Oppression thrives in apathy. It operates on indifference. It succeeds because people have given up. Once people broadly accept that nothing can be done, it becomes true. It doesn’t matter whether a weight is one pound or one thousand pounds. If no one will try to move it, it cannot be moved.

A tyrant nurtures this sense of resignation. He is a schoolyard bully or an abusive boyfriend writ large. He nourishes distrust, warning that anyone else would be worse. He crows about his successes, no matter how minor. He taunts defeated opponents, building them up after the fact to grow his own strength by the telling. Yet his power is contingent on limited resistance. He doesn’t win by defeating everyone. He wins only when enough people give up. It was as true for Benito Mussolini as in your high school cafeteria. It’s true now.

What do we do about it? How do you fend off defeatism? You need to recognize that you don’t have to do everything. You just have to oppose injustice where you are able. The goal is not to be Superman, and save the city yourself. The goal is simply to help where you can. That’s it. If you are able to make phone calls, keep making phone calls. If you are able to write letters, keep writing letters. If you are able to march, march. If you are able to donate money, keep donating money. It isn’t important that your individual actions are effective on their own. It is, however, vital that you continue to work toward the liberty and justice that this nation should stand for, both for yourself and for the others who will be encouraged by it. Even on days when you have given up hope, you can still have resolve. Victory comes from saying “Yes, we can,” one more time than they will say, “no you can’t.”

Nearly as important is appreciating and celebrating success. Any victory no matter how small will be treated as a triumph by an oppressive regime. The opposition must do likewise wherever they are able. Seeing and celebrating small successes undermines the narrative of inevitable failure. It reminds you of what you’ve accomplished, and reinforces for everyone else that they, too, can still make a difference. Celebrate when a good bill passes into law, at any level. Celebrate when your candidates win. Celebrate the defeat of any oppression, however temporary. Every time you do, it supports others who might consider giving up. Some people will say that there’s nothing to celebrate until some kind of final victory. Those people are wrong. Human being work best when they feel like their efforts are effective. Acknowledging smaller successes does not prevent continued work toward a larger goal.

The myth of history always centers itself on great leaders: Alexander the Great, Cicero, Abraham Lincoln, Dwight Eisenhower. Everyone loves to hear about the victorious hero. But the rarely spoken truth about these heroes is that they didn’t do anything. Alexander was king, but Macedonian soldiers and cavalry defeated Persia. Cicero delivered speeches, but the Senate and the Roman people protected the Republic. Lincoln wrote the Emancipation Proclamation, but Union soldiers won the war and government agents and the slaves themselves ended chattel slavery. After the Supreme Court issued a ruling against segregation in Brown v. Board of Education, Eisenhower did not personally fly to Little Rock and enforce the ruling. Nine brave students integrated the schools themselves, protected by members of the United States army. History is always made by individuals acting on behalf of a cause. We are those individuals.

The effort to resist the current administration has often been compared to a marathon rather than a short sprint to emphasize the scale and to warn people to pace themselves. If we’re going to compare our efforts to the field of athletics, it seems more appropriate to use a team sport. Let’s say that this is a football game: The quarterback can’t win it by himself. We all have to play our part, whether that’s running the ball, blocking the defense, or even punting effectively. Do what you can, as well as you can. One touchdown or one interception won’t win the game. Cheer anyway. It makes the next one come easier. By that same token one bad play won’t force a loss. Halftime is in 2018. If we work together, we can get there with our Democracy intact and go into the second half with the lead.

Consider the problems around refugees and immigration. This country has had a huge influx of people looking for a better life. It has been going on for decades. Many of these immigrants are poor –  not the best and brightest. Some of them come in legally, but many have snuck in by way of Canada. They do not assimilate to American culture. They have a foreign religion and worship among themselves, reciting prayers in a foreign tongue. When they speak English at all, it’s broken and with a heavy accent. Many of them are criminals and are involved in street gangs. Specifically, I want to talk about the ones who joined our military only to betray their sacred oath and join members of their foreign religion to wage war against the United States. I’m talking, of course, about the Irish-American military deserters who formed St. Patrick’s Battalion and took up arms against the United States.

Following the Great Famine, thousands of Irish emigrated to the United States seeking a better life. Lacking land and money, many joined the American Army. These foreign soldiers faced discrimination and abuse on account of their foreign origin and Catholic religion. In 1846, when the United States began a war of territorial expansion against Mexico, an Irishman, John Riley (born Seán Ó Raghailligh in County Galway) organized Irish deserters into a unit of the Mexican Army, the San Patricios. They fought under the flag of the Irish Harp and fought against the United States in the Mexican-American War. While the Irish San Patricios were renowned in Mexico for their bravery, the United States ultimately won the war, seizing Texas and northern Mexico.

