Category Archives: Trump

a checklist for democracy activists

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Many Americans are working to defend democracy, but we need even more. People with diverse agendas and various diagnoses of our current problems must take action right now. There are several legitimate theories of our crisis. We need people to address whatever aspects resonate most with them, coming from their diverse backgrounds and viewpoints.

I think these (below) are our most important tasks. And I believe that if many people do them, our disagreements about diagnoses and strategies will not matter very much, because a stronger civil society will preserve democracy:

One-to-one interviews: Fanning out in a community and asking people what they care about, looking for individuals who have various kinds of leadership potential and networks, and bringing them together in meetings. Use a guide like this one.
Local news: Collecting information that would otherwise go unreported because of the collapse of local journalism, and sharing it. Local news is highly relevant to national events, because everything from budget cuts to ICE raids plays out in locations.
Caring for affected people: Raising money, serving food, driving people where they need to go, taking care of their children and pets, helping them find work.
Advocacy in local institutions: We need concerned citizens to meet with their school superintendent to ask how undocumented children are being protected, their local college president to ask about free speech, and their local TV station to ask about biased news coverage. Some of this advocacy can be friendly and low-key. Sometimes, local leaders just need our quiet support. But some issues may have to escalate to public conflict.
Registering and turning out voters: It is fine to do this in a partisan way: party activism is an important aspect of democracy. It is also possible to register and motivate voters in a genuinely nonpartisan way to expand the electorate and protect everyone’s right to vote as they wish.
Recruiting and supporting candidates: This is important at all levels, from school boards to 2028 presidential candidates.
Nonviolent resistance: Civil disobedience is a spectrum, from easy and safe actions to very courageous ones. The method of banging on pots in big cities has spread globally in the last decade and has now reached Washington, DC. It is an example of a relatively safe action. Standing in the way of armed government agents is much more dangerous. Effective nonviolent movements offer and celebrate a wide range of actions.

I did not list protests on this table. They can be valuable, but I want to suggest that they are more means than ends. For example, a march can be a powerful way of publicizing that there is a resistance and collecting the contact-information of people who might do the other tasks. I often think that the most important people at a rally are not the speakers on the podium but the folks at the back of the crowd with clipboards.

These are not tasks for individuals to do alone. None of us can accomplish much by ourselves; we can’t even think wisely unless we discuss what to do with others. Therefore, the tasks listed above require organizations, and there is an equally important agenda for building and sustaining groups:

Recruitment: Individuals must be invited into organizations and made to feel welcome, notwithstanding their previous experience and views, and encouraged to commit to the group. (This is where protests belong on the checklist.)
Logistics: A group can’t get anything done unless someone finds a space, buys the pizzas, arranges childcare, and does all the other scutwork. Some of this requires skill and experience; all of it requires effort. By the way, the people who contribute in this way must be recognized and thanked.
Decision-making: Groups must make decisions efficiently, yet without ignoring dissenters who have genuine disagreements. Effective groups treat meeting time as a scarce resource and use it economically. They know what they are doing at any given moment during a meeting. (Are we venting? Brainstorming? Advising someone? Choosing between two courses of action?) I recommend distinguishing between contested values and merely practical questions and reserving discussion time for the value-conflicts that need resolution. I would delegate practical issues to volunteers to decide. It is also crucial to record all decisions so that it’s clear what the group has committed to do.
Leadership-development: Groups need leaders. Even the most non-hierarchical groups actually have leaders, although those people may not have titles or official powers. Leaders should be recognized and thanked. They should have opportunities to grow. They should also be held accountable and, if necessary, removed.
Raising and holding money: The typical anti-Trump resistance group raises money, but not for itself. Members pass the hat (metaphorically), and their funds go to political candidates or name-brand national nonprofits. This is unsustainable. In the first month of the first Trump Administration, 350,000 people donated to the ACLU, disproportionately funding one organization that had one strategy. Then the money tapered off. Groups need their own bank accounts and budgets, reserving some funds for their own continuous fundraising.
Hiring: We need more people whose jobs involve organizing for democracy, and we need pathways for those who want to do this work. Organizers can be young, part-time, and (frankly) underpaid, but they need salaries.
Scaling up: Once there are three resistance groups in a given county, there should be an umbrella group for the county. This should not just be forum where like-minded people share news; it should make decisions. That implies a leadership structure at the county level–and then upward from there.
Coalition work: There should be many flavors of organizations, and they should coordinate. I completely respect the big emerging networks, such as Indivisible and #50501, but they need company, and not everyone will want to join any given network. Groups have various identities and agendas. To work in coalition is not only to express mutual support or to agree on general principles. (In fact, it’s fine if different groups disagree on principles.) A coalition can coordinate concrete actions at key moments. That requires empowering selected representatives from the various member organizations to meet and make decisions.

