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Opinion
What Is Trump's True Endgame in Venezuela?
If a military invasion and occupation of Venezuela is not feasible and a successful CIA instigated coup is unlikely, what does Trump really want?
Oct 20, 2025
It’s ironic that in the same week that President Donald Trump escalated the drug war in the Caribbean by unleashing the CIA against Nicolás Maduro’s regime in Venezuela, the Department of Justice won an indictment against former National Security Adviser John Bolton, the architect of the failed covert strategy to overthrow Maduro during the first Trump administration.
The one thing the two regime change operations have in common is Marco Rubio, who, as a senator, was a vociferous opponent of Maduro. Now, as secretary of state and national security adviser, he’s the new architect of Trump’s Venezuela policy, having managed to cut short Richard Grenell’s attempt to negotiate a diplomatic deal with Maduro. Regime change is on the agenda once again, with gunboats in the Caribbean and the CIA on the ground. What could go wrong?
Donald Trump’s penchant for turning the metaphorical war on drugs into a real one by deploying the US military dates back to his first administration, when he threatened to designate drug cartels as foreign terrorists and proposed launching missiles to blow up drugs labs in Mexico. During the recent presidential campaign, he declared, “The drug cartels are waging war on America—and it's now time for America to wage war on the cartels.” Apparently, he meant it.
Back in office, he named six Mexican cartels, the Salvadoran gang MS-13, and the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua as foreign terrorist organizations (FTOs) and ordered the Pentagon to draw up plans for military action against them. Early on, White House officials seriously debated military strikes against cartel leaders and infrastructure inside Mexico, but decided that cooperation with the Mexican government would be more fruitful. Nevertheless, the unusual appointment of a veteran Special Forces military officer to head the Western Hemisphere Affairs office of the National Security Council signaled that Trump was still was serious about resorting to military force to wage the war on drugs.
Nobody has ever won the Nobel Peace Prize for starting a war.
The focus then shifted to Venezuela. The day before the New York Times broke the story about Pentagon planning for action against cartels, Attorney General Pam Bondi announced that the US government was offering a $50 million reward for information leadings to Maduro’s arrest, accusing him of the “use cocaine as a weapon to 'flood' the United States.” Trump claimed Maduro was directing Tren de Aragua in “undertaking hostile actions and conducting irregular warfare against the territory of the United States,” a claim that the intelligence community concluded was untrue, despite pressure from Trump political appointees to make the estimate conform to Trump’s claim. The two senior career intelligence officers who oversaw preparation of the estimate were summarily fired.
In August, the Trump administration deployed a naval task force to the Caribbean, including three guided-missile destroyers, an amphibious assault ship, a guided-missile cruiser, and a nuclear-powered attack submarine. The following month, US forces began air strikes on vessels allegedly smuggling narcotics in international waters off the Venezuelan coast. When Democrats and some Republicans questioned the legality of summarily killing civilians who posed no immediate threat, Trump informed Congress that he had determined that the United States was in a state of “armed conflict” with unnamed “drug cartels,” whose drug trafficking constituted an attack on the United States. Therefore, traffickers were “unlawful combatants” subject to being killed on sight. Admiral Alvin Holsey, commander of US Southern Command, resigned on Thursday, reportedly because of concerns over the extrajudicial killing of civilians in the air strikes.
When Venezuelan opposition leader María Corina Machado dedicated her Nobel Peace Prize to Trump and asked for his help to oust Maduro, US escalation ratcheted up another notch. Last week Trump acknowledged that he has approved lethal CIA operations inside Venezuela. Asked if he had given authorization to “take out” Maduro, he refused to answer. In the same news conference, he also revealed that he was considering military strikes inside Venezuela. B-52 bombers have been dispatched to fly just off the Venezuelan coast and US Special Forces air units are conducting exercises in the area as a “show of force,” according to one official. Some 10,000 US troops have been deployed to the region.
Yet despite this impressive show of military prowess, it seems unlikely that the Trump administration is prepared to invade Venezuela. The forces currently deployed are nowhere near enough to occupy the country, which is five times the size of Iraq, Washington’s last misadventure in nation-building. Moreover, Trump has repeatedly promised his MAGA base there would be no more “endless” foreign wars, telling a 2024 campaign rally he would “turn the page forever on those foolish, stupid days of never-ending wars.” Even the air strikes on Iranian nuclear facilities caused consternation in his “America First” base. And nobody has ever won the Nobel Peace Prize for starting a war.
