Welcome to the Resistance, Bret Stephens.

The elite opinion vibe shift is underway.

There has been a marked shift within the Republic of Letters. David Brooks is calling for a “National Civic Uprising.” Bill Kristol is asking “where does the ‘Abolish ICE' movement go to get its apology?” And now even Bret Stephens (Bret Stephens!) is saying that Trump is trying to turn the United States into “a nation of toadies.”

Brooks captures it well:

Trumpism (…) is primarily about the acquisition of power — power for its own sake. It is a multifront assault to make the earth a playground for ruthless men, so of course any institutions that might restrain power must be weakened or destroyed.

So far, we have treated the various assaults of President Trump and the acolytes in his administration as a series of different attacks. In one lane they are going after law firms. In another they savaged U.S.A.I.D. In another they’re attacking our universities. On yet another front they’re undermining NATO and on another they’re upending global trade. [emphasis added]

Now, as we approach Trump’s first hundred days, the scale and the stakes have become clear. This isn’t a series of isolated attacks. This isn’t Trump 1.0-but-faster. Trump 2.0 is attempting a to speedrun the complete collapse of American electoral democracy and the broader global order.

The sheer brazenness has been shocking.

I, for once, expected that they would follow the strategic logic of Niemöller’s poem — First they come for the most vulnerable, banking on public indifference while weakening the rule of law.

Instead they have started by going after white-shoe law firms, Ivy League universities, Ukraine, and the global financial system. The strategic goal is to achieve a cascade of compliance. If Trump can do this to Columbia and Skadden, then what hope is there for the smaller institutions?

(And, read Bill McKibben: other major civil society institutions might be soon to follow.)

Ezra Klein has a must-read (or listen) column/podcast this week. “The Emergency Is Here.” Speaking with Asha Rangappa about the plight of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, he notes that the administration is not proceeding in a legally-careful manner, trying to establish legal precedents for overwhelming executive authority. Rather, what they are doing is asserting the power to disappear anyone, with the expectation that neither the conservative Court majority nor the Republican Congressional majority will stop them.

As Ezra writes:

To the Trump administration, Abrego Garcia is not a mistake. He is a liability, and he is a test. A test of their power to do this to anyone. A test of whether the loophole they believe they have found — that if they can get you on a plane, they can hustle you beyond our laws and leave you in the grips of the kind of gulags they wish they had here.

They are not ashamed of this. They are not denying their desire to do it to more people.

This is how dictatorships work. Trump has always been clear about who he is and the kind of power he wants. Now he is using that power.

The sole, slim hope available right now is that the pace and scale of Trump’s assault will marshal a whole-of-society resistance movement. Here’s Brooks, again:

It’s time for a comprehensive national civic uprising. 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. Trump is about power. The only way he’s going to be stopped is if he’s confronted by some movement that possesses rival power.

(…)

I’m really not a movement guy. I don’t naturally march in demonstrations or attend rallies that I’m not covering as a journalist. But this is what America needs right now. Trump is shackling the greatest institutions in American life. We have nothing to lose but our chains.

Bret Stephens isn’t quite ready to march in the streets just yet. (It’s early. He might get there.) And Stephens’s contribution is still useful, because he functions as something of a weathervane for upper-crust elite opinion. Here he is, connecting the dots, recognizing that Trump 2.0 represents an existential threat, and ought to face vocal resistance even from those who agree with their policy aims.

He’s even pushing back against Trump’s attempts to demolish civil society and free expression under the guise of fighting anti-semitism.

Stephens:

(…) what clearly is now happening, what we’ve learned over the last 10 days is, this is an effort not to curb or reduce antisemitism; it’s an effort to destroy academic freedom. So he latched onto the question of the issue of antisemitism on campus, which is real, which is right and which I think the left was in denial about to a great extent. But he’s using it for an agenda, which is destructive to American liberty.

If we are going to have a mass movement powerful enough to reclaim and ultimately repair American Democracy, it will have to include more than the usual suspects. The Courts won’t save us. Congress won’t save us. The platforms and the newscasters won’t save us. We are going to have to find some way to save ourselves.

A movement powerful enough to change the trajectory we are on is going to have to be much larger than anything I have seen in my lifetime. It will surely need the Brookses and the Stephenses, telling their audience that this time things really will not work out just fine. The folks who spent Trump’s first administration complaining that cancel culture was the greatest threat to free speech are going to need to rouse the masses by saying “well this is in fact so much worse.”

And let’s not kid ourselves: they won’t be enough. A popular front that spans from Bret Stephens to, uhm, me won’t turn the tide overnight. It will take so much more than that. This is going to be very hard. It is going to take a long time.

But it’s noteworthy. And it’s a start.

So I’ll conclude with some words I never expected to say to Mr. Bret Stephens, given our history:

Well done, Bret. Good column this week. Welcome to the Resistance.