Trump has surrounded himself by a protective scrum of advisors who spend much of their time keeping him steady and massaging his ego to assure him the people are all behind him. I don’t think he knows how to deal with the size of the opposition so far. He turns to conspiracy theory to try to convince himself that what he wants to be true really would be except for evil “dudes” out there—George Soros hiring actors to protest, millions of undocumented aliens voting, etc., and of course the original Trump conspiracy that refused to think a black American could be a legitimate president.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shock_and_awe

Maybe this is just another stages of grief but I’ve been noticing a number of online discussions in which progressives are shutting down other progressives for not being progressive enough. Every time I see a positive post, I can predict there’s going to be about three enthusiastic “yes!” comments, followed by a 500-word comment explaining why the idea isn’t radical enough.

Folks, we’ve got bigger problems than trying to figure out who’s the most woke person on our Facebook feed.

Successful social change movements are always a spectrum of more or less politically-correct and radical voices. It’s like a chord in music: strings vibrating on different frequencies sound better together. Sometimes in politics you need the crazy radicals to stir things up and sometimes you need the too-cautious liberals to legitimize the protest message.

Some years ago I was part of an campaign in Philly that targeted what many of us felt was a propaganda push around Columbus Day. An attempt by all of the concerned activists to come together predictably went nowhere. There were too many differences in style and tactics and language and culture. But that breakdown in coordination allowed each subculture to pick a tactic that worked best for them.

The Quakers did their visible agitprop leading and got detained. The anarchists made creative posters and set off surreptitious stink devices. Some anonymous pranksters sent out fake press releases to disrupt media coverage. The resultant news coverage focused on the sheer diversity of the protests.

If protest had indeed come from a single group following a single tactic, the dissent would have been buried in the fourth paragraph of the coverage. But the creativity made it the focus of the coverage. Diversity of tactics works. Mistakes will be made. Some progressives will be clueless–maybe even some of the ones considering themselves the most woke. It’s okay. We’ll learn as we go along. We might laugh at how we used to think wearing safety pins was effective–or we might wonder why we ever thought it was meaningless symbol. Whatever happens, let’s just encourage witness wherever and whenever it’s happening. Let’s be gentler on each other.

• Yes, the Japanese were secretly trying to surrender before the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagaski. The U.S. thought incinerating 150,000-some people was a good negotiating tactic, and it worked: the Japanese government to instantly agree to unconditional surrender.
• Yes, the U.S. takeover of Hawaii and the Philippines were aggressive acts to secure shipping routes in the South Pacific. In 1854, a United States warship under the command of Commodore Matthew Calbraith Perry sailed to Japan and forced it to sign treaties opening up its markets. The threat of Russian expansion from the West and U.S. expansion from the south and east was a large part of the reason Japan militarized in the first place. These are the kind of facts one should have when standing in the Smithsonian gazing up at Enola Gay and wondering how it ever came to be that the U.S. would drop two nuclear weapons over two heavily-populated cities.