Yesterday my wife and I and a friend drove to downtown Springfield for a rally against Trump, organized by Indivisible – a grassroots group focused on local protest movements. We had heard that Massachusetts senators Markey and Warren would be speaking in the flesh, but that rumor proved false. Two staff persons, one from each office, delivered short statements from each senator to a distressingly small turnout, many of whom lifted signs. The best sign featured a cardboard toilet seat, a roll of toilet paper, an American Flag, and a fluttering piece of paper with the inscription, “Dump Trump.” Another sign proclaimed, “Musk Must Go.”
This was an older group, less than a crowd but slightly more than a bus stop gathering, people in their sixties and seventies, mostly white. An icy wind blew along the canyons of streets and buildings – people held their scarves against their chins. The demonstration, if we take the liberty of calling it that, took place in front of state government offices on Main Street. In front of us rose the angular, steel, and glass structures of modern bureaucracy, and just across the street, behind us, a row of 19th-century brick buildings with ornate moldings reminded onlookers of a stately, more optimistic past of local manufacturing, and prosperity.
All around us a sparse collection of local people, mostly Black, wandered past. Everything had a blunted, opaque sense of incompleteness. People seemed to linger in slow motion. The most dangerous criminal in human history (Chomsky’s phrase) had just grabbed the entire nation like it was a tag-sale toaster, and the outrage could not have been more muted – the gathering felt less like a rally and more like a support group for grieving spouses. The discrepancy between the requisite task – opposing the brutal hub of global fascism – and the overly civilized response, hit you like a wad of acidic bile in your throat. This was not akin to the famous Chinese image of a lone protester standing before a tank – there was no tank, no National Guard contingent, no concrete representation of repression, not even a local cop. The few protesters had no foil to confront unless you label reality itself as the wellspring of oppression.
We are a nation of factions – some have been anesthetized by the media, and others have been wound to the breaking point with anxiety, almost too stunned to react. The mantra -resist – is everywhere, but the plan has yet to emerge.
As an elderly person myself, I imagined that every one of my geriatric comrades – people who likely protested in vast numbers against Nixon over half a century ago – had fantasized about downtown Main Street being overrun by angry, youthful crowds. Are the remnant survivors of Nixon the only thing standing between Trump and the end of organized life on earth (another of Chomsky’s terms)?
A large man with an eagle tattoo on his neck took photos of the straggling attendees and our friend whimsically asked if he belonged to the FBI. “I don’t answer stupid questions,” he snapped. I suppose that all questions about surveillance are “stupid.”
“Yes, you will be watched, identified, and placed in a database, but am I the one? Maybe?”
The Springfield rally took place on the same day that Trump talked about America “cleaning out Gaza,” a framing that evoked associations with “The Stroop Report ” (General Jurgen Stroop was the leader of the SS regiments that “liquidated” the Warsaw Ghetto.) We are being, from moment to moment, assaulted with almost random cluster bombs of threat oozing from the robotic, tortured soul of Donald Trump.
There are improbable appointees like RFK Jr. and pronouncements about some sort of dark ghost of American empire rising out of the ashes of collapse. Trump alights on an idea and abandons it like a psychotic bee careening across the burnt remnants of a meadow. We are assembling too many thoughts for our damaged brains – there is 51st state Canada, invasions of Panama and Greenland, and the wholesale immolation of the federal government to consider and dismiss. The nano-plastics cling to our contorting neurons, we blink and spasm at the sheer volume of nonsense, prospective violence,e and contradiction.
Much of the world has spent my entire lifetime in a state of powerless vigilance, using precious emotional energy anticipating US malice – people in villages waiting for death squads, looking at the sky for bombers and drones, shaking with grief while olive groves are cut down, rain forests burned and houses bulldozed. Now, that sort of anxious scanning of the horizon becomes ours – fascism allows everyone to become an enemy of the state. Michael Moore’s Email came today – entitled “The Coup d’Etad Has Begun.” Moore also sent out an accompanying report by Yale historian, Timothy Snyder. Snyder suggests that the coup is not about physical violence like the January 6th botched and chaotic ransacking of the capital, but about a digital coup, a fascist annexation of cyberspace, a looting of online storage bins. Here is Snyder’s description of the moment:
“Resistance to the coup is the defense of the human against the digital and the democratic against the oligarchic. If Musk controls these digital systems, Republican elected officials will be just as helpless as Democratic ones. The institutions that they voted to create can also be “deleted,” as Musk puts it.
President Trump, for that matter, will also perform at Musk’s pleasure. There is not much he can do without the use of the federal government’s computers. No one will explain this to Trump or to his supporters, of course.
A coup is underway, against Americans as possessors of human rights and dignity, and against Americans as citizens of a democratic republic. Each hour this goes unrecognized makes the success of the coup more likely.”
