by Katalin Balog

“…eventually he regained his balance and dismissed all thought of resistance from his mind, and concentrated on accepting the dizzy state of the world that was spinning round him as a perfectly natural state of affairs…” —László Krasznahorkai, The Melancholy of Resistance (trans. George Szirtes)

I grew up in communist Hungary, the country that is the original source of the bitterness of Krasznahorkai, winner of this year’s Nobel prize in literature. During my upbringing there, and before, for generations, politics had been a constant presence in everyday life, and history, too, with still fresh memories of fascism all around. I am not saying that politics dominated everything; there was life beyond it, but still, it was unavoidable. It provided the oppressive, at times humiliating, at times ridiculous mise en scène of our lives. During my youth spent in dissolute opposition to the tired version of communism in the 1980s, I knew that there was an alternative: the democracies of the West, which struck me, on my visits as an impoverished tourist from Eastern Europe, as obviously, vastly, and exhilaratingly superior to the places on my side of the Iron Curtain.

When I moved to New York in 1989, illusory as some of my expectations turned out to be, I reasonably concluded that I escaped history’s clutches. Like a good enough mother, guarding inconspicuously the safety of her children, American democracy turned out to be, from my vantage point in any case, the constantly humming background of a normal life unmarred by the intrusions of a power-hungry political regime. The newspapers, by and large, reported the facts instead of the tendentious, strangely formulated distortions and outright lies I grew up on, and there seemed to be a certain, minimal level of decorum in public affairs. I didn’t feel the need to be constantly on alert; I didn’t even need to know much about politics at all.

But now it looks like history has caught up with me again. So I started wondering if the Eastern European experience can shed any light on the present predicament of the US. If it can teach something about the meaning of resistance.

Resistance

During the first Trump presidency, the so-called “Resistance” was considered “cringe” by both the left and the right. As Quinta Jurecic explains in The Atlantic, it became associated with “wine moms” – middle-aged white women whose activism is mocked as self-indulgent and superficial. Worst of all, it was associated with issues like social progressivism and the defence of democracy, which turned out to be not top of the agenda for most of the electorate. After the second coming of Trump, resistance needs to be rethought if it is to succeed.

As it turns out, resistance has many types. Krasznahorkai gave an interview to Svenska Dagbladet in February of this year. With the deftness that comes from living in a country that experienced oppression of one sort or another for most of its history, he remarks: “There is no hope left in Hungary today, and it is not only because of the Orbán regime…The problem is not only political, but also social…”. His emphasis on the distinction between the political and the social is illuminating. The problems in the US are also not only political, but social as well. And the political and the social call for different kinds of resistance, which I call *implicit *and explicit.

Implicit resistance is an affirmation of values and views that go against the prevailing order without directly tangling with its shibboleths. Václav Havel, in his essay The Power of the Powerless – for which he went to prison for 3 years – describes how even ordinary people can throw a wrench in the gears of a regime just by “living in truth” – like writing a novel that is truthful despite official expectations to the contrary. There are many examples of this under repression. Géza Ottlik’s great novel, School at the Frontier, recounts events at a military school in Hungary in the late 1920s, where the main characters get bullied as a group but develop a “method”, an inner resistance that allows them to preserve their dignity. The novel was published in 1959 despite the fact that its last scene is situated in the immediate aftermath of the 1956 Revolution, a “delicate subject” at the time. The novel became a bible, a handbook, a consolation for people living under oppression. Péter Esterházy, who copied the novel by hand on a single sheet of paper, said in his homage to Ottlik, “One likes to think of Ottlik as a guarantee that truly awful things will not happen….He is the writer of our defeat, who, despite all, wants us to believe – one of the duties of a great magican – that nevertheless, still, somehow, we scored.” (my translation). Ottlik did not attempt to overthrow the regime, didn’t even disobey it in any overt ways. But he did push the culture and changed the meaning of living under oppression for many who read him.

Explicit resistance, on the other hand, involves taking on politics directly, like when the revolutionaries of 1956 called for the fall of one-party dictatorship. Explicit resistance, by its nature, is riskier than implicit resistance. It sometimes ends in death.

But there is no sharp line between the two. No regime explicitly outlaws the truth as such; so writing doesn’t necessarily involve a direct confrontation. Nevertheless, the truth might be labeled a lie, and writing about it might be treated as an explicitly hostile act. Virtually all of Milan Kundera’s novels were banned in communist Czechoslovakia, and after the normalization following 1968, he was stripped of all his posts and affiliations, and had to subsist on translation work and help through informal support networks until he was finally allowed to emigrate in 1975.

Which tactic is suited best to our present situation, in Trump’s America? David Brooks, for example, despite the perceived failure of the “Resistance” during the first term, seems to side with explicit resistance, like protests, organizing, and refusing to give in to pressure where it is applied. Others, like Justin Smith-Ruiu, argue for holding the line in more subtle ways, engaging in implicit resistance, trying to push the social, without directly confronting the political. But as Krasznahorkai points out, the political and the social are intertwined. And so advocates of explicit resistance should also take on the work of implicit resistance in the sphere of the social, but conversely, it is also true that, in many cases, implicit resistance is not enough.

The order of things

While the political is simple to think about: elections, laws, the power of the executive, the functioning of government agencies, etc., the social is harder to put one’s finger on. By the social, I mean something like the “order of things:” the invisible ways in which the cultural norms of an era are set, for example, by forming and transmitting stereotypes about categories of people and the nature of institutions, or establishing mutual expectations about what kind of verbal and non-verbal interactions are normal.

