here's the article. unfortunately, can't copy the comments as they were pretty enlightening... bear in mind this is very mainstream 'liberal' definition of, and perspective on 'resistance' but still....
By Ross Barkan
Jan. 25, 2025
"When Donald Trump was inaugurated as the 47th president of the United States, it was too cold to go outside. An arctic chill had enveloped much of the country, and Trump, this time, joined history in the Capitol Rotunda. Thousands of supporters huddled in a nearby arena to watch him address the nation on a screen; there was no outdoor parade. The streets were mostly empty of his critics, and the weather could be blamed for that as well.
But if Washington had been so frigid eight years ago, it’s easy to imagine that liberals would have been willing to risk frostbite. Trump’s first inauguration, in 2017, was countered by the Women’s March, which brought nearly 500,000 people to Washington alone, making fleeting icons out of its chief organizers and standing, at the time, as the largest single day of mass protest in American history.
Trump was a crisis and an obsession back then, and the “resistance” to his administration represented the high-water mark for a certain kind of liberalism: one that was sincere and totalizing, full of fury and a thirst for action. Almost every Democrat, from the ex-presidents to the junior staffers, had a blockbuster opinion on how Trump won, why Hillary Clinton failed and where the party had to migrate. They meted out blame: James Comey, the Russians, Bernie Sanders, Jill Stein, the white working class. Every Democrat seemed to have a plan for resisting Trump, too — for ensuring his presidency would never have the patina of normalcy.
Just a few months into Trump’s presidency, Al Green, a representative from Texas, called for his impeachment, and rank-and-file Democrats reveled in the speed at which the new, incendiary president might be undone. Not a day went by, it seemed, when there wasn’t a mass march or calls for a fresh demonstration. Twitter and Instagram were hothouses for anti-Trump activism. Causes were minted quickly: standing up for immigrants (which morphed into the drive to abolish Immigration and Customs Enforcement), or defending women (which fueled the Women’s March and, later, #MeToo), or sustaining Black Lives Matter (which reached its apogee after George Floyd was killed in 2020).
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The 2010s resistance to Trump — that sprawling, seemingly irrepressible mass movement that joined everyone from Bush Republicans to Bernie socialists — was like little else in the modern era. It seems even more remarkable in retrospect than it did at the time. This was a period during which there was debate over whether Sarah Huckabee Sanders, Trump’s press secretary, should even be served at a restaurant.
The Trump movement could be equally fervent. There were obvious policy components that attracted his supporters — nativism, protectionism, railing against elites — and Trump was wise enough to jettison unpopular parts of the old Republican platform, like slashing Social Security and waging new wars overseas. But much of his appeal is personal; to be MAGA is almost to inhabit an identity category. Ardently following Trump can mean caring, suddenly, about all his particular predilections and mounting a fight against the enemy wherever possible — in product boycotts or on street corners, on social media or in NASCAR chants, in school board meetings or at election sites.
There is a term, coined by the leftist writer and academic Anton Jäger, to describe this era: hyperpolitics. It denotes the period between the mid-2010s and the early 2020s, when politics engorged much of the public discourse. This was the moment of all-encompassing, high-stakes political stances, in which people looked out to see good always fighting evil — the far right taking up its tiki torches or antifa roving the streets — and culture turned into a perpetual tinderbox. It was, at times, a performance art, and notably mimetic. Its MAGA caps and pussy hats belonged to the same lineage of letting absolute strangers know exactly what your values are.
In 2025, everything is different. The protests are relatively muted. Few Democrats talk about impeachment or sustain their alarm over incipient fascism, even with Elon Musk possibly gesticulating like a Nazi. For all the spectacle of Trump, this inauguration was, ultimately, a rather ordinary one.
Democrats do not seem as anguished or animated by this Trump Restoration as they were by his ascension; neither are they howling about their own party’s future. The left — looking up after eight years of resisting Trump and finding that in fact, he has expanded his vote share in each general election — is recalibrating. Some progressives have signaled their willingness to work with Trump if he embraces their policy aims, while centrists fret that the Republicans have outflanked them on too many cultural issues. Border policies that were decried as fascistic in Trump’s first term are gradually being embraced, or at least no longer resisted. The old discourse around the “normalization” of Trump is dead; businesses that once stood at a remove from Trump giddily treat him as an ordinary president now.
