The #Resistance Is Back — Be Afraid

If you squinted at various points through this election season, it almost felt like old times—specifically, 2017, when a loose coalition of voters, elected officials, and former TV game show contestants joined together with the singular goal of resisting a newly inaugurated president, Donald Trump, whom they viewed as an existential threat to democracy and the republic itself.

#TheResistance, as it was known on the website then called Twitter, didn’t materialize in time to stop Trump’s first election, but it had solidified its place in the culture by the time he took office, urging that we all had a pressing imperative to resist his xenophobic, racist, and homophobic policies in ways big and small—sometimes while wearing matching pink headgear—and assuring us that we shouldn’t be too concerned about the dubious new friends we seemed to be picking up along the way.

In retrospect, to see this energy bubbling up around President Joe Biden’s reelection might have been cause for some reflection, or at least taken as a sign that the president was not coming up with anything new in his bid for another four years, beyond still not being Trump.

But when Biden’s disastrous debate happened, and the Resistance was cast into turmoil. Would it be better for the president to #Resist those calling for him to step down out of the belief that he’s the only one who can beat Trump or should he bow out and make way for Vice President Kamala Harris?

When Biden officially dropped out of the race, the relief was palpable: Finally, we could go back to focusing on beating Trump, with everyone tucked into line and newly united around Harris. And with Harris’ ascendance to the party’s nominee, the #Resistance vibes have once again reached a fever pitch.

All of our favorite characters are back out to play, and we’re welcoming cops and war criminals like former vice president Dick Cheney under the big tent and wish-casting about a reanimated Ronald Reagan pulling the lever for the first woman president. Most punishingly, Democratic voters are being asked to set aside core tenets of progressivism to electorally defeat Trump—the same ultimately failed moral bargain they were asked to make the first time around.