How to live under Trump II

What will be your posture in a second Trump era? Resistance? Retreating into the local? Returning to your craft?

I am undeniably middle-aged now, so I’ve been thinking about posture. Am I sitting right? How is my spine doing? Do I run too much for my knees? Do I run too little?

But the question of posture that has most consumed me of late is less physical than moral. With a second Trump presidency looming, after what feels like a mere Biden interregnum, what is the right posture to adopt toward it, and toward our common life generally in the era that is coming?

I talk to people for a living. Over the holidays, with time off, I took a break from talking to people for a living by talking to people for free. And something I have been noticing in all of these conversations, and in the public conversations I scroll through, and even in the comments many of you have been making, is that many people are similarly wondering about their posture in this moment in history.

Here is what I mean. When I think back eight years ago, at the dawn of the first Trump term, people seemed clearer on their posture. For a lot of people who opposed him, that meant drafting themselves into a so-called #Resistance. It was a strange word, given that in other times and places it was a word that really meant something, denoted real and life-threatening risks taken to defy autocracy, whereas here we were often talking about Twitter beefs. But it was an idea that gave people purpose and brought a lot of less political people into politics and gave people who had been flailing in early November a solid sense of purpose by the time that January rolled around. The concept of resistance was useful and life-giving to laypeople, activists, organizations.

And, of course, there were other postures back then — from tuning out the news, to going with the flow, to you-name-it. It’s a big country.

My overwhelming sense in talking to people over the last two months is that almost no one — there are some, but almost no one — is interested in signing up for Resistance 2.0. There will be, and there must be, brave people who, in fact, do just that, who suit up to file lawsuits, oppose nominees, investigate corruption. God bless them, every one of them. Democracy dies in people like that not existing.

But my strong sense is that a great many people who felt drafted into a resistance posture last time around do not feel so drafted this time. This does not mean they support Trump. Most of them are far angrier and more worried this time around. Most of them assume that this time will be worse, with fewer guardrails.

And yet. What I observe many people wrestling with is the question of whether one’s posture — the way you stand in the world relative to that world — should be reflexively, automatically, saturatingly decided for you by national political events.

What I see and hear around me is a lot of people, in all walks of life, who are looking up at the national scene and then down at their watches, starting to think about their time on this planet. How much of your life can you spend yelling in opposition to something? Yelling in fury about something that most voters seemed to want? I was 33 when Trump rode down the golden escalator. I am 43 now. I am as devoted as anyone I know to democracy and freedom and the American constitutional order. But it occurs to me from time to time that I do not wish to spend the better part of my adult life in a posture of opposition to a vulgar demagogue. I wish to be and live about other, richer, bigger things.

But you don’t get to choose your era. I know that. The people I’ve been listening to know that. They are not welcoming the cruelties and hatreds that have been promised by Trump. I think what they’re wondering is how you actually end up getting the country you deserve.

Is it by standing in perpetual resistance, philosophical fisticuffs in the air, chanting about democracy, calling out each incremental outrage?

Maybe it is. But maybe, I hear people saying of late, there are other postures to consider.

For some, it is the posture of retreat into the realms you can control: into private life, where you can make a good world for your children and loved ones even if you are struggling to achieve a good world in general. It may be a retreat into doing your actual work, your actual craft, your actual art, resuming a creative posture rather than living in a mode of reaction to the actions of a wannabe autocrat. And this posture of retreat is not, I think, like military retreat. It is not about handing over the country. It is rooted in the thought that what might make the country resistant to what has been happening to it is not more resistance but more health at the roots. Maybe what we can do is nourish the roots again.

For some, there is allure in the posture of returning to the local. I hear many people who are not turning away from politics in general, but who are redefining the geographic sphere to which they pay the most attention. They are thinking closer to home. They are going to meetings they always left other people to go to. Again, this doesn’t seem to me like a capitulation to anything. It seems like an analysis of where there is actually room to maneuver.

For others I hear from, there is a posture of reorganizing. By this I mean people who are also not content to stand in hair-trigger opposition to Trump and every little thing he does, but who rather want to spend the next many years building the pro-democracy movements and civic organizations and political parties that, had we already them, would have prevented this mess. The old idea of resistance was that Trump was singularly problematic, and that by marshaling great anger toward him and also hawkish vigilance, the worst excesses could be curbed. The reorganizing types are less focused on Trump and more focused on the complete and utter failure of a pro-democracy movement to be trusted by and in sync with most people.

I also notice in many people a posture of rethinking. The first Trump presidency was a time of great and often smug certitude. He was so wrong that the contrast made us right. He was so against democracy and justice and freedom that anything we did was self-evidently heavenly. But self-righteousness corrodes the soul and the mind. And the long posture of resistance and fury and perma-vigilance has turned many of us into certitude bots instead of people of curiosity. Democracy is all about curiosity, it depends on curiosity, because it is about you and I figuring each other out and then choosing the future together, instead of the king doing it for us. But the moral clarity triggered by Trump’s vacuous viciousness lulled many of us into a dogmatic slumber. Now I see and hear around me people who are getting into a posture of real rethinking, who are returning to curiosity, who are willing to ask real and hard questions about what many of us missed and didn’t see and may not see still. Their posture is not outward but inward.

I want to be very clear. Much of what is coming in the next few years will be very grave and will be deserving of strenuous resistance and pushback and investigation and suing. I don’t believe the phenomenon I’m observing is people tuning out and unplugging and kissing the country goodbye. That is probably happening, too, somewhere out there. But that’s not what I’m seeing.

What I’m seeing is people attempting to attend more holistically to a nation in ill health. What I see is people spreading back out across many lanes, taking on what they know how to take on — at the level of the symptoms, and at the level of the causes. What I see is many postures of trying.