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maga extremists
Think Trump's Tyranny Can't Be Opposed or Stopped? Think Again
The MAGA movement will not be able to continue without the support and acquiescence of those whose lives and future it is destroying.
Jan 29, 2025
U.S. President Donald Trump and his MAGA supporters now control the presidency; the Congress; the administrative agencies of the federal government; the Supreme Court; and the U.S. military, intelligence, and security apparatus. He will be able to call on support from a wide swath of the public and from a cadre of armed vigilantes and groups organized for violence and intimidation. He dominates much of the media and is in a position to intimidate much of the rest. He has the support of a large sector of corporations and the wealthy. He has a demonstrated willingness and ability to use not just the legal instruments of government but also violence and intimidation, criminal methods, and coups. The official opposition to him within the electoral arena is in many cases weak, feckless, and discredited. So how is it possible that his domination can ever be overcome?
There is a movement emerging in response to the MAGA threat. But is it even possible for this emerging movement to develop the power it will need to counter a Trump tyranny?
Gandhi once wrote, “Even the most powerful cannot rule without the cooperation of the ruled.” A Trump tyranny will not be able to continue without the support and acquiescence of those whose lives and future it is destroying. It will only be able to pursue its destructive course if they enable or acquiesce in it. A movement can overcome the most powerful regime if it can withdraw that cooperation.
Social Self-Defense means defending those who are threatened as a way both to defend them from injustice and to defend our common interest as people—as members of society.
But how can that power be concretely realized? There are several ways that resistance to Trump’s MAGA regime can exercise significant power:
- Constituent power: the ability of a mobilized electorate to influence leaders whose own power depends on election.
- Protest power: the ability of masses of people to demonstrate the large numbers and willingness to act of those who share their views.
- Disruptive power: the ability to exact costs on powerful institutions by disrupting their functioning through civil disobedience, strikes, and other forms of direct action.
- People power: the mobilization of an entire society to withdraw support from a regime in order to bring it to an end through a nonviolent uprising or “social strike.”
There are no guarantees that such power can be mobilized in a way that will contain the Trumpian onslaught, let alone bring it to an end. Trump and his coterie appear to be committed to permanent rule by their followers and their ideology. To accomplish that they need to destroy all possible barriers to their domination. They must break down the institutions of democracy that might stand in their way, for example by restricting the right to vote. They need to eviscerate the institutions of law, medicine, civil service, journalism, and other relatively independent bases of potential opposition. They have to prevent economic actors, including corporations and unions, from pursuing their own self-interest rather than conforming to the regime’s demands. They need to intimidate and silence those who might expose their lies and abuses. They must demolish political obstacles, not only from the Democratic Party, but within the Republican Party as well. They need to paralyze the population with fear and entice it with the promise of a better life, or at least with bread and circuses.
While this program for MAGA domination promises enormous power, it also poses enormous vulnerabilities for its perpetrators. By making almost every individual and constituency a potential victim of its onslaught, it is also likely to generate a vast, diverse, and potentially unified opposition. Its program is an attack not just on one or another group, but on society as a whole—on the very practices and relationships that allow us to live together in a peaceful and constructive way. They are undermining the foundations of a free and ordered society. They are dismantling the basic practices that make life something other than a war of all against all. And they are hell-bent on destroying the natural conditions on which our life on Earth depends.
The MAGA regime threatens immigrants, African Americans, Muslims, workers, women, children, the elderly, the disabled, LGBTQ+ people, all who depend on government for their health and well-being, and the environment on which we all depend for our very existence. Indeed, it threatens all that holds us together as a society. The resistance to that onslaught is therefore not just the defense of one or another group, but a defense of society, indeed of the very possibility of society. We the people—society—need to defend ourselves against this threat and bring it to an end. We need what resisters to authoritarian regimes elsewhere have called “Social Self-Defense.”
The term “Social Self-Defense” is borrowed from the struggle against the authoritarian regime in Poland 40 years ago. In the midst of harsh repression, Polish activists formed a loose network to provide financial, legal, medical, and other help to people who had been persecuted by the police or unjustly dismissed from their work. Calling themselves the Committee for Social Self-Defense (KOR), they aimed to fight “political, religious, and ideological persecution”; to “oppose breaches of the law”; to “provide help for the persecuted”; to “safeguard civil liberties”; and to defend “human and civil rights.” KOR organized free trade unions to defend the rights of workers and citizens. Its members, who insisted on operating openly in public, were soon blacklisted, beaten, and imprisoned. They nonetheless persisted, and nurtured many of the networks, strategies, and ideas that came to fruition in the gigantic Solidarity union—and ultimately in the dissolution of repressive regimes in Poland and elsewhere in Eastern Europe.
