Your Plan to Resist Trump Is Dumb and You’re a Wimp

Grow a spine, liberals — fight like you mean it

by ANDREW DOBBS

Here’s a quick test for determining whether a proposed response to Trump is pointless or not: would the folks proposing it be doing more or less the same thing if Florida senator Marco Rubio had won the presidential election?

If the answer is yes then that either means that Trump and Rubio — or any other mainstream conservative — are essentially the same sort of threat, or that the project before you is non-responsive to Trump’s threat because it is designed for a very different kind of situation. It is guaranteed to fail.

Because Trump is not normal — remember how important it is that we not normalize him? — these fine-for-Rubio-or-Scott-Walker plots are wastes of time. They presume that Trump’s plans are like those of typical GOP politicians and presidents, and that he’s susceptible to the same sorts of limitations and pressures to which they would be susceptible.

But his plans are very different, and he has very different ambitions and fears, making these plans completely useless.

These proposals are proliferating right now, but one seems to have risen above the rest at the moment, the “Indivisible Guide.” Composed by former Democratic congressional staffers, it claims to provide a concise but comprehensive game plan for recreating the Tea Party, but this time for the good guys.

Maybe it’s because there are few titles more descriptive of a self-righteous and unearned sense of superiority than “congressional staffer,” and few entities less effective in liberating the oppressed than congressional Democrats, but these authors have created a document that is deluded about history and promoting actions wholly inappropriate to the conditions at hand.

The Indivisible Guide is pointless bullshit.

“The authors of this guide are former congressional staffers who witnessed the rise of the Tea Party,” the guide begins. “We saw these activists take on a popular president with a mandate for change and a supermajority in Congress. We saw them organize locally and convince their own (members of Congress) to reject President Obama’s agenda. Their ideas were wrong, cruel, and tinged with racism — and they won.”

They then present the rest of the guide as a means of recreating that wrong, cruel, racist victory on right, compassionate, liberal terms. The guide goes over how to organize small local groups to keep track of your members of Congress and hector them with questions at public events, town halls, social media and in their offices until they fold to public pressure and Trump’s policy agenda is thus defeated.

As far as a guide for grassroots lobbying of Congress goes, it is excellent. They make some assumptions about the historical experience of the Tea Party, however, that are seriously wrong.

First and most important is the notion that Obama had a progressive agenda that failed because of Tea Party pressure. In reality, Obama had a clear path to accomplishing the most progressive reforms his electoral base demanded — universal publicly-funded health care, direct assistance for foreclosed homeowners, criminal accountability for bankers and for Bush administration wrongdoers, among others — but Obama himself never really wanted to do these things and they didn’t happen because he and congressional Democrats, not the Tea Party, blocked them.

It is important that we do not allow the Indivisible Guide authors obscure this fact. Just after Obama’s inauguration Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner launched a response to the economic crisis that Washington Post reporter Matt Stoller called “a wholesale attack on the American home (the main store of middle-class wealth) in favor of concentrated financial power.”

“A financial system in collapse has to allocate losses,” Stoller explained. “In this case, big banks and homeowners both experienced losses, and it was up to the Obama administration to decide who should bear those burdens. … Rather than forcing some burden-sharing between banks and homeowners through bankruptcy reform or debt relief, Obama prioritized creditor rights, placing most of the burden on borrowers.

“This kept big banks functional and ensured that financiers would maintain their positions in the recovery. At a 2010 hearing, Damon Silvers, vice chairman of the independent Congressional Oversight Panel, which was created to monitor the bailouts, told Obama’s Treasury Department: ‘We can either have a rational resolution to the foreclosure crisis, or we can preserve the capital structure of the banks. We can’t do both.’”

Obama, of course, chose to preserve the capital structure of the banks at the expense of their debtors — mostly middle-class homeowners.

The Indivisible Guide’s authors avoid the fact that the Tea Party was initially inspired not merely or even primarily by an antipathy against Obama, but rather by a resentment against government collusion with elite financial interests.

They do acknowledge that Tea Party groups began “in response to the 2008 bank bailouts and President Obama’s election,” conveniently highlighting a policy enacted by Bush and not Obama. But a basic class analysis of the Tea Party — workers mostly without college degrees but with incomes which allow for home ownership, putting them on the more precarious end of the middle class — would indicate that these folks had a powerful material motivation. A fear that they would lose their homes and most of their wealth.

Had Obama prioritized bailing out families instead of bankers could he have won these folks over? We’ll never know because he never tried, and it wasn’t Tea Party agitation or phone calls to congress members that stopped him, it was his loyalty to the ruling class — a source of populist resentment that the Indivisible Guide totally ignores.