Trump shoots the messenger, though not on 5th avenue…and why he gets away with it

If Democrats would stop blaming voters’ bigotry and ignorance for their election losses and pay attention to the legitimate concerns behind the rise of Trump they might better understand why their approval rating is still significantly lower than his.

AI generated image.  Gemini refused to depict
Trump standing on 5th Avenue with a smoking gun.

The president may not have been standing in Fifth Avenue when he metaphorically shot his labor statistics messenger, but close enough.

There is widespread agreement that Trump’s firing of Erika McEntarfer, the commissioner of the Bureau of Labor Statistics, poses great danger to the future health of the economy. To quote one expert reaction:

If policymakers and the public can’t trust the data—or suspect the data are being manipulated—confidence collapses and reasonable economic decision-making becomes impossible. It’s like trying to drive a car blindfolded. This manufactured chaos will reduce business investment and consumer spending, making a recession—and soaring unemployment—far more likely in coming months.

Trump’s political instincts, however, are almost always better than the reasoned judgement of establishment thinkers like Heidi Shierholz, who wrote that paragraph for the Economic Policy Institute.

How can that be?

A day or so before the commissioner lost her job, journalist Jesse Singal (a liberal journalist) told an interviewer that his reporting on social science research has revealed a disturbing pattern of shoddy methods, ideological bias, groupthink, and outright corruption. Experts, he said, “have screwed up so badly so often”

The crisis in expert authority is a disaster in its own right—we should be able to trust the studies that are published—but one of the knock-on effects of it is it does fuel folks like Trump who take the burn-it-down-approach.

Singal spoke before the firing of Ms. McEntarfer, but he had no trouble coming up with an example of a Trump administrator burning something down: Robert F. Kennedy’s attack on expert vaccine consensus. As if on cue, a week after Singal’s interview, Kennedy announced a $500m cut to  mRNA vaccine research funding.

Singal’s findings turn liberals’ “believe science” lawn sign narrative on its head. In that story, scientists are the heroes. They give us a set of uncontested facts that make our lives better. Those who attack scientific consensus are the villains who are causing the crisis in expert authority, which undermines reasonable decision-making and leads to chaos.

Singal suggests a somewhat different story, in which failings of scientific expertise are at least partially responsible for the “crisis in expert authority.”

And the crisis extends beyond science to every kind of expert in government, education, the media—just about every institution and by extension, democracy itself.  In every case, there is at least some kernel of truth to the sense that experts and institutions have failed us.  And Democrats have become the party that defends the experts and institutions against Trump's attacks on them. 

Meanwhile, Trump has a plan for reviving the middle class that requires attacking those institutions and, in spite of his many blunders, his low approval rating is still significantly higher than the Democrats’.

Democrats could stop blaming voters’ bigotry and ignorance for their losses, acknowledge the failings of elite experts and institutions, and come up with a better plan to restore working class prosperity.

Or they can keep doing what they've been doing and wait for the anti-incumbency cycle to run it's course after Trump’s policies inevitably fail and voters decide they hate the Republican Party even more than they hate Democrats.

Then the party of experts will have a slim majority for a few years until their policies inevitable fail again. 

Notes

This recent Atlantic article offers a list of the ways that Trump is likely to fail. Note to self: read this again in a couple of years to see which of these predictions came true.

It’s Trump’s economy now. The latest financial numbers offer some warning signs (AP, Aug. 2).

Even if Trump manages to revive the manufacturing sector, it's not going to restore middle class prosperity.  Here's why. 

Jesse Singal’s book, “The Quick Fix” focuses on bad science in psychology. 

Here's an example of a left wing party that defeated a Trump-like opposition by admitting past mistakes.

Why Democrats are still losing to Trump in spite of everything

The 5-point advantage for Republicans reflects a preference for a party that knows how to use its power to get things done and seems to have a plan to restore working class prosperity. 

 

This card was made by dues-paying union members
to express their resentment against fellow workers
who refused to pay dues in "right to work" states.

Around the time that Republicans were passing a budget that was giving tax cuts skewed to the wealthy and cutting $1 trillion from health insurance for the least affluent Americans, a Democrat member of the County Commission where I live was announcing her defection to the Republican Party.

In explaining her decision, Wendy Piper wrote:

When I was growing up, the Democratic Party supported middle class and working families, such as the one to which I belonged… I was raised primarily by a single mother, and our homes included trailers and trailer parks. My mother worked hard for her money, and I knew at the time that any tax dollars taken from her pocket to support those perceived to be worse off economically impacted her ability to put food on our table. The class divide has only become sharper.

