The New York Times called for an “uprising” six months ago
Six months ago, the New York Times told the righteous to grab their rifles and run to the frontlines of “a comprehensive national civic uprising” (see “What’s Happening Is Not Normal. America Needs an Uprising That Is Not Normal.” (April 17, 2025): “It’s time for a comprehensive national civic uprising”)
How’s the uprising going? Have the revolutionaries managed to kill enough fascists to make a difference? Or are Bernie and AOC still our only hope?
So far, the only real hint of something larger — a mass countermovement — has been the rallies led by Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. But this, too, is an ineffective way to respond to Trump; those partisan rallies make this fight seem like a normal contest between Democrats and Republicans.
What is happening now is not normal politics. We’re seeing an assault on the fundamental institutions of our civic life, things we should all swear loyalty to — Democrat, independent or Republican.
Trump is about power. The only way he’s going to be stopped is if he’s confronted by some movement that possesses rival power.
The NYT said, in the above article, “We live in a country with catastrophically low levels of institutional trust.” What could account for low levels of trust? The political science nerds in the 2020 paper, below, say “We find a statistically significant negative relationship between ethnic diversity and social trust across all studies.” (i.e., a random assemblage of humans via asylum-based immigration will result in a low-trust society).
Could AI perhaps update this classic “To the barricades” image to show young American progressives wearing Antifa T-shirts and carrying avocado toast?
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