Building an Opposition to Survive the Trump Era
Mass protests have demonstrated a wide range of disagreement with the Trump agenda. But we need smaller local and regional networks to build a more rooted, sustained opposition.
But given the scale of the onslaught, there is a sense that people aren’t resisting enough. The New York Times Opinion columnist Michelle Goldberg described the apparent conundrum: “There’s less hope and more resignation” now compared to Trump’s first term. “In the last election Trump won the popular vote, and most demographics shifted rightward. The resistance has seemed exhausted and demoralized, and leaders in business, law and academia have adjusted accordingly,” she wrote.
Mass protests have demonstrated disagreement with the Trump agenda. But protests have generally been fragmented and localized, proving to be little more than speed bumps for Trump’s reckless agenda. What we need is to build a more sustained resistance, one that can pose a real threat to the Trump regime, are more rooted, sustained local and regional networks.
Protest is the continuity from the first Trump presidency to the second. From the iconic Women’s March after Inauguration Day in 2017 to the historic uprisings in the summer of 2020, no other president in modern U.S. history has endured thousands of protests and demonstrations against almost every facet of his administration. During Trump’s first term, the Crowd Counting Consortium tracked upwards of 60,000 protests involving at least 21 million people, describing the outpouring as probably “the biggest sustained protest movement in U.S. history.” The mass movement of 2020 was instrumental in pushing Trump out of office and ushering in the Joe Biden presidency. But even as Biden began to betray his campaign promises, his administration met little resistance. That’s until the Palestine solidarity encampments broke through in the spring of 2024.
In the early days of Trump’s second term, scrappy federal workers organized to protest his plan for mass layoffs. Local activists targeted Tesla dealerships across the country with pickets and protests to oppose Elon Musk’s role in dismantling federal agencies and firing federal workers. The protests were likely instrumental in helping to tank Tesla’s stock and push Musk out of the Trump administration in late May. Yet his nefarious influence in disrupting the operations of the federal government has persisted.
By the spring, the demonstrations had grown to sizes similar to those that had dogged the first Trump administration. Hundreds of thousands of people gathered at Hands Off demonstrations in April to stop what the organizers called “the most brazen power grab in modern history.” At Trump’s behest, the typically anodyne Flag Day, June 14, was transformed into a bellicose parade celebrating Trump’s birthday, and the 250th anniversary of the U.S. Army. The No Kings protests held the same day were the largest anti-Trump demonstrations yet. Organizers claimed that more than five million people participated in some 2,000 locations nationwide — the largest single-day protest since the first Trump term, and proof that Trump doesn’t have a mandate.
But the protests are not large or politically cohesive enough to pose an actual threat to the regime. His opposition has yet to cohere into a formation with a clear political agenda. Part of the reason is that the politics of these demonstrations and the liberal opposition more broadly are muted, if not murky. The No Kings demonstrations were organized to reject “authoritarianism, billionaire-first politics and the militarization of our democracy,” according to the organizers, without offering a vision for how to move forward. What should we do other than protest? What are the constructive demands that could attract a broad base of people? The vague demands of liberals may lead ordinary people to assume their goal is to get society back to how things were before Trump returned to power. Organizers aren’t offering enough political clarity.
Even worse, if protest organizers and liberals make calls to return Democrats to power in the upcoming national elections without insisting on major political changes, people may become even more checked out. Americans are disappointed with Democrats’ weak resistance to the GOP. Any opposition that offers simplistic defenses of our democracy or that aspires to return Democrats to office and get back to normal may deepen the right wing’s hold on power.
People’s disillusionment with the representative institutions of our democracy — the Supreme Court, Congress, our two major political parties, our corrupt political system and even the media — should inspire calls for radical changes to our so-called democracy.
The American public views their governing and civic institutions as caught between corrupt and ineffective. In the spring of 2024, less than a quarter of Americans polled expressed trust in “the federal government to do the right thing.” That was during the Biden administration. Eighty-five percent of people said they “don’t think elected officials care what people like them think.” Such skepticism also extends to political parties. A record 28 percent expressed sour views of both major parties — an increase from 7 percent 20 years earlier. Americans’ confidence in the Supreme Court slid a whopping 27 percentage points from 2019 to 2025. Three-quarters of Americans believe that democracy is under threat, but much of that sentiment seems driven by how people experience an impoverished democracy in their day-to-day lives.