Here is an example. In the first impeachment trial of Donald Trump, Adam Schiff’s defense of constitutional principles and democracy took on an air of unreality. This was not for lack of courage or even a certain kind of brilliance on his part. But his words could no longer carry the weight of their meaning. What was happening was deep. It was not just a breakdown in the outward behavior of political, government, and media actors. It was not just the diminishment of checks and balances. Creeping authoritarianism is deeper and harder to resist than mere bad behavior. It changes the ways people see and experience their world.

This radical transformation of worldview didn’t only occur in true believers in the cult of the president. It also occurred in the careerists around him; in the reluctant collaborators; and finally, more and more, it was all of us. The defense of previously widely shared norms took on a different meaning; it suddenly started to seem like ineffectual hectoring. Ever so subtly, figures and institutions associated with the rule of law start seeming quixotic, overeager, overrighteous, ripe for being taken down a notch. Even if we didn’t want to admit it, there was a creepy undertow to the spectacle. It was not solely due to the counterattacks and the muddying of waters via a ceaseless torrent of non-sequiturs, insinuations, and obscure threats – though they did help. The bigger problem was that these norms no longer had a firm foothold in the world – they were more like a hangover.

In School at the Frontier, Ottlik explains this phenomenon very clearly. He describes how the child protagonist is transported from the “civilian”, “naïve” world of unconditional parental love to a military boarding school where he has to cope with officially sanctioned bullying by a group of kids; from the warmth of home to the cold terror of the real world. The two worlds have trouble mixing. One day, he receives a package from his mother containing a comb that she insists he use to always make a good impression. In his new environment, those words have an absurd ring. What worked and made sense outside becomes irrelevant, in fact, embarrassing.

Which world is more real? We don’t get an unequivocal answer in the book, but it is the civil memories that carry all the meaning that the school tries, and almost succeeds, to destroy.

Implicit resistance

Ottlik himself contributed to a change of discourse around oppression and obedience. But he was aware that the dominant discourse of any age is a given that cannot be changed by simply saying no to it. One needs to build an alternative discourse in which people can live. If the liberal principles of the rule of law, separation of powers, and individual rights are to be revived, a new life needs to be given to them. Right now, these principles leave a large portion of the electorate cold. The resistance to Trump needs to build a new culture around them that people find authentic. The Democratic party needs to come up with leaders people can believe, who don’t seem alien and judgmental to them.

At the same time, liberalism won’t become the organizing principle of society again unless a remedy is also found for the social divisiveness and mutual hostility of the last decades that acquired special ferocity during the Trump years. In the process we, the citizens of this country, have become clueless avatars of opposing forces. That is what authoritarians desire – to consume their enemies, even in their enmity. Any sign of life outside the self-defined sphere of reality is a threat to be quashed – to be distracted from by an unceasing flow of provocation. And things can get much worse. Hate and illiberalism have established themselves in the mainstream to such a remarkable degree that when a former DOGE staffer had a social-media post that included the phrase “Normalize Indian hate,” J.D.Vance declined to condemn it. And recent reporting in Politico about up-and-coming young Republicans praising Hitler and wanting to send opponents to the gas chambers exceeds the darkest fantasies.

I honestly don’t know where the remedy for this will come from. But the hate and fear of these past years, fueled by the algorithm, needs to be transcended. It is not that hard to think of the many good people among Trump’s voters. We have to again practice our human ability to tolerate disagreement and difference, to not wall ourselves off rigidly from those who view things differently. This shouldn’t mean a tolerance for racism or fascism, but there are a lot of views one disagrees with that one can recognize are not inherently evil.

A related problem for the “social” is posed by a defining characteristic of the Trump regime: it builds a sense of urgency and high alert. Everything is swallowed up in the circus of politics, and the human sphere is emptied out by constant bickering. There is no longer room for a purely private existence, independent of politics, thinking of the world and the people in it freely, with relaxed curiosity. We can’t even get lost in a novel or story – everything plays out against the background of the train wreck of our politics. Resistance to preoccupation with ephemeral, unsatisfying aspects of existence may look hopeless as Trump’s reign coincides with the increasingly abusive practices of the attention economy, but examples might be contagious. To quote Esterházy again: to be at home in the world, it doesn’t suffice that we are not enslaved in any way; we also need to keep the most secret machinery of our soul intact.

Explicit resistance

Democracy is also rapidly losing ground in the political arena. The respectable former pillars of democracy: Congress, the Supreme Court, and the DOJ were the first to go. Civil society institutions, like universities, media, law firms, and businesses, are under pressure, though they have lately shown some signs of life, and regular people have also stepped up. But clearly, resisting the regime outright is risky. Things have not gone that far that opposition could cost one’s life, although the risk to livelihood, which is real, is also a powerful deterrent. Many people go along because going along is part of human nature.

How much explicit resistance can be expected from people and institutions? Strangely, in situations far worse than our current one, people have still regularly stepped up. Take Putin’s Russia. While Schiff’s defense of democracy and the rule of law felt like a defeat, Navalny’s rebellion is an inspiration. He was playing a role realistically open in a dictatorship: defiance at the cost of personal safety and happiness.

Resistance to oppression cannot be measured simply by its success. As Hanna Arendt said in Eichmann in Jerusalem:

“For the lesson of such stories is simple and within everybody’s grasp. Politically speaking, it is that under conditions of terror most people will comply, but some people will not… Humanly speaking, no more is required, and no more can reasonably be asked, for this planet to remain a place fit for human habitation.”

In this regard, Terrence Malick’s film A Hidden Life is quite interesting. It is about a peasant in an Austrian village who, when everyone else goes along with the normalization of fascism, simply sticks to the old ways and refuses to fight for the Nazis. Not because he is hoping for a different outcome; just because his own moral compass doesn’t allow him to obey. One can only hope that one won’t be tested too hard in this regard. But as Arendt says, some resistance might be necessary to keep up morale for the rest of us.