Part 7 of this series contains the following chapters:

9. A Constructive Program for Social Self-Defense
10. What Social Self-Defense Is Defending

Defending Society Against MAGA Tyranny: A Prospectus for Action is a report from the Labor Network for Sustainability, co-published by ZNetwork.org.

Click here to read the report in full: Defending Society Against MAGA Tyranny: A Prospectus for Action

A Constructive Program for Social Self-Defense

In the midst of the great civil disobedience campaigns for Indian freedom, Mahatma Gandhi simultaneously promoted what he called the “Constructive Program.” The program encouraged people from the village level on up to organize themselves to meet their needs on an egalitarian, democratic basis. Social Self-Defense likewise needs a positive program, both to meet the needs of those being hurt by the MAGA juggernaut and to demonstrate that there are alternatives to Trumpism worth fighting for.

For the past five years, the Green New Deal has provided a highly popular vision and program that would protect the climate in ways that would create good jobs for working people, end poverty, and alleviate injustice. While the Green New Deal has been bottled up in Washington, there has been a little noted groundswell of movements and programs that are implementing the principles and policies of the Green New Deal at community, municipal, state, tribal, and union levels.[1] This “Green New Deal from Below” can make a unique contribution to the fight to protect workers, vulnerable groups, society as a whole, and the climate in the coming era of Trump tyranny. Indeed, the Green New Deal from Below can provide a unifying constructive program for Social Self-Defense.

Some of these initiatives describe themselves as Green New Deals; others don’t use the name but pursue the same principles and policies, combining the necessity for climate protection with the need for jobs and justice. For example:

• In Seattle, a broad coalition including labor unions, advocates from low-income communities and communities of color, tribal nations, faith leaders, healthcare providers, businesses, environmental advocates, and clean energy experts launched a campaign for the city to create its own Green New Deal. The city council passed a Green New Deal resolution to eliminate all city greenhouse gas emissions by 2030 with a just transition for those affected. The council then established a Green New Deal Oversight Board, with most of its members from climate-affected communities, and passed a progressive payroll tax on employees making at least $150,000 per year who worked for companies with at least $7 million annual payrolls. By 2023 the Oversight Board had distributed $27 million for climate resilience, electrification, and help for low-income homeowners to transition to electric heating.

• In Illinois, the Climate and Equitable Jobs Act promoted by a broad coalition of labor and community groups sets the state on a path to a carbon-free power sector by 2045 with the strongest in the nation labor and equity standards. The bill will slash emissions, create thousands of new clean energy union jobs, expand union apprenticeships for Black and Latinx communities, and increase energy efficiency for public schools. It also contains a transition program for families and communities currently reliant on jobs in the fossil fuel industry. Journalist Liza Featherstone called the legislation “A Green New Deal” for Illinois.

• In Sunset Park, a poor neighborhood in New York City devastated by Superstorm Sandy, residents organized a Sunset Park Climate Justice Center. They began do-it-yourself climate strategies like painting rooftops white to reflect the sun, creating a storm-water collection system, and starting small urban farms. They set up a system of block captains to prepare for future disasters. When developers proposed to rezone the area for upscale development, residents led by the community organization UPROSE demonstrated, rallied, lobbied, and forced them to withdraw the proposal. Then they launched New York’s first community-owned solar cooperative, Sunset Park Solar. It is collectively owned by all its energy consumers and serves 200 low-income residents. Next they developed a plan for a South Brooklyn offshore wind assembly and maintenance hub, part of their vision for a Green Resilient Industrial District, or GRID. The state of New York selected Sunset Park for a wind turbine assembly and maintenance hub, which is expected to provide 1,500 short-term and 500 long-term jobs. The hub will contract with minority- and women-owned business enterprises for at least 30 percent of its supply chain needs. 

• In Kansas and Missouri a group of elected officials developed a plan for a Bi-State Sustainable Reinvestment Corridor to connect Kansas City, Kansas, Kansas City, Missouri, and Independence, Missouri with rapid transit integrated with a wide array of related community development programs, including Zero-emission transportation options; affordable housing; green infrastructure; broadband access; safety and security enhancement; economic development; and renewable energy and energy efficiency projects for public schools and libraries. Planning for the first segments of the plan are underway.  

