David Frum is a never Trumper and has written an article in the Atlantic offering some advice for effectively protesting Trump. He’s still in denial by rejecting that the GOP is Trump and Trump is the GOP and he is stuck in the delusion that “conservatism” is some type of a political philosophy that Republicans believe in. We’ve all seen how quickly the GOP coalition is willing to toss in the trash any “beliefs” they claimed to have had, and are perfectly willing to trade democracy for fascism in exchange for a tax cut.
But still, he sees the authoritarianism that has consumed the White House and he’s doing what he can to fight the orange abomination. Now there’s an awful lot in his article that I disagree with, much of it seems to be an effort to try to attract the GOP regulars, which I think is a total waste of time, but he does have some suggestions we might want to think pretty hard about.
Trump wants to identify all opposition to him with the black-masked crowbar thugs who smashed windows and burned a limo on his inauguration day. Remember Trump’s tweet about stripping citizenship from flag burners?
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Don’t let him get away with it. Carry the flag.
I think this is a really good point. WE are the Americans who believe in and are fighting for democracy. We should not cede to Republicans that they are somehow patriots because they wear a flag pin, especially after they have so freely supported GOP fascism at every level of government. At the risk of being politically incorrect, those in the resistance are the true patriots in this country!!
Since his acceptance speech in Cleveland, Donald Trump has made clear that he wants to wage a Nixon-style culture war: cops against criminals, soldiers against pacifists, hard hats against hippies. Don’t be complicit. If you want to beat him, you have to reject his categories.
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If you see guys with crowbars in the vicinity of your meeting, detain them yourselves and call the cops. You’re the defenders of the Constitution, the Republic, and the Western Alliance. Act like it.
Another good point. The best way to turn the uninformed apathetic public against the resistance is to let a bunch of TV cameras start showing people smashing windows or starting fires in the street as the first story on the evening news. Violence will demoralize many in the resistance and we need to do everything we can to prevent it. Don’t give the fascists the ammunition they need to turn the public against us.
The Occupy Wall Street movement fizzled out in large part because of its ridiculously fissiparous list of demands and its failure to generate a leadership that could cull that list into anything actionable. Successful movements are built upon concrete single demands that can readily be translated into practical action…
So it should be for critics of President Trump. “Pass a law requiring the Treasury to release the President’s tax returns.” “An independent commission to investigate Russian meddling in the US election.” “Divest from the companies.” These are limited asks with broad appeal.
If we have a bunch of people calling their congresspeople, one calling for a ban on GMO’s, another calling for free college education, another asking to pardon Snowden…, our representatives are simply going to tune us out and start ignoring us. So we need to refine our message to a very few main points that will draw the public’s attention. This is hard to do since the GOP/Trump regime is firing a barrage of deplorable actions at us. But have you heard much about the “investigation” into how Russia helped perform a coup in an American election? Hearing much about the bribes foreign governments are laying down at Trump run properties?
We are getting easily distracted with the flood of BS that comes out every day. Maybe we should wrap those distractions in one of our main points and make sure we contact the media to get them back to covering the important things without them making the minister of propaganda the main news story every day.
Frum has given us a perspective we need to pay attention to. We certainly don’t want to accept most of what he’s suggesting, but we also don’t want to ignore everything. The more we learn the better we’re going to get, and we will never ever give up.
RESIST!