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For most politicians and journalists, the answer to nearly every question is to look up. Not at the moon, the stars or even the chimney tops, but at their leaders: the people who sit atop institutions, wield power and set the line that others follow. The top of the totem pole is the sole focal point, and the stories that count usually come from the heights of power.
Bend your neck back far enough and Davos becomes not a talking shop in a Swiss ski resort, but a gathering of world leaders; Keir Starmer flying into Beijing is a summit of great powers; even who should be the MP for Gorton and Denton is really all about the Labour leadership. For this piece, the Guardian’s research librarians counted how many times the words “leader” or “leadership” appeared across the British press. Over the past week alone, the rough total stands at 2,000. A third of those stories concern one man: Donald Trump.
“We know a lot about what fifth-century Greece looked like to an Athenian citizen,” observed EH Carr in his classic What is History?, “but hardly anything about what it looked like to a Spartan, a Corinthian, or a Theban – not to mention a Persian, or a slave or other non-citizen resident in Athens.” Sixty-five years later and our daily news remains wall-to-wall Athens, with scarcely a Spartan vox pop.
Until a week such as this one, which reminds us that power doesn’t belong only to the powerful. Just look at the disarray inflicted on Trump, head of the world’s sole superpower, by Minneapolis, a city with barely more people than Croydon.
After months of resistance by Minnesotans, the president’s immigration chief, Gregory Bovino, has been forced out of the city. Trump’s head of homeland security, Kristi Noem, faces either the sack or impeachment. Key members of his team are tearing strips off each other. And the Republicans’ signature domestic policy – the terrorising of multicultural Democratic cities by thousands of mercenary bullyboys, masked up and kitted out like they’re taking Basra – is now opposed by a clear majority of Americans.
Left to conventional leaders, this would not have happened. Just last week in Washington, a crucial number of Democratic representatives defied their own party to side with Trump and pump more money into the immigration crackdown. Just last week in Davos, thousands of the highest-paid executives in the world – billionaires such as Stephen Schwarzman, who takes more in an hour than the average American earns in a year – dutifully queued up to hear the Orange Ego ramble on. Facing the administration’s classic mix of sweeteners and threats, the US’s media empires, its best universities and top law firms have folded like origami.
Trump doubtless expected the same in the icy midwest. Instead, his troops faced a nonviolent fightback. Tens of thousands across Minneapolis and Saint Paul turned out week after week to protest, even when it was so cold, wrote one reporter, that he couldn’t take notes: “The ink in my pens had frozen.” Despite the state executions that have been all over the world’s news, despite being teargassed and assaulted, ordinary Minnesotans still turned out.
When others went into hiding rather than face the immigration gangsters, their neighbours made sure they got food and supplies. And yet others acted as ICE-watchers, monitoring the violence and barbarism of armed thugs whose salaries come from US taxpayers. Many have kept on their civic duties despite the killing of Renee Good, a poet and mother who ICE employees shot in the face then called a “fucking bitch”; and Alex Pretti, a nurse executed by a gang of seven agents, apparently for holding up a phone.
These two ordinary people were murdered by their own government, then slandered by it. Their corpses were tagged as “domestic terrorists”. Their fellow Minnesotans have been attacked as an “organised illegal insurgency” by Joe Lonsdale, a cofounder of Palantir. On one thing, he was right: the activists have been very organised, providing training to newbies, turning restaurants into field hospitals, running elaborate networks to get provisions to those Minnesota families in fear for their own safety. But an insurgency this is not, not when mums tooting whistles are battling masked men toting guns, paid up to $50,000 just for signing up to ICE; not when a smartphone camera is wielded against teargas; or when hecklers are handcuffed and hauled off.
The hub of this work is south Minneapolis, last in the world’s headlines six years ago as the site where George Floyd was killed by police officers. Some of those who rose up in the Black Lives Matter protests of that period have clearly reawakened their old networks. Others note that Minnesota regularly tops measures of social trust: in other words, its residents are among the most likely to place their trust in their neighbour across the road, rather than the leader at the top of the pile.
The resisters in Minneapolis provide an example of what the historian Moshik Temkin calls leadership from below. In his recent book, Warriors, Rebels and Saints: The Art of Leadership from Machiavelli to Malcolm X, Temkin writes how under authoritarian rule, societies will turn to “leaders who have few followers and no institutional power”. He gives the resistance in Vichy France as an example. “They might not be able to openly call themselves leaders or reveal themselves as leaders or reveal themselves at all. We might not ever even know their names.” Their power comes not from their direct impact, but from their example.
Against the ethnic division sown by the White House, a significant number of Minnesotans have shown neighbourliness. Recoiling from the aggression and overreach of Trump’s lieutenants, Americans have been presented with an example of homespun solidarity. The Battle of Minneapolis is not over: ICE agents are still teargassing schools and threatening protesters (“You raise your voice, I erase your voice,” one bullyboy says into a camera, from the safety of his SUV). Bovino’s replacement, Tom Homan, is not much of an improvement: he helped create ICE’s practice of separating kids from their parents. But after a year in which the American establishment has talked of a vibe shift and a new Trumpian orthodoxy, citizens in the US and around the world can see it is not so: that it is resisted by them in the face of military hardware and unconscionable aggression.
This week, Minneapolis offers those who would tell the story of the US a different narrative, although what it will be is inevitably unclear. For EH Carr, the importance of any president or his protesting crowds is never settled once and for all, but debated forever by those looking back with questions of their own age. As he wrote, “The historian belongs not to the past but to the present”. All of us will one day form the raw material of history; we will all belong to the future. That should change how we act now.
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Aditya Chakrabortty is a Guardian columnist
