WE MUST BUILD AN OPPOSITION, NOT A RESISTANCE - UPDATED

“You never really know what you’re fighting for till you lose.” - Ernest Hemingway, regarding the Spanish Civil War

“Donald Trump and the cynics want us to believe that he is all-powerful, and that if you fight back you will lose. He wants you to believe that if you fight back you may face danger. And he wants you to believe that it won’t matter, because he is in control of everything — and it is not true. It is time for us to build not a resistance but an opposition — something that is durable, something that will last for four years, and beyond. And we need to build that opposition now, and we need to all gird ourselves for the long run.” - Marc Elias

Donald Trump is trying to lie us into a war. This time it’s not an external war; it’s a 21st century version of a second civil war - a war by Americans against Americans, one about which Pete Hegseth declares “this time, we’ll win.” Trump and Hegseth (whether or not he is SecDef) and those who ally with them are proud to identify themselves with the Southern traitors who decided 164 years ago to tear apart the country that claimed it was based on “liberty and justice for all” and create a country based on what Alexander Stephens described in 1861: “Our new government is founded upon exactly the opposite idea; its foundations are laid, its corner-stone rests, upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery subordination to the superior race is his natural and normal condition.”

This week, we have seen what an actual opposition party is capable of doing in the face of an authoritarian’s attempt to overthrow democracy in South Korea. Unfortunately, the United States does not have a way of overturning a declaration of martial law by a vote of the legislature, as was the case in South Korea. Should Trump carry though his threat to invoke the Insurrection Act, which would allow him to deploy the military domestically, the only “out” provided in the Constitution is to obtain a court order denying it. Given the state of affairs with the federal judiciary - and most particularly the makeup of the Roberts Court - the likelihood that an order issued by a federal court judge would be upheld at the appellate court and most certainly not at the Roberts Court in the inevitable appeal should such an order be issued.

Looking at the leadership decisions made this week by Democrats in the Senate - with Chuck Schumer remaining as leader of the Senate Democrats, backed up by Dick Durbin and the rest of the Old Timers Club, the likelihood in such a case would be Schumer asking for a meeting in the White House to negotiate how far the operation would go. The Democratic leadership in the House isn’t appreciably better. And this is if Trump didn’t order leading Democrats in Washington be detained when he issued such an order.

Thus, any sort of opposition is going to come from we, the people, without the support of any governmental institutions.

I experienced what living under governmental repression would be like - without the actual arrests - back when the FBI was running COINTELPRO. No matter how many times my attorney would tell me that the FBI was not going to arrest me, every time I got one of their harassing phone calls “just asking for information, sir,” I checked my rearview mirror twice as often as normally, and didn’t answer the door when I wasn’t expecting someone. That low-level fear gnaws at one. Fortunately, my wife was as committed as I was, so there weren’t any arguments about pulling back involvement in the anti-war resistance, or dropping out. But I did have friends who were married with children, who did become frightened enough to take those steps, and I do not fault them for worrying about first things first.

That was when only the very top end of the movement was experiencing any real hassles from the government. I have no idea what would happen in the case of people being actually picked up and disappearing into the camps Trump promises to begin building on Day One of his return to power. All I do know is, if they get away with any degree of “mass deportation,” they will be emboldened, and possession of a Real ID driver’s license proving one is a citizen will be a thin defense indeed to joining the earlier detainees.

I’m sorry to bring up such a frightening topic (it frightens me and I have some idea of what would be involved - I would be surprised if this didn’t scare those who don’t have that experience even more). But watching Trump make his appointments - where the obviously incompetent nominees like Matt Gaetz are replaced by individuals just as politically committed to loyalty for Donald Trump, coupled with actual experience of running such an agency (like Pam Bondi at DOJ) is frightening in its potential. Incompetent martial law can be opposed - we just saw that - competent martial law is a whole other beast.

Just exactly what an organized opposition - as opposed to a “resistance” as existed during Trump 1.0 - would look like is something I am still pondering.

So I’ll end with these words from Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez:

“I don’t have marching orders for you right now. My marching order would basically be to find your safe network of people, to find your pod, to find your community. We have to do a lot of community building. and by that, I don’t just mean ‘organizing,’ politically. I mean active community building. We are in a position where the isolation of a capitalist system, the isolation produced by COVID, just where we are as a society, people working three or four jobs just to make ends meet. We do not have community. And, believe it or not, community, whether it’s your church or mosque or temple, whether it’s a knitting group, whether it’s your dinner circle, building that community is actually far more transformative, and far more important than you may realize.”

UPDATE: Jut so you know what the Insurrection Act allows the president to do:

“Whenever the President considers that unlawful obstructions, combinations, or assemblages, or rebellion against the authority of the United States, make it impracticable to enforce the laws of the United States in any State by the ordinary course of judicial proceedings, he may call into Federal service such of the militia of any State, and use such of the armed forces, as he considers necessary to enforce those laws or to suppress the rebellion.”

The succeeding paragraph is equally scary:

“The President, by using the militia or the armed forces, or both, or by any other means, shall take such measures as he considers necessary to suppress, in a State, any insurrection, domestic violence, unlawful combination, or conspiracy.”

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