The Whig Resistance Handbook
This party's just getting started.
The Democrats and NeverTrumpers do not have a great track record when it comes to #resistance. Historically, parties calling themselves the Whigs have often done better. “Whig resistance theory” helped preserve British freedoms under James II. American Whigs like Abraham Lincoln joined the Republican party en masse and turned it into, well, the party of Lincoln.
Whigs, in the sense I mean and David Brooks means, are people looking for non-zero-sum solutions, for ways of making everyone richer while preserving our liberty. We’re creative and kind, both in policy and in direct action. We’re upset about the harm 45² might do, not about the wrong people getting helped or being happy. We’re going to do what we can to mitigate the harm, and to look for ways both we, and the administration, can work together to help.
The following list is incomplete. You can help by expanding it.
Harm Mitigation
Trump may have gone full Nazi, but, importantly, his advisors and the Republican party leaders are mostly emphatically anti-Nazi. This, I hope and mostly believe, will sharply limit how much deliberate harm the administration does. But things are likely to get pretty bad for undocumented immigrants, people who share a name with an undocumented immigrant, and people in any way related to anybody who might possibly be an undocumented immigrant. We need to insist on high levels of transparency around the living conditions of people being “mass deported,” and we should also be looking for ways to throttle it.
Procedural Roadblocks
There are going to be a lot of ways to do this via procedure. Encourage your local lawyer, political officeholder, or government worker to get creative. Did ICE file an environmental impact statement for that new detention center? Wait, this detainee shares a name with a foreign ambassador, are we sure they don’t have diplomatic immunity? Tactics like these have often worked, even under the Nazis, because the vast majority of people doing terrible things are just following procedure, and have little interest in going beyond the letter of the law.
Help Find Less Harmful Solutions
If Trump decides he really needs to bulldoze Yosemite National Park to put in a gas pipeline, he may still entertain good faith proposals to find an alternative route that doesn’t go through a volcano. Don’t worry too much about avoiding “handing him a victory.” He’s a lame duck. We don’t need to humiliate or thwart him as an end in itself.
If You See Something, Say Something
It is our duty as concerned citizens to report any suspected illegal immigrants to ICE. Now, according to Title 18, U.S.C. § 1001, we’re not allowed to make statements to the government that we know are false. So how many people do you really know are here legally? You can only be truly confident about people you’ve personally given birth to on U.S. soil, or witnessed being born to someone whose birth certificate you’ve carefully verified. But for anyone else, including yourself, all you have is hearsay, and people lie to cover things up, so you can’t trust anyone.
Don’t waste ICE’s time with anyone who you think is likely to be illegal—if there’s more than like a 1% chance, I’m sure they’re already on it. And don’t break the law by reporting anyone with a 0% chance, if you believe in that sort of thing, or lying in any other way on the form. But in that 0-1% range, I’m sure you know a lot of people. ICE accepts anonymous reports. If you’re concerned about the Immigrant Conspiracy finding out what you’ve done, you’re also free to use a VPN.
If and when there start being worrisomely brutal crackdowns on other groups, such as Muslims, or other tip lines start opening, same suggestions apply. It’s pretty easy to convert to Islam, if necessary, before reporting yourself.
Other Direct Action
Deliberately hurting or killing someone is very rarely the morally correct thing to do. Illegally helping someone often is. Whenever violence seems like the answer, try thinking more creatively.
DIY Presidenting
The other class of harm the Federal Government can do is passive—not acting when they should, or following their standard procedures in extraordinary times, out of apathy. The 2012 documentary How to Survive A Plague, about AIDS activism, turned out to be surprisingly relevant in 2020, in ways I wish we’d realized earlier. In the late eighties, there were several promising-seeming treatments for AIDS, but they were going through the standard 7-10 year process to be approved by the FDA, while the pandemic raged. Organizations like ACT UP protested and lobbied to accelerate clinical trials and approvals, and then to fund more research.
The Feds got in the way of the Covid response as much as they helped. While it’s not clear whether or not Clinton would’ve been much better, it’s definitely true that a great President would’ve intervened when testing, vaccine trials, and masking were being pointlessly obstructed by bureaucracy.
