The other small business insurrection

Neighborism as a galvanizing check on Trumpism.

On June 3, 2025, demonstrators face federal agents during enforcement operations on Lake Street in Minneapolis, Minn. By Taylor Dahlin. (Wikimedia Foundation / cc-by-2.0)

Yesterday was a national day of protest against ICE in the U.S., and you know change is in the wind when coffee shops, yoga studios and the other small enterprises of decent city living start posting defensive Instagram messages explaining why they’re not shutting their doors to engage in even more spectacular resistance.

These acknowledgments of nonparticipation by the baker or the bookseller matter more than they look. After all, your more eager activists aren’t a good barometer of current conditions. They’ll protest whether it’s the springtime of peoples or a winter of despair. (One young demonstrator yesterday, laughing about conservative allegations about paid protesters, told the L.A. Times: “I would pay money to protest Trump.”) But the non-participant’s public explanation why they’re not closing shop isn’t just an absentee note, it’s an address to a protesting community. It’s acknowledgement of the heavy hand of democratic culture’s most powerful and uncontