Transcript: Dems Need Fresh Faces, Achievable Ideas to Defeat Trumpism

Greenberg: Yeah. And it’s interesting and important strategically, but it’s not that interesting morally. It’s all functionally the same. Anyway, that was a really important atmospheric shift. And so a lot of our own thinking shifted from, Can we do one-offs focused on specific policies where we’re mobilizing to try to push back on this policy? to, What do we need to do to build the mass public opposition to Donald Trump? And then to show it in force, in ways that are actually going to introduce into all of these alternate decision-makers this question of, Is Donald Trump actually going to win? Because fundamentally what’s happening is [within] a bunch of sections of society, their decision-makers have said, Well, Donald Trump was elected. He won the popular vote. He’s going to consolidate power. This is the new normal. I’ve got to find my place underneath this new regime, and I’ve got to secure my position. And so I’m going to fold in and obey.

And it’s our job collectively as the resistance to make people think maybe that’s not actually going to happen. Maybe this is going to be a short-lived experiment in attempting to impose fascism that’s going to end in a disaster for him and a historic wipeout for the Republican Party and an era of accountability and retribution and renewed democracy afterward. And maybe they need to actually hedge their bets a little bit, right? And so part of the thinking is we shifted to stuff like Hands Off and No Kings, which were obviously massive collective movement efforts. We do need to do things where we’re showing up for different issues, where we’re showing up at different moments of crisis, but we also needed to collectively link arms and have a big-tent orientation to bringing out everyone who could collectively object to some part of what was going on and to show broad displeasure across the board.

And so that was the thinking with Hands Off, which was oriented very much around reaction to the DOGE cuts and to the attacks on so much of our services, federal government, civil rights, all of the pieces that were under attack there. That was the thinking with No Kings, which was a broad anti-authoritarian, anti-overreach, [and], because of the L.A. deployment, anti–immigration enforcement [protest]. Each of those protests, they were oriented so that you could show up—whatever brought you out, we were all showing up under the same umbrella to show supportive strength—and then oriented toward organizing people and moving them into longer-term collective local organizing. Fundamentally, what we think is that we’re pretty far down the path into authoritarian consolidation of power. And in that moment, we’ve got to use the traditional tools that we’ve got. We’ve got to use our congressional advocacy. We’ve got to do our electoral work. But we also have to recognize that those things are not going to be sufficient, and what we are going to need is mass civil resistance that targets not only our elected officials but actually every facet of power in American society and says you have to take a side.