At the turn of every New Year this decade, the world has seemed darker and more frightening. But I want to tell you about resistance to the madness that gives me hope. I have just returned from a semester in California. There, creativity is flourishing in a grassroots resistance to Trump, as more and more people organize for a more just world.
What does the grassroots resistance to Trump do?
Utter pandemonium inside the Home Depot store in Oakland, California! Among the aisles of tools, nails, putty, electrical supplies, and thousands of other home-improvement items, a brass band is playing. A procession of people chanting and holding up placards reading “ICE out of Home Depot!” winds its way through the store. Many are waving ice scrapers—which they then line up to pay for. Once they have paid for the scrapers, they queue up again to return them.
Ice scrapers – this year’s Christmas gift?
Customers are not buying and returning ice scrapers because they suddenly realized that the need to scrape ice is actually quite limited during California’s mild winter. They are doing it as a protest against Home Depot’s overly cooperative relationship with ICE. ICE is the federal force that the Trump administration has expanded in order to detain and deport undocumented migrants. ICE often comes to Home Depot parking lots because day laborers gather there in search of work. The ice-scraper action has been repeated in several cities across the United States in recent months.
Most of the staff look happy—possibly with the exception of the woman tasked with organizing the line at the self-checkout registers. After all, it is very likely that they themselves, or their friends and families, feel the stress caused by ICE.
Outside the store, demonstrators stand with banners and sing Christmas carols with newly written lyrics, for example a version of “White Christmas.”
I’m dreaming of an ICE-free Christmas Just like the ones we used to know Where the treetops glisten and kids don’t listen to ICE detaining folks they know. I’m dreaming of an ICE-free Christmas with every protest card I write May our laws be fairly applied And may all our Christmases be bright
A number of organizations are coordinating the action. They have spoken in advance with the day laborers about how they view the situation. In addition to, of course, not wanting to be detained and deported, they want access to customer restrooms and the ability to buy food on the premises. In short, they want to be treated with ordinary respect. The organizers are arranging a fundraiser for those day laborers who cannot seek work at the site on the day of the demonstration.
Peaceful, witty, and playful actions are one of several methods used by, among others, the movements Indivisible and Bay Resistance in the resistance to Trump. The large “No Kings!” demonstrations across the United States have also been organized by a multitude of organizations. Indivisible played a central organizing role in the most recent one, which drew seven million participants. I was not familiar with these movements before coming to California. But I have taken part in their meetings and activities throughout the fall. I was energized and impressed by their work, and I will therefore write about it in a series of blog posts.
Indivisible and Bay Resistance – part of the resistance to Trump
Indivisible was founded in 2017 in response to Trump’s first election victory. “We are a grassroots movement of thousands of local Indivisible groups working to elect progressive leaders, rebuild our democracy, and defeat the Trump agenda,” they write on their website. But many people in the movement want more than that, a point I will return to in the next blog post. Bay Resistance describes itself as a network of organizations, labor unions, and neighborhood groups in the Bay Area. (The Bay Area comprises San Francisco and surrounding cities and areas in Northern California.) They define their mission as defending “our communities, our movement, and our planet,” and as pushing forward on economic justice, climate justice, gender justice, and racial justice.
Growing rapidly
The movements are growing rapidly. Indivisible’s founders, the couple Leah Greenberg and Ezra Levin, hold weekly Zoom meetings where they discuss strategy and respond to questions from participants. They always begin by welcoming new Indivisible groups from around the country. Ten had been added in a single week, they reported at the most recent meeting. At the meetings I have attended, participation has ranged from 6,700 to just over 8,400 people. Attendance peaked when morale was high following the latest successful No Kings! demonstration and Democratic victories in several elections—not least the election of Zohran Mamdani as mayor of New York. Bay Resistance is also growing at a remarkable pace.
Core tasks
Both organizations work with campaigns and actions over both the short and long term. Resistance to ICE and the defense of migrants’ rights has probably been the issue that has consumed the most energy in recent times.
Political work within and directed at the Democratic Party is also important. Several people I spoke with in the organizations have been active—perhaps beginning their political engagement—in campaigns for individual candidates such as Bernie Sanders or Kamala Harris. Indivisible seeks to influence the party by supporting radical candidates. The founders analyze which candidates to back along two axes. One is the left–right axis. The other measures how willing candidates are to actively resist the drift toward authoritarianism. Indivisible wants to replace candidates who “play dead” (as they put it) with those who fight for democracy. The movement is currently developing a strategy to support candidates who meet their demands in next year’s primary elections.
Fundamental issues of justice are also central to the organizations’ work. Both collaborate with movements working for universal access to healthcare and the ability to earn a living, and against discrimination and inequality. They also organize their own campaigns around these themes.
There are working groups focused on climate issues, but that work does not appear to be prioritized at the moment. And I understand that it is easier to mobilize people around resistance to Trump than around climate issues. But I am not sure that this is the right long-term priority. Nor am I sure that they are wrong—here are tens of thousands of people engaging for a more livable world.
And they do so according to a carefully thought-out strategy, which I will describe in the next blog post.