BRIEF: Normalize being in the streets

Big thought, small step, deep breath — for April 11, 2025

BIG THOUGHT

Accept cringe, embrace community, act collectively

When we talked to the philosopher Olufemi O. Taiwo yesterday afternoon, he made a great point about collective action. It not only helps explain how we got into this mess but also offers a way forward, illustrating just how fragile the far right’s grasp on power is, and outlining a blueprint for lasting change — if people can come together to make it happen.

In the spirit of thinking seriously about backlash politics, one of the things [Black Lives Matter] led to is what we're experiencing right now. Where the right wing saw regular people, the kind of people that just go to book club and brunch, coming out in defense of protests against racism and police brutality. And they freaked the fuck out.

They realized that, at least at that time, they were losing a generational-long struggle for what political common sense was going to be in this country. It didn't take a Berkeley radical to see what was wrong with racist policing. It didn't take somebody with pink hair and they/them pronouns to have a political analysis of what's wrong with stomping on someone's back until they die.

And, you know, actually the fact that regular brunch goers were out on the streets was a show of the strength of anti-racism at that time. And we should be leaning into that. I am team brunch.

And that’s the heart of the matter. Being in the vanguard is important because it takes organizers and early adopters to build a movement. But to succeed, a movement needs to become a mass movement, and that means progressive veterans putting aside their preconceptions and joining up with, well, team brunch. That might not be comfortable for everybody: consider the agita that roiled social media over the supposed “cringe” factor — mass participation, that is — at this past weekend’s Hands Off! rallies.

Getting everyone on board is simply what success means. Sure, somebody needs to take the first step, as the writer and activist Sarah Schulman told Lydia Polgreen of The New York Times this week. But that’s only a first step — what matters is the next step, and all the steps after that.

It’s always difficult to be in the first group of people that understands something. It’s better to be in the fifth, you know, because people are already used to it.

But these were people like the Abraham Lincoln Brigade. Americans who wanted to fight fascism in Spain, the U.S. government would not support them. And of course later the U.S. entered the war against fascism. So by the ’40s, the average American would describe themselves as fighting against fascism.

That’s true whether you’re talking about individuals, institutions, or even nations working together, as the political scientist Daniel Drezner observed this week, in a piece on the international response to Trump’s chaotic tariff proposals.

What Trump’s coercive actions have revealed is that Mancur Olson was right in The Logic of Collective Action: even in the face of an existential threat, it is extremely difficult for like-minded actors to pool their resources together and cooperate. This is for the reason that Olson articulated — the free-rider problem — but for other reasons as well. For one thing, the transaction costs of a coordinated response are high. They are even higher during a crisis. For another, if one or two actors fail to cooperate it can create a decision cascade that makes it impossible for any coalition of the resistance to hold the line.

These dynamics have been at play with law firms and universities, but they are even more powerful in international relations.

Certainly, lots of individuals and institutions have failed to understand this, and are continuing to do so even today, going it alone against the Trump regime or trying to make solo deals. But it’s only when people (or institutions) finally recognize that they can’t go it alone that they can win.

We have to pull together to get anything like security. I think the idea that the way you stay safe is by being quiet, by withdrawing, you know, I don't think that's the way to win. I think people can't count on individual bravery, but we can count on collective bravery, on collective organizing. And so the more we pull together into organizations that can support each other, the better off we'll be.

And that shouldn’t mean having to rebuild a coalition every time. Collective action isn’t supposed to be temporary — just think about the sorts of things you might consider civic responsibilities, like voting, or citizenship itself. A political victory, no matter how big, isn’t one-and-done — because, as Taiwo also pointed out, progress is reversible. The Abraham Lincoln Brigade got denounced during the McCarthy era as “prematurely antifascist.” We’re seeing all kinds of social justice progress rolled back right now — and that’s not an indictment of progress, just a warning that it doesn’t preserve itself.

The gains from the civil rights movement could have been more serious and more substantive, but we never should have thought that they didn't require defense.

The way to combat that? Build something lasting: community.

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SMALL STEP

Check out the library

It’s National Library Week, and whether you’re a dedicated bookworm and already take advantage of the huge variety of services that libraries provide for their communities or you’ve gotten out of the habit over the years, it’s time to hit the stacks. Why? For one, libraries are fantastic, and librarians are tireless guardians of knowledge and truth. And, unfortunately, because these critical institutions — like the great majority of American institutions — are under threat right now, most immediately by the massive cuts to the Institute of Museum and Library Services, which in normal times provides the grants and personnel that deliver library services to disabled readers, low-income students, incarcerated readers, and rural libraries across the country. So go check out a book. And call your reps and tell them to do something about this.

DEEP BREATH

What kind of times

“Art means nothing if it simply decorates the dinner table of the power which holds it hostage,” wrote the poet Adrienne Rich, who created and lived by those words. Here she is, reading her “What Kind of Times Are These,” from 1991, but all the more relevant today.

I've walked there picking mushrooms at the edge of dread, but don't be fooled

this isn't a Russian poem, this is not somewhere else but here,

our country moving closer to its own truth and dread,

its own ways of making people disappear.

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Photo by Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images