The fundamental things apply / As time goes by
Woman needs man / And man must have his mate / That no one can deny
It's still the same old story / A fight for love and glory / A case of do or die
The world will always welcome lovers / As time goes by
Oh yes, the world will always welcome lovers / As time goes by
"As Time Goes By," 1931

There's a lot of gender happening lately, isn't there? Men and women are increasingly politically polarized;  in the most recent election young women voted Democrat by a 12-point margin compared to men. Abortion rights and trans rights are everywhere on the ballot. MeToo ripped the veil of silence off an epidemic of rape and sexual harassment across elite society. Every once in a while an angry boy buys an assault rifle and murders a crowd of people; afterwards he is found ranting about "Beckys" and "Stacys,” "Chads" and "the black pill."  Meanwhile thinkpiece after thinkpiece is generated on the "epidemic of male loneliness;" meanwhile the number of never-married women has increased from under 25% to over 30% since 1990. The world's richest man, who has recently spent a quarter of a billion dollars to buy himself a seat in the next presidential administration, stays up all night posting about how boobs in video games are too small these days.

And then of course there's the birthrates thing. They're going down (you may have heard). This phenomenon in particular is an obsession across the right. Of course one gets the sense that any conservative who starts going on about birthrates is about .05 blood alcohol content away from screaming out the fourteen words: "we must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children." They view declining birthrates not as an economic or a civilizational problem but a racial one: their "race" is dying out.

This has made the topic of birthrates a bit taboo in liberal circles: no one wants to go near that dumpster fire. And yet. Consider South Korea, where the birth rate is at .8 per woman and falling. In other words, South Korea is a nation that is going to halve in size each generation. Doesn't that strike you as a bit... odd? Like maybe this is a symptom of some deeper problem?

It is the contention of this essay that it is. The problems just reviewed are not many crises, but one: a crisis in gender relations. The problem is real, and it has a material cause—but not a material solution. We can start by talking about the birthrates thing, for unlike social media outrage it is measurable.

The birthrates thing

For most of human history, the population was relatively stable. Birthrates were enormously high—the average premodern woman would spend most of her adult life nursing or pregnant—but death rates were equally high, especially among children. This was the age of the Malthusian trap, in which any living standard gains from increases in productivity would rapidly be eaten up by new mouths.

Around two hundred and fifty years ago, give or take, we escaped the trap. Productivity per worker began skyrocketing. Modern abundance—and especially modern science in the form of sewerage, clean water, public sanitation, vaccines—caused death rates to plummet. As a result the population exploded: between 1800 and 2000, Europe went from 195 million to 727 million, Africa from 81 million to 809 million. This was the world that prompted Paul Ehrlich's notorious "population bomb" theory, in which ever-increasing human numbers would soon bankrupt the planet's carrying capacity.

We escaped that trap too, through the "demographic transition." The death rate stayed low, but the birth rate started falling across the developed world. This appears to have both economic and cultural causes, and is increasingly a universal human phenomenon. In 1979 the Communist Party of China, under the influence of the ideas of Ehrlich and the Club of Rome, instituted the one child policy; in 2015 they revoked it, and today they are working desperately to increase the birth rate.

The decline in birthrates is often attributed to the cost of raising children. In the premodern world children went to work as early as six or eight, and thus constituted an economic benefit to the family; in the modern world they don't start working until they're teenagers, later if they attend college, constituting a huge upfront cost without much return for decades, if ever. "Surely this explains why birthrates are decreasing." It does not. Various countries have experimented with various degrees of income support for parenthood: paid maternity/paternity leave, childcare subsidies, direct cash payments. The effect on the birthrate of all these programs appears to be approximately zero.

What is relevant to the birthrate is how many children women want to have—shocking, I know. In countries where women want to have more children, women have more children. America and South Korea make good contrast cases. In America women want to have 2.7 children, and have 1.7. In South Korea women want to have 1.4-1.8 children, and have .8. Neither American nor Korean women have as many children as they say they want—but still, the number of children desired does seem to affect the number of children produced.

These are all facts. What remains a question is whether declining birthrates are a problem. Conservatives view declining birthrates as a civilizational—which is to say, a racial—crisis. This is the wellspring of "great replacement" conspiracy theories, the reason the fourteen words are central to white nationalist ideology. They believe their race is dying out, or at least being outcompeted by "inferior" races. As noted above, the stink of this idea has left liberals unwilling to admit that declining birthrates could be any kind of problem at all.

But they are. South Korea provides a useful case study. As noted earlier, each subsequent generation of South Koreans will be half the size of the previous. This will generate serious social problems. An ever-shrinking workforce will be required to support an always-larger population of retirees; as larger amounts of economic production are devoted in this direction, economic growth will slow. The prospects of the new generation will be just that much dimmer than their parents'. On top of this, South Korea shares a land border with a bellicose neighbor that even now proposes to conquer and subjugate it. Decreasing populations means decreasing military capacity, and in an era of declining population every casualty in war is irreplaceable. (It is for this very reason that Ukraine's military conscription begins at 25—and this after being lowered in 2024.)

In America it is easy to ignore these problems. We are bordered by two peaceful neighbors and two vast oceans and possess history's most preeminent military. The idea that war might ever touch the homeland is unimaginable. Americans have more children, and in addition to the domestic birthrate, America has proven unusually good at attracting and integrating immigrants, at least as compared to peers or competitors like China or Europe. America is not facing a material crisis of birthrates—but other countries are.

And yet. There is something more, isn't there? This niggling feeling that there's something wrong. Something more than the material problems I've outlined. So let me be clear: there is something wrong with a social form that cannot reproduce itself. It suggests that, on balance, the people of that society don't think their way of life is worth continuing. (And likewise there is something wrong with a social form that can only reproduce itself given the existence of poor, high-birthrate neighbors to supply a continual stream of human clay.) This is not a point about this or that race or people, because frankly "races" don't exist in any biological sense. This is a problem endemic to the developed world: it reflects something about the societies we have made.

So what has gone wrong in the modern world?

The patriarchal bargain

To talk about today we must talk about the past. If our social form does not any longer reproduce itself, we must ask: how did it formerly reproduce itself? And why has that mode of reproduction broken down? The answer to the former question is simple: our society once reproduced itself according to the patriarchal bargain.

In the simplest terms, the bargain works like this: women provide reproductive labor in exchange for security. Reproductive labor includes childbearing, but also childrearing, and also—this part is important—guarantees of paternity. Security includes economic security as well as physical security. The bargain has a variety of interesting conundrums—the goods are exchanged not once but continuously; once it is made the woman has little ability to alter its terms. In other words, she puts herself into the power of a man in the hope that he holds up his end of the deal. Needless to say, it is not a great bargain to make—but in many societies, it has nevertheless been a woman's best option.

That is because the patriarchal bargain is sustained by a broader social context. This context can be expressed simply in terms of North, Wallis, and Weingast's rents-exclusion dynamic. Women are excluded from social participation, especially economic participation. This is not to say that women do not engage in production—they almost always do, especially household production—but without the ability to engage in public social participation, they have little ability to set the terms of that labor. The bank account belongs to the husband, so to speak.

As a result of women's exclusion, rents accrue to men. In order to acquire a share of those rents, women are forced into an unequal bargain. If women want material prosperity and physical security, they have no choice but to make the patriarchal bargain and put themselves into the power of a husband.

The root causes of women's exclusion are various. The plough appears to be a major cause of patriarchy, insofar as it gives men a substantial economic advantage over women as compared to hoe-based agriculture. In other cases, such as purdah, the root of the exclusion appears to be purely cultural. Regardless, economic and cultural exclusions feed back into one another.

So far, so bleak. Here's the thing: the material basis of the patriarchal bargain is breaking down, and it has been for about two centuries. This was obvious in 1988, when Kandiyoti coined the term "patriarchal bargain," and that breakdown has not abated a whit in the intervening decades. The root cause of the breakdown is simple: we call it the modern world. The condition of modernity is continually increasing worker productivity as a result of technological progress—sustained long run per capita economic growth.

What this has meant for women is a society in which they have options outside the patriarchal bargain. Simply working for a wage is enough to provide the security that once husbands exclusively controlled. Or, to put it more intuitively: the rise of two-income households isn't a result of economic hardship. It's a result of economic growth. You could live on one income—if you were willing to accept substantially less material goods. But you want the stuff. The returns to paid labor outside the home far exceed the returns to domestic production. Success in life is less and less defined by your ability to drive a plough or swing a sword and more and more by your ability to produce in a technologically and industrially advanced economy.

It is unlikely, in other words, that the patriarchal bargain can ever be reconstructed. The condition that drives women's liberation is the condition of modernity itself: the technological and productive progress that is the source of modern material abundance—and the power modern abundance brings. No one is willing to give that up, though the tension may vex reactionaries.

The stories we tell

So much for the patriarchy—right? Hardly. The patriarchy had a material basis and that material basis is eroding, but that material basis had a cultural symbiote, and the symbiote endures. By which I mean: patriarchy is not just an economic structure. It is a story we tell ourselves about women and men—about what they are for, who they are to each other, what makes a good woman and a good man—and that story has staying power independently of patriarchy's material basis.

Where to start on this? I'm a sucker for the classics. So let's start there: The Big Sleep, starring Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall, 1946. The plot is... convoluted. But the archetypes are familiar. Bogart is Philip Marlowe, the coolest, toughest, canniest private eye you ever met. Bacall is Vivian Rutledge, rich and beautiful—and the coolest, toughest, canniest dame you ever met. As the trailer puts it, "That man—Bogart! And that woman—Bacall! Are that way again!"

But here's the thing: being strong isn't enough to make Marlowe a good man. Eddie Mars, gangster and antagonist of the film, is strong and tough and smart—but he's not good. Marlowe's a good man because while he might be a disrespectful wiseass, he's decent when he doesn't need to be.

And here's the other thing: being beautiful isn't enough to make Vivian a good woman. Carmen, her sister, is beautiful as anything, but faithless and wild and kind of a mess. What makes Vivian the real deal is how she sticks to her word no matter what—indeed, Marlowe compliments her on sticking to her word to Mars, even well past when it was in her interest.

In the dry terms of social science we call this "costly signaling."  It's easy to make promises on a sunny day—easy to keep them too. What you do in the dark when no one's watching and every interest says "break it," that shows your real character. A good man, he's gotta be good and he's gotta be strong and it's gotta be both. A good woman, she's gotta be beautiful and she's gotta be faithful and it's gotta be both. The drama of these stories is always women and men dealing with the tension between their two desired attributes. But the reason it's those two specifically, for men and women specifically, falls out of the nature of the patriarchal bargain.

