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What the Democrats' SOTU Response Might Really Say About Resistance in 2026
Jason Stanley has mapped the authoritarian playbook in detail. What he doesn't cover — what almost nobody covers — is how the loyal opposition runs its own operation on the other side. Liberal nationalism, and the "Resistance Liberals" who push it, don't suppress resistance. They absorb it. And that absorption is doing as much to enable authoritarianism as anything happening on the right. The mechanism works like this. Genuine anger, real fear, the impulse toward resistance — liberal nationalism gives all of it somewhere comfortable to go. Founding myths. Shared values. Better angels. The arc bending toward justice. It performs opposition through aesthetics: the language of fighting back, the imagery of resistance, the emotional register of urgency. And then, when the emergency is most acute, it converts all of that energy into a single magic bullet: wait for November. Authoritarianism doesn't just need active supporters. It needs resistance chilled, slowed, channeled into forms that don't threaten existing power. Liberal nationalism does that job. It doesn't storm the gates. It manages the people who might. Tomorrow that's what you're watching for. The Democrats chose Colonial Williamsburg — a site purpose-built in the 1920s to perform an orderly, conflict-free founding that never existed — to deliver their response to a government that has killed American citizens in the streets of Minneapolis, stripped history from federal sites, and is eight months away from the midterms it is asking you to treat as the answer.
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