Defending Society Against MAGA Tyranny: Social Self-Defense Has Begun

Social Movements, USA  •  January 22, 2025  •  Jeremy Brecher

The resistance to the MAGA juggernaut has already begun at community, city, and state levels.

• The governors of Illinois and Colorado announced a new coalition called Governors Safeguarding Democracy, designed to protect state-level institutions against the threat of authoritarianism.¹ It’s reported that more than 20 states are involved.²
• Governor Gavin Newsom called a special session of the California legislature to fund the state’s civil rights, climate action, LGBTQ+ rights, reproductive rights, disaster funding, and protections shielding undocumented immigrants brought to the country as children.³ It’s been referred to as “Trump-proofing” California.
• Less than a week after the election, 100,000 people registered for a call hosted by more than 200 organizations, including the Working Families Party, MoveOn, and Indivisible.⁴
• More than 40,000 people joined a call announcing a new version of the Indivisible Guide, which played a crucial role in mobilizing the first Trump Resistance.⁵
• Denver mayor Mike Johnston announced he will encourage people to protest mass immigrant deportations and that he would be willing to go to jail if necessary.⁶
• The Los Angeles city council passed a “sanctuary city” ordinance to bar using local resources to help federal immigration authorities. In emergency resolutions the city’s public school system reaffirmed itself as a “sanctuary” for undocumented immigrants and LGBTQ students.⁷ Denver, Chicago, Boston, Philadelphia, and other cities have also passed sanctuary ordinances.⁸
• The organizers of the largest one-day demonstration in US history, the 2017 Women’s March, along with many other groups such as Planned Parenthood and the ACLU, are organizing a feminist People’s March for January 18, shortly before Trump’s inauguration.⁹
• Chicago officials have instituted community trainings designed to teach people how to spot and respond to immigration enforcement actions. A local training in mid-November drew nearly 600 people.¹⁰
• San Diego county supervisors voted to prohibit its sheriff’s department from working with US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) on the federal agency’s enforcement of civil immigration laws, including those that allow for deportations.¹¹
• The ACLU laid out a program to help cities and states become a “Firewall for Freedom,” blocking federal efforts to access private data, limiting cooperation with federal immigration authorities, banning federalization of state National Guard units, and funding abortion care and travel to get it.¹²
• The watchdog nonprofit Congressional Integrity Project initiated a “Civic Defense Project” as a rapid response “war room” to debunk baseless attacks and defend those unfairly targeted.

Some predict this resistance will fizzle. Others expect it to burgeon. Neither of these predictions can be counted on. What happens with the resistance to the MAGA juggernaut will depend on what people decide to do and whether they create means for action that can accomplish their ends. The purpose of this Prospectus is to contribute to the search for those means of action.

What Is Social Self-Defense?

Donald Trump and his MAGA supporters will soon control the presidency; the Congress; the administrative agencies of government; the Supreme Court; and the US military, intelligence, and security apparatus. He will be able to call on support from a wide swath of the public and from a cadre of armed vigilantes and groups organized for violence and intimidation. He dominates much of the media and is in a position to intimidate much of the rest. He has the support of a large sector of corporations and the wealthy. He has a demonstrated willingness and ability to use not just the legal instruments of government but also violence and intimidation, criminal methods, and coups. The official opposition to him within the electoral arena is in many cases weak, feckless, and discredited. So how is it possible that his domination can ever be overcome? This prospectus tries to answer that question.

As we saw in the Prologue, there is a movement emerging in response to the MAGA threat. But is it even possible for this emerging movement to develop the power it will need to counter a Trump tyranny?

Gandhi once wrote, “Even the most powerful cannot rule without the cooperation of the ruled.” A Trump tyranny will not be able to continue without the support and acquiescence of those whose lives and future it is destroying. It will only be able to pursue its destructive course if they enable it or acquiesce to it. A movement can overcome the most powerful regime if it can withdraw that cooperation.

