, NEA, SEIA, IUBAC and UNITE HERE) as well as the governors of nine states. Indivisible just endorsed him, citing the support of 93% of their local leaders. So did the Grassroots Connector, representing several dozen local and statewide groups.

Taking the public endorsements at face value, there are still at least 233 uncommitted votes outstanding. Two-thirds of the DNC’s 74 at-large members (in many cases long-time party apparatchiks) are in that group, along a number of big state delegations including Florida (13), Michigan (6 out of 8), North Carolina (7 out of 8), and New York (11 out of 13). A many smaller states or territories that each have four or five voting members have also largely kept their powder dry, including Alabama, American Samoa, Delaware, Guam, Hawaii, Iowa, Kansas, the Marianas, Puerto Rico, and the Virgin Islands along with the eight members of Democrats Abroad. So, while on paper Martin is ahead, the race is still open. The DNC’s Rules and By-Laws say that the election can be by voice vote, but the current chair or 25% of the voting members can request that it be done by roll call.

—Related: Tonight at 7pm ET, Higher Ground Labs is hosting a online discussion with all nine of the DNC chair candidates on “The Future of Technology and Media at the DNC. Watch here.

One More Thing About Nazis

I don’t think it’s a coincidence that AOC’s declaration that she will “fight Nazis until [she is] six feet under the ground” has resonated so strongly. While all kinds of elite agenda-setters are telling us that we have to adjust to the new crowd in power, seeing Elon Musk make two Nazi salutes was bracing. Like the assault on Congress on January 6, which we all saw and understood to be a violent insurrection, even if its perpetrators are all now pardoned, it can’t be unseen. (Though it can get pushed down Orwell’s memory hole if we let them.)

Musk could have ended this controversy by apologizing and insisting that he was no fan of Nazism, but instead the next day he posted a series of tasteless jokes, like “Some people will Goebbels anything down! Stop Gőring your enemies! His pronouns would’ve been He/Himmler! Bet you did nazi that coming.” This got Jonathan Greenblatt of the Anti-Defamation League, which had previously excused Musk’s Nazi salute, to tweet, “We’ve said it hundreds of times before and we will say it again: the Holocaust was a singularly evil event, and it is inappropriate and offensive to make light of it. The Holocaust is not a joke.” That’ll stop him, Jonathan!

Jodi Rudoren, the editor of The Forward, a venerable American Jewish publication, managed to get Greenblatt to respond on the record to her asking why the ADL had given Musk’s salute a pass. She wrote, “I texted Greenblatt the next morning asking how we could know for certain that Musk’s was ‘an awkward gesture’ and ‘not a Nazi salute,’ as ADL had declared. ‘How do we know anything?’ he responded. ‘Right,’ I replied. ‘So why declare if we don’t know?’ ‘I said what I saw,’ Greenblatt texted. ‘That’s all.’” The ADL’s offer to grace to Musk is not aging well.

In Germany, which has some relevant experience with this problem, people don’t offer excuses when they see Nazi salutes, or insist that comparisons to the Nazi years shouldn’t be made because the Holocaust was such an exceptional event. As the German weekly Die Ziet commented,

“A Hitler salute is a Hitler salute is a Hitler salute. There is no need to make this unnecessarily complicated. Anyone on a political stage giving a political speech in front of a partly right-wing extremist audience--anyone who raises their right arm in a swinging manner and at an angle several times is doing the Hitler salute.”

But here in the United States, we’ve been taught for several generations now that all such comparisons are, excuse me, verboten, and if you make them then you are putting yourself, not your target, beyond the pale of polite discourse. Thus in 2004, when MoveOn held a competition to define President Bush in a 30-second TV ad, it was successfully shamed by the Republican National Committee because a few of the user-submitted ads compared George W. Bush to Hitler. Putting the Holocaust into a wholly separate category, though, prevents us from understanding how state-directed persecution of minorities exists on a continuous spectrum. Hitler didn’t get the idea for concentration camps from nowhere; he was learning from the practices of American occupiers in Cuba and the British in South Africa, as Andrea Pitzer explains in her essential book One Long Night. And the Nazis’ ideas about eugenics came from other Western sources as well, including American ones.

