“Living a moral life in an age of bullies requires collective action; it cannot be done alone. Each of us must organize and participate in a vast network of moral resistance. From this solidarity we will grow stronger. This is what our current moment requires.”
— Robert Reich, July 29, 2025.
Right after the 2020 election, Donald Trump attempted to convince Republican Canvas Board members in Wayne County (which includes Detroit, near where I live) to declare a substantial number of votes for Biden as fraudulent, asserting that the election was “fake” and that he had actually won. He included his usual rant against Black cities, describing them as corrupt cesspools of lawlessness and violence.
To which our Michigan Attorney General, Dana Nessell, replied: “Really the themes that we see, that persist, are this: Black people are corrupt, Black people are incompetent and Black people can’t be trusted,” she said. “That’s the narrative that is continually espoused by the Trump campaign and their allies in these lawsuits.”
As explained by former University of California, Berkeley School of Law professor Bertrall Ross in 2020: “What we’re seeing in the (Trump) campaign now is the same voter suppression practices we have seen historically to target African Americans and other people of color. For the Republican Party, which has grown increasingly allergic to rules and reality, it’s also a driver of strategy.”
The way racism works for Trump is that he fires up his base with fear and hatred of people of color, giving whites a sense of race-based superiority so that they will blindly believe his claims that he won the 2020 election.
It is no surprise that, back in office in 2024, Trump has swept thousands of innocent brown people into concentration camps while lashing out against predominantly Black cities like Baltimore, Maryland, and Birmingham, Alabama.
A Tale of Two Cities: Baltimore and Birmingham
Look at Baltimore, Maryland: This is a city Trump has slandered with his usual racist tropes as “very dangerous & filthy place,” a “disgusting, rat and-rodent infested mess,” and where Mayor Brendon Scott’s respect for his constituents’ heartfelt desires and can-do capabilities has enabled all kinds of change for the better.
Scott, who is 41 years old and has been Mayor since 2020, has lowered crime by community engagement and by offering opportunities to the city’s gang members.
First, he identified the perpetrators of gang violence and gun deaths and then offered them alternative lifestyles. The thing about gangs is that they offer young Black people a structure for their lives: they have their own system of rules that you must obey and leaders who make it clear what you have to do and to earn their respect and that of your peers. In other words, gangs are an (anti-social, illegal) means of achieving dignity and self-worth.
But gang violence reached a point in Baltimore where everyone (including, I suspect, the gang members themselves) was afraid to go out on the streets for fear of getting shot. Whole neighborhoods were hunkered down in their houses while bullets flew every which way, with the result that community life was atrophied.
In this situation, Scott marshalled his government and police force to rebuild a sense of community and purpose. Upon election, he announced the creation of the Mayor’s Office of Neighborhood Safety and Engagement to “coordinate city agencies and community partners in the fight against violence.”
Shalise Manza Young notes in The Contrarian that in 2023, Baltimore set up The Summer Youth Engagement Strategy, sponsoring pool and family block parties. Then summer camps and community centers were opened.
Young reports impressive results: “While noting that the work is far from over, Scott’s office announced this month that there had been 68 homicides and 164 non-fatal shootings in the city over the first six months of the year, a 22% and 19% decline, respectively, over the first six months of 2024, and a 62% drop compared with the first six months of 2022. There were five killings in April, the fewest in a month in Baltimore’s recorded history.” (bolding added)
How did Scott and his Baltimore allies achieve such stunning results?
First, they made sure that the gang leaders understood that the police knew who they were and would come for them if they continued to terrorize their neighborhood. Then, they offered them recreation and athletic activities along with technical training and educational skills that would help them achieve a better future. As a result, job opportunities were opened for 8,500 kids.
Now look at Birmingham, Alabama: Here, there is similar excitement about 44-year-old Mayor Randall Woodfin’s organizing city dwellers to take charge of their own neighborhoods. In a 2024 WBRC 6 news conference, Mayor Woodfin addressed the city’s efforts to curtail violent crime in a press conference. He explained that:
“It does not matter what people do as long as everyone is active in saying ‘this is my block, this is my street, and I am going to protect it. If I see any form of crime, I will report it.’ Birmingham, Alabama, would be a safer place.
[…] Almost a month in, we are pleased with the progress. I think the biggest thing for us is continuing to get the pulse of the residents about how they feel about it. Their likes, dislikes, etc., adjusting as we need to.
[…] What I want to do is continue to have conversations with those influencers, with those entertainers, with those activists and other young people who have platforms that young people follow to say ‘I need you to use your platform to encourage young people, tell young people there are other ways, there are other options. You don’t have to go down this path.’”
A key to bringing down urban crime is adequate police staffing and cooperation between police and other city agencies: “Collaboration is different from take over, collaboration is different from take over. I encourage collaboration all the time.”
