In the Face of Overwhelm
We owe it to each other to resist attempts to disorient, divide and distract us from the reality of government takeover by the billionaire Right.
Asha Ransby-Sporn
A young activist raises the Black power fist at Freedom Square in Chicago in summer 2020. Photo by Darius Griffin for The TRiiBE®
President Donald Trump and Elon Musk’s right-wing alliance of billionaire interests has wasted no time since Trump took office a few weeks ago. Just some of the slew of directives: an attempt at freezing trillions of dollars of life-saving federal funding; a consolidation of power in the Trump-led executive branch; rollbacks to hard-won climate protections; aggressive anti-immigrant orders; elimination of diversity, equity and inclusion programs at every level; an attempted pushout of huge swaths of federal workers with essential roles. Everything the government touches — which is more parts of our lives than we may often pause to think about — is at stake all at once.
This “flood the zone” approach seems to be effective. From longtime Democratic senators to the many of the smartest left strategists I personally know, an effect of overwhelm is setting in. Maryland’s center-left House Democrat Jamie Raskin called it “sensory overload.” One member of American Federation of Government Employees described the response from their members — many of whom have been unfairly placed on leave — as “a mix of anger, confusion, derision and a desire to stick it out.” President of AFGE Local 252 called it “pure chaos.”
Meanwhile, after spending more than $250 million to get Trump elected, Musk has effectively been handed keys to the federal government, door by door, department by department. Bulldozing past the objections of senior government officials, Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency — a misnomer that refers to the team of coders, lawyers and engineers with little-to-no government expertise carrying out the reactionary wishes of the richest man in the world — has secured access to some of the fundamental elements of government, including systems by which Social Security checks are processed, grants for cancer research are distributed, and employment data is maintained for more than 2 million federal workers.
We often talk or joke about the kind of crises that spark real societal collapse as things that loom, that we are on the brink of; endless memes say the world is about to end. But climate disasters are already here, new technology has been used for political manipulation and social control, and the world witnessed a genocide in Gaza we could not stop. Now, what we’re seeing unfold in the federal government — a billionaire with his eyes set on being CEO of the world quite literally taking over the machinations of government — is what many are calling a full-on coup.
We owe it to each other not only to reject the idea that there is nothing we can do, but to resist these attempts to overwhelm, distract and divide us.
To give a little context to what’s unfolding, Project 2025 didn’t come out of a right-wing plot in the past few years or even since the Trump/MAGA era. This blueprint for radical right-wing change is a culmination of a multi-decade strategy to deregulate capitalism and gut all the parts of government that get in the way of maximum profit, exploitation and wealth accumulation, and it’s funded by old-money billionaires like the Koch brothers and Joseph Coors (beer baron and earliest Heritage Foundation donor). These mega-donors represent varying brands of far-right political philosophy but are unified by their shared material interest in replacing government as we know it with rule by brute capitalist force.
Right-wing strategists are pleased, seeing many of their longtime political dreams come true. Leaders from the ultra-conservative Heritage Foundation have affirmed the new administration’s “breakneck speed” and the former director of the organization’s Project 2025 efforts, Paul Dans, described Trump’s early presidential actions as “exactly the work we set out to do.”
Even former Trump advisor Steve Bannon, a loud critic of Elon Musk, is still affirming that this political moment “couldn’t be a better time to be alive” for those on the far Right.
We should be naming the moment for what it is: a transformational win for the billionaire Right. As if the neoliberal era’s outsourcing of essential public-good functions of government to private companies wasn’t destructive enough, direct government takeover by the richest man in the world is a nightmarish escalation of how bad bad can get when the rug is pulled all the way out from under.
The architects and implementers of these plans are banking on the public being too overwhelmed with information to understand the impact or find coherent ways to resist. After all, what average person really knows all of what the Treasury Department payment system disperses (tax returns, Social Security payments, medical research grants, much more) or what percentage of local school funding comes from the Department of Education anyway? How quickly can the courts (which the Right has spent enormous amount of money to influence) parse what’s legal? And how inspiring is it, really, to mobilize around protecting government that the neoliberal era has already gutted so much that most of us are generally dissatisfied anyway?
By design, the unpopular details get lost in the sauce. Take, for example, Head Start — just one important federally funded program that hundreds of thousands of working parents rely on — which is now at risk. Polls show that 86% of American voters (and a majority on both sides of the political spectrum) support investing in quality childcare and early learning programs, but there’s been little attention on Head Start in the midst of something as sweeping as a freeze on “all federal funding.”
Moves like these are difficult for the public to digest, let alone react to. By the time we have caught up to understanding the situation at the Treasury Department, they’ve moved on to gutting the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the Department of Education, the Department of Labor.
Certainly, there are pockets of resistance. Protesters at the Capitol and a growing number of cities hold signs reading “THIS IS A COUP” and “Nobody elected Elon Musk” as the public continues to make sense of federal functions that have been compromised or targeted. Even in the days before Trump’s inauguration, many immigrant justice groups and elected officials around the country mobilized to spread know-your-rights information to mitigate the harm of ICE raids. Healthcare workers have been independently archiving crucial public health data to preserve needed information from the Centers for Disease Control. But even as tangible threats are coming at us faster than ever — to needed forms of public assistance, funding for public infrastructure, regulatory functions that promote fair labor practices and public health, and more — we have not yet seen the kind of response close in scale to 2017, when hundreds of thousands who came out to the Women’s March, to mobilize at airports against Trump’s Muslim ban, or to resist family separation at the border.