Social Self-Defense is the protection of that which makes our life together on Earth possible. It includes the protection of the human rights of all people; protection of the conditions of our Earth and its climate that make human life on Earth possible; the constitutional principle that government must be accountable to law; and global cooperation to provide a secure future for people and planet.
The individuals and groups who oppose the Trump agenda are as diverse as the targets that agenda threatens.
In the face of MAGA assault, protecting individuals, groups, and society as a whole go hand in hand. The attacks on individuals and groups are a threat not only to those directly targeted, but to our ability to live together in our communities, our country, and our world. It is a threat to all of us as members of society. Protecting those specific constituencies who are most threatened is essential for protecting our common interests as people. Social Self-Defense means defending those who are threatened as a way both to defend them from injustice and to defend our common interest as people—as members of society. Social Self-Defense means we’ve got each other’s backs.
Historians emphasize that there were great political divisions among the KOR activists who first developed the idea of Social Self-Defense. But they were able to act together around the agenda of resisting the Polish regime’s attacks on workers and society as a whole. The individuals and groups who oppose the Trump agenda are as diverse as the targets that agenda threatens. Trump and his supporters have the potential capacity to play them off against each other and to make deals with them one by one. There will be enormous pressures on advocacy organizations, movements, parties, and even activists themselves to sell each other out.
Social Self-Defense is a means to unify ourselves around mutual aid and around our common interests. It defines Trumpism not only as a series of separate threats to different sectors, constituencies, and policy agendas, but also as a unified—and therefore unifying—common threat. It allows us to use each action and campaign against one or another Trumpite abuse as a way to strike a blow against the MAGA project as a whole. Social Self-Defense does not annul but does transcend the rivalries of Democrats vs. Republicans and of Left vs. Right. It is a frame that can help unify those who should be acting in common to overcome the MAGA juggernaut.
This is the first of a series of Strike! Commentaries on social self-defense against the MAGA juggernaut. It originally appeared on the Labor Network for Sustainability website on January 21, 2025.
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Don't Wait for Trump's Attack, People. It's Time to Go on Offense
Trumpy Dumpty is thin on the facts, policies and programs, but he is as cunning as a hungry shark in detecting weakness in his opponents, especially the Democratic Party.
Dec 14, 2024
Now is the time to prepare anticipatory strategies against what the vengeful, avaricious, lawless Trump and his Trumpsters have boasted out loud about daily. Don’t wait until Trump’s inauguration. A short list of suggestions follows:
- The civil servants and their unions better organize a personal presentation to their new bosses, most of whom are ignorant about the agencies they head other than to want to dismantle or enfeeble them. Be proactive or you will be always playing defense.
- Daring peaceful resisters in marches and rallies, beware of infiltrating provocateurs promoting violence. If you’re engaging in non-violent, civil disobedience, beware that Trump can’t wait to call you “terrorists” and use unbridled police power for arrests and prosecutions demanding long sentences.
- Trump and the Trumpsters, with his militias in waiting, as on the border, will contrive a phony threat from what they will label domestic “terrorists” to pulverize or intimidate their opponents. Trump thrived on the MAGA extremists and will give them “red meat,” if only to keep them occupied and loyal. They will demand action based on Trump’s wild campaign rhetoric.
- Being a convicted criminal himself, Trump will take federal cops off the corporate crime beat, reduce taxes on the wealthy and giant companies, ignore climate violence, add more bloat to the wasteful military budget, and increase pandemic threats with fake dismissals of looming perils. Don’t count on the business guys. They don’t like daily chaos, disruption and uncertainty that goes with Trump’s insatiable daily ego that must be fed constantly, but most CEOs won’t criticize Trump.
- Trump fears the Israeli lobby and their genocidal leader Netanyahu. His first term proved that in spades. Now he’ll back whatever Netanyahu, the Israeli war criminal, does. Annexing the West Bank, demanding more billions from American taxpayers to continuing the bombing, killing and pillaging in the Middle East region is just the tip of the iceberg.
