Liberal Cowardice on Display and Two Cheers for Rachel Maddow

Watching Rachel Maddow [the other] night stirred conflicting emotions: I was moved by her unwavering commitment to illuminating the many forms of resistance rising up against Trump’s authoritarian rule and enraged by the cowardice and silence of so many liberals who should know better.

Maddow has been chronicling the growing spirit of defiance sweeping across the country—against a regime defined by cruelty, lawlessness, and the systematic dismantling of human dignity. One of the most chilling examples is Trump’s assault on the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR), a program credited with saving over 26 million lives in more than 50 countries. Its destruction will result in the preventable deaths of millions—a shameless act of medical genocide.

This brutality is not limited to foreign shores. The abduction, incarceration, and deportation of children, families, and asylum seekers --often without due process, and always without compassion--reveal a government governed by a politics of terror. These are not isolated policies; they are manifestations of a deeper authoritarian project. This is white Christian nationalism on steroids, largely influenced by Stephan Miller, an acknowledged white supremacist.

Maddow courageously documents the growing acts of resistance around the United States, and in doing so she reminds us how urgent and necessary it is to build collective power in the face of a regime wedded to state terrorism. The hour is late, and the stakes are nothing less than the survival of our most basic freedoms and our shared humanity.

But this past Thursday, Maddow hosted Harvard professor Steven Levitsky, who made the deeply disingenuous claim that resistance to Trump must come from the powerful—the bankers, the law firms, the elite universities—while sidelining the very people who have been on the frontlines of resistance: the workers, educators, young people, and activists who have fought tirelessly, at great personal cost, to expose and challenge this regime’s cruelty.

At one point, Levitsky dismissed such resistance, referring to the 'little old ladies demonstrating at Tesla dealerships' as an example of irrelevant forms of protest. Maddow rolled her eyes and countered, suggesting that perhaps these demonstrations provided the very backbone for more 'powerful' figures to speak out.

This kind of liberal naivety/cowardice reveals a profound misunderstanding of where real change originates in times of struggle—certainly not from the corridors of power he oddly sees as real sources of resistance. Clearly, no reading of Howard Zinn here.  

Levitsky's elitist view of resistance ignores the undeniable fact that it’s precisely these grassroots movements—often demonized and marginalized—that may have forced those at the top to confront their complicity and, in some cases, recoil from their support of Trump's fascist agenda. Should the unrepentant and alleged leaders to which Levitsky refers oppose Trump--the spineless CEOs like Jamie Diamon, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, Sam Altman, Bill Ackman, and others-of course, but that would be asking a lot from this sycophantic group of enablers.

Let’s not forget who these elites past and present are—the same individuals who backed the Iraq War, who enabled the financial crash of 2008, who justified the disastrous War on Terror post-9/11, who supported the current McCarthyite purge of the universities, and the list of horrors goes on.

They’re the architects of the very conditions that allowed Trump’s rise. I have far more faith in the men, women, young people, workers, and all those who continue to stand up and fight back against the fascism that’s hollowing out our democracy. The latter are going to jail, being beaten by police, being shipped off to modern day gulags while the rich and powerful offer interviews on CNN and to the New York Times.

It is not the CEOs, hedge fund managers, or political elites—the very architects of the nightmare we are living through—who will deliver us from it. It is the workers, the young, students, the defenders of Palestinian freedom, the environmental activists, those fighting for racial justice, gender equality, and a world free from obscene inequality who carry the torch of resistance and the promise of a different future. To suggest, as Levitsky does, that the powerful will lead the fight against Trump is not only comic—it is morally bankrupt.

Levitsky’s response was a shameful act of intellectual retreat. To place faith in the elite and powerful to fight against the smothering fascist politics brought to the center of power by the Trump administration is to abandon the very people who have risked everything to preserve it. When public intellectuals turn to the ruling class for salvation, they reveal not just cowardice, but a fundamental betrayal of the spirit of democracy itself. What hope remains when those entrusted with naming the crisis refuse to see where its real antidote lies—in the courage of everyday people who dare to resist?

-Henry Giroux