Bread Knives to a Gunfight: How there’s no real American opposition and things are worse than you thought

I have been doom-researching lately. Other folks may prefer doomscrolling, and I do my share of that, too, but I also engage in doom-researching, which is basically me hunting down various texts of history to confirm what I dread is coming. At least with history, we can see how a few of these situations panned out.

On one of my multiple towers of books in my apartment that have been started, have been half-read, or which need-to-be-read is Halik Kochanski’s doorstop of a volume, Resistance, about underground efforts across Europe to fight Hitler. I’ve already been tunneling through books on the French Resistance for a special project, and each night, I scoop up from my night table Arthur Koestler’s Scum of the Earth, his memoir about getting arrested in France as an “undesirable alien” at the start of World War Two.

You can hardly blame me for my tastes. I’m a Canadian, and the Felon-in-Chief to the south keeps threatening my country. He threatens Greenland, insisting America has to have it, and he’s threatened to invade Panama.

But what is frustrating, even at times infuriating, is the response — or lack thereof — from the American public. Yes, the U.S. no longer has the draft, which was the major spur for clean-cut, tidy, white Americans to start protesting the Vietnam War (not giving a shit for the longest time that Black Americans were sent over, and they couldn’t get college deferments). And yes, there is some degree of indignation among news commentators over Trump making imperial noises, but —

No one is hitting the streets in a big way (or even a little way) for us outside the U.S. You remember? Trump’s foreign targets?

In fact, no one is hitting the streets on a massive scale and on a regular basis at all over the U.S. becoming a fascist state.

And please don’t give me this nonsense about the rallies held by Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio Cortez. Yes, I know they mean well. A little more than a week ago, they were thrilled to get 34,000 people in Denver. But are we really supposed to be impressed by that? Are you kidding?

This past weekend, someone close to me poured scorn on the wider, greater American indifference and reminded me of two crucial events:

Hundreds of thousands turned out in Istanbul to protest Turkish president Recep Erdogan’s arrest of his political rival, Ekrem Imamoglu, the mayor of Istanbul. Check out the video of the great sea of demonstrators. And this is in a country where Erdogan has increasingly stepped on human rights and had journalists and writers arrested, put on trial, or even deported.

Remember, too, the young Kurdish woman Mahsa Amini who flouted Iran’s hijab standards and was cruelly beaten and murdered. She inspired a whole movement and series of protests that were awe-inspiring for its scale. In a country that was already infamous for its repression.

Where, my friend asked, are the American equivalents? Practically nonexistent. Those whom liberal, left and even sensibly moderate Americans look to for a way out of this mess have packed bread knives to a gun fight.

Faith is hopelessly, foolishly being put in the courts, where enforcement of federal rulings will depend on the U.S. marshal service, but as typical with the fascist playbook, Trump and his goons have already weaponized law enforcement to work for them, and the marshal service falls under the Department of Justice. Not much hope there.

Faith has also been put in the usual channels such as the Wisconsin election, but Elon Musk has already made a mockery of that process by doing the same thing he did during the presidential race, openly buying votes — which under normal circumstances would be a crime. Yet no one’s stopping him. Wisconsin’s state supreme court has already turned down a legal challenge.

And too many still don’t get it. It doesn’t matter what the outcome of the state election will be. It doesn’t matter what lower courts will rule.

Once infiltration has reached a critical mass in institutions like courts and parliaments, those institutions become a sham and no longer work as bulwarks to protect democracy. Their vestigial shells are kept around merely for validation and window dressing.

The socialist politician Giacomo Matteotti got up in the Italian parliament in 1924 and made excoriating speeches against fascism. Mussolini had him murdered. Everyone knew it, and though there was a trial for a group of assassins, three of them were given an amnesty later by Mussolini’s government. Conditions sound familiar?