A woman needs a man who is strong enough to provide material and physical security, but she also needs one who is decent enough to keep providing that after she's signed on the dotted line and doesn't have any recourse. A man needs a woman who is beautiful enough to bear beautiful children, but he also needs one who is faithful enough so he can be sure those are his kids he's raising. Kind of a tawdry analysis behind a beautiful movie, but there it is. (Maybe, somewhere in the interstices of all that tawdry bargaining, we might find—love. But that's a tough flame to catch, and keep alive. More on this later.)

Let's take another example. By the time Die Hard is released in 1988, the story is changing. Die Hard is a story about cops and robbers, gunfights and explosions, but before the first terrorist walks onto screen the movie makes its stakes clear: will the hero get the girl? In this case, the girl is Holly Gennaro, who has moved to Los Angeles to take a high-paying job. It's made clear she no longer needs her husband for material security—the Rolex she's earned as a bonus is the symbol of that—as is the fact that she no longer uses his name.

But then: terrorists, gunfights, the inimitable Alan Rickman's Hans Gruber. Holly might not need John McClane for economic security, but she sure as hell needs him for physical security. And at the climax of the movie, John takes that Rolex off her wrist, sending Gruber plummeting to his death—and she takes his name again, introducing herself to the TV cameras as Holly McClane.

These days the story is getting even more strained at the seams. Patriarchy-as-narrative is plainly visible in manosphere culture. Andrew Tate, Romanian sex trafficking kingpin, is selling a vision of patriarchy to young men—a vision of male power and female dependence. A young man posts on Instagram "She doubled her body count, so I doubled my body weight." This is not just classic patriarchy, but a reaction to its breakdown, doubling down on its worst aspects—raw power and domination without love. This is what MacKinnon called the sexual fetishization of female submission; in the manosphere even actual love and sex become secondary to the act of power.

The story endures even as the story stops making sense.

A new archetype

These are all stories about what makes for a good man. They are adapted to a certain material reality—the world of the patriarchal bargain. A world where women need men for economic or physical security. But mostly, we are not being taken hostage by elite European terrorists. We live in a safe world; indeed, the modern world has some of the lowest rates of violence (murder, assault, rape) ever recorded. More and more, women don't need men. And men haven't figured out how to adapt to that.

Declining fertility is precisely a symptom of this breakdown. As Alice Evans documents, the rise of singlehood among young people is not a result of women not wanting marriage or children—but rather women finding the bargain on offer not particularly attractive. Men think they are happier and wealthier married—and they're right. Women think they are happier and wealthier alone—and they're right. The bargain is not good for women, and more and more we are declining to make it.

We need new stories. We need a new archetype. You gotta be worth choosing, not because she needs you, but because she wants you. The trick of gender is the trick of the modern world: learning to live together as free and equal citizens. Which is to say: telling a story in which we can be free and equal together despite our differences. A story about how men are useless and don't have worth and aren't worth wanting isn't really going to cut it, not as long as men remain half the human population.

To return to the rents/exclusion analysis, Francis Fukuyama argues that most successful reforms of such systems involve not the destruction but the extension of elite privileges to the masses. The aristocrat doesn't lose; the commoner gains. England did not abolish its royal courts; it allowed more and more people to use them, and an aristocratic privilege was transformed into a common right. You might think what I am saying is "just coddle men more." But what Fukuyama's analysis also suggests is that this process also involves elites consciously accepting equality, rather than digging in their heels and refusing to let go of their relative status. Our ability to build new narratives depends, in the end, on those narratives being embraced by both men and women. 

What happens when the fundamental things no longer apply? What is a man to a girl who can buy herself flowers?

The knight saves the princess from the orc. That's a story about cool sword fights and glimmering dragons, but it's also a story about men and women and what they are to each other. A good man is a knight and not an orc; a good woman is a princess and repulsed by the orc's advances.

But what happens when the girl picks up the sword and kills the orc herself? What happens when she goes ahead and rules the kingdom without a man at her side? The knight has spent his life training for that moment—waiting for the moment he might prove his worth in the act of killing an orc. A dream evaporates—and now what does his worth consist in? Can he find a way to be something worth wanting for his own sake—a man who is wanted even despite not being needed? Until we figure out how to tell that story, the crisis of gender relations will not abate.

Or, you know, maybe we'll just take another step down the reproductive technology tech tree and solve the problem in another way. These days who even knows.

I can buy myself flowers
Write my name in the sand 
Talk to myself for hours 
Say things you don’t understand 
I can take myself dancing 
And I can hold my own hand 
Yeah I can love me better than you can
"Flowers," 2023

Featured image is The Hireling Shepherd, by William Holman Hunt

Since 2015, Trump’s opposition have feared that he had authoritarian aspirations. Every action he took after losing in 2020 certainly vindicated those fears. Another through line of Trump’s career in and out of politics, however, is his intense focus on personal loyalty. Installing loyalists in key positions of power is, of course, a classic way to pave the way for establishing yourself as a dictator.

But it is also an important move in establishing a personalist system, whether authoritarian or not. The risk of personalism is distinct, but not unrelated to, the risk of authoritarianism. As the political scientist Xavier Márquez explains in his recent paper on the topic:

The personalization of power is the process through which the relative authority of the ruler and the political elite, and hence the relationships of “horizontal” accountability between them, shifts in favour of the ruler. This process is conceptually distinct from autocratization, the loss of “vertical” accountability that results in ruling elites becoming less accountable to the populations over which they rule.[1]

It is quite possible that over the next four years Trump will fail to surmount the status quo of term limits and competitive elections, but succeed in converting the federal executive branch into a more complete system of personal rule by the president. The status quo of the “imperial presidency” already allows Trump to do quite a lot of substantively bad things without changing a single thing about the institutional arrangement. But any process of making things worse—whether to pursue mass deportation or to take the first steps towards authoritarianism—is almost guaranteed to pass through personalization first. If we can successfully mitigate the risks of personalization, we will likely mitigate a number of other things a personalist Trump presidency would do with his expanded power as well.

Márquez has elsewhere described personalism as an inversion of the principal-agent relationship.

In institutionally constrained systems of rule, the ruler is the agent, and some other organization is the principal, which ‘uses’ the ruler to achieve its own goals. Agents (rulers) may cheat and attempt to act in their own interests, but the organization can still hold them to account in a reasonably effective way. In ‘personal’ systems of rule, by contrast, the ruler is the principal, and the organization is the agent; the ruler ‘uses’ the organization to achieve his goals, rather than vice versa.[2]

I can think of no better description of the relationship that Trump has established between himself and the Republican Party. American parties are extremely weak and porous; their manifestations in the Senate, House, and White House rarely form a harmonious whole, never mind the relationship between their offices in federal and state governments. Yet somehow Trump has transformed the sprawling, decentralized, frankly dysfunctional apparatus of nominating and promoting Republican candidates into a system of personal fealty. We saw signs of this early on, when a wave of boring and ordinary Republicans retired from Congress and the rest took the Lindsey Graham path.

Drawing on Max Weber, Márquez discusses three broad strategies by which individuals establish personal rule: the mobilization of charisma, of legality or formal authority, and of informal authority.

The mobilization of charisma draws on the emotional attachments between a leader and a group of followers to expand the reach of norms of allegiance to his person; the mobilization of formal authority exploits rational discourses of justification to expand the scope of formal executive powers; and the mobilization of informal authority takes advantage of the ruler’s position in a network of interests to grow patronage networks that undermine other forms of authority.[3]

In what follows, I will discuss the risks of the second Trump term chiefly through the lens of these paths to personalization.

The federal executive branch

Most Americans have a sense that the president is in charge of everything in the federal executive branch, that he’s the big boss of the whole apparatus. Indeed, the notion that there are members of the federal executive bureaucracy who do not answer to the president is invoked frequently and with scorn. These “unelected bureaucrats” form a “deep state” that subverts the will of the democratically elected president. Let us set aside for the moment the question of just how democratic our process for picking presidents is. If what we want is a system of democracy and rule of law, rather than one where we elect officials empowered to do whatever they please, then what we want is something like legislative supremacy.

Legislative bodies are far more democratic than presidents, because much finer subdivisions of the population have someone representing them in the legislative process. Of course, legislators do not implement their own legislation; it is up to the executive branch to execute the law. But in order for that execution to be democratic, it must actually be in accordance with those laws passed by (at least a majority of) the democratically elected legislators.

In a parliamentary system, the ministers are voted in by the legislature to act as its agents in running the executive branch. In the American system, congressional committees oversee executive bodies in a number of ways. Budgets and appropriations must also pass through Congress, a lever that that body does not fail to use in order to influence the character of the executive bureaucracy. As Josh Chafetz explains, appropriations bills:

Are generally “accompanied by detailed committee reports giving the specific amounts the department or agency should spend on each program within the budget account.” Given that the appropriations committees retain the power to specify detailed spending levels in the statutory language itself—and given that they retain the power to drastically cut those spending levels in future years or to attach unpleasant riders—the departments and agencies “treat those committee reports as the equivalent of legislation. As Democratic representative (and chairman of the House Appropriations Committee) David Obey put it in 2009, “For any administration to say, well, we will accept the money, but ignore the limitations is to greatly increase the likelihood that they will not get the money.” When agencies do wish to “reprogram” funds (in other words, spend funds in ways that are consistent with the legislation but inconsistent with the committee report), they generally report to the relevant appropriations subcommittee and receive permission to do so.

(. . .)Such pressures seem generally effective: there is a growing body of evidence suggesting that the federal bureaucracy is broadly responsive to congressional preferences. As Morris Fiorina provocatively put it, “Congress controls the bureaucracy, and Congress gives us the kind of bureaucracy it wants."[4]

Strange as it may seem, the best arrangement for having a system that is both democratic and lawful is to vest a representative assembly with the highest institutional authority but to give executive bodies arms-length independence from elected officials. As Chafetz documents, there is plenty of evidence that such independence does not, in practice, mean that the authority of the representative assembly is ignored. What it does mean is that civil servants can be made to understand that their duty is to implement and follow the law, rather than merely to follow orders.

The problem with the president is that, by its nature, it is an office that governs by giving orders. Unlike a prime minister, the president cannot be removed by a simple majority vote from a single chamber of the legislature. Indeed, impeachment has proven too high a bar even when a president has sent a mob which physically threatens members of Congress in their place of business. Moreover, the levers that Congress has to discipline the executive branch must by and large be approved by the president as well, for ultimately budgets and appropriations pass through ordinary legislation. And finally, the president can claim democratic legitimacy that competes with the legitimacy of Congress, rather than complementing it. Separately elected presidents, by their nature, thereby put democratic legitimacy in tension with the rule of law.

