Gabriele Holtermann/Sipa USA via AP Images
Indivisible Brooklyn urged Sen. Chuck Schumer to take action and fight the MAGA agenda at a rally outside his home in the Park Slope neighborhood of Brooklyn, New York, February 8, 2025.
I’ve never been much of a Chuck Schumer fan. Like all of New York’s Democratic senators since the financial deregulation of the 1970s and ’80s and the extirpation of Rockefeller Republicanism, Schumer has cultivated Wall Street as a major source of campaign contributions. In return, he’s successfully worked to secure such Wall Street absurdities as the tax exemption for carried interest, a loophole only a mega-financier could love. Most of the time, he personifies, and helps define, a generally liberal Democratic mainstream, but there are occasional glaring exceptions when some financial-sector income streams are up for Senate consideration.
I’m not surprised by the outrage that the Democratic base has shown toward Schumer for voting to extend government funding until September. His decision, as best I can discern, was tactical: a belief that the Trump/Musk axe would destroy even more essential services if it was left to the president’s discretion to decide which agencies to keep open than that axe is already destroying. But I suspect the intensity and breadth of that outrage came because Schumer put an identifiable human face on the failure of the entire American left and center-left to come up with a way to stop Trump’s war on America.
In Chuck’s fall, that is, sinned we all.
What’s strikingly clear is that, so far, the only source of resistance to Trump that has managed to stop, however temporarily, some aspects of Trump’s war has been the courts. Democratic governors and state legislatures can enact counter-policies to Trump’s, but in many cases, federal laws preempt the states’, and in other cases, federal funding is something the states rely upon.
Which means that there are precious few avenues through which the immense mass of non-MAGA Americans can effectively respond to the daily stream of outrages that Trump and Musk spew forth. To be sure, individual organizations are increasingly turning out some of their members to protest specific policies: federal employee unions, pro-immigrant groups, environmental organizations, scientists, health researchers, women’s and civil rights advocates, and so on. Few if any of these protests have rated front-page or prime-time coverage, nor reached a level where they constitute the kind of mass statement that the great civil rights or anti-war rallies once produced.
It’s time that they did. It’s time that they must.
I’d suggest that some of the mass or semi-mass organizations that comprise the American center-left and left need to work together, across constituencies and causes, to provide a tangible, viable mass opposition to Trumpism. That means Indivisible working with Our Revolution, the AFL-CIO, the Planned Parenthood PAC, the NAACP, the liberal churches, student organizations, the AARP PAC—hell, the American Bar Association if Trump continues to defy or ignore court orders—to turn out crowds that even Fox News couldn’t ignore. And it means subordinating some eminently good causes to those that unite the broadest possible range of Trump opponents.
That means opposing Trump’s cuts to services that most Americans count upon: Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, apprenticeship programs, those employing medical researchers, park rangers, the guards watching over nuclear weapons. That suggests that veterans, already facing massive cuts to the health services they need, should take a leading role. That also suggests that the defense of American democracy should also take pride of place. As I’ve suggested in earlier On TAPs, April 19 is the 250th anniversary of the Battles of Lexington and Concord, which sparked the distinctly anti-autocratic rebellion we call the American Revolution. That Saturday, I know, is one day before Easter, but American democracy is every bit as much a civic religion—or should be—as Christianity is a faith-based one. As for all those young folks who’ll be spring-breaking on Florida beaches, well, there are always hotshot young organizers who think they can organize all kinds of unlikely devotees. Here’s their chance.
Comes the moment, comes the movement? Well, dammit, the moment is here.
