{"id":41683,"date":"2025-06-05T13:43:37","date_gmt":"2025-06-05T20:43:37","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/?p=41683"},"modified":"2025-06-05T13:47:52","modified_gmt":"2025-06-05T20:47:52","slug":"why-the-trump-protests-will-fail","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/2025\/06\/05\/why-the-trump-protests-will-fail\/","title":{"rendered":"Why The Trump Protests Will Fail"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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By Evelyn Quartz<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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In a recent segment<\/u><\/a>, MSNBC commentator Rachel Maddow breathlessly described an upcoming \u201cNo Kings Day<\/u>\u201d<\/a> protest of President Donald Trump<\/a> on June 14, pointing to a coordinated protest effort that day across all 50 states. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

These types of pro-democracy protests, she explained, are helping to \u201ccreate a culture in which it is shameful to capitulate to Trump\u201d \u2014 for law firms, media companies, billionaires, and business interests. Not shameful to uphold unjust policies or suppress workers. Shameful for the elites to align with the wrong brand. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

What do these protests look like? Rows of professionally printed signs reading \u201cNot My President.\u201d Choreographed chants about saving democracy. Speeches by nonprofit leaders and local officials, livestreamed for social media. Few named targets. Few direct demands. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Maddow spoke with real sincerity. She and her guests\u2019 urgency was palpable. But the vision they offered was limited \u2014 not a plan to challenge power, but an effort to shape elite respectability. The protest\u2019s goal wasn\u2019t to shift institutions. It was to signal social, professional, and aesthetic boundaries. Not leverage. Reputational management.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Nowhere does Maddow name the structures of power that enabled Trump\u2019s return. An economic order defined by globalization, the money-ridden political system \u2014 this bipartisan consensus failed millions, but none of it is interrogated. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Instead, the protest becomes a moral signal, not a strategic challenge. And it reflects something deeper about this liberal worldview: a belief that Trump is the singular threat while leaving the system that enabled him untouched. It\u2019s a way of thinking that relies on a crumbling assumption: Trump was a fluke in an otherwise functional democracy. It demands that civic decency is the solution and that protest is not a confrontation with power, but a performance of moral alignment. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The irony is that in the 1990s, Maddow was an AIDS activist involved with ACT UP. In 1999, while Al Gore was campaigning for president in New Hampshire, she risked arrest by holding <\/u><\/a>a banner that read: \u201cGore\u2019s Greed Kills, AIDS Drugs for Africa.\u201d The protest targeted<\/u><\/a> Gore\u2019s role in siding with U.S. pharmaceutical companies to block South Africa\u2019s access to affordable HIV medication. It was bold, confrontational, and aimed squarely at power.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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That kind of protest \u2014 disruptive, morally urgent, and materially specific \u2014 bears little resemblance to the one Maddow promoted on air, which was a plea for social boundaries and a reaffirmation of norms. A far cry from the banner she once held.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

When Trump was first elected, the liberal class \u2014 MSNBC pundits, pro-democracy centrists, and the consultants shaping consensus \u2014 framed his rise as an anomaly, a rupture to be repaired. Defeating \u201cTrumpism,\u201d they argued, would be like cutting out cancer. But this diagnosis never accounted for the conditions that produced him. It treated Trump as a disease, not a symptom.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

None of this is to deny that Trump\u2019s return poses a real threat. His record of authoritarian rhetoric, political retribution, and contempt for democratic norms is well documented. But he didn\u2019t claw his way back through brute force. He won \u2014 by expanding his base, turning <\/u><\/a>out new voters, and capitalizing on the disillusionment of millions who had once backed the Democratic Party. Voters who showed up for Biden in 2020 stayed<\/u><\/a> home in 2024.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But instead of facing the collapse of the bipartisan, neoliberal consensus they\u2019ve defended for decades, the liberal class reverted to familiar tropes: Trump as a fluke, an aberration, a villain who somehow broke into an otherwise healthy system. The Resistance, they believe, will rise again to stop him. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

This dominant narrative in liberal circles \u2014 a symbolic clash between decency and fascism \u2014 obscures the deeper crisis beneath his rise. It avoids naming the economic, institutional, and political failures that made his comeback possible. And in doing so, it sidesteps the harder, more urgent task: confronting power itself.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Protest For The Hobbyists<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