This contempt extends to the media, too. Sixty-nine percent of Americans say they have little or no trust in the mainstream media. Take The New York Times, widely perceived as the standard bearer of liberalism and among the loudest institutions to proclaim the need for a robust defense of democracy. But the paper undermined its ostensibly lofty position with its recent intervention in the New York Democratic mayoral primary race. The Times editorial board, almost a year after announcing it would no longer endorse candidates in local elections, urged voters not to rank Zohran Mamdani, a state legislator who is an avowed democratic socialist, in the ranked-choice voting system. The editorial landed days before the primary, when polls indicated that Mamdani was second only to former New York governor Andrew Cuomo.
The editorial board conceded that Mamdani “offers the kind of fresh political style for which many people are hungry during the angry era of President Trump.” Yet it justified its position by deriding Mamdani as an “elite progressive” with an “agenda uniquely unsuited to the city’s challenges.” Even more baffling, it concluded that Cuomo “would be better for New York’s future than Mr. Mamdani,” even though in 2021 The Times had cited “74,000 pieces of evidence” of long-standing patterns of “unwelcome and nonconsensual touching,” “offensive comments,” and other misconduct in calling for his resignation as governor.
Of course, editorials by The New York Times editorial board are not widely read. But this refusal even to consider Mamdani a plausible candidate fuels the idea that large, powerful civic and political institutions don’t care what people think. Institutions like The New York Times want people to stop Trump but only on their own terms, and in ways that preserve the failing status quo. American passivity is fueled by the idea that it doesn’t matter what the public thinks because those with power do what they want anyway.
In contrast, the Mamdani campaign demonstrates what a combative response to Trumpism could look like. With more than 50,000 volunteers, the campaign acted like a social movement, one that had to overcome bipartisan attacks and the vitriolic racism of the right. More important, the politics of the campaign took a forward-looking, constructive approach. For months, Mamdani focused on a redistributive agenda that called for taxing the wealthy to generate resources that would make the city more tolerable for working-class New Yorkers: universal child care, fast and free public buses, a $30 minimum wage, rent freezes. He put affordability at the heart of a campaign to defend democracy. And beyond that, he stood for the rights of Palestinians. That’s attractive to people. He offered a proactive agenda both in local and national politics.
And voters responded. He garnered more votes than any candidate in New York mayoral primary history. In his victory speech, he said, “Democracy has disappeared in several other great nations not because the people dislike democracy but because they have grown tired of unemployment and insecurity, of seeing their children hungry while they sat helpless in the face of government confusion and weakness.” He added, “In desperation, they chose to sacrifice liberty in the hope of getting something to eat. New York, if we have made one thing clear over these past months, it is that we need not choose between the two.”
In response, a rogues’ gallery of Democratic Party operatives and donors are furiously cobbling together an opposition to Mamdani, the will of the voters be damned — further evidence of the party’s situational defense of democracy. More and more people believe that the political and governing institutions of our democracy, including elected officials, are unresponsive to them. Why would we expect the public to defend those institutions?
This view of democracy among liberals and Democrats — we’ll defend it when we like the candidate, policy, or court decision — is not much different from Trump’s democracy. His administration will go along with policies and court decisions it likes and ignore those it doesn’t. Recently, Gov. JB Pritzker of Illinois told Democrats, “It’s time to fight everywhere and all at once,” imploring, “Never before in my life have I called for mass protests, for mobilization, for disruption, but I am now.” He added, “These Republicans cannot know a moment of peace. They have to understand that we will fight their cruelty with every megaphone and microphone that we have.” Many other Democrats share his desire to fight Trump on their terms, but not in ways that challenge the parts of the status quo they continue to defend. That includes the disgraceful role of the U.S. in financing Israel’s ongoing genocide of Palestinians.
