The More You Have, the Less You Fight

Who will and will not save us.

Mar 11, 2025

As our thrilling national descent into fascism proceeds day by day, along with it comes an increasingly frantic search for the answer to the question: “Who will save us?” The more ruthlessly the crank of oppression turns, the larger the pool of citizens becomes who begin casting their eyes to the horizon of American society in search of saviors. Where will we find those fabled heroes of civil society, those true believers in freedom and democracy, who will form the firewall to stop what is happening from happening?

None of us can predict the future, but it is possible to make some well-informed guesses about where we should—and should not—expect to see The Resistance forming in earnest. In any situation like ours, where a vindictive and dictatorial figure with no regard for law or morality is centralizing power in his own hands, it does not take a crystal ball to know how different groups will respond. It only takes an understanding of incentives, and of human nature. Here is one thing that I feel very confident in saying: The people and institutions in America who have the most will do the least in this fight. Do not be surprised when your search for saviors among the pillars of society fails.

Business will not save us. “Business” as such has no morality at all. It has only the mandate to profit. It is detrimental to this mandate to go against whoever controls the US government. Therefore business does not do that—not here, not in Nazi Germany, not anywhere. Companies and executives and boards and investors may individually have moral beliefs, but all of these beliefs must be subsumed to the need for profit, lest the business itself cease to exist. This is less of a condemnation than an observation. This is the nature of capitalism. (This inherent amorality and its capacity to acquiesce to monstrosities is why capitalism should be condemned, but expecting individual companies not to act in accordance with their robotic programming usually leads to disappointment.) Business interests will always try to buy political power and arrange the government so that it acts in their benefit. They’ve done this astoundingly well in the US. While doing that, however, they weakened our democracy so much that it became vulnerable to what is happening now. Companies will fall in line because to oppose what is happening is to subject themselves to the risk of government retaliation that would hurt profits. It is some consolation that this attitude may earn them the destruction of the American system of law that enabled their profits in the first place. But we will all be going down together, so the comfort is thin.

Rich individuals will not save us. Yes, there may be scattered individuals who dedicate their wealth to fighting fascism, but in aggregate, wealth itself will be a shackle on resistance. Huge portfolios that consist of corporate ownership and stocks and bonds and real estate offer a huge surface of attack for a powerful foe such as an angry president. The richer people are, the more vulnerable they are to loss, and the more keenly they feel its potential looming. Consider the mega billionaires who sat behind Trump at his inauguration. What is the job of these individuals? Their job, in reality, is “protecting their own fortunes.” To the extent that their fortunes are tied up in their companies, they want to protect the interests of their companies, but when wealth gets into the nine and ten and eleven and twelve figure range, it becomes its own job. The oligarchs do not own their fortunes. Their fortunes own them.

The law will not save us. Again, there will be scattered heroes, but the biggest and richest and most respected firms in the legal establishment will all fold as pressure increases. They will fold for the same reason that businesses fold, because law firms are business. Trump has already made an example of two big firms who did work for his enemies, and he can continue doing that until the entire Big Law world adopts the (safe, sensible, sober) practice of not taking on any work that might anger the administration. It is simply a rational business decision. For adjacent reasons, I think that the courts themselves will ultimately wilt in the face of Trump’s utter disregard of what they say. Some judges may fear removal or impeachment, and pull back from aggressive rulings in order to save their own careers—but more than this, the mechanism of control will be the very idea that what judges say matters. If a sufficiently powerful president decides he doesn’t give a fuck what judges tell him, he gives judges themselves the choice of tempering their rulings, or of being exposed and humiliated as empty figureheads when their rulings are brushed away. We have not reached this point yet, but we are well on the path to it. Law firms will protect their wealth, and judges will protect their own existential purpose, and both will protect their own prestige. The law will not save us when the oppression is coming from the people who make up the laws.

Congress will not save us. Like judges, they will be placed in the position of being humiliated as powerless—thereby causing everyone to question why they exist in the first place—or of backing up the strongman. This has obviously already happened in the Republican Party, where almost all of the anti-Trump officials have been purged and only yes men can survive. You will see the same thing happening in a more subtle way on the Democratic side as well. That does not mean that there will not be good, brave, even heroic individual politicians. It means that the conventional wisdom that governs the leadership of the party dictates that getting elected, maintaining a presence, is the highest good, and therefore as the threat of more exaggerated voter suppression and corruption of elections and more dangerous retaliation from the White House against Democrats increases, the party’s leadership will grow not more aggressive, but less—because getting more radical in their resistance would cause further (legal and illegal) retaliation from above, and that would harm their reelection chances, and is therefore considered unwise. Like the rich protecting their fortunes, the Democratic Party is built to protect its seat at the table even if that table is shrunk down to minute size and cast out into the sea. They will happily float away as their constituents drown.

Universities will not save us. Though students are always and everywhere on the front lines of resistance against oppressive governments, and writers and professors and researchers are always responsible for building the intellectual foundations of resistance movements, the institutions of higher education themselves will, for the most part, be easily cowed into keeping their heads down. That is because universities are less Gardens of Free Thought than they are portfolios of real estate holdings and endowment investments and government contracts and comfortable bureaucratic sinecures. I could not invent any better demonstration of how you can expect universities to act in coming years than what Columbia University is doing right now: Allowing a student to be illegally snatched by the gestapo with scarcely a murmur of complaint, while attempting to placate the right wing with statements of concern about campus antisemitism, while having their government funding gutted anyhow. As full and complete a capitulation as you can imagine. This tenor of response to fascism will be the norm among our most prestigious universities, where leaders will feel that their responsibility to the endowment fund and to the budget outweighs their responsibility to poke the fascist bear. Whenever America safely emerges from the current dark age, those universities will be able to safely publish histories of the time that nod obliquely to their own possible mistakes.

Unions. Will unions save us? Organized labor is the most robust form of resistance to the type of oppression that is coming. That will not change. The existing union establishment, though, is vulnerable to the same forces that are pressing other institutions down into their holes. Big unions are entities completely enmeshed in a legal framework that the government is capable of manipulating or scrapping altogether. The administration just tossed out an existing union contract covering nearly 50,000 TSA agents. Is that “legal?” Maybe, though that is an illustration of the inadequacy of the law more than anything else. Is it an outrageous and existential attack on union power that demands a strike in response? Yes. But a strike would be illegal, and the workers could be fired, and the union itself could be subject to enormous fines and penalties, and it is extremely unlikely that a strike will happen. (I do not mean to portray this as an uncomplicated choice. Some of the most aggressive strikes in labor history have failed and destroyed entire unions and harmed worker power for decades to come. The dangers are very real.) What existing unions already have acts as a disincentive for them to take risks, lest they experience an abrupt and major loss. Instead, they will subject themselves to slower, more gradual losses: The government will make it hard to organize new members, easy for employers to retaliate against union drives, and public sector unions will be stripped of every last scrap of influence. I believe in the labor movement, but it would be dishonest not to observe that our own institutions have the same weak points as those discussed above.

So where does this leave us? If the most powerful and wealthiest parts of society will not form the vanguard of the resistance, who will? It is a question that answers itself. Grassroots movements made up of regular people are where the resistance has to happen. Ideally, enough pressure can be created from below to bolster the fearful institutions into joining the fight. But they will not lead it. At best, they will get on the right side of the fight when they make the judgment that doing so is a bet that has a reasonable chance of success. Allow your disappointment in this fact to be leavened by the knowledge that you, yourself, are the most important determination of what America’s future will look like. If you, and millions of people like you, resolve to stand up, we will win. We have the numbers. If you and I sit around waiting for all of those Respectable Institutions to take the lead, we will be spending the next few years doing nothing except being crestfallen by the inaction from above. I guess we might as well get to it, then. Don’t be sad you’re not rich. Be happy that you’re free.

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