The #Resistance Is Dead; Long Live The Resistance

Liberals have written a requiem for what you might call Resistance One—the mode of opposition in Donald Trump’s first presidency anchored around upholding democratic norms and opposing and exposing Trump’s corruption.

The determination of death is evident from a quick check of vital signs: In just the past few weeks, some of the most high-profile heroes of the Trump resistance all saw their fledgling political careers cut short. Dan Goldman, who led the first Trump impeachment as counsel for the House, lost his seat in Congress to a primary challenger. George Conway, who helped stand up the Lincoln Project, lost a House primary race for a different New York City district. And Alexander Vindman, one of the key witnesses during the first Trump impeachment inquiry, lost the Senate Democratic primary in Florida.

And the cause is obvious: Resistance One plainly didn’t work—just Google who’s president today! (Though ideally you’ll use a different search engine).

You could watch the conventional wisdom gel over the course of a few hours. See here, here, here, here, and here.

I think this analysis is wrong. It is, at the very least, wrongheaded. The grassroots desire for a strong resistance along the lines conjured almost a decade ago was completely correct. It remains the animating demand of the Democratic Party electorate, whose voters want to throw the bums out and replace them with better fighters.

What’s dead is what you might more aptly call the Hashtag Resistance of leeches and failed leaders who siphoned the passion for a muscular opposition to fuel grifts or manage the coalition without really representing it. We got the artifice of checking and balancing instead of the real kind.

Liberals aren’t over resistance. They want a Resistance Two that doesn’t get bled dry by frauds and cowards.

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First: Did primary voters really render a verdict on the concept of resistance by rejecting those three candidates?

Three’s a trend, which is why the idea caught on, but it’s also a tiny “n” and when you examine each race on its own terms, you find the resisters lost for quotidian and unrelated reasons. It’s only when you zoom out that you can divine the collective judgment of the Democratic electorate, and it’s clearly on the side of more resistance, not less. ...