Unrealistic Cynicism vs Realistic Hope

Taking the long view of how mass movements win, with a big warning from the anti-Vietnam War effort.

Every week or so for the last several years, I’ve driven to Long Island to visit my mother, who still lives in the house where I grew up (Hi Mom!). I know the route like the back of my hand. For years, one of the houses on the way to her has been festooned with Trump flags. But a few months ago, I noticed a change. The purple flags are all gone. Now, the only thing waving is an American flag.

A week ago Saturday, while doing a day of deep canvassing with Canvassing Connectors in Peekskill, NY, my teammate and I finished our rounds having a long conversation with a progressive movement organizer who happened to be on our route. She knew a lot about the neighborhood nearby. “You should go to this group of houses around the corner,” she told us. “They all took their Trump flags down in the last few months.” And indeed none were on display.

Something similar is happening around the country. On the r/newjersey subreddit, a user named “G00G00Daddy” posted two days ago: “I was driving through Cranbury yesterday and a home that’s been flying a trump flag for at least the past 3 years has taken it down. It was still flying in December, so a recent update. Have others noticed the same?” “LaurAdorable” replied, “I know of a house in Clark who had several pro Trump flags and ‘go brandon’ ones a few years ago that suddenly were gone and are just showing American flags now. Interesting.” Another named “mcgeggy” wrote, “Same here in Howell. Multiple Trump flags in front yard for many years, now just American flags.” Someone replied that they also saw a house in Howell that first lowered its Trump flag to half-mast before removing it.

Longer range travelers are reporting the same thing. In r/SLO, which stands for San Luis Obispo County on the central coast of California, user named “Ok_Comfortable4138” wrote eight days ago, “I just spent a long weekend covering many miles around rural SLO and Monterey Counties via rural backroads and was astonished by the lack of MAGA banners on display in front of houses.” In the FoxBrain subreddit, a user named “LonkToTheFuture” reported a month ago, “Recently drove to a wedding in the Texas hill country from Houston. Typically out on the rural state highways I would see at least a handful of Trump flags and signs. Last weekend I saw none at all, except for a big 2024 campaign sign that had Trump’s name ripped off it.” Three days ago, a user named “NoZookeepergame6715” replied, “Same. I drive out to West Texas regularly. It used to be littered with Trump flags. I haven’t seen a single flag in Texas in several months. Means something...”

Indeed it does. Trump’s declining poll numbers have a real-world corollary: many of his most devoted supporters are quietly withdrawing. Some, like Ashley St. Clair, a 27-year-old TikTok influencer who is perhaps best known for mothering a child with Elon Musk, have decided to make a full break with MAGA and are telling tales from out of school. But as buyer’s remorse settles in, more are probably just going to take a break from politics. And some may switch to voting for Democrats, or for less far-out Republicans.

In both the short term and long run, this trend could be as important for the future of American politics as the trend you are probably hearing all about right now: how Republican legislatures are doing more mid-decade gerrymandering and have just given themselves a major advantage in the battle for control of the House of Representatives. Indeed, the trends are connected: there’s no question that Trump allies in Congress and many statehouses can see their declining popularity and therefore are pulling out the stops to tilt the playing field further to their advantage. This is making the path to retaking the House much steeper, as G. Elliott Morris points out. It’s also engendering a lot of despair about how the Rs are rigging the game.

But the question I have for you, dear reader, is which trend are you choosing to fixate on? Because believing that all hope is lost is dangerous, and even more so when so many people are doing all they can to turn the tide.

This is a pivotal year

According to K. Starling’s We the People Dissent newsletter, in the first three months of this year, there were roughly 22,000 demonstrations, rallies, protests, marches and vigils expressing opposition to the Trump regime. This, she says, is about 50% more than 55,000-60,000 protests she and her volunteer helpers tallied in 2025.