But how can that power be concretely realized? There are several ways that resistance to Trump’s MAGA regime can exercise significant power:

• Constituent power: the ability of a mobilized electorate to influence leaders whose own power depends on election,
• Protest power: the ability of masses of people to demonstrate in large numbers and be willing to act with those who share their views,
• Disruptive power: the ability to exact costs on powerful institutions by disrupting their functioning through civil disobedience, strikes, and other forms of direct action,
• Social strikes: the mobilization of an entire society to withdraw support from a regime in order to bring it to an end through a nonviolent uprising or “people power.”

There are no guarantees that such power can be mobilized in a way that will contain the Trumpian onslaught, let alone bring it to an end. Trump and his coterie appear to be committed to permanent rule by their followers and their ideology. To accomplish that they need to destroy all possible barriers to their domination. They must break down the institutions of democracy that might stand in their way, for example, by restricting the right to vote. They need to eviscerate the institutions of law, medicine, civil service, journalism, and other relatively independent bases of potential opposition. They have to prevent economic actors, including corporations and unions, from pursuing their own self-interest rather than conforming to the regime’s demands. They need to intimidate and silence those who might expose their lies and abuses. They must demolish political obstacles, not only from within the Democratic Party, but within the Republican Party as well. They need to paralyze the population with fear and entice it with the promise of a better life, or at least with bread and circuses.

While this program for MAGA domination promises enormous power, it also presents enormous risks to its perpetrators. By making almost every individual and constituency a potential victim of its onslaught, it is also likely to generate a vast, diverse, and potentially unified opposition. Its program is an attack not just on one or another group, but on society as a whole – on the very practices and relationships that allow us to live together in a peaceful and constructive way. They are undermining the foundations of a free and ordered society. They are dismantling the basic practices that make life something other than a war of all against all. And they are hell-bent on destroying the natural conditions on which our life on earth depends.

The MAGA regime threatens immigrants, African Americans, Muslims, workers, women, children, the elderly, the disabled, LGBTQ+ people, all who depend on government for their health and wellbeing, and the environment on which we all depend for our very existence. Indeed, it threatens all that holds us together as a society. The resistance to that onslaught is therefore not just the defense of one or another group but a defense of society, indeed of the very possibility of society. We the people – society — need to defend ourselves against this threat and bring it to an end. We need what resisters to authoritarian regimes elsewhere have called “Social Self-Defense.”

The term “Social Self-Defense” is borrowed from the struggle against the authoritarian regime in Poland forty years ago. In the midst of harsh repression, Polish activists formed a loose network to provide financial, legal, medical, and other help to people who had been persecuted by the police or unjustly dismissed from their work. Calling themselves the Committee for Social Self-Defense (KOR), they aimed to “fight political, religious and ideological persecution”; to “oppose breaches of the law”; to “provide help for the persecuted”; to “safeguard civil liberties”; and to defend “human and civil rights.” KOR organized free trade unions to defend the rights of workers and citizens. Its members, who insisted on operating openly in public, were soon blacklisted, beaten, and imprisoned. They nonetheless persisted and nurtured many of the networks, strategies, and ideas that came to fruition in Solidarity – and ultimately in the dissolution of repressive regimes in Poland and many other countries.

Social Self-Defense is the protection of that which makes our life together on earth possible. It includes the protection of the human rights of all people; protection of the conditions of our earth and its climate that make our life possible; the constitutional principle that government must be accountable to law; and global cooperation to provide a secure future for people and planet.

In the face of MAGA assault, protecting individuals, groups, and society as a whole go hand in hand. The attacks on individuals and groups are a threat not only to those directly targeted but also to our ability to live together in our communities, our country, and our world. It is a threat to all of us as members of society. Protecting those specific constituencies who are most threatened is essential for protecting our common interests as people. Social Self-Defense means defending those who are threatened as a way both to defend them from injustice and to defend our common interest as people – as members of society. Social Self-Defense means we’ve got each other’s backs.

Historians emphasize that there were great political divisions among the KOR activists who first developed the idea of Social Self-Defense. But they were able to act together around the agenda of resisting the Polish regime’s attacks on workers and society as a whole. The individuals and groups who oppose the Trump agenda are as diverse as the targets that agenda threatens. Trump and his supporters have the potential capacity to play them off against each other and to make deals with them one by one. There will be enormous pressures on advocacy organizations, movements, parties, and even activists themselves to sell each other out.

