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)

Handouts v. Opportunity: What does the Working Class Want?

One December afternoon in the 90s I wandered into the local Good Will store and was looking through the men’s shirts when another shopper tried to hand me a $5 bill. “I like to give to people shopping in these kinds of stores during the holiday season,” she said. I declined to accept, even though—grad student that I was—I could have used an extra five. 

I was reminded of this moment the other day while reading “Does the Working Class Vote Against Its Interests?” by John Vassallo in The Liberal Patriot.  Vassallo advises Democrats to stop asking what’s wrong with working class Americans who don’t support their candidates and instead ask why their policy menu is not more appealing to these voters.

The enrollment surge in means-tested programs such as SNAP since the Great Recession is not necessarily an unqualified testament to government’s ability to help the less fortunate,” he writes. “Rather than a tribute to Democrats’ good intentions and the effectiveness of the safety net, this trend could be seen as an indictment of America’s labor market policy and the deprivation that offshoring, anemic growth, lousy jobs, and chronic underemployment have created. Moreover, the explosion in food bank usage, crowd-funding to pay for medical procedures, and other forms of charity and nongovernment aid underscore the frequent inadequacy of these programs.

Working class people want the dignity of meaningful work and a living wage, not handouts. Vassallo calls for a return to the pre-1970 progressivism that “focused on promoting inclusive development while deterring economic predation and unfair business practices” rather than just managing poverty with “patchwork transfers.” 

Without old Democratic policies like the Wagner Act and the GI Bill my parents wouldn’t have been able to buy their first home and spawn my four older siblings—all while in their 20s. Dad made a living wage as a unionized low skilled laborer in a meat packing plant—back when meatpacking was unionized. 

(Side note: meat companies busted labor unions in the 60s by hiring illegal immigrants and Democratic administrations did nothing to enforce laws against hiring them; the party is currently divided about whether to penalized employers for hiring undocumented migrants) 

Such programs were based on Democrats’ “abiding belief in the importance, and feasibility, of continued enablement through decent jobs, schools, housing, and affordable family recreation.” 

But, Vassallo suggests, Democrats no longer offer a working class path to the American Dream. Vassallo leaves out one path the Party does advocate: go to college. In fact, I was the first among the siblings to get a bachelor’s degree thanks to the generous state-subsidy of higher education that’s been slowly eroded since then.  

But their policies have tended to increase student debt rather than make college more accessible to working class kids—Joe Biden’s bestowal of loan forgiveness to one cohort of debtors notwithstanding. And anyway, at a time when AI is poised to eliminate lots of white collar jobs, expanding the number of college grads competing for them doesn’t seem likely to solve the employment problem, when about 34 percent of America's college graduates work in professions that don't require a college degree. 

Michael Sandel’s excellent book, Tyranny of Merit identifies the origin of the liberal obsession with college degrees.  Beginning sometime in the 1960s, education leaders, led by the president of Harvard, began to think of public grade schools not as places to prepare students for citizenship, but as sorting machines to determine which students would go to which colleges—or no college at all. College admissions became the venue for determining merit and deservingness. Sandel shows us the many ill effects of this idea as it has somehow gotten general acceptance in the culture, but the effect most relevant to our purpose: it fosters hubris among the successful and humiliation among those who don't manage to get their Bachelor’s degree. “A system that celebrates and rewards ‘the best geniuses’ is prone to denigrate the rest, implicitly or explicitly, as ‘rubbish’” (161). 

Sandel talks about his book here.

Put Sandel beside Vassello’s article and it might look to some like it’s either college or welfare in the Democratic American-Dream playbook. Bill Clinton seems to be the chief architect of this approach. He embraced trade policies that led to the "China Shock" (the precipitous loss of US manufacturing jobs in the 2000s) and told American workers: “what you earn depends on what you can learn. There’s a direct relationship between high skills and high wages and therefore we have to educate our people better to compete.”  

For her book, Coming Up Short Jennifer Silva interviewed 100 working class adults who didn’t learn enough in school to compete successfully in the job market. She found that:

At its core, this emerging working-class adult self is characterized by low expectations of work, wariness toward romantic commitment, widespread distrust of social institutions, profound isolation from others, and an overriding focus on their emotions and psychic health (10).

If the Democrats have done little to save unions and preserve programs like the GI bill, the Republicans have actively opposed those things. So why would an increasing number of working class people vote for Trump? Isn’t the Democratic party the lesser of two evils?  

Another piece on Substack, by Yasha Mounk, a political scientist who studies the global rise of populism, has a theory. Trump, he argues “has forged a brand of populism that has wide appeal and makes big promises about the future”: aspirational populism. Where Democrats are asking why working class people vote against their interests, billionaire Trump has somehow managed to address the sentiments of the white “losers of globalization” by raising tariffs and expelling immigrants, while pulling in an increasing number of non-white working class voters. He writes that anti-globalization

was and likely remains Trump’s appeal for one part of his electorate. But another part of his base—just as important—has a very different view of America. Hailing from groups that had once been banished to the fringes of American society or have immigrated more recently, they don’t want to return to a supposedly golden past. On the contrary, they are optimistic about the future and embrace entrepreneurial values precisely because they feel that their hard work is starting to pay off. They don’t picture themselves as standing in a long, static line [a reference to Arlie Hoschild’s book, Strangers in their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right] to enter a destination they covet; rightly or wrongly, they believe that the doors to it would be wide open if gatekeepers—from journalists to Democrats to elites self-servingly insisting on outdated norms [and, I might add, college admissions offices]—hadn’t cruelly decided to bar their way.

That the system is “rigged” by gatekeepers has been a theme of both of the great contemporary American populists—Trump and Bernie Sanders. The nature of that rigging is vividly illustrated in Mathew Stewart’s 2018 article in The Atlantic, “The 9.9 Percent Is the New American Aristocracy.”  

It’s no revelation to say that social mobility in the land of opportunity has decline drastically since the middle of the last century, and now lags behind most of Western European. I imagine that when Trump talks about making America great again, his rising number of non-white voters do not hear “bring back Jim Crow” as his liberal critics charge him with dog whistling; they’re thinking that he just might succeed in restoring opportunity to Americans even ones who don't attend a four-year college.