Harvard’s Crowd Counting Consortium, which uses a more stringent tallying method, has only released numbers through the first two months of this year, but the trendline is the same. In all of 2025, CCC counted 39,154 protests against Trump across America. Through the end of February 2026, it recorded another 9,447. That puts 2026 to be 45% more active, in terms of on-the-ground protest, than last year.

Neither of these tallies include the burst of activity around No Kings 3 on March 28, “Communities Not Cages” on April 25, and MayDay on May 1. Right now, based on my ongoing tracking of upcoming events on Mobilize.us, the progressive event platform, there’s a surge of attention on voting rights, with immigration and democracy being the other leading topics mentioned across the thousands of events Mobilize displays. The Court’s Callais ruling has prompted several urgent listings, most prominently the “All Roads Lead to the South” national day of action on May 16.

Also, in addition to the annual wave of PRIDE events happening in June, Mobilize is also showing a direct-action campaign targeting Citizens Bank protesting its financing of ICE detention centers. The De-ICE Citizens Bank Coalition is building towards a national day of action on June 6, with 34 across New England, the company’s home territory.

However you slice the data, there will be a record amount of mass protest this year. All this effort, though, is setting us up for one of the classic challenges faced by many protest movements: It’s very rare for us to know in real time the effect of our actions.

Uncertainty about whether you are winning, treading water, or going backwards is a hallmark of mass movements. And when movements grind along for a long period without seeing much, if anything, change in response to their efforts, people often respond in one of two ways. Many give up, while a smaller group gets radicalized. Both moves are understandable. Neither are helpful.

This is one of the great lessons of the anti-Vietnam War movement of the mid-1960s to mid-1970s that is quite relevant to today. I’m in the middle of reading Tom Wells’ magisterial history of that period, The War Within: America’s Battle Over Vietnam. Of the anti-war movement’s challenges, he writes:

“For many, the anti-war fight brought mounting and profound political frustration. Despite the movement’s steady expansion, they observed, the bloodletting in Vietnam only increased. The White House seemed heedless of public protest, its occupants amoral. There was apparently no telling how far the US government would go to impose its designs on the peasantry of Southeast Asia: even World War III was possible. Public support for US policies compounded activists’ distress. The building frustration in the movement bred feelings of desperation in many circles. Gor some protesters the desperation even begot self-sacrifice. ‘What more can we possibly do?’ was a common cry in the movement. The frustration was greatest among amongst youth. And it was particularly pronounced in periods following large national demonstrations, when, despite the dissent, little if anything seemed to change. Few activists fully appreciated the considerable political power they possessed...

One of my theses is that thwarted political hopes were the main (but by no means the only) impetus behind escalations in anti-war tactics. Frustrated hopes were the principal reason for the growing militancy in the movement, including the use of political violence. The only way to stop the war, many protesters concluded, was to make America ungovernable....

Activists’ failure to appreciate their actual political power hurt their cause. That failure spawned defections from the movement. It bred lethargy, stagnation, and despair in the movement’s ranks, impeding the organization of protests and the maintenance of anti-war groups. It fostered antipathy to traditional legal demonstrations, hindering the public display of anti-war sentiment. It hampered efforts to sustain outpourings of dissent, particularly in the early 1970s, when, amid Richard Nixon’s escalations of the war, cynicism about the efficacy of anti-war protest was especially widespread. Not least important, it aggravated dissension over strategies and tactics among activists, thereby depleting energies, hardening internal divisions, and reducing the movements capacity for coordinated action.”

If only movement activists had known the kind of impact they were having, in real-time. Writing twenty years after the fact, and with the benefit of many interviews with Administration officials as well as internal records of conversations, Wells asserts:

“The US government took the antiwar movement quite seriously. If many protesters fail to appreciate their political clout, officials in the Johnson and Nixon administrations did not. They considered the movement a nagging sign of domestic dissatisfaction with the war, a threat to their base of domestic support, a menace to American social stability, and a source of encouragement to the Vietnamese enemy. Officials recognized that protesters were, in fact the cutting edge of domestic anti-war sentiment as a whole. Washington consequently followed the movement’s activities closely, nervously, relentlessly. Officials at the highest levels paid keen attention to them. Presidents Johnson and Nixon both took an active interest in the movement’s doings. The intelligence reports they requested and received on protests exhibited market detail...