Apparently, the class divide she is concerned about is not between the rich and the working class, but between the working class and people who qualify for welfare benefits. She added:

My former party continues to advocate for the growth of government and redistribution instead of boosting the growth of the economy, which benefits all. Rather than onshoring jobs that provide a living wage (what FDR used to call a “family wage”), they propose nominal increases to the minimum wage.

OBBB & the two parties

While Commissioner Piper was expressing outrage about offshoring of manufacturing, Democratic Party leaders were trying to stoke outrage about cuts to Medicaid in the Republican budget alongside regressive tax cuts.

They think they have an issue they can ride to victory in next year’s congressional midterms.

They may be right. A CNN poll taken in the wake of passage of the One Big Beautiful Bill showed that 33% of Americans have an unfavorable view of the Republican Party and only 51% have a positive view.

A week after I read about Piper’s resignation in the Caledonian-Record, the paper printed an op-ed by Nathan Meyers, a graduate student in the sociology department at UMass Amherst, citing the Congressional Budget Office’s and Joint Committee on Taxation’s prediction that by 2033 “the bottom 20% will pay more in taxes while the top 0.1% receives $43 billion in cuts” as a result of the bill.

But this outcome, Meyers wrote, is just the latest manifestation of 50 years of transferring wealth toward the rich and away from wage earners. Since 1970, the share of national income going to workers has fallen 14% and the share going to the “business surplus” increased 18%. Corporate profits have “outpaced economic grown by 193% since 1970.”

So what makes Republicans think the working class will swallow this latest policy aimed at punishing welfare recipients and transferring wealth upward? Do they think that the “false consciousness” of the “poorly educated” will lead them to vote against their own self interest? That’s the condescending theory the highly educated people who lead the Democratic Party—and their highly educated loyal voters—trot out after every election the Democrats lose, most notably after Bush’s 2004 re-election.

This image was all over the internet after the 2004 election.
You can still buy the sticker on Amazon!
The book-length version of the sticker was written
by Thomas Frank: What’s the Matter with Kansas.

And it is surely the theory they would use to explain that CNN poll, which ranked the Democratic Party even less popular than the Republicans, at 28%.

Elite failure

Here’s a theory: The low ranking of both parties reflects an accurate assessment of the current state of America’s political leadership. The 5-point advantage for Republicans reflects a preference for a party that knows how to use its power to get things done and seems to have a plan—however iffy—to restore working class prosperity.

It may be that voters like Wendy Piper are willing to roll the dice on Donald Trump’s economic schemes. At least he has a plan to “onshore jobs.” Meanwhile, the Democrats can't seem to agree on a way to help working people who don’t qualify for welfare benefits but are still struggling to make ends meet.

Bill Clinton captured the White House in 1992 by saying he would govern on behalf of Americans  “who work hard and play by the rules.” Ms. Piper seems to think her former party no longer cares about those people.

Democrats oppose cuts to welfare programs, but what is their plan to pull all working Americans out of the 50-year hole they’re in and revive the working class? Ms. Piper thinks they are motivated by other things. Democrats, she wrote, care more about gender identity and undocumented immigrants than “kitchen table issues” of working class voters.

What Republicans/MAGA are offering to working class voters

So what might Piper think Trump’s Republican Party will do for anyone outside of the “billionaire class”?

Maybe she and other working class Republican voters are buying the warmed-over Reagan-era supply side arguments put forward in the Wall Street Journal’s opinion podcast, Potomac Watch. Their claims:

Tax breaks for business research, development and equipment purchases are likely to boost productivity and spur economic growth (and onshore jobs?).

Medicaid provisions are aimed at saving the program. COVID era expansions made sense during that crisis, but making them permanent is not sustainable.

Eliminating the state medical provider taxes will end a scam through which hospitals and state governments conspired to milk the federal government for more matching funds.

In contrast to the liberal argument that the bill will bankrupt rural hospitals, the podcasters claimed that hospitals have been the fastest growing employers in the country, outpacing per capita GDP grown in every decade since 1970. (Doesn't everyone agree that US spending on health care is excessive and needs to be curbed?)

They praised the bill’s prohibition of state-funding of health care for undocumented immigrants. This point contradicted what I assumed was true, that illegal immigrants pay taxes but don’t get welfare benefits. In fact, the Associated Press recently reported that three states that have been providing Medicaid benefits for undocumented immigrants since 2020—California, Illinois, and Minnesota—are curtail them, even before the OBBB takes effect, for budgetary reasons. “The programs cost way more than officials had projected at a time when the states are facing multibillion-dollar deficits,” AP reported. DC and at least three other states have also offered Medicaid coverage to immigrants since 2020.

