The first step in any form of collective resistance is to recognize the seriousness of the political, social and economic threat that a Trump administration poses to the United States' fragile democracy. Secondly, while American society may be slipping away into the shadows of authoritarianism, it is imperative to think politics anew in order to wage more formidable struggles in the name of economic and social justice.
All societies contain sites of resistance, and progressives with structural power need desperately to join with those who have been written out of the script of democracy to rethink politics, find a new beginning and develop a vision that is on the side of justice and democracy. Hope in the abstract is not enough. We need a form of militant hope and practice that engages with the forces of authoritarianism on the educational and political fronts so as to become a foundation for what might be called hope in action -- that is, a new force of collective resistance and a vehicle for anger transformed into collective struggle, a principle for making despair unconvincing and struggle possible.
Education must become central to any politics of resistance because it is fundamental to how subjectivities are produced, desire is constructed and behavior takes place. Paulo Freire, the Brazilian educator, was right in insisting that subjectivity is both the material of politics and the platform where the struggle over consciousness and resistance takes place. Antonio Gramsci, the great Italian Marxist, was right in arguing that at the heart of political struggle is a war of position, a struggle in which matters of education, persuasion, language and consciousness are fundamental to creating the formative culture that makes radical change possible. This is a struggle in which inner worlds are made and remade not only under the weight of economic structures but also through the pedagogical mediums of belief, moments of recognition and identification.
While we may be entering a period of counterrevolutionary change, it must be remembered that such historical moments are sometimes as hopeful as they are dangerous. Hope at the moment resides in struggling to reclaim the radical imagination and bringing together an array of single-issue movements, while working to build an expansive, broad-based social movement for both symbolic and structural change. Central to such a task is the need to build alternative public spaces that offer fresh educational opportunities to create a new language for political struggle along with new modes of solidarity. At stake here is the need for progressives to make education central to politics itself in order to disrupt the force of a predatory public pedagogy. We must disrupt the "common sense" that is produced in mainstream cultural apparatuses and that serves as glue for the rise of right-wing populism. This is not merely a call for a third political party. Any vision for this movement must reject the false notion that capitalism and democracy are synonymous. Democratic socialism is once again moving a generation of young people. We need to accelerate this movement for a radical democracy before it is too late.
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