Still, America has coped remarkably well with this tension, compared to other presidential systems. Our Congress has remained quite strong compared to any system, and our federal courts have grown stronger and stronger over time. While our tendency to skew in the direction of judicial supremacy is hardly desirable, one thing it does not foster is personalism.

Like many of his predecessors (including his own first term), Donald Trump will seek to cast off the constraints on the powers of the personalist president. Unlike those predecessors, he comes to office with a team of people who have spent time laying the groundwork to succeed at this specific endeavor. He also begins his term with a sycophantic Supreme Court supermajority that was willing to invent a new category of legal immunity just for him while he was out of office. Our system is vast and complex, with many levers available for many actors to resist the powers of the president; Trump may not succeed. But Márquez’s analysis provides a guide to how he is likely to make the attempt.

Prestige and power

Márquez describes the first avenue of attack as follows:

By the “mobilization of charisma” I mean the process by which charismatic attachments with a relatively limited number of followers are mobilized to expand the degree to which the authority of the leader is enforced on groups which may not have charismatic attachments to him. Charismatic authority in modern states typically finds itself hedged by legal norms, and charismatic attachments are difficult to sustain except in conditions of crisis. But leaders can exploit charismatic attachments with limited numbers of followers to weaken or even destroy formal norms that hedge their power, or to introduce new norms that expand their discretion even if charismatic attachments weaken.[5]

One of his examples is the Cultural Revolution, in which Mao leveraged his personal prestige to encourage various groups to attack his rivals within the CCP. So intense was the response that at the peak, the formal head of the Chinese government was subjected to a “struggle session” and beaten by his own staff. Trump’s relationship with his base is as rooted in “charisma” or personal appeal as Mao’s was with his own.

The reason that Trump has been so successful in converting the Republican Party into the party of Trump, despite the decentralized and wide-open nature of American parties, is precisely because he has a mass of extremely loyal supporters to leverage. Though large in absolute terms, it is not a large segment of society overall; Trump won the 2024 primary with 17 million votes. At 76 percent, that is an overwhelming supermajority of primary voters. However, it is only around 5 percent of the roughly 156 million people who voted in the general election, and 5 percent of the overall population. 5 percent of the population is more than enough to achieve Cultural Revolution levels of terror, if they are willing to go that far. Rather than struggle sessions, of course, we are more likely to see events such as January 6 repeated. During the election cycle we saw how the focus on a single town was enough to induce an atmosphere of terror there. In both cases, it is not as though Trump issues explicit orders about what his followers ought to do, but all of them were mobilized by his personal charisma to take aggressive action.

In the first Trump term, old guard Republicans with a reputation for working with Democrats either retired or completely reinvented themselves into frothing Trump loyalists, as Lindsey Graham most famously did. They did not do this out of the expectation that Trump would reward them for the shift, but out of fear that Trump’s base would be turned against them in their own primaries. Given both Trump’s broader base and the nature of the current Republican staffer class, physical threats to keep people in line are not out of the question.

This is why the GOP has failed to rid itself of Trump for the past nine years. Even when he was a clear electoral loser, and when Trumpist candidates underperformed in 2022, they could not rid themselves of him or his loyalists. Trump is not at the forefront of a broader movement, though “intellectual” conservatives have worked overtime since the beginning to try and build one around him. Instead, Trump’s leadership rests on a foundation of charismatic attachment, something that by its nature is tied to him personally.

It’s a fickle thing that is difficult to measure. By one estimate, roughly one-third of self-identified Republicans define their politics based on their enthusiastic embrace of Trump and his rhetoric specifically. Trump’s personal social network, Truth Social, has about one million active monthly users and five times as many website visitors. That is vanishingly small for a social network, but impressively large for assembling a people for whom the only benefit is being in digital proximity to Trump and fellow Trumpists. It is difficult to say how large the potential pool of mobilized people truly is, especially since Trump overall has never been particularly popular by traditional measures (although disturbingly, he is doing much better lately).

Still, the proof is in the putting; Trump loyalists have frequently shown up, whether it’s on the streets, in the Capitol, on Truth Social, or in purchasing his merchandise. Whatever its current size, the maintenance and cultivation of charismatic attachments requires frequent “campaigns”; the perception during the first Trump term that he was producing gobs of news events a week stems from this imperative to maintain his primary source of strength. Where Hitler expanded his charismatic authority through quick, decisive military victories, Trump maintains his primarily through his “owning the libs” first approach to public communication, constantly feeding his base fresh culture war red meat.

It remains to be seen the extent to which Trump can succeed in mobilizing charisma to engage in “authority destruction” against those arms of the state that limit his power in office.

A spoils system

Márquez describes the most common facet of authoritarian regimes and especially of personalist ones as follows:

Patronage involves the informal authority that emerges in unequal but enduring relations of exchange between a patron and many clients, where the former typically provides economic resources in exchange for political support. (. . .)[Patrimonial] regimes are characterized by high levels of de-institutionalization, where formal authority is no longer a good guide to the location of power.

While it is true that one needn’t be the formal head of state to be the true head of a patrimonial regime, “the informal authority rulers acquire through patronage is typically parasitic on their formal authority,”[6] so it often is one and the same person in both positions. Indeed, the top patron usually leverages their patronage to get the top spot in the government, which they then use to further grow their patronage network. Márquez uses the example of Putin, who developed an extensive patronage network during his first tenure as president, and remained the true center of the patrimonial regime when he hit his term limit and became prime minister in 2008. Everyone understood this at the time. However, there was “a genuine risk for Putin”[7] that his successor Medvedev may have been able to use the presidency to build a patronage network of his own and truly supplant Putin’s personal authority. It worked out for Putin because the groundwork he had laid before stepping down allowed him to get officials to provide a “legal” path to return to the presidency.

Trump’s mode of governance has always been in the mode of a patronage network. He did this even under the extremely high stakes of the early pandemic. The Project 2025 plan for the federal executive branch is more or less a return to the principle of the spoils system, a form of patronage that was openly touted in Jackson’s day. Now he also has Elon Musk as part of his coterie, someone who has already demonstrated his willingness to throw around serious cash for the cause. The more cash and jobs he has to offer to join his patronage network, the larger and more powerful it will become. The more the jobs in question are in the federal government specifically, or the court system, the more Trump’s personal power will expand. Even tariffs, the most seemingly economics-focused policy of Trump’s touted agenda, will undoubtedly be used to reward allies and punish enemies to strengthen Trump’s hold on his patronage network.

Formalism and elite persuasion

The final line of attack Márquez describes as follows:

Rulers can expand their formal authority by mobilizing coalitions to change constitutions or other public norms regulating their discretion. While the mobilization of charisma and/or informal authority are typically necessary to the construction of such coalitions, the expansion of formal authority will normally also involve the deployment of persuasive arguments. For example, rulers who face term limits often craft very specific arguments to evade or change them, and such arguments shape how parliamentary coalitions, supreme courts, or the public at large evaluate and react to these proposals. Significant resources are invested in persuading others of the rationality of formal institutional change, rather than simply mobilizing them through emotional appeals or co-opting them with economic resources.[8]

January 6 is the most famous of the “Stop the Steal” efforts the Trump campaign pursued after it lost the 2020 election, but it was by no means where most of its efforts were invested. They filed a large number of lawsuits, they prepared fake electors, and they pressured election officials. The fake elector scheme was supposed to line up with their strategy to have Vice President Pence reject the certification of the election results, after which they would move to have these new electors’ votes take the place of the original ones.

What all of these have in common is the use (and misuse) of formal justifications and existing institutional procedures. Rather than sending a mob to intimidate or do violence, they file a lawsuit. Rather than struggle sessions, they have “creative” readings of existing law that they attempt to get other members of the elite, such as Mike Pence, to throw their support behind. Sometimes the use of institutional procedure and legal interpretation is quite above board; after all, anyone can file a lawsuit and get their day in court. Other times, as in the whole certification and fake elector scheme, what they are doing is plainly at odds with both law and practice, but if the precedent can be set and enough people with institutional authority line up behind it, it will become law and practice. As Márquez puts it, “many moves of dubious legality can increase executive power as long as they cannot be effectively challenged.”[9] The certification scheme failed because Pence was never on board, the Supreme Court likely would not have been either, and enough members of Congress also were not.

Even then, eight Senators and (more significantly) 139 members of the House objected to the certification. Trump’s control over the GOP has only been consolidated further in the interim. There will likely be all manner of “moves of dubious legality” that he calls upon them to support over the next four years, all in the name of expanding his personal power.

Throughout his first term, Trump made extensive use of this tactic. He used emergency powers expansively, he bribed farmers to compensate for the pain they faced from his tariffs without this new line of subsidy going through Congress, and pushed the boundaries in a number of ways.

And the people around Trump have learned practical lessons from their first experience of power, and have not spent the last four years idle. Project 2025 is, essentially, a multimillion dollar effort to devise a plan of action of just this kind. All the detailed procedures and creative interpretations of the law that Trump might need in order to convert the federal executive branch into a tool of personal rule. They wrote it, they published it, it’s freely available to the public. Trump distanced himself from it during his campaign—because it was polling poorly, certainly, but also perhaps because there is a sense in which the whole project is aimed at making him into the agent of a specific agenda rather than the principal. Nevertheless, he is bringing on board plenty of people involved in it. There is no reason to doubt that he and his people are going to try to implement it, and that an important consequence will be the personalization of the federal government.

Now, before he has even returned to office, he is attempting to “introduce new norms” such as that the Senate must recess in order to allow him to appoint whomever he pleases. Formally, a president cannot make this happen (despite Trump’s claims to the contrary). But the risks that come with opposing Trump and facing his base in a primary or in the flesh are no small matter. John Thune, the new Senate majority leader, has made noises that the Republican caucus might go along with this move.

There are reasons for optimism on this front. When Matt Gaetz withdrew his nomination for Attorney General, it was apparently Trump himself who told him to do so because he didn’t “have the votes.” This means that contrary to Thune’s cooperative rhetoric, he had made it clear to Trump that there would be a vote, and too few would be willing to support Trump’s choice. Thune’s selection for majority leader itself was at odds with Trump’s own wishes. None of this means that Trump will fail to crush all internal opposition later—Mao, for example, was frustrated by his rivals on many occasions and indeed was typically eclipsed by others in their formal authority, but ultimately created a situation in which none of them dared criticize him. And now Trump has pre-announced that he will be firing the current FBI Director, something for which presidents typically suffer a political cost, yet there seems to be little in the way of a reaction.