The idea that Musk, not Trump, controls the master plan, suggests a new version of fascism – not of capitalists salvaging what they can in the face of a populist groundswell, but of a populist ruler, dumb as a bag of hammers, subjugating himself and his movement to the mythos of capitalist eugenics. In Snyder’s view, the inner circuitry of capitalism becomes the motor of fascism, we will be digitally enslaved. I don’t believe that Snyder is a socialist, nor does he see the coup as an inevitable product of the US economy. There is a strange rapprochement between liberal Democrats like Snyder, and some more radical leftists – people nominally agree about the insidious predicament. A predatory and anti-moral state rules over us, but the remediation shifts as one moves further left. Snyder does not detail the means of resistance, and Moore rather vaguely describes it as:
“What he (Trump) doesn’t know is that there are literally thousands of us working right now to stop him. We have numerous ways to do that — through the courts, in Congress, mass actions of civil disobedience, police and district attorneys refusing to break the law and joining with us to block the only person the Supreme Court has declared can break the law.”
The key phrase is “there are literally thousands of us working right now to stop him” – thousands are not enough. The organization “The General Strike,” which I have signed to support, aims to reach a number of over 10 million to commit to a mass shutdown.
One persistent narrative theme holds that we have a finite window of time to confront the orange malignancy. At a certain discreet moment, fascism becomes “consolidated” – the capacity of the fascist regime for mobilized violence renders resistance impossible. History’s favorite cautionary tale, the Nazi state that ruled Germany from 1933 to 1945, proved that fascist power can eviscerate opposition completely, and force the human soul to go into a state of hibernation. The Nazi state, with its surveillance, system of concentration camps embedded within local neighborhoods, and willingness to apply the death penalty as an arbitrary and mundane response to even the most minimal acts of political opposition, gives us a model for the Trump regime’s worst-case scenario. Within that context, Sophie Scholl and the White Rose inevitably became fodder for Roland Freisler’s guillotine. The state had the legal authority to commit murder for the crime of distributing leaflets.
The pardoning of the January 6th “insurrectionists” shows how carefully Trump reenacts the early strategies of the Nazi Party – paramilitary terror foreshadowed the police state. The crude street violence of the “Brown Shirts” conditioned German society to the habits of lethal bureaucracy – the Gestapo, the SS, and the “People’s Court.”
I believe that Democratic Party-affiliated pundits have been vague and confused about the nature and purpose of resistance/solidarity/organization – the goal is not to build an electoral opposition but to prevent the consolidation of the fascist state. Once the Trumpist/fascist state succeeds in erecting the mechanisms of psychological control it is too late. YouTuber, Leeja Miller, called for complete opposition to all Republican aspirations (her pitch was aimed at feckless Democratic senators and those who ought to confront them for caving into and normalizing Trump). Perhaps the only viable hope that resistance now has is to make the country ungovernable (Miller’s term), chaotic, a cauldron of anarchy. We waste our time, I believe, dreaming about a socialist takeover of The Democratic Party, or, even worse, fantasizing about an act of alchemy in which the professional class ruling the blue party morphs into the working class. I believe that we have to go beyond petitioning Democrats to obstruct.
An organization ought to be very specific and aimed at the cornerstones of Trump’s oligarchy. Organized strikes, general strikes, mass refusal to pay taxes, confrontations against ICE on behalf of victimized targets of mass deportation – boycotts of all unnecessary commodities should, I believe, be planned and carried out immediately. No one possessing good faith ought to shop at Amazon, buy a Tesla, purchase junk from Walmart, or fill up a gas tank if it isn’t a matter of survival. Make America at least unprofitable, and, at best, “ungovernable.” Cancel your Facebook/Meta page. Do not throw slabs of raw meat to oligarchs like Zuckerberg.
It took the Nazi state almost six years to become a fully violent, lethal regime – the perfection of bureaucratic evil. The T-4 Euthanasia Program and the developed concentration camp system evolved incrementally over several years. Kristallnacht occurred late in the 5th year of the Nazi regime. The free press, however, was completely dismantled within a year of Hitler assuming power. The decimation of opposition voices is critical to fascist consolidation. Let's examine fascist states today like Hungary, and Turkey. We find that none of these states have achieved the level of media censorship that Nazi Germany accomplished, but all have attacked and wounded the free expression of journalists.
A third of jailed journalists, globally, are in Turkey. The war in Gaza has featured a huge death count for reporters. In Hungary, the fascist regime controls some 80% of the media.
At what point does a fascist regime consolidate power and make opposition impossible? We have no easy answer to that, but perhaps the neutering of media is the delineation point of no return. We have that amount of time – until the press is shuttered – to bring the Trump administration to a grinding halt. Make America ungovernable! Not MAGA, but MAU!
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