Culture
There is no simple, single answer to how one should resist a totalitarian government. The most effective movements have been nonviolent, requiring immense patience and a collective will to overcome deep-seated divisions.
Updated 04:46 pm EDT, August 20, 2025
Published 04:46 pm EDT, August 20, 2025
Photography: Flávio Iryoda
Political Resistance in America
Sitting in a pretentious sidewalk café as the sky dimmed to an apricot-lavender hue, I sipped a crystal-clear martini with a tiny lemon sliver floating in the fast-diminishing liquid. I watched the surging crowd walk by, enmeshed in smiles, frowns, and in some cases, there were faces lined with worry or determination. As they ebbed and flowed from my seat, I sat silently wondering, which one of you? Who here voted for an orange-faced entertainer desperate to quiet the snubs and hurt from his youth and control us within a cult of vulgarity and hate?
More importantly, which one of you would resist with me? Push back the dark, grim totalitarianism and refuse to be quietly herded into living in an English-speaking banana republic with a neurotic, vain leader for life?
Resistance. It is a word fraught with deep emotions, dark and swirling like a purple-tinged tempest, both beautiful and dangerous. Yet, it is imperative we resist. Not specifically Trump, though. That is a far too facile answer, since he is nothing more than the latest manifestation of decades of worry, desperation, and hate that many people, not just Americans, have been embroiled in. Trump is a dangerous and cunning individual who very well might lead to the destruction of democratic values and the slide of the prolific American epoch into a miasma of tawdry and frankly embarrassing totalitarianism. But in the end, he is a lazy entertainer who was allowed, by us, to goad us into hating each other more than laughing at him.
As we have written earlier in AVESSA’s article, “Lost Dreams,” this slide into confusion began with Ronald Reagan’s economic policies in the 1980s. He was the trigger that started the erosion of the dreams of poor white Americans. His lies and racial profiling dramatically increased poverty, homelessness, and the normalization of racial contempt, which has led us to the orange man and the distinct possibility that I will end up wearing some hideous polyester jumpsuit in either El Salvador or Somalia.
Well? No. I choose to resist. But how? There are dozens of groups actively opposing the current government here in the USA, but I am hardly the Che Guevara type, with sweat-stained clothes and a sour stink about my body. Heaven forfend.
First, what really is resistance, and how could it be effective here in the United States? In the past, heroes, anarchists, pacifists, and militants have at one time or another promoted resistance to political regimes they described as dictatorial. More recently, those who participated in the “No Kings” protests shouted the idea of resistance as they peacefully chanted in the streets of dozens of cities and towns. It was an inspiring sight for many of us, but nonetheless, continued resistance will be challenging, given its complex history.
Proto-Americans in the 18th century cried in despair and at times in hypocrisy about King George’s tyrannical taxes and the cost of tea. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, anarchists transformed resistance into a byword for enforcing political and social change, whether the populace wanted it or not.
Certainly we do not refer to the laughable German resistance during Nazi regime. I do not diminish the actions of real German heroes, such as the White Rose student group in Munich or Claus von Stauffenberg and his fellow aristocrats. They tried from a grassroots standpoint while the rest of the country hid in the dark, stifling shadows, hoping the violence would pass them by. Only to emerge blinking into the light, all immediately claiming they were part of the resistance. After all, all the true heroes had mainly been murdered, so who would contradict them?
Still others think immediately of Mahatma Gandhi and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., who adhered to nonviolent resistance and led to massive changes in the British Empire and the United States. However, these movements were led by intensely charismatic men who, through their words and actions, inspired countless others to dream and passively resist for their ideals.
The term resistance has always been ambiguous. It has referred to both violent and nonviolent political action, encompassing acts that aim at a fundamental and perhaps revolutionary overhaul of existing society, as well as those seeking to preserve or reestablish the status quo.
This ambivalence is the source of its broad appeal as a rallying cry, but the ambiguity also reveals the weakness of the act that we apply today. Many Americans are resisting the current totalitarian-leaning government, but they do it in various effective and ineffective manners. The very word “resistance” masks the conflicting ideas swirling in this country over what the common political goals of the resistance are. We must face some tough moral and political questions about our resistance before it can be effective. We must also contend with the ever-powerful American culture. Put bluntly? Americans loathe being told what to do.