So long as institutions remain more or less intact, any president is likely to engage in this kind of formalism and proceduralism to some extent. We will certainly need to pay close attention to how the Trump administration does so in pursuit of personalism. But in many ways, the greatest danger comes when even superficial attempts at appearing lawful have been discarded, for “A ruler who can rely on his informal or charismatic authority over others needs to expend less justificatory effort to expand his formal authority.”[10]

In combination

The important point is that these elements are not isolated, but offer individual tactics in an overall strategy of the personalization of power.

Charismatic mobilization makes use of the strong affective attachments of particular groups to a leader to enforce extralegal norms of allegiance to him; the mobilization of formal authority deploys justificatory discourses to enhance the legal-rational affordances of a ruler’s official position; and the mobilization of informal authority colonizes formal structures to bend them to a ruler’s will. Each of these forms of authority also interacts with the others to shape the possibilities for personalization in a given regime; thus, legal authority can be used to strengthen patronage networks, control over patronage can be used to increase a ruler’s formal authority, and control over formal authority can be used to promote a ruler’s charismatic authority.[11]

What makes Trump uniquely dangerous as a figure is that he truly does bring all three together the way no president in recent memory could have. None brazenly made use of patronage the way he does, something for which he has faced no consequences whatsoever, proving that he can continue to do so safely. Only Obama could be said to have had any groups to be mobilized through charisma, and he simply used it for the prosaic purposes of winning elections, nothing more. Most men in the history of the “imperial presidency” made use of formalism to attempt to expand their personal power, but few had a pool of talent quite so dedicated to gaming it out as Trump has, and none of them had the ability to buttress this strategy with the other two.

It is not always true that forewarned is forearmed; there is only so much any of us can do to resist the process of personalization that Trump is about to embark upon. But it is my hope that if we can identify each of these strategies as he deploys them, we stand a better chance to find levers to use against them.

[1] Márquez, Xavier. 2024. “The Mechanisms of Personalization.” Democratization, November, 1–21. doi:10.1080/13510347.2024.2426197. 1.

[2] Márquez, Xavier. Non-democratic politics: Authoritarianism, dictatorship and democratization. Bloomsbury Publishing, 2016. 65.

[3] Márquez, Xavier. 2024. “The Mechanisms of Personalization.” Democratization, November, 1–21. doi:10.1080/13510347.2024.2426197. 2.

[4] Chafetz, Josh. Congress's Constitution: Legislative authority and the separation of powers. Yale University Press, 2017. 71-72. Chafetz’s citation for the “growing body of evidence” includes:

• Harris, Joseph Pratt. "Congressional control of administration." (1964).
• Kirst, Michael W. Government without passing laws: Congress' nonstatutory techniques for appropriations control. UNC Press Books, 2018.
• Daugirdas, Kristina. "Congress underestimated: The case of the World Bank." American Journal of International Law 107, no. 3 (2013): 517-562.
• Hammond, Thomas H., and Jack H. Knott. "Who controls the bureaucracy?: Presidential power, congressional dominance, legal constraints, and bureaucratic autonomy in a model of multi-institutional policy-making." The Journal of Law, Economics, and Organization 12, no. 1 (1996): 119-166.
• McCubbins, Mathew D., Roger G. Noll, and Barry R. Weingast. "Administrative procedures as instruments of political control." The Journal of Law, Economics, and Organization 3, no. 2 (1987): 243-277.
• Weingast, Barry R., and Mark J. Moran. "Bureaucratic discretion or congressional control? Regulatory policymaking by the Federal Trade Commission." Journal of Political Economy 91, no. 5 (1983): 765-800.
• Prakash, Saikrishna B. "INDEPENDENCE, CONGRESSIONAL WEAKNESS, AND THE IMPORTANCE OF APPOINTMENT: THE IMPACT OF COMBINING BUDGETARY."
• Yaver, Miranda. "The Power of the Purse: How Institutional Conflict Yields Congress Assertion of Spending Power Regulatory Authority." In APSA 2012 Annual Meeting Paper. 2012.

[5] Márquez, Xavier. 2024. “The Mechanisms of Personalization.” Democratization, November, 1–21. doi:10.1080/13510347.2024.2426197. 7-8.

[6] Ibid. 14.

[7] Ibid. 15.

[8] Ibid. 12.

[9] Ibid.

[10] Ibid. 13.

[11] Ibid. 12.

Featured image is Mao Zedong Museum in Changsha, Hunan province, China

In the days after January 6, 2021, it appeared that the worst was finally behind us. The shock of that event was felt quite broadly at first. It seemed as though Trump might truly be politically finished, that we needed only to make it to Biden’s inauguration without another incident and we would all be able to breathe a collective sigh of relief. The worst outcomes had been avoided—so it seemed at the time.

Yet here we are, in November of 2024. The results are in—Donald Trump will be our president once more. This time, it is not an artifact of our bizarre selection process, except in as much as that process depressed turnout in “safe states”. Regardless, this time around, Trump received not just more electoral votes but a real majority of the popular vote. Rather than electing an ordinary Democrat, American voters chose a man who has promised to deport 20 million people and make war with Mexico. And once again, those voters who turned out handed his party the Senate, at minimum. It is bleak, but it is the reality.

We are about to enter a very dangerous period and action to mitigate those dangers is urgently needed. We have to start today; we cannot wait. It is not just that Donald Trump has promised the largest population expulsion in human history; unlike 2016 when immigration factored relatively less in Trump’s appeal to his base, in 2024 the GOP itself handed out “MASS DEPORTATION NOW!” signs at the RNC Convention. It is not just he has promised it and there is voter appetite for it; members of his administration such as Stephen Miller spent their time out of office figuring out exactly how to pull it off, flaunting their enthusiasm for the level of bloodshed that will be required. Finally, Trump has repeatedly insisted that he will be going after his political opponents using all of the tools available to the president.

Meanwhile, red state governments have spent the better part of the last decade showing exactly how the contemporary GOP behaves when in power. Extreme restrictions on abortion access that put the basic medical support needed by all pregnant women in jeopardy. Targeting the parents of trans kids or the trans kids themselves. Again and again, implementing the most vicious versions of right-wing culture war talking points.

During the first Trump term, a number of strategies of resistance were pursued. From day one, with the Women’s March, and again later with the George Floyd protests, mass demonstrations of enormous numbers served as an important reminder that winning office is no guarantee that a population will willingly submit to being governed. Also from day one, in fighting the Muslim Ban, opponents of the Trump administration took him to the courts. The law enforcement community was engaged, as Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein judged questions about Trump’s dodgy activities worth appointing a special counsel to look into. Much of the press took on an adversarial slant, as Trump kept them constantly fed with new outrageous actions, and his barely-concealed shady past provided a trove of reportable stories. Finally, a Democrat-controlled House impeached him twice, a first in history.

Most of these strategies will need to be pursued again as the Trump administration breaks the law and bends the political system to its will in an attempt to deliver on the many horrible things he has promised to do. But there is good reason to think that they will be less effective this time around, and to think that Trump’s people will be more effective in seeking to accomplish more vicious goals.

I do not want to promise, just days after Trump’s victory and a little over two months before he takes office again, that the scenario will be drastically different this time. But we have many reasons to believe that it will. And should a quarter of what Trump promises come to pass, it will be disastrous. The time has come to seriously think about what it would mean to break the glass when the emergency is upon us.

First and foremost, what it will take is a plan of attack for blue jurisdictions to sandbag the implementation of fascism. State and local governments controlled by Democrats have the most potent institutional and legal levers available for this fight. A great deal of what we think of as federal policy in fact relies upon state and local administrative capacity. This provides leverage to a huge number of actors outside of the federal government. Protestors and activists must focus on applying pressure to these officials in order to act at key moments: to engage in strategic acts of opposition that reduce the ability of a Trump-dominated federal government to achieve its goals.

In the more traditional realm of policy, blue jurisdictions can pass laws and regulations that undermine the underlying political economy on which the GOP relies, and reform the political economy that has created waves of net out migration from blue states where the cost of living is high. These tactics, alongside organized direct action to assist vulnerable communities, will be our inside strategy for the second Trump term.

Delay, delay, delay

Even totalitarian regimes run on a personalist basis cannot move on the basis of every little whim from Dear Leader. Any political and legal system of sufficient scale is weighed down by the basic requirements for keeping a large organization going at all; something that brings with it significant inertia in terms of the practices of street-level staff. And the American system, for all its faults, is as far from totalitarian as it gets. While the presidency has, from its inception, always struggled to pull the system towards personalism, it has never truly succeeded. The fragmentation of American political authority, though lessened after the Civil War and especially after the growth of the federal executive branch in the 20th century, has on the whole persisted. And the massive growth of the federal executive branch, while nominally increasing the president’s authority, in fact has created numerous institutions that vary greatly in their responsiveness to the president’s demands. Some are not very responsive at all, often by design.

In the first Trump term, all of these structural frustrations to presidential personalism were on full display. State attorney generals and organizations like the ACLU sued the federal government to oppose executive orders written by Trump. Federal civil servants and even political appointees resisted Trump’s policies because they broke with existing policy or with the law as written. The Senate Democratic Caucus filibustered the GOP trifecta’s legislative initiatives, and the Republican Senate majority very coyly did not abolish the filibuster, allowing them to blame Democrats when laws that were potentially politically disastrous did not pass. Eventually, a Democratic House impeached Trump, to list only the most dramatic of the measures it took to oppose him.

Some of these really are what kept the first Trump term from being as disastrous as it might have been. The Muslim Ban was ultimately allowed in modified form, but the court fight delayed it for a year and a half. A year and a half is more than a third of a presidential term; during that time, the Trump administration had to devote time and resources just to get one of its first executive orders implemented at all. A presidency is ultimately a race against time; a first term president has at most three years before they must begin to spend time campaigning for their second term. A second term president becomes more and more politically impotent as outwaiting them becomes an ever-easier option. If, in the second Trump term, we successfully delay the implementation of some of the worst things he has promised for over a year, that will be a major victory, if not nearly enough on its own. After all, the implementation itself will also take time, bringing us yet closer to the impending deadline.

