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ionelvDavid Brooks has an excellent article in The Atlantic, titled "America Needs a Mass Movement—Now. Without one, America may sink into autocracy for decades." There is already some stir about this article on the interwebs, e.g. on reddit. Here are some excerpts from Brooks' article:
Americans will eventually reject MAGA, not only because it’s like a foreign implant in the body politic but also because over time, it will become clearer that Trump’s ethos doesn’t address the real problems plaguing his working-class supporters: poor health outcomes, poor educational outcomes, low levels of social capital, low levels of investment in their communities, and weak economic growth. [...] Trump’s biggest legislative achievement is a tax cut for the rich. How does that help the working class?
The second task is to construct a vision of America that is more inspiring than MAGA’s. [...]
Populists and Progressives needed each other—and still do. Without populists, progressives can turn into a bunch of affluent, out-of-touch urbanites who have little in common with regular Americans. Without progressives, populists can turn into anti-intellectual, paranoid bigots. The progressive valorizing of cultural diversity is balanced by populists’ emphasis on cultural cohesion.
The third task, of course, is to actually build the movement around the vision. Social movements are bigger than political parties, and focused on more than just passing bills in Congress. They push for change on civic, cultural, institutional, and legislative fronts all at once. They change the climate of the age.
Today, Trump dominates the narrative landscape. During his Apprentice days, as the journalist Tina Brown has pointed out on her Substack, he learned that Americans have at most a two-week attention span, so to control the conversation, you need to stage a series of two-week mini-dramas, each with high-stakes confrontations and surprises.
To counter this, an anti-populist social movement must create a competing cascade of mini-dramas. Every day, the Trump administration’s statements and actions provide abundant material for such drama.
The final of Alinsky’s 13 “Rules for Radicals” was: Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it. Another (the fifth one) was: Ridicule is man’s most potent weapon.
Nonviolent uprisings are twice as likely to succeed as violent ones, according to Chenoweth and Stephan’s research. Peaceful uprisings earn moral authority for themselves and take it away from the regime. When nonviolent protesters confront the regime, they can come across as brave, self-disciplined, and dignified. When regimes retaliate against nonviolent protesters with fire hoses or rubber bullets or tear gas, they come across as ruthless and malevolent.
Nonviolent protests put authoritarian regimes in a lose-lose situation: Either cede the streets to the protesters, or crack down in ways that weaken your legitimacy. If a movement seeks only to please its own radicals, it fails. If it uses action to change the narrative and persuade the mainstream, it has a good chance of success.
We have traveled a long way from Whitman’s hymns of vigor and hope. But the spirit of the country, although perhaps dormant, still lives. Trumpism is ascendant now, but history shows that America cycles through a process of rupture and repair, suffering and reinvention. This process has a familiar sequence. Cultural and intellectual change comes first—a new vision. Social movements come second. Political change comes last.