See also: “democracy’s crisis: a system map (a longer and revised version of which is forthcoming in Studies in Law, Politics, and Society); the current state of resistance, and what to do about it; tools people need to preserve and strengthen democracy; and a flowchart for collective decision-making in democratic small groups.

holding two ideas at once: the attack on universities is authoritarian, and viewpoint diversity is important

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Two points are valid, in my opinion, and we should address both:

First, the Trump Administration is using almost every available tool, including unconstitutional methods, to harm universities and to interfere in their internal affairs. At my university, they literally abducted a beloved graduate student because she had written a completely appropriate op-ed in our student newspaper, thus suppressing speech on our campus.

The Administration receives support from people who think that higher education has been intolerantly leftist (or biased against Israel). Trump and his close associates may believe those complaints. However, their campaign against higher education is top-down and self-interested and closely resembles that of other “personalist” authoritarian regimes around the world today, which range across the ideological spectrum:

  • “Under the [right-wing] authoritarian leadership of Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, the government has started a culture war to dismantle the independence of academic institutions.”
  • “As Modi’s [Hindu nationalist] BJP tightens its grip, India’s universities become political battlegrounds where academic independence is sacrificed to ideological loyalty.”
  • In Venezuela, “The main public universities, in particular, have paid a heavy price as a consequence of their defense of democratic values and academic freedom, as they have been defunded by the government” (which is left-wing).
  • “Much of the structure of Turkish higher education” is being dismantled “through purges, restrictions, and assertions of central control, a process begun earlier this year and accelerating now with alarming speed.”

Both here and in other countries, attacks on universities are coordinated with attacks on broadcast media, foundations, law firms, civil servants, judges, and, often, the legislative branch.

In its battles with US higher education, the Administration has some grassroots support. In July, Gallup found that 41% of people had little or no confidence in higher education, and of those, 32% said it was “’too liberal,’ trying to ‘indoctrinate’ or ‘brainwash’ students, or not allowing students to think for themselves as reasons for their opinions.” That group represents 13% of the whole sample: enough to generate a flood of social media, but a minority of the population. The Administration’s agenda is mostly self-interested rather than populist.

Thus I disagree with people like Greg Lukianoff, the president of FIRE (now the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression), who believe that American universities courted trouble by being intolerant of conservatives. He says, “If they’d listened to us 15 years ago, none of this would be happening.”

I welcome FIRE’s current work against the Trump Administration, but I believe that Trump would have gone after higher education in exactly the same way if universities had attracted more prominent conservative faculty and speakers or had avoided issuing statements about current events. Right-wing media would still have found plenty of anecdotes about liberal bias, and 13% of Americans would still have denounced higher education from the right. The administration needed a pretext–not a fair assessment–to squash higher education as an autonomous sector.

Second, I believe that one of our most important tasks–as humans, and specifically as people who study or work in universities–is to inquire into what is right. This process (call it “normative analysis”) is comparative or dialectical; it’s about juxtaposing alternative values and competing arguments and reasoning about which is better. Furthermore, John Stuart Mill was correct; you can’t just read and discuss alternative arguments to feel their force. You must talk to peers who sincerely hold them.

I think that swaths of US higher education are too ideologically homogeneous to support this kind of reasoning well. In the liberal arts and some of the professions, the dominant ideology is left (although not Marxist, because real Marxism is marginal). In business schools, economics departments, and business-oriented engineering programs, I think the bias is center-right and biased toward technology.

I do not object to the characterization that the whole of higher education is too homogeneously center-left. For instance, at my university, less than one percent of faculty political donations went to Republican candidates or organizations in 2018. At the same time, the name “Marx” is mentioned in just four Tufts course descriptions this semester, half of which are in Art History; none in the social sciences. In short, the ideological range is constrained on both sides, not to mention that academic culture tends to be secular, meritocratic, cosmopolitan, civilian, Anglophone. and technocratic.

Excessive homogeneity can lead to clichés, “motivated reasoning” (selecting evidence to favor a preferred conclusion) and weak argumentation. It can fail to prepare people to engage the broader society.

Meanwhile, few faculty are trained and empowered to address questions of value in academically rigorous ways.

