Resistance

The Resistance to the home-grown Hitler's regime is organizing at all levels and among all groups, from environmentalists to civil rights advocates, even including Democratic officeholders.  And now a leader:

"President Obama is rethinking his plans to withdraw from the political arena after he leaves office next year, hinting to friends and supporters that he wants to add his voice to the shellshocked Democratic activists and elected officials who are now angrily vowing to oppose Donald J. Trump’s presidency."

"In his remarks to activists, Mr. Obama urged them to stop moping and to ratchet up their opposition to Mr. Trump by Thanksgiving. He promised to join their cause soon after, telling them: “You’re going to see me early next year, and we’re going to be in a position where we can start cooking up all kinds of great stuff to do.”

The rest of this New York Times article is about Democratic officeholders and advocacy groups resolved to oppose the coming tide of catastrophe.  A Politico piece is about Obama campaigns and White House alums organizing a Resistance.

The New Yorker has a long piece based on David Remnick's recent conversation with President Obama.  He's engagingly honest, and let's hope his hopes work out.  But if not, and in the meantime, the Resistance.

Remnick quotes President Obama on Internet information and the climate crisis:

The new media ecosystem “means everything is true and nothing is true,” Obama told me later. “An explanation of climate change from a Nobel Prize-winning physicist looks exactly the same on your Facebook page as the denial of climate change by somebody on the Koch brothers’ payroll. And the capacity to disseminate misinformation, wild conspiracy theories, to paint the opposition in wildly negative light without any rebuttal—that has accelerated in ways that much more sharply polarize the electorate and make it very difficult to have a common conversation.”

That marked a decisive change from previous political eras, he maintained. “Ideally, in a democracy, everybody would agree that climate change is the consequence of man-made behavior, because that’s what ninety-nine per cent of scientists tell us,” he said. “And then we would have a debate about how to fix it. That’s how, in the seventies, eighties, and nineties, you had Republicans supporting the Clean Air Act and you had a market-based fix for acid rain rather than a command-and-control approach. So you’d argue about means, but there was a baseline of facts that we could all work off of. And now we just don’t have that.”

That can't be the whole explanation, because the rest of the world is not fooled. Meanwhile, internationally, an angry world prepares to resist any Trumped-up efforts to derail the Paris climate agreement:

...with the election of Donald J. Trump — and his threat to withdraw the United States from the accord — shellshocked negotiators confronted potentially deep fissures developing in the international consensus on climate change. On the sidelines of the negotiations, some diplomats turned from talking of rising seas and climbing temperatures toward how to punish the United States if Mr. Trump follows through, possibly with a carbon-pollution tax on imports of American-made goods.