Of course, Trump is no ordinary president, and whether or not there will be a deadline is part of what is at issue here. Trump tried to overstay his welcome once already; there’s no reason to believe that he won’t try again in four years. The entire Project 2025 game plan is to make the federal bureaucracy and the military more responsive to his will. So the institutions that rendered a real coup impossible in 2021 may not stand in the way this time. However, once again, that very game plan itself takes time to implement. It is possible that a resistance strategy of delay, delay, delay, will be enough to save us in the end. Those of us who are very worried about what Trump will try to do need to be open to this idea. Delaying is one thing the American system is very good at; indeed, it may be the thing it is good at. If we aggressively make use of every institutional tool available to us, in a best case scenario, we might end up with a second Trump term that is only a little worse than the first. Not a great outcome, but far from catastrophic, with much of the institutional damage at least being quite reversible.

But we cannot assume life will be so convenient. In his first term, Trump did not just surround himself with sycophants; there were also a number of long-standing institutional figures who had a seat at the table. These included, most famously perhaps, Anthony Fauci, but also figures like John Kelly and Mark Milley who will certainly not have a role in Trump’s second term. The most extreme elements of Trump’s circle have had four years to build their personnel lists to ensure that all of these roles will be filled with people whose sole qualifications are personal loyalty and an indifference to or enthusiasm for the cruelty of what they are asked to do. In getting what they wanted on immigration, the first Trump administration did not just rely on executive orders, but an enormous number of more detailed internal changes to the bureaucracy, which they will be able to use as their starting point. Such things are much more difficult to challenge in the courts or even to uncover in the first place, much less oppose. And of course, while Biden has appointed over 200 federal judges, Trump expanded the GOP majority on the most important court at the very end of his first term. He will begin his second term with that 6-3 majority already in place—a majority that was willing to invent a new doctrine of presidential immunity from prosecution on his behalf.

We should continue to pressure officials to make use of all the tools deployed the first time around, and more like them. But we should be prepared to ask for more, much more. The political leadership in all blue jurisdictions must be made ready to recognize a truly lawless Trump administration for what it is, and to take drastic action accordingly.

Why blue jurisdictions

The federal government relies on state and local governments to provide administrative capacity to a significant degree. As political scientist Martha Derthick put it:

Congress loves action—it thrives on policy proclamations and goal setting—but it hates bureaucracy and taxes, which are the instruments of action. Overwhelmingly, it has resolved this dilemma by turning over the bulk of administration to the state governments or any organizational instrumentality it can lay its hands on whose employees are not counted on the federal payroll.[1]

She notes that even Social Security, considered by many to be the premier example of a purely federal policy, “relies on state governments for much of the administration of the disability portion” of that policy. “It is up to state agencies to make the initial determinations of disability through which an individual qualifies for monthly payments from the Social Security Administration.”[2]

The status quo on the ground today provides state governments with enormous leverage in intergovernmental disputes because they are, more often than not, the administrators of policy set at the federal level. While the federal government developed many tools to fight the federally illegal Jim Crow regimes in the south, this fight was broadly supported by the American public at the time, and made use of competent civil servants who spent their careers learning from the ways intransigent localities adapted to each attempt to police them. A Trump administration is unlikely to command that kind of mass mandate, and the entire premise of Project 2025 is that competent civil servants will be purged in favor of loyal ones. The odds that they will learn, in less than four years, how to be as capable as the Civil Rights Division became over a period of decades is a dubious proposition even if we ignore that these Trumpists won’t be picked for being capable in the first place. The more successful Trump is at purging the federal bureaucracy, the less likely they’ll be able to keep up with the maneuvering of blue jurisdictions. On the flipside, the less successful Trump is at purging the federal bureaucracy, the less likely they are to go along with his flagrantly illegal orders.

Just as the Heritage Foundation developed an action plan in extreme detail, liberal think tanks must draw on the best legal and political science talents to develop strategies of institutional noncooperation and political resistance, depending upon the policy area and upon the political calculus faced by the particular blue jurisdiction. The options available in California or New York are not available in Pennsylvania, never mind in Texas’ Travis County. The levers available to states and localities in immigration differ from the levers available to resist a Trumpist FTC. The approach a politician will take when they wish to be quietly noncooperative may differ from when they wish to be coy but indiscrete, which may differ from when they wish to be openly aggressive in their opposition.

One final note on this point: it will be critical for blue jurisdictions to get their law enforcement agencies on board with the plan to resist. Federal law enforcement is a drop in the bucket of law enforcement capacity in this country. Even state level law enforcement is quite small compared to the vast army of local police officers. Former Trump officials have been quite clear that any mass deportation plan at even a fraction of the scale they have promised would require extensive integration of as many state and local police as they could persuade to cooperate.

It is therefore of utmost importance that local Democrats have a good relationship with law enforcement. Measures may need to be taken to improve such relations, through budgeting choices and public flattery; pressure campaigns in particular ought to carefully pick their rhetoric so as to be respectful of those that need to be won over while being unyielding in the demands we make of political officials. “Abolish the police” and anything in that rhetorical vein needs to be buried.

Pressure campaigns

Even sympathetic politicians will not take action on their own initiative. They will have to be persuaded that it is in their political interest to do so.

The biggest weakness of The Women’s March was its lack of strategic objective or timing. It simply demonstrated mass dissatisfaction with the Trump administration the day after it began. The best use of mass protest is in response to something specific. It does not even need to be an action, it can be as simple as some specific thing that Trump or a member of his administration says. But it has to have some substance, some specific area of concern. Perhaps it is about prosecuting his enemies. Perhaps it is about mass deportations. No one doubts there will be a steady supply of choices to latch onto. Those seeking to mobilize protests need to make sure they do pick something specific to latch onto, and be disciplined in making opposition to it the loudest rhetoric of the protest.

Outside strategy in a second Trump term will almost never be about aiming at obtaining gains or mitigating losses in the realm of policy, but instead about doing so in the realm of institutions. A lot of opposition in the first Trump term was holding action. You can fight in the courts, as was done with the Muslim ban and a number of other things. And mass protest may make officials hesitate to implement Trump’s policies, or members of Congress hesitate to support Trump’s bills.

As discussed in the previous section, the main targets of outside strategy in the second Trump term should be Democrats, in jurisdictions where the Democratic Party is dominant. And the goal of such action should be to permanently alter the relationship between the institutions they control and any government apparatus controlled by Trump’s party. Even if some Democrats in some blue states might readily be on board with that idea, most will hesitate, and Democratic localities in red states will be even more reticent. They will need to be pushed, relentlessly. In the media, in phone calls and letters directly to representatives, and through mass demonstrations. Existing organizations that can be drawn into the cause will need to leverage their existing relationships with state and local Democrats, and new organizations will need to be built.

Reshaping local political economy

The political scientist Alexander Hertel-Fernandez has documented how Republican-aligned groups sought not only to win elections, but to “use policy to change the power structure available to their allies and opponents.”[3] A typical example would be weakening collective bargaining and otherwise draining the resources available to unions. Democrats need to play this game as well if they’re to reduce the ability of the Trump administration and its red state allies to mobilize locally.

This is particularly relevant for states where power changes hands between the parties on a regular basis, or where Democrats might take power for the first time in many elections. There are a host of policies that tend to get passed in such situations, including automatic voter registration, expanded early voting, and mail-in ballot procedures, which are certainly important. But Democrats would do well to also go after the local backbones of the Republican Party. Car dealerships are a good example; right now, nearly every state prohibits car manufacturers from selling directly to consumers. Car dealerships are an artificial product of policy decisions that have frozen industrial organization in a moment in time. And they overwhelmingly invest their resources in Republican causes. Kneecapping car dealerships is both good policy and good politics.

There is a whole class of person like this where the policy case for putting the squeeze on them may be less strong than car dealers, but the political logic—given the emergency in which we now find ourselves—may need to win out. Anything to weaken the material and organizational base of support for fascism in America.

We cannot simply attack the political economy that supports the GOP, however; we must rebuild the political economy of deep blue jurisdictions. If states like New York and California continue to bleed people and investments to states like Texas, Arizona, and Florida, more and more people will fall under the most extreme forms of MAGA tyranny. We must crack up the political economy that maximizes rich residents and pushes out poor and vulnerable ones. The large Democratic polities must become good at building again, both housing and infrastructure. So long as all energy and manufacturing investment is going to deep red states, that is where people will go for opportunities. So long as it is too expensive to live in major blue cities, people will not be able to afford to move to take advantage of what opportunities there are there—or to seek refuge there, for “The scarcity of housing functions to keep variously marginalized persons dependent on or abused by superordinate persons.”

An underground railroad for vulnerable communities

Throughout our history, activist networks have worked to move vulnerable people from jurisdictions that make their lives difficult to better ones. Whether it was the underground railroad helping escaped slaves to permanently move away from slave states, or ARAL helping women get abortions outside of the US, organized direct action has always played a role in improving people’s lives.

We are already in a situation where immigrants, women, and trans people, at minimum, could use assistance relocating to less hostile jurisdictions. With Trump back in office, the threat has intensified enormously. Investing in networks to provide aid (for example, mifepristone and misoprostol) and assistance in finding and settling in safer locations is going to be critical. Blue jurisdictions in red states may, for example, be less able to directly stop Trump’s mass deportation program in their locality, but still able to pass information to key organizations if they find out that federal agents are honing in on someone who lives there. Indeed, even Democrats elected in Republican-controlled jurisdictions can potentially serve that role.

But we cannot rely on elected officials alone. There is already an enormous network of immigration activists and lawyers in this country. We must build further upon this strong foundation, as we seek to engage in activities beyond influencing policy and fighting in the courts. We must also build relationships with sympathetic federal civil servants (so long as these still exist) who can serve as sources of information.

As A. D. Blair put it, “nothing that happens in the United States is going to make resistance impossible and certainly nothing that has happened yet has done that.” We are not powerless. There are a lot of us, and we command significant economic, political, and cultural capital. It is important to use that now rather than take a wait and see approach, because it will only get more difficult later.

I have tried to provide an outline for what needs to be done, if not a fully fleshed out plan of action. I will not leave it here, either from a planning and discussion perspective, nor in terms of my own actions. The time is now. We cannot wait any longer.

[1] Derthick, Martha. Keeping the Compound Republic: Essays in American Federalism. Washington, DC: Brookings Institute Press, 2001. 63.

[2] Ibid, 68.

[3] Hertel-Fernandez, Alexander. State Capture: How Conservative Activists, Big Businesses, and Wealthy Donors Reshaped the American States—and the Nation. New York: Oxford University Press, 2019. 36.

