Plateau, Impasse, and the Work of Hope
A recent CrimethInc. article on the “plateau” or “impasse” of the Trump 2.0 era arrived on social media as both diagnosis and summons. It wears the language of analysis—historical comparison, enumerated objectives, retrospective narration—yet it is also unmistakably a call to action. The question worth asking is not whether the article is sincere or well-intentioned, but what kind of document it actually is, and what effects its framing may have beyond those it intends.
Read closely, the piece functions less as a strategic assessment of power than as a form of pastoral care for a demoralized audience. This is not a criticism so much as an observation. Movements have always produced texts whose primary purpose is to sustain commitment in moments when outcomes are unclear and costs are rising. The “plateau” and “impasse” metaphors render continued engagement as reasonable rather than as desperate, suggesting that endurance itself is evidence of traction. It's a legitimate function, but it is different from analysis, and the distinction matters.
The tension becomes clearer when one compares the article’s central claim with its own evidence. The text argues that the administration's advance has stalled, yet it also catalogs an extensive list of objectives—purges, institutional capture, legal weaponization, normalization of repression—that it suggests have been largely achieved. If that inventory is accurate, then the absence of constant escalation does not necessarily signal failure or stalemate. It may indicate successful consolidation followed by a shift from construction to maintenance. The article never quite reconciles this possibility. Instead, it treats “slowing down” as synonymous with “losing momentum,” even though history offers many examples of administrative systems that grow quieter precisely because they no longer need to rush.
This points to a deeper analytical gap: the article assumes a friction model of power. Resistance creates pressure; pressure produces concessions, fractures, or retreat. But it does not seriously entertain the alternative possibility—that the system has reached a form of equilibrium in which dissent is tolerated because it no longer threatens the control of administrative institutions, patronage networks, or information flows. Under equilibrium conditions, additional pressure does not translate into leverage. It translates into heat absorbed by participants themselves: exhaustion, risk, sorting, and selective punishment. The article’s strategy depends on a sensitivity to pressure that its own description of institutional capture calls into question.
Related to this is how the article handles popular support for the administration. That support largely disappears from view, treated as a temporary artifact of manipulation, fear, or false consciousness. The expectation is that reality will intrude and fracture the base. What goes unexamined is the possibility of durable, value-aligned, cross-class support for policies centered on immigration restriction, cultural rollback, institutional distrust, or punitive order. Acknowledging that support would complicate the article's moral geometry of “the people versus the billionaires,” but without it the analysis remains incomplete. In a genuinely divided society, mass protest does not read as a unified uprising; it reads as factional conflict—and that distinction grants administrations room to manage dissent rather than compel reflexive response.
The cadence of mobilization reinforces this concern. Twice-yearly national protests, however large, are not sustained pressure; they are episodic rituals. Predictable demonstrations can be planned around, waited out, and selectively punished afterward. They may nourish identity and solidarity, but they rarely accumulate institutional leverage on their own. The fact that even an engaged reader must look up when the last protest occurred is not a moral failing; it is a diagnostic signal. Movements that alter power relations tend to become ambient. They are difficult to forget because they do not fully recede between moments of spectacle.
All of this raises a problem of prescription. If the article’s inventory of achieved objectives is broadly correct, then the exhortation to “protest more” does not obviously follow. The text offers no clear mechanism by which continued mobilization translates into leverage against an administration that has secured loyalty within enforcement agencies, curbed independent knowledge production, and made opposition professionally and economically costly. The prescription presumes a vulnerability that the diagnosis itself undermines.
Hovering behind these tensions is a question the article cannot comfortably ask: what if the system is not temporarily broken, but functioning as intended for a plurality of your neighbors—and what if your current forms of resistance are already priced in? Asking this would shift the frame from strategy to ethics under constraint. The question would no longer be “how do you stop this?” but “what does it mean to live truthfully inside something that may not be stoppable in the near term?”
From CrimethInc.’s vantage point, that question looks like defeatism. From another angle, it looks like phase recognition: an acknowledgment that a moment of friction may have given way to a more durable configuration. Movements often resist this recognition because it destabilizes the moral architecture that sustains participation. Yet refusing to name the shift does not prevent it; it merely obscures the tradeoffs people are already making.
None of this negates the article’s value, for it succeeds at what it is most clearly trying to do for its audience: provide moral orientation, sustain solidarity, and encourage mutual aid in a climate of fear. “Show up anyway. Protect each other. Refuse normalization.” For many, this is not strategy but survival—psychological, communal, ethical. That's an important distinction.
The risk lies in borrowing the authority of strategic analysis to deliver an ethical exhortation. The article wants to say that these actions matter because they are beginning to work. It may be more honest to say they matter because they provide hope to their participants, even if they do not change outcomes on any desired timeline.
If the steady-state interpretation is closer to reality, then the future does not look like sudden collapse or dramatic reversal. It looks like tolerated dissent, selective consequence, exit, and exile. "Resistance" does not fail because people stop resisting; it fails because those behaviors ceases to alter the system’s behavior. The system adapts, and the resisters adapt in turn.
At that point the question changes. Not “how do you win?” but “what kind of person are you willing to be under constraint?”
That question has no strategic answer. It has ethical ones. And crossing into that territory may feel like surrender to those still committed to mobilization as leverage. But it may also be the beginning of a different kind of honesty—one less intoxicating than prophecy, and perhaps more durable than hope.
Postscript: On Plurality
One final complication is worth naming.
Much of the tension explored here rests on an assumption—often implicit—that there exists a latent moral consensus waiting to be activated: a public that would recognize domination if only it were clearly named, a majority that would resist if only the correct lever were pulled. But the evidence suggests otherwise.
We do not inhabit a single political story that's been temporarily misread. We inhabit a plurality of moral temperaments, coexisting in the same space, interpreting the same conditions differently, and desiring fundamentally different things from power.
Some people want liberation, even at the cost of instability.
Some want order, even at the cost of cruelty.
Some want dignity without safety.
Some want safety without dignity.
Many want simply to be spared.
These are not misunderstandings to be corrected; they are orientations. They shape which metaphors resonate, which risks feel tolerable, which futures feel survivable. They explain why CrimethInc.'s “we are a rebel alliance” feels clarifying to some and alien to others—and why symbols of the Galactic Empire can feel comforting rather than monstrous.
Recognizing plurality does not excuse harm, nor does it require moral flattening. Harm remains harm. But it does foreclose the fantasy that a single narrative—whether revolutionary, institutional, or restorative—can stand in for shared reality.
In that light, the question “what should we do?” fractures into many smaller questions: what can I do without lying to myself? what risks am I willing to take? what bargains am I accepting, even if others refuse them?
Plurality doesn’t offer a strategy.
It offers orientation.
And perhaps, in a moment where leverage is uncertain and futures diverge, that orientation is not a retreat from politics but a refusal to mistake one’s own clarity for collective inevitability.