The movement played a major role in constraining, de-escalating, and ending the war. The movement inhibited both US air and ground activity in Indochina during the Johnson administration. It fed the mounting unease with the conflict of key administration officials in late 1967 and early 1968. The movement fueled Eugene McCarthy’s presidential bid, which shaped official perceptions in 1968 that the public had turned against the war period it had a significant effect from the influential private Johnson advisors known as the wise men. And it was the most important manifestation of the domestic antiwar mood that forced the Johnson administration to reverse course in Vietnam in 1968.

The peace movement also exerted a substantial impact on the Nixon administration’s policies in Vietnam. It fueled US troop withdrawals from Vietnam. It continued to inhibit both the US air and ground wars in Indochina. It exerted a critical influence on Nixon’s decision not to carry out his 1969 threat to Hanoi of a massive military blow. It shaped his determination to prematurely withdraw U.S. forces from Cambodia in 1970. The movement nourished the deterioration in US troop discipline and morale in Vietnam, which provided additional impetus to US troop withdrawals. It put pressure on the administration to negotiate a settlement of the war. And it gave impetus to congressional legislation that cut off US funds for the war.”

Now apply this insight to the first months of 2026. We already know that the massive nonviolent resistance to ICE in Minnesota, which was buttressed by more than one thousands “ICE Out for Good” protest rallies around the country the weekend of January 24, led to the cashiering of Greg Bovino and the firing of Kristy Noem—though we don’t have the internal records or testimony of administration officials revealing more. Either way, the cause and effect seem plain.

Why hasn’t Trump continued to escalate his war on Iran? Could it be that the reports of eight million people in the streets on March 28 spooked him? Again, we probably won’t know the full answer for years. Trump chickens out for lots of reasons, including stock market crashes and oil price jumps. But considering how much he seems to care about the size of his crowds, the continuing appearance of big crowds opposing him on America’s streets must also be having an impact.

The problem with catastrophism

I felt moved to make this point this week about mass movement confusion after reading Jonathan V. Last’s recent screed in The Bulwark titled “The Enshittified States of America.” Last is the editor of The Bulwark, the breakout publication of the #NeverTrump center-right, and one of its star performers. His work is often smart, even trenchant. On the Bulwark’s many podcasts, he is often one of its more acid commentators. With this piece, though, he was channeling the kind of cynicism that grows when you feel like nothing is changing despite your most passionate, best efforts.

Using tech writer Cory Doctorow’s powerful description of the process by which tech companies rise by being good for their users but then, once they’ve locked them in, “enshittify” by monetizing them in ever more exploitative ways, Last makes a similar claim about America itself:

“Let me tell you a highly stylized version of the American story,” he writes.

“In the beginning, there was a startup called the United States, which we’ll refer to by its stock-ticker symbol, USA. It was young, scrappy, and hungry and needed to figure out how to deliver value to its citizens users.

So it did a bunch of things: It created a central bank. It expanded its territory. It established mass communications (the postal service) and roads and public education. Eventually, it took the painful step of expunging slavery.

This startup grew in size and productivity and market cap. Its user base became enormous. After about 160 years, USA became the biggest company on the planet, at which point it achieved a bunch of important network effects. Because USA benefited from free trade, it developed a military that could enforce a globalized system of free trade. Capital—both human and financial—flowed into USA. People—both users and clients⁴—loved USA. And for another 70 years it delivered good results for both. Its stock couldn’t have been higher.

But then USA went down the road toward enshittification.”