Featured image is Trump Protests, by Ben Alexander

History is not just an objective record of what has been. It is a reminder of what can be. Useful history offers inspiration but not hagiography, cautionary tales but not empty moralism. The Founding Fathers’ success in establishing new, stable political institutions is tempered by how relatively quickly the society served by those institutions devolved into a civil war. We should never forget that the success of the Civil Rights Movement occurred in the shadow of the earlier, quite enduring success of the Redeemers at the end of Reconstruction. We must never lose hope, for others have succeeded against far worse odds, but we must not forget just how bad things can get, either.

Here at Liberal Currents we are all quite afraid of what Donald Trump will try if he is allowed a second term. Between his track record, his campaign promises, and his Supreme Court effectively granting him legal immunity for his actions, there is ample evidence that his administration would attack the pillars of liberal democracy with impunity. All of us have felt that the ordinary methods of political opposition in regular use today have proven insufficient, that the problem has proven too large, too systematic, that more needs to be done even in the event of a Trump defeat at the polls. Each of us has, therefore, looked back to American history for methods of positive political action that might be useful today. Samantha Hancox-Li, seeing in the constitutional crisis of our moment a parallel to the constitutional crisis precipitated by the Articles of Confederation, looked back to the Founding Fathers. The Founders leveraged a concept of democratic legitimacy in order to circumvent the formal procedures needed to overturn the Articles of Confederation. They successfully replaced the Articles with the Constitution of 1788; we should not assume a repeat performance to be impossible.

Paul Crider, observing the viciousness of red state governments as Trump has successfully remade the party in his image, looked back to Frederick Douglass, who thought seriously about what it meant to be a good liberal who respects rule of law when the evil of slavery is legal. Douglass did not sit passively and wait for the evil laws to be changed; he developed a method of constitutional hardball that still has value today.

In this essay I will look instead to the Civil Rights Movement, in particular, Thomas E. Ricks’ interpretation of it as presented in his book Waging a Good War. Ricks describes the Movement structure and campaigns in military terms, as they often did themselves.This is a useful lens for understanding how they organized themselves, why they made the particular tactical choices they did, and what their overarching strategy was.

The challenges that the Movement faced were distinct from those emphasized by Hancox-Li’s subject or Crider’s. While the Founding Fathers were a cohesive elite that had fought a war together and represented the groups with all the economic and political power in their young country, Movement figures represented a minority of just one region of the country. Where Douglass opposed a slavery enshrined in the Constitution and affirmed by legal institutions, the Jim Crow states were lawless regimes that bucked the Constitution and the federal government, and relied heavily on mobs and the Klan for their enforcement.

A second Trump term would not conform precisely to any of these scenarios, but it is precisely in offering a range of them that history provides its value. Gaining an understanding of the different methods used in different times for different types of problems allows us to be flexible, to expand the options we are able to imagine being available to us today. The opposition to Trump would not be a regional minority the way the Movement was; instead, as Hancox-Li puts it, it “is a majority of the population, controls the majority of the national economy, the major financial, economic, intellectual, and cultural centers.” There is legitimate fear of political violence from MAGA types, but for the most part the problems we face institutionally are more intrinsic to the structure of American federalism and the legal system as currently constituted than was the case for the fight against Jim Crow; in that sense, Crider’s focus on Douglass’s methods is apropos.

Nevertheless, it beggars belief to say that the dominant economic and cultural elites of the country will act boldly of their own accord. They must be galvanized. And while Douglass’s insights are still valuable and relevant today, he was writing before the dawn of mass politics and mass media. The Civil Rights Movement, by contrast, had to galvanize moderates even among Blacks, and ultimately found their success in galvanizing white moderates across the country. They operated at an early stage in the birth of a truly national American media system, a system to which they owed their most dramatic successes, but which was also arguably a chief cause in their undoing.

The Civil Rights Movement has lessons to teach us still. And contrary to conventional wisdom, their methods are very much available to us today.

The methods

The critical components of the Movement, in Ricks’ military interpretation of them, were:

●      Training

●      Discipline

●      Support structures

●      Planning

●      Strategy

●      Reconciliation

All six emphasize the less visible aspects of the Movement. The boycotts, the sit-ins, the Freedom Rides; these were specific, very public actions that activists took which are retold in popular histories of the era. But all of these actions were aimed at some specific strategic objective. All were conducted by activists who had been trained for weeks or months ahead of time, and were monitored by other activists who were given the role of maintaining discipline. All required extensive planning and logistical support. And in every case, there was a great deal of follow-through that occurred once a political victory was won.

Training was a pivotal part of what enabled the success of the Civil Rights Movement. In 1958, James Lawson, then a student at Vanderbilt University’s divinity school in Nashville, Tennessee, began a training program. As Ricks puts it:

Lawson believed that he could turn the city into “a laboratory for demonstrating nonviolence,” and that doing so could plant the seeds for “many Montgomerys.” He set to work, conducting on March 26, 1958, the first of what he called “workshops” but the American military would call intense training and indoctrination. These took place on Tuesday nights, Saturday mornings, and Sunday evenings in church basements, at first with about ten participants, none of them students. But in the fall of 1958, students began to participate, and the workshop group doubled.^[1]

These workshops included discussions of principles and best practices, but it also involved actual practical training, in which some participants roleplayed nonviolent protesters, and others roleplayed the “harassing whites.” Trainees learned to resist their impulse to fight back or flee, as well as to protect their fellow activists if the violence escalated too far against one of them.

Lawson’s workshop was not exceptional in the Movement. Later on, Freedom Schools would attempt to scale up the approach to a certain extent. Even before the Movement properly took off, Rosa Parks had attended a session at the Highlander Folk School, which chiefly focused on preparing labor organizers but from which she took important strategic lessons. As I will discuss further down, much could be gained if the cultural center of gravity for activists in America could shift from the humanities departments of our universities to the more pragmatic type of programs that the Civil Rights Movement benefited from.

Training and discipline of course go hand in hand, as any military expert would tell you. Of course, training is not all there is to discipline; otherwise there would be no need for court marshals. In the case of the Movement:

Protesters needed to be held to their training. Internal observers especially would monitor marches and try to stop anyone deviating into violence, which was essential to maintaining public support. This is also useful in deterring provocateurs working for the foe.^[2]

Activism is a voluntary pursuit where activists cannot truly be forced to do anything by their organizations; unlike an actual military, the enforcement here lacked real teeth. But simply having people on hand who were skilled at diffusing conflicts and could intervene before situations spiraled out of control made a difference time and again. These monitors were just one aspect of the support structures in place behind every protest, which “ranged from employing those observers to compiling lists of potential marchers who needed babysitters.”^[3]

It may sound obvious to say that you need a plan and a strategy, but the fact of the matter is that most mass protests today are truly spontaneous, without much pre-planning, if any. The Movement, meanwhile, emphasized having an ultimate objective for every action, and a planning stage in which they thought through the basic details of “If we do this, and they do that, what do we do next?”^[4]

Finally, the Movement’s greatest victories came not through the political defeat of their enemies but by “winning the peace,” the step which Ricks refers to as reconciliation. “The goal is not to crush your opponents but to change them, to find a way to live together down the road.”^[5]

An example of politically defeating their opponents might include the victory of the Montgomery boycotters in court; the Movement did not simply take that victory and move on. Consolidating it took real work. As Ricks recounts, Martin Luther King, Jr. and his colleagues had been preparing the community for what to do after victory for weeks before victory arrived.

Any boycotter who could not behave on the bus with restraint, they instructed, should “walk for another week or two.” And when integrated rides began, the Montgomery Improvement Association assigned two ministers to ride on each line at the morning and evening rush hours to monitor passenger behavior.

This kind of planning and disciplined behavior post-victory helped to entrench the gains. The core organizations of the Movement—the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), and the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE)—were all exceptionally good at the follow through for every campaign. This is perhaps the most underrated aspect of their success.

The media and its discontents

The birth of broadcast media and big, national mass audiences was a tremendous boon to the Movement. The brutes who formed the backbone of the Jim Crow system relied heavily on the fact that the audiences for their actions were by and large local audiences. Those with the power to change the system did not want to, for their interest was tied up in it or at any rate they did well enough that the risks associated with disrupting the status quo seemed higher. Those who suffered under it were regularly taught lessons in fear.

Television changed this reality. Backwater toughs found themselves faced down by media-savvy activists who exposed them to national audiences. Moreover, activists had the luxury of being selective in their targets, though they did not always succeed in this. History has familiarized most Americans with two high profile Civil Rights campaigns in Alabama, at Birmingham and Selma. Few are familiar with the campaign in Albany, Georgia. In that town, Chief of Police Laurie Pritchett had done his research on the Movement’s tactics and was prepared for them when they arrived. He had done groundwork with authorities outside of his jurisdiction in order to expand the jailing capacity he had personally available to his department. This allowed him to stymie the Movement’s tactic of overfilling jails in order to apply pressure. He also ensured that his deputies all treated the activists gently and respectfully, both when arresting them and when overseeing their imprisonment. Eventually, the Movement had to pull out with little to show for it.

Birmingham’s “Bull” Connor and Selma’s Jim Clark, meanwhile, were vicious by disposition and not particularly canny opponents in general. They unleashed almost theatrical levels of cruelty on the protesters, and theater is exactly what it became. In the case of the famous Selma march, the performance made it to a stage viewed by an audience of 48 million, nearly a quarter of the country’s population, in one single night.^[6]

The growth of a national broadcast media may have been the Movement’s salvation but in many ways it was also its undoing. As Ricks notes:

[I]n the years after Freedom Summer, the image of the civil rights worker inexorably shifted from the low-key voting rights organizer to the angry activist shouting into a microphone in front of a camera. Moses said of Stokely Carmichael that he became “a national media figure, and the organizers stopped organizing because it was more glamorous to do what Stokely was doing.” (. . .) “For the media, you don’t need even an organization, all you need is a charismatic personality,” Moses commented years later. He noted that Jesse Jackson rose to prominence in a similar way: “He is a genius at exploiting the media.” Meanwhile, SNCC’s field operations dwindled, and it became a group less focused on organizing and more on speaking.”^[7]

This was a trend that impacted more than just the Civil Rights Movement, of course. Increasingly, those with the skill of performing on camera displaced those with the skill of training, planning, and executing. In our own era, this trend has accelerated beyond what mere television could cause, as everyone now has a social media profile in which they can aim to make themselves the star of their own story, rather than a good, disciplined, rank and file member of a movement.

