The Way to Beat Back Trump Was Just Revealed
The fight against ICE in Minneapolis defies easy categorization. Is it activism? Protest? Political opposition? Resistance? None of these terms quite captures what we’re seeing: people putting their own bodies on the line to care for immigrants and impede the operations of a paramilitary force in their city. My colleagues have come up with their own, apt ways to describe it: Maybe this is “neighborism,” or a movement for “basic decency.” I like the way an elderly couple named Dan and Jane, in one dispatch, explained their motive for joining the effort: “humanist.”
The word that comes to my mind is dissidence. If we want to understand why the whistleblowing, camera-wielding people of Minneapolis have caused the Trump administration—and Donald Trump himself—to flinch, I believe we need some added history, and a bigger map. What we’ve been watching is part of a long, established tradition—one that might help Americans unlock a different kind of future.
Dissidence is not revolution; it is not even political opposition. It’s something much more elemental. It emerges in environments where power—usually government power—tramples on the basic conditions of life as people know and value them. We know what this means in Minneapolis: People do not like to see their neighbors terrified and rounded up. They do not like to see masked men with guns acting with impunity. They do not like their children being too afraid to go to school. Unlike, say, the “pussy hat” protests that immediately followed Trump’s first inauguration and launched what came to be known as the resistance, the reaction of regular people in Minneapolis is not, fundamentally, about an ideological or policy disagreement with the administration. The movement that has arisen on the city’s frigid streets is about defending what any reasonable American would call “normal”—the expectation of a life without the threat of violence and coercion.
This is when the dissident has always stepped in. Since Trump’s first term, historians have been furnishing us with analogies from the past to help explain our unprecedented political reality—many more people now feel comfortable uttering words such as authoritarianism, even fascism. But when it comes to the mindset and actions necessary to stand up to these forces, the past also provides precedents—and role models—that we shouldn’t ignore. For as long as tyranny has existed, there have been people who resist the pressures of conformity or even the natural instinct toward self-preservation in order to say “no.”
The dissidence of Minneapolis reminds me of the Argentinian mothers who found themselves in an impossible situation during the military junta of the late 1970s. Their children, deemed “subversives” for their work with the poor or their leftist politics, were abducted in the middle of the night, disappeared without explanation. The most obvious choice for each of these mothers was to keep quiet, to avoid drawing attention to her family. But some refused to do so. They started searching and asking questions, and eventually they joined together to stand week after week, year after year, outside the presidential palace with signs that read Where are they?
[Read: A mindset for the Trump era]
Today’s dissidence also reminds me of the Underground Railroad. Think of what this network of liberation demanded: all of those innkeepers, church deacons, farmers, and housewives risking violence and potential arrest in a country that was, as Frederick Douglass put it, “given up to be a hunting-ground for slaveholders.” In an environment of terror—the Fugitive Slave Acts made harboring a runaway a federal crime—these individuals conducted their own moral calculus: Slavery was an abnormality, one worth obstructing in any way, at any cost.
This is not a history of people practicing politics or fighting for regime change. It is, in fact, humanist. These people are not looking to replace one governing order or ideology with another. They are fighting an incursion, reacting to a violation of humanity, and deciding to do something about it.
Another dissident comes to mind, a familiar if anonymous one. Most people assume that the man in that famous photo from 1989 who stood in front of a line of tanks near Tiananmen Square was trying to block them from crushing the democracy protests. And that may have been his intent. (No one ever learned his identity or his fate.) But I see something else in that lone figure carrying two shopping bags: a man who is perhaps heading home to prepare dinner, who has a recipe in mind, who has been planning what music to listen to on his cassette player that night and remembering the details of a conversation with his wife, when four tanks suddenly appear in his path. They are blocking his path, not the other way around. The dissident insists on continuing his journey home. He refuses to move out of the way.
The dissident who probably thought most about what it means to be a dissident was Václav Havel, the Czech playwright who, in 1989, became the first democratically elected president of his country. Havel understood dissidence, at its inception, as not being political at all; he considered it, rather, “pre-political.” It could emerge from wanting to play strange music, wear one’s hair long, speak one’s mind, defend one’s economic interests, or protect vulnerable neighbors. When you are not allowed to assert these core aspects of who you are—to be a fully autonomous human—you face a choice: Either abandon those parts of yourself, or refuse to and become a dissident.
