Hi, fellow Americans! Would you like our country to become an authoritarian police state? A nation where federal agents can knock on your door and search your home without a warrant? A nation where everyone has to carry around their proof of citizenship at all times, or risk being arrested by federal agents on the street and thrown into a dungeon? A nation where peaceful protesters are at risk of being maimed or even killed in the street? A nation where the President invokes emergency powers to crush protests with troops?
Those all sound like lurid exaggerations when I type them out — the kind of thing crazy Resistance Libs would rant about on Bluesky. And yet consider the most recent news from America’s immigration crackdown:
Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem is defending reports that people have been asked by federal agents to prove their citizenship status as Immigration and Customs Enforcement operations continue in cities across America…
On Jan. 3, a Texas detainee died in ICE custody in what a medical examiner is likely to rule a homicide, according to The Washington Post; on Jan. 7, Minneapolis resident Renee Nicole Good was shot four times by an ICE agent while attempting to drive away from officers, and was soon pronounced dead; on Jan. 9, a 21-year-old anti-ICE protester was permanently blinded and allegedly mocked by agents after he was shot at close range by non-lethal ammunition, according to his aunt; and on Jan. 14, a Venezuelan man was shot in the leg during a struggle with ICE officers.
Footage of agents clashing with protesters, crashing into vehicles and going up to homes in cities like Minneapolis [has] spread through social media, and Trump has threatened to invoke the Insurrection Act in Minnesota to squash anti-ICE protests with military force.
The truth is that some Americans probably do like this. There is no freedom gene that courses through the blood of those whose ancestors fought in the Civil War. A deep reverence for liberty does not flow from the water of the Mississippi River. There are some who quietly nod their heads and grin when they see protesters beaten savagely by government thugs, relishing the thought that “the left” is being put in its place. There are those who smile at the notion that an invasion by the anti-White hordes of the Third World is being finally turned back by our valiant Boys in Masks.
But there are fewer of these than before. The furor over the killing of Renee Good and the ICE raids in Minnesota and elsewhere has not died down and vanished into the bottomless pit of the news cycle like almost every other outrage during the long Trump Era A recent poll found that 82% of Americans have seen the video of Good’s killing, and by and large they agree with the obvious interpretation that the killing doesn’t look like self-defense. Many more Americans say the shooting was unjustified than say it was justified:
Those numbers are just the tip of the iceberg. America is getting increasingly fed up with Trump’s immigration policy in general:
ICE’s name is becoming toxic, with a majority of white voters and even 25% of Republicans disapproving of the agency:
Trump’s internal polls appear to show the same. Here’s reporting from Axios:
President Trump's team recently reviewed private GOP polling that showed support for his immigration policies falling. The results, reflected in public surveys, bolstered internal concern about the administration's confrontational enforcement tactics…
The private polling suggested a rupturing of the coalition of independent, moderate and minority voters who were key parts of Trump’s victory in 2024. Such voters will play a big role in determining whether Republicans keep their slim House majority in November’s midterms…
60% of independent voters and 58% of undecided voters said Trump was “too focused” on deporting illegal immigrants, the poll viewed by Trump’s team found.
Joe Rogan, the nation’s most popular talk show host and a prominent Trump supporter in 2024, is among those for whom the stormtrooper tactics of the immigration crackdown have gone too far:
Nor is the ICE storm the only thing that Americans despise about the second Trump presidency. Even most Republicans are opposed to Trump’s threat to seize Greenland from America’s allies:
And Trump’s already-dismal numbers on the economy continue to deteriorate.
To many Democrats and progressives, the news that America is turning against Trump comes as a balm of reassurance amid the otherwise grim drumbeat of headlines. Resistance Liberalism was right about Trump — he was a corrupt, brutal authoritarian at the head of a fundamentally racist movement. Media bullshit can deceive some of the people some of the time, but in the end, being right about things tends to shine through.
Many Dems no doubt hope to ride the wave of dissatisfaction with Trump to victory in November, and perhaps in the 2028 presidential election as well. Polls show that Dems have surged past the GOP in terms of party identification, and that a record-high 28% of Americans label themselves ideologically “liberal”. Gen Z is ideologically more progressive than Millennials on most issues.
Perhaps the American people, bamboozled by right-wing media narratives, simply had to discover the error of their 2024 choice the hard way, and Democrats simply need to sit and wait for the masses to come home.