Some have understandably concluded from this that the kind of organizing that the Movement engaged in is simply impossible now. After all, how can we possibly expect behavioral discipline at an in-person protest when we cannot even have message discipline under normal circumstances? The idea of even attempting that kind of discipline seems far-fetched; who would want to join an organization that restricted your use of your personal social media?

It is undeniably harder now to pull off what they did than it was at the time. But we greatly underestimate just how hard it was to begin with when we focus on a handful of spectacularly successful organizations over a ten to fifteen year period. There is a reason that segregation and mass disenfranchisement lasted as long as it did, after all.

Moreover, there is a great distance between hard and impossible. We absolutely can organize today, as they did then.

Adapting their approach

Richard Rorty once sang the praises of campaigns over movements because the former is “something finite, something that can be recognized to have succeeded or to have, so far, failed.” Movements, meanwhile “neither succeed nor fail. They are too big and too amorphous to do anything that simple.”

I share Rorty’s fondness for the focused and concrete nature of campaigns, but have to disagree with his assessment of movements. The Civil Rights Movement in particular, was clearly not a single discrete campaign, and did have clear, overarching goals that guided how campaigns were decided on and planned. Though the distinction is muddy, you do need strategy as well as tactics, and to effect drastic change over the long term, you do need a movement as well as particular campaigns.

With the prospect of a second Trump term in front of us, what we need now more than ever is a movement to implement true liberal democracy in America, to shore up its institutional weaknesses. As Samantha Hancox-Li put it, “The constitutional order must be reforged if it is to uphold the fundamental American ideals of freedom, democracy, and equality.” She framed this in particularly American and patriotic terms; the Civil Rights Movement always made sure to do the same, even (or perhaps especially) when they were laying out their heaviest criticisms of the American status quo. That is simply a good rhetorical strategy. The bottom line is that we all know that the American institutional order has grown sclerotic and that this has put Americans in general and our most vulnerable communities in particular at increased risk. Hancox-Li’s suggested end-point is a good one, though it will ultimately be a matter of ongoing discussion among movement members as well as those they attempt to bring into the fold.

The chief infrastructure of the movement should be a replication of the Freedom Schools, or Lawson’s workshops, or the Highland Folk School. These training outfits can be set up as nonprofits, but we must be cautious about how this is pursued. There are an enormous number of liberal-aligned nonprofits that exist today who nevertheless are simply part of the established base of social power that is unlikely to do anything particularly drastic unless properly galvanized. We do not want to simply create another nonprofit of this kind, merely another sponge for cash from Democratic donors. Instead we should aim at more focused, leaner organizations like Run For Something that do just one thing and do it well.

Right now, the drift of some humanities departments towards a high level of abstraction, combined with the discursive incentives created by our present media environment, have resulted in a political culture that is vague on particulars. Large concepts such as patriarchy, structural racism, and capitalism loom over the discussions, but we never seem to get actual analysis of the specifics of these structures. Pragmatic analysis aimed at specific action is entirely absent.

Compare this to Ricks’ description of Lawson’s workshops:

The first step in the workshops was to explain the theory and philosophy of nonviolence. The next step was to introduce tactics—how to translate theory into practice. The third was to determine procedures—how to implement those tactics, step by step.^[8]

We need more organizations and individuals who are focused on creating a culture of activism that is fundamentally practical and not purely theoretical. As Ricks emphasized, there is certainly a role for theory. But the theory of nonviolent direct action was always grounded in the high practical stakes of those putting it into practice, something that cannot truly be said of whatever analogue we may wish to draw to today.

The movement for “the fundamental American ideals of freedom, democracy, and equality” needs to aim to develop, through training and regular community-building, a class of competent and flexible activists. The training will impart knowledge of the best practices needed to conduct a successful campaign, and develop the skills to pull it off. These activists will then be able to come together, either for years at a time as the Civil Rights Movement organizations did, or just to accomplish some goal at some specific time and place, and then disperse.

Truly spontaneous mass protests are here to stay. In many ways, this is a good thing. But horizontalism does not work as a strategy for enacting change. Smaller, disciplined organizations with competent activists can exist alongside unpredictable, unplanned protests. Among the best practices that need to be developed for this community of activists are tactics for taking advantage of spontaneous mass protest when it occurs, turning surprise mass action into specific, concrete gains.

Another important best practice needs to be the development of social media policies for activist groups. I mentioned above that social media has made message discipline very difficult, if not impossible, for any given group these days. Just about every member of any organization is going to be used to casually offering opinions in public, even if only for very small audiences made up largely of acquaintances. When an organization is attempting to walk some political tightrope, they can very easily get pushed off of it because a member posted something which angered the wrong people or was perceived as at odds with the mission of the organization. Less innocently, some members may attempt to better their position in the internal politics of an organization by airing their grievances externally, something that can be fatal for a group’s cohesion and credibility.

People seeking to participate in a particular group’s activism should be required to agree to the group’s social media policies. Just as the SCLC had individuals that monitored marches, contemporary groups need social media monitors to ensure these policies are followed. Enforcement actions can include asking a particular participant to stay off of social media for a week if they are found to have violated the policy. Even in the absence of punishments that have real teeth behind them, expressing clear disapproval on the part of the group for a member’s social media behavior can be a potent tool for reining them in, especially if it is done through a set of rules that all have agreed to. If that is not enough, incalcitrant posters should be removed from the group entirely. This is unlikely to be sustainable in a big organization that is going to be around for years and years, but may be achievable for specific, time-bound campaigns with discrete actions and goals.

A great deal of the original principles of the Movement can be taken on board without modification. For example, the practice of carefully laying the groundwork before engaging in direct action, through information gathering (or “reconnaissance” as Ricks puts it) and by making contact with the local leadership of the communities you seek to mobilize. Or the mantra to “turn negative energy into positive action,”^[9] which sounds a bit New Age but in practice meant that when white supremacists bombed a church, the Movement seized the initiative to get political concessions. The basic playbook still works; there is no reason to reinvent the wheel.

We are already organized

I am not here seeking to pretend that we are lacking for activism, even good, effective activism, on behalf of liberal ideals today. Organizations like Fair Fight Action in Georgia drive voter registration and turnout despite absurd hurdles the state of Georgia has put in place. If the institutionalized nonprofit iteration of Black Lives Matters has faced similar failure modes as other such organizations, its many local chapters (affiliated or not) have done good, nuts and bolts work that we will be hearing about for years to come. Even Occupy Wall Street, which was a failure from all practical points of view on its own, can reasonably be read as step one in the learning process of a new generation entering into the world of activism.

With this essay I hoped only to play my own role as a liberal writer, to unpack the methods of a group of activists which we have had decades to analyze and discuss. The history of Black Lives Matters and everything they have done and will do has yet to be written. But the Civil Rights Movement ended long ago, its most successful actions and greatest failures have been turned over and scrutinized again and again.

What is important to remember is that they did do it, then. And we can do it, now. Whether we must face a second Trump term, or not.

[1] Ricks, Thomas E.. Waging a Good War: A Military History of the Civil Rights Movement, 1954-1968 (p. 43). Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Kindle Edition.

[2] Ibid,332.

[3] Ibid.

[4] Ibid.

[5] Ibid.

[6] Gurri, Adam, Law and Social Action (March 20, 2021). Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=3808658 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3808658. 12.

[7] Ricks, Thomas E.. Waging a Good War: A Military History of the Civil Rights Movement, 1954-1968 (p. 246). Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Kindle Edition.

[8] Ibid, 45.

Featured image is James Lawson, by Laura Garcia

… we the people, the people, the PEOPLE—we, the people, do ordain and establish this Constitution. There we stand on the main foundation. [Sources of Danger to the Republic, 1867]

Frederick Douglass is the liberal mind for our antiliberal times.

The remarkable life story of Frederick Douglass—escaped slave, abolitionist newspaperman and orator, advisor to presidents, and statesman—tends to eclipse the man’s own ideas. But his star-spangled résumé also featured the fact that he was an innovative political philosopher. His autobiographies are barely disguised political treatises more than they are memoirs. He omits almost any reflection on his intimate relationships, and every story he relates is a parable for some philosophical idea. His vast corpus of writing included essays and speeches explicitly on the nature and justification of government, the derivation of rights, the limits of the Constitution and democracy, and the philosophy of reform.

Douglass was a liberal, though liberals have oddly tended to leave him on the shelf—a glance through any history of liberalism almost invariably fails to even mention Douglass. Douglass’s individualism, his appeals to natural rights, his cosmopolitanism, and his beliefs in self-betterment and social improvement through commerce and industry all fit a basic liberal outlook. But it’s hard to pin him down to anything narrower than that.

What is distinctive about the political philosophy of Douglass—what sets him apart from other liberals—is his fugitivity. Douglass had an ambivalent relationship with the law and a willingness to think and act outside established institutions. Like any good liberal, Douglass advocated the rule of law and stable representative institutions. Liberals are comfortable theorizing about political institutions and constructing mythical origin stories to justify those institutions. Douglass, by contrast, elaborated a political theory from his experiences as a slave, where institutions were directed against him and people like him. He had to become attuned to the differential character of law as it applied to slaves and other outlaws—those outside the law.

The institutional breakdown prior to the Civil War and the extraconstitutional cataclysm of the Civil War itself gave Douglass reason to think about how liberal values could be applied in a revolutionary context of institutions in flux. A keen awareness of the militarily defeated but socially and politically unbroken spirit of slavery gave Douglass a no-bullshit attitude toward the fragility of liberal institutions. Douglass was attuned to how inequalities of wealth and political power and the ever-adaptive spirit of slavery represented ongoing threats to the republic and the flesh and blood people it comprised.

A fugitive liberal

Douglass embodied this fugitive rebelliousness against the established authority from his earliest memories as a slave boy. He recounts the “first decidedly anti-slavery lecture” he ever heard—Hugh Auld explaining to his wife Sophia the danger of teaching young Fred how to read. It would “unfit him to be a slave.” Douglass resolved to learn at all costs. This commitment to unfitting himself to slavery would extend to teaching his fellow slaves to read, an objective he would clandestinely pursue for the rest of his tenure in bondage.

Reading and teaching may feel like small stakes. The slave drivers would disagree, but Douglass’s fugitive philosophy would develop further when he found himself “pinched with hunger.” Stealing food from his master was justified easily enough as simply moving the master’s property from one bin to another, since his belly also belonged to Master Thomas. Douglass found that slaves are justified in stealing from society at large, and not just the necessaries of life, but gold and valuables.