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Republicans, for their part, are still engrossed by Trump, but even their politics feel more muted — at least compared with the 2010s ascendance of the alt-right, back when Milo Yiannopoulos was preening for the cameras. As the Republican coalition has expanded, it has found it harder to hold onto its spirit of righteous insurgency. Americans are no less polarized now. But the sense that the political was entirely personal, that performing politics was vital, seems to be fading. We are exiting the era of hyperpolitics.
All flames — even the hottest and most spectacular — eventually burn out.
Perhaps the most important way to understand the causes that dominated the hyperpolitical era is that they each, in their own ways, could be seen in Manichaean terms. They were moralistic; they possessed heroes and villains. Chief among them was the struggle against Trump, which was framed first and foremost as a struggle against fascism. In the early days of 2017, there was fear over what Trump might do to the country, but this fear mingled with a certain thrill: Those resisting him could feel they were making history, taking up a cause as heroic as the last century’s antifascists had.
To be on one side and against the other was to be consumed with a style of activism that demanded righteousness. Fervor was the currency and “moral clarity” the catchword. Nuance was discarded; against Trump, the world-historical menace, who had time for it? By 2020, stopping Trump was the overriding theme of the election, with the pandemic as the inescapable backdrop. In that same year came the killing of Floyd, triggering the largest mass protests in American history.
Conservatives, too, mobilized fully on the cultural terrain, fighting over school curriculums and library contents, bashing any corporation that seemed too socially liberal, treating the consumption of ivermectin as a form of political resistance.
But those same pathologies did not take over the 2024 presidential election. It had its culture-war fodder and circumstantial peculiarity — the 11th-hour Kamala Harris ascension, Trump’s third straight nomination — but in the end it proved rather ordinary. Its discourse was dominated by inflation, immigration and even trade policy. Some post-election analyses homed in on cultural issues, especially Trump’s attack on trans rights, but the consensus, in the end, was that the electorate had cared more about material concerns, like the cost of living or the state of the southern border.
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Now that it’s done, with relatively few on the left genuinely shocked by Trump’s win, accommodation and acceptance are the new watchwords. There is chatter about deal making, whether it’s from Gretchen Whitmer, the Michigan governor who is a probable 2028 candidate, or Senator Elizabeth Warren, the Massachusetts progressive who was a leading light of the 2010s resistance. (Senate Democrats who said similar things in 2016 tended to be drowned out by those promising resistance.) Hardly anyone is being tagged as a fascist collaborator for openly musing on how to work with the second Trump administration; the old psychology around complicity, from back when visiting the White House could be equated to lunching with Goebbels, has melted away.
It’s remarkable, in fact, that despite all its fervor, the era of hyperpolitics did not leave behind much that was durable. Many of its leaders have fallen out of public view; there is no equivalent of a 1960s “civil rights generation” to carry the work forward. Black Lives Matter and the Women’s March do not stand, in 2025, as well-wired, fully functioning political organizations, able to organize mass marches at a moment’s notice.
In that hyperpolitical time, Jäger wrote, very few people were “involved in the sort of organized conflicts of interests that we would once have described, in a classical, 20th-century sense, as ‘politics.’” There were arguments about morality, not policy or governance. There was talk of expanding the welfare stare, certainly, but Sanders’s Medicare for All was not at the heart of these fights, nor was rolling back globalization, as with the 1999 protests against the World Trade Organization. The hyperpolitical left wasn’t even reliably excited by the Biden administration’s concrete actions — its industrial policy or its tranches of cash for roads, bridges and public transportation.
The drama surrounding antifascism faded; now it can seem tired and alarmist to warn that Trump will end free elections. Another standard reflex, under hyperpolitics, was to attribute much of Trump’s popularity to racism, but that argument has struggled to sustain itself: Trump has, in each successive general election, increased his vote share with nonwhite working-class voters, flipping majority-Latino counties, attracting far more Asian voters and even making inroads with Black men.