The more likely next steps are targeted attacks on drug storage sites, on individuals involved in trafficking, and perhaps on members of the Maduro regime—the sort of strikes the White House contemplated launching against Mexico back in February. That could slow or even stop the flow of drugs through Venezuela, but Venezuela is not a drug producer. Colombia is the producer, and if it can’t send its drugs through Venezuela, it will send them through Mexico or up the Pacific coast in homemade “narco-submarines.” The obvious futility of trying to stop drug trafficking by waging covert or overt war against Venezuela suggests that the real motive is political—to bring about regime change.
Can the CIA’s covert operatives pull it off? In the places where they’ve been successful (Iran 1953, Guatemala 1954, Chile 1973), the key has been to turn the military against the civilian government. That’s not likely in Venezuela. The so-called “Cartel of the Suns” is a loose network of military officers profiting from a wide range of criminal enterprises, including collaboration with Colombia cocaine traffickers. Regime change in Caracas, especially the establishment of an opposition government led by María Corina Machado and friends, would pose a grave threat to the military’s interests. They might dispatch with Maduro, but if the infrastructure of the regime and armed forces remains intact, nothing would change.
The CIA’s efforts to foment a coup have already failed once. In 2019, at the peak of popular opposition to Maduro’s regime, with Washington promoting oppositionist Juan Guiadó as the legitimate president, “Operation Liberty” was a plan to split the army as a catalyst for regime collapse. Instead the plan collapsed when no significant military units defected.
If a military invasion and occupation of Venezuela is not feasible and a successful CIA instigated coup is unlikely, what is the end game for Trump’s escalating conflict with Venezuela? Will the president be satisfied with more performative displays of military force until the next crisis pushes Venezuela out of the headlines and off his agenda? Will he be satisfied if Nicolás Maduro is replaced by some other member of his regime so Trump can claim victory? Or will he finally conclude that Marco Rubio’s obsession with regime change in Venezuela is just as much a dead end as John Bolton’s was, and give Richard Grennel the nod to go back to Caracas and make a deal?
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We Can Build a Healthier World, But Don't Expect RFK Jr. to Lead the Job
How we construct society significantly determines the ways different groups live—and die. Unfortunately, despite some rhetoric to the contrary, Trump's health secretary seems content to let corporations continue to sicken us.
Oct 20, 2025
The Senate Finance Committee hearing with Robert F. Kennedy Jr. was explosive. The Secretary of Health and Human Services was accused of “reckless disregard for science and the truth,” and senators from both parties were openly hostile as they questioned him extensively on his vaccine policies, as well as the firing of scientific advisory board members and agency heads and their replacement with ideologically driven anti-vaccine supporters. During that more than three-hour session, he was called a charlatan and a liar, and he returned the insults.
The distrust of his honesty and integrity was palpable. The public health community already mistrusted his views on vaccines and the role of science. There was, however, some modest hope that he would at least follow through on his views on the environmental causes of chronic disease and the food industry’s disastrous impact on obesity and diabetes, as well as other diseases. Sadly, that’s been anything but the case and there’s quite a history behind that reality.
A Long History of Public Health Disasters
In focusing on the environmental causes of disease, Kennedy was building on a public health tradition that saw disease, suffering, and death as, at least in part, a function of the worlds we’ve constructed for ourselves and others over time. Historically, some instances of unnecessary suffering are glaringly obvious. Take, for instance, the exploitation and often premature death of Africans enslaved and transported to the New World under conditions so inhumane that approximately 10% to 20% of them perished during what came to be known as the Middle Passage. And don’t forget the suffering and early deaths of so many who survived and were consigned by whites to forced labor in the American South, where the average life expectancy of a newborn slave child was less than 22 years, or about half that of a white infant of the same era.
