In Star Trek, the Borg have a saying, “Resistance is futile.” No exclamation point, they say it matter-of-factly. The Borg are a cold, calculating collective. They care nothing for individual life, species, or civilizations. Their goal is to extract whatever they can from whomever they meet and move on to the next victim. They are a lot like Trump and his people running the US government right now. Naturally, when faced with such an existential threat as the Borg or Trump, people want to resist whether it’s futile or not.
The thing is, unlike the Borg where people can resist with literal fighting on the battlefield, most people don’t know how to resist Trump. Most of the people who want to resist are committed to nonviolence. Literal fighting on the battlefield is out. Instead, people are trying all kinds of things. Some are posting on social media. Some are spamming government emails. But the three most organized forms of resistance I’m hearing about are protesting, boycotting, and calling for a constitutional convention. All three have major problems, though, which I’ll talk about in turn.
Traditional protesting, where a bunch of people show up at the capitol waving flags and banners, is probably the most impotent way to resist. In order to work, it needs to generate sympathy among the people with the power to change things. The best way to do that is to be willing to suffer for your cause. The protesters need to be willing to get beaten up by the cops. They need to be willing to go to jail. Right now, the people with the power to change things, Trump and Congress and the Courts, are all controlled by the same people and they feel no sympathy for the protesters. It’s possible that other countries may feel sympathy for the protestors, but the early signs are that they will be unwilling to try to exert power over the country with the largest economy and largest military on the planet. The main thing protesting will do is make the protesters feel better.
Boycotting in and of itself isn’t a bad idea, but again, the boycotters need to be willing to suffer. There’s all this talk of buying nothing on February 28th. One day of boycotting will do exactly nothing. There’s also talk of a series of three-day boycotts, each boycotting a different company. Amazon would get boycotted for three days, then Walmart would get boycotted for three days, then Target, etc. Again, this will do nothing. Those big companies can wait us out without a problem. In order to do something, the boycotts would have to last weeks or even months. The Mongomery Bus Boycott lasted more than a year. Basically, a boycott has to last until the demands are met, and I don’t see that happening.
Finally, there’s the idea of a constitutional convention. There are several problems with this. First, CNN reports that Trump’s approval rating is at 47%. That’s higher than it ever was during his first term. Almost half the population of the United States is happy with the way Trump is running things. That makes the current, legal way of changing the constitution a non-starter. We’d need at least 75% of the people on our side to call the convention. If we went around the current constitutional method of change, what would that even look like? The people calling for a constitutional convention don’t seem to be saying. They’re also not saying what they hope to get out of the convention. Are we talking a whole new government? I’m all for that, but what would it look like? (Some of my suggestions are here, here, here, and here.) Without these answers, it’s unlikely that the 53% of people who don’t approve of Trump would come together as one.
This has been a very pessimistic piece. I suspect that most Americans are not willing to suffer to get their way. And I don’t see how a constitutional convention would work. Maybe I’m wrong on all three counts. In fact, I hope I’m wrong on all three counts. But I don’t think I am.
So, is resistance futile? I don’t know, but I want to say no, it’s not futile. We just lack vision. In my last post, The United States Is a Pariah State and Should Be Treated as Such – Nutmegger Daily, I suggested that the rest of the world could help us resist. A general strike might help. Unfortunately, I don’t have good answers, though. It’s probably a multi-pronged approach that’s necessary. As distasteful as they may be, we need Congress and the courts to resist. We need the people to resist. We need other nations to resist. We need to sway the Trump approvers to our point of view. We need to do everything we can. It may be futile, but we have to try.