They claimed the work requirement is necessary to force able-bodied men who have no reason to be out of the work force. (They seem to have read the work of Nick Eberstadt whose 2016 book, Men Without Work, found that a whopping 16.1% of men age 25-55 have withdrawn from the workforce—compared to 6.2% in the 1960s. It's not clear how many of them are on Medicaid.)

The work requirement’s paperwork burden will not be as onerous as the anti-OBBB press has made it out to be, and work requirements are routinely required for many welfare programs, they claim. One of the WSJ pundits summed up the Democrats’ position on this point: “even if you don't work at all you should be able to get free health insurance for life even if you have no children or if you are a 35 year old man.” (About 60% of Americans tend to support work requirements. But this Pew poll seems to support the Democrats' argument that Medicaid recipients are already working or have good reasons not to be.)

Of course the Wall Street Journal reflects views of the pre-MAGA Republican Party of Ronald Reagan and Paul Ryan. I checked in on MAGA chieftain Steve Bannon, who has been critical of elements of Trump II that haven’t been sufficiently populist. It seemed reasonable to assume he would be opposed to the upward transfer of wealth and budget cuts likely to disproportionately effect the MAGA base. But he was even more enthusiastic than the Journal about the “supply side elements” of the bill, predicting a “coming economic boom.”  He thinks the CBO estimate of a 1.8% GDP growth rate is wrong and predicted the bill would lead to a growth rate between 2.8 and 3.5% which will lead to more tax revenue and reduce the deficit.

But Oren Cass, crowned by Politico as “the MAGA movement’s top economic guru,” skewered the Bill as “warmed over Reaganism” that doesn’t address the “actual political preferences of their constituents and the country.”

He contested Bannon’s rosy memory of the 2017 tax cut (that it boosted GDP growth to 3.4% by 2019). “If you go back and look at what happened after the passage of the 2017 tax bill and whether the economy somehow is performing better under those rates, the evidence just is not there, particularly when you look at what’s happening on the deficit side,” Cass said.

(Cass's assessment of the impact of the 2017 tax cuts is supported here and here and in the graph below from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.)

Cass defended the cuts to Medicaid and thinks that despite flaws of the Bill, the GOP is more likely than the Democrats to advance policies that will to create an economy that fosters working class prosperity. He said:

On trade, obviously, things have already substantively swung massively, and on competition and antitrust issues, things have been completely transformed. On labor issues, you’re seeing the administration and the folks they’re appointing and folks in the Senate shift directions.

Democrats claim to be the party of working Americans, Cass said, but they don’t prioritize policies addressing working class issues. Instead, he said, Biden prioritized measures that hurt working class interest. His green energy legislation replaces good-paying working class jobs in the energy sector, with lower-wage green energy jobs (He might have a point; UAW President Shawn Fain said: “the EV transition is at serious risk of becoming a race to the bottom.”)  Cass also pointed to Biden's failure to stem the tide of illegal immigrants who drive down working class wages, or to fight harder to protect American jobs from competition from cheap Chinese imports.

We loyal Democrats shouldn’t completely discount the notion that the Republican Party might end up being the more working class-friendly party. Some reasons:

1. I’ve been disillusioned with the Democratic Party throughout my whole voting life, for a number of reasons, but largely because they embraced free trade without a plan to make up for the lost jobs, they never fought back against the right’s war on labor unions and they didn’t protect public universities from the budget cutters. They’ve always just been the lesser of two evils from my working class perspective.

2. In his first campaign for the presidency, Obama embraced labor’s “Card Check” proposal, but in office he didn’t make it a priority and it didn’t happen. That failure is a fitting bookend to the neoliberal era that began with Carter, who basically sabotaged similar legislation, paving the way for 45 years of de-unionization of the American workforce (Judith Stein, Pivotal Decade, 180-190; and Jefferson Cowie, “The New Deal that Never Happened,” in Stayin' Alive, 261-312).

3. Speaking of the neoliberal order, it seems to be coming to an end, thanks in large part to Donald Trump. What follows might be worse, but it needed to die. Thanks, Donald.

4. Actual working class people have been fleeing the Democratic Party over the last 40 or 50 years, especially post-Obama. If they come to make up the Republican base, the party can’t completely ignore their interests . . . can they?