Or, to take another example, in her famous 1906-1907 study Work-Accidents and the Law, Crystal Eastman, the feminist cofounder of the American Civil Liberties Union and a social reformer, wrote of 526 men who were killed in accidents in the steel mills of Pittsburgh and another 509 who suffered serious injuries in—yes!—a single year, arguing that many of those accidents would have been preventable had work conditions been different. As she grimly reported:
Seven men lost a leg, sixteen men were hopelessly crippled in one or both legs, one lost a foot, two lost half a foot, five lost an arm, three lost a hand, ten lost two or more fingers, two were left with crippled left arms, three with crippled right arms, and two with two useless arms. Eleven lost an eye, and three others had the sight of both eyes damaged. Two men have crippled backs, two received internal injuries, one is partially paralyzed, one feebleminded, and two are stricken with the weakness of old age while still in their prime.
Some aspects of the inevitable—fatal disease or other devastating genetic and biological conditions—are clearly affected by how societies care for their members. Historically, race, social class, geographic location, gender, age, and immigrant status have all been shown to have a tremendous impact on access to medical care and the quality of that care. The social and economic arrangements Americans created have shaped patterns of disease prevalence, distribution, and recovery over the course of our history.
Most obviously, a system dependent on slavery produced untold suffering and death among those most exploited; a commercial economy involving trade between various regions of the country and the world often lent a significant hand to the transmission of diseases from mosquitoes, rats, and other sources of infection. The development of cities with large immigrant populations gave landlords the opportunity to profit from renting airless tenements without adequate sewerage or pure water, producing epidemics of tuberculosis and cholera, among other diseases of poverty. Similarly, the disfiguring accidents and diseases caused by toxic chemicals were often a reflection of the rampant expansion of a laissez-faire industrial system that put profits above human life. And the Trump administration’s decision to promote the use of coal and ignore the impact of a fossil-fuel-based economy on the climate and on health is perhaps the most glaring example today of the urge to maintain a world that is (all too literally) killing us.
Smallpox in the 18th century, along with typhoid, typhus, yellow fever, and cholera epidemics, and a plague of childhood diseases in the 19th century, were all exacerbated by the squalid conditions in which people lived. The industrial revolution created conditions for the development of epidemics of silicosis, lead poisoning, and asbestosis. In more recent decades, agricultural workers in the vineyards of California and elsewhere were regularly showered with pesticides while harvesting the food that agricultural companies packaged and sold to the nation. In that process, millions of people have suffered diseases and deaths that could have been avoided.
Recently, our collective environmental practices have contributed disproportionately to global warming and so to extreme droughts, ever more severe hurricanes, and rising sea levels that threaten to flood entire nations, and we’re sure you won’t be surprised to learn that such events can, in turn, result in compromised resistance to disease. Endocrine disruptors like bisphenyl A, PCBs, and dioxins manufactured in the 20th century turned out to cause a variety of cancers, birth defects, and other developmental disorders. Meanwhile, hundreds of chemicals manufactured in recent decades have undoubtedly led to increased deaths, diseases, and neurological damage globally. And, of course, count on one thing: Issues like these won’t be seriously addressed by Robert Kennedy Jr., despite his occasional claims that he will.
The Poor and People of Color Bear the Biggest Burden of Social Neglect
The Covid-19 pandemic provided us with an example of how unequal the effects of disease regularly are. Over the course of the pandemic’s first few years, Covid-19 killed more than 1 out of every 300 Americans. However, the burden of those deaths was distributed anything but evenly through the population. Those in a weakened state and without access to decent healthcare were the most likely to become ill and die. Although “the greatest number of deaths [were] among non-Hispanic white people… the rate of Covid-19 cases, hospitalizations, and deaths [was] higher among people of color.”
According to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, compared to whites, “American Indians and Alaskan Natives were 3.1 times more likely to be hospitalized, Black or African Americans are 2.5 times more likely to be hospitalized and 1.7 times more likely to die, and Hispanic or Latino persons are 1.5 times more likely to get Covid-19 and 2.3 times more likely to be hospitalized” In stark graphs, the Poor People’s Campaign documented that “people living in poorer counties died at nearly two times the rate of people who lived in richer counties.” During the early phase of the epidemic, from December 2021 through February 2022, counties with the lowest median income “had a death rate nearly three times higher… compared to those with the highest median incomes,” a difference that can’t simply be explained by disparities in vaccination rates.
