Irresistible Fools

Our next meeting is on April 1st. Really.

In our first two meetings, we talked about the meaning of democracy and the nature of civic virtue. The theme this time will be resistance.

Since we last met, the pace of the regime’s descent into authoritarianism has accelerated. We have seen this regime and its henchmen :

• deport people it accuses of being “gang members” to El Salvador
• defy federal court injunctions
• arrest green card holders
• detain, abuse and deport visitors to the United States
• continue to escalate tensions with our closest international allies
• use the White House as the setting for an ambush of the president of Ukraine
• snuggle up to Putin
• cut off weapons deliveries and and intelligence sharing to Ukraine
• attempt to dismantle the Department of Education
• silence the Voice of America
• squelch dissenting voices on university campuses by extorting cooperation from pliant university administrators
• bully law firms that represent(ed) people the regime does not like
• impose a de facto “whites only” and “men only” policy in the celebration of American heroes
• violate federal law by sharing classified documents about military actions on Signal

And that, of course, is not even close to an exhaustive list—but it gives us an idea of why we feel so exhausted.

We can group these into a few categories. This isn’t complete; it’s something we should think more about, but this is a start:

• Attacks on people who oppose the regime
• Attacks on people whom the regime despises
• Attempts to eliminate institutional resistance
• Substituting parastatal organizations (DOGE, MAGA) for the legally constituted institutions of the state
• Attacks on the legal system in order to make it impossible to hold the regime accountable

For the next meeting, I propose that we think about what effective resistance actually looks like. That means thinking about a number of different aspects of resistance; I propose that we decide at the beginning of our gather what we focus on. Here are some questions we might consider.

• Who is most at risk?
• How do we help people who are most in danger and most in need of support—those who have been directly targeted by the regime ((immigrants, people of color, women, LGBTQ+ people, people who stood up for the rule of law)?
• How do we assess the risks of resistance—for ourselves and for others?
• How do we make certain that people opposed to the regime can continue to communicate safely and openly?
• How do we mitigate the risks of resistance?
• How do we help institutions do better?
• How do we help people understand the gravity of our situation?
• How do we help people in government fulfill their obligations to protect the rights of all people?
• How do we build for a better future?

That’s a lot.

This may all seem overwhelming, but there are many examples of resistance movements, some of which won outright: the anti-slavery movement in the United States, notably African-American resistance; desecration in post-war America; anti-colonial movements, especially in India; Yugoslav resistance to Nazi occupation; and French resistance during the Occupation.

Despite the enormous range of things that we might look at, I’m recommending only one article, a short piece that’s freely available:

Blumenson, Martin. “The Early French Resistance in Paris.” Naval War College Review 30, no. 1, Special Issue (1977): 64–72. https://www.jstor.org/stable/44641789

I pick this not because France is a paradigm for successful resistance, but because it’s pretty digestible, it discusses the early stages of resistance in France, and, well, because it’s open access and thus readily available to anyone.

Please get in touch if you need more information about the meeting. It’s at 7 pm, April 1, at the usual place. Please send an email to admin@firsttuesdayalliance.org if you need further information.