5. When Ezra Klein and Derick Thompson’s book Abundance, explaining why Democratic-led governments have been so ineffective at following through on promises to solve problems where they reign—housing shortages, for example—and offered sensible ways to do better, they were met by a “buzz saw of opposition from the left.”  And while Democrats are having a debate over whether to remove the obstacles that have prevented them from building high speed rail or rural internet or EV charging stations, Trump and the Republicans are getting things done. Deregulation in the OBBB, Bannon asserts, will make it possible “to build things in America again.”

6. Democrats have invested a lot in building a base of suburban, college-educated constituents of the "professional-managerial" class, and the leaders of the party are part of that strata.  The cultural gap with the non-college-educated working class might be unbridgeable.

7. Patrick Ruffini makes a somewhat compelling case that Republicans are more likely to become a working class party than the Democrats in his book Party of the People: Inside the Multiracial Populist Coalition Remaking the GOP. It would not be the first time in our history that the parties switched roles.

Democratic priorities

In the last presidential campaign, Democratic nominee Kamala Harris began with a focus on economic policy relevant to workers, but then pivoted to the issue Democrat have been hammering to little effect since 2016: democracy. Wall Street Journal campaign reporter Josh Dawsey said Harris ignored her aides’ pleas not to make her final campaign address—delivered on the Ellipse where Trump had riled up the crowd before the J-6 attack on the Capitol—about Trump’s threat to democracy.

When Trump aides heard about the speech, Dawsey says, they were “gleeful; they, were like: can we get her to do it again tomorrow night?” Meanwhile, Dawsey says, Trump’s message “was just about inflation and immigration and prices.” All the polling had suggested that voters were motivated by economic issues, not Trump’s crimes and saving democracy; but the Harris campaign ignored that.

She must have been listening to all the liberal pundits and economic “experts” who were saying that  voter’s economic anxiety was misguided because statistics showed the economy was in great shape. “America’s glorious economy should help Kamala Harris,” The Economist Proclaimed shortly before election day. 

But according to the Ludwig Institute, and some others, it was the government statistics that were misguided—they underestimated inflation and unemployment and overestimated working class income.

Prices of the necessities that make up working class budgets rose 9.4% annually during the peak inflation years of 2022 and 2023, not at the official 4.1 rate, which includes luxury goods that only the well-healed can afford and which did not see much price-rise.

The real unemployment rate as of June 2025 is closer to 24% than the official 4.1% rate cited by experts. To arrive at a true rate of unemployment, Ludwig argues, you have to include as unemployed people working only part time and not earning a living wage. The official rate includes them as employed, and it totally ignores people who have given up on looking for work and have withdrawn from the workforce.

Wendy Piper’s Free Rider Problem

As I mentioned before, Nick Eberstadt of the American Enterprise Institute, has done admirable work in revealing the largest group of non-working people, the 16% of men in the prime working years of 25-54.  His data suggests that most of them are not doing something productive, like civic engagement or education; only 2.6% are caring for children, compared to 39% of non-working women (110). Eberstadt argues that men were lured out of the workforce by generous Great Society welfare programs.
As another writer summed up his theory, these men are “slackers gaming a too generous system” (194).

Like dues-paying members of unions, no normal person likes a free rider. But to people like Wendy Piper, the liberal opposition to the work requirements for Medicaid in the OBBB suggests that liberals love them.

I don’t love free riders, but I don’t love the work requirements, either, if, as some critics claim it will cost states more to implement than any money it will save and if the paperwork burden really is as onerous as the left claims. Anyone who has filled out financial aid forms for college students can certainly believe that.

My Take

I’ve lived and worked mostly in the Democratic-liberal-cosmopolitan-elite-academic bubble for most of my professional life. But I share Wendy Piper’s lower class origins as well as some of her frustrations with the Democratic Party of 2025, though not to the point of joining the Republicans—at least not yet. But I think her letter should be reprinted and shared with any Democrat who wants the Party to win elections.

We should meditate, in particular, on the words I italicized, bolded and underlined in this sentence:

My former party continues to advocate for the growth of government and redistribution instead of boosting the growth of the economy, which benefits all.

We all know the Republican recipe for policies that “benefit all”: cut taxes and regulations to spur investment that will create jobs and lift all boats. The MAGA wing throws in some tariffs to bring back manufacturing.

The Democrats used to have a “benefits all” recipe that worked. It was called the New Deal. There is no means testing for Social Security.  Everyone who works for wages qualifies. Since they abandoned that "benefits-all" approach, beginning in the 1970s, the party switched to a complicated goulash of separate programs, one for each constituency, but that left out broad swaths of the working class during an era of de-industrialization. 