And where will our latest secretary of Health and Human Services be if something like that happens on his watch? While he may call on companies to voluntarily remove food colorings, we should expect that, in a crisis, he’ll ultimately tell Americans to change their behavior and not eat cereals with food colorings.
Who you are, where you live, what you do, and what you earn have always been the key factors determining your lifespan and your health, rather than the technological changes in medical treatment that have become available.
But don’t even count on that since such products are deemed necessary to maintain the profits of a food manufacturing and distribution system largely controlled by a few giant agricultural businesses. Real reform of such a system would undoubtedly benefit the health of Americans. However, in the absence of a strong social movement, the entrenched interests that have promoted such industrial food production will undoubtedly prove to be virtually immune to serious restructuring or change. Indeed, as nutritionist and public health advocate Marion Nestle has written, there is now little resistance to the continuing unchecked growth of the agricultural sector and few challenges to the rights of Campbell’s, McDonald’s, Monsanto, Perdue, Smithfield Foods, and others to conduct their businesses in ways that may indeed threaten the health of tens of millions of Americans.
Of course, there is also real truth to the story of progress toward better health. The average life span of a white boy born in 1900 in a large American city was only 46.3 years, and of a Black boy, only 33 years. By the second decade of the 21st century, however, the average life expectancy for Americans was close to 78 years, although the gap between Black and white remains. Similarly, this country has reduced the number of deaths that used to plague both children and women giving birth, while largely controlling cholera and other water-borne diseases through the introduction of relatively safe water supply and sewerage systems. The last 150 years, writes demographer Richard Easterlin, have seen the “average life span” more than double globally from 20 to 40 years at the turn of the last century to between 60 and 80 years today. And yet Secretary of Health Kennedy seems to be ready to jettison perhaps the single most important technology responsible for rising life spans: vaccines! Rather than mandating that children receive vaccines before entering school, Kennedy said the decisions should be left to the state and to parents. Despite efforts to backtrack on his long anti-vax history, in interviews on CNN and elsewhere, he has insisted that “there are no vaccines that are safe and effective.”
While national and international mortality statistics tell an important story, they often hide wide variations in the health and well-being of those who make up such figures. A closer look at the life spans of industrial workers, women, Native Americans, Blacks, Hispanics, and whites reveals vast differences in disease experience. The persistence of disparities in health and longevity among them may, in truth, be the most enduring health reality of American society. Although new discoveries in medical science, impressive technological interventions, and modest policy initiatives have improved American health, narrowing the gaps described above, those disparities have persisted for more than four centuries.
Who you are, where you live, what you do, and what you earn have always been the key factors determining your lifespan and your health, rather than the technological changes in medical treatment that have become available. The narrative of ever more improvement that’s been the bread and butter of so much of public health’s self-congratulatory history needs to be modified to acknowledge the millions of years lost through the (too) early deaths of Blacks, Native Americans, and poor and working-class whites since the colonial era.
In the 19th century, the incidence of classic infectious and communicable diseases, including cholera, smallpox, tuberculosis, and typhoid, was at least in part the product of specific decisions, including the way landlords profited by jamming people into tenements and leaving them with outdoor plumbing and a polluted water supply. In short, suffering wasn’t just the inevitable byproduct of urbanization and industrialization, but of a dominant ideology that reinforced a laissez-faire economic system with profit (for the few) as its main goal.
Why, you might wonder, did so few question the logic of crowding so many together when there was nearly unlimited space in which to live in a still sparsely populated nation? Who determined that some people’s health could be sacrificed for the wealth of others, even though there were often no objective reasons why conditions could not have been better?
Who Should Live and Who Should Die?
In effect, leaders then made social and political decisions about who should live and who should die, as they will again in the Trump era. Unfortunately, it’s all too rare to think of diseases not as an inevitable byproduct of a particular exposure or an inevitable outgrowth of modernization or industrialization, but as the byproduct of decisions made by individuals, groups, and societies. In different eras, different conditions have been created that diseased, maimed, or killed people all too unequally.
Isn’t it time, in the era of Donald Trump and Robert Kennedy Jr., when, for instance, the administration’s devastation of the US Agency for International Development might, according to the medical journal The Lancet, lead to 14 million more deaths globally, to broaden the definition of what causes disease and death in the United States (and elsewhere)? Isn’t it time not just to focus on viruses and events in nature, but on the structure of an American society in which the rich are growing ever richer and income inequality is on the rise, a world in which corporations, government, and institutions make decisions that profoundly affect people’s health? Consciously or not, the decisions the dominant groups in a society make determine who lives and who dies, who flourishes and who prospers.