Normative analysis is the focus of a subfield in political science, political theory, which had about 75 job openings in the USA in 2022-3 (5.75% of all political science jobs). That year, there were also about 450 job openings in the USA for philosophers involved with value-theory (broadly defined). Put together, those searches constituted about one open job dedicated to teaching normative inquiry for every ten institutions of higher education in the United States.

Normative analysis is (and should be) conducted in other disciplines as well. Yet it is generally countercultural across higher education and in contemporary society.

Some right-wingers denounce discussions of “divisive concepts.” I have personally observed left-wingers who are genuinely intolerant of conservative (or classical liberal, or religious) arguments. And many administrators, professors and students are positivists. They believe that facts and values are strictly distinct; that values are matters of opinion; and that scholarship should be about facts. It is particularly difficult to have a serious discussion about values in a community where people share key political values and yet deny that values are relevant, claiming that research and teaching are only about facts.

In sum: we should expand philosophical or ideological heterogeneity on college campuses, which means extending our ideological range to the right but also in other directions. We should do so because it is good for us, not because the Trump Administration claims to want this outcome. Trump’s people simply want to squelch autonomous civil society. A powerful civil society is confidently pluralistic and willing to debate normative questions from many angles. Getting there requires internal work, even as we battle our national government for freedom.

See also: Trump: personalist leader or representative of a right-wing movement?; primer on free speech and academic freedom; how to engage our universities in this crisis; trying to keep myself honest.

learning from the Great Salt March: on civil disobedience and breaking through to mass opinion

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Erica Chenoweth, Soha Hammam, Jeremy Pressman, and Christopher Wiley Shay estimate that the No Kings protests this June were among the largest in American history, and the number of protests is growing faster than in 2017 (see the graph above).

Protesting has several purposes, including advertising a movement and recruiting people to take other actions. But protests can also influence people to change their views or behavior. For example, they can convert people who disagree or motivate people who are passive (Bayard Rustin 1965).

Inevitably, the vast majority of any protest’s audience does not observe it directly. People see it through media of various kinds. That was even true during the French Revolution (Jones 2021), and more so in an era of mass communications. It is critical whether and how media organizations (and nowadays, social media users) describe protests (Wasow, 2020).

For those protesting against Trump, two current challenges are: 1) neglect and 2) backlash. Some prominent voices in the media seem not to notice that protests are happening, which may reduce their impact. And many powerful media outlets misrepresent protesters. For example, right-wing media obsessively presented Black Lives Matter (BLM) protests as violent, when data show that they were not, and this contributed to a very tangible backlash. BLM demanded reductions in police budgets, but the presence of BLM protests was associated with increases in police budgets (Ebbinghaus, Bailey & Rubel 2024).

The power of media can be discouraging, especially given the splintered and ideologically polarized media landscape and the prevalence of media outlets that are outright hostile to resistance.

However, protest events can break through if they are skillfully designed (and perhaps a bit lucky).

Consider the apex moment of Gandhi’s career as a protest leader, the Great Salt March of 1930.

Before he launched the March, the Indian independence movement was struggling, and Gandhi was struggling against rivals who included religious sectarians, Marxists, and violent revolutionaries. The media that mattered to him (Indian and foreign) was polarized by ideology, language, and ethnicity and was widely hostile to him.

Gandhi chose to march to the sea to harvest salt because that action would dramatize the evils of imperialism, provoke police action, acknowledge the needs of poor Indians for whom salt was expensive, and turn salt itself into a powerful symbol.

When Gandhi set off on foot with a rather small group, press reports were dismissive and patronizing. The Statesman newspaper of Calcutta called the march “a childishly futile business,” and the Times of India defended the government’s salt monopoly as good for the poor. In the USA, TIME Magazine mocked Gandhi’s “spindly frame” and called his wife Kasturba, “a shriveled, little middle-aged Hindu.” (I quote these and the following snippets from Guha 2018.)

But the scale of the march and the brutality of the police response at the shore broke through. TIME switched to describing Gandhi as a statesman and even as “St. Gandhi,” whose “movement for independence” uses “Christian acts as a weapon against men with Christian beliefs.” Perhaps not all the world’s coverage was favorable, but most of the media switched from viewing Gandhi as a bit of a joke to taking him very seriously indeed. He was back at the head of the Independence movement, which now had momentum.

