Where is our Tiananmen square ‘Tank Man' who can stand up to Trump?

The Guardian

04-04-2025

Everyone's waiting for that one person to stand up to Donald Trump. Not just that one person. There are a lot of such people. You can read about them in every newspaper. But that one person with real power who's willing to risk something costly in defiance. That one university president who'll say, fuck you and your money. That one Democrat who'll say, fuck you and your threat to my re-election or that of my party. Everyone's looking for our Tank Man, staring down a column of tanks, all by himself, in Tiananmen Square.
Why don't we see that person? Where is our Tank Man? (And, no, I don't think Cory Booker doing a marathon-length filibuster counts.)
The reason we don't see that person is that we're asking the wrong question. There's a reason there are so few lonely individuals willing to stand up to the machine. It's not just simple cowardice or craven self-interest, though that might explain some of it. There's something deeper at work.
It's hard to take a risk, but it's especially hard when you feel like there's no point, that you'll fail, or worse, that you'll be the only one out there doing it. When you're the only one doing it, you run a risk much worse than failure. You run the risk of doing something pointless. Everything in our nature cuts against the grain of pointlessness. Yes, history might remember you, but what is history? To risk pointlessness is to risk foolishness, frivolousness, fatuity, inanity. It can even feel like moral slovenliness.
Take Roy Huggins, one of my favorite villain-heroes of the blacklist era. You've probably never heard of him. In his time, he was a screenwriter, producer and director of some note. He was responsible for The Fugitive and The Rockford Files. He also named names, after initially refusing to cooperate with the government.
Why did he do it? He had a lot of reasons. But this one has always stayed with me:
When you're thinking of becoming a hero, you feel like a slob. You feel, do you really have a right to do that?
It's a perplexing question: do I have the right to become a hero? One doesn't usually think of heroism as a right. Why does Huggins frame the question that way? Because he thinks of heroism as some sort of extravagance, some sort of selfishness, a kind of grandstanding that comes awfully close to vanity.
The philosopher Thomas Hobbes had some thoughts on this matter, how easily the quest for glory, which had traditionally been considered a virtue, could slide into vaingloriousness. And the philosopher Max Weber had a similar intuition: how easily the tragic hero becomes a kind of narcissist, preening in front of the mirror.
I think Huggins is getting at something like that slide, from glory to vainglory, from heroism to vanity and narcissism. It's why he immediately follows up his question on the right to heroism with the question: do I have the right to be a slob?
That's what made him afraid. He could imagine taking on a heroic act if he thought it might achieve something, even in failure. But to think that the act would be completely extinguished by failure, by its pointlessness, that was too much.
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I find myself thinking about this fear a lot. I've done a fair amount of political stuff over the years, some of it at some cost and risk. But it was always collective and it was always meant to work, to be successful, in some way, to achieve something, even in failure. That's what made it worth the risk.
I've always hated the romance of heroism, the futile gesture of protest and defiance, particularly of the individual. It reeks of what Lenin hated about intellectuals, who 'undertake everything under the sun without finishing anything'. He called that a kind of 'slovenliness', incidentally.
But I can see the underside of my dislike. It can make you leery of being that only person out there, and sometimes that may be what other people desperately need: just to see you, anyone, out there.
Corey Robin is the author of The Reactionary Mind: Conservatism from Edmund Burke to Donald Trump and a contributing editor at Jacobin. This piece originally appeared on coreyrobin.com.