Democracy is not a spectator sport — Advice to Americans from one Canadian

[Ken Gray] Today, I have joined the ranks of the disheartened.

FAKE NEWS, though I am stymied by the number and severity of the many horror stories I discover daily. With so many different fronts on which to report, attacks on the leadership of the National Security Agency, potential threats to peaceful protest, the destruction of the environmental protection agency, the list of devious actions is seemingly endless — like the game Whac-A-Mole, (with apologies to moles everywhere) you beat down one initiative while across the board two more pop up. This is all by design, and the content is all laid out in Project 2025. The Blitzkrieg worked in Spain and Poland in 1939, and it’s working now. We are befuddled and exhausted as the forces of evil continue unabated.

Sure, the public protests of a few days ago have demonstrated widespread dissent with both Trump and Musk. The numbers of events and protesters are predicted to grow in the weeks ahead. But on April 20 recommendations regarding the Insurrection Act will be sent to the Oval Office for direction and likely, implementation. To use a Nazi timetable we are roughly around 1938 again. April 20 could be a game changer from which a return may be impossible.

So dear American friends, how will you cope and how ought you to respond to powerful forces and sinister coalitions?  How large is your capacity for resistance? How might you (and Canadians north of our shared border) move from spectator politics to strategic resistance?

In the article extracted below, I find many ideas about how we all can find our place in the resistance. Whether a state governor, a faith community leader, a lawyer, a landscaper, or a breast-feeding mum, we can all make a difference and have our say as part of a collective reformation movement.

Please join me in refusing to give up resistance through whatever means available to each of us. Otherwise, as the cartoon leading this blog will become true. Tyranny will prevail.

May this long but worthwhile article from The New Republic provide both direction and encouragement to us all. We are in this together, whether we live in the US, Greenland, or on a remote island off the coast of Australia populated by angry penguins. I hope we all can find hope and strategy from Fighting Back: A Citizen’s Guide to Resistance — Ordinary people have more power than they know written by Timothy Noah for The New Republic on /March 27, 2025.

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[Timothy Noah, The New Republic]

This country has never witnessed an abuse of presidential authority so extreme as what Trump is right now wreaking in every conceivable direction.   

An extraordinary national mobilization is underway. Every conceivable method of lawful opposition is being applied to arrest Trump’s bizarre and frequently illegal sabotage of the very government he was elected to lead. Some acts of resistance will work; others will fail. It will be some time before we have a clear sense of what works best.

“There is no silver bullet—no single arena, not even the courtroom, where Trump’s illegal power grab can be stopped. “There’s no messiah” who will “sweep in and make everything better,” said Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers. That’s up to you and me. The good news is there are a lot of us.

No matter who joins this fight, it won’t be won next week, or next month. Barring impeachment and removal, Trump will be president for four long years, and not even his allies expect him to become less authoritarian and kleptocratic. So pace yourself. But the sooner you join in, the more effectively we can limit the damage. Here’s how.

Sue the Bastard

The most obvious arena in which to stop a lawbreaker is the courts, and that’s where Resistance 2.0 begins. More than 70 lawsuits were filed against the Trump administration just during Trump’s first month in office, challenging everything from his attempt to end birthright citizenship (which is embedded in the Fourteenth Amendment) to Elon Musk’s de facto shutdown of the United States Agency for International Development (which distributes about $40 billion in international aid per year). The result was a blizzard of federal court rulings that blocked, at least temporarily, various administration actions—46 rulings in Trump’s first eight weeks, according to The New York Times.

What role is there for John Q. Citizen? If you’re a lawyer, consider volunteering for a nonprofit group engaged in Resistance 2.0, or donating money. Both are usually best done at the local level, but don’t neglect national nonprofits taking on Trump, which include Democracy Forward, Public Citizen, and State Democracy Defenders Fund.

March

Civil society can’t be saved in the courts alone. It’s up to us as a people to stand up and push back. The purpose of such protests is not to influence the president. “Trump doesn’t really get moved by hundreds of thousands of people marching against him,”

 The purpose is to bring like-minded people together into resistance networks; to attract publicity that will draw new people into the movement; and, through that same publicity, to alert other politicians that failing to oppose Trump will cost them support.

Pester Your Elected Officials

The congressional Democrats’ annoyance [with voter dissatisfaction] demonstrated that they were feeling appropriate pressure from voters to swing into action. The groups that mobilized them had done well.

[Groups such as] Indivisible sprang up after the 2016 election to educate voters about how to harness their power as constituents, adopting some tactics (but none of the politics) of the right-wing Tea Party movement. Indivisible ended up playing a significant role in preventing Trump from eliminating Obamacare and in the Democrats’ recapture of the House in 2018.

After the 2024 election, Indivisible updated its primer on constituent power; the new Practical Guide to Democracy on the Brink is refreshingly blunt. Elected officials care about “advocacy that requires effort” such as phone calls, personal emails, “and especially showing up in person.” They don’t usually care about form letters or a social media post. A constituent acting alone is easy to blow off; a constituent acting with other constituents is not, especially if the others include constituents who are wealthy or otherwise prominent.

Keep Up

The most important thing is to follow the mainstream press. It’s long been a badge of honor on the right not to subscribe to The New York Times or The Washington Post. Liberals have lately followed suit. That’s just foolish. These national newspapers, along with The Wall Street Journal, are imperfect but indispensable sources of reliable information. So is your local newspaper, if you’re still lucky enough to have one.

But you should also use social media. Yes, most of it is a fetid swamp of half-truths and outright lies, and if it disappeared tomorrow, I wouldn’t be terribly sorry. But some of it conveys useful information.

[Social media and] websites teem with Trump horror stories. Share them online or, better yet, in person, because you can’t resist effectively by acting alone. There are local resistance groups aplenty; join one and get the word out.

The woods are burning. What are you waiting for?