Conveniently for the wealthy few who stand to gain from capitalism without guardrails, the average person probably doesn’t trust that efforts at creating (or stopping) big-scale change will work. Across the political spectrum, attitudes about government institutions are at all-time lows. Many who believe we should have a fairer, more just and equitable society (I’ll call us “the Left”) have, in some form or another, accepted a posture away from believing that we truly can achieve such transformation at the scale of society.
It would be a mistake to think this stems from apathy, or even passive acceptance of the status quo. I see this pessimism about our overall political system as a result of political awakening to the levers of power that have rigged the system against the majority of us. As the book Secrets of a Successful Organizer, published by Labor Notes, argues, “apathy isn’t real” — the barrier to people-powered organizing is not that people don’t care to see change in the context of their workplaces, but that they believe the forces against them are too strong.
This framework says that the role of the organizer — and, I would add, the role of the political leader, the movement communicator and the influential community member — is to win people over to a different attitude. Centuries of organizing and bottom-up resistance to oppressive regimes offer a different story about what’s possible.
Believing that there is simply nothing we can do to change the ways things are is exactly how the status quo has always been kept in place. Worse, it’s how the unimaginably wealthy have been able to consolidate power to keep society moving in a direction that keeps them getting richer and richer at everyone else’s expense. And in this moment, what serves their interests is to overwhelm those of us inclined to fight for something better in the world — to the point that we either disconnect, revert to silos, or ignore what’s going on.
Our political strength will rely on frameworks to better face the moment and the meaning of it together. That means confronting the reality of what we are up against: rapid acceleration toward corporate/billionaire rule and inequity beyond our imaginations.
It means distinguishing between various factions and motivations that exist among those aligning to take power away from everyday people, not lumping them all together. It means facing many of the ways organizing and social change work on the Left has been insufficient or has recycled norms that don’t address the bigger picture. It means facing the institutions that make up society as they are and charting paths to get from here to a vision of a better there. And it means taking the risk of getting behind people and projects willing to challenge and replace Democratic establishment figures who stand in the way of real political leadership.
The conditions of the moment demand that we are clear-eyed enough to meet the conjuncture and find openings for those new paths forward.
Beyond a laundry list of moral positions or communities we care about, we should be tying ourselves together with a coherent vision for the direction we want our society to go — and a worldview about how it should work — that can compete with the individualist, free-market economic populism and so-called patriotism of the MAGA Right. For many of us, that starts with a story about a more equitable world where we invest in robust, accountable public institutions that function effectively to serve the public as a whole. That’s to say, we know our current government systems are deeply dysfunctional and we believe that investing in the common good — healthcare, housing, education — is better for everyone; we are committed to a transition to public good institutions that function to benefit the many.
We’ve got work to do in the coming months, years and decades to clearly project that vision, and to construct a sense of belonging as part of that “public” that benefits from common good social and economic policy. Those of us wanting a more just and equitable world like this one should orient ourselves away from echo chambers and toward strategies for speaking to everyday people en masse — toward practicing the work of winning people over to that worldview at scale.
Let’s be people who talk to our neighbors and our stubborn family members. Let’s be people who knock on doors. Let’s be people who want to be part of movements that welcome people with their status quo opinions and complexities on issues, part of movements that see the value of communicating via media at the biggest scale possible, and be supporters of strategies that work to construct majorities to undermine these billionaires who will let the rest of us starve and die if we let them. Let’s be people who are flexible enough to shed tactical dogma, step outside of issue silos, and embrace moments of opportunity. Let’s be people who are part of big tent coalitions that can wield power and win.
Billionaires like Elon Musk are conditioned, by virtue of their wealth, to see themselves as political actors who can shape the way the world is. One of the purposeful consequences of overwhelm is that we see ourselves as the people politics happens to as opposed to being active participants in doing politics or shaping our political reality. We see our work as calling out what’s wrong, extracting concessions at some small-in-the-scheme-of-things scale, or simply trying to understand as we get by. And it’s true that, as people who are guided by values of equity and meeting the needs of everybody, our work is much harder — because it requires that we pool our resources and work together.
But we are political actors, too, if we choose to be!
None of us are relegated to being passive observers. Any shift in the status quo requires a base that follows along and accepts or rejects a new normal. It was right-wing populism and the Tea Party and subsequent MAGA movements that have made the power grab of capitalists like Musk and Trump possible. It will be a movement of everyday people and community, faith, labor, political and cultural leaders — brave enough to face where we’re at honestly and to reject back-to-normal politics — who will make possible any shift in a new direction.
Asha Ransby-Sporn is a Chicago-based organizer and writer, and a columnist for In These Times. She was a co-founder of Black Youth Project 100, where she led the groups’s national organizing program and worked on racial, economic and gender justice issues across the U.S. Asha has led and been a part of community-based campaigns that have won ballot referenda on investing in non-police mental health programs, blocked a weapons manufacturer from a multi-million dollar tax break, pressured institutions to divest from the private prison industry, and led on winning political campaigns including to elect Chicago’s union-backed mayor in 2023.
Asha is deeply committed to building power through organizing and writing about the power and complexity of social movements.