I am not saying that we need a new Gandhi. Centralized leadership is overrated (even in the Indian independence movement). The way to achieve a breakthrough today is to try many tactics in a decentralized way until one or more of them work. But all of us can learn from the Great Salt March, particularly:

  • Innovation: We always need new forms of civil disobedience. Harvesting salt illegally on a public beach was an innovation in 1930. Protesting at Tesla showrooms was an innovation in 2025. What’s next? (Right now, I am wondering about a march of many religious congregations from the National Cathedral toward Lafayette Square.)
  • Grassroots support: Gandhi would have lost humiliatingly except that thousands of people joined him on his march. The cost of salt resonated with poor Indians (as did his leadership, of course). The question is not which issue is most important, but what gets many people involved.
  • A focus on the audience. It is always hard for social movements to think rigorously about how outsiders will receive their messages, because they disagree with the outsiders! Activists are not obliged to change their goals to cater to public opinion, but they must consider perceptions. What will “Normies” think about our protest? That may sometimes be an annoying question, yet victory depends on answering it well.

See also: the state of nonviolent grassroots resistance; features of effective boycotts; how to engage our universities in this crisis etc. Sources: Bayard Rustin, “From Protest to Politics: The Future of the Civil Rights Movement” Commentary (February, 1965); Colin Jones, The Fall of Robespierre: 24 Hours in Revolutionary Paris (Oxford University Press, 2021); Omar Wasow, “Agenda seeding: How 1960s black protests moved elites, public opinion and voting,” American Political Science Review 114.3 (2020): 638-659; Mathis Ebbinghaus, Nathan Bailey & Jacob Rubel, “The Effect of the 2020 Black Lives Matter Protests on Police Budgets: How ‘Defund the Police’ Sparked Political Backlash, “ Social Problems, 2024, spae004, https://doi.org/10.1093/socpro/spae004; Ramachandra Guha, Gandhi: The years that changed the world, 1914-1948 (Vintage, 2018).

Trump: personalist leader or representative of a right-wing movement?

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Here are two frameworks for analyzing Trump and MAGA. Although elements of both could be true, they are not fully compatible. More importantly, they suggest quite different responses.

  1. MAGA is an ethnonationalist right-wing movement with considerable popular support (although less than a solid majority), a base of local organizations, and deep roots in American history (Smith 1999). Donald Trump is the current national leader of this movement, but it will outlast him. The movement uses many conventional methods, such as winning elections and passing legislation through the legislature. It also plays hardball and violates rules and norms, but that is not a definitive trait. In fact, the center-left has also used similar behavior at times. Ethnonationalist right-wing movements are common around the world today. Some are led by charismatic figures, but that is not especially true of AfD in Germany, for instance. Their common characteristic is their ideology.
  2. Trump is a personalist or patrimonialist leader. Today’s personalists around the world include right-wing, left-wing, and technocratic leaders, and many are ideologically flexible. In essence, they are charismatic leaders whose followers owe their power to the leader and who trample rival power centers in the civil service, other branches and levels of government, the media, and civil society (Frantz et al.). In personalist parties, the grassroots is almost entirely passive; power is centralized. Insofar as today’s personalists share a philosophy, it is populist-authoritarianism, or perhaps Bonapartism–identifying the authentic people with a single “strong” leader.

If you apply the ideological framework, then your response to Trump will vary depending on your ideology. If you’re on the left, you’ll want to build a more popular and effective progressive alternative. You may welcome defectors from the right, but you will be suspicious of them if they remain conservative. If you’re conservative but not MAGA, you may see some value in some of Trump’s positions and suspect that liberal elites are biased against him. If your main concern is polarization, then you may recommend cross-partisan dialogue and favor a centrist response.

On the other hand, if you apply the personalist framework, then you may be attracted to the solution that seems to work in other countries–a broad-based coalition in defense of constitutional limits and against the charismatic leader. This coalition should have a modest economic and social agenda and focus instead on challenging the authoritarian leader.

I suppose my own view is that Trump is a personalist authoritarian who taps into a robust right-wing ethnonationalist movement, just as other personalists use locally popular ideologies (Hindtuva, Chavismo) in their respective countries. This means that I would endorse strategies that challenge Trump as a personalist as well as ideological opposition from the left and center-left. However, I am not sure the same people and organizations can do both at the same time.

See also: democracy’s crisis: a system map (a revised version to appear in Studies in Law, Politics and Society); what is the basis of a political judgment?. Citations: Smith, Rogers M. Civic ideals: Conflicting visions of citizenship in US history. Yale University Press, 1997; Frantz, E., Kendall-Taylor, A., Wright, “Why Trump’s control of the Republican Party is bad for democracy,” The Conversation, Jan 30, 2024.

what a Democrat could do with Trump’s power

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In the Atlantic, Paul Rosenzweig asks what a Democratic president could do with the unilateral executive powers that the Supreme Court seems willing to grant Trump–assuming that the “Court acts in good faith—that its views on presidential power are without partisan favor, and that it doesn’t arbitrarily invent carve-outs to rein in a Democratic president.”