It was necessary that the right to steal from others should be established; and this could only rest upon a wider range of generalization than that which supposed the right to steal from my master. It was some time before I arrived at this clear right. To give some idea of my train of reasoning, I will state the case as I laid it out in my mind. 'I am,' I thought, 'not only the slave of Master Thomas, but I am the slave of society at large. Society at large has bound itself, in form and in fact, to assist Master Thomas in robbing me of my rightful liberty, and of the just reward of my labor; therefore, whatever rights I have against Master Thomas I have equally against those confederated with him in robbing me of liberty. As society has marked me out as privileged plunder, on the principle of self-preservation, I am justified in plundering in turn. Since each slave belongs to all, all must therefore belong to each.' [Life and Times of Frederick Douglass (LTFD), 1892]

Emphases mine. Douglass does not dispassionately derive his conclusions from first premises. He seeks out this reasoning because necessity—the pinch of hunger—requires that he steal food. Yet he must justify his actions, both to himself and to an imagined other, and eventually to his readers. The right derived from his need is clear. Moreover, because it is not the singular slaveholder, but an ideology and elaborate political economy of the slave power that oppresses the slave, transgressive actions against the system of slave power itself and those individuals enabling and enacting the slave power.

This parable captures a recurring theme of Douglass’s fugitive liberalism. Transgressive actions are morally authorized and sometimes even demanded by the manifest needs of people for “self-preservation,” in order to survive. But we must justify these actions and prepare some path to lawful relations between free and equal persons after the transgression.

Douglass continues,

The morality of free society could have no application to slave society. Slaveholders made it almost impossible for the slave to commit any crime, known either to the laws of God or to the laws of man. If he stole, he but took his own; if he killed his master, he only imitated the heroes of the revolution. Slaveholders I held to be individually and collectively responsible for all the evils which grew out of the horrid relation, and I believed they would be so held in the sight of God. [LTFD, 1892]

Douglass occupies a double position. Those who take decisive action against the slave power are like unto the heroes of the revolution. At the same time, this is a perversion of the morality of the free society. The slave power necessitates actions unbefitting free people.

Douglass enacted these values as a fugitive ex-slave. Like many escaped slaves, Douglass lied and forged official documents in order to make his escape to the North, with the crucial assistance of Anna Murray, a free Black woman who would provide his travel fare and later marry Douglass. It’s worth pausing to emphasize the inherent fugitivity of the escaped slave. There were no legal pathways to the North, even in principle—no queue, no forms, no fees. Escaping from slavery was pure lawbreaking.

Once free in the North, Douglass had to live in anonymity or risk being kidnapped by slave catchers and returned to bondage in the South, against which he would have no legal recourse. When Douglass chose to reveal his identity in 1845 by publishing his Narrative of the Life of a Slave, he fled to the British Isles, where he would live in exile for 22 months and only return when some of his friends had pooled enough money to purchase his freedom from his former owner. The life of a freed slave was one of extreme legal precarity.

Just as he wanted to share the liberating power of the written word with fellow slaves, Douglass wanted to aid the escape of as many enslaved persons as possible and so he became involved in the Underground Railroad. On at least one occasion, this led Douglass to sheltering fugitive slaves who had killed agents of the state in their flight. After the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, Douglass advocated deadly resistance against those who were authorized by the Act to capture and abscond with escaped slaves. “The only way to make the Fugitive Slave Law a dead letter is to make half a dozen or more dead kidnappers.” 

Douglass was a friend and confidante of John Brown, who would lead the raid on the federal armory at Harpers Ferry in 1859 that ultimately sparked the Civil War. Douglass refused to join Brown on the raid, and advised against its execution, but Douglass also kept Brown’s confidence, was forced to flee the country for his complicity, and would for the rest of his life sing Brown’s praises as an American hero. 

This brief recounting of these events of Douglass’s life shows Douglass was no stranger to violence, including violent resistance against the state. But Douglass would offer his radical counsel to the state as well as against it. Douglass criticized Lincoln for placating the South and demanded the emancipation and arming of the enslaved population to fight against the slavers. Though a fierce critic of Lincoln during the early, reticent stages of the Northern campaign, Douglass would go on to defend Lincoln’s wisdom. Notably, Douglass’s fugitive relation to the law could extend to those in positions of authority when they were willing and in a position to strike a blow against the slave power. Douglass exalts Lincoln for being willing to do what was necessary—in spite of strict adherence to norms and procedures—to save the republic.

We appealed, to be sure—we pointed out through our principles the right way—but we were powerless, and we saw no help till the man, Lincoln, appeared on the theater of action and extended his honest hand to save the republic. No; we owe nothing to our form of government for our preservation as a nation—nothing whatever—nothing to its checks, nor to its balances, nor to its wise division of powers and duties. It was an honest president backed up by intelligent and loyal people—men, high minded men that constitute the state, who regarded society as superior to its forms, the spirit as above the letter—men as more than country, and as superior to the Constitution. They resolved to save the country with the Constitution if they could, but at any rate to save the country. To this we owe our present safety as a nation. [Sources of Danger to the Republic, 1867]

Emphases mine. At the root of Douglass’s fugitive philosophy is his observation that, at the end of the day, it is up to the individual to act. Republican government cannot survive without moral individuals doing what is necessary to uphold republican principles. No constitution or system of government sustains itself by force of words or reason. It is always up to individuals to do the right thing. In a political crisis where rogue parties are determined to ignore norms and laws and resort to violence, the form of government and the delineated functions and powers of institutions may be powerless to repel them. In an extraconstitutional situation where the Constitution has already been ignored or overridden, the Constitution itself offers no guidance for returning to a constitutional context.

Douglass reminds us that the Constitution doesn’t exist for its own sake. The purpose of government, our laws, our Constitution, is to serve flesh and blood human beings. Lincoln and his allies sought to save the United States within the Constitution if at all possible, but they resolved to save the nation by going around the Constitution if necessary.

Lincoln and his allies were in the theater of action. They were the ones situated to act, to steer the mass of citizens and resources to oppose the threat facing the nation that was rent asunder. By “theater of action,” Douglass distinguishes Lincoln and his government from the millions of Americans who could express their values, vote one way or another, and engage in individual acts of humanity and resistance, but who ultimately were at the mercy of powers and events outside their control.

Finally, Douglass speaks of Lincoln’s “honest hand.” Lincoln may have had to seize extraconstitutional power to save the country, but that doesn’t mean anything goes. Douglass’s fugitivity is always liberal. It is always bound by the spirit of law and humanity, and only authorized when peaceful and legal options have failed. Resorting to violence or seizing power for vicious reasons must always be condemned. 

The spirit of slavery

Douglass was thus not a fire-breathing radical by disposition. The radical measures he advocated always aimed at creating or returning to a state of freedom, equality, and social order. He resisted any temptation for revenge or violence beyond what was necessary for liberal order. In his famous conflict with the slavebreaker Edward Covey, Douglass tells his readers that he fought defensively, and avoided striking any crippling blows. In one of the greatest political disappointments of his late life—and what would be seen by later generations as the end of Reconstruction—the Supreme Court effectively nullified the Fourteenth Amendment and the Civil Rights Act of 1875. Though Douglass saw this as a calamity that left Black people in the United States naked and defenseless, he still saw the potential for peaceful reform, and resisted calling for violent action against the “autocratic” Supreme Court. 

Liberals crave clear rules for when to “break glass in case of constitutional crisis,” but such crises are always novel, and by definition spread outside known political terrain. There be dragons. Douglass couldn’t offer hard and fast rules, but he offered a model of forbearance—resisting radical measures as long as possible—with constant appeal to constitutional principles, and an invitation to return to constitutional relations.

Throughout his autobiographies, Douglass humanizes whites and even slave-owners, first the neighborhood children who were too young to grasp why Douglass was different from them and was fated for slavery. Douglass had an evident affection for his mistress, Sophie Auld, who began teaching him how to read out of her good nature, before Hugh Auld imposed the spirit of slavery on their otherwise natural human relationship. Later in life, after the war, Douglass recounted visiting a now elderly Thomas Auld. Even this man, who had presumed to own Douglass and subject him to slavery, was given the benefit of Douglass’s orientation toward a future of peace and equality.

[N]ow that slavery was destroyed, and the slave and the master stood upon equal ground, I was not only willing to meet him, but was very glad to do so... He was to me no longer a slaveholder either in fact or in spirit, and I regarded him as I did myself, a victim of the circumstances of birth, education, law, and custom. [LTFD, 1892]

Douglass’s great enemy was not any person, but the system and spirit of slavery. Though slavery itself was destroyed by the Civil War, Douglass believed the spirit of slavery persisted, and would take generations to fully defeat. "Though the rebellion is dead, though slavery is dead, both the rebellion and slavery have left behind influences which will remain with us, it may be, for generations to come." This spirit of slavery is the systemic racism that critical race theorists and other racial justice activists have brought to our attention, the systematic and persistent social, economic, and political disadvantages thrust upon Black people in America. The slave power—the political faction that implicitly or explicitly acts to preserve systematic Black disadvantage and the domination of a white elite—persists to the present day.

The MAGA movement of Donald Trump represents the slave power in its most acute contemporary form. In the second part of this essay on fugitive liberalism, I will explore how Douglass’s ideas might be applied in our own time of antidemocratic authoritarianism, outlaw communities, and constitutional crisis.

They're pulled from their homes. Rounded up.

Then?

Well, there's not anywhere they're set to go, or even can go. There's no plan.

Get a thousand parking lots and some tents or something. 

They'll need and want meals prepared, network access, drinks and snacks, a bed, a shower, toiletries, cleaning services, laundry, medicine, education, books, church, rewarding work, vacations, shopping, entertainment, family life, and community.

Are you going to pay for that?

Well, you won't want to.

You know, they were fine, where they were. You were hardly paying for any of that stuff before. They generally had jobs, and paid taxes.

You also have jobs. That's how you pay taxes.

Anyway, after you yank them away from their jobs, they won't be able to pay for anything they need and want, so you'll have to.

But you won't want to pay very much, so you'll throw them into hot warehouses, or onto parking lots under some tents. 

And soon they'll be hungry. Tired. Dirty. Gross. Sick. Out of touch.

Considering how much you were already being told to hate them, how Trump was already dehumanizing them while they were freely living their lives, how right will he seem after he's sealed them inside these godforsaken pens?

And you'll be paying 100 percent of their costs of living.

When you stop paying some of those costs, without setting them free, they'll start dying.

The camps will be riddled with death.

We'll want the camps to go away. 

Probably, hopefully, we'll quietly let the people who survive go back to their homes, back to their jobs and lives.

We'll wish to forget the whole thing.

They'll want to forget it too, but won't.