David Michael Miller
That sounds kind of romantic. It brings to mind brave men and women wearing black turtlenecks and berets while they sit in cafes plotting to blow up railroad bridges. They look warily at a stranger approaching their table. Tentatively, they ask, “Rayzisstaunce?” Lustily, the stranger replies, “Rayzisstaunce! Viva la Clinton! Viva la Sanders!”
But language is important, and resistance is the wrong word on two levels. First, it’s not accurate, and second, it represents a posture and attitude harmful to American democracy.
It’s not accurate because resistance implies opposition to a government imposed by force or otherwise illegitimately in your country. So, we had the French Resistance fighting the Nazis. In fact, just about every nation overrun by the Germans in World War II had its own resistance movement. These really were extremely brave and patriotic people risking their lives to reclaim their country and their freedom.
So, for liberal Americans, simply aggrieved by an election gone horribly wrong, to refer to themselves as the resistance is factually wrong, but also kind of disrespectful to genuine resistance fighters. Having to witness Sean Spicer twist the English language to fit the contradictory ramblings of his boss is not the same as being tortured by the Gestapo.
Worse, thinking of ourselves this way only serves to further deepen the divides in American society. Resistance implies that the Trump administration is illegitimate. The administration is deeply incompetent and somewhat dangerous, but Donald Trump was legitimately elected president of the United States. We can question the judgment of our fellow Americans, and we can seek to abolish the Electoral College. We can worry that the Russians conspired with Trump to rig the election, which would in fact be treason, but unless that is proven, we have to live with what our system has delivered in the way of leadership.
To question the very legitimacy of Trump is the mirror reflection of some right-wing factions that questioned the legitimacy of President Obama. Ironically, Trump himself was part of that when he fed the phony birther movement. It was wrong and destructive when Trump and the right did it, and it’s no less harmful when the left does it now.
Rather than borrowing from the French, better to take from the British and to think of ourselves as the loyal opposition. We strongly disagree with the policies (to the extent they can be discerned) of our national government, but we are loyal to our shared nation and to its institutions. We respect the presidency even if we despise the president. Because the biggest threat to our country right now is not Donald Trump; it’s the deepening divide between a diverse, urban, educated America and a mostly white, more rural or small-town, less-educated America.
If liberals stand for anything it’s tolerance and the willingness to reach out and to try to understand other points of view. Rather than dismiss Trump voters as bigots and fools, a “basket of deplorables,” it would be better for us to be a little bit humble about how our own blindness and arrogance led to our stunning defeat not just for the presidency but far down the ticket. Republicans now hold more statehouse seats nationwide than they have in almost 100 years.
My fellow liberals, we are not being literally murdered, but we are getting killed at the polls. If you really think that you are so dominated by the other side that you need to think of yourself as the resistance to an occupying force, then maybe you want to reflect on how it got like that and your own part in making it this way.
