Why We Fight

Masked thugs armed and kitted like they’re about to retake Mosul from the Islamic State prowl the streets of American cities looking for racial minorities to kidnap and send to horrific prison camps without a warrant or a whiff of due process. They shoot school teachers for following them and honking their horns to alert their neighbors. They brutally assault and murder American citizens with apparent impunity. The president and his family engage in open, lavish corruption to the tune of billions of dollars. In the span of a year, he has turned The United States—the main author and guarantor of the post-Second World War, rules-based international order—into the biggest threat to that order, destroying our system of alliances in the process and making both America and the world far less safe and less prosperous.

He uses the Department of Justice to persecute his political enemies with criminal cases so obviously invented they often can’t even make it past a grand jury for a felony indictment. He and his minions flout the law that requires them to release the files detailing the massive child sex trafficking conspiracy in which he’s neck deep. His party’s majorities in Congress and the lawless hacks in robes they’ve installed on our Supreme Court aid and abet him at every turn. The oligarchs who control the vast majority of our economy, including our most important legacy and social media platforms are almost all Vichy scum, loyal to the MAGA regime to one degree or another out of avarice, fear, or their own ideological affinity for fascism. And the algorithmic social media platforms the oligarchs control are vast, ceaseless torrents of fear and doom, keeping us all afraid, angry, and anxious in their unregulated efforts to monetize as much of our attention as they possibly can. 

In the face of these developments and under the influence of the oligarchs’ social media algorithms it is perhaps unsurprising that most people do their best to avoid the news and politics and that many have fallen into nihilistic, doomerist gloom. Social media is awash in examples of this attitude. 

While the reasons for this kind of lolnothingmatters defeatism posing as wised up sophistication are understandable, to the extent you give in to the temptation of doomerism, you do the fascists’ work for them. As Timothy Snyder and many other scholars of authoritarian regimes have noted, they want us depressed and hopeless and passive. The most direct and reliable consequence of cynicism isn’t wisdom, it’s passivity. If all is lost, if there aren’t going to even be elections anymore and we’re all fucked, then why bother resisting? Why bother, for instance, enduring hours in freezing temperatures and risking life, limb, and eyesight to follow around the masked goons in Minnesota, warning your neighbors of their presence and doing everything you can short of physical violence to hamper their efforts at kidnapping and brutalizing your neighbors? Why bother organizing with your neighbors to provide economic relief for immigrant neighbors afraid to go to work and to provide safe rides for their kids to school? The real work of resistance is hard. Victories are rarely easy, rarely quick, and almost never permanent or total. Sniping and pontificating on social media is vastly easier and, unlike resistance, it provides instant gratification. 

The way I’ve framed these questions makes the first answer clear: as Minnesotans are currently proving and as our parents and grandparents proved in the civil rights movement, all is not lost. Creative, organized nonviolent resistance works—Dr. Erica Chenoweth’s work on this is essential reading. It’s true that a fascist movement currently controls all three branches of the federal government and we are, as the political scientist Dr. Mark Copelovitch frequently points out, now living in a competitive authoritarian system. But politics doesn’t stop in an authoritarian system and the fact that ours is still competitive matters a great deal. 

A large and growing majority of Americans find the brutality of Trump and Miller and their thugs revolting, as is clear from the massive swing in public opinion against their immigration policies. Minnesotans, through their bravery, their level of organization, their disciplined nonviolence, and the blood of Renee Good and Alex Pretti along with countless others who’ve been maimed have dramatized the stakes and turned ordinary Americans against Trump and his goons using tactics very similar to those that worked in Birmingham and Selma two generations ago. And Minnesotans aren’t going anywhere. Neither are the rest of us. 

We’re going to retake The House of Representatives—and possibly even the Senate—in November and we’re going to primary the squishes and Vichy Democrats who have failed to understand or meet the moment. And we’re going to spend the last two years of MAGA’s time in office shining very bright spotlights on all of its myriad abuses and corruption. The regime is going to spend the entirety of its last two years fighting subpoenas and impeachments. Then we’re going to retake the White House. And whether from local prosecutors or The Department of Justice under a Democrat in 2029, there will be investigations and there will be accountability. It won’t be perfect, but it will happen and it will matter. 

In the meanwhile, non-violent direct action and the friction it creates matters. As I’ve written before in this space, Americans commonly suffer from the idea that democracy and dictatorship are binaries instead of a spectrum. But as anyone who’s ever studied democratic backsliding can tell you, the real world doesn’t work like that. Much as they would like you to think they’re all powerful and you should give up, there are very real limits on what they can do both logistically and in terms of public opinion and legitimacy. The fact that angry citizens by the hundreds are showing up in Surprise Arizona to pressure their city council to not allow an ICE concentration camp in their city matters. So does the fact that wine moms in Kansas City are lighting proposed ICE prison warehouses on fire. It makes it a lot harder, slower, and more expensive for DHS to find warehouses for their concentration camps. 

The fact that ICE and CBP can’t go anywhere in Minnesota without being followed, filmed, and swarmed by angry Minnesotans defending their neighbors matters. It means ICE has to use a lot more manpower and time to kidnap a lot fewer of our neighbors than it would be able to do without the resistance. The noise protests outside the hotels hosting ICE agents matter. They make it more expensive for DHS to find hotels and, along with the widespread hatred for ICE in general, they make it harder for DHS to recruit. 

The efforts of attorneys and judges matter. Thousands of our neighbors have been released from Miller and Noem’s concentration camps due to their work. And again, DHS and DOJ are being made to expend a much higher percentage of their finite resources than they would without the heroic work of immigration attorneys and the commitment of federal judges—including many Trump appointees—to the rule of law. 

There are also good personal reasons why we fight. What are you going to tell your grandchildren about what you did during this period when they ask? “I cowered at home and doom-scrolled and spread defeatism on social media” ain’t it. Live your life in such a way that you’ll be proud to tell your future kids and grandkids about it. 

Hope isn’t only, “the thing with feathers, that perches in the soul, and sings the tune without the words, and never stops, at all” as Emily Dickinson so beautifully put it. It’s also a discipline. As the writer John Green recently explained, much like love, hope is both a feeling and something we must constantly, actively choose. Doing so is  the first and most essential step to tearing down this fascist regime and it will do wonders for your mental health to boot. 

Featured image is from the ICE invasion of Chicago in 2025, by Tia Dufour