The corporations and politicians that once paid lip service to the values of alarmed liberals now feel free to reverse course. Mark Zuckerberg, the chief executive of Meta, went on Joe Rogan’s show to express his desire for a corporate culture that celebrates masculinity and “aggression.” After the election, the Massachusetts Democrat Seth Moulton reacted to the clash over trans rights — which Trump’s campaign appeared to successfully exploit — by declaring that he didn’t want his daughters “getting run over on a playing field by a male or formerly male athlete.” He was, of course, condemned by some. But the backlash he faced was nothing akin to what he might have encountered a few years ago. The activist energy has leaked away.
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The lack of grandiose rancor between Trump and the Democrats may also be manifesting within the party itself. Remarkably, there is little outward agonizing over what comes next, and what the party should resemble in the coming years. The Democratic National Committee will be the locus of opposition to Trump and chart the party’s future, but the contest for its chair has, to the surprise of many, been tame. It pits Ben Wikler, the chair of the Wisconsin Democratic Party, against Ken Martin, the chair of the Minnesota Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party. The two have much in common and few ideological disagreements. They clash on mechanics and how beholden they might be to national consultants or other state party chairs. Otherwise, beyond their ages and home states, it is difficult to tell them apart.
Such a tepid matchup is another thing that would have been unimaginable eight years ago. Back then, Keith Ellison, a congressman and Sanders acolyte, was in a seismic struggle with Tom Perez, a former Obama administration official, for leadership. Each side spoke of the existential. It was time to save the country, which meant the ideological direction of the party was freighted with importance: Would Democrats embrace uncompromising progressivism or establishmentarian liberalism? Try to reach working-class voters by railing against corporate power, or dominate the suburban vote as the party of conventionality? Across Trump’s first term, we saw an internecine war that boiled down to an argument on how best to defeat Trump himself. This was the shadow that hung over the 2020 presidential race and the upstart primaries that brought leftist superstars like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez into the public eye.
Ken v. Ben lacks those kinds of stakes, barely captivating the 450-odd D.N.C. members who will actually decide the outcome. Despite a clear sense that the habits of the last era have failed the party, some of them seem hard for Democrats to kick. Wikler recently posted on X that he would lift up the Democratic Party’s “full coalition,” checking off “Black, Latino, Native, AANHPI, LGBTQ, Youth, Interfaith, Ethnic, Rural, Veteran, and Disability representation.” It was a throwback to a kind of politics that soothed Democrats throughout the 2010s but could not halt the progression of the Trump right — the kind of identitarian inclusiveness that does more on a moral, symbolic, hyperpolitical level than it does to offer anything of political substance to the groups in question. Perhaps it was comforting to some, but for voters — and those who couldn’t decode every abbreviation or wondered why the “interfaith” were their own subset of the coalition — it was surely perplexing.
What lies ahead, it seems, is a cooling, characterized less by dejection than by a sober realization that whatever was tried before simply didn’t work. It is challenging, after all, to maintain a perpetual state of alarm and tell voters that every election might be the last one. The anti-Trump resistance, on its own terms, was a failure. Trump is here, yet again, and he’s a popular vote champion this time.
What comes next might be a more conventional politics — one still grounded in resistance, but perhaps of a quieter type. When Trump signed his executive order to end birthright citizenship, the governors and attorneys general of more than 20 states sued to stop him. Mass protest wasn’t required, nor were calls for a fresh antifascist movement. The work was merely done. Democrats seemed to be saying, implicitly, that this was enough: action without performance.
The cyclical nature of American politics promises that even Trump’s moment in the sun will last only so long. If he stumbles, 2026 may see more Democrats in Congress and an end to the G.O.P.’s ability to pass significant legislation. What is probably not soon returning, regardless, is the white-hot activism of the last decade. Politics will be the static, crackling in the background. It won’t be everything, anymore."
Topic: Changes under Trump 2.0 (Read 188630 times)