ON POLITICAL CHANGE

AS PART OF THE ATLANTIC’S “THE UNFINISHED REVOLUTION,” David Brooks writes, “America Needs a Mass Movement—Now,” October 14, 2025. His article provides a culminating lesson in civics, the initial one seen here at SimanaitisSays.

Here are tidbits gleaned from Brooks’ article, together with a summation of my own.

Others Have Risen. Brooks observes, “Other peoples have risen up to defend their rights, their dignity, and their democracies. In the past 50 years, they’ve done it in Poland, South Africa, Lebanon, South Korea, Ukraine, East Timor, Serbia, Madagascar, Nepal, and elsewhere.”

Political Scientists’ Thoughts. “Such uprisings are not rare,” Brooks notes. “For their 2011 book, Why Civil Resistance Works, the political scientists Erica Chenoweth and Maria Stephan looked at 323 resistance movements from 1900 to 2006, including more than 100 nonviolent resistance campaigns. What Chenoweth and Stephan showed is that citizens are not powerless; they have many ways to defend democracy.”

Trump Threats. “The second Trump administration,” Brooks recounts, “has flouted court decisions in a third of all rulings against it, according to The Washington Post. It operates as a national extortion racket, using federal power to control the inner workings of universities, law firms, and corporations. It has thoroughly politicized the Justice Department, launching a series of partisan investigations against its political foes. It has turned ICE into a massive paramilitary organization with apparently unconstrained powers. It has treated the Constitution with disdain, assaulted democratic norms and diminished democratic freedoms, and put military vehicles and soldiers on the streets of the capital. It embraces the optics of fascism, and flaunts its autocratic aspirations.”

Will It Go Away In Three Years? “If you think Trumpism will simply end in three years,” Brooks writes, “you are naive. Left unopposed, global populism of the sort Trumpism represents could dominate for a generation. This could be the rest of our lives, and our children’s, too.” 

The Long View. Brooks describes, “This crisis is not about election cycles. It’s about historical tides. Every so often, a political-cultural-social tide sweeps the world, leaving everything rearranged in its wake. Two hundred and fifty years ago, the democratic tide swept across the West, producing the American and French Revolutions and eventually the democratic revolts of 1848. The totalitarian tide of the early 20th century produced revolutions in Russia, Germany, and China. The 1960s gave us the tide of liberation, which produced the decolonization movements, the civil-rights movement, and the feminist movement. The neoliberal revolution of the 1980s and ’90s produced Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher in the West and Deng Xiaoping and Mikhail Gorbachev in the East.”

“Since 2010 or so,” Brooks observes, “the tide of global populism has risen, a movement that has brought us not just Trump, but Viktor Orbán, Narendra Modi, the revanchist version of Vladimir Putin, Xi Jinping, and Brexit.”

A New Vision is Needed. “To beat a social movement,” Brooks posits, “you must build a counter social movement. And to do that, you need a different narrative about where we are and where we should be heading, a different set of values dictating what is admirable and what is disgraceful.” 

Focussing This New Vision. “The traditional American story,” Brooks says, “is built on hope and possibility. The MAGA story is built on menace and threat. The traditional American story embraces risk. The MAGA story clings to security.”

“A successful anti-MAGA movement,” Brooks asserts, “must start by winning some achievable, concrete victory—halting this specific attack on democracy or that specific Trump program—and building from there. It must bring people from fear and stasis to hope and momentum.”

A Violent Revolution? Brooks writes, “Will it ever come time for Americans to do what their 1770s predecessors did, and take up arms against a despotic and unjust regime? That’s not realistic or even worth thinking about. Nonviolent uprisings are twice as likely to succeed as violent ones, according to Chenoweth and Stephan’s research.”

Why Civil Resistance Works, by Erica Chenoweth and Maria J. Stephan, Columbia University Press, 2012.

Moral Authority. “Peaceful uprisings,” he says, “earn moral authority for themselves and take it away from the regime. When nonviolent protesters confront the regime, they can come across as brave, self-disciplined, and dignified. When regimes retaliate against nonviolent protesters with fire hoses or rubber bullets or tear gas, they come across as ruthless and malevolent.”

American Cycles. “Trumpism is ascendant now,” Brooks concedes near the end of his article, “but history shows that America cycles through a process of rupture and repair, suffering and reinvention. This process has a familiar sequence. Cultural and intellectual change comes first—a new vision. Social movements come second. Political change comes last.”

A Summation. I believe many Americans have this new vision. For so many of us, the image of people being denied the vote, left without health care, snagged off the streets, or tear-gassed is a horrific one. Two million of us got involved on a recent Saturday as a growing social movement. And we can continue calling for change from those chosen to represent us. 

Thanks, David Brooks, for a much appreciated civics lesson. ds

© Dennis Simanaitis, SimanaitisSays.com, 2025