There was opposition in Germany to Hitler’s regime in the early 1930s, but again, much of this was directed into the traditional channels of democracy. Everyone seems to forget that there was a trial for the Reichstag, at which the judges declared the wrongly accused innocent. There were protests over this in New York and London, and the Soviet Union applied enough pressure that Hitler had to let several of the accused, all Communist Bulgarians, fly safely out of Germany.

The point is that the window is short before a fascist regime becomes so monolithic that resistance has to go underground. The U.S. is running out of time.

Part of the problem is that Americans stick to the delusion that they are exceptional, that because theirs was one of the first modern democracies (but no, it wasn’t the first, nice try), that their institutions somehow have the magical powers to save them. Only they don’t because they’re run by ordinary human beings, some better than others, some worse, but all prone to common frailties, including self-interest. Chuck Schumer’s cowardly surrender to the GOP funding bill showed exactly how they can fail.

But worse is the notion that the most appropriate, logical path for opposition to the growing fascism is through the Democratic Party. The party that couldn’t even persuade American voters it had anything meaningful to offer them. And this, too, will be a disaster. Gawd bless that we live in a digital age, because whole forests would die if you printed out the endless media commentary and piffle about how Democrats must move to the center to “win.”

In other words, turn themselves even more into Republican Lite, with more liberal billionaire donors.

On Facebook, economist Robert Reich posted: “Every tyrant in history has sought to stifle criticism of himself and his regime. But America was founded on criticism. American democracy was built on dissent. Every institution, group, firm, or individual that surrenders to Trump’s wanton tyranny invites more of it.”

This is a fine sentiment, but as much as I greatly admire Reich, he’s terribly wrong and has bet on Bernie Sanders, who will become increasingly irrelevant.

That’s because Americans don’t really understand dissent and never have. Go to a Barnes & Noble or even an Indigo in Toronto, and you can pile up the books about Washington and the 1776 Revolution, and yeesh, year after year publishers churn out these reliable tomes that tell the same rah-rah story. Which will not help them. Which will not give them any useful instruction for the struggle ahead. You’re not fighting the British anymore with muskets, you’re facing cops decked out in army gear who have been told — and will just go along with it — that you teaching about the Freedom Riders or Stonewall is a crime. So, get down on your knees.

A march or protest is not supposed to be an end in itself. It’s a tactic that’s supposed to lead to something more, to either legislative change through increased public pressure or to complete removal of a regime by graduating to armed insurrection.

But there have been only three major groundswells of activist protest in modern times that made American legislators quake in their boots and think they could lose power.

Because that is what true protest is about: threat. The threat that we’ll storm the Bastille, climb over the barricades and haul you off a throne or from behind a desk and toss you into a cell.

Sorry to lean on the crutch of a handy quote from a movie and graphic novel but comic book writer Alan Moore was right: “People shouldn’t be afraid of their government. Governments should be afraid of their people.”

A convincing argument can be made that Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal largely came about because if this remarkable “traitor to his class” hadn’t pushed his reforms through, you could have had a socialist revolution in the United States. Which likely would have been a damn good thing. Alas, you got the watered down version of Social Democracy. Nevertheless, outrage worked.

When African-Americans rose up during the civil rights movement, they did change things and genuinely threatened the power structures, not just in the South but for the whole United States. It was only natural that when reform took too long, activism became more radicalized, and nothing scares the shit out of a bigot like Ronald Reagan, who was governor of California, than seeing Black Panthers drill with rifles. Outrage worked, though it came with costs.

It is my own minority opinion that when young people hit the streets over the Vietnam War, that for all their pious talk about trying to protect the Vietnamese, American youth frankly didn’t give a shit about them and cared more about not getting their legs blown off (which is a perfectly valid reason, just don’t pretend you have a higher, noble purpose). Be that as it may, these protests did absolutely nothing to stop the war. Nothing. Nixon, in fact, ramped up bombing and attacked a country minding its own business, Cambodia. But for a while, the federal government was genuinely scared that protests could turn into a direct challenge to the government itself.