This is a national trait that has been present from the start of the republic. Not only did we rebel against King George III, but we also rebelled later in 1791, when the nascent government imposed a tax on whiskey intended to amortize the cost of the Revolutionary War. Farmers, who were the majority of the populace at the time, despised the tax since it was more profitable for them to make hootch than flour. Surprise, Americans were alcohol-driven even in 1791. That impasse triggered the Whiskey Rebellion, a violent insurrection that Washington suppressed with the aid of federal troops. The confrontation revealed a psychological gap between the governors and the governed that persists to this day.
Another aspect of American culture is that, regardless of what our forefathers did centuries ago, today’s population also tends to loathe violent resistance. We believe that given the choice between a new totalitarian regime and a band of violent resistance fighters? The majority of the herd will shy away from violence. Most Americans believe they have too much to lose materially by getting involved in politics. That is the dichotomy of the current situation. Many Americans are significantly uncomfortable with totalitarianism.
If for no other reason than they hate being told what to do. But at the same exact time, many Americans have fallen prey to the propaganda that all resistance to the current government is led by violent immigrants, or “shudder” people of color who want to destroy the suburban way of life, including the joy-filled activities of eating trans fats and dying of heart congestion. Frankly, at this moment, we hate and distrust each other more than we fear the threat of being a banana republic with cronyism and oligarchy. Too much mistrust, fear, and confusion hinder effective action.
So, is peaceful civil disobedience the answer? Reviewing the civil rights movement, it is clear that the movement believed the politically disadvantaged could rely on nonviolent lawbreaking to sway those with natural advantages and ultimately generate meaningful political reform. But the civil rights movement required patience, a charismatic leader, and carefully selected plans to demonstrate that black people were human beings and were being denied fundamental rights.
Gandhi’s movement for Indian independence lasted from the early 1910s until India’s independence in 1947. For almost forty years, he employed tactics of civil disobedience, such as boycotts and peaceful protests, to challenge British rule. These actions, particularly the Salt March, gained international support, putting pressure on the British to grant India independence. Imagine the sultry March day when Gandhi started walking with 78 highly disciplined followers, all marching over 200 miles to the grey-white sea. He did this to defy the British law that forbade Indians from gathering salt. Once Gandhi reached the mud flats, he scooped up salt sediment in front of thousands of people.
Fat chance that would happen today. Most Americans could not last more than eight weeks during the summer of 2020 without breaking all COVID-19 protocols. Many publicized their refusal to wait for medical approval, gathering with glee and smugness. Can any of you imagine Americans planning a 40-year-long peaceful resistance today? People get shot daily through impatience because they drive like visually impaired turtles. Patience, similar to violence, doesn’t seem to be the correct path either. So what is?
The answer is certainly not simple, nor will it be easy. From a pragmatic point of view, there needs to be multi-pronged resistance. However, there should certainly be absolutely no violence. That will play into the greedy desires of our oligarchs.
Recall the recent Jeff Bezos wedding, a $ 50 million event that evoked all the sensitivity and heart of Joseph Foulon de Doué, a French Controller-General of Finances during the reign of Louis XVI. When informed that the middle class and poor of France were starving, he smirked and spit out, “Let them eat grass.” Naturally, Foulon was later lynched by a revolutionary mob, his head placed on a pike and paraded through the streets with grass stuffed in his mouth. Although as amusing as it may seem to imagine Lauren Sanchez’s plastic cheeks full of “la pelouse”, that is not the answer. Once violence starts, we as a country will be lost, and then, in our opinion, a real, permanent tragedy will be the result.
The multipronged resistance must be a combination of political actions, legal battles, and the need for most of us to get off our fat behinds and vocally express our disdain for the current state.
In the United States, we only have the Democratic Party as a realistic leader of political resistance. Until now, they have been as effective as a dodgy dose of Ozempic has been to Oprah’s enormous appetites. Nonetheless, they must stop gawking and start working passionately in Congress to slow down the power grab. Fervently, openly deny all support to Trump’s nominees, and gleefully glue governmental operations into a standstill.
Part of the failure up until now is that Democrats have employed standard negotiation tactics, which have the drawback of communicating that all is absolutely normal while punch and pie are being served in the foyer. These are not normal times. Citizens take cues from political and public figures. If the Democratic Party acts normally, why should everyone else be that concerned?
The sad fact is that some politicians never face consequences for their conduct; their constituents continue to vote for them for a myriad of reasons, and that is part of what has brought us to this moment.
