The Brooklyn Rail

Leah Greenberg, the co-founder of Indivisible, told Michelle Goldberg of the Times that while Trump “has been able to do extraordinary damage that will have generational effects, he has not successfully consolidated power. That has been staved off, and it has been staved off not, frankly, due to the efforts of pretty much anyone in elite institutions or political leadership but due to the efforts of regular people declining to go along with fascism.”¹ The People are catching up and gearing up for more vigorous protests and demonstrations against the regime in the new year, and the fact that this year marks the 250^th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence will provide even more focus for those efforts.

On January 2, Timothy Snyder said “The control of language is necessary to undermine a legal or constitutional order.” The torrent of language that Trump spews out on social media every day must be countered with intrepid, articulate, and persistent responses by individual citizens like Timothy Snyder and Heather Cox Richardson. The fact that both of these citizens are eminent historians is not coincidental, since amnesia is a essential part of the Trump plan. The celebration of the founding of American democracy will provide a lot of opportunities to remember where we came from and what we stand for. Trump & Co. have tried all along to appropriate and twist the meaning of the Declaration and the Constitution, and that original language must be taken back over the next year.

That said, this year is almost certainly going to be another difficult one, as Trump and the MAGA movement redouble their attempts to undermine and destroy American democracy and the rule of law. As the Supreme Court appears to be curtailing Trump’s illegal deployment of the National Guard and Regular Army troops and Marines into American cities, Trump is pulling back from sending more troops into Chicago, Los Angeles, and Portland. Trump will have to find other ways to expand his military reach. Historically, when authoritarian leaders see their power slipping away, they start wars, and Trump just started one in Latin America (with Greenland? Canada? Iran?!!? to come?). All of these incursions will have dire unintended consequences.

Building an ostentatious “Triumphal Trump Arch” at the entrance to Arlington National Cemetery is intended to be a military monument to Trump, but it will instead provide a recurring reminder of what Trump told his then chief of staff John Kelly when Kelly, in 2018, recommended that Trump visit the Aisne-Marne American Cemetery near Paris, where US Marines killed in World War I are buried. Trump asked, “Why should I go to that cemetery? It’s filled with losers.” At that time, Trump also referred to the Marines killed in the Battle of Belleau Wood as “suckers.” And during a Memorial Day visit to Arlington National Cemetery in 2017 with Kelly, whose son, who died fighting in Afghanistan, is buried, Trump turned to Kelly and asked, “I don’t get it. What was in it for them?”

In his inauguration speech on the first day of the 250^th Anniversary year of independence, democratic socialist mayor Zohran Mamdani vowed to “govern expansively and audaciously,” but he meant on the side of the People, not against them in favor of oligarchs and technocrats. In his first speech in office, Mamdani was not afraid of speaking boldly, from the very beginning: “My fellow New Yorkers: Today begins a new era.”

For people who have been fed empty platitudes, outright lies, and meanness for six out of the last ten years, Mamdani’s words sounded strange, but welcome, and also curiously familiar. It was the sound of youth, yes, but it was also the sound of American democracy, going back 250 years:

And yet we know that too often in our past, moments of great possibility have been promptly surrendered to small imagination and smaller ambition. What was promised was never pursued, what could have changed remained the same.

A lot of Mamdani’s appeal is to New Yorkers, on behalf of New York City. But it will spread outside of New York. This is the city that long ago rejected Donald Trump, but it now embraces Zohran Mamdani. And as Mamdani said, New York is “where the language of the New Deal was born.”

Rather than letting people off the hook and telling them that “only I can save you,” Mamdani demands more of us going forward:

No longer will we treat victory as an invitation to turn off the news. From today onward, we will understand victory very simply: something with the power to transform lives, and something that demands effort from each of us, every single day.

What we achieve together will reach across the five boroughs and it will resonate far beyond. There are many who will be watching. They want to know if the left can govern. They want to know if the struggles that afflict them can be solved. They want to know if it is right to hope again. . . . .

The work continues, the work endures, the work, my friends, has only just begun.