Look more closely, though, and you can see that neither Trump, nor Trumpism, nor the Republican party is collapsing, the way support for George W. Bush’s presidency collapsed at the end of his second term. The Resistance Libs were completely right about Trump, but they still haven’t managed to come up with a compelling alternative, either ideologically or in terms of a plan for governance. And this is probably putting a ceiling on support for the Democrats.
The evidence shows why Resist Liberalism is not enough
First let’s look at some numbers, and then let’s talk about some principles and ideas.
Trump’s overall approval has fluctuated a bit, but remained around 40%:
Crucially, about 30% of Independents continue to support Trump.
And the share of Independents continues to hit record highs. Voters are moving away from the Republicans, yes, but they’re not moving to the Dems. Instead, they’re declaring their disgust with both parties:
This is especially true for young Americans, whose disillusionment with the GOP has not translated into increased Democratic support:
Even more ominously for the Dems, there’s evidence that aside from Trump himself, Americans still prefer Republican approaches on most issues:
This puts the lie to the notion that the Dems’ low approval numbers are being driven by disaffected progressives who wish the party would fight Trump harder. If Democrats can’t recognize their weaknesses on immigration and the economy, they’re in trouble.
On immigration, voters disapprove of ICE’s brutal tactics, but support for securing the border and kicking out illegal immigrants continues to be substantial. A recent WSJ poll found that Trump’s approval on border security continues to be positive:
A recent CBS poll found that even Americans’ disapproval of ICE is more about tactics than about the fundamental goal of removing illegal immigrants:
Democrats seem to have forgotten the magnitude and the consequences of the progressive failure on immigration during the Biden era. They seem to have forgotten that the Biden years saw a sharp surge in anti-immigration attitudes:
The return to pro-immigration attitudes in 2025 polls is fundamentally thermostatic; it’s a reaction to Trump’s overreach. But 2021-24 showed that the thermostat can swing very quickly in either direction. The country hated the disorderly flood of quasi-legal low-skilled immigration that Biden allowed for the first three years of his presidency, and one year of hasty reversal of those policies merely cemented the bitter realization that the first three years had been a conscious choice.
If progressives take power again and return to those permissive border policies, anti-immigration sentiment will return, and America will once again place its trust in JD Vance and the race warriors of the Great Replacement. Yet I have seen zero evidence that progressives have reckoned with their immigration failures of 2021-23. I have not seen any progressive or prominent Democrat articulate a firm set of principles on the issue of who should be allowed into the country and who should be kicked out.
This was not always the case. Bill Clinton had no problem differentiating between legal and illegal immigration in 1995, and declaring that America had a right to kick out people who come illegally:
I have seen no equivalent expression of principle during the second Trump presidency. Every Democrat and progressive thinker can articulate a principled opposition to the brutality and excesses of ICE and to the racism that animates Trump’s immigration policy. But when it comes to the question of whether illegal immigration itself should be punished with deportation, Democrats and progressives alike lapse into an uncomfortable silence.
Every Democratic policy proposal I’ve seen calls to refocus immigration enforcement on those who commit crimes other than crossing the border illegally. But what about those who commit no such crime? If someone who crosses illegally and then lives peacefully and otherwise lawfully in America should be protected from deportation, how is the right-wing charge of “open borders” a false one?
More generally, I have seen no attempt to reckon with why Americans were so mad about immigration under Biden. I have seen no acknowledgement that Americans dislike the violation of the U.S. law that says “You may not cross the border unless explicitly admitted under our immigration system.” I have seen zero recognition of the anger over quasi-legal immigrants’ use of city social services and state and local welfare benefits.
I have not seen any Democrat or progressive even discuss the concern that too rapid of a flood of immigrants could change American culture in ways that the nation’s existing citizenry don’t want. Nor have American progressives looked overseas and wondered why the people of Canada and (to a lesser degree) Europe have forced their own governments to decrease immigration numbers dramatically in recent years.
On the economy, too, progressives and Democrats have opportunistically bashed Trump’s performance, but have not laid out a cohesive, practicable policy for governance. Beyond the general equivocation over tariffs — until recently seen as a pro-labor policy — there has been no general reckoning with the flaws in the progressive economic policy that emerged out of the 2010s.
On deficits, I do see some of the more wonkish progressive intellectuals — for example, Paul Krugman — acknowledge that structural budget deficits are a problem, especially now that it’s Trump doing the deficit spending. That is praiseworthy. But I haven’t seen deficit reduction become a Democratic rallying cry, the way it was in the 1990s and early 2000s.
