Resistance Is Mobile

Maybe it’s the decades of disappointment talking, but watching the same Democratic leadership, the same pundits and the same click-baiting resistance personalities circling the wagons after Nov. 5 called to mind the words of Anton Chigurh, the ”No Country for Old Men” villain who executes people with a pneumatic bolt pistol: “If the rule you followed brought you to this, of what use was the rule?”

There are troubling signs of a re-rot, starting at the fish’s head. We still have Hakeem “Bipartisanship” Jeffries and Chuck “Name a Victory of Mine — I’ll Wait” Schumer at the top of the party heap. On Dec. 3, Schumer announced his retention as Senate minority leader by pledging (emphasis mine) to “look for ways to collaborate with our Republican colleagues.” At this point, no one expects Chuck to understand that bipartisanship only polls well because cable news and legacy op-ed ditto-heads are still telling people that it’s important. But the very least he could do is think of a better verb.

The retreads are rolling out on social media, too. The migration from the fascist-captured former Twitter to Bluesky has been like a new school year, with the same kids wearing a fresh summer look to rope in a new crowd. The Lincoln Project is still trawling for clapter. The Occupy Democrats have a new account with which to torment Politifact. The MeidasTouch has heard from credible sources that the president-elect was farting, and they’ll slam more dunks on #DiaperDon with the same efficacy as ever (scoreboard!); whether that means again running donor money through a Super PAC making blink-length ad buys and overcompensating contractors, then smearing the next journalist who asks where the money goes remains to be seen. “Mueller, She Wrote” reaped a six-figure audience despite a relevance matching the name, a self-impeaching autobiography and a win list still marked “TBD.” Seth Abramson, meanwhile — whose “investigations” have led to three books, each with names beginning “Proof of …” and none concluding with ”How Much Time You Could Have Saved with Two Newspaper Subscriptions” — arrived on Bluesky and found himself blocked by thousands of users. Naturally, he blamed being included on a “resistance grifter” blocklist on a “Soviet-educated, Putinist hacker.” (The user in question is a software engineer and Pink Floyd fan from New Jersey.) 

If ”Pod Save America” did what it says on the box, the show would’ve been canceled by now. If the conspiracy flavored Resistance based out of 30 Rockefeller Plaza had worked, we wouldn’t have Trump reruns. But we’re here because the Resistance (the mentality, the network, the brand, the cash-in) has spent post-2016 targeting audiences as consumers and providing them a service unrelated to political outcomes. Between waiting to hear if the feds got Gorpman to turn state’s evidence on Bleemer and hopscotching around the country to retweet a surge of transient dunks for special elections and doomed bellwether candidates du jour, it has soothed like a drug. But to borrow from an old public service announcement, winners don’t use drugs. The comfort offered today puts off victory until tomorrow. 

The everyday user’s experience of “The Resistance” from 2016-2020 was a lot like a political and online version of alcoholism. You would wake up and feel incomplete and wrong, or scared and nervous, the experience of the world febrile and refracted through some unseen break in the glass around you, and eventually you would fill the cracks and pour calm throughout the body via this salvific, completing elixir. Things were right again, just for a bit.

With alcoholism, the trouble is that the next day brings more of the same, hastened and intensified by the damage done to your nervous system by the previous day’s booze. It begins as a necessity and in short order becomes a self-necessitating one. Each pour of equilibrium and contentment comes with a double-shot of the next-day’s need. The prospect of stopping is the prospect of living with an incurably broken feeling forever.

And while the comparison is not so neatly 1-to-1, there is something uncomfortably analogous to spending each day looking for the dopamine hit of the next whammy dunk that puts Trumpism in its place, the next must-see clip that threatens to humiliate Donnie #Drumpf into accountability, the next bit of virality that maybe gets in front of enough eyeballs and sends the John Madden voice from the “Ask Madden” feature in his eponymous video game shouting in your head, “This one’ll stop him for sure!”

Like a conspiracy theory, resistance consumption remains passive, deferring agency to the presumption that something or someone is in charge, and something or someone will handle it. It’s the comforting thought suggested by the existence of the Lincoln Project (and lesser variants like the MeidasTouch) where the people who spent their careers paving the runway for Trumpworld can rhetorically take out Air Force One, and that a United States perverted by the works of Republican hatchet men will be repaired by their swinging the weapon in reverse. To paraphrase Chief Wiggum, “Cut together, stupid!”

Something similar is at work with the resistance’s fondness for modern Kremlinology. Both Rachel Maddow on the high end (legitimate, scary) and the likes of Seth Abramson on the low (redundant, weird) hold out a tantalizing notion that charting a twisting path from Trumpworld back to Moscow will uncover a line of dominoes that will begin to topple when the one at the point of origin comes into view. It assumes conspiracy undoes itself, rather than becoming evidence for what’s to be done.

At the end of a dark night, neither virality nor conspiracism solve the problem enough to truly make you feel better, because they don’t involve you actually doing anything. That’s not their intent; getting you to listen and click again tomorrow is. Like losing weight or beating depression or feeling better about yourself, the solution to feeling better about politics and actually resisting is so obvious it almost feels insulting and just rigorous enough to feel like there has to be a better way. You’ve just got to get up and do the work.  

Yes, you deserve rest, and, yes, you should not neglect your own nourishment, but a key feature of our federal system is that resisting Trump starts down the block. One hundred thousand followers scattered around the United States and hanging on your next retweet will never have anything like the power of showing up in an average community with 49 other people ready to say “no.” Nobody ever resisted anything without first getting in the way. Resistance, after all, is a physical property. In its least attractive but most relevant form, it is an exercise. It is an application of moral and human force that can arrest momentum and relieve great burdens, and it is something at which you grow stronger only through repetition.

Like working out, it can take a while to discover the labor that tricks your brain into feeling exhilarated, and just like going to the gym and listening to what classes others rave about, sometimes it takes attending a protest, or dropping in on one volunteer organization to encounter the other people or purpose that energizes you. The only thing you have to accept is that nobody will make montage videos of you on Day One or become your 100,000th follower on Day Two. But that’s fine. The work can eventually make you a celebrity, but celebrity doesn’t do the work. If it did, dipshits larping as their “West Wing” characters would’ve tweeted Kamala into the White House.

Besides, the best kind of micro-celebrity is being known as a permanent pain in the ass in your community: The person willing to march in the hot sun, stand in front of the abortion clinic, shout outside the facility where undocumented detainees are kept, and place him- or herself between a gratuitous display of force and its victims. The scariest person in the conservative cosmology — outside of the imaginary — is you again, sitting in the school board or city council meeting, speaking during the allotted time for community feedback, and reminding your representatives that people besides their donors are listening. That person’s every bit as terrifying to Democratic Party leadership.

Which, yes, all sounds like work. And at first, it’s exhausting and intimidating. Maybe you aren’t even in the right place, and maybe this isn’t what you most need to be working on, and you’re not seeing any results yet anyway. You may not have any friends to do this with either. But it gets easier and makes more sense the more you do it, and the more community you can find to surround and empower yourself with. There are no secrets, and the truth isn’t complicated: It’s an exercise simple enough that they can put the message on a shoe. At some point, you have to just do it.