- Lastly, Trump will drive a level of White House dictatorial lawlessness never before seen. His rhetoric and record strengthen this prediction. Remember his July 2019 declaration “With Article II, I can do whatever I want as President.” He acted on that all the time. (See prior columns at nader.org and also read “Wrecking America: How Trump’s Lawbreaking and Lies Betray All” by Mark Green and Ralph Nader).
The anticipatory strategies here must be diverse, covering all three branches of government, and vectored toward the GOP. The citizen groups may have to work weekends, alongside the labor unions hated by Trump.
Trumpy Dumpty is thin on the facts, policies and programs, but he is as cunning as a hungry shark in detecting weakness in his opponents, especially the Democratic Party. Attached is a fable I wrote in 2022 that portrays how he might think about the Party of the Donkey. Given what happened up to and on November 5, 2024, it’s still useful to read today.
What Could Donald Trump Be Thinking About the Democratic Party?
October 21, 2022
Imagine Donald Trump dining with two of his supposed political advisers. Being an advisor to Donald means you soak up Donald’s political comments and feed them back to him. At this dinner, Donald was spouting off about the Democratic Party.
“Hey guys, know why the GOP is ahead in the polls?” “Why?” the two advisors replied in unison. Donald responded, “Because the Democrats are busy losing all by themselves, backtracking out of fear. Fearing a Party they are supposed to be fighting is what I call ‘beating themselves.’”
“Tell us more,” urged the two advisers.
“The Democrats are beyond stupido. They’ve contracted out their campaigns to consultants who, with their loyalties to their other corporate clients, have sold the Dems a strategy of caution – otherwise known as cutting off your cajones. Candidates without balls can’t think for themselves and just follow the script. Lots of Dems don’t want to appear with Bernie Sanders – the one guy I didn’t want to debate – who gets huge votes in conservative Vermont. What chickens!”
“This is all so beautiful, so gorgeous for us. Dems without balls means they campaign every day with their political antennae flailing, afraid they’ll say the politically incorrect phrase and upset the word police or deviate from their consultant’s finger-waving “no-no’s” if they want to rake in big money.”
“Imagine me contracting out my run to a consultant. ‘Donald, say this, don’t do that, do this, don’t say that.’ And paying them big bucks. Never! My people want the unfiltered Donald. That’s why they turn out in standing-room-only droves compared to the empty-seat Dems.”
Adviser #1 pipes up: “And the NY Times reports that the Dems are so afraid of our blaming them for inflation that they’ve shut up on their most popular ‘bread and butter’ positions, like freedom for women, health and safety for kids, good jobs and pay for more workers, increasing Social Security benefits. You know ‘bleeding heart stuff.’”
“Stupido Fabuloso!” Trump sneered, almost choking on his sirloin steak. “They don’t know who they are or worse who they WERE! FDR clobbered the Republicans with Social Security, minimum wage, and unemployment compensation, and he pushed for unions, taxed the rich and went after business crooks. He taunted the GOP. They called him a ‘traitor to his class,’ and he said he welcomed their hatred.”
“These issues are still very popular today, but the Dems aren’t pulling their base. The idiots even let me take the word ‘populist’ from their shaky hands – me the very core of Big Business.”
“They’ve mostly gagged themselves, leaving poor little Joe Biden alone talking about his infrastructure/jobs projects. Some Dems are so cowardly they don’t want to be seen campaigning with Delaware Joe.”
Adviser #2: “The Dems don’t learn from The Trumper. In politics, you got to boast. Politics is fatal for wimps.”
Trump cupped his mouth adding – “Jeez, I boast about things that aren’t even true, just like my casino ads. The Dems aren’t puffing about what is true. On paper, they support FDR’s New Deal updated to give everyone health insurance and voting rights for everyone, even felons. But where it counts – on the road, they’re in a driverless car. Ha, ha, ha – see? They’re beating themselves.”
“Because we are with the Winners, we’re against all the ‘communist’ things the masses drool over. And we are still winning. Why? Because we are masters at controlling what the media wants to cover – outrageous charges, flagrant behavior and all kinds of red meat the profit-obsessed media barons can’t resist. I told them as much in 2016. Still, they bit. Hilarious.”
“The GOP has got the offensive down to a science. Driving Dems nuts with ‘critical race theory’ (what’s that anyway?), ‘defunding the police’ (hah, we’ve defunded the federal regulator cops big time), ‘open borders,’ ‘radical judges,’ ‘over-regulation,’ ‘high taxes,’ ‘socialism’ – these are short enraging words that stick with our people. Like deer in the headlights, the Dems freeze, mumble and fret. Remember our old mentor Lee Atwater who said ‘When you’re explaining, you’re losing.’”