There’s a decent chance this will all happen again some time in the next four years, and a near-certainty that there will be some similar moment. Say, there’s swarms of venomous bees stinging people, and we’ve discovered a radio signal that pacifies them. But the FCC, which has strict rules about radio frequencies, keeps shutting down the transmitters sending out that special signal that calms the deadly deadly bees. The thing to do in this situation is mainly to resist the FCC, not the Republicans. Hold die-ins and other protests, keep up the pressure in the media, force them to actually acknowledge the damage they’re doing.
Also, do you have an apparently sane governor? State governments can substitute for the Feds. They can call in the National Guard, spend discretionary funds in emergencies, and help coordinate private relief efforts. Trump isn’t fundamentally opposed to humanitarian interventions, but in some cases it might be easier to get your state to act than your country, even if it “should” be a national issue.
Route around the damage
If the Department of Education goes away and the charter schools in your area are terrible, the most important thing to do is to stop educational gatekeeping. Don’t discriminate in hiring based on education. At all. Put together suggested curricula that people can study online, and give competency tests, if there’s stuff you really need people to know before you hire them.
The next-most-important thing is to provide alternatives. Don’t just blindly imitate what the government was doing—think about the effects you liked about public school, or whatever else gets gutted, and find cheaper, private and community-driven ways of accomplishing the same thing.
This is pretty much what Trump and Musk say they’re hoping is going to happen. That doesn’t make it wrong to do. We really do have a lot of outdated laws and process hanging around, and this really may be an opportunity to improve. Be careful to avoid Resisting for the Sake of Resisting. At the same time as he was failing to act on AIDS, Reagan was creating GPS and granting general amnesty to undocumented immigrants. The best modern President on pandemic preparedness was George W. Bush.
#Resist Depression
You should let the joy in whenever it comes knocking. This is the number one message I wish I could send to myself in 2016. You are not obligated to feel bad because other people are suffering. It’ll happen anyway, because you have empathy. So you don’t need to resist the ordinary or extraordinary pleasures of life, out of some misguided sense of duty or guilt over your privileged position (if you’re in one). We’re all in this together, and the goal is to increase human happiness. Sometimes—probably often!—the best way you can serve the shared project is to be happy.
To the extent that you can, and keep your sanity, also pay attention and help. But don’t burn yourself out trying to pay attention to everything that’s going wrong, and don’t make a special effort to share in other people’s misery. Take time, every day, for gratitude.
What, then, is the answer? We must accept our unwanted and unfortunate circumstance and yet cling to a radiant hope. The answer lies in developing the capacity to accept the finite disappointment and yet cling to the infinite hope.
Happy Martin Luther King Day.
Great post, Aaron. Thank you for this.
Your sane advice reminds me of something Emerson wrote in one of his essays.
He seems to have encountered at least one case of what we now call borderline personality disorder. In his essay “Considerations by the way,” he writes that “a virulent, aggressive fool taints the reason of a household. I have seen a whole family of quiet, sensible people unhinged and beside themselves, victims of such a rogue. For the steady wrongheadedness of one perverse person irritates the best: since we must withstand absurdity. But resistance only exasperates the acrid fool, who believes that Nature and gravitation are quite wrong, and he only is right. Hence all the dozen inmates are soon perverted, with whatever virtues and industries they have, into contradictors, accusers, explainers, and repairers of this one malefactor; like a boat about to be overset, or a carriage run away with, --not only the foolish pilot or driver, but everybody on board is forced to assume strange and ridiculous attitudes, to balance the vehicle and prevent the upsetting. For remedy, whilst the case is yet mild, I recommend phlegm and truth: let all the truth that is spoken or done be at the zero of indifferency, or truth itself will be folly. But, when the case is seated and malignant, the only safety is in amputation; as seamen say, you shall cut and run. How to live with unfit companions?—for, with such, life is for the most part spent: and experience teaches little better than our earliest instinct of self-defense, namely, not to engage, not to mix yourself in any manner with them; but let their madness spend itself unopposed;--you are you, and I am I.”
Emerson's advice may be helpful (at least a little helpful) during the next four years.
This is a wonderful post, Aaron. Perfect for reading on this day. Thank you.