Nor have I seen progressives or Democrats question the basic idea of throwing ever-greater government subsidies at overpriced, supply-constrained service industries like child care, health care, and education. This approach, which was conceived by progressive economists and communicated to the Democrats via think tanks like the Roosevelt Institute and the Washington Center for Equitable Growth, has obvious flaws. It pushes up service prices both microeconomically, by subsidizing demand, and macroeconomically, by raising structural deficits and encouraging inflation.
But I have not seen any reevaluation of this basic approach; if progressives are once again handed power, Americans can probably expect more increases in these dubious subsidies, and the deficits and the inflation that go along with them.
Nor have I seen much attempt to grapple with many other issues that hobble the progressive movement — the unfairness of DEI, the blatant permissiveness toward crime and disorder in blue cities, the dependence of progressive governance on useless or corrupt nonprofits, the unpopular stands on certain trans issues, and so on. Those issues aren’t as important as immigration and inflation, but they contribute to a general perception of the progressive movement and the Democratic party as being out of touch with the masses and unserious about governing.
The one exception is the Abundance movement, which aims to reverse the progressive movement’s embrace of procedural barriers to development — and which has come under vicious fire from movement progressives for daring to question the approach.
In fact, the general approach among Democrats and progressives seems to be that no lessons whatsoever should be learned from their failures during the Biden era. The Democratic National Committee just canceled an autopsy of the 2024 election:
Democratic officials and strategists blasted the Democratic National Committee on Thursday for withholding its autopsy of the party's loss in the 2024 presidential election, despite repeatedly pledging to release it…Several Democrats — including many advising possible 2028 presidential candidates — said burying the report unfairly helps former Vice President Harris if she runs again, and shields top party consultants by hiding potentially damaging information about their efforts.
Yes, you read that right: Kamala Harris is considered a leading contender for the 2028 presidential nomination:
Many Democratic powerbrokers in D.C. are done with Kamala Harris…But among lots of Democratic voters — particularly Black voters crucial in a Democratic primary — Harris is an exalted, historic figure…In a swing through the deep South, she was greeted like a rock star by enthusiastic crowds of mostly Black men and women, and white women…Harris’ appearances — like early polling for the 2028 race — defied top Democrats’ belief that she isn’t popular with the party’s base, and that people blame her for Donald Trump’s 2024 victory.
Whether or not Harris runs again, the fact that she’s still so popular suggests that among the shrinking number of party faithful, the response to 2024 is the same as Larry David’s famous rule for Seinfeld: “No learning.”
The Democratic Party itself, meanwhile, is increasingly dominated by its staffer class — young, extremely online ideologues for whom the principles of 2024-era progressivism are bedrock assumptions rather than temporal issue stances to be questioned every cycle. For those staffers, ideas like the notion that trans women should be allowed on women’s sports teams, or that anti-white discrimination in hiring is moral and desirable despite being blatantly illegal, are simply done deals; the staffers assume that because all of their friends have accepted these principles, America has as well, and they’ve moved on to new causes like Palestine.
This is, of course, the mirror image of the GOP, whose staffer class is heavily populated with white supremacists. It’s undoubtedly one reason why Americans increasingly reject both parties and register as Independents. But that simply worsens the problem; since Independents can’t vote in most primary elections, moderates abandoning the parties has a sort of “evaporative cooling” effect, where ideologues choose the nominees and the bulk of the electorate is then forced to select between two unpalatable alternatives.
Is this, then, the future of American politics? Will the silent majority of patriotic liberals and traditional conservatives oscillate back and forth between passive rule by two tribes of unaccountable ideologues whose brains have been rotten by social media? Will each tribe exploit its powers to degrade and despoil America during its time in power, then smugly wait for the inevitable backlash-to-the-backlash to return them to power after an increasingly despairing electorate throws them out on their ear?
America can do better than this — indeed, we must do better than this if we are to continue as a viable nation-state. Resistance against the evils of the Trump administration is necessary, but not sufficient. Liberals who believe in traditional liberal ideals and effective governance have to do more than just get increasingly angry on social media; they must form a strong, purposeful movement oriented around fighting for those things. It must be that offline movement, rather than the ghost of Biden-era progressivism, that promises to take over once the race warriors, thugs, and would-be fascists have been shown the door.