Irish Catholic immigrants fought in a declared war against the United States as part of a foreign army. Those involved lived in Mexican exile or were punished in courts martial. Those deserters who were captured were branded – literally branded with hot iron – as traitors and hanged.

Relevant today is what didn’t happen: Loyal Americans of Irish origin were not rounded up and deported. There was no blanket ban on Irish or Catholic immigration. Their children grew up as Americans. They adopted American values and American accents. They ascended to the highest levels of success in both business and government. An Irish-American president is commemorated on the fifty cent coin. Today in the United States, if those Irish deserters are remembered at all, they are celebrated in song and film.

Assimilation does not happen over the course of a single night. But for many of us of Irish ancestry, we choose not to remember the difficulties our ancestors faced in integrating into American culture. We pretend that our people were model citizens and not at all like those immigrants today from Mexico or Syria who cause trouble. But the hard truth is moving to another country is a difficult transition for anyone. The same forces of nativism and alienation that tormented my Irish ancestors in the 1840s are faced by the current generation of immigrants.

In fact, the discrimination immigrants face today is far more overt. Today’s discrimination is sanctioned by our government. The president has issued executive orders banning immigration into this country according to religion. He has proposed a massive slash in government services in order to finance a giant wall to keep other immigrants out. Families are being split up and immigrants are being deported for seeking medical care, for practicing their religion, for speaking out. Even American citizens are being detained at the border for no reason apart from their religious beliefs. None of these have raised an army battalion. None of them deserve this treatment. This nation is founded on the belief that all people have an equal right to liberty and justice.  We’ve always had a hard time living up to those ideals.  But in 2017, more than any time since the abolition of slavery, we are failing spectacularly.

James Madison

In the past year one idea has been repeated so frequently that it’s become a cliche: Americans are more divided than ever. We have made our political parties a defining element of character. We talk about whether we’re from blue states or red states. There are more protests and political activity since the Vietnam War and disagreement over those protests dominates the conversation on social media. This division didn’t begin with the 2016 election, but in this new administration it has crystallized. As I have watched all of this, I keep thinking about history and the founding of the Republic.

Americans being divided is nothing new. Two hundred years ago, as our Constitution was being considered, James Madison in Federalist No. 10, warned about the danger to the United States inherent in dividing ourselves into parties and factions, and when one group becomes too powerful. He defined “faction” in this way: “a number of citizens … who are united and actuated by some common impulse of passion, or of interest, adverse to the rights of other citizens, or to the … interests of the community.”  Madison further argues that humanity is naturally inclined to divide ourselves into groups on account of our differences in wealth, religion, and background, but that those divisions can become an enemy to liberty when our impulse to protect and promote that group exceeds our love and support for the larger community of our fellow citizens, “A zeal for different opinions concerning religion, concerning Government, and many other points, … have, in turn, divided mankind into parties, inflamed them with mutual animosity, and rendered them much more disposed to vex and oppress each other, than to coöperate for their common good.” Unfortunately, that’s where we have found ourselves as a nation.

During the Obama administration, and especially since the 2016 election, the elected portion of the Republican party has become this kind of faction. The party made their animosity for President Obama clear when Sen. McConnell announced that preventing his reelection would be their priority as a party and Sen. Cotton decided to block one of his appointments, not for the individual’s politics or qualifications, but out of spite. The Republican Senate leadership refused to consider any Supreme Court nominee from President Obama for spurious reasons, and announced that if Hillary Clinton were elected, they would block any nominee of hers entirely. Republican House majority leader Kevin McCarthy even admitted that the interminable Congressional hearings and investigations around the Benghazi attack were arranged in order to damage Clinton politically. This is not what anyone would call cooperation for the common good.

A zeal for different opinions concerning religion, concerning Government, and many other points, … have, in turn, divided mankind into parties, inflamed them with mutual animosity, and rendered them much more disposed to vex and oppress each other, than to coöperate for their common good.

Under the new administration, the Republican party has taken complete control of the executive branch as well as the legislature. This has given them the opportunity move on to the “vex and oppress” stage of Madison’s warning. Newly elected presidents typically are conciliatory and make statements about representing all Americans and wanting to reach across the aisle. The new administration has done the reverse. The president has made explicit statements that he represents Republicans. Sen. Rand Paul has made the statement that Congress wouldn’t be spending time investigating alleged corruption of fellow Republicans.  The president has appointed individuals to his cabinet who are manifestly unqualified, billionaire political donor Betsy DeVos as Secretary of Education,  and Rick Perry as Secretary of Energy, a politician who had no idea what the Department of Energy even did. The Republican Senate leadership confirmed them rather than oppose a Republican president.

