The Hashtag Resistance Is Dead

Is there any reason to mourn?

When Trump was elected for the first time in 2016, it sent a shockwave through the American political universe. People could not believe this guy, this guy, actually won the election. He was too crude, too openly racist, too indecent to ever be president. His presidential win upended the Rules of Order that liberals believed in until this point. This was a full blown crisis. The Democrat-aligned media braced itself for utter pandemonium, people cried in the streets, and out of this event emerged something called the #Resistance. The day after the inauguration in 2017 was the Women’s March in Washington DC. Half a million people attended, many wearing their pink “pussy hats” (a tongue-in-cheek reference to the Access Hollywood tape where Trump said he would “grab [women] by the pussy”), and there were parallel protests worldwide. The call to action was to resist Trump, refuse to normalize him, to fight him at every turn. While the initial reaction to Trump’s election was organic and grassroots, it also birthed an entire media ecosphere that saw a highly motivated base of consumers who wanted to plug into Trump’s every move and be given direction on what to do.

Women’s March, 2017 - Getty Images

The hysteria around Trump’s election was not entirely misplaced. This event was certainly deviation from the norms we’d come to expect in our country and Trump himself is mercurial, chaotic, and unpredictable. Aside from the bad things you can always typically expect from a Republican administration, there were absurdities, both egregious and benign, that were specific to this one guy — drawing on a Dorian forecast map to change the trajectory of a hurricane, saying there were “fine people on both sides” after the Charlottesville white supremacist rally that killed Heather Heyer, looking directly at the solar eclipse without sunglasses on. Liberals who had come to expect that the world worked a certain way had many of their illusions shattered. In their desperation to cling to what was familiar, they become avid consumers of #Resistance media, and a new industry emerged.

Twitter accounts like “Brooklyn Dad Defiant!” and “@JoJoFromJerz” gained tens of thousands of followers virtually over night through their constant snarky replies to the endless slew of tweets from Trump’s account. Amy Siskind, Seth Abramson, and Eric Garland gained notoriety for writing or compiling long tweet threads about the ‘mango Mussolini’, and Podcasts like “Mueller She Wrote” used the Russia investigation to sell their audience on all the ways the walls were really closing in on the orange man this time. The Lincoln Project - a media company full of #NeverTrump Republicans - was born. Rachel Maddow saw the highest ratings she’d ever had as millions tuned in to hear about the #Russiagate conspiracy (how the 2016 election was allegedly stolen by Putin). Everywhere you looked, anti-Trump content was being churned out at a breakneck pace to liberals who were clamoring to make sense of a world in which Trump could be their president. You could donate to an ineffective Super PAC, buy a shirt, buy some “art”, support a Patreon. The ways of handing your money over to this menagerie of fools was virtually limitless.

#Resistance was a business and business was good.

Despite the wide array of personalities that encompassed the hashtag resistance, a common thread between them all was the view that Trump was an aberration. That our political system was mostly functioning as it should be and that everything was fine prior to his election. That things would go back to normal, if only we could remove that damned orange stain. There would be no analysis of the ways in which the failures of both political parties paved the way for Trump; how the economic deterioration of the working class that started with Carter and Reagan, through to Clinton with NAFTA, and to the ‘08 financial crisis during Obama and ensuing recession, had pushed the country towards the reactionary; towards charlatans who could easily exploit their anger and direct it towards undesirables. Instead of a reckoning with the material conditions that made Trump possible, those who invested their dollars in these hucksters were told that 2016 was a fluke, was Russia’s fault, Bernie’s fault, Jill Stein’s fault, and that our extremely well-functioning systems were going to hold Trump accountable any second now. They were merchants of hopium to comfortable liberals who were more activated and tuned in than they had been in decades.

A classic

The hashtag Resistance also came with it a culture of paranoia among its most ardent followers. It was not uncommon to be accused of being a Russian agent if you were a left-leaning commentator who criticized the Democratic party. So many of these personalities became little more than conspiracy theorists in their efforts to explain why Democrats didn’t seem to be holding Trump accountable, that the pejorative #BlueAnon (the liberal counterpart to QAnon) was coined to describe them. The #Resistance were the Democratic Party’s biggest cheerleaders and if you had the gall to expect these politicians to do more, you were working for the enemy. After all, the #Resistance was certain to win, and why wouldn’t you want to be on the winning team?

After the blue wave in the 2018 midterms, the Democratic party fully embraced the coterie of grifters, swindlers, and Republicans who sought to reinvent themselves as anti-Trump patriots. Between 2018 and 2021, the hashtag resistance became an unofficial arm of the Democratic party; from direct payments via Super PACs to their top tweeters, to invitations to Joe Biden’s White House, to paid speaking slots, to cameos from Dem politicians on their various zoom calls, this carefully crafted conflict of interest insulated Dems inside a bubble where they could do no wrong. The Democratic Party lucked into an environment where the status quo was upheld as something to be idolized, something liberals were desperate to return to.

