Will the Resistance Have an Afterlife?

D onald Trump’s most obsessive opponents — the “Resistance” — have a tendency to live down to their own views of him. They are insane on Twitter, full of high dudgeon, and conspiratorial in nature. Vladimir Putin is a prime mover in the world as they imagine it. The tech companies are all in on it, somehow. We are on the knife edge of permanent Republican rule if Biden doesn’t win. So they say.

There is always a conspiracy to explain away Republican wins. Sometimes it is the Republican noise machine, even if Democrats build a much larger and better-funded one. Sometimes it is a nefarious corporation. Often the conspiracy theories that Democrats use to motivate themselves are simply forgotten, living a ghostly afterlife. Remember Diebold? Remember that Bush was conducting the war in Afghanistan in order to personally profit from a pipeline? Remember when Democrats distrusted the Bush-era CIA? Probably not. No. All was forgiven, huh.

But it’s worth asking whether there will be an afterlife to the Resistance.

I expect that there will in fact be continued pressure on Facebook and other social-media companies to monitor, restrict, and throttle speech that is inhospitable. The Left has taken to saying that “Facebook is a Right Wing Company” — which is to say, it hosts and facilitates the conversations of people in America who are older, whiter, and more conservative than users of other social networks, and workers at the company itself. The move to pressure and clamp down on social media is widespread. This has been the case not just in authoritarian nations such as China, but in liberal-democratic ones such as Germany, whose social-media law is admired by Russia and the Philippines.

What about Democrats’ Trump-induced anti-vaxxer streak? Huge majorities of Democrats report their skepticism about forthcoming vaccines, a mistrust that has been fed by leading Democrats — including Joe Biden. I expect none of the pharmaceutical companies are going to throw out their expensive research and development after November 3. Will Democrats remember their suspicions about Trump suborning the science to win the election, if in fact he does not win election?

A few weeks ago, during one of the periodic Resistancey-panics, Barack Obama told the world that Donald Trump was trying to “kneecap” our Postal Service. A thousand hashtags were launched. Celebrities spread pictures of mail trucks being hauled away. Will a Joe Biden presidency dedicate more funding to the post office and restore the machines, trucks, and mailboxes that were supposedly being carted off with our democracy a few months ago? Or will it continue the ongoing budget cuts and eventual shrinkage of service that has been the direction since at least the Obama administration launched its own attempt to restructure the post office?

The figment of Resistance imaginations that could have the most consequence is the belief that Vladimir Putin is the source of all our troubles. This belief already has had an effect on the world. Putin’s Russian opponents have complained that the way the U.S. media makes Russia’s leader out to be an omnipotent and canny hand behind all world events, and puppet master of the United States under Trump, has diminished their own chances of defeating him in Russia.

Progressives such as Nancy Pelosi still insist that “all roads lead to Putin” despite the fact that U.S. relations with Russia are at their post–Cold War nadir, with less day-to-day diplomatic contact than at any time in decades, owing to mutual diplomatic expulsions going back to the beginning of the Trump presidency and before.

Democrats, including Joe Biden, continue to circulate the story of “Russian bounties” on U.S. troops in Afghanistan, even though it looks to be a bogus and politically motivated leak of dubious intelligence, one aimed at keeping American troops in Afghanistan (guarding George W. Bush’s pipeline, I guess). Will this change our foreign policy?

Every incoming president, going back to at least Ronald Reagan, has begun his administration with a determined effort to improve and reset relations with Moscow, or at least to look Russia’s leader soulfully in the eyes. Will Biden confront Russia about this bogus story? Will Democrats pressure him to do so?

Or will they forget, the way that Donald Trump seems to have forgotten to lock Clinton up? I hope they do. If not, we better hope those extra mail trucks can be repurposed for a land war in Estonia.