Who really makes up the ‘Resistance?’

As soon as reports began appearing from last Saturday’s massive “Hands Off” protests in the United States, the usual right-wing canards began to pop up as well: doctored photos, overstated crowds and, most stereotypically, professional paid protesters. Tweet after tweet showed the usual Craigslist ad, offering $200 for anyone who’d be willing to stand around with a placard for a couple of hours.

No one would argue that there’s a professional protest infrastructure in the United States, and that if you followed the money trail, you could trace a lot of the funding back to the kinds of NGOs that the government is trying to defund and shut down. The sinister invisible hand of the Soros family is dipping in there somewhere. But it’s ludicrous to imagine that they’re spending that money to buy protesters. They don’t need to.

It might be hard to believe, but many Americans really don’t like Donald Trump. They’re absolutely desperate to find any way to voice that dislike, and you can only put up so many “This is not normal” posts on Instagram. So to the streets the masses go, freely, of their own will. This weekend, millions of people made “good trouble” as voluntary foot soldiers in a pseudo-revolution.

This doesn’t mean the protests are effective, because they’re not, that they mean much of anything, because they don’t, or that they represent the will of the majority of Americans, which they definitely don’t. Judging from news reports, and from the very specific demographic information I’m gleaning from my social-media feed, the vast majority of people who clogged America’s downtowns on Saturday were 40 or older, white, and college-educated. It was as though National Public Radio had manifested itself in human form.

It makes a lot of sense. There’s nothing that the Trump Administration could do to please this crowd short of handing out a free tote bag containing a CD of a heretofore unreleased Wilco album. Even then, that wouldn’t be nearly enough. Many of these people have either worked in government or near government, have had their research funding cut or know many people who do, and have staked their entire late-life identities on being allies of the social-justice rhetoric that eventually caused the Democratic Party to lose power, possibly for a generation.

These people are older, in the stock market, and are terrified that they’re about to lose their nest eggs because of policies that they don’t understand and that might not benefit them even if they did. The current economic and political landscape is simply beyond their imagining. Meanwhile, the corporate media that they constantly consume has convinced them that a new Reich is imminent, and that they’ll be first against the wall. Delusions of deportation abound. Desperate times call for desperate political cosplay.

The old protest class also misunderstands their current cohort. I saw one post this week desperately try to explain away why nearly everyone at the anti-Trump rallies is white. It’s because, this person said, people of color are simply “terrified” of the repercussions and consequences of protesting.

It’s not an uncommon sentiment, and it’s absolute nonsense. Maybe the “Tesla Takedowns” carry with them a certain frisson of danger, where a tossed Molotov cocktail is at least a possibility, but the “Hands Off” rallies are only slightly more dangerous than a PBS telethon. American cops have rarely been cuddlier than at these family-friendly affairs.  

Someone else, equally condescendingly, said that people of color aren’t at the protests because they work “two or three jobs.” Or maybe they just had something else to do on a Saturday afternoon. It’s also quite possible that they actually voted for Trump and support his program. Most likely, they just don’t care. These protests are simply not a game they’re playing.

The people crying “Hands Off” or whatever the slogan of the week might be seem to think that they’re part of some sort of social movement that owes its roots to the great Civil Rights marches and Vietnam protests of the 1960s. While it’s true that the protest infrastructure and methods haven’t changed much, the vibe and makeup of the congregants certainly has. In their minds, they’re marching across the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma. In reality, they’re just people whose team, now way out of power, has them doing the Political Thing of the Week. Someday soon, they may wake up to the reality that their Resistance bedfellows are a lot more monochromatic than they might prefer. It’ll be just another disappointing story from This American Life.