Taking the Long View after April 5th

essay

At a lunch gathering the day after the April 5^th nationwide demonstrations, a friend asked, “So what’s going to happen as a result of all these demonstrations?” We were all feeling pretty good that so many people had actually turned out, by some counts, as many as 25,000 in St. Paul alone. The tone between the lines of my friend’s question was, “What good do demonstrations do anyway?” The answer to that is pretty clear: They don’t do much good at all if they are one-offs and if they don’t grow. They also don’t do much good if they are the only thing you do. Making change takes more than protesting.

April 5^th alone is unlikely to stop Trump from playing tariff games, and it won’t dissuade him from setting his ICE dogs on visa card holders exercising their First Amendment rights or from his DOGE whiz kids vandalizing congressionally mandated departments. The abductions by masked agents, and the whisking away of innocent victims to the Salvadorian gulag will continue as long as this administration can get away with it. Large crowds protesting our convicted-felon president, no matter how clever their signs and righteous their cause, will obviously not do the trick alone.

We need to take the long view and build a movement as energetic and pervasive as the MAGA virus.

But you don’t need a Substack writer to tell you that social movements take time and a medley of actions to grow. The first SDS March on Washington in 1965 brought out about 20,000 people. By the height of the anti-war movement, the demonstrations in D.C. numbered in the hundreds of thousands. The same is true for the Civil Rights movement. The 1963 march where Dr. King gave his “I Have a Dream” speech happened after years of struggle and organizing. Grass roots movements, the kind that lead to cultural shifts, start small.

They don’t change things in a day or a week or even a year, but they do change things. The anti-war and civil rights demonstrations of the 60s were as much the catalyst for change as the result of underlying social changes already in train. We have come a long, long way since then, the bigots presently in charge notwithstanding. They are fighting a rearguard action. The culture has changed largely as a result of the upheavals of the past.

Now we face a new series of upheavals. The demonstrations of April 5th mark the beginning of a significant movement to hold off a fascist takeover of our government—and then to remake that government stronger and more resilient for the future. This will be a years-long process that will demand more of us than showing up with a sign. Yes, we will need more and bigger demonstrations, but while we are building them we need to actively support the institutions that allow democracy to thrive.

Support Public Television and National Public Radio with your time and money. Straight information is the lifeblood of democracy. Support the Smithsonian Institution and the Library of Congress because we need to have access to the many strands of our history and culture, not only one, sanitized, approved, glorious version. We need to know and face the unvarnished truth. Stand by academic freedom because democracy needs vigorous debate and experimentation. Send money to the American Civil Liberties Union, the most fearless defenders of our rights to free expression. Show up at your school board meetings and stand with librarians defending a wide range of reading options for students. Everything mentioned here is presently under attack by the Trump administration.

So write letters to the editor. Call your representatives frequently and let them know your position and how you vote. In short, become civically active. Through it all, we will need to wake up the cowardly, venal Republican Party by beating them at the polls and in the courts. We will need to crowd their town hall meetings, show up outside their offices, tell the loud truth about their lies, and field candidates who can win—and who have demonstrated that they will do the job with energy and integrity.

What is going to happen as a result of the April 5^th demonstrations? More and bigger demonstrations and a growing activism that cannot be ignored. We are stuck with Trump and his band of radical misfits for the next four years, but that doesn’t mean we have to sit down and shut up. It means that we have to watch them closely and stay informed, and it means that we have to resist them in the information and educational spaces, in the courts, at the polls, and—yes—in the streets with bigger and always peacefully loud protests.