It’s up to us to resist Trump

LET THE resistance begin.

The churning fear and revulsion swirling inside us as we watch Donald J. Trump take the oath to become the 45th president of the United States will be at least somewhat balanced by the satisfaction of watching inspiring and unprecedented levels of protest rising up to greet an incoming president.

Trump's approval ratings have dropped to around 40 percent before he's even taken office, undermining his claim to have a "mandate" to enact his racist and reactionary agenda.

The widespread disgust has led to a virtual cultural boycott of the White House. Professional athletes have spoken out against Trump and hinted at ending the tradition of visiting the Oval Office after winning a championship, while musicians seem to be jostling each other for the honor of refusing to play the inauguration.

Not surprisingly, Trump is tweeting that the polls are "rigged" and "so wrong"--and his supporters will no doubt dismiss critics in the entertainment world as out-of-touch elitists.

But the truth will be plain to see--for all those willing to look, anyway--on the streets over the next two days, as the number of Trump supporters at the inauguration will almost certainly be dwarfed by those coming out to protest him, both in Washington, D.C., and across the country.

Thousands of people are taking off work today to directly confront the inauguration, and hundreds of thousands will rally tomorrow at the National Women's March, as well as hundreds of "Sister Marches" across the country and internationally.

Dozens of Congressional Democrats have said they will boycott the inauguration after Trump belittled Georgia Rep. and civil rights movement hero John Lewis for calling Trump an "illegitimate president" because of allegations of Russian interference in the election.

It's nice to see our country's official opposition party actually engaging in some opposition after most Democrats spent the first weeks after the election pledging to find ways to collaborate with Trump. But let's be clear that whatever the Russians did or didn't do is a drop in the ocean compared to the many more important reasons why we need to oppose Trump.

IF WE want to talk about what makes Trump an illegitimate president, let's start with the criminally underreported fact that Trump's margin of victory in key states that gave him the White House is lower than the number of voters--most of them people of color--whose ballots were never counted or who were improperly purged from voter rolls.

Let's talk about the fact that despite voter suppression, Trump got almost 3 million fewer total votes than Hillary Clinton--which is actually close to what was predicted by national polls on the eve of the election--but won because of a ridiculous Electoral College system that was created centuries ago to preserve the dominance of slave owners, and that no other country would dream of using to decide its government.

Let's talk about an entire political system that has become so corrupted and undemocratic that we somehow ended up having to choose between the most unpopular pair of presidential candidates in the history opinion polling for popularity.

It's revealing, after all, that the main way Russia allegedly meddled with the election was not with "fake news," but by hacking and leaking genuine e-mails that offered a rare glimpse of the truth: The cynical disdain of Clinton campaign for its supporters.

Now, thanks to this thoroughly undemocratic election, we have an incoming administration led by a blustering bigot and filled with a motley crew of greedy bankers, "alt-right" racists and free-market ideologues intent on destroying the very departments they're supposed to be leading.

It's a right-wing cabal that wants to implement massive tax cuts for the wealthy, starve Medicaid, and privatize public education, Medicare and Social Security. And they plan to get away with it by scapegoating immigrants, whipping up fear of Muslims and repressing protest movements like Black Lives Matter.

Their goal is another wave of reaction like the one ushered in by Ronald Reagan in 1980. But unlike Reagan, Trump isn't going with the stream of a widespread rightward shift in society. In the aftermath of the Great Recession, we live in a polarized moment in which many people have radicalized to the left, but for the moment, the right wing is more powerful and organized.

Trump has already proven that he doesn't need to be popular to win elections, and he doesn't need his policies like mass deportations and repealing Obamacare to be popular--they're not--in order to carry them out. He just needs us to not be able to stop him.

THE PROTESTS against Trump's inauguration are a necessary start to what needs to be a strong and lasting resistance on multiple fronts. Let's carry today's sentiment that we are up against an illegitimate government into all of our work.

That means creating bases of teachers, students and parents who will fight for our schools and refuse to accept the reactionary agenda of incoming Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, whose policies are designed not to help public education but destroy it.

It means growing immigrants rights organizations that can challenge every deportation and detention on the orders of an administration staffed by racists with ties to white supremacist groups and led by a president who infamously launched his campaign by calling Mexican migrants "rapists."

And it means confronting every other aspect of the Trump agenda--from busting unions to closing abortion clinics--rather than searching for "common ground" with an enemy who is promising an unrelenting assault on everything we care about.

This type of determined resistance is well beyond the tame opposition of mainstream politics--in fact, it already is.

In the days after the election, Democrats who had been calling Trump a fascist in an effort to scare up votes for Clinton instantly began to "normalize" the grossly abnormal, pledging to find issues where they could work together with the incoming president.

It was only the surging momentum for the Women's March over the past month, which pressured a number of unions and liberal organizations to mount a mobilization for Inauguration Weekend, that has pushed the Democrats into a more confrontational stance.

Yet even this feeble sign of oppositional life has been framed in the most conservative possible terms: as a patriotic response to those darned Russkies fixing our election, rather than the homegrown injustice and racism of voter disenfranchisement.

The Democrats don't want to raise the real issues of Trump's illegitimacy, because they could lead to further questions about the legitimacy of the corrupt political system that they help maintain. The "party of the people" is hoping that the inauguration protests will be a one-off event so its leaders can quickly get back to serving the corporate elite, while safely channeling popular discontent into campaign donations.

We can't let that happen. Our task is in the months ahead is to build both direct resistance to Trump's policies and durable movements and socialist organization that can chart an alternative way forward, combining the fights against economic inequality and oppression.

We pledge to do everything in our power to make sure that the inauguration protests mark not the high point but the starting point of the anti-Trump resistance.