We are at a turning point in history. We must save ourselves. I think we will.
This is an article worth reading, and I am adding what I commented at the end.
--Kim
I just watched a video from historian Tad Stoermer that really hit home.
Tens of thousands of people marched through Minneapolis in -35°F windchill over the weekend. Negative thirty-five. That's "your eyelashes freeze together" cold. That's "frostbite in ten minutes" cold. And they showed up anyway - for a general strike, for protests at the airport, for standing watch outside schools where ICE might grab kids.
So Stoermer has a question: If the people are willing to freeze their asses off for this, why does it feel like resistance is failing?
Stoermer teaches resistance history at the University of Southern Denmark. He wrote a book about it. He's been studying how ordinary people challenge abusive governments for years. And he just dropped a video that should be required viewing for anyone wondering why all this energy isn't translating into results.
His answer is brutal and simple: the problem isn't bottom-up. It's top-down.
Here's what he means. Congressional Democrats function as what political scientists call a "loyal opposition." That's not an insult - it's a technical term. It means they oppose policies while accepting the legitimacy of the government making them. They contest within the boundaries. They play by the rules of a system that assumes everyone's operating in good faith.
And then he points to the receipts.
Last week, House Democrats made a big show of opposing ICE funding. The vote was 220-207. Almost all Democrats voted no. Sounds like resistance, right?
Same day. Different vote. The other funding bills - the ones that keep the rest of this government running - passed 341-88. That's 149 Democrats voting yes. To fund the same administration they say is "out of control." The same week ICE shot two American citizens in Minneapolis.
Stoermer's not saying Democrats are evil. He's saying they're structurally incapable of leading actual resistance. That's not their job. Their job is to be the loyal opposition - emphasis on loyal. They oppose, but only within limits. The loyalty comes first.
So who does lead resistance when the official opposition can't?
This is where it gets interesting. Stoermer points to what's actually working in Minnesota: neighborhood networks tracking ICE in real time. Parents standing watch outside daycares. A church delivering 12,000 boxes of food to families too scared to leave their homes. Over a thousand labor unions endorsing a general strike. Citizen journalists documenting what's happening while network cameras wait at the capitol for someone in a suit to give them a quote.
The infrastructure. The unsexy shit. Hand warmers, coffee, legal aid, supply runs. That's what lets people stay in the fight once they're in it.
He compares it to the American Revolution - which, fair, historians love to do. But his point lands. The colonists spent over a decade expecting the British system to fix itself. Looking to their official representatives for help. It took them that long to realize they needed to build parallel structures outside the system. Their own leadership. Their own institutions.
"That's where we are now," Stoermer says. "The looking elsewhere part. And for some of us, the being it part."
The American Revolution started with nine guys in a distillery. Not in Parliament. Not in official channels. In a room full of people who decided the system wasn't going to save them.
Minnesota is showing what that looks like in 2026. The question is whether the rest of the country is paying attention - or still waiting for Chuck Schumer to fix it.
My comment:
Kim Cooper
Let me tell you of the runoff, the side effects, of the Minnesota Martyrs. We went to town today for errands and grocery shopping. Everyone was unusually polite and courteous and helpful and pleasant and smiling. I noticed it and wondered at it, and, as I got back into the car it hit me that this was people reacting to the situation in Minneapolis. I started to cry, I was so moved, and then as my spouse got into the car, I mentioned it, and my spouse said, "Yeah, I noticed how everyone is acting." I knew to connect the kind behavior with the disaster because of Rebecca Solnit's book, *A Paradise Built in Hell*. America is in this together -- I'm in Washington state. How are things in your neck of the woods?
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