Adviser #1: “The big hole the Dems dug came long ago when they wrote off half the country as being too conservative and stopped spending money on their candidates in red districts. They don’t have the energy we have – look at how we’ve beaten them in the gerrymandering fights. It’s the energy gap. Remember 2009-2010?”
Trump broke in: “David, don’t get carried away. The biggest thing was their stupidity. Dems would spend more on a single Pennsylvania Senate seat than on six Senate seats combined in the Mountain states. Those states used to have Democratic Senators. Now GOP dominates there. Year after year, they don’t listen. I don’t listen either, to be frank. But I’m a very stable genius, while they are, as New Yorkers say, ‘Tone deaf.’”
Adviser #2: “Also the Republicans listen to their outside allies. Like Heritage, Cato, and Norquist. The Dems lean on their control-freak consultants and give progressive groups the cold shoulder. I have a progressive friend who tells me horror stories. She just gave me a copy of a blockbuster collection of very practical ways – down to the rebuttals and slogans – the Dems can use to landslide us in November. I started sweating until she told me most of the Dems are not rushing to use it. Most don’t even know about the two dozen citizen leaders who put it together, edited down to fiercely powerful persuasions by wordsmith Mark Green – a long-time Dem from New York City. It’s available to the world on winningamerica.net, but Green is confident that we will never pick it up.”
Trump: “Hmm, Winning America? – Nice ring to it. This fellow Green. I remember meeting him at a fundraiser when he was running for Mayor twenty years ago. He was all business, no small talk. He scared me then.”
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Trump Is Primed to Lead the American Counter-Revolution
The MAGA/NatCon crowd on the verge of taking over government have made speech after speech outlining their ideas to wield radical violence on behalf of objectives as wide-ranging as eliminating the FBI to invading “sanctuary cities.”
Nov 26, 2024
The revolution may not be televised, but the counter-revolution sure will be.
In this new political era, the dominant military power in the capitalist world-system is ruled by a Venn Diagram of baddies—ethnonationalists, oligarchs, tech bros, and national security hawks. These elites take their opportunity to direct state power from the legitimacy afforded a single man. One of the only common elements about the diverse (but majority white and male) votes cast for Donald Trump is that they all saw Washington liberal elites as the enemy.
To put it differently, Trump voters were against one set of ruling-class elites and so cast their vote for a man who has surrounded himself with a different cadre of ruling-class elites, all of whom seem to fashion themselves as enemies of the previous dominant set. MAGA politics marks the emergence of political counter-elites with nothing short of revolutionary ambitions.
But what does that mean? Why is nobody talking about what is obviously emerging—counter-elites who are literally talking about revolution?
Defining Terms
In parsing the distinctions and overlaps among conservatives, reactionaries, and the forgotten category of counter-revolutionaries, everything is at stake.
Everybody’s go-to text today for these terms and concepts—terms that typologize the political right—seems to be Corey Robin’s The Reactionary Mind. A fine book, but a product of its moment (2011) and definitely a distinct take rather than a consensus view about the right. Joe Mackay has also done some work parsing conservative and reactionary in particular.
George Lawson, meanwhile, has made a convincing case that in the context of the age of empires, “counter-revolution” was about countering the revolutionary projects that emerged after the French Revolution. This gave counter-revolution back then a Burkean quality, which is to say conservative in the literal sense—preserving the old order, tradition, and distributions of power. This is the conventional way of understanding counter-revolution.
But in the West right now, and specifically in America, there is no left-revolutionary situation to counter. This is why the dust-binned work of Arno Mayer might be the ideal way to make sense of where this current configuration of right-wing political power is taking America.
Seen through a Mayer-ian lens, Project 2025 is not “weird”—it’s a field manual for counter-revolution on the institutional and policy terrain.
Mayer wrote many classics, but the one that really speaks to our moment is Dynamics of Counter-Revolution. In that book, he offers three types of right-wing “forces of order” with different agendas. Two are straightforward but deserve explaining, while the third is both more controversial and more important to grasp right now.
He defined conservative thought as “designed to give coherence to the defense of traditional social, economic, and political institutions and of traditional aesthetics, morals, and manners.” Reactionaries, meanwhile, “advocate a return to a mythical and romanticized past. In this past they seek the recovery and restoration of institutions…which sustained a hierarchical order of privileges and prerogatives.”
