My impression is that the first Trump presidency left everyone at a loss. If you react with outrage, you're labeled in some negative way. This is really an extension of online trolling, where any emotional reaction proves that you "lost." Everyone has a chance to speak up now, but this actually diminishes the power of everyone's voice. You're one drop in a few billion or a few hundred million now. And to the extent that you do speak up, it's fully partisan; the complaints of "the other side" are never heard nor granted legitimacy.

I imagine there are people who would call this cynical and defeatist, but I think often people speaking up is purely counter-productive these days. So many attempts to speak up are just yet another partisan volley which can be written off on partisan grounds alone. Worse, given the way that social media works, the worst and most extreme voices from your faction will be the ones which get the most attention. They will paint your entire faction, and from a public opinion perspective, people will view your side as being far more extreme than it might actually be.

I think people have a model in their head of the civil rights movement, and they think that protest alone will be successful just like it once was. It's not clear to me that protest, in and of itself, actually does much these days. Trump seems to enjoy seeing his ideological opponents outraged, and his supporters are either cowed towards him, if not far more vindictive than the man himself. Maybe it's just because I keep seeing the mindless noise from the internet, but real push-back here requires a centralized and most importantly, a focused movement. One that doesn't just incorporate the most extreme policy positions from its wings, and understands how to build a broad coalition. It's something people have forgotten how to do. It might be trite to blame social media, but no one seems to understand how to build a broad coalition in the way that Dr. King did during the civil rights movement. Movements these days tend to exclude, rather than include, and tend to be led by radicals and extremists, which defeat the cause they claim to fight for.

> I imagine there are people who would call this cynical and defeatist, but I think often people speaking up is purely counter-productive these days. So many attempts to speak up are just yet another partisan volley which can be written off on partisan grounds alone. Worse, given the way that social media works, the worst and most extreme voices from your faction will be the ones which get the most attention. They will paint your entire faction, and from a public opinion perspective, people will view your side as being far more extreme than it might actually be.

I think there's a way around this: pair attempts to speak up with base-broadening stuff that controversial within your faction and will alienate the "most extreme voices from your faction."

Basically: DEI is a goner (for instance), stop defending it and throw it in the fire, too. Advocate for literally building the wall. Support tariffs, but say you'll do them more competently and actually bring the jobs back. The focus and energy should be on protecting the basic constitutional order, everything else is a distraction. The people toward the extremes need to be the ones holding their noses to vote, not the guys on the fence.

For protests and movements to actually succeed, they will eventually need candidates in the polls. But the U.S. is a two-party system, and the other party has, with their many years in power, shown what they will do, i.e. not much.

Great comment, articulates something I've been feeling lately but didn't quite have the words for. (Not American, but similar situation in my country.)

Where do we go from here? What kind of action would be effective?

this sums up the situation eloquently and perfectly