Why the Left should begin a campaign of non-cooperation with the federal government
Preamble of the United States Constitution — by Anthony Garand
Opponents of Donald Trump’s second term as president should not sit passively on the sidelines of American politics, waiting for toothless Congressional Democrats to take action. Neither should we wait for the midterm elections of 2026 to try to electorally overwhelm the officials of the current government with progressive dissenters.
After all, even as Democratic candidates use the current state of affairs to swamp my cell phone and presumably yours with text messages asking for donations to their campaigns to fight the policies of the Trump administration, Senator Chuck Schumer has led the Senate Democrats to another one of their disgraceful surrenders. Meanwhile, the Trump administration is implementing an authoritarian takeover of the federal government, openly following a blueprint established by Victor Orban in Hungary and Vladamir Putin in Russia.
Is it even possible to rid a nation of an authoritarian dictator in an election overseen by officials of that very authoritarian government itself? It has been done but only rarely. The alternative is for the American people to come off the sidelines of political life and take direct action ourselves when conventional politics fails.
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Starve the beast
As a single individual, non-payment of my own federal taxes could be considered a foolish and futile act of civil disobedience. If others join in, a mass movement can be built that has the potential to begin a process of starving the beast of fascistic authoritarianism through coordinated mass action. In his essay Civil Disobedience, Henry David Thoreau argued for the right to principled civil disobedience on the argument that the individual conscience is superior to governmental authority, since the government is simply a set of institutions and traditions that human beings have set up. The more a person is blindly obedient to authority — as a soldier, is, for example — the more of their own humanity that person has lost.
Tolstoy grounded his civil disobedience in the principle of non-resistance of evil by force, based on his reading of the teachings of Jesus. Gandhi saw non-violent direct action as the way to get all of Indian society involved in the independence movement while grounding it in the time-honored Jain teaching of ahimsa. Martin Luther King argued that unjust laws degrade the human spirit, and non-violent direct action against unjust laws make the injustice plain to all, thereby forcing members of society at large to confront the issue.
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Consent of the governed
I base my call for direct action on my political understanding that is both widely accepted in American society, and yet also derived from a progressive and even revolutionary spirituality. Citizens of the United States generally revere our country’s Declaration of Independence. This document asserts that to secure the ability of citizens to live and prosper, we form governments, and these governments derive their legitimacy from the consent of the governed. Furthermore, the people are justified in dissolving their ties to any government that does not have such consent.
I believe in the essential intersubjective nature of each of our individual selves. All of the people we have known continue to exist as part of ourselves, and vice versa. These jointly held patterns of habitual thought are not objectively true, but subjective understanding. Ultimate truth beyond any particular subjective social understanding can be experienced through personal introspection and love for others.
Animosity toward anyone is felt as agitation in one’s own consciousness. Thus, one’s own well-being is dependent on the well-being of others. On this basis, I believe that society is best governed by the community of citizens collectively making our own economic and social decisions, which will inevitably include policies designed to foster that well-being through universal health care, education, housing, food, and so on. Thus, a democracy that is communitarian. Social democracy.
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Working towards the ideal
The government with the consent of the governed that our foreparents imagined has never been fully implemented. The Constitution of the United States was a step in the direction of democratic government. But the majority of those who peopled the part of the North American continent that became the current fifty states were not asked for their consent. We continue to work to better realize the ideals of equality and consent of the governed in the future. That is why we call ourselves progressives.
Yet under the administration of Donald Trump, even the pretense of adherence to the constitutional process has been abandoned. Congress’s power to appropriate or remove funds from any governmental project has been unconstitutionally usurped. The administration is beginning to ignore legitimate rulings of the judiciary. It has begun to cut funding for federal agencies that monitor the security of some elections.
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Support the Constitution
The Constitution of the United States, the document written to begin to establish government by the consent of the governed, is being undermined before our eyes. Is there some reason why taxpayers should continue to meekly send payments to the federal government this April 15th? Is there some reason we should authorize tax payments to be withheld from our paychecks? Others have suggested that we don’t.
The American Revolution started as a tax rebellion. Thoreau’s anti-slavery and anti-war tax resistance also showed the way. There is strength in numbers. Can we, en masse, follow in Thoreau’s noble footsteps in non-violent, non-cooperation before Trump’s authoritarian coup has been consolidated and such action becomes impossible? It could be a start down the path toward national redemption.