Resistance and Dissent Under Trump

When M. Gessen won the Pulitzer Prize for opinion writing last week, The New York Times proudly reposted a bevy of columns by the Russian émigré op-ed writer. At the top of the list was a piece from February 8, 2025, bearing the headline “The Chilling Consequences of Going Along With Trump.” It explicitly compared America at the start of Trump II with “a society that is falling in line behind a totalitarian leader.” Citing the Yale historian Timothy Snyder (who has since ostentatiously expatriated himself to Toronto), Gessen warned against “anticipatory obedience” to the American duce. For “budding dictators,” the column argued, such obedience is a “key building block” of their power. But if we refuse to obey, the dictators will lose.

At first glance, the essay, with its ringing demand for moral courage, would seem hard to argue with. Writing of this sort, that insists on the moral power of humble individuals to resist evil, has a long, proud tradition in modern history. Gessen’s essay has echoes of Martin Niemöller’s meditation “First they came for the Socialists, and I did not speak out…” It has echoes of Vaclav Havel’s great essay “The Power of the Powerless,” which suggested that apparently innocuous acts such as a greengrocer placing a sign saying “Workers of the World Unite” in his shop window can provide crucial reinforcement for totalitarian power.

But on closer examination, Gessen is less compelling. Presenting the fight against tyrants and aspiring tyrants as above all a matter of individual morality and individual conduct misreads the recent history of repressive regimes and of dissent under them. It encourages a sense of self-satisfaction, even self-righteousness among those casting themselves as the “resistance.” And it distracts attention from the material and social building blocks of repressive power—ones that generally matter much more to their survival than “anticipatory obedience.”

The story of dissidents in the Communist bloc, which Gessen takes for a model, is an inspiring one, and I would never suggest that it didn’t matter. But how did it matter? Was it the dissidents’ refusal to obey that mattered most? Their example, and their writings, certainly helped undermine the legitimacy of the Communist regimes. But the dissidents did not, by themselves, come close to bringing the regimes down. That happened above all because petrified, corrupt, massively inefficient Communist systems could not provide their populations with a decent standard of living compared to the West. The dissidents mattered most at the end, when the systems were collapsing under their own weight and desperate last-minute attempts at reform provided an opening for those who had bravely offered resistance for decades. It was then that a history of dissent gave figures like Havel the standing to manage and shape the transition to democracy.

Before 1989, what also mattered was the work of organization that the dissidents carried out, through initiatives such as Charter 77. which Havel helped direct. The single most consequential example may have been the Polish KOR (Committee for the Defense of the Workers), in which intellectuals built ties to the labor activists who founded the Solidarity trade union in 1980. Solidarity became the greatest threat that a Communist system had ever faced “from below,” because it could exert actual social and economic pressure on the government.

Dissidents in the USSR faced much stronger obstacles to such efforts than their counterparts further west. The Moscow Helsinki Watch Group, established in 1976 to monitor Soviet compliance with the Helsinki Accords on human rights, was forcibly dissolved a few years later. This history may be one reason why Gessen, who grew up partly in the late USSR, stresses individual moral resistance rather than collective organizing. But the relative weakness of Soviet dissident organizations arguably contributed to democratic failure in Russia post-1991. There was no Russian figure with the moral authority and independence of Havel or Wałęsa to help lead the country into the post-Soviet era.

If the current American “resistance” has so far proven so woefully ineffective, one big reason is that so much of it has adopted the Gessen/Snyder emphasis on individual moral action. A prime example is the event that took place in the United States on March 28, 2026. What? You don’t remember? That was the date of the most recent nationwide “No Kings” protests, and if they didn’t stick in the memory, it is for good reason. As I wrote here the day after, not only was “No Kings” a fairly silly theme, but despite all the people who turned out, the rallies had little real organization or goals. There was no platform, no memorable oratory, no leadership in evidence. It all amounted to a giant well-intentioned squawk: “we will not obey.” Even though a disturbingly high percentage of the protestors were old enough to remember the Civil Rights Movement, they seemed to have forgotten the example of the Civil Rights Movement. The March on Washington this wasn’t.

Gessen’s column scolded hospitals for discontinuing trans care, a medical institute for canceling a diversity program, ABC News for settling a Trump libel suit, and Mark Zuckerberg for ending Meta’s fact-checking program. They should all have had more moral courage. Don’t treat Trump as a king. I agree! But a more effective way of stopping Trump might be, well, to build a real political movement. Soviet dissidents did not have that opportunity, but we do.

And the focus such a movement should adopt seems fairly obvious, to me at least. It should not just protest Trump’s moves towards autocracy. It should protest the main reason for his moves towards autocracy, which is a different kind of -ocracy: plutocracy. Trump may pose as a populist, but he is establishing government of the super-rich, by the super-rich, for the super-rich (on this subject, see Tim Noah’s terrific new story on the techlords in The New Republic). Unlike Ronald Reagan, he barely even bothers to dress up his actions in the language of “trickle-down economics” or “a rising tide lifts all boats” (by this point in his demented decline, he probably couldn’t understand the concepts anyway). His administration is an appallingly corrupt casino where donors pay to play. The adjudicated rapist throws red meat about trans and immigrant rapists to his base while cutting their benefits, driving up prices, and giving massive corporations the green light to screw the public without interference.

This is what a protest movement should focus on. Zohran Mamdani’s mayoral campaign showed the way, but most mainstream Democratic politicians have misunderstood it as being just about “affordability,” and forgetting the little word “socialist” that Mamdani puts after “democratic.” Don’t just attack the Republicans for soaring prices. Attack them for the corrupt reasons they have caused prices to soar.

A serious protest movement, as opposed to the inchoate “No Kings” rallies, should have some clear, simple goals: canceling tax breaks for the super-rich and imposing new, fair taxes on them; strengthening social benefits rather than cutting them; restricting corporate power; putting an end to Trumpian corruption and holding the corrupt criminally responsible; federal funding of elections to offset the influence of the super-rich. In short, ending government of the super-rich, by the super-rich, for the super-rich. Harness the anger of people who can’t afford to buy a home, see a doctor, or care properly for children. Harness it against the people who are responsible. Every Democratic candidate for office in the midterms should consider running on some version of this program and organizing rallies and marches that have these clear goals (and if they need to offend some of their own super-rich donors in the process, so be it).

So yes, don’t obey in anticipation. But above all, stand up and fight.