When student activists flooded the streets to show support for Palestine in the spring of 2024, Democrats denounced them as antisemitic, and then-President Biden maligned their largely peaceful protests as violent and disorderly. The Democratic Party wants protests of the Republican Party’s political agenda (unless those protests are led by a progressive Democrat). But if you call Israel’s war on Palestinians genocide or criticize arms shipments to Israel, the Democratic National Committee will label you antisemitic and may mobilize the police to destroy your protest. Even internally, the Democratic Party is hostile to democratic expression it does not control. The gun control activist David Hogg was hectored out of an elected leadership position in the Democratic National Convention. His transgression? Suggesting that Democrats who were out of step with the politics of the base should face primary challenges. Political protests are not like water faucets that Democrats can turn on and off depending on whether they approve.
Trump’s attacks prove once again that political movements are not guaranteed. They need more to grow than worsening conditions. We’re still in the early days of this miserable presidency, and no one knows what might lead to the kind of political outpouring that could curtail or even stop Trump’s reactionary agenda. An incalculable mix of confidence and consciousness combine in unpredictable ways to give millions of people the belief that they can stop a government on a rampage. In an April poll, 59 percent of Americans described the beginning of Trump’s second presidency as “scary.”
Eventually, people’s anger and disgust will overwhelm their feelings of fear and intimidation, especially as the terrifying c onsequences of Trump’s big, ugly bill set in. Add to that the ongoing horror of the ICE raids and the heartless policies that leave victims of climate catastrophes in Texas, New Mexico, and elsewhere on their own. Systematic efforts to roll back the civil rights infrastructure that took 100 years to build will also motivate those appalled by racism to act.
For many, that moment arrived when a proliferation of local networks formed to challenge the draconian immigration raids in Los Angeles, where ICE’s attacks have been particularly concentrated. Thousands of Angelenos fanned out across the city to defend immigrants, protest, hold and attend know-your-rights trainings, and provide grassroots aid to families once again pushed into the shadows. On July 10, 1,400 people showed up for a training in nonviolent civil disobedience in Los Angeles.
Beyond L.A., ICE raids have forced other communities to develop their own networks, as in Milford, Mass., where ICE captured and detained Marcelo Gomes da Silva, an 18-year-old student. Gomes da Silva, who arrived in the U.S. from Brazil when he was 7, was taken by ICE while on his way to volleyball practice. Hundreds of his classmates and teachers, along with other community members, swung into action, putting ICE on the defensive. Right after the high school’s graduation ceremony, the students, still in their gowns, marched into town, demanding his release. They were joined by around 200 teachers. He was released six days later.
According to one report, Milford was the first New England town to join an ICE program to crack down on hiring undocumented immigrant workers. In last fall’s election, 42 percent of Milford voters chose Trump. Since securing Gomes da Silva’s release, the community has continued to organize as it builds a lasting network to resist ICE’s fascist tactics.
At the heart of such efforts is a politics of togetherness and solidarity, an us-against-them orientation. This reflects the growing class polarization in the country, evinced by a government led by billionaires and elites who loot public coffers to engorge their bank accounts even further. These kinds of local ties and networking are important, especially when the befuddled Democratic Party remains politically paralyzed. They have offered no hint of leadership on any relevant issue, especially immigration, leaving every city to chart its own course. The development of a coherent opposition is coming together through local responses to a wide range of political and economic attacks instead. It’s not just the size of the protest and demonstrations in defense of an abstract idea of democracy that matter. The day-to-day reality of how people defend against the cruel attacks on workers will define the opposition required to survive this era.
Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor is a co-founder of Hammer & Hope and the Hughes-Rogers Professor of African American Studies at Princeton University. She is the author of Race for Profit: How Banks and the Real Estate Industry Undermined Black Homeownership and From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation and the editor of How We Get Free: Black Feminism and the Combahee River Collective. She is a recipient of a MacArthur Foundation “Genius Grant” and a Guggenheim fellowship.
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https://truthout.org/articles/amid-rising-fascism-the-left-looks-for-action-it-should-also-ask-questions/
Amid Rising Fascism, the Left Looks for Action. It Should Also Ask Questions.
There’s no cookie-cutter solution to confronting fascism; action must be grounded in analysis, says Robin D. G. Kelley.
