On the social media site formerly known as Twitter, the famed Times journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones recently claimed Donald Trump’s victory was a function of “anti-Blackness” and misogyny. David Corn, the prominent Mother Jones reporter, fumed about Russia interfering with another presidential election. A random person in my feed screamed about light-skinned Latino men dooming the country. One woman said all women should stop dating and having sex with men.
It was easy to think, consuming these dispatches in the wake of Trump’s resurgence and the utter destruction of Kamala Harris’ presidential campaign, that the manias of 2016 and 2017 were repeating themselves. For months, I’ve wondered whether a potential Trump triumph could trigger the rise of a new so-called Resistance or a mass revival of the social justice left—or woke, if I find that term a bit wearying and imprecise. Now that Trump has won a far larger victory than he did eight years ago, would we be returning to a version of those times, when Trump’s madness drove his opponents all the madder and men like Robert Mueller were sanctified?
The answer, I’ve found, is an emphatic no. The above social media posts were liked enough, but they were the equivalent of hearty shouts at a windswept sea. In deep blue New York City, where I was born and still reside, there is no such thing as a second Trump resistance. There is no marching, no braying, no promises for new anti-fascist movements. No one is calling for another women’s march (there’s still time) and no one is talking about abolishing Immigration and Customs Enforcement. No one is demanding the police get defunded. The social-justice groups put out their statements but are otherwise quiet. Life, it seems, has simply gone on.
This is not to undersell the damage a Trump restoration might cause. Trump’s courts and bureaucracy could further undercut abortion rights. He will gut environmental regulations. His corporate tax cuts will worsen income inequality. His Justice Department might go on a ghoulish revenge tour. Social-safety-net programs for the poor can be weakened. New money (Elon Musk) and old money (the Kochs) can run roughshod over the federal government. Joe Biden’s progressive economic legacy is in peril. And those who believe Trump will offer more for the Palestinians must remember he’s the same president who farmed out Middle Eastern policy to his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, who remains a rabid Israel hawk.
None of this, though, amounts to the end of democracy. It seems the American people have called the bluff of media elites. They cared most about bringing down the cost of groceries and making housing cheaper. Trump has no serious plans for making everyday life cheaper—he’s attacked housing development in suburbia and seems to believe tariffs will somehow make domestic goods cost less—but he, unlike the Democrats, wasn’t in power these last four years. Across the world, incumbent parties have been getting punished, and the Democratic Party was no exception. It didn’t help that Democrats spent several years calling inflation a myth or downplaying concerns by pointing to the relative health of the American economy. Voters plainly were alienated.
The lack of a new 2017-style resistance is not to be bemoaned; it speaks to the growing maturity of America and the realization, I hope, that such histrionics were ultimately unsuccessful. The anti-Trump movement lost. Haranguing the media for “normalizing” Trump and demanding that Democrats keep calling Trump a liar or fascist did nothing. Trump simply came back stronger. The old anti-Trump resistance, a cottage industry of aggrieved Republicans nostalgic for the Bush years and MSNBC liberals who wailed about the evil Orange Man and his subservience to Vladimir Putin, had no coherent message beyond Trump’s inherent unsuitability for office and their belief that voters, over time, could be browbeaten into blindly supporting Democrats. The culmination of it all was Trump becoming the first Republican to win the popular vote in 20 years.
None of this amounts to the end of democracy. It seems the American people have called the bluff of media elites.
The Trump-era protests were largely unfocused and self-satisfied. They had limited structure and deficient leaders—if they possessed leaders at all. The Women’s March crumbled away. Black Lives Matter devolved. Serious organizers sat at the helm of the civil rights and feminist movements of the 1960s and 1970s, and material change was won. The upsurges of the 2010s and 2020, when George Floyd was killed, amounted to spectacle and little else. Some laws did change on the criminal justice front, and progressive prosecutors were swept into office, but there was little thought given to the long-term, to building durable organizations that would outlive the boom times. Movements cannot rise on froth alone.
This hyperpolitics, as the academic Anton Jäger has called it, lived online. Its manna was the pre–Elon Musk Twitter and Facebook when it wasn’t suppressing news links. The digital realm allowed for fast organizing and faster disappearance. Posting felt like its own act of resistance. Tweet hard enough, the psychology went, and good things might happen. Trump, then, was Twitter’s king, and the media hung on every demented dispatch. The resistance never ran out of outrage. It was a toxic cycle that pleased everyone. Trumpists could brag about owning the libs. Liberals could feel the catharsis of an ocean of retweets.
Little of it was tethered to material conditions. A few leftists offered an alternative path but couldn’t quite rise above the tide. Bernie Sanders, in 2016, had the correct instincts; he understood where the nation was headed and spoke to some of the same anguish and distrust in elites that would lead to Trump’s presidency. Sanders ran on class struggle, denouncing free-trade agreements, and the deindustrialization of the Midwest. He promised universal health care. He didn’t dismiss identity concerns—he had marched in the civil rights movement, and his record on social justice was strong—but he believed it was economics that would unite the white, Hispanic, Black, and Asian working classes of America. The Hillary Clinton campaign dismissed him as a racist, and the Democratic establishment strained to suppress him as much as they could. Clinton won more votes, but Sanders upsetting her in Michigan was the warning shot that the smug former first lady chose to ignore. We know what happened next.
Among despondent Democrats today, there is much chatter about alternative media. Some think Musk’s X fed so much disinformation into the electorate that all of these voters chose Trump. They claim that the correct information would have saved Harris, as if a campaign devoid of a message or genuine rationale for running just needed media coverage that was a bit more sycophantic and widespread. It is true that the collapse of regional newspapers has fed conspiracy theories and, in some form, enabled a charlatan like Trump. It is also true that in the largest media market in America, New York City, Trump won the highest share of any Republican candidate since the 1980s. But if Democrats actually care about the alternative and the dissident, they had their chance and blew it. In 2020, Joe Rogan endorsed Bernie Sanders. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez threatened to un-endorse Sanders because he went on Rogan’s podcast. This was the hectoring, condescending, insular Democratic Party at its worst, and the red map of 2024 is a reminder of all that squandered.
Will Trump, as many liberals and a slew of internet famous historians have promised, deliver fascism? No. There will be elections in 2026, and again in 2028. The dying embers of the resistance might wish otherwise, if only to be right about something for once. There is much, of course, to resist and combat in Trump’s governance. He will have full control of Congress. The policy that comes from that government could immiserate the working class. Resisting it all will require the kind of discipline and sobriety that the 2010s ideological warriors never learned.