Fight Now, Hope Always

The assault on the liberal foundations of America feels every day like it accelerates. Not just in terms of the damage inflicted, but also in the enthusiastic tearing off of masks by which the new regime and its supporters repudiate the liberal virtues and celebrate their replacement by illiberalism, fascism, hatred, exclusion, bigotry, and the soiling of decency.

It’s a lot. And we’re just two months in, with at least 46 months to go. (Even if Trump’s health declines and he dies in office or becomes otherwise incapacitated, it’s likely only to replace a mad king with decentralized madness.)

This “a-lot-ness” can feel paralyzing. Especially because most of us can’t readily do anything about it. There are good people fighting the good fight, of course. Lawyers are busy in court challenging every illegal act. Organizations like Keshet are giving financial support to LGPTQ+ Americans fleeing unsafe red states for safer blue ones. Anti-Tesla protests, prompted by Elon Musk’s clumsy breaking of federal agencies alongside his well-documented far-right neo-Nazi sympathies, are tanking the company. Even if elected Democrats are mostly failing to live up to this moment, the resistance is resisting.

These acts, big and small, add up. Tyranny needs support, and if Trump is to succeed in fully abolishing American democracy, and American liberalism along with it, he needs constituencies onboard with his goals. The more people stand up to him, the more people fight back, the more people refuse to go along, the harder it’ll be for him to consolidate control.

But, still, most of us aren’t lawyers filing challenges to administration policies, nor are we foundations with substantial funds to help oppressed people. Nor are our economic decisions significant enough, by themselves, to bring meaningful pressure. So what can we do?

Two Approaches to a Better World

All of the above are examples of fighting back now. And they’re important. If you have opportunities to slow down the consolidation of authoritarianism, or to help those it’s targeting, you should take them. You should do what you can.

But “what you can” isn’t limited to resistance tactics, and this is good news for all of us who don’t have those opportunities immediately open to us. The fact is, our current moment will end, someday. America will move on from Trump, and it will move on from Trumpism. When that happens, I don’t know. No one does. It could be in 46 months. We could have free and fair elections in November 2028, the Democrats could sweep to power, and the undoing of the damage could begin. But it might well be longer.

Still, the end will come, and when it does, we need to know what comes next. We’ll need to move on from limiting the destruction and have a clear vision of what to build in its place.

And that’s where all of us come in. Liberalism—which is what must come next if what comes next is to be better than what we’re facing now—isn’t just a set of institutions and their rules. It’s a way of life. It’s embodied and lived values, and the principles guiding them. Liberalism is an ethic of life, and how we relate to others, and how we view ourselves within the society that defines the environment of our lives.

Being an Example of Trumpism’s Antithesis

Trumpism—and all right-wing authoritarianism—is, at its core, a kind of dreary anger. It is the corrupt psychology of people who are, in an ethical sense, failures. They don’t know how to live virtuously or well. They look out at a liberal world and hate it because they lack the inner resources and the social perspective to recognize not just its value, but its joy. Trumpism is what happens when you don’t understand that your suffering is self-inflicted, and so resent those who haven’t inflicted a similar suffering on themselves, and respond to that resentment by seeking to tear the world down.

Illiberalism is close and cramped. Liberalism is open and expansive. The liberal way of life appeals (to most of us) because it lets all of us thrive in ways that contribute to, instead of coming at the expense of, the thriving of others. To be a good person, then, both in the sense of living a good life and in the sense of being morally good, is to be liberal. To reject liberalism is to be, therefore, a bad person.

So what all of us can do, if we’re not situated to concretely fight back, is to be good people—and to show the bad people what that looks like. Even if you can’t do anything right now, right here, to fight back against the authoritarian fascism that has taken the country, you can be an example of what a liberal future looks like. You can live liberalism in a way that embodies how it works and demonstrates why that’s what a reclaimed world must look like.

We are in a fight over law and policy, but we’re also in a fight over narratives. People view the world through stories, and they define themselves through their place in them. Trumpism is a story of decline, and a story of rebirth through the narrowing of identities and the crushing of diversity. Thus Trumpism is the “palingenetic ultranationalism” that is one of the widely accepted definitions of fascism.

Liberalism must be the counter-narrative, the rejection of a story of diversity as decline, and national identity as exclusionary. But to make that narrative appealing again, and to position it as the (still) future story of America, we must make liberal characters sympathetic and admirable ones. After Trumpism falls from power, we need a wide political base committed to reestablishing the liberal narrative. 

And that’s where you come in. That’s where we all come in. The nation’s politics are illiberal—authoritarian, white nationalist, fascist—but within that we can still be liberals. We can lead liberal lives, motivated by liberal values—and relate to each other as liberals.

What to do? Show the way. Reaffirm the story of a better future by being an example, in the small moments throughout our lives these next 46 months, of what a liberal looks like, so that when this ends, and the rebuilding begins, we have a clear picture of what to aspire to.