July 26, 2025
A protester wearing an American flag holds up his hands in front of police amid protests in Los Angeles, California, on June 14, 2025. Mario Tama / Getty Images
The anti-colonial struggle for a free Palestine has reached a desperate point as the Israeli military regularly fires on starving Palestinians seeking aid and water. Meanwhile, the rise of fascism in the United States continues at an alarming pace, with unprecedented funding passed for Immigration and Customs Enforcement expansion as the public continues to witness masked kidnappings and disappearances.
Seventy-five years after the publication of Aimé Césaire’s Discourse on Colonialism, Robin D.G. Kelley argues that the book still has important lessons to teach in the current historical moment. Fascist states are not a perversion of liberal democracies but rather their extension, and it is critically important that anti-fascism incorporates anti-colonial approaches.
In this exclusive interview for Truthout, Kelley offers a vision of the work needed on the left that goes beyond looking for answers or examples to follow. Kelley is a professor of U.S. history at the University of California, Los Angeles, and an author or editor of more than a dozen books, including Freedom Dreams and Hammer and Hoe. The interview that follows has been lightly edited for clarity and length.
October Krausch: You started your remarks at the Socialism Conference by saying you’re a better historian than activist. Why was it important to you to name that right at the top?
Robin D. G. Kelley: It’s part of a larger point I was making about what it means to be at this conference where people are literally looking for answers. I think we have done an absolutely horrible job of understanding and analyzing both the conditions now and before. A lot of people want inspiration from me. They want me to get people inspired about the possible future and what we’re going to do. Because I write about social movements, they want me to pull out examples, and that’s not useful to me. I specifically gave a lecture that was about understanding the things that are not so clear to us: the close relationship between liberalism and fascism historically and in the present, and the fundamentally intertwined relationship between colonialism and fascism. That’s what I do well. If someone says, “Well I need you to go out and get 40,000 signatures,” I can’t do that.
Some people have decided that scholarship and analysis are less important than action. I’m not saying it’s more important or less; I’m saying you can’t separate it. By holding up action separate from critical analysis, we end up fetishizing this invention called the activist. And then they say, “Yeah, we love Robin because he’s an activist.”
So that was my way of saying I don’t want to be in a position where people say, “So what do we do?” Because that’s for all of us as a collective to figure out. And I wanted people to listen and follow this analysis, which I think is useful, but not so much for literal lessons. I don’t think history works that way. The lessons to me are the lessons that Césaire laid out [in Discourse on Colonialism] in terms of the relationship.
October: What you’re saying reminds me of something I’ve learned from abolition: One of the problems with the criminal legal system is its cookie-cutter approach. We have essentially the exact same prison in Michigan and in Texas and in California, then the U.S. exports those prisons to Brazil and that’s the “solution” for all kinds of harm. I’ve learned a lot by taking seriously that history doesn’t work that way, the social world doesn’t work that way, conflicts don’t work that way. But you see that desire for a template to follow repeated all over. Very few things work that way and it creates a lot of harm.
Robin: Exactly. It’s also that the powers that be want you to use a cookie-cutter approach. I feel like part of my whole project as a Marxist historian is to try to locate and understand what we can’t see. That’s what Karl Marx did. In Capital, Volume 1, Marx talks about the secret of the labor theory of value. All that value, you can’t see it; it’s hidden because it’s in labor power.
There can never be a cookie-cutter approach because we’ve got to figure out what we don’t see. I fear sometimes it’s very easy to fall into the trap of empiricism. People would think, Well, of course because if something is empirical it means that we can actually locate it and see it. The problem is it’s hiding other things that we can’t see.
I’ve never been one to only write about the glories and the existence of working people because we have to understand what is it that reproduces work. Why is it that they’re fighting in the first place? Why is it that they’re losing? That means studying power. That means like reading all 925 pages or whatever it is of Project 2025. To me, that’s just as important as reading personal narratives of working people winning.