• In Holyoke, MA, local residents, many of them poor Latinx/Hispanics, suffering from asthma, campaigned to shut down the coal-burning Mount Tom power plant. But, concerned about the jobs of the workers in the plant, they demanded not only closure of the plant but also protections for the plant’s workers. The city and state teamed up on a “Mt. Tom Power Plant Reuse Study” with wide community input that called for conversion of the site to solar energy. 17,000 solar panels have been installed on the site of Mt. Tom’s closed coal-fired power plant. Holyoke’s city-owned utility company now runs almost completely on clean power. The city is continuing to seek job-and-revenue-generating investment for the site, ranging from manufacturing to cannabis production. CBS News headlined its account of Mount Tom’s transition, “How One Small City Sowed the Seeds for Its Own Green New Deal.”

• In DeKalb County, Georgia in the fall of 2024, the DeKalb Green New Deal presented a 100% clean energy and transportation transition plan. Since it started in 2020, the DeKalb Green New Deal has passed 20 climate action policies, resolutions and initiatives. A county official, Ted Terry, told a news outlet: “Our Green New Deal is specifically a DeKalb Green New Deal – it’s what we think we can do with our own resources, our own land, our own people.”
• On New York’s Long Island, a co-op led by women of the Indigenous American Shinnecock Nation have fought for and are now exercising their traditional right to cultivate and harvest kelp in Long Island Sound. Their ocean farming extracts carbon and nitrogen from the polluted waters of Long Island Sound and produces an environmentally friendly alternative to fertilizer derived from fossil fuel. It is also producing jobs for impoverished tribal members. This and similar seacoast programs are often referred to as a “Blue New Deal.”

• In Minneapolis, unionized workers who clean downtown commercial office high-rises struck to demand that their employers take action on climate change. The janitors, members of Service Employees International Union (SEIU) local 26 who are mostly immigrants and women, won a green education initiative that includes training in climate-friendly cleaning and building management, funded by their employers.

With Trump in the White House we can still form municipal agencies like Seattle’s that fund climate-protecting programs that benefit low-income communities. We can still pass state legislation like Illinois’s that embodies the principles and policies of the Green New Deal. We can still organize our neighborhoods the way Sunset Park did for do-it-yourself climate resiliency and jobs-and-justice-friendly development. We can cooperate across state lines like Kansas and Missouri to develop mass transit integrated with climate-friendly housing, education, and other needs. Like Holyoke, we can force the shutting of fossil fuel infrastructure and the develop and implement our own plans for jobs and justice in our communities. Like the DeKalb Green New Deal we can develop plans for a just transition to climate-safe energy and start implementing them with multiple concrete programs. Like the Shinnecock kelp farmers we can form cooperatives and start producing and selling climate-protecting products. And like the Minneapolis janitors, we can strike to force our employers to improve our jobs in ways that protect the climate.

Can the Green New Deal from Below contribute to outflanking an authoritarian national government? Probably not all by itself. But to resist and eventually overcome the Trump tyranny, we need to create bastions of Social Self-Defense. That will involve many methods, including mutual aid, on-the-ground protection of those under attack, intelligence sharing, and many other expressions of solidarity. Green New Deal from Below initiatives can be a critical component of this Social Self-Defense.

First, such initiatives can help meet the need for programs and activities that support individual survival and livable communities. Green New Deals from Below already do this, but the need will be far greater in the face of Project 2025-type cuts to social supports. People in Chile under the Pinochet dictatorship turned to forms of self-help both to resist repression and to provide needed food, shelter, and healthcare for resisters and oppressed communities. The Green New Deal from Below can play a similar role under Trump’s assault on the people’s welfare.

Second, campaigns for Green New Deal from Below programs have proven to be an effective means for bringing together siloed constituencies and helping them unify objectives and actions. Its programs unify climate, jobs, and justice and their proponents. Playing off groups against one another is a regular part of Trump’s playbook. Conversely, mutual aid among those he attacks will be a central means to limit his depredations and ultimately bring them to an end. The Green New Deal from Below can play a significant role in bringing together the diverse groups threatened by Trump and creating cooperation and a sense of community among them.