Social Self-Defense is a means to unify ourselves around mutual aid and around our common interests. It defines Trumpism not only as a series of separate threats to different sectors, constituencies, and policy agendas but also as a unified – and therefore unifying — common threat. It allows us to use each action and campaign against one or another Trumpite abuse as a way to strike a blow against the MAGA project as a whole. Social Self-Defense does not annul but does transcend the rivalries of Democrats vs. Republicans and of Left vs. Right. It is a framework that can help unify those who should be acting in common to overcome the MAGA juggernaut.

It thereby provides a basis for solidarity.

This prospectus draws on a range of historical experiences to explore possible modes of action for overcoming the MAGA assault on society – ways of implementing Social Self-Defense:

1. The Prologue, Social Self-Defense Has Begun, describes the initial stages of Social Self-Defense in the MAGA era.
2. This Introduction, What is Social Self-Defense?, presents an overview of Social Self-Defense against the coming Trump autocracy.
3. What We Must Prepare For describes some unpredictable but threatening possibilities for Trump’s rule.
4. Social Self-Defense in the First Trump Regime recounts the history of the first Trump Resistance and draws some positive and negative lessons for the future.
5. Strategy for Social Self-Defense lays out a strategic assessment and strategic guidelines for resisting and overcoming MAGA.
6. Electoral Opposition analyzes the opportunities for utilizing the remaining institutions of democracy for Social Self-Defense.
7. Non-Electoral Opposition explores the potential for an opposition based in civil society that goes beyond the limited and sometimes ineffectual opposition that is likely to be provided in the electoral arena.
8. The Social Strike examines the role of and possibilities for civil resistance through “people power” to MAGA coups and other direct threats to democracy.
9. A Constructive Program for Social Self-Defense suggests the role that the Green New Deal from Below and other constructive programs at the grassroots level can play in building Social Self-Defense and providing inspiration for defeating tyranny through social transformation.
10. What Social Self-Defense Is Defending lays out the fundamental principles that must be defended if our life together is to be anything but nasty, brutish, and short.

The future course of the MAGA juggernaut and the response to it are highly unpredictable. Strategies to address it must evolve rapidly to meet changing realities. They will be the work of many hands. This prospectus offers gleanings from historical experience that may be helpful for people doing that work. •

This article first published on the ZNetwork website. The full PDF (50 pages) is available here.

1. “Governors Safeguarding Democracy,” GovAct.org, November 2024.
2. Tim Dickinson, “The Battle Against Trump 2.0 Begins in the States,” Rolling Stone, December 17, 2024.
3. Lauren Gambino, “Democratic leaders across US work to lead resistance against Trump’s agenda,” The Guardian, November 16, 2024.
4. Sarah D. Wire, “The Donald Trump resistance is ready for when Democrats are done grieving,” USA Today, November 22, 2024.
5. Ibid.
6. Edward Helmore, “Denver Mayor says he will urge protests against Trump’s mass deportations,” The Guardian, November 23, 2024.
7. Bernd Debusmann Jr, “Los Angeles declares itself an immigration ‘sanctuary’,” BBC, November 19, 2024.
8. Adrian Carrasquillo, “Immigrant rights groups gear up to fight Trump mass deportation plan,” The Guardian, December 13, 2024.
9. Mimi Montgomery, “Women’s March plans to protest Trump’s second presidency in D.C.,” Axios, November 8, 2024.
10. Rachel Leingang, “Sanctuary cities respond to Trump deportation plans: ‘We’re preparing to defend our communities’,” The Guardian, November 29, 2024.
11. “San Diego sheriff says she won’t honor county’s ‘sanctuary’ immigration policy,” The Guardian, December 11, 2024.
12. Anna Kutz, “ACLU: Officials should enact law ‘firewall’ ahead of Trump 2nd term,” News Nation, December 13, 2024.