Notes:

On Wendy Piper, see Robert Blechl, “County Commission adopts inclusion resolution, commissioner defects to GOP,” Caledonian-Record, July 7, 2025. The Caledonian-Record is behind a paywall, but you can read Piper’s full op-ed in the Manchester Union Leader.

Josh Dawsey was interviewed by Mike Pesca on his podcast, The Gist, July 9, 2025. “The Loyalty Trap: Inside the 2024 Biden-Harris Collapse.”

Oren Cass interviewed China shock economist David Autor here.  It explains a lot about the MAGA revolt against free trade.

According to David Leonhardt, among the western liberal democracies there’s only one liberal party that has been able to defeat the populist right. Here’s what they did. “In an Age of Right-Wing Populism, Why Are Denmark’s Liberals Winning?” New York Times, Feb. 24, 2025. 

Lessons from Piper’s letter are echoed in Daniel Martinez HoSang, “Inside the Rise of the Multiracial Right,” New York Times, July 24, 2025. The defection of ethnic/racial minorities from the Democratic coalition illustrates the failure of the Democrats' “appeal-separately-to-every-group” strategy.

I was surprised that Cass thinks Trump II is doing a good job vs monopolies. I’d just read this piece on the great anti-monopoly Substack of Matt Stoller and came away with the impression that Trump II is squelching anti-trust enforcement that had ramped up under Biden. 

Eberstadt's book, Men Without Work, includes essays by two writers with "dissenting points of view," who argue that men weren't lured out of the workforce by generous welfare benefits, but were pushed out by de-industrialization. 

Just before I posted this, I read, again in my local newspaper, an article that also tries to understand working class support for Trump.  Alex Hinton writes, for example, that Trump supporters aren't ignorant to the possible downsides of the OBBB:

Sure, their reasoning goes, bumps in the road are expected. But they think that most of the criticism of Trump and this latest bill is ultimately fake news spread by radical leftists who have what some call Trump Derangement Syndrome, meaning anti-Trump hysteria.

How liberals should celebrate the Fourth

Fireworks at the Navy Yard in DC, 2024

Folks on the left are often accused of being less patriotic than conservatives.  There's something to this.  Every year, Gallup asks us questions about our feelings for the USA. This year, 92 percent of Republicans said they were extremely or very proud to be an American. Only 36 percent of Democrats feel that way. 

Trump has something to do with this, but the gap was still wide in the middle of the Biden administration, 52-36. And Republicans even had an 8-point edge in the Dems' most patriotic year of the Obama administration. The younger they get the less patriotic.  Gen Z Democrats were 42 percent less proud to be Americans than the oldest cohort of Dems over the last five years.

Why is this?  Many reasons, I'm sure, but here's one I've observed first hand in studying and teaching US history over the past 37 years, and as a parent of three children.  You might call it the Howard Zinnization of the American history curriculum. 

From what I can see Howard Zinn's very popular book "A People's History of the United States," has influenced a majority of teachers now teaching US history, and might be the single most popular book to assign in their history classes. To quote the website of the Howard Zinn Project: 

The Zinn Education Project promotes and supports the teaching of people’s history in classrooms across the country.... With more than 168,000 people registered, and growing by more than 10,000 new registrants every year, the Zinn Education Project has become a leading resource for teachers and teacher educators.

Zinn's book was first published in 1980, sold 4 million copies by 2022, has been translated into a dozen different languages, and was adapted for children and assigned to my my daughters in middle school.  Here's what Zinn had to say that was relevant to the topic of national pride in the original edition of his book (which, yes, I own):

We must not accept the memory of states as our own. Nations are not communities and never have been.  The history of any country presented as the history of a family conceals fierce conflicts of interest … between conquerors and conquered masters and slaves, capitalists and workers, dominators and dominated in race and sex. And in such a world of conflict a world of victims and executioners, it is the job of thinking people as Albert Camus suggested, not to be on the side of the executioners.

We've seen the problem with this thinking in recent years, as the left has been divided into a circular firing squad more intent on dividing itself into victims and oppressors so the latter can be cancelled, and some have exited the left in response.  The Philosopher Richard Rorty forsaw this way back in 1998 in his wonderful antidote to Zinnism, Achieving Our Country, a book that liberals and leftists should read in the town square every Fourth after they recite the Declaration of Independence: we should 

refrain from thinking so much about otherness that we begin to acquiesce in what Todd Gitlin has called, in the title of a recent book, "the twilight of common dreams." It means deriving our moral identity, at least in part, from our citizenship in a democratic nation-state, and from leftist attempts to fulfill the promise of that nation.

