Resources for Resistance Recap

Since the 2024 election, I’ve written over a half dozen posts offering resources for resistance.

Here is the recap in video form, on Instagram.

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The “Resources for Resistance” posts I have written thus far are as follows:

• Choose Your Adventure

• Meet your neighbors? Yes, and…

• Breathe… and push!

• Welcome to the “Derp State”

• “Decoupling in Gandi’s Political Strategy

• Audre Lorde on Self Care

0. “Choose Your Adventure”

• Before I understood that that offering “resources for resistance” to imminent fascism needed to be a series, I referred readers to a well–substantiated piece that appeared on the Waging Nonviolence, site.

  

1. Resources for Resistance
   At this stage I offered some ideas that I came across at an early stage. Rachel Maddow suggested that this was the moment that journalists, and I add scholars of social movements, have trained for. Alexandra Ocasio–Cortez says to get to know your neighbors, a clear reference to the concept of civil society. The lesson of the Serbian student resistance Otpor, is to take the attitude, in this case with our MAGA neighbors, “Come join us. We are on the winning side.”
   

2. Meet Your Neighbors? Yes, and….
   I this post I rely on some research by Mark Granovetter on the “strength of weak ties.” It’s not only important to organize amongst your neighbors. It’s also important to build links between communities. Strong ties alone can produce isolation, but weak ties between affinity groups of resistance make everyone stronger.
   

3. Breathe… and push!
   The subtitle of this offering is drawn from Valerie Kaur’s 2016 “Watch Night Service” speech, the last time the Manchurian Cantaloupe was elected. A dear friend asked “how we survive,” and I responded first with lines from Denise Levertov’s people “Making Peace,” but then added Kaur’s work on Revolutionary Love and spiritual warriorship. Mourning can be political as Gene Sharp has documented, and as we have observed throughout the Muslim world.
   

4. Welcome to the “Derp State”
   I use “derp state” as mirror to the fake warnings of the “deep state,” as millennial parlance for the term derived from Greek, kakistocracy, referring to governance by the worst people. I highlight Stephen Himmler, I mean Miller, in particular because of his particular dedication to the pursuit of a “final solution” for immigrants. But I end with Gene Sharp’s enumeration of methods of political noncooperation, including efforts within established political bureaucracies.
   

5. Decoupling
   Norwegian peace researcher Johann Galtung highlighted several important features of Gandhi political strategy, including decoupling, “breaking relations at the level of social structure while reinforcing the deeper structure of human unity through greater interaction at the personal level.” This resonates with me strongly as a sociologist, forever striving against US hyperindividualism, which is isolating, Isolation is a particular vulnerability fascism will seek to cultivate in all of us. This could be helpful also in dealing with MAGA neighbors, another thing that inquiring dear friends want to know. There’s a great debate with Cenk Uygur that Francesca Fiorentini has just had on her Bitchuation Room podcast. Apart from great admiration for her bearing up under the torrent of testosterone, I think he’s wrongly only halfway there. We coopt MAGA populism on our terms, which is Fiorentini’s argument.
   

6. Audre Lorde on Self Care
   Lastly, I offered some reflections on my reading of Audre Lorde’s A Burst of Light (1988). I’ve seen many recommendations on social media for “self care” as a response to the elections. It’s not about bubble baths per se. It was good to go back to the radical intersectional origins of the concept as a form of political warfare. In her observation that federal funding for cancer research was cut by the same amount used to fund the Contra war against the people of Nicaragua, Audre Lorde connects the personal to the political, or in the words of C. Wright Mills’s formulation of the sociological imagination, construes personal troubles as public issues.

I would like to continue such writing. I find myself constrained in doing this by personal troubles that I, as a sociologist, construe as public issues. That’s how I got into this perspective in the first place. I could use your help. As soon as I can figure out how to appropriately connect all the “tubes and wires” (with apologies to Thomas Dolby, “She Blinded Me With Science”), I’d like to begin accepting donations to this blog.

I’m on the threshold of 25 subscribers in the year 2025. Providing more content with greater regularity is a bootstrap problem. For instance, I’m writing this from a public library where there is free internet, because I don’t yet have effective internet where I’m staying. It’s these sorts of personal vulnerabilities that fascism will exploit and pursue. Fascism is here because the structural conditions for it have brought us to this point. Collective agency is needed to restructure those conditions.

In the bootstrap stage of this blog, I don’t think it’s fair yet to promise regular posts and erect a paywall. I’d like rather to continue to make my posts free for now, and solicit your donations. This matter of respect for my readers is also reflected in the care I will take in setting up the blog to receive these donations. Stay tuned for this announcement.

“Donations” can be construed nonmaterial as well. Share the post. Share the blog with potential subscribers. Leave a comment about questions you may have or topics you might like to have covered. Public sociology is a practice which interacts directly with publics about the usefulness of its ideas.