What Makes Protest Matter

How resistance moves from spectacle to strategy—and what it takes to rebuild democracy from the ground up.

Aug 04, 2025

The machinery we’re up against is enormous, but not invincible. Every authoritarian project depends on public exhaustion, cynicism, and a slow erosion of civic capacity. What looks like strength from above is often a fragile consolidation of power, resting on the assumption that most people will comply or look away.

The August 2 protests, organized across more than 300 cities, offered another glimpse of resistance. Not dramatic, not massive, but persistent. These were not headline-grabbing spectacles. They were steady signals that the country’s democratic reflexes haven’t been extinguished. That matters, but it’s not enough.

Can we stop Trump’s totalitarian project? That’s the question many are asking—urgently, not rhetorically, and not without fear. It feels like something foundational has shifted. The institutions we once relied on to buffer change, protect rights, or mediate conflict are being hollowed out or turned against us. It’s not just that history is repeating—it’s that it’s accelerating. And behind that fear is something deeper: discouragement. For many, it feels like the rules have changed, but the tools we’ve used to respond haven’t kept up. We are left feeling powerless to stop it.

And yet, we are not powerless. We still have tools—some familiar, some underused, some hiding in plain sight. We have habits of self-governance. We have the capacity to organize. We have institutions, frayed but not yet collapsed. And we have the ability to withdraw our consent—not just at the ballot box, but in the marketplace, the workplace, the classroom, the street, and the neighborhood. Resistance begins wherever people stop cooperating with their own subjugation. The greatest danger isn’t just authoritarianism itself—it’s the belief that nothing can be done.

We are witnessing power being restructured, not just in Washington but across the social and ecological systems people rely on to survive. This isn’t just political drift—it’s a reordering of who gets to live where, who gets protected, whose labor is valued, and which futures are allowed to exist. If protest is going to matter, it must confront this directly. It must move beyond spectacle and into the infrastructures of survival: public institutions, shared resources, civic trust, and the land and labor that sustain them.

The machinery we’re up against is enormous, but not monolithic. Authoritarian projects don’t rely solely on force. They thrive on fatigue. They colonize the future by making it unthinkable. They isolate people from one another, then offer fear in place of solidarity. Anthropology teaches us that power is never just top-down. It is sustained through relationships, routines, habits of compliance—and it can be disrupted in those same places. Political ecology reminds us that these systems are never only symbolic. They are material. They are embedded in land use, water access, zoning codes, financial instruments, and environmental degradation.

This is why protest must be strategic. To endure, it must be rooted in the material, embedded in everyday life, and sustained through collective purpose. It must shift from visibility to leverage, from moments to movements, from opposition to construction. Not just saying no, but making new rules and new arrangements for life together.

Authoritarianism doesn’t just distort politics. It distorts time. It erodes long-term thinking. It collapses the future into a state of constant crisis. People stop planning, stop trusting, stop investing in each other. Protest, in this context, becomes a way to reassert civic time—to say that the future still belongs to us, and that what we do now still matters. That’s not rhetoric. That’s repair.

So what can we do? Start with the local. Resistance becomes legible when it’s tied to real stakes: a union drive, a school board fight, a water-rights dispute, a public housing campaign, a move to stop the privatization of a clinic or a park. These aren’t symbolic issues—they’re about who controls the means of collective life. And they’re often the places where authoritarianism is most quietly enforced.

This is why coalitions matter—not as slogans, but as relationships. Labor organizers, land defenders, public school teachers, reproductive justice groups, environmental monitors, tenants’ unions, independent journalists—these aren’t single-issue actors. They are communities confronting different faces of the same logic: extraction without consent.

Authoritarianism fragments to rule. It divides by immigration status, race, region, education, and religion. It pits humans against ecosystems, labor against land. Political ecology reminds us that these are not separate struggles. They’re rooted in the same logic of dispossession—of control, of livelihood, of time, of meaning. Resistance begins when we make those connections visible again.

Disruption is necessary. When protests interrupt the routines of governance or commerce, they force a response. But without structure, disruption burns out. What sustains resistance is care. Mutual aid isn’t charity—it’s the infrastructure for another kind of politics. When people cook together, set up legal clinics, organize rides, or run public Wi-Fi, they are not just helping each other. They are refusing the premise that survival must be individual, commodified, and earned.

The real measure of resistance isn’t how loud it is, but what it builds. Every protest that becomes a campaign, every network that grows into an institution, every moment that turns into a practice—that’s how civic life endures. Protest, when it works, isn’t just a message. It’s a scaffold. It’s political infrastructure in the making.

Corporate media rarely show this. It doesn’t fit the formula. They want conflict, spectacle, arrests. But democratic culture is often built in quieter spaces. In anthropology, we call this narrative sovereignty—the power to speak for yourself, define your conditions, and shape your future. It’s not a luxury. It’s the ground of resistance.

Resistance can be part of everyday life. It might be a teacher who keeps banned books on the shelf. A grocery worker who organizes instead of walking away. Tenants forming an association in a building targeted for speculation. A neighbor who blocks the privatization of public space. It might be moving money from JPMorgan Chase to a credit union. Canceling a contract with a data-mining telecom and joining a local broadband co-op. Or refusing to shop at companies whose political action funds support authoritarian agendas—not as isolated moral choices, but as coordinated acts of refusal.

These acts don’t just build the infrastructure of resistance—they can be powerful. Corporations like ExxonMobil, Molson Coors, Walmart, and Shell have longstanding ties to the Heritage Foundation through direct contributions, donor-advised funds, or aligned family foundations. Many of the same networks are now backing Project 2025. When we continue doing business with companies underwriting the policies we oppose, we’re not bystanders—we’re participants. Divestment, at scale, becomes a form of political refusal.

These aren’t gestures. They are reallocations of power. In a political ecology of authoritarianism, where control is exerted through zoning laws, utility monopolies, development incentives, and debt markets, redirecting your labor, money, and attention is not just personal. It’s structural. It’s civic power.

Wherever we refuse to be reduced to data, labor, or disposable bodies—wherever we coordinate, protect one another, and begin rebuilding what’s been hollowed out—that’s where resistance takes hold. Not just in defiance, but in reconstruction. Not just in withdrawal, but in world-building.

The goal isn’t just to oppose authoritarianism. It’s to make democracy harder to dismantle. That work doesn’t begin in Washington. It begins wherever we remember how to govern ourselves, meet shared needs, and insist that the future is not yet written.

Victory won’t come as a single turning point. It will come in increments: erosion, replacement, endurance. Through the reoccupation of civic space, the restoration of trust, and the rebuilding of systems that serve life rather than control it.

The most effective movements aren’t always the loudest. They’re the ones that show up consistently, trade spectacle for structure, and build habits of solidarity stronger than the fear used to divide us.

We need no permission. The tools are already in our hands: local organizing, collective care, tactical withdrawal, civic memory, strategic refusal, economic clarity, and the insistence that no one gets to decide for us what kind of world is possible.

Wherever we build trust, wherever we rebuild institutions, wherever we repair what’s been broken—that’s where democracy begins again.

And that’s where the work already is.

James’s Substack

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