As 2025 slumbers toward its end, there are tentative signs of life in our constitutional republic. Few — certainly not I — would have predicted that the first stirrings of congressional resistance to unbridled executive power would begin with Marjorie Taylor Greene. And who would have guessed that state lawmakers in Indiana would be among the first to stand up to President Trump and hold firm to basic principles of good government and constitutional limits. Resistance breeds confidence. Now a small group of Republican House members has broken ranks to allow a vote on legislation restoring healthcare subsidies. These are modest acts, but meaningful ones. They suggest that the fever of submission to an all-powerful President claiming extraordinary presidential power may be breaking.
I have argued that we are living through an attempted revolution — though not the kind we are accustomed to recognizing. Unlike past revolutions fought in the name of equality, Trump’s revolution is directed against legitimacy itself. It rejects the idea that political authority must be grounded in equality before the law. It offers no alternative institutions, no constructive vision of a new order. Its aims are destruction and power: destruction understood as the delegitimation of elections, courts, laws, expertise, and the procedures that make politics possible; and power understood simply as domination — the replacement of one elite with another, stripped of justification and bound only by force.
At its core, this is a kind of class war, though not the economic struggle imagined by Marx. The class behind Trump is new and difficult to name. But understanding it is essential if the most excessive and illegal acts committed in its name are to be resisted. It is a coalition of an anti-bureaucratic bourgeoisie, a resentful petty bourgeoisie, and a plutocratic elite. What unites these otherwise divergent groups is rebellion against authority. They are the unmanaged and the uncredentialed, those who experience oversight — by auditors, regulators, professors, journalists, or judges — not as a condition of fairness but as humiliation. Oversight is recast as conspiracy.
Judges, professors, regulators, and journalists — figures meant to safeguard impartiality — are imagined instead as a coordinated apparatus of exclusion. This new revolutionary class experiences its marginalization from cultural and institutional power as illegitimate. It believes itself the rightful elite and resents any authority that would constrain, judge, or limit it. For them, legitimacy itself is exposed as a fraud, a mask for domination. In its place stands only the rule of power: Thrasymachus’ claim that justice is the right of the stronger, and a crude Darwinism in which only the fittest deserve to survive. Lawful order is not reformed but abandoned.
What has been most shocking over the past year is how compliant and cowardly so many lawmakers and leaders have been, coordinating with and excusing the worst of Trump’s excesses. Most Americans — and many elected Republicans — are not revolutionaries. They may share the President’s anger at liberal elites, but they do not wish to burn the system to the ground. And yet, fearful of Trump’s wrath, they have fallen in line. The result has been both embarrassing and dangerous.
Still, there have been extraordinary acts of political courage. Governors and mayors have resisted the President’s attempts to mobilize state National Guards. Judges and lawyers have challenged unconstitutional and illegal actions. And millions of Americans have taken to the streets — with whistles, bullhorns, costumes, and resolve — to protest the lawless and un-American spectacle of masked ICE agents operating with impunity.
One of the most important lessons Hannah Arendt offered in Eichmann in Jerusalem is that bureaucratic evil depends less on fanaticism than on coordination — and on the willingness of decent people to look the other way. Arendt was struck by the fact that Eichmann, in his dealings with educated Germans and even with Jewish leaders, was never meaningfully challenged. No one forced him to stop and think about what he was doing. She contrasted this with countries like Denmark and Belgium, where political leaders refused to cooperate with Nazi deportation orders — and where the vast majority of Jews survived.
The lesson Arendt drew was simple and unsettling: thoughtless obedience reaches its limits when it is confronted by others who refuse to coordinate, who interrupt routine, who insist on judgment. In dark times, the refusal to go along is not merely moral. It is political. Courage is contagious. After a year of unexpected cowardice, it is heartening that we are heading into 2026 with hope.