Some disease-related tragedies are unavoidable, but all too many are not. There was no need for children to die in such large numbers from infections in the crowded slums of the 19th century, nor for workers to suffer so extensively from chronic diseases and disabilities in the factories of the early 20th century. Nor is it necessary in the modern era to pollute the environment with synthetic plastics that lead to epidemics of cancer, heart disease, or stroke. Worse yet, it’s anything but necessary, as Donald Trump is determined to do, to continue to pollute the global environment through the endless overuse of fossil fuels, ensuring that this world will someday become so warm that it may no longer support human life across significant swaths of the globe. How we construct society, in other words, significantly determines the ways different groups live—and die.
An understanding of how Americans have built their past should give us the power to shape the future. Companies do not have to continue to introduce synthetic hormones, pesticides, or other materials into the milk American children drink, the wheat in the cereals millions of Americans eat, or the meat that is a staple of our diet. Even simple regulatory changes could have a positive impact on how we, our children, and our grandchildren will live and die. Many positive changes, though never achieved without a struggle, aren’t particularly revolutionary or even massively disruptive of existing social relationships. Europeans, for example, have decided to require chemical companies simply to test their products for safety before being introduced into the stream of commerce.
We as a people should not have to watch helplessly as the Earth’s ecosystem is devastated through habitat destruction, resource depletion, and global warming. We should be able to learn from the horrible global accidents of the recent past. Chernobyl in Ukraine, and Fukushima in Japan are perhaps the most well-known “dead zones” our species has produced through inattention to the risks we humans create—in those cases, of course, with nuclear power. But we can learn from other, less well-known communities where human decisions have resulted in untold health consequences. Take, for instance, the way polychlorinated biphenyls polluted the community around the factory in Anniston, Alabama, where they were first produced in the 1930s, or how the town of Times Beach, Missouri, had to be literally abandoned because of the way that now-banned Polychlorinated Biphenyls, or PCBs, were spread on its roads. A host of polluted landfills across this country and around the world are now Superfund sites in need of massive investment to detoxify.
Simply put, the message we can learn from the past is that we need not continue to build worlds that kill us but can, collectively, make more life-affirming decisions. In the age of Donald Trump, who is now seeking to end women’s use of Tylenol, and Robert Kennedy Jr, we have entered a world of medical quackery. As Senator Maria Cantwell (D-Wash.) exclaimed, “Sir, you’re a charlatan. That’s what you are.”
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After No Kings Day, Feed Your Head
We should commit ourselves to becoming students of struggle because there is so much to be gained not simply from action, but from deliberative, informed, and educated action.
Oct 20, 2025
Now that No Kings Day October 2025 has come and gone, what should we do with all our energy?
The carnivalesque atmosphere of protest across the nation on Saturday fed a hunger for political community and solidarity in the face of the relentless assault on our basic democratic rights that has been raging since the start of this year.
The signage alone—from cats kicking crowns to “We in Danger, Girl: Resist”—called us to move from words to action. Now.
Act we should.
For there is plenty to do.
Histories of anti-authoritarian struggle are an indispensable storehouse of knowledge for the days and weeks after the protest is over.
Join the American Civil Liberties Union. Work to support anti-Trump candidates in the 2026 midterms. Write your elected representatives, including judges, to let them know you support their efforts to defend the Constitution. And find out what the local organizers of your No Kings Day have planned next.
We should do all these things.
But we should also read. And study. And debate. And learn.
I’m not kidding.
We should commit ourselves to becoming students of struggle because there is so much to be gained not simply from action, but from deliberative, informed, and educated action.
And history, especially Black history, is a crucial resource in this struggle.
Consider Augustus Wood’s recent book, Class Warfare in Black Atlanta, which maps the ways that working-class African American men and women fought the neoliberal takeover of Atlanta from the 1970s onwards, pushing against both white and Black elites seeking to bulldoze their communities in the name of economic development and “progress.”
