Expecting Legislators to Lead the Resistance is a Category Error [View all]

On podcasts and in this post, I’ve been trying to make a point about how you resist fascism.

Americans have at least three tools to resist fascism: legal, legislative, and via political movement. A great many people have conflated legislative opposition with movement opposition, and based on that conflation, assumed that Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries must be leaders of The Opposition.

But that’s a category error.

While there are a lot of things Schumer, especially, could do better, you shouldn’t want either Schumer or Jeffries to be the leader of the resistance. You shouldn’t want that because the goals of the movement and of an opposition party in Congress are not the same. You shouldn’t want that because having a Black guy and a Jew from New York leading your resistance will likely make it harder to do what you need to do, which is (in significant part) to build a political movement big enough to undermine if not overthrow fascism.

More at https://www.emptywheel.net/2025/07/09/expecting-legislators-to-lead-the-resistance-is-a-category-error/