As Rosenzweig notes, a Democrat would want to rebuild or build things, whereas Trump’s new powers mostly involve canceling or blocking things. Therefore, a Democrat would have a harder job than Trump has. Rosenzweig also notes that it will be a challenge to fill vacant positions that are authorized by statute. “Firing experts is much easier than hiring them. And given the uncertainties that Trump has created, our best and brightest might not willingly take positions in the federal government. Who wants a job that might last only four years?”

I would add that any president must refrain from crossing certain ethical lines, regardless of what the courts may rule. For example, selecting individuals to be prosecuted violates the rule of law; the government should only investigate alleged crimes, not choose people as targets for legal action. No politician should decide ex ante to prosecute Elon Musk or Steven Miller or any other individual.

But I think Rosenzweig somewhat underestimates the opportunities for the next administration. Here are four:

  1. Rebuilding the civil service

Hiring federal workers will be a challenge, but a worthy one. Yes, the Trump cuts have unjustly ended careers and caused massive damage. At the same time, the federal civil service has long suffered from a severe problem of generational replacement, hiring far too few young people. This is one reason that some federal agencies and offices have been sclerotic and ineffective. To attract young and talented people into federal service will require leadership. We should expect that from our next president. The result could be a better executive branch.

(Yes, federal jobs are less secure, now that the president seems to have the right to lay off civil servants; but government positions are at least as secure as jobs in the private sector.)

  1. Restoring accountability

Although the rule of law does not permit selecting individuals for prosecution, it requires accountability. The difference lies in process. The next administration could create commissions, offices, and/or tribunals that investigate corruption and illegality without fear or favor. Individuals and organizations that allege that they were abused by the Biden Administration or its predecessors could come forward, not just those with complaints against Trump and his people. The White House would have no say in the decisions.

  • It would be worth considering a Truth and Reconciliation model.
  • In addition to investigating crimes, the administration could investigate federal employees and contractors and terminate those who crossed ethical lines–with due process. Companies that gave things of value to Trump would also be at risk of bribery charges.
  • It would be worth trying to waive sovereign immunity so that aggrieved parties could sue the government for damages. There is no question that the Trump Administration has intentionally caused costly harms. (And possibly previous administration did so as well.) I am not sure whether courts would allow plaintiffs to sue without Congressional approval. But it would be worth testing a strategy of unilaterally waiving the sovereign immunity defense.
  1. Judicious cuts

There are pieces of the federal government that a responsible center-left or progressive administration should cut by fiat, using the powers that Trump has accumulated. For example, I would consider zeroing out Enforcement and Removal Operations (ERO) within ICE. The benefits would far exceed any disadvantages.

  1. Leverage

A responsible president of any party should not fire people or cut spending just to achieve political objectives. For example, a responsible president should not threaten to fire all the federal workers in a district unless its representative votes with the administration. That would harm innocent workers and clients.

However, leverage can be used more judiciously. Terminating all positions in Enforcement and Removal Operations would be a net benefit for the public; it could also be a bargaining chip in negotiations about immigration reform. A president could even threaten to relocate federal jobs of certain types out of specific districts. For example, there are nearly 1,000 Small Business Development Centers (SBDCs), 50 federal Rural Development State Offices, and more than 360 IRS Taxpayer Assistance Centers (TACs). Maybe a Member of Congress would like those to leave his district? Or would the Member prefer to vote “aye” on the president’s bill?

I am not sure I want this kind of president. There is a risk that playing hardball with the new presidential powers would further degrade constitutional norms. But perhaps such leverage would be ethical if the proposed legislation were valuable and the collateral damage were strictly limited.

Going beyond specific bills, I would consider proposing a grand bargain. We need a much stronger and more capable Congress, a more resilient civil service, and a more rule-bound presidency. Since the courts are responsible for unleashing the president, laws won’t suffice to change the balance; we probably need constitutional amendments. I could see a progressive or center-left president saying: “Pass these amendments and limit my discretion. Meanwhile, I will use my unilateral powers to the full.”

A raft of ambitious policies would be a success. A restored constitutional balance would be a success. And it might be possible to get one followed by the other.

See also: repairing the damage of federal actions; Gen Z and rebuilding the federal workforce; a generational call to rebuild; and rule of law means more than obeying laws: a richer vision to guide post-Trump reconstruction