Get to know the stories of Phyllis Whatley and Eva Davis, Black working women who built “overlapping” movements across space, housing, and labor to beat back Atlanta’s takeover by urban power brokers. We have so much to learn from their courage and their strategies.
If a scholarly book like Wood’s is too much to pick up, go to your local library and find a novel which fictionalizes key moments and movements in anti-democratic history. Try Colson Whitehead’s Pulitzer prizewinning The Underground Railroad. Or check out John Lewis’ memoir, Walking With the Wind.
Or if fiction doesn’t appeal, follow a short form like an op-ed. Top of that list right now is Bobby J. Smith’s piece, “Chicago Restaurants Using Civil Rights-Era Playbook to Fight ICE,” which reminds us how prescient, and present, the tactics of the recent past are.
And if reading per se isn’t the way you want to access lessons on how ordinary people fight the power of the state and its legal and carceral systems, check out the website of the MAMAs project, which documents in word and image how the mothers of unjustly incarcerated sons have developed powerful pedagogies over a decade-long struggle for the freedom of their kids.
History comes in many forms and formats. So, as the 1967 Jefferson Airplane song “White Rabbit” exhorts us, “feed your head.” By whatever means possible.
Because after we put away the No Kings signs for now, we need recourse to concrete examples of how to counter government-sponsored violence and fascist takeover—partly so we can be inspired by those who have come before, and partly so we can develop models based on past patterns and present strategies that we can put into action now.
It goes without saying, of course, that for many communities in the US and elsewhere, these struggles are not new. They are intensified, yes, but they build on micro- and macro-aggressions that have been rending the social and economic fabric for decades if not centuries.
It’s important to remember that wherever violence has happened and the state has exercised lethal power against citizens and other subjects, people have resisted. We have to know these histories.
Luckily, there is a deep and rich archive of protest movements that historians, professional and otherwise, have labored to assemble and preserve precisely to serve us in these times.
Which is exactly why the current regime is banning books, coming after courses and curricula which amplify these histories, and seeking to remake the story of the last 250 years in their own image.
They want to erase the history of survival and resistance which can and will be activated to challenge their arrogation of power—activated to resist the dismantling of democratic foundations and to protect anew those rights which have been hard won over the last two centuries.
Histories of anti-authoritarian struggle are an indispensable storehouse of knowledge for the days and weeks after the protest is over.
We need to study them, with the present in mind. So get out there and read up on the practical examples that Black history especially has to offer us as we seek not just solidarity, but usable forms and portable practices drawn from the work of those who came before us.
When we do so, we ourselves will be making histories available to those who come after us to learn from, to mobilize, and to improve on.
Feed your head, and the rest will follow.
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History Won't Remember the Crowd: It Will Remember What the Crowd Built
If we want a nation of citizens and not subjects, we must do the slow, steady, unglamorous work of taking back our republic, one precinct, one institution, and one election at a time.
Oct 20, 2025
The No Kings Day protests last weekend were breathtaking. Seven million or more Americans filled streets across the country explicitly condemning the way Trump has been running our country. They carried handmade signs, sang freedom songs, and for one afternoon reminded the nation that resistance still burns hot.
But here’s the hard truth: that energy, that passion, that righteousness means very little if it doesn’t translate into structure and leadership. Movements that fail to coalesce around leaders and build institutions typically die in the glare of their own moral light or fail to produce results.
We’ve seen it before. The Women’s March drew millions. Occupy Wall Street electrified a generation. Black Lives Matter shook the conscience of the nation. But without leadership, durable organizations, funding networks, and consistent strategy, these movements faded from the political field as quickly as they filled it.
Protests without public faces and follow-through are like fireworks. Beautiful, brief, and gone before the smoke clears.
Real change doesn’t happen on the screen or even in the streets. It happens in the precincts, in the county offices, in the long nights where volunteers count ballots or knock on doors. With education, spokespeople, and specific demands.
The last time I saw my late buddy Tom Hayden was when we were both speaking in Dubrovnik, Croatia some years ago. I was doing my radio program live from there and we reminisced on the air about Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), the organization he helped start with the Port Huron Statement and I was a member of in East Lansing.