The Hashtag Resistance at the White House

There was no need for the liberal base to do more than vote every couple years, the “adults in the room” were handling it. Any time a Democrat politician did not act with the urgency the moment required, resist libs were assured that they only needed to “trust the plan” and that Nancy Pelosi was playing 5D Chess. The #Resistance media space was a bevy of false hope that bred complacency in anyone who believed in it. People would breathlessly tune in to podcasts that insisted that Trump’s day of reckoning was coming. They would smash that like button and get #TraitorTrump trending on Twitter, they would buy Seth Abramson’s ridiculous book of compiled tweet threads, they would watch MSNBC for 10 hours a day, they would share sassy Nancy Pelosi gifs. Most importantly, they would refuse to question the authority or goodness of the Dems.

The superficiality was a feature not a bug. Many of the worst characters from the last 20 years of politics were able to reinvent themselves as patriots, many were able to fabricate yarns about how they had inside intel into the White House, many were able to make a million bucks, and none of them would ever give up access to their Dem establishment heroes and tell the truth. None of them would ever connect the threads between the failures of the Democratic Party to address material conditions, to fight back against power grabs that started with the Federalist Society, to confront the catastrophic effects of neoliberalism, and our current crises. Instead of facing the hard truths about what Trump’s election said about the state of our country and its leaders, the entire #Resistance media sphere promised that online outrage, media consumption, and heavy dose of lawfare would be all it takes to close this chapter of American history. This was nothing more than a thin patina on a “business as usual” politics that was certain to destroy us. If you dared to suggest that Democrats aren’t actually on our side, don’t really work for us, can’t save us, you would be met with waves of hostility by the loyal consumers of #Resistance content who were unable to mentally process such a terrifying reality.

Of course, in the end Trump was never actually held accountable…but don’t worry, a lot of people got really, really rich!

Now that Trump has been re-elected, with a larger vote share than before, and the party has taken an overtly collaborationist stance towards the man, the #Resistance has fully collapsed. Ratings on liberal news channels are plummeting, and the base is tuning out. After nearly a decade of little more than branding exercises, it was apparent that none of the traps that were supposedly being set for Trump panned out. Exhausted liberals who received little more than pablum for 8 years have completely lost interest. Not only did the media-manufactured #Resistance fail, liberalism itself is failing too. Without the tools to understand the current environment, liberals are giving up or leaning into their more reactionary impulses. Trump clearly wasn’t an aberration as so many claimed; his politics are now a permanent part of our political environment. There would be no consequences for his actions, not now, probably not ever. In reality, there was nowhere for this sort of “movement” to go. A movement can only last if it is grounded in a materialist understanding of the world, history, and honesty about our present conditions. It cannot survive on copium alone.

Those who got rich telling comfortable lies to their followers for dollars will be just fine. There will be no acknowledgement that the Democratic party completely failed to stop Trump and MAGA. There will be no come to Jesus where those who have been led astray see the light. What started in earnest and could have been transformed into a real movement was hijacked by those who saw a quick and easy way to make a buck selling fantasies to some who wanted to better understand the world they were entering, others who just wanted comfort, assisted by craven politicians who saw a way to pretend to put up a fight against neofascism without having to rock the boat with their donors. While these folks have maintained their paychecks and connections to high profile establishment Dems, while new grifters have been brought into the fold, the average American continues to suffer greatly as programs are eroded and prices rise and the world heats and the wars go on.

While it is somewhat alarming to see the malaise with which liberals are greeting a second Trump term, it is also the inevitable outcome of an era in which the entire media and political environment did everything it could to obscure the truth. Liberalism has historically never been an effective bulwark against fascism. They are the norm-seeking, status quo upholding, protectors of capital. As the conditions for the working class continue to devolve, liberals will continue to shift right to protect their worldview - and their profits. As the contradictions become more and more difficult to explain away, the audience for ungrounded hopium dissolves. Partisan liberals who have not been radicalized leftward over the last decade may be fully unreachable, but there are far more people who have removed themselves from the political process entirely. There are far more who have stopped believing in this system altogether than there are people who are still giving their hard-earned dollars to bullshit artists.

With the relentless but politically useless #Resistance out of the way, there is a vacuum that can be felt. Many, even the most ardent liberal partisans, are noticing that Democrats cannot save us. This isn’t a moment to despair, however, this is an opening. The left is the faction with a coherent worldview that can explain the crises we face. The left not only has the right analysis, we have the cure. As liberalism continues to fail to make sense of the world, we must find a way to seize the narrative and bring those who checked out back in, with a program and strategy that can defeat the right for good.