Mayer’s counter-revolution is particularly relevant to the current moment. He defined this concept as the forces of “order, hierarchy, authority, discipline, obedience, tradition, loyalty, courage, sacrifice, and nationalism [that wield revolutionary methods,] mobilizing and regimenting superannuated, unhinged, and inert individuals and groups… that enables them to become a new but claimant political counterelite.”
Unpacking counter-revolutionaries even further, Mayer goes on to say that they combine “the glorification of traditional attitudes and behavior patterns with the charge that these are being corrupted, subverted, and defiled by conspiratorial agents and influences… its constructive purposes remain deliberately inchoate and equivocal.”
It is common to use reactionary or far-right to describe MAGA and NatCon politics. These guys are no Edmund Burkes, after all. Neither of these terms is wrong, but they say nothing about counter-revolution, which is something they actively talk about. To wit:
You Say You Want A Revolution, Well, You Know
It’s not just that they invoke revolution in their rhetoric. Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) talked about revolution rhetorically while running for president, but proposed a pretty gradualist reform agenda… and a non-violent one at that.
The MAGA/NatCon crowd on the verge of taking over government, by contrast, have made speech after speech outlining their ideas to wield radical violence on behalf of objectives as wide-ranging as eliminating the FBI to invading “sanctuary cities” to bombing Mexico and initiating mass deportations of immigrants from everywhere. Seen through a Mayer-ian lens, Project 2025 is not “weird”—it’s a field manual for counter-revolution on the institutional and policy terrain.
The “fascist debate” about MAGA has been frustrating and unhelpful. Mayer’s category of counter-revolutionary, though, captures important features, only some of which are present in the “fascist” discourse:
- Nationalist
- Glorification of tradition
- Authority
- Hierarchy
- Counter-elite elite
- A need to purge “agents” who have corrupted the nation
- Mobilizing “unhinged and inert” groups of people
That checks out!
According to Theda Skocpol in States and Social Revolutions, revolution consists of “rapid, basic transformations of a society’s state and class structures… accompanied by and in part carried through by class-based revolts from below.” Counter-revolution, then, is a similarly rapid and radical transformation of the world but with two distinctions. One is that it comes from the top (by elites) even more than from below. The other is that the content of the revolution, following Mayer, is reactionary.
And now that MAGA has more institutional power to transform America than any group in the past 100 years, the future will look less like Nazi Germany 2.0 than a project of counter-revolution to transform the social order and existing distributions of power in society. American government will be ethnonationalist. It will be patriarchal. It will be violent. It will redound to the benefit of oligarchs. And it will threaten to destabilize the world.
Disturbingly, the architecture for this counter-revolutionary project has much source material to draw on in the form of existing U.S. foreign policy and the existing balance of forces between capital and labor. Even the counter-revolutionary’s impetus to dehumanize its enemies has gotten a substantial boost from the dehumanization that permeates U.S. policy, from the Mexico border to Palestine.
That “normal” U.S. politics has gifted the counter-revolution so much of what it needs to wreak havoc on the world should prompt a re-examination of what is normal.
Is “Counter-Revolution” Right?
Mayer’s various arguments are not beyond critique. His analysis of counter-revolution ties closely to the making of World War I, which he saw as an external solution to domestic political conflict between left and right. But all the belligerents in World War I were not polarized in the same ways when it came to left-right conflict. And although there is evidence that the world war had domestic political motivations, there’s not enough evidence to suggest it was more important than alternative motivations (inter-imperial competition, the boomerang effect of colonialism, the balance of power’s inevitable system failure, the “cult of the offensive,” national status pathologies, etc).
A slightly amended argument would carry more weight: World War I tilted Western politics in favor of counter-revolutionaries and reactionaries, even if that was not its primary purpose. It’s hard to argue with that.
Nevertheless, what makes Mayer notable is the very shape of these important arguments. He’s bringing together an analysis of geopolitics with left-right politics. His formulations are compatible with neoclassical realism in international relations but have much more meaning and content than that theoretical tradition.
And in the final analysis, if Mayer’s counter-revolutionary diagnosis applies to the current admixture of ethnonationalists, oligarchs, tech bros, and national security bros, then the political horizons of the progressive left are going to have to transcend donating money to the Democratic Party.
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