Minneapolis is showing a new kind of anti-Trump resistance

While the Trump administration continues its immigration enforcement operations in Minnesota, anti-ICE protests continued in Minneapolis and around the country — from Los Angeles to rural Maine — over the weekend.

In the Twin Cities area, meanwhile, this activism is well-organized; but it’s not a traditional, anti-government protest movement of the likes we saw during President Donald Trump’s first term. Some have called this new model “dissidence” or “neighborism” — or, more traditionally, “direct action.” As one organizer described what’s happening in the city, “it’s kind of unorganized-organized.”

To better understand this new development and its possible ramifications, Vox spoke with Harvard University’s Theda Skocpol, a renowned expert on political organizing in the US, who has written seminal analyses of the decline of the labor movement, the rise of the Tea Party movement, and the strengths and weaknesses of the resistance movement that arose during Trump’s first term.

When Vox last spoke to Skocpol, in the days after October’s No Kings protests, Skocpol emphasized that the point of protest isn’t to keep growing the number of people in the streets. It’s to create opportunities for organizing and to build lasting political power.

In her view, Minnesota is meeting that model for opposition: “Minnesota has emerged as a heroic example of state and local and neighborhood-level resistance in the name of core patriotic and Christian values. And that is an extraordinarily powerful counterforce that will transform what other states and localities do.”

Our conversation has been edited for clarity and length.

What were your initial reactions to how Minneapolis responded to the ICE surge this year, and to the killings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti?

The Trump administration made a huge mistake in thinking that Minneapolis would be an easy display case for overwhelming an urban area. They must have thought this would be an easy place to demonstrate overwhelming force that would cow people into saying, “Whatever you want to do is fine,” and then they could proceed to other places. 

What they misjudged is that Minnesota, including the Twin Cities area, has a very strong civic culture and a lot of neighborhood connectivity. And this has been very much neighbors organizing to help neighbors and to monitor what’s going on. It certainly was enabled by the fact that Mayor Jacob Frey took a strong stand right from the beginning in calling “bullshit, bullshit.”

[Minnesota] was the wrong place to try and do that, because in many ways they were pre-networked and ready to push back. The cumulative effect of the two [killings] and the fact that the lying was so blatant and the effort to demonize the victims was over the top — it’s that sequence that, on top of a highly mobilized urban area, that just made this explosive.

How do these protests differ from earlier anti-Trump and anti-ICE protests we’ve seen, like No Kings, or the anti-ICE actions in Los Angeles and Chicago?

All these things are complementary. I would point to three kinds of movements. First is big street demonstrations, protests. There are elements of that in Minneapolis, of course.

Then there are organized groups that are engaged in ongoing political pushback. The Tea Party and the anti-Trump resistance in 2016 were both examples of that. They were sparked by the election of a president and co-partisans in Washington that caused people to organize and start continuous pushback, not just street demonstrations. 

The thing in Minneapolis is something further that we haven’t seen elements of elsewhere. It’s churches and neighborhoods and grassroots community organizational networks that are already existing, that mobilized to help immigrant families first and foremost. Then this developed into these kind of watchers with cameras. There’ve been elements of that in other places, but it’s just much more pervasive, widespread, and organized in Minneapolis.

Underneath it all is people in their churches, in their neighborhoods, organizing like a PTA meeting. In a lot of parts of America, you couldn’t organize a PTA meeting.

You’ve offered observations before about what anti-Trump resistance efforts should look like: You’ve said that they should be bottom-up, grassroots-organized, and energized around specific goals in both election years and off-years to be lasting. 

Is Minneapolis following that model?

This is a further iteration of it because the threat is continuous. The ICE surges are not just an election year thing. It will carry over.

Also, I’m not saying there are no top-down elements here, but it rests on a very strong civic and neighborhood culture. There are a lot of organizers in Minneapolis; some are Indivisible-connected, some are labor unions. There’s strong labor unions there. That matters. 

There are people who are doing what they can to raise money, to organize trainings, to do all kinds of things that really empower and create channels for people to step into it if they want to and haven’t before.

The political leadership in the state of Minnesota has also been important. Governor [Tim] Walz has gotten more confrontational. It was very important that Mayor Frey didn’t hesitate when he spoke up right away.

But there is a highly financed, huge, and rapidly growing paramilitary force in the land. And it’s not going away quickly.

But I don’t expect people in Minneapolis to quit. I don’t think they’re going to be easily fooled about things. I expect their ongoing resistance to remain in proportion to whatever threat they face. 

So can this resistance be replicated beyond Minneapolis? Or do these qualities mean resisting this effectively is unique to Minnesota?

We have to be a little cautious, because I don’t think there are very many metropolitan areas where the combination of political leadership and community-level networks are as strong and ready to respond.

There are some distinctions, yes. Scandinavian public culture is very embedded there. And it doesn’t matter if you’re Scandinavian or not. The layout of the city, the way people were just realizing things are happening through kids and parents of kids in school [made a difference]. A lot of the people who are active are not going out to protest, are not even standing out with cameras. They’re ferrying groceries to neighbors, picking up kids at school. So you have neighborhood networks, some of which are left over from the fact that police reform had gone very far there [after the 2020 George Floyd protests].

It’s important that there’s a lot of religious-based organizing, primarily Lutherans. Lutherans are moderate Protestants, not part of this kind of Christian nationalist wing. There’s lots of Methodists and Catholics involved here too, and Jews and Muslims. But Lutherans have a strong congregational culture.

So it’s not going to be easy to find this unique combination. But it also may be that the Trump administration will not have the wherewithal to send such a massive force into one place.

If you come into Massachusetts, you’re going to face some similar stuff, and they would’ve faced similar stuff in Maine if they’d gone further there.

So what comes next? Will this get us over the popular 3.5 percent theory for social change [that governments aren’t able to survive when 3.5 percent of the citizenry engages in sustained nonviolent protest]? Will other cities and states be able to replicate this?

What the people of Minneapolis have managed is to raise national awareness of this authoritarianism. It’s an astonishing proportion of Americans who watched the videos of the Pretti and Good killings. We’re in the 70 percent range.

In March, we’re going to see the next round of No Kings protests. If the weather is good, we might see bigger numbers, and exceed the popular 3.5 percent protest metric. But it’s always going to be a small minority of people who actually go out to street demonstrations, and they’re always going to be skewed younger.

The significance of these events in Minneapolis is that they have basically shown us a kind of moral resistance. We’re beyond the point now where people can’t see what this is. In that way, the deaths of these two people are now being described in martyr-like terms. 

Other places will learn from Minneapolis. If there are efforts to flood cities with paramilitary forces, others will organize. It won’t be easy, but the fact that Minneapolis did it first — it’s a model. People do move between these places. From Chicago to California, and to Charlotte, North Carolina, there’s learning that goes on. 

So I’m not pessimistic about the Minneapolis resistance. It’s really neighborhood self-help and resistance. It’s not occasional protests; it’s ongoing. It’s every day that people have worked this into their routines, and I don’t believe it will stop until the horrors stop.

One of the things this has done is to wake up state-level officials that they’ve got to get their act together. It’s been slow, but if you have federal militarized forces descending on your state, and at the same time the federal government’s trying to cut off revenue, you better organize; you better be prepared to explain what you’re doing to your citizens.

Minnesota has emerged as a heroic example of state- and local- and neighborhood-level resistance in the name of core patriotic and Christian values. And that is an extraordinarily powerful counterforce that will transform what other states and localities do — and what many associations that we don’t think of as political will do.