The response was paranoid. And stupidly wrong. Because if you go through the history of protests in the post-war period, Americans will march in the streets to change policies, but as a habit, they’re generally not interested in overthrowing their own government.

It was why January 6th was so shocking. A mob pretending to be a spontaneous “storm the Bastille” revolution, which was really a disguised coup. It was why Trump sat on his ass at the White House and refused to condemn it for hours — he was hoping it would work. But his minders, who are so much smarter than him (okay, a tree stump near the Rose Garden is smarter than him) recognized the value in his running again and drafted up Project 2025.

Americans as a whole are neither politically nor emotionally prepared to actually go toe-to-toe with law enforcement in the streets. Part of this is completely understandable. Who wants to get beaten up and hauled off in a cruiser to a jail cell? Who expects it?

This is also why the violence on college campuses at pro-Palestinian demonstrations horrified supporters. They naively thought they could make their point and be left alone. I suspect it never occurred to any of them, even to professors who sometimes intervened when a cop was abusing a student, that the old civilities and rules no longer applied.

Which brings us back to the doom-researching. In Arthur Koestler’s memoir, Scum of the Earth, he describes how the French authorities were already rounding up leftist activists, many of them Europeans from elsewhere, long before the Wehrmacht marched into Paris. If you read William Shirer’s Collapse of the Third Republic, an impressively thick but gripping volume, you find out how the steady toleration of crackpot, violent right-wing movements helped create the conditions for Vichy.

For the United States, that evolution has been underway for a long time, but critics refused to see this as part of a bigger canvas until it was staring them in the face. You can read about the treatment of Professor Bruce Robbins at Columbia here, and the university’s crumbling before Trump threats has already been widely reported. Over at Johns Hopkins, as Ellie Wolfe has reported, “Employees were… told to not help community members leave or hide, if they are being sought by federal agents.”

What is truly appalling about this is that we know — as it’s been reported by multiple news services — that ICE agents are frequently acting outside the law and detaining people illegally. But the university administration is turning traditional respect for institutions and law and order on its head. In a truly fascistic move, it presumes ICE is correct and those being pursued have no choice; worse, those on campus can’t act on their conscience and to a higher civic duty.

It is American exceptionalism that will prevent some people from recognizing how this corrosive obedience has anything to do with French collaborators or Quisling in Norway during World War Two. Western culture has romanticized the Allies, and American history — with its relentless hero worship of the armed forces — has no precedent for admiring or learning from a modern, home-grown resistance. There are no real-life stories about modern civilian Americans in basements planning guerrilla attacks on the base of an occupying army.

A gazillion people in the U.S. have guns, and many bought them with the deranged notion that one day, they might have to defend themselves against the government. Surprise! A regime has come along that really does threaten their rights, only most of these idiots will gladly side with it.

All of this is why the most pathetic expression in the U.S. at the moment of “Resistance” — which doesn’t even pass the smell test for proper effort — is pointless vandalism against Tesla dealerships.

It’s truly pitiful and downright embarrassing. No coordinated effort, no proper thinking that went into why the dealerships should be targeted apart from the fact that their Musk’s business, and no way that these stupid gestures can inspire others (except to commit more acts of stupid vandalism) or can be followed up with something else.

As neighbors with the U.S., Canadians have often been forced to breathe the same political air as Americans, who let Trump suck up all the oxygen in the room every damn day. I and many others I know have already made the personal decision that we dare not go visit the U.S. because of the horror stories already coming out about detained Canadian visitors.

But your orange thug has made it clear he’s not leaving, and he wants an empire. He’s making these noises now because he believes he has the population at home sufficiently cowed. Sooner or later, like the fascist dictators of the previous century, the matter will come down to force. It’s time to face up to that reality.

And whether his threat to those of us beyond U.S. borders is imminent or delayed, we unfortunately will remain stuck monitoring how the American public reacts. We who are in the cross-hairs need sane Americans to get smarter and start forming a proper Resistance now before it’s too late for anyone.