Like the American Revolution, the Civil Rights movement, the union movement, and the women’s suffrage movements before it, SDS’ success in helping end the war in Vietnam didn’t just come from mass mobilizations (although they helped), but flowed out of an organizational structure and local and national leaders who could articulate a single specific demand to end the war.
As Frederick Douglass famously said in 1857, “Power concedes nothing without a demand.” That demand must be loud, specific, recurrent, and backed by organization and leadership.
When the Occupy movement, for example, was taken over by a group of well-intentioned people who insisted that no leaders or institutions emerge within it, they doomed it to obscurity.
Trump’s neofascist administration understands this dynamic; it’s why they came down so brutally on student leaders in the campus anti-genocide protests. They succeeded in preventing either institution or leadership from emerging in a meaningful way.
Modern protests often reward attention, not action. Social media loves the march, the chant, the sign, and the photo that goes viral. Trump’s people complain and mutter about “hate America marches” but generally tolerate them, assuming they’ll fizzle out like Occupy did. The click feels like participation.
But power never bends to viral content. While the George Floyd protests did produce some changes, those (particularly diversity, equity, and inclusion) are aggressively being rolled back by Republicans with little protest because there’s no institution or leadership to lead the protest against their retrograde actions.
Authoritarian politicians understand this better than anyone. They know that a protest can be permitted because as long as it limits itself to protest it burns itself out. A million tweets feel like movement, but they evaporate by morning. The noise is cathartic, and the system stays the same.
Real change doesn’t happen on the screen or even in the streets. It happens in the precincts, in the county offices, in the long nights where volunteers count ballots or knock on doors. With education, spokespeople, and specific demands.
The campaign of Zohran Mamdani for New York City mayor is a great example; here we’re seeing real leadership and an effective organization that he’s built around his candidacy. It’ll be an inspiration for an entire new generation.
That’s the difference between the America that not just marched in movements but also created organizations with structure, leadership, and a specific vision of the future they’re fighting for.
The movements of the 1960s, for example, changed America because they had leadership, structure, and strategy. The civil rights, labor, and anti-war movements were powered by organizations like the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, SDS, and the United Farm Workers. Leaders such as Martin Luther King Jr., John Lewis, Tom Hayden, and Dolores Huerta trained others, built networks, and turned protest into policy.
Those marches were not spontaneous. They were the culmination of years of organizing in churches, union halls, on campuses, and in living rooms. King’s March on Washington was not the movement; it was the exclamation point on a decade of strategy.
Today, our movements are broader, younger, and more diverse, but also largely fragmented and leaderless. Social media spreads outrage faster than ever, but it can’t replace the disciplined institutions that have historically held movements together. If we’re to save American democracy, we can’t only have bursts of energy without long-term direction.
It is not that people lack courage; they lack coordination. The right-wing oligarchs intent on destroying our democracy built their empire from the ground up with the Powell Memo and, more recently, Project 2025 as specific blueprints.
For more than 40 years, the Republican Party has been playing a long game. While Democrats chased the next election cycle, conservatives built a media empire.
They invested in talk radio, cable news, think tanks, and local media outlets. They funded the Heritage Foundation, the Federalist Society, the American Legislative Exchange Council, and a constellation of dark-money groups that shape laws before most people even hear about them. They worked the school boards, city councils, and state legislatures. They didn’t just build candidates. They built infrastructure.
And it paid off.
When a bought-off, well-bribed Clarence Thomas delivered the deciding vote in Citizens United v. FEC in 2010 to legalize bribery of judges and politicians, that decision’s infrastructure became their weapon of choice. Suddenly billionaires and corporations could pour unlimited, even anonymous, money into the political bloodstream. And, most significantly, the right already had the arteries and veins in place.
While progressives held rallies, conservatives bought the megaphones, built the institutions, and found, elevated, and empowered leaders and spokespeople. The result is a minority right-wing movement that dominates America through structure and leadership, not popularity or protest.
Democrats have good people, good policies, and good intentions but lack a unified strategy and clear leadership. Too often, the party reacts instead of leads. It posts instead of plans. It wins headlines and loses legislatures. It’s most senior people often dither rather than project power and leadership.
Right now, when the right pushes disinformation and chaos, the left too often offers silence or even confusion. We need a structure that says: Here is the America we would govern, and here are the people ready to govern it.