A second prong is lawsuits. Courts are crucial but the judiciary has a piss poor record of preserving democracy by itself. However, lawsuits and a continual legal pounding of the current totalitarian-leaning laws are key to the multi-pronged resistance. By highlighting sympathetic cases, such as mothers and infants being cruelly flung into spider and rat-infested African or Central American prisons.
Or potentially seeing a law-abiding, semi-socialist mayor stripped of his citizenship simply for not thinking like our federal government. There is a limit to the judicial strategy, since intricate legal issues are difficult to present to the public in a way that enables people to grasp their significance. That doesn’t mean litigation in such cases is a bad idea. But it does mean we cannot solely rely on the judiciary to get us out of the mess we are in.
Finally, the most powerful and complex element to activate resistance is people on the streets. History has shown us that resistance against dictators and oligarchs has a positive impact. True, we may get shot or gassed. Don’t underestimate the hatred encased in the current administration. But we stand at a crossroads which is absolutely of our own making. Therefore, it is the American people who need to stand outside and have their voices heard.
This last piece of resistance will be supremely hard to activate for the simple reason that, by all accounts, we also hate each other. No pulling punches here, rural whites hate urban citizens, and that doesn’t even account for racial and economic tensions. One of the reasons we have ended up with an orange would-be dictator is that we have been divided and set against each other. Now we must execute the impossible to make resistance effective. We have to forgive each other. We have centuries of injustice to contend with.
With rich, poor, black, Hispanic, straight, gay, male, and female disputes that stun the mind and frankly make me despair at times. But for us to escape living in a country where fantastically rich oligarchs push the majority of us around like neurologically divergent chimps, we must learn to forgive. Yes, there are many historical injustices, and in our secret, silvery dreams, we all yearn for justice. For the weak and downtrodden to receive some level of parity.
But life is not fair. Never has been, never will be. It is up to all of us to forgive and join together to protest, regardless of whether the person next to you is not your best friend. It’s essential to remember Martin Luther King’s distinction between hope and optimism. Hope is based on faith and represents a form of spiritual strength, regardless of one’s religion or beliefs. Optimism is an analysis of probabilities. I remain hopeful, despite my tendency to be pessimistic. I hope we can overcome our internal hatred and distrust and start resisting together.
Resistance is a collective action. It is grotesque that some prominent figures and organizations capitulated before the orange would-be dictator was reelected. It would be fabulous if we found pragmatic and charismatic leaders to build a broad coalition. It is clear, though, that whoever is available is not stepping up. So, a grassroots alliance will have to be our answer for now.
This, of course, is the absolute hardest action of all. But we at AVESSA have hope. Hope will not die. I don’t want to wait forty years for this period of insane instability and totalitarianism to end. But I will wait and hope for that time if I have to, and I, illogically, some would say comically, have faith in humanity. Americans have tried for decades to be better, more ethical, and learn from their mistakes. We are lost at the moment, but hope and resistance are our only chance now, and we must take it.
So let me tell you a story. I was happily walking back from a series of required but heinously boring errands beneath the crystal topaz sky. I found myself three blocks from my destination, and I stopped to buy some Diet Coke. I had only wanted 12 cans. I’m not usually a drooling addict. Really. But? The store had a promotion. Buy two 12-can packs and three additional packs for free. As my mind swirled with eager greediness, I quickly bought them and faced the horror of having to still walk three blocks with five 12-packs of soda in my limp, barely muscular arms.
The sun, hot and swollen, shone pleasantly through the branches of trees worn down by pollution but daring to live nonetheless. They cast a dappled shade as I waddled, hunched over with 60 cans of Diet Coke huddled in my arms. As I trudged the three blocks and internally screamed at my stupidity, three separate people proactively came to me and, with sincere smiles and grave concern, asked if they could help me. I was touched. Really. Granted, they could have seen me and were hoping I would have a massive coronary, which would allow them to search my sweaty carcass for loose change. But? I choose to believe in their decency.
And those interactions strengthen my hope. The United States is full of genuinely lovely people who yearn to root for the underdog and live their lives quietly in peace. These are the people who give me hope. And no one will strip me away from that belief. Not even the grotesque pawing oligarchs or their henchmen. These are the people who will resist. And whether it’s this year or in forty years. These are the people who will persevere.
Recovering from an obsession with Italian-designed menswear, Alfonso decided to take a deeper look into women’s fashion to see how our relationship among clothing, society, and business has changed. Educated as an economist with an MBA, he travels between Chicago, Miami, and Mexico on a search to see what happens next to fashion.
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