Brian Beutler wrote a piece last week brainstorming ideas about resistance. Josh Marshall riffed on it a couple of days ago. Basically, they both make the point that it’s very hard to resist state power in the hands of despots but not impossible. One of our unique, clunky governmental structures is federalism which confers quite a bit of power on individual states and we are seeing them flex it in opposition to Trump’s aggressive attempts to usurp it. (I wrote about this right after the election.)
Beutler has a couple of out-of-the-box ideas that are worth considering. The first, which he admits is a real gut check, is a relaxation of gun laws in blue states. I’m horrified by the idea but it’s worth thinking about the argument he lays out:
- For all the past decades of right-wing revolutionary cosplay, the second amendment was actually written in anticipation of the kind of despotism the state and state-adjacent paramilitaries are now visiting on blue America;
- Washingtonians and residents of other cities are no less entitled to exploit the Supreme Court’s batshit second amendment jurisprudence than anyone else;
- Rightist fantasies about armed vigilantes stopping armed miscreants are stupid, but that doesn’t mean every other argument for keeping arms is also stupid. If you were among the people Trumpists have in bad faith accused of treason, would you maybe want to keep a gun in your home?
I don’t think I could ever feel ok about owning a gun but who knows where I’d be after a few years of this. After all, we have armed, masked thugs roaming the streets of my city right now. The bigger consideration that springs from this idea is how we should start thinking about civil disobedience. This is a very tough question right now, These people are ruthlessly asserting police power in record time.
The other idea he throws out is less terrifying to contemplate. Gavin Newsom mused in a tweet recently that perhaps California should start withholding its income taxes since we are being treated like a vassal state and contribute far more than we ever take out of the federal coffers. Beutler writes:
But of course, the federal government collects income taxes from millions of individual earners, through their employers, not from state governments. Newsom’s tweet thus scanned to sophisticated readers as an idle threat.
What if it weren’t so idle? California is a big employer. It can presumably suspend withholding. It can create incentives for others to do the same. Gavin Newsom could at the very least mount a tax-protest campaign large enough to overwhelm federal enforcement. Other Democratic governors and influential Americans could join in solidarity. In the aftermath of another blue-state natural disaster, and in the face of the GOP’s callous indifference, measures like these could generate sympathy.
“It would require a massive mobilization of collective action where you would have to have discipline and scale and multiple millions of people and corporations not paying their federal income tax because they want to take a stand,” California Attorney General Rob Bonta told me last week. “It would be like a mass protest. And like, you know, could it happen? It could happen. Like really good organizing. The governor saying, I’m gonna be the first, I’m not gonna pay my taxes, and I want you all to join me—like big influential leaders saying that.”
I would support this. It’s very radical and would provoke a right wing primal scream heard ’round the world. But if all the big blue states banded together and we were able to muster a critical mass among the population this could be very effective.
I don’t know if any of this is realistic but I like that people are thinking along these lines. Trump’s authoritarian take-over is unprecedented and it’s going to take some radical thinking to get us out of this. Using whatever institutional power we have to fight back is absolutely necessary, especially since so many of our other civil institutions have failed so miserably in the face of Trump’s threats.