CommentsGELFAND’S WORLD--What would massive resistance look like? (Massive resistance ended the Vietnam war—photo above.)
In regard to the expected reactionary onslaught, Erik Loomis writes the following in the blog Lawyers, Guns & Money:
"All we really have in the end is massive resistance. That is where we are heading–acquiescence or resistance. You and I will all need to make our choices about whether we will stand up against oppression in ways that a lot of our ancestors did not stand up to Jim Crow, to Chinese Exclusion, to the Japanese internment camps, etc."
This is his conclusion after considering what Donald Trump has already done since the election. He summarizes the bad news:
"I don’t actually have confidence that we will have a functional democracy by 2020. It’s entirely possible that historians, assuming they exist in a century, will see 2016 as the end of a period of American history where rights generally expanded. That’s because Trump, Giuliani, Sessions, Gingrich, Flynn, etc., etc., and most importantly huge chunks of the Republican base, simply do not respect the fundamental tenets of democracy and they are seeking to roll back two generations of social progress. Despite what I might have believed a mere few weeks ago, they are in fact reasonably likely to succeed.
Some of the proposed rollbacks include the end of Medicare as we know it, the reversal of the Roe v. Wade principle, and the repeal of the Affordable Care Act. Voter suppression will be part of the recipe. Those are just a few of the likely outrages on the domestic side. On the international side, we have almost no idea what will happen.
The outrages will most likely be presented in legal form -- as bills before congress and as judicial appointments. What then, constitutes massive resistance?
There are two potential paths. The first, requiring only a small number of people, is that a few Republican senators may quietly decide that they don't want Trump's power to be left unchecked. Their best approach is to leave the senatorial rules in effect, particularly the one that requires 60 senators to break a filibuster. It's the rule the Republicans used so effectively in thwarting Obama when the Democrats held a senatorial majority. It would only take three Republican votes in the senate to maintain the current rules.
If that should happen, then it's up to the Democrats in the senate to resist and obstruct at every possible point. They should go hard on the more objectionable cabinet appointments. Even the appointments that eventually go through should be subjected to aggressive and prolonged questioning at the committee level.
Democratic opposition is particularly important in terms of a Supreme Court nominee. If the Democrats can delay a Trump appointment permanently, that would be righteous payback and it would be protective of our system.
It would be up to the rest of us millions and millions of people to back up the Democratic senators. We would march in the streets when necessary, and flood our senators and congressmen with mail and telephone calls.
But if the Republicans stick together and go for a change in the senate's rules, then the deluge is upon us. It will be up to the American people to figure out what we mean by massive resistance. What would it consist of, and how can we make it effective?
The first order of business is to decide that we are serious. To borrow a phrase from an old movie, it's called commitment. It will take tens of millions of people, acting in concert, to make the point properly.
Here's a for instance. The first time that Paul Ryan or one of his lackeys proposes to phase out Medicare, we need to act aggressively. That means visiting the office of every congressman, writing letters (in our own handwriting), and marching in the streets. It also means raising funds in advance, so Democrats can send out mailings to the people who will be most affected.
Imagine a television ad which shows somebody on Medicare saying, "It was great to finally get free of the health insurance companies. Now the politicians want to put me back in their clutches."
Given the views of the congressional Republicans, we are going to have a lot to dislike. It's long since time that the saner among us form their own version of the Tea Party, but one that upholds traditional liberal values.
It's about time that the more powerful unions got on board. The dockworkers can close down shipping. They've done it before in limited jurisdictions, but suppose they were willing to carry out actions on both coasts and on the Gulf. The same argument goes for railroad workers and airline pilots. It's what should have happened (but didn't) when Reagan fired the air traffic controllers.
One other idea, albeit a long shot. We badly need a national union of white collar workers, part time workers, and temps. It's been attempted on a limited level by graduate students and college athletes, but it never got very far due to governmental interference and a general lack of will on the part of the workers. There are at least 80 million Americans who fear and resent the Trump victory, and it's time that they unified to represent the interests of the worker bees. (Curiously, the idea that Democrats should have spoken out for blue collar workers in order to win the Michigan and Wisconsin votes has been out there since the day after the election.) It shouldn't take long before the working class realizes that Trump isn't really their guy. We should take the old country tune "Take this job and shove it" and make it into a political movement that isn't on the side of the Republican Party.
I might add that the title of the Loomis column is a takeoff on the famous quote from H.L. Mencken, "Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard." It's a bit cynical for my taste, but the result of the Trump election is consistent with Mencken's point of view. Loomis continues:
"And I am disappointed in myself for not seeing this more clearly before the election. Democrats and liberals were holding on strictly to the presidency as a buffer between us and the apocalypse. Between gerrymandering, voter suppression, and a bloody ineffective DNC strategy to operate on the state level, Republicans had already grabbed most of the levers of government. And while Trump is uniquely bad in some ways, in many others, he really isn’t that much worse than your bog-standard mainstream Republican governing class such as Scott Walker, Rick Scott, Paul LePage, Rick Snyder, or, of course, Mike Pence."
We should make use of the judicial system where possible, in particular fighting for voting rights and against gerrymanders. It won't solve everything, but it is part of the overall approach.
We also need to create a new language of opposition. The fact that Donald Trump is treacherous, lazy, and greedy is becoming increasingly obvious, but we need to build the arguments against him using the right words and phrases. Based on Trump's most recent statement that he actually won the popular vote if you subtract out millions of illegal votes, I think that the term crybaby would be a start.
(Bob Gelfand writes on science, culture, and politics for CityWatch. He can be reached at [email protected])
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Loomis: ‘All We Really have In the End is Massive Resistance’