Third, the resistance to Trump’s authoritarianism will need something that goes beyond resistance to provide inspiration and a better and more attractive alternative. Polling shows that, five years after it first hit the headlines, the elements of the Green New Deal are still highly popular.[2] The Green New Deal from Below shows that it is possible to embody these elements right in the places where people live and work. And those embodiments provide a “proof of concept” demonstrating that the Green New Deal really works and could truly make a better country and a better world. 

While Trump and his minions will no doubt try to crush many positive initiatives, Green New Deal from Below programs are in a relatively strong position to resist. Their initiatives are usually not dependent on the national government for support. They are also generally very popular on their home turf. While Trump and his henchfolk have shown that they will go after anyone, trying to smash popular Green New Deal from Below programs is likely to backfire, causing more political loss than gain. Call it a form of political jujitsu.

How can the Green New Deal from Below be strengthened to help resist Trump’s ravages? To start with we can simply hold up its accomplishments as a demonstration that collective action can win things that people actually need. We can start new local projects around the country to protect people from the effects of Trump’s tyrannical actions and to draw together constituencies around common projects. We can link up to form a concerted Green New Deal from Below that is more than the sum of its individual parts. And we can protect each other from attack.

One of the leading proponents of a Green New Deal from Below is Michelle Wu, the mayor of Boston. Her programs have included solarization and resilience in poor neighborhoods, a massive construction program called the Green New Deal for Boston Public Schools, a Youth Clean Jobs Corp, and provision of free, nutritious breakfasts and lunches to all of Boston’s 50,000 public school students, prepared by an employee- and Black-owned food service company.

Wu has already shown how action by a Green New Deal from Below can resist the coming Trump onslaught. On November 12 she told the Boston Globe that the city’s authorities will not assist federal law enforcement in any mass deportation efforts and pledged to fight the fear that might take hold among some Bostonians when President-elect Donald Trump takes office.

The role of the Green New Deal from Below in the Trump era can go beyond such defensive measures. To paraphrase Wu, the impact of the Green New Deal has been to “expand the sense of what is possible.” A key objective of Trump and Trumpism is to obliterate that sense of possibility – the knowledge that through collective action people can improve their lives and their world. The Green New Deal from Below resists that obliteration, with people organizing to build the blocks of possibility right in their own backyards.

Of course, the Green New Deal from Below by itself won’t stymie the depredations of a national government tyranny. But it is part of a larger process of social self-defense. Its intent is not to abandon the national political arena, but to open a way to reshape it from below. The Green New Deal from Below can go ahead right now to start building parts of the world we want to see in ways that will be hard for the Trump tyranny to stop. It can bring the forces together that need to cooperate if the Trump regime is to be put to an end. And it can show that our individual and common needs can be met through collective action, even under highly adverse circumstances.

10. What Social Self-Defense Is Defending

While Trump and MAGA threaten specific individuals and groups, they also threaten the essential principles that make it possible for people to live a life that is not nasty, brutish, and short. Defending these principles is a common interest – indeed necessity — for all of us. Conversely, defending the rights and wellbeing of every individual and group is essential to preserving the rights and wellbeing of all.

As the Preamble to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights points out, “Recognition of the inherent dignity and of the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family is the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world.” Similarly, the protection of the earth from devastating climate change and other environmental destruction is essential to the preservation of ourselves and our posterity. The fundamental principle of constitutionalism – that governments and their officials must be ruled by law – is necessary to prevent tyranny. The recognition that human beings are part of one species and must share one planet is necessary to prevent efforts to advance one nation, people, or group by destroying others.

These principles provide a basis for unifying the struggle against Trump and MAGA. They provide a way to ground the objectives of the anti-Trump movement on fundamental norms.

These principles can define not only what Social Self-Defense is fighting against, but what it is fighting for. They provide the ultimate grounding for the case against MAGA. They can serve as the basis and justification for alternatives proposed by Social Self-Defense. And they provide “red lines” that must not be crossed in any kind of cooperation with the Trump regime.