The cultural Left often seems convinced that the nation-state is obsolete, and that there is therefore no point in attempting to revive national politics. The trouble with this claim is that the government of our nation-state will be, for the foreseeable future, the only agent capable of making any real difference in the amount of selfishness and sadism inflicted on Americans.

We of the Left—not the environmentalist left or the LBGTQ left or the feminist left or the labor left or the progressive or moderate left—but a broad left-of-center coalition capable of winning national elections have to believe that we are capable of moving the country toward a better future—like Lincoln and Roosevelt did. Otherwise, we abandon the government to a Right that seems to want more, not less selfishness and sadism. 

Notes

For some thoughts about reasons to feel patriotic about America, I recommend Isaac Saul's essay for Independence Day 2025  "Do I love America? On patriotism and my country," on the Tangle website. It includes a link to the Tangle podcast version where he reads the essay. Also, "How Democrats Can Maintain Their Patriotism in the Trump Era," by Michael Baharaeen on the Liberal Patriot Substack. And Yasha Mounk giving an outsider's view of his adopted country.

 

Violence drowns out explanations

From the peaceful Mayday protest in DC

If the success of a protest movement depends on winning converts to the cause—fellow citizens who will either join it or vote with it—then recent opinion polls should give an indication of how the movement is doing so far.

In early June, YouGov polled about 3,000 American adults before and after the June 14 No Kings rally. The results were encouraging. Before June 14, 33 percent said they strongly approve of the protests; after, that number climbed to 38 percent, with another 9 percent approving “somewhat,” and somewhere between 16 and 25 percent of others who could be won over. 

In my last post I suggested that a better theme could win over those fence-sitters. Since then, the Senate passed a federal budget that would throw millions off health insurance while giving lucrative tax breaks mostly to the wealthy.

It’s also crucial that the movement remain peaceful and that it distances itself from any violence that occurs in connection with protests. By a margin of 42 to 35, respondents told YouGov they believed participants in recent Los Angeles protests against Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) were mostly violent.

And note how closely those results track with opinions on public approval of the protest (45-36 percent disapproval).

These results are consistent with extensive studies of 20th century protest movements around the globe, which found that nonviolent campaigns were twice as effective as violent ones.

But also, when individuals associated in the public mind with an otherwise peaceful movement commit violent acts in conjunction with or close proximity to protests, it tends to undermine popular support.

No one understood this better than Martin Luther King Jr.

By 1962, his movement had been succeeding in winning popular support, largely because of the contrast playing out on the nightly news between peaceful protesters and violent segregationists who opposed them, especially Southern cops with their dogs and fire hoses. In Albany, Georgia, the movement encountered a different dynamic.

Unlike segregationists in other cities, Albany police chief Laurie Pritchett restrained his men from retaliating violently and against protesters. When gangs of local blacks—characterized by King biographer Taylor Branch as “juke-joint” hoodlums who were not “movement people,” began throwing bricks and bottles at police outside a meeting of organized protesters at Shiloh Baptist Church, Pritchett pushed through the crowd and into the Church, walked up to the podium, and spoke to the crowd.

“We respect your policy,” he said but added: “I ask your cooperation in keeping Albany peaceful. This business of throwing rocks is not good.”

Of course the movement people inside the church agreed—but what power did they have against the hoodlums outside?

King was in jail at this time. Later during the campaign, when organized protesters marched to the jail with the goal of being arrested to show the contrast between their peaceful demands for basic rights and unreasonable Southern resistance, “angry Negro bystanders” started hurling beer bottles, rocks and bricks at the arresting officers.

During the riot Pritchett quipped to reporters: “Did you see them non-violent rocks?” Press reports included a photograph of a cop holding a rock that knocked out two of his teeth. The New York Times published a “lauditory profile of Chief Pritchet,” Branch wrote. It seemed that a Southern cop, "not King, was the “master of nonviolence that night.”

But now, King was out of jail. When one of his associates suggested he should rationalize the violence  as an understandable response to segregation in his comments to reporters, King refused. The violence, King reasoned, would drowned out any such explanations, Branch wrote.

Meanwhile, King declared a day of penance and went on a “peacemaker’s tour of Albany’s Negro dives” to explain the nonviolent strategy to its patrons and how their violent reactions had undermined the movement. “We don’t need guns and ammunition, just the power of souls,” King told them.