Money is speech, the court told us. But that was a lie designed to cement oligarchy. Citizens United allowed the wealthy to flood elections with cash, to buy influence, to capture regulators, and to shape policy without accountability.
The result is an American political economy that serves the powerful and distracts the rest. Billionaires fund propaganda networks that pretend to be news. They back think tanks that write laws to protect monopolies and suppress wages. They fill campaign coffers so thoroughly that elected officials become their employees.
This is not a conspiracy theory: It’s an accounting statement. Follow the money and you’ll find the fingerprints of the same handful of billionaire and corporate donors behind almost every regressive policy of the last two decades.
The GOP didn’t just accept this system. They engineered it. And they exploit it to this day.
The right has been building its machine since the Powell Memo in 1971. The left must start today.
If democracy is to survive, Democrats—and small-d democrats—must build an infrastructure that competes on a similar footing. That means fundraising systems that depend on millions of small donors instead of a few billionaires. It means community-level leadership development. It means institutions that outlast elections. And it requires specific demands.
Real resistance begins with message discipline. Every Democrat, every progressive organization, every citizen who believes in democracy must be part of a single, steady chorus: Defend democracy, restore the middle class, protect the planet, guarantee healthcare and education for all, and—most important—get big money out of politics while establishing a legal right to vote.
The right repeats its talking points until they become accepted truth. We must do the same, only with facts, compassion, and moral clarity.
Endurance is just as essential, and in that sense Indivisible—the one organization that’s really emerged so far to lead this movement—has gotten us off to a great start.
The movement, however, can’t fade when the crowds disperse or when social media moves on. It has to grow in the offseason, in county offices, at organizing meetings, in living rooms, and in campaign trainings that prepare the next generation of leaders.
Change starts locally, which is where you can volunteer and show up. Conservatives understood long ago that power begins on school boards, city councils, and election commissions. They built from the ground up while progressives often looked to Washington. If we’re serious about reclaiming democracy, it must start in those same local arenas where laws are written and values are taught.
We must also be clear about what we stand for. Protest is not policy.
Real policy means repealing Schedule F, protecting voting rights, restoring oversight, enforcing antitrust laws, taxing concentrated wealth, defending reproductive freedom, guaranteeing healthcare and education for every American, making it as hard to take away your vote as it is to take away your gun, and finally removing the corrupting influence of money from our political system.
These are not slogans: They’re the foundation of a functioning democracy, which has been dismantled bit by bit over the years by the billionaires who own the GOP.
And none of this will succeed long-term without strong progressive media. We need to restore and support newsrooms and platforms that report truth, tell stories that matter, and counter the billionaires’ propaganda networks. If we fail to shape the narrative, those who profit from lies will continue to shape it for us.
Finally, real resistance requires action with purpose. Outrage alone changes nothing. When the powerful refuse to listen, we must act with the same courage that fueled the labor movement and the fight for civil rights. Strikes, boycotts, confronting violence with nonviolence, and coordinated economic pressure are how ordinary people force extraordinary change.
As Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, Douglass, Jane Addams, King, Cesar Chavez, Huey Newton, and Hayden (among others) taught us, history moves when citizens organize, persist, and make injustice impossible to ignore.
The right has been building its machine since the Powell Memo in 1971. The left must start today. We must be as disciplined, organized, and relentless as they are, but with a moral compass that points toward democracy to counter their fascist project.
The No King Day protesters reminded the world that America still has a conscience. But a conscience without a plan is a sermon without a church.
The next phase of this movement must be structural. We need think tanks, training programs, legal defense funds, local newspapers, coordinated communication networks, and candidates ready to lead at every level. We need to replace despair with design and get inside and animate the Democratic Party.
Democracy is not defended by hashtags. It’s defended by hands, millions of them, building, voting, organizing, and refusing to quit when the cameras are gone.
The No King Day marches were righteous and inspiring. But history will not remember the crowd: it will remember what the crowd built.
If we want a nation of citizens and not subjects, we must do the slow, steady, unglamorous work of taking back our republic, one precinct, one institution, and one election at a time.
Volunteer for your local Democratic Party and become a precinct committeeperson. Join Indivisible. Run for local office and participate with local pro-democracy organizations. Show up.
That is the revolution worth marching for.
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