Last goes on to argue that America has been “getting worse, on balance, for coming on a quarter of a century,” specifically listing hyper-partisanship, the Supreme Court’s rightwing turn, Congress giving in to executive power, the rise of the oligarch class, the decline of the rule of law and the hyperscaling of corruption.

Though Last doesn’t quite say so explicitly, I think the recent Court decision in the Callais case undoing the last vestige of sixty years of racial progress on voting rights is weighing heavily here. As he writes about how our “enshittified” system’s current failures:

Everyone knows that gerrymandering is a net negative. There are good (though not perfect) solutions to prevent it. But we’re actually moving backwards on gerrymandering because one party unilaterally disarmed, the Supreme Court has become a partisan entity, and the other party has become anti-democratic. So we know how to fix gerrymandering, most people want to fix gerrymandering, but not only can we not fix it, but it’s getting worse.

This is the kind of “doom and gloom” punditry that I tried to call out here a few weeks ago. Its only effect can be to increase despair and withdrawal, or a tilt towards more radical thinking and tactics. And Last is wrong in particular about solving the gerrymandering problem—we can eliminate it completely by adopting a different paradigm built around proportional representation and fusion voting, and that approach will appeal just as much to Republicans about to be shut out of seats in blue states as it appeals to Democrats worrying about protecting minority representation.

However, it’s harder to offer people realistic hope than it is to sell them unbridled cynicism. There is a path to PR and fusion that is at least as doable as the path to restoring the old status quo of the Voting Rights Act, and it doesn’t require packing the Supreme Court. But if we’re not careful, justified outrage about the ways MAGA Republicans are currently breaking the norms of American politics will have the effect of disabusing people of the value of any path to systemic change.

I asked Claude to read and summarize the hundreds of comments people posted on Last’s essay. Most readers agreed with him. While a few commenters got a lot of support for offering silver linings (Libraries in America are great! Costco is a shining example of “what capitalism could be”!), the overall tone was agreement with his premise. Comments using doom/collapse/hopeless/over/fucked language outnumbered comments using hope/optimism language by roughly 2.5 to 1 (90 vs. 36), and by reactions the gap is wider — about 4.5 to 1 (384 vs. 84). Last replied in-thread with “Hope? lol. Wrong newsletter,” and that captures the room.

Beware the lure of the dark side

When you think what you’re doing isn’t working, either you give up, or you start pondering more radical ideas. This, for example, is the path writer Chris Armitage—best known for calling for “soft secession”—is taking his readers on. While Armitage still argues that conventional forms of civic political pressure affect the decisions of elected representatives, at a more systemic level he is urging that Blue states stop cooperating with the federal government and adopt what he “oppositional federalism” and “constitutional non-compliance.”

Oppositional federalism means the state using its “sovereign authority” to go on offense against federal officers who break state law, Armitage suggests. (Notice how this can work both ways, though—as segregationist governors once argued.) And constitutional non-compliance means states nullifying federal law within their borders and stopping federal action on state soil, though Armitage goes further, writing: “Think of this tier as, ‘there are literal concentration camps, whether it’s me, or me and my friends, or the mayor ordering the city police, or the governor activating the national guard, we are using every power we have to stop horrific things from happening’.”

We don’t have to go far back in American history to remember where this kind of thinking leads. Whether it was the Bundy ranch standoff in 2014, where Cliven Bundy, a rancher inspired by the so-called “sovereign citizen” movement refused to accept federal jurisdiction over his grazing privileges, or the Weather Underground, which led a bombing campaign targeting government buildings in the early 1970s aiming to overthrow the US “oppressor nation,” small groups of radicalized citizens have turned to violence against what they’ve believed to be illegitimate authorities. And instead of winning, they mainly succeeded in driving support toward the institutions they opposed.

Let’s hope that come this fall, no one repeats this pattern. But for that we need to sustain realistic hope, when nihilistic despair beckons.

End Times

As they say, shift happens.