Human rights: Many of Trump’s and Project 2025’s proposals will result in deprivation of human rights. Their housing, education, healthcare, and other social welfare proposals will result in deprivation of the human rights to housing, education, and healthcare. Their proposals to dismantle labor law will eliminate the right of workers to organize, bargain collectively, and undertake concerted action — and their basic human rights to freedom of speech, assembly, and expression. Their proposals to further restrict the right to vote undermine the fundamental right to equality. The list could go on to include discrimination against LGTBQ+ people, women, racial and religious groups, and other infractions too numerous even to list. Social Self-Defense means protection of human rights.

The earth:Our individual and common life depend on our natural environment. Trump’s assault on every aspect of the environment has already begun. His proposals for expanding fossil fuel production and burning spell catastrophe for the earth’s climate. His nominees to head the EPA, Department of the Interior, Energy Department, State Department, and other agencies have dedicated their lives to destroying the environment in the interest of private enrichment. Social Self-Defense means protecting the natural world and a climate system capable of sustaining human life.

Government under law: Richard Nixon notoriously said, “When the president does it, that means it is not illegal.” This is the doctrine of tyranny, against which society has struggled since the era of the “divine right of kings.” Donald Trump propounds the same constitutional doctrine, saying for example that, “The law’s totally on my side, meaning, the president can’t have a conflict of interest.” That terrifying doctrine has now been enshrined by Trump-appointed judges on the Supreme Court. While constitutional interpretations can differ, a doctrine of unlimited presidential power is tantamount to tyranny. Social Self-Defense means making governmental institutions and officials subject to law.

One people, one planet: Donald Trump’s bellicose threats and insults to other countries and their leaders pave the road to war. His threats of unilateral economic aggression pave the way to international conflict, trade wars, and downward global economic spirals. His repudiation of global efforts for climate protection paves the way for both American self-destruction and the destruction of the rest of humanity.

It is a truism that the world today is too interdependent for any one nation to provide for its own wellbeing unless it also assures the wellbeing of the rest of the world community. The problems of individual nations, races, and religions cannot be solved by making economic, military, or environmental war on others. Security and environmental wellbeing require global cooperation.

Social Self-Defense means international cooperation to provide a secure future for people and planet.

At best, Trump and MAGA will do immense harm. They will expand warfare, destroy the climate, increase inequality, and bring mass impoverishment at home and abroad. At worst they will replace American democracy with a lasting tyranny.

A month after Trump was elected, a Reuters/Ipsos poll found that barely 40% of Americans said their opinion of Trump was favorable; 55% said it was unfavorable.[3] Trump and MAGA can be overcome if a substantial proportion of that majority – joined perhaps by later converts – shift from passive disapproval to active withdrawal of consent. This prospectus lays out many ways to implement that active withdrawal of consent.

Passive acquiescence is consent. The active withdrawal of consent is Social Self-Defense.

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[1] More than a hundred Green New Deal initiatives in more than 40 states are described in Jeremy Brecher, The Green New Deal from Below: How Ordinary People Are Building a Just and Climate-Safe Economy (Urbana: Illinois University Press, 2024).

[2] Grace Adcox and Catherine Fraser, “Five Years After Its Introduction, the Green New Deal Is Still Incredibly Popular,” Data for Progress, February 6, 2024. https://www.dataforprogress.org/blog/2024/2/6/five-years-after-its-introduction-the-green-new-deal-is-still-incredibly-popular

[3] Less than half of Americans say opinion of Trump is favorable: Poll

Jeremy Brecher is a co-founder and senior strategic advisor for the Labor Network for Sustainability. He is the author of more than a dozen books on labor and social movements, including Strike! Common Preservation in a Time of Mutual Destruction, and The Green New Deal from Below.

The mission of the Labor Network for Sustainability is to be a relentless force for urgent, science-based climate action by building a powerful labor-climate movement to secure an ecologically sustainable and economically just future where everyone can make a living on a living planet.

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