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Patrick | Complex Simplicity's avatar

Saying “no” may ignite the spark of resistance, but it is insufficient to sustain the fire of a lasting movement. The peril of Trumpism is not merely its grotesque vulgarity, its institutional vandalism, or its authoritarian ambitions—it is that it flourishes in a vacuum, an abyss created by an opposition too often hesitant, too often reactionary, too often defined by what it resists rather than what it envisions. The dream may not be walking, but without it, politics devolves into a Sisyphean game of ideological Whac-A-Mole, endlessly batting down fresh manifestations of the same malignancies rather than erecting a structure in which such malignancies cannot thrive.

Yes, there must be an unflinching rejection of authoritarianism, of bigotry, of the unabashed corruption that defines Trump and his acolytes. History is not moved by negation alone. People do not sacrifice merely to extinguish tyranny; they sacrifice to build something in its place. They march not only against, but toward.

While you dismiss the American left as “foolish,” let’s note the reality—foolish or not, they were correct. They saw what conservatives refused to acknowledge: that the right was accelerating, in real time, from the erosion of democratic norms to the overt flouting of law, to the embrace of authoritarianism as a governing principle. They warned that a movement willing to gut the Voting Rights Act, to launder conspiracy theories into policy, and to excuse corruption as a virtue of strongman politics would not stop of its own accord. They saw the trajectory when conservatives still insisted that Trump was an aberration rather than an inevitability.

In this way, your argument risks being self-annihilating. A movement constructed solely in opposition—to Trumpism today, to communism in the past—invites an abyss of its own. The moment the immediate threat recedes, so too does the unifying principle. It is why Reagan followed Carter, why Trump followed Obama, and why, absent something affirmative and enduring, another demagogue will follow Trump.

So, yes, say no—say it emphatically, unequivocally, and without concession. But let that be only the prelude. Without an articulated vision of what ought to be, negation alone is a feeble dam against the tide. Otherwise, we resign ourselves to a perpetual cycle of reaction, forever defined not by what we stand for, but merely by what we stand against.

7:51 AM MST Addendum: One of my biggest frustrations with the 2024 Harris and Biden campaigns was that, while they rightly warned that democracy was on the line, they failed to prioritize the systemic reforms needed to protect it long-term and prevent future bad actors from exploiting the same weaknesses Trump exposed. They presented the why but never engaged with the how. This always made winning, at best, a stopgap. The cracks in the system were already visible, and without real action designed to safeguard democracy, it was only a matter of time before someone else stepped in to exploit them.

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Travis's avatar

My walking dream: a country with more millionaires and no billionaires. A country where anyone can be rich--and many are, but no one can be an oligarch. All it would take to get there is an individual wealth cap set at $100M with every dollar of wealth above that level taxed at 100%. I ask why not? And then I remember, we live in a country full of bootlickers to billionaires who ask not what billionaires can do for them and instead ask what they can do for billionaires.

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