Conservative urges unlikely alliance as key to leaving Trump's presidency in ruins

Conservative author and political commentator David Brooks is calling on Americans to launch a “mass movement” to combat the Trump administration’s push “into authoritarianism,” and is proposing an unlikely alliance as the best approach for such a movement to gain traction.

“Today, populists and progressives generally occupy opposing political parties. But as Richard Hofstadter noted in his classic 'The Age of Reform,' at the turn of the 20th century Populists and Progressives formed an alliance,” Brooks wrote in an op-ed published Tuesday in The Atlantic.

“The Progressives of that era, then as now, were concentrated in the highly educated neighborhoods of big cities," Brooks wrote. "The Populists, then as now, were concentrated in the smaller towns of the Midwest and the South. But both the Progressives and the Populists wanted to help those who were being ground down by industrialization.”

As many have before him, Brooks described President Donald Trump’s second term in office as a “slow corrosion of our ruling institutions,” and one that was “well underway.” As such, he posed what he called “the question of the decade: why hasn’t a resistance movement materialized here?”

As Brooks noted, many lawmakers and those in the education and private sectors have capitulated to the Trump administration, which Brooks argued was due to “intimidation.” Such capitulation, however, would only allow “dominance to become a habit,” he wrote.

The solution, Brooks argued, was a mass American movement, and one that had frequent parallels in U.S. history.

“The old Populist Progressive alliance was economically left, socially center right, and hell-bent on reform. A contemporary version of this alliance would likely turn out to be the same,” Brooks wrote.

“This has the benefit of scrambling outdated 20th-century categories of left and right, and could help promote the notion that we are one nation, culturally cohesive but economically and demographically diverse," he added. "It rejects the Trumpian idea that we are sentenced to an endless class or culture war.”

As for what this potential alliance would actually need to do, Brooks said it was a simple matter of achieving real-world “concrete” victories in halting an anti-Democratic push from the Trump administration.

“A successful anti-MAGA movement must start by winning some achievable, concrete victory – halting this specific attack on democracy or that specific Trump program – and building from there,” Brooks wrote. “It must bring people from fear and stasis to hope and momentum.”