Hank Kalet

There is a nobility and necessity to dissent. To speak up. To take politics into our own hands. We are taught that the structures of our government will save us, that our constitution created checks and balances to keep the government in line, and that all we need to do is show up at the voting booth and cast our ballot, that the folks we elect are good and honorable and have our interests at heart. And that we can sit back and let them manage the country’s business, the ballot being our primary tool for accountability.

But the governing structures we create operate on unwritten rules and norms that get filtered through the media and turned into what we accept as “truth.” The United States is a democracy, for instance, is treated as a foregone conclusion, as is our exceptionalism as a nation. We are that City on the Hill, a beacon for the world. Yadda, yadda, yadda.

This narrative, sadly, is both incomplete and dangerous. It serves what Timothy Snyder calls a “politics of inevitability” — that sense that things will always work out because, well, they always have. The “politics of inevitability,” he argues, ultimately leads to a “politics of eternity,” or a politics written in stone that excludes those being governed. Snyder’s book, “The Road to Unfreedom,” focuses on how this process plays out in Russian politics, but also is meant as a warning to Americans. Written and published during the first presidential term of Donald J. Trump, and reissued in 2023, Snyder is clear-eyed about the damage done to the American system of governing pre-Trump, and the dangers that the structural damage will make it easier for someone with autocratic tendencies to push us from inevitability to eternity.

Enter Trump 2.0 and the fecklessness of his Democratic opponents.

Trump has upended political expectations and torched norms, and the Democrats have taken to their traditional TV perch to fight back. The party’s national leadership — and donor class — have not gotten the memo that new tools and strategies are needed to defend Americans, that they will need to do more than what they have done in recent decades if they are to protect the most vulnerable among us.

On immigration, the party has struggled to follow the lead of folks like Newark Mayor Ras Baraka, U.S. Rep. LaMonica McIver of New Jersey, U.S. Senator Alex Padilla, or New York Mayoral candidate Brad Lander — all of whom have been arrested for confronting the Trump deportation machine.

People have taken to the street numerous times, not in 1960s radical fashion but in much larger numbers. The No Kings rallies were massive, and occurred amid more chaotic anti-deportation protests in American cities, protests that turned violent thanks in no small part to the actions of law enforcement (this is the real history of political violence in the United States, one in which state actors respond to American’s exercising their right to assembly and petition with water cannons and truncheons). There have been arrests of those protesting the Trump/Republican “One Big Bill” — a massive Ponzi scheme of a bill that will gut the federal treasury and strip millions of vulnerable Americans of assistance.

Democratic leaders at the local, state and federal level, rather than find ways to support the resistance or build upon it, have reached for the old 1990s playbook. They have backed centrist candidates who offer milquetoast proposals, fearing reprisals from voters — even though the last nine years have produced few centrist victories. The party, for the most part, has abandoned discussion of economic divisions and inequality in favor of a campaign based on a collection of right-wing Republican endorsers of the status quo.

It was Trump who offered bold ideas. It was Trump who found language to speak to the disaffected. Democrats ceded this to him, and he rode this wave of dissatisfaction and division back to the White House.

Democrats still do not seem to understand this. They continue to focus one an elusive notion of “electability” that constrains their choices. In New York, voters rebuked Democratic Party leaders and backed 33-year-old Zohran Mamdani, a Democratic Socialist, for for mayor to be the nominee, eliciting a full-on frenzy of panic among party regulars. Mamdani was bold in the primary, focusing on affordability and promising a rent freeze for public housing rather than trying to placate big money.

And boldness is what’s needed. Trump poses an existential threat to our flawed democracy. Republican for decades have chipped away at both the official and unwritten structures that hold our government together. Trump accelerated this chipping away in his first term and then attempted to take a sledge hammer to it on Jan. 6, 2021, when his supporters attempted to take over the Capitol Building. Trump is now taking a bunker-busting bomb to these edifices. We can’t rely on electoral politics (not solely) to keep our democracy from crumbling into autocracy.

This is why real dissent and resistance is essential. Why we need strong and radical labor unions, why need to organize defense of immigrants, the trans community, and all those under direct assault.

Hank Kalet is a journalist in New Jersey and lecturer of journalism at Rutgers and is a member of the executive committee of Rutgers Adjunct Faculty Union. Email grassroots@comcast.net. His blog, Channel Surfing, is at www.kaletblog.com. Twitter, @newspoet41; Facebook, facebook.com/hank.kalet.