King was modeling his behavior on Mahatma Gandhi, who fasted whenever his followers resorted to violence.

It’s important to note the connection between the tactics of the Civil Rights Movement and the fortunes of the Political Party more inclined to support its goals and thus associated with it in the public mind. 

Princeton Politics Professor Omar Wasow studied press coverage of the 1960s Civil Rights Movement and found that “when the [protest] tactics were primarily nonviolent, the counties proximate to nonviolent activism tended to vote more liberally.” But when violence broke out in connection with protests, those counties voted more conservatively. Violent protests in reaction to King’s assassination may have helped to elect Richard Nixon in 1968. “In the counties with violence, the Democratic vote fell by at least 2 percent, which was enough to help Richard Nixon win the 1968 presidential election,” Wasow said.

This year, a May 25 YouGov Poll had the Democratic Party’s popular approval under water by a whopping 20 percent (58-38% unfavorable). Having been blamed for lawlessness at the border, and rising crime in cities, the Democrats can’t afford to be associated with more of the same.

Of course the current anti-Trump movement has no one well-respected and credible leader like King to make the case to purveyors of violence.

Violent eruptions on the sidelines of peaceful protests—like those at the recent Los Angeles anti-ICE riots or during the George Floyd protests of 2020—are probably inevitable.

But it’s imperative that leaders of the movement and the Democratic Party unequivocally, clearly, unambiguously, and in unison condemn the violence rather than try to justify it as many did in 2020, ignoring King’s maxim that violence drowns out explanations.

For example, Nicole Hannah Jones, a prominent figure in the “race reckoning” of 2020 and mastermind behind the New York Times 1619 project, argued that property destruction isn’t violence if no one is hurt—this at a time when police stations were burning on the nightly news, once famously behind a CNN reporter describing “mostly peaceful protests.”

Ta Nehisi Coates, perhaps the most prominent African American advocate of the 2010s, proclaimed that "The people who are called on to be nonviolent are the people with the ability to do the least amount of damage; whereas, we don't call upon those who have the most power and actually can do the most damage."

The Nation published an article with the headline: “In Defense of Destroying Property: We cannot conflate the destruction of plateglass with the violence that is being protested.”

Any nuance behind comments like these are sure to be drowned out by images of burning police stations and Waymos, as the polls on the LA protests show.

Also in their June polling, YouGov asked people about their lingering perceptions of the George Floyd protests and found that 46 percent thought they were “mostly violent,” and only 33 percent remembered them as “mostly peaceful.”

You would think the party and the leaders of organizations behind the protests like Indivisible would learn from past mistakes, but I’m not hopeful.

When the Democratic pollster (and self-described socialist) David Shor posted Wasow’s article after violence broke out during BLM protests in 2020, he was attacked relentlessly on Twitter by fellow liberals and then fired from his job at Civis Analytics, a consultancy founded by one of President Obama’s campaign analysts.

At least one Democratic member of Congress is repeating the mistakes of 2020 and instead of unequivocally distancing the cause from violence as King did, asserting “nobody was shot, nobody was killed” and “there was no violence,” at a time when Waymos were burning in the background. 

Note

On the Albany protest and King's response to violence see Taylor Branch, Parting the Waters: American in the King Years, 604-621.

The role of protest in the opposition

 

I made this sign for the "No Kings" protest June 14 along the bridge over the interstate in Littleton. I had to leave early, while the protest was still going on, and as I was walking back to my car, displaying the sign for drivers waiting in a very long line of stalled traffic, a man in a pickup truck leaned over a child in the passenger seat and shouted “Fuck You” while saluting me with his middle finger. “Faggot,” he added, as the traffic inched up and I kept walking.

I was hoping to make a sign that would be persuasive, but instead it was provoking. Or maybe it wasn’t the sign so much as the protest itself, or the traffic jam it caused.

On Monday, the Caledonian Record ran a front page photograph of a 7-year-old girl at a similar protest in nearby St. Johnsbury Vt.  She was standing with her mother, holding a hand made sign with hearts and flowers and the words “Fuck Trump,” and smiling proudly for the camera. A letter-to-the-editor called the image “disgraceful, disgusting, and disrespectful.”

He was angry at the newspaper for printing the photo, but I was glad they did; it reminded me that nastiness in politics these days goes both ways. And neither side shields their kids from it.

Meanwhile, no one seems open to persuasion.

This was the first anti-Trump protest I’d attended as a participant since they began in 2016, though I had shown up at two others in DC in April and May as an observer.