One of Havel’s greatest achievements was Charter 77, a petition—and then a movement—that became a sustained opposition to the Communist regime. But he was always quick to point out that what launched the whole effort was the arrest of a band of anemic-looking, long-haired rock musicians called the Plastic People of the Universe. Their only crime, it seems, was wanting to play weird, psychedelic music redolent of Frank Zappa. There was nothing subversive about their songs—many of which were about loving beer—and so it was not hard to appreciate what was being suppressed when the musicians were put on trial and sentenced to prison, nor were the stakes for every free person difficult to understand.
[Read: The hero Europe needed]
This elemental appeal of dissidence is easier to see when we compare it with the resistance that has marked most of the Trump years. The tactics of activists have largely included mass protests, most recently those of No Kings Day, as well as smaller, simpler ones, say, chanting and ringing bells in front of Tesla showrooms. Such acts are useful for bolstering your own political side, for creating a sense of solidarity. But they don’t usually help widen the circle of opposition. They are more like pep rallies—not without value, but also easy to ignore. The same can be said of the resistance’s main message, which tends to focus on Trump’s threats to democracy and the rule of law. This, too, is not pre-political, because it tends to alienate those who don’t already agree with this dire (if accurate) analysis.
Compare the grievances of these protests with the issues and stakes that dissidents have revealed in Minneapolis. The assault by federal agents was an attack on something pre-political, on parts of our communal existence that people, in normal times, take for granted. You should be able to assume that parents, immigrant or not, won’t be ripped away from children. You should assume that people don’t have to hide in their house because their skin is brown or black. You should assume that filming an interaction with the police won’t end in your death. These are all pre-political assumptions, and we hold them not as Democrats or Republicans, but as individuals who just want to live freely.
Havel, surprisingly, didn’t much like the word dissident and used it, he said, “with distaste, rather ironically, and almost always in quotation marks.” He worried that the label gave the impression that there was some rarefied class of people whose job it was to be “professional malcontents”; dissidents, he insisted, were just “ordinary people with ordinary cares.” What made them special was their defense of those pre-political instincts that we all share. Does the fact that they are defending something so basic diminish what dissidents do? I don’t think so. How many people really are willing to sacrifice so much for the sake of just being human?
When it comes to Trump, we’ve just seen dissidence gain a tactical victory where resistance has failed. The question for those appalled by the actions of this administration has always been how to get more people to share a morally grounded outlook on what is happening to the country. This is hard, to put it mildly. Almost every news event gets filtered through a tribal lens (and the tribalized media that supports it). Even the death of Renee Good, caught on video from multiple angles, was largely interpreted in partisan ways.
But since the killing of Alex Pretti, something has shifted. A wider swath of people are beginning to perceive the state’s violence against its citizens as an abnormality. Just listen to the Republican who dropped out of the race for Minnesota governor in part because of what he was seeing in Minneapolis: “I cannot support the national Republicans’ stated retribution on the citizens of our state, nor can I count myself a member of a party that would do so.” The change could be felt even in Trump himself, who demoted the man running the Border Patrol operation in the city and spoke of the need to “de-escalate a little bit”—not a phrase that’s commonly in his vocabulary. We are a long way from justice for these two deaths, but to judge by polls and even Fox News coverage, many more people now agree that a violation has taken place.
[Read: What should Americans do now?]
This happened because of the American dissidents in Minneapolis. They have organized outside of the spotlight, and not toward a nationwide mobilization but with a sharp, local focus on their neighbors. They communicate on Signal channels, stand guard outside elementary schools, bring food to scared immigrants sheltering in their homes. They have placed an emphasis on watchfulness, on care, on safety and calculated risk—all qualities that characterized dissidents in the Soviet Union and characterize them today in Tehran and Beijing. Their actions resulted in images that bore moral witness to what federal agents are doing in their city. But they also established a sharp contrast that people with open eyes and goodwill could not fail to recognize.
The American dissidence, should it continue and grow, will need to look different from the resistance of months and years past. It will need to focus on what is common to all of us, what Havel called “the aims of life.” We share many more of these aims than we sometimes realize. We may disagree about tax rates and foreign policy, gun rights and rent freezes, but “normal” is a universal concept in America when it comes to what we expect for our children, our communities, and our sense of security and well-being. To be a dissident in this moment means moving beyond scoring points and underscoring differences, and on to recognizing what we are all losing—and blowing a whistle in order to prevent that loss.
Dissidence might seem to be a lonely act. It has always started that way. But what is called for now is the spirit of that man in Tiananmen Square, that immovable character, a human who insists on getting home to do the things that give his life purpose and will not let a few tanks get in his way.