The Republicans are quick to put their purported values aside in order to support the administration. Compare their actions to their own words. In December of 2015, Mike Pence called the proposed Muslim ban, “offensive and unconstitutional.”  Yet, when the president signed the executive order, far from objecting, Pence applauded. The Speaker of the House offers the same story. During the campaign, Paul Ryan called such a ban “not reflective of America’s fundamental values.” But by the time the executive order was signed, Ryan had apparently changed his mind about the nature of American values. He firmly supported the president and defended it publicly.  Sen. John McCain and Sen. Marco Rubio both expressed dissatisfaction with the selection of Exxon CEO Rex Tillerson as Secretary of State, a man with no diplomatic experience and troubling ties to Russia and Vladimir Putin. McCain went so far as to compare the likelihood of his supporting Tillerson’s with flying pigs. When the final votes were cast, McCain and Rubio were both in the “yea” column. Tillerson was confirmed and the president’s agenda was supported. During the 2016 campaign, Rep. Jason Chaffetz, chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee expressed concerns about the Clinton Foundation and suggested that government services were for sale.
But now that his own party has won the White House, Chaffetz has unconcerned about the president’s ties to his family business or his debts to foreign nations. He pronounced the president “exempt” from conflict of interest laws and declined to investigate. This was never about American values or conservative principles. The primary goal of the Republican party has become maintaining power for their own faction.

Among the Republicans who are not involved in government, over the past several years, an entire parallel system has built up around supporting the party and demonizing any opponents. The right wing has its own internet dating networks so they won’t have to accidentally meet political opponents. The faction has a news channel in Fox News which devotes the majority of its programming not to news but to editorial content attacking Americans who are outside their faction, whether that is President Obama picking basketball teams, rap musicians, feminists, or non-Christian religions, and especially journalists and newsmedia outside the right wing infosphere. None of these things have any significant news value or relationship to policy, but they’re associated with the opposition. As it happens, Madison anticipated this as well: “So strong is this propensity of mankind to fall into mutual animosities, that where no substantial occasion presents itself, the most frivolous and fanciful distinctions have been sufficient to kindle their unfriendly passions, and excite their most violent conflicts.” In fact, the conservative faction has made even more arbitrary and ridiculous distinctions. The faction draws lines over restaurants, music, nearly the whole of talk radio, even what kind of car you drive. None of this matters from a public policy perspective, but it serves to draw cultural lines between us and them and to reinforce who is in-party and who is an enemy.

When anyone points this out, the faction members are quick to argue that “they do the same thing.” This is manifestly false and an attempt to distract from the issue by employing a false equivalence. Fox News has no counterpart on the left.  MSNBC briefly attempted to fill the role, but has moved away from that. CNN and the broadcast networks are more interested in entertainment and sensationalism than pushing an agenda or a party line.  There are liberal propaganda outlets like US Uncut, but they lack the institutional support from within the party that Breitbart and Drudge have.  And when they attack conservative media, they attack conservative propaganda outlets, not legitimate, if editorially conservative, newspapers like the Wall Street Journal. The Republican party rarely in recent years sees members vote across party lines when it will make a difference. By contrast, Democrats routinely defect to support GOP initiatives when it suits their interests.

James Madison is not the only one to have warned us about the danger inherent in party politics or when one faction completely seizes the reins of government.  George Washington himself gave this warning in his farewell address:

“The alternate domination of one faction over another, sharpened by the spirit of revenge, natural to party dissension … is itself a frightful despotism. But this leads at length to a more formal and permanent despotism. The disorders and miseries, which result, gradually incline the minds of men to seek security and repose in the absolute power of an individual; and sooner or later the chief of some prevailing faction, more able or more fortunate than his competitors, turns this disposition to the purposes of his own elevation, on the ruins of Public Liberty.” – George Washington

How We Respond

Unfortunately, and perhaps counter-intuitively, the only way to counter a political faction whose loyalty to their collective has taken priority, is by acting collectively. That runs the risk of creating another corrupt faction, but it isn’t inevitable. We can work together toward a common goal without drinking the Kool-Aid. Read a real newspaper. Don’t get your information from opinion pages, blogs, and cable news channels. Determine what your principles are. Write them down. Actually write them down. Decide now where you will draw the line for the politicians you support. What actions will cause you to put your support elsewhere. That doesn’t preclude joining the Democratic or Republican Party if that gives you a voice or furthers your principles, nor does it preclude compromise. It’s okay to develop a fondness for people in your group but that must not override your loyalty to your principles. But the guide for your actions and for your votes must be those principles, not gaining or maintaining power for your friends, for your party, for your in-group. Once the votes are cast and your representatives are elected, whether your candidate wins or loses, you have the power and the duty to communicate with the winner and urge that person to act in accordance with your values.

For me the basic guiding principles are Liberty and Equal Justice.  The candidates and parties whose actions work against those principles risk losing my support.