'We're Tired': Anti-Trump Liberals Are Burning Out, Can't Muster Up Motivation to Protest Anymore
Unhappy with the election results? This time, don’t count on an army of angry women in pink knit caps marching down the streets of America’s major cities to provide you succor.
Because, according to The New York Times, it turns out white-hot, inchoate rage eventually burns out — even if it takes eight or so years to fully extinguish.
An article from last Wednesday’s Times — one of the two official organs of the #Resistance, along with The Washington “Democracy Dies in Darkness” Post — pretty much summed up the mood in the headline: “‘Get Somebody Else to Do It’: Trump Resistance Encounters Fatigue.”
Yes, there are still holdouts, reporter Katie Brenner noted: “In the days after Donald J. Trump’s electoral victory, thousands of people revived the grass-roots movement that opposed his first term in office.
“Marchers in Manhattan took over streets carrying a block-wide banner that read, ‘We Won’t Back Down.’ Activists in Los Angeles and Chicago decried Mr. Trump’s abortion and immigration policies and vowed to descend on Washington to protest his inauguration in January.
“But participants noted that Mr. Trump had not appeared to be swayed by protests, petitions, hashtag campaigns or other tools of mass dissent. Many have been calling for a fresh playbook.”
What’s that “fresh playbook?” Nobody seems to know, except that the people carrying it out are anything but fresh.
“We’ve marched so much. We’re tired of doing the same thing over and over,” said David Hogg, the anti-gun activist who rose to fame after surviving the Parkland, Florida school shooting.
“After the election, I got several texts saying, ‘Screw it. People in power don’t know what they’re doing and I need to run.’”
“We need to be positioned to bring a new generation into office so we’re not just protesting and marching,” Hogg said. “We can’t be outside looking in.”
However, the whole “fresh blood” thing didn’t seem to work out when the Democrats swapped out ol’ Uncle Joe for Kamala Harris — and, as digital strategist and communications expert Leslie Mac pointed out, resistance figures who came to prominence via digital activism like Hogg seem to be part of the problem.
“I keep getting emails to sign petitions,” Mac said. “These people coming to the White House don’t care about petitions. They don’t care how many people sign them. They don’t care what they say.”
“Digital spaces are not your friend anymore,” she added.
“Social media turned activism organizing into a kind of public relations job, where your follower count and where you were quoted mattered as much as the tangible work that was being done,” Mac said. “I’m not saying that good things didn’t happen in online spaces. But sponsorships and brand deals started to intermingle with activism. It was celebrity.”
So, what’s the solution? “The Trump era could usher in a revival of local, in-person activism as people find new places to put their energy with people they know well,” the Times reported.
“Already, during the Biden administration, conservative grass-roots activists pushed successfully for abortion bans, remaking school curriculums and banning books from libraries. Liberal grass-roots groups emerged to reverse some of those measures.”
And yet, with the exception of abortion bans, wokeness was was on the ballot and wokeness lost, meaning those “[l]iberal grass-roots groups” didn’t exactly work, either.
Insiders aren’t feeling so happy about things, either.
Consider another Times report from the day after Election Day: “Cynthia Shaw worked at a polling place in the Detroit suburbs on Election Day and went to bed ‘still hopeful’ that Vice President Kamala Harris could win, she said. By Wednesday morning, she was bereft, her head pounding.”
“It feels so much more definitive this time,” the 65-year-old Shaw said, adding she had no appetite for another #Resistance charge up the hill.
“So many of us are so exhausted,” she said. “I don’t mean to be so bleak, but that’s how it feels today.”
But there was also one 43-year-old Coloradan who apparently hadn’t learned the lessons of the past eight years, Liz Folkestad.
“My anger drives a fire,” she said. “I will engage. I’ll show up, I’ll march. There is solace in knowing that you’re not alone.”
This quote came, however, after the ultimate liberal self-own bromide: “There was definitely an hour when I Googled, ‘How to move me and two kids to Portugal,’” she said.
Yes. Because those “America: Love My Candidate or I Leave It” liberal types were profoundly effective in convincing the rest of us to ensuring they stay, so much so we were kind of irked when they did despite our electoral efforts otherwise.
So, what happens when no amount of overheated rage works? There are various coping mechanisms, but one thing is for certain: There are a lot of exhausted libs, and none of them seem to have learned a thing. Great work, all of you.
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