My reluctance to join reflects the thoughts I expressed here shortly after the election, in agreement with Conor Friedersdorf’s article in the Atlantic arguing against a “Resistance 2.0” movement. History is full of protest movements that backfired, and Trump’s ever growing vote totals suggested to me that #Resistence 1.0—the congressional investigations, impeachment resolutions starting in the first months of his presidency, and widespread and persistent street protests that began in the lead-up to the 2016 election—hadn’t stopped more people from voting for Trump every time he’s been on the ballot.

Friedersdorf suggested that Democrats and their supports should act like a “normal opposition party” instead of a resistance movement.

For elected Democrats, that would mean cooperating with the governing party where possible and finding areas of bipartisan agreement on legislation that will improve the lives of Americans.

Senate Democrat Amy Klobuchar, for example, persuaded, the administration to get behind a bill she sponsored allowing victims of "revenge porn" to force social media companies to erase it. The Take-it-Down Act was signed into law last month.

Meanwhile, advocacy groups in the opposition can launch court cases against the administration when it violates the Constitution and degrades Democracy.  The Brennan Center for Justice is focusing intensively on this project. 

So far, Trump has obeyed most of the court injunctions, Klobuchar pointed out, including recently if belatedly, regarding two immigrants detained without due process, Kilmar Abrego Garcia, and Mahmoud Khalil. Contrary to popular rhetoric on the left, we are not yet in a “constitutional crisis,” she said.

So what can the rest of us do in a normal opposition?  

The party in opposition and its supporters, Friedersdorf said in December, should keep in mind “that new House elections are just two years away” and Democratic candidates should be able to win away some of Trump’s voters if he reneges on promises he made that are important to them.

Trump has promised again and again that he won’t cut Medicaid. But the Big Beautiful Bill that he supports reduces its funding by almost a trillion dollars and could throw 20 million people nationally and 46,400 in NH off heath insurance according to estimates by Democratic legislators. That loss would be absorbed disproportionately by rural hospitals, about half of which are already operating at a loss.

New Hampshire is a purple state, but Littleton is the rural end of the state where health care providers are already scarce. The Record reported on Tuesday that Ammonoosuc Community Health Services, was closing its Franconia branch, in part because it expected to lose $524,430 if the House’s Big Beautiful Bill gets through the Senate.

It’s an example of how these cuts won't just hurt people who get thrown off Medicaid.  I have good employer-sponsored health insurance, but Ammonoosuc is my health-care provider. PBS estimates that 400 rural hospitals are vulnerable to closure because of the proposed cuts.

In the 2026 midterm election NH will have an open Senate seat. Protesters could help to make Medicaid cuts a more salient issue in the election.

Admittedly, my sign was flawed. Who was    
going to read all those stats from their car as
they dove by.  This woman had the right idea.

In planning for the next election, Friedersdorf wrote, Democrats need to “Focus on offering a better alternative to voters, not ousting the person they chose.”

The majority of the signs in all three protests I attended were aimed more at critiquing Trump than suggesting the better alternative.

In fairness to the sign painters, it’s not very clear what the Democratic Party is offering, aside from “Not Trump.”

In the last election, health care was the only one of the five top issues important to voters and which they trust Democrats more than Republicans to address. And the party won the 2018 midterms by promising to save the ACA (Obamacare). But in 2024, that was not a major focus of Democratic  campaigns.

I agree that Trump poses a serious threat to basic democratic and constitutional norms. But that’s an argument that the left has been making for 10 years and it just doesn’t resonate with the voters Democrats need to win over.

And voters polled in the last election said “delivering change that improves Americans’ lives” was more important to them than “preserving America’s institutions” by a whopping 78 to 18 percent.

They also said the next president needs to deliver a “shock to the system” rather than restore stability by 53 to 37 percent. The chaos of Trump 2.0 may change their minds.  But maybe it won't.

The No Kings Rally was an impressive accomplishment. Organizers estimate that 5 million people turned out in cities and towns in all 50 states. Clearly a lot of patriotic Americans want to do their part in opposing the current government and preserving constitutional democracy. But their efforts will be no more effective than those of #Resistence 1.0 if the Democratic Party doesn’t also offer Trump-voting fellow Americans a better alternative and if protesters don't target their messages to winnable voters--who may or may not include the guy in the pickup.  

Note: 

Updated on 7-6-25 to reflect new estimates of how many will lose insurance based on changes made in the Senate (Joint Economic Committee)