Instead of shying away from talking about Musk’s evident love for ethno-nationalism, we should be doubling down on what his display showed. It is who he is, after all. Just this past Saturday, he appeared virtually at a rally of the far-right Alternative for Germany party and said that it was time for Germans to “move on” from “past guilt.” He added, “Children should not be guilty of the sins of their parents, let alone their great-grandparents. It’s good to be proud of German culture, German values, and not to lose that in some sort of multiculturalism that dilutes everything.” Do I really have to spell out his meaning?

One last point about Musk, which I will put in language that is well understood among politicians of both parties. (Perhaps it’s the only language they really understand.) His popularity is dropping. A Wall Street Journal poll of voters in mid-January (gift link) found that half disapproved of his advising Trump on federal spending, while only 39% said it was a good idea. In October, people’s view of Musk was split evenly 45-45, while now 51% view him unfavorably and just 40% view him favorably. (In case you think this is just part of a general shift, note that Vice President J.D. Vance’s approval numbers have moved in exactly the opposite direction in the same period.) Musk is also profoundly stupid and temperamental, and his political views are too extreme for most people.

That Wall Street Journal poll also found that 68% of the public believes “Congress has a duty to serve as a check and balance on the President” and only 27% felt the election had given Trump “a mandate to govern as he sees fit.” By 60% to 34% voters favor protecting funding for education, healthcare and social safety net programs over cutting taxes. Majorities oppose Trump’s proposals to take over Panama, Greenland or make Canada the 51^st state. This isn’t rocket science folks, but if the opposition party doesn’t act like one, grassroots activists just have to push them harder.

—Bonus link: Dr. Philip Low, the CEO and founder of NeuroVigil, was a friend and partner of Musk’s for many years. What he says about him now does not pull punches. He claims Musk’s Nazi salutes were done in part because “He was concerned that the ‘Nazi wing’ of the MAGA movement, under the influence of Steve Bannon, would drive him away from Trump, somewhere in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building, rather than in the West Wing which is where he wants to be.”

Some Good News

Let’s give a hearty welcome to the Higher Ground Institute, a new joint project of Higher Ground Labs and the Cooperative Impact Lab that is aiming to be “a collaborative space for innovation, hands-on experimentation, and the thoughtful integration of emerging technologies.” It’s going to be helmed by Jose Cornejo as executive director and Oluwakemi Oso as chief program officer, with Kate Gage of CIL and Betsy Hoover and Leah Bae of HGL joining them as co-founders.

The Institute is an extension of work that both organizations and their co-founders have been doing together for the last few years, seeding many new startups and helping progressives adapt to and take advantage of new technologies and platforms like AI or TikTok, and the two orgs are working towards an actual merger. I spoke to Kate Gage yesterday about the institute, and she was brimming with enthusiasm and ideas. While both organizations have done a lot together already, she told me, “We’ve never had a dedicated team or strategy about how all this work fits together.” She added, “People are hungry for research that focuses on how technology is actually being adopted, or which emergent technologies the field needs to pay attention to in six months or a year or two years.”

A planning memo Gage shared with me expresses a powerful vision:

“Despite superior campaign tools and unprecedented investment in traditional tactics, Democrats struggled to connect with key voters in ways that drove meaningful action. Meanwhile, Republicans found success by reimagining voter engagement, building networks of authentic voices that reached people where they actually are. This gap between our technological capabilities and strategic approach presents a warning and an opportunity. Our movement has built powerful tools and mastered the science of data-driven campaigns. Yet to succeed in today’s rapidly evolving landscape, we must move beyond optimizing our existing playbook – we must transform how we engage communities at the most fundamental level. This evolution demands that we overcome persistent barriers, from resource constraints to institutional risk-aversion, that have historically placed true innovation beyond reach for many organizations.”

End Times:

Seven minutes of fun.