For the liberal professional class, protest has become a political project, one that reasserts their moral authority while defending their position within a crumbling order. By framing the crisis as a breakdown of norms rather than a reckoning with power, they avoid harder questions: Who holds real influence? How is it maintained? What would it take to change it? In this framework, resistance becomes symbolic performance \u2014 an expression of virtue and identity, not a confrontation with the systems that govern us.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This isn\u2019t a new problem. Over a century ago, sociologist \u00c9mile Durkheim warned<\/u><\/a> that when societies lose moral coherence \u2014 when shared meaning breaks down \u2014 rituals may endure, but they lose their binding force. Politics becomes expressive rather than strategic. Protest becomes a performance of virtue, not an exercise of power.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Political theorist John Gray put it more bluntly<\/u><\/a>. In the absence of real consensus, he argued, Trump had to be turned into \u201ca theory of evil\u201d by the liberal class \u2014 a villain so grotesque and singular that the system\u2019s failures could be projected onto him. In this narrative, protest isn\u2019t meant to transform the system. It exists to preserve the illusion that the system still works.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The upcoming \u201cNo Kings Day\u201d is far from the first protest of its kind. Over the past decade, liberal protest culture has returned again and again to the same playbook. From the 2017 Women\u2019s March<\/u><\/a> to the \u201cBans Off Our Bodies\u201d rallies<\/u><\/a> after the leaked Dobbs memo, and even \u201cDefend Democracy\u201d vigils <\/u><\/a>after the Jan. 6 riot, these demonstrations have mobilized outrage without confronting power. They prioritize tone, aesthetic unity, and moral alignment \u2014 often drawing massive crowds, but issuing few demands. The goal is to be seen, not to force concessions. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The spectacle is uplifting, frictionless \u2014 designed to reassure participants they are on the right side of history. It\u2019s no wonder figures like Sen. Chuck Schumer<\/u><\/a> (D-N.Y.) and Rep. Hakeem Jeffries<\/u><\/a> (D-N.Y.) \u2014 Democratic leaders who have repeatedly upheld corporate interests \u2014 feel comfortable showing up with a bullhorn.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

What\u2019s missing from these protests is what once made protest effective: solidarity across individual differences \u2014 not personal virtue signaling \u2014 and direct demands aimed at those who hold power.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The labor uprisings of the 1930s weren\u2019t expressions of personal outrage. They were organized disruptions. Workers in auto plants and steel mills walked off the job, occupied factories, and shut down production. These movements united <\/u><\/a>immigrants, Black workers, and the rural poor \u2014 not around identity, but around shared interest. Their goal wasn\u2019t visibility. It was leverage. And they won \u2014 not in one burst, but through decades of sustained struggle.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The civil rights movement, too, was rooted <\/u><\/a>in material demands, despite being remembered today mostly for its rhetorical grace. The 1963 March on Washington \u2014 best known for Martin Luther King Jr.\u2019s \u201cI Have a Dream\u201d speech \u2014 was officially a march for Jobs and Freedom. The campaign demanded a national living wage, federal jobs programs, desegregation, and voting rights. After the march, King and his fellow activist leaders went to the White House to bring their demands directly to President John F. Kennedy. The sustained activism of that era led to landmark legislation like the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Justice for Janitors campaign<\/u><\/a> has been a century-long movement that continues to this day. Started in the 1920s, led by workers of all genders and races, the movement won union contracts, wage increases, and health care through coordinated strikes and protests at corporate headquarters. They didn\u2019t rally in parks. They organized and protested where power lived \u2014 and forced concessions.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

These movements weren\u2019t perfect. But they operated from a clear logic: Protest is leverage, not performance. They didn\u2019t presume solidarity. They built it: through risk, through conflict, and across lines of difference.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Step Into The Void<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

In an era that has lost sight of what protest is for \u2014 how its power is built not through performance but through collective risk \u2014 it\u2019s no surprise the liberal class prefers the sanitized version. These rituals offer catharsis without confrontation. They preserve the appearance of engagement without threatening the foundation of the status quo.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But if protest no longer threatens power, it leaves space for something else to rise. And in that failure lies an opportunity.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This is the left\u2019s challenge \u2014 and its opening. Because protests like the one planned for June 14 will fail. They will fail to confront power, to offer a vision beyond moral symbolism. And they will fail to address the collapse of legitimacy that made Trump possible in the first place.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The truth is, the left has been trying to do this work for years \u2014 building unions, defending tenants, organizing across differences. But it\u2019s been too often shut out. Mocked as too radical. Boxed out by a liberal class that would rather lose to the right than share power with the movement that could actually win something better.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Now, the center is cracking.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The question is what will rise in its place. The task is not just to protest the collapse, but to recognize what\u2019s real and what\u2019s performative. To see through the rituals \u2014 and step into the void with something more serious, more grounded. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

If the liberal class clings to the symbols of democracy, the left must fight for its substance. That means organizing where power lives, demanding what solidarity requires, and building something that doesn\u2019t keep us trapped in the center\u2019s endless cycle of \u201cleast bad\u201d candidates \u2014 but instead begins to redistribute power \u2014 economic, political, and moral \u2014 back to the people.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Because when all is said and done, when the slogans fade and the cameras turn off, protest is not a brand. It\u2019s a threat.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By Evelyn Quartz In a recent segment, MSNBC commentator Rachel Maddow breathlessly described an upcoming \u201cNo Kings Day\u201d protest of President Donald Trump on June 14, pointing to a coordinated protest effort that day across all 50 states.  These types of pro-democracy protests, she explained, are helping to \u201ccreate a culture in which it… Continue reading → <\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41683"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=41683"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41683\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":41688,"href":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41683\/revisions\/41688"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=41683"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=41683"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=41683"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}