October: At the keynote, you talked a lot about the continuity of fascism and liberal democracy, especially the continuity of fascism and colonialism. You offered that the establishment of Israel precisely in the era of formal international decolonization is a really powerful example of why we have fascism here in the United States today: Colonialism never ended and we will always have the problem of fascism if we’re not thinking about those as intertwined things. Some of your examples were about anti-fascist struggles that were not anti-colonial or were anti-Black. Your lecture had me thinking about Sophie Lewis’s recent book, Enemy Feminisms. One of the things Lewis says is that, as feminists, we have a tendency to define, say, anti-abortion feminists or KKK feminists, as outside of “real” feminism. Lewis says that we have to own that and then we have to think about where the seeds of domination and white supremacy lie inside of feminism. Do you think it makes sense to think in a similar way about enemy lefts or enemy socialisms?
Robin: The left has already done that. We call it sectarianism! Unfortunately, it’s not always been done in the most thoughtful way. I think what Sophie Lewis is trying to do in the book is very thoughtful in terms of having a critical analysis of the positions that are within a framework of feminism. It’s not to abandon feminism, but to really understand it. With the enemy socialism example, these folks are basically constructing enemies as a way of either trying to maintain or attain some kind of hegemony within left circles, or because they have a disagreement in analysis that’s not a fundamental disagreement in values.
Part of my concern is actually the opposite. I understand enemy feminists, but once we start to do what the left has done for a long time — that is, attack those we disagree with as social fascists or as left opportunists — there’s no opportunity to build through critique, dialogue, and struggle, which offers a way of understanding that maybe our critique is wrong.
For me, that’s also about grace. There are some people in left organizations who I completely disagree with, including (and I struggle with this) the leftists who have a really bad position on race. I could make a decision to sort of expose and dispose of them, or to say, “Okay, let’s critique that failure to understand race.”
I’m so frustrated with the Marxist-Leninists who are basically applauding Donald Trump because the Trump administration is getting rid of DEI [diversity, equity, and inclusion], like, “Well, that’s great, because DEI is just a neoliberal trick.” For me, that’s just dumb. So rather than say, “Oh, they’re the enemy,” I write and argue and publicly speak against that position and explain why. I expect and want a response. Because to debate it and recognize that we share a lot in common is to pull people within that movement into ours.
October: I’m wrestling with some of these ideas and I think a lot of people are. When is someone your enemy? And when is it like, “Okay, we can travel together for a certain amount of time”? That’s a difficult decision to make and there’s no template for it. At the same time, we have to really draw some hard lines because people are going to sell us out when we’re in these higher stakes.
Robin: I agree with that. I think there are times when we do have to draw hard lines. I guess what I’m also saying is that there’s a value in making that critique as clear and public as possible. It doesn’t have to be friendly.
There are basically a lot of racist white left organizations. They’re everywhere. I dream about them at night. There are left tendencies that are deeply nationalist, which I think is problematic as well.
If we’re trying to build a working-class power, then it doesn’t make sense to ignore or vilify every single segment of the working class. It’s enough to continue taking them to task and explaining why. In Hammer and Hoe, I wrote about Klansmen who end up joining the Communist Party because they saw it as maybe the best option, but they don’t come politically correct. They would use like, comrade n*****. Communist Party members were like, “You can’t say that,” but they wouldn’t say, “You have to leave.” The Party would work with them as much as they could to bring them in, but at the same time, promote organic leadership. That’s two really important things that may seem counterbalancing: to promote organic leadership and to promote and support people who may not actually know it all.
It’s also important to listen and engage because if we really do believe we have the right position on everything, then we’re living in a dreamworld. I’ve never known of a movement in my life that has the right position on everything. Even today, we’re so advanced that we don’t have the right position on everything. You don’t know yet.
October: It’s funny, it feels like a contradiction in and of itself to say, “Oh, I didn’t know either and now I know this thing,” but you feel at any given moment in time like, “I have a bunch of strongly held beliefs. They’re the correct beliefs.”
Robin: Right, there’s nothing wrong with really believing that you have the correct belief. In fact, if you don’t, why do you do it? The contradictions are high.
