This is what democracy looks like

There is an uncountable number of repositories of power all across the United States. Some are huge and obvious: the federal government, major corporations, police departments, billionaires. But there are millions of small ones, too, including small businesses, community groups, churches — and the people themselves.

In theory and historically, the federal government is the aggregation of all the small individual centers of power. In recent decades, though, it’s been fair to wonder whether the federal government wasn’t instead an aggregation of the huge ones.

No matter. There is a new aggregation of the small centers of power — one manifested every single day in opposition to the federal government that was created to represent them.

We are where we are because Donald Trump saw the power and wealth of the federal government and wanted it for himself. There wasn’t obviously a path for him to get there but he stumbled forward anyway, discovering that repeating the stuff he heard on Fox News about The Elites and The Immigrants got a lot of people riled up. It also took him a while to figure out how — and, moreso, if — he could start siphoning off the country’s power, but he did.

It’s always useful to remember that Trump came to the White House not via the route of politics but via the route of capitalism. It is particularly useful to remember that in this discussion, because the voraciousness is the same. His focus has always been on accumulating as much power and influence as he could, and that’s how he approaches the presidency, too. When he spends the country’s wealth and influence, it’s on what he wants, not what benefits the country.

What’s been weird to learn is that other leaders of institutions act the same way. Some of them hoard and protect their influence like it’s money because they, too, are rich. You don’t get rich by giving your money away and (they seem to believe) you don’t get powerful by exercising your power. But, in fact, that is often how power works: using power can help build power. At the very least, power holds no value unless it is exercised, which alone is a valid reason to exercise it. If you are powerful but never use your power, you are not powerful.

I’m talking here primarily about the huge, obvious loci of power — the centers of power that exist in part to serve as checks on other centers of power. Congress vis-a-vis the presidency. The media relative to the government. Higher education in contrast to misinformation. But they often aren’t serving as checks on what’s unfolding, or are obviously and bizarrely using their power only sparingly, garden hoses aimed at protecting their own homes from the wildfire.

So it’s left to individuals, who have stepped up where institutions have not.

There’s been a lot of ruminating about why this is the case, why individual, average people have been bold but newspapers and senators haven’t been. To some extent, it’s a numbers game. There are 340 million people in the United States. About 260 million of them are over the age of 18, meaning that about 146 million adults just in the U.S. disapprove of the job Donald Trump is doing as president. That’s a big pool from which to find a few thousand who are willing to fight for democracy.

I mean, there are about 350,000 adults in Minneapolis alone. Even just in theory, it wouldn’t be hard to find a dozen who were substantially committed to opposing Trump’s deployment of power that they would make it the center of their daily activity. But in practice, thousands have. Even after two people were killed by federal agents while doing so.

What’s important about this movement is that the only power that most of these protestors have is their own. They are expending all of it — and in doing so helping to build a bigger, aggregated power. The stewards of large accumulations of power are wary and timid. Enough stewards of personal, individual power are bold and engaged that a significant counterweight to the administration has emerged.

It’s telling that so many defenders of the administration can’t accept this for what it is. The constant refrain that opponents of the administration are paid to express their opposition is generally nothing more than a bad-faith effort to delegitimize it. The idea that tens of thousands are being slipped cash to whistle at ICE officers without any evidence of such payments emerging is as dumb an argument as saying that 2020 was affected by rampant fraud — which is a reminder that the stupidity of an argument is no barrier to its adoption. Even the idea that liberal donors giving to liberal groups somehow constitutes “funding” the protests is a deflection from the fact that bespoke responses to ICE have been created on the fly, with thousands of volunteers chipping in.

Not all of the dismissiveness aimed at anti-administration protests is bad faith. In a polarized country, many Americans literally don’t know anyone who disagrees with them; to such people, the idea of sincere opposition might legitimately seem invented, particularly if they are immersed in a media environment that claims precisely that.

Part of it, too, is that the country’s ideological divide manifests in diverging views of how society works. The right focuses on individualism; the left on community. Protests are more common on the left in part because there’s an acceptance of communal action that isn’t prevalent on the right. To them, what’s unfolding in Minneapolis can seem literally inexplicable. (The overlap between this divergence and population density is probably causal; one reason kids who go to college shift left is because going to college is inherently a communal act, even when it isn’t in big cities.)

Individualism and selfishness are intertwined. And hoarding power and money is a selfish act. This is probably overly neat, but it remains true that this tendency toward hoarding is a significant reason that a far-right president has been able to erode American democracy so quickly.

But democracy isn’t solely about elections or about the exercising of aggregated national power. As the old protest chant has it, activism is also what democracy looks like. Citizens piecing together ad hoc institutions to confront oppression is democracy. People stepping up to protect the country when Congress and the Supreme Court won’t is democracy.

Democracy isn’t simply being defended. It’s being reorganized — out of unfortunate necessity, but effectively. So much so that the huge centers of power are finally starting to notice.

Photo: Protesters in Minneapolis. (Fibonacci Blue/Flickr)