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The Question at the Table
Why America’s resistance looks like silence
I’ve been in the Atlantic Provinces over the past few days, absorbing local atmosphere for my books and great seafood for my stomach. It’s a good place to listen. People talk slower here. The ocean sets the pace. Over scallops and chowder, in kitchens and pubs with fogged windows, a question has come up more than once—never angrily, never smugly, always with genuine confusion.
Why aren’t Americans doing something to stop Trump and his cronies?
It’s a fair question. It lands without accusation, like a weather report that doesn’t match what you’re seeing out the window. From Nova Scotia or Newfoundland, the United States looks loud but inert—endlessly arguing, endlessly posting, but somehow failing to put its shoulder against the door. I didn’t have a clean answer when the question was first asked. So I started paying closer attention to what “doing something” actually looks like inside the country now—and why it so often fails to register as action from the outside.
The first problem is embedded in the premise. Americans are doing things. They’re just not doing them in ways that travel well across borders.
In December, before dawn, clergy chained themselves to the doors of an ICE building in San Francisco. They sang hymns while federal officers cut the chains and zip-tied wrists. Inside the crowd was a woman named Alexandra De Martini, legally blind, holding a baby. Her husband had been detained during what she believed was a routine green-card appointment. She told a reporter she couldn’t function without him. Not rhetorically. Literally.
The idea that Americans aren’t acting is wrong. The harder truth is that much of the action has become personal, costly, and easy to miss.
Zoom out and the numbers complicate the picture further. In June 2025, millions of Americans turned out for coordinated “No Kings” protests. Credible estimates put attendance between four and six million people in a single day—one of the largest mass protest mobilizations in modern U.S. history. Not just New York or Los Angeles. Small towns. County seats. Places most outsiders will never visit.
In Big Rapids, Michigan, a woman named Deb Karns told a local reporter she didn’t believe in kings and was “just sick of it.” Another protester talked about wealth flowing upward and rights flowing out. A Navy veteran named Taj Weir admitted he’d tried to bike across the country to escape politics and failed. He worried aloud about the military being pulled into partisan gravity.
These aren’t professional activists. They’re ordinary people brushing up against the limits of endurance.
So why does it still look, from Halifax or Lunenburg, like nothing is stopping the slide?
Because American resistance no longer happens on a single stage. It fragments. It diffuses. It collides with a political system engineered to slow everything—especially correction.
The same constitutional machinery once celebrated for preventing rash decisions now cushions authoritarian ones. Courts intervene, but months later. Elections promise remedies, but only on fixed calendars, inside a system that overweights geography and underweights raw numbers. Executive power, meanwhile, moves quickly—rewiring agencies, norms, and enforcement long before counterweights can assemble.
Political scientists have a name for this phase. Steven Levitsky calls it competitive authoritarianism: elections still exist, opposition still operates, but the state increasingly functions as a weapon—against media, universities, civil servants, and dissenters. Control without spectacle. Paperwork instead of tanks.
When repression becomes bureaucratic, resistance is forced to become either microscopic or ruinously expensive.
Fear does the rest of the work. Not abstract fear—specific fear. Fear of losing a job. Fear of being singled out online. Fear of arrest under newly broadened anti-protest laws. Fear of being the wrong face in the wrong place when politics turns physical. Members of Congress now speak openly about credible threats against them and their families. You don’t need universal terror to chill a society. You just need enough examples.
There’s also exhaustion, which outsiders often mistake for apathy. A decade of permanent emergency has left people toggling between outrage and triage. Rent. Health care. Childcare. Work schedules that don’t tolerate arrest records or viral videos. Politics becomes something you do after survival tasks are handled. For many Americans, they never are.
And there’s another misconception tucked inside the Atlantic-table question: that meaningful resistance must look like mass protest. In the U.S., much of the opposition has retreated—deliberately—into institutions. Lawsuits. Injunctions. Regulatory trench warfare. Whistleblowing. Union fights. Civil-service refusal. These don’t photograph well. They don’t trend. They do, occasionally, slow damage.
From outside the country, that kind of resistance reads as absence. From inside, it often feels like the only lane left that doesn’t end in jail or bankruptcy.
America is not short on dissent. It is short on synchronized leverage.
Add one more distortion: Americans misread each other. Research on polarization shows people vastly overestimate how extreme and unified “the other side” is. That misperception fractures coalitions before they form. People retreat into the belief that they’re alone—or that speaking up will only harden opposition. Silence becomes misread as loyalty. In reality, it’s often calculation.
So when someone in the Atlantic Provinces asks why Americans aren’t doing something, what they’re really asking is why moral urgency hasn’t converted into visible, decisive power.
The answer is structural, not cultural. Democracies don’t collapse all at once. Resistance carries uneven costs. Systems designed to slow change can be repurposed to protect its erosion. Fear, fatigue, and fragmentation outperform brute force. And much of what Americans are doing now is defensive—holding ground, buying time, keeping institutions from becoming weapons—rather than revolutionary.
History rarely offers the moment where everyone finally stands up and the problem resolves itself.
What it offers instead are long years where people resist in ways that don’t look heroic until much later, if at all. Lawsuits no one celebrates. Protests that don’t stick. Officials who quietly refuse orders. Citizens who show up knowing it may not matter, but knowing silence guarantees loss.
From a table in Nova Scotia, that can look like nothing. From inside the United States, it feels like a grinding effort to keep the floor from giving way completely.
That may not be a comforting answer. But it’s the honest one.