Part of what I was trying to say [in the keynote speech] was that too many of us, at least in my circle, stop at the recognition that fascism itself is a product of colonial rule. And then they end up falling into the shaft of creating the hierarchy of the colonized and the white people. Part of my discussion about austerity was to add another dimension to class struggle, saying that in order for colonialism to actually work, they had to crush the European working class. They had to make the working class not just nationalist, but weak enough to eliminate as much anti-imperialist sentiment as possible.
That means we have to go even deeper in our analysis of understanding the European working class. It’s just not enough to analyze the world as if all the colonized are the oppressed and the white people are the oppressor. Because then we have no understanding of the BRICS countries, for example. That’s what I’m saying: A lot of us, even those who think we have all the answers, don’t have that analysis yet.
October: I was reminded in a recent panel at the Socialism Conference that the Vietnamese national liberation movement did win against more powerful militaries. That’s easy to forget at a time when people here don’t seem to feel that there is potential for big wins. But it happens and it’s happened in history. Simultaneously, you highlight the way those victories are incomplete. And that’s part of why we’re still fighting fascism, right? How do you negotiate living in that tension?
Robin: Yes. Vietnam as a national liberation movement defeated the United States. Vietnam as a national liberation defeated France in 1954. Vietnam, just like Haiti. But I would argue that communism in Vietnam was defeated, even though the nation of Vietnam won in the short term.
What is Vietnam now? Vietnam, along with Bangladesh, produces much of the world’s textiles from the lowest-paid workers. It’s the continuation of the exploitation of labor in a place that fought to end the exploitation of labor. Most of those companies that do business making apparel in Vietnam are U.S. companies or multinational companies. Vietnam just made this trade deal with Trump. There is a rising Vietnamese elite, much like China. The Chinese Communist Party has become — and again, I have lots of debates with people about this — has become the organization, if you’re a bureaucrat, where you can become a millionaire. That’s not the vision that brought peasants and workers to the party. The victory is nevertheless a sign of the inability of U.S. imperialism to win everything it wants. But it’s also the long-term defeat of communist vision and practice, and it’s a sign that the capital order is intact and it ebbs and flows.
Capitalism is not going anywhere anytime soon unless we do something different. If we were to really take the question of why did Vietnam defeat the United States, we have to ask two other questions: What was the state of the United States at the time of its withdrawal? It was a global economic crisis and the U.S. economy was in shambles in many ways. The price of the war was just too much. What made the price of war go up? Working people in the United States. All those struggles in the ’60s and early ’70s to expand the welfare state made government spending higher. The War on Poverty was a minuscule amount of money but, nevertheless, it was competing with the war expenditure.
The result of the global realignment that has happened since that time is that the combined power of China, Russia, India, Brazil, South Africa and Saudi Arabia outweighs the United States. What did these BRICS countries produce? Did they produce the beautiful, amazing welfare state of the non-aligned movements? No, they created massive inequality and state repression, all the things that are required to maintain colonial and fascist power. So we’re still here. I’m not trying to be pessimistic, but this is the nature of class struggle. The grounds keep shifting on us. And if you don’t see the grounds as global, then we end up not knowing who or how to fight or how things happen behind our backs.
This is why we don’t need slogans. We need answers. And we can’t have answers without really good questions. We can’t have good questions without knowing the history. And it comes down to that. I think about what it means that someone like Vladimir Lenin, who was kind of busy, would write an entire book-length study on agriculture in the U.S.
Marxists have always been immersed in history, but we’re not so much anymore. It’s not about the left, it’s about our culture altogether. And again, it also goes back to the activist ethos, and this notion that to be activists, we need action now. That’s kind of a fetish. When political education ends up becoming, “What are the immediate strategic issues that we need to deal with now?” rather than developing a larger analysis, that’s a little bit of anti-intellectualism.
October Krausch
October Krausch, Ph.D., is a public sociologist, activist and writer in the Detroit metro area. Their writing has been published in Truthout, In These Times, Inside Higher Ed and The Progressive, among others. They have been involved in a range of community movements including anti-eviction movements, free schools, independent media and Latin American solidarity work, and are currently facilitating the Abolitionist Book Club, an inside/outside reading group with members of the Black Prisoners Caucus. Always working to balance love and rage, October finds freedom in the struggle.