In a 2021 article about the relationship between (poorly-funded) education and crime in Baltimore, Dr. Rayshawn Ray, professor of Sociology at the University of Maryland, argues “that the higher one’s level of education, the lower the propensity to commit crimes, particularly violent ones.” This suggests that improving education can be a key factor in reducing crime rates in Baltimore.
Shalize Young links Randall Woodfin’s work in Birmingham, Alabama and Brandon Scott’s with Brandon Johnson’s in Chicago. “All three of those mayors,” she notes, “are Black men. While the Trump regime reminds us daily that it has no regard for the lives and contributions of Black people and has made painting Chicago and Baltimore in particular as savage hellscapes a cottage industry, these men are leading major turnarounds in their respective cities.”
“As they garner praise for the work they’ve done to improve their cities,” concludes Young, “they’re showing that, as Scott has said, DEI (diversity, equity, inclusion) means ‘definitely earned it.’”
While Trump has significantly undermined key U.S. institutional defenses of democracy, such as the separation of powers, having corrupted his Executive branch and influenced the Supreme Court and Congress, it is clear that democratic work continues at the local level in cities and states.
Related Articles: Going Over the Falls in a Barrel: Can Democracy Survive in America? | Trumpocracy 2.0 and the Inevitability of History | On Freedom: How to Protect Democratic Values in a Second Trump Regime
Is Individualism the Culprit?
New York Times columnist David Brooks argues that Trump has been able to erode democracy because people have abandoned community morals for individualism. Western individualism prevents us from making moral decisions (which require group consensus) because, “crudely put, the Enlightenment took away the primacy of the community and replaced it with the primacy of the autonomous individual.”
Brooks explains Trump’s moral emptiness as the result of a society so fragmented by individualism that we have lost all sense of the common good. Thus, the Republican Party’s abandonment of adherence to historical norms and of law itself.
It seems to me that Brooks has the wrong end of the stick: American democracy is not being destroyed by excessive individualism but by tightly coherent groups of people who believe Trump’s promises to make America white again and desire a “unitary president,” aka dictatorship, under his leadership.
When Brooks sees Trump as an individual “who doesn’t even try to speak the language of morality,” I do not attribute his behavior to socially fragmented individualism but to followers delighted by his narcissism, a condition that elevates individualism to a pathological level.
With the Heritage Foundation’s detailed Project 2025 as a script, Trump’s bad (white) boy charisma attracts social groups to cohere around his wishes. It is not individualism but group coherence that empowers the Proud Boys, Keepers, MAGA Republicans, and White Supremacists.
Much like the gangs of Baltimore and Birmingham, these function as coherent cadres rigidly organized around firmly held norms and values, though they produce vicious rather than virtuous cycles of behavior.
It is not, in Brooks’ argument, that individualism has left them unable to make moral judgments, but that their judgments are based on fascist values. Everyone but their pathological leader, that is to say, is community-minded, eager to act upon their sense of white entitlement with the kind of cruelty and hatred he encourages.
Mayors Brandon, Scott, and Woodfin herald a new generation of political leaders who arrive at different values by listening to what their communities say and then using their skills in governance and intergroup collaboration to shape these needs into solutions for a common good.
Mere Resistance vs Community Hope
The other day, I attended a protest against the current regime where we lined up on both sides of a busy boulevard, displayed our posters at passing cars, and then cheered, waving little upside-down American flags, when they honked in agreement.
As always, there were a lot of homemade signs with an idiosyncratic variety of messages. I joined three enthusiastic young women who were grinning from ear to ear and waving signs that read “Jesus would be flipping so many tables by now,” “Make Empathy Standard Again,” and “Dissent is Patriotic.”
As I sat next to them with my sign which read “Climate Voters!” (Trump had removed all major reports about the impact of climate and gutted EPA protections against pollution just that week), I realized that all four of our signs expressed group values: those of the Christian religion, a moral standard including empathy, dissent as an element of patriotism, and the common good of our Beloved Planet.
Sitting on my other side were three oldsters whose signs expressed what they were against: “Down With Ice,” “Rage Against the Regime,” and (held by a quiet little old man), ”Screw the Mother F….s!”
All were perfectly appropriate to the theme of the protest, which was “Resistance,” but from the way they talked — a litany of what Trump had done, one malfeasance gloomily recounted after another, delivered in an extremely discouraged tone — it seemed to me that Trump’s last six months of cruel divisiveness had overwhelmed them.
Even though they were resisting by sitting there with their protest signs, his blitzkrieg of misdeeds had left them in a state of discouragement bordering on depression.
The contrast with the three cheerful young women left me wondering whether it was their grounding in a religious, normative, and patriotic value frames rather than a merely individualistic sense of grievance that endowed them with a moxie and stick-to-itiveness that bodes well for the future of our democracy.
Editor’s Note: The opinions expressed here by the authors are their own, not those of Impakter.com — Cover Photo Credit: Alisdare Hickson.
