How can ordinary Americans regain political agency?
When you have an unrepresentative government, or, put differently, a government that represents oligarchic interests and corporations, as well as being heavily influenced by lobbyists, domestic and foreign (AIPAC), you get Trump and Congress conspiring to decrease Medicaid, to cut food support for the poor, while funneling more money upward to the very richest Americans.
American workers essentially have no agency, no ability to act in meaningful ways in the political realm. Along with no agency, Americans also have fewer liberties, especially if you should choose to criticize U.S./Israeli policies and otherwise challenge the imperatives of the powerful.
Be careful shouting “Give me liberty or give me death!” in these times. Death may be far easier to achieve.
What is the answer to regaining our agency? In “Between Past and Future,” the political philosopher Hannah Arendt wrote how French resisters to the Nazis during World War II discovered themselves—their true nature—in and through action. In resisting the Nazis, they seized control over their own agency by exercising it in the face of danger. They chose risk, they fought to effect change, they took stands that often meant life or death.
Through action, these resisters lifted themselves out of “normal” time, Arendt argued, entering instead a realm between past and future, a realm of true existence, a present of dynamism, of possibilities, of clarity of commitment.
Political agency is not going to be given back to the people. If we regain it, it will only be by seizing it ourselves, through action, through commitment, through risk-taking, and perhaps most of all through large-scale organized resistance.
Hopefully, that resistance can remain non-violent. I prefer reformation or restoration to revolution, recalling the words of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn that revolutions unleash the most elemental barbarism.
Bracing Views 
As I stand on my vigil on the sidewalk it has occurred to me that I have escaped to reality, presenting to the public what is true, leaving behind the falsity that is so much a part of daily life whether through advertising or what is heard from the Trump administration. My conversations with those who stop to talk are never small talk. It’s refreshing and has me looking forward to each day dealing with the real.
Adding to this is watching passing traffic, hundreds of cars with drivers oblivious to what their routine burning of fuel is doing to the future and everyone in a rush, disregarding speed limits (25 mph where I stand) and racing to get one car ahead before the next stoplight just a few blocks away. There are the “noise boys” who, given 100 feet of clear road ahead, will hit the gas to get the thrill of their exhaust noise for a few seconds. Then you hear the routine repeated blocks away. I’ve said it before, and it is impressed on me daily, America is a land of children who only appear to be adults. Trump is the icon for it.
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