The Weak and The Strong
We have to look beyond the establishment for a movement against Trump.
Soft overcomes hard, weak overcomes strong. Everybody knows it, nobody uses the knowledge.
| Lao Tzu, translated by Ursula Le Guin, Tao Te Ching
In What’s Happening Is Not Normal. America Needs an Uprising That Is Not Normal., David Brooks paraphrases Thucydides as the backdrop for his pitch for a mass uprising against Trump:
Under the empires of old, the strong did what they willed and the weak suffered what they must.
But the original reads differently:
The strong do what they can, and the weak suffer what they must. | Thucydides
The strong do what they can, not what they willed. So a mass movement must be focused on stopping what they can do to us — we, the weak — not changing the thinking of the strong, not to only blunt their desires. We need to cast them down, and destroy their strengths. To take their power, their money, their control.
Brooks then tries to make a case for a mass movement against Trump, but when he casts about for leaders in the struggle, all he can seem to find are institutions:
It’s time for Americans in universities, law, business, nonprofits and the scientific community, and civil servants and beyond to form one coordinated mass movement.
Notice that he doesn't mention unions in the list of institutions, which I would have expected from a Democrat; but then, he’s not. He seems to be referring to what some call the groups, special interest groups that traditionally promote their own interests, and have had decades to find common cause in the Democratic Party, another group not listed.
He argues there has to be one coordinating organization to make this all work:
There doesn’t always have to be one charismatic leader, but there does have to be one backbone organization, one coordinating body that does the work of coalition building.
I believe Brooks is incapable of imagining an uprising of the weak against the strong. But wasn't that the story of the French Revolution, the American Revolution, Gandi's revolution, and the Civil Rights movement? The weak declaring resistance against the strong?
We should instead look to what he dismisses as 'the beyond'. The great majority of people in the US do not trust institutions -- like those he listed — and ordinary people would likely be happier with a movement emerging from outside the establishment.
Brooks ends by saying he's not 'a movement guy'. More than that, he's a conservative, and that is not a quarter you'd expect revolution to arise from.
But the Human Spring is coming, where the weak will pull down the strong, which in our time and place is Trump and his pals.
Damon Linker wrote in the Guardian in 2023:
30 years ago, if I told you that a bunch of billionaires and intellectuals on the right are waiting in the wings to impose a dictatorship on the US, you would have said that I was insane.
And here in 2025, it is time to put a stop to that insanity.