General Discussion

https://wagingnonviolence.org/2024/11/10-things-to-do-if-trump-wins

I'm not great at summarizing and it's lengthy,
so I'll present the title of each section with my favorite sentence or passage from that section.

1. Trust yourself
If you don’t want to read this article now and instead take a good walk, do it.

2. Find others who you trust
I promise I’ll head towards practical resistance strategies. But the emotional landscape matters a great deal. Hannah Arendt’s “The Origins of Totalitarianism” explored how destructive ideologies like fascism and autocracy grow. She used the word verlassenheit — often translated as loneliness — as a central ingredient. As she meant it, loneliness isn’t a feeling but a kind of social isolation of the mind. Your thinking becomes closed off to the world and a sense of being abandoned to each other.

3. Grieve
After Donald Trump won in 2016, we all saw colleagues who never grieved. They didn’t look into their feelings and the future — and as a result they remained in shock. For years they kept saying, “I can’t believe he’s doing that…”

4. Release that which you cannot change
Unaddressed, this desire to act on everything leads to bad strategy. Nine months ago when we gathered activists to scenario plan together, we took note of two knee-jerk tendencies from the left that ended up largely being dead-ends in the face of Trump:

Public angsting — posting outrage on social media, talking with friends, sharing awful news
Symbolic actions — organizing marches and public statements

The first is where we look around at bad things happening and make sure other people know about them, too. We satisfy the social pressure of our friends who want us to show outrage — but the driving moves are only reactive. The end result wasn’t the intended action or an informed population. It’s demoralizing us. It’s hurting our capacity for action. Public angsting as a strategy is akin to pleading with the hole in the boat to stop us from sinking.

5. Find your path
One pathway is called “Protecting People.”

6. Do not obey in advance, do not self-censor
(a thought not directly from the article,
but I see a lot of "we can't do anything" kind of thinking around here,
and it looks to me like a kind of obeying in advance)

7. Reorient your political map
How we position ourselves matters: Are we interested in engaging with people unhappy with the regime — whether because they love the current institutions or are unhappy with Trump’s policies on them? Are we able to tell a story that explains how we got here — and do political education? Or are we only interested in maintaining ideological purity and preaching to our own choir?

8. Get real about power
Power will need to emerge from folks no longer obeying the current unjust system.

9. Handle fear, make violence rebound
They were young people who took a sarcastic response to regular police beatings. They would joke amongst each other, “It only hurts if you’re scared.”
Their attitude wasn’t cavalier — it was tactical. They were not going to grow fear.

10. Envision a positive future
I don’t feel certain, and I’m not predicting we win. But we’ve all now imagined storylines about how bad it might get. We would do ourselves a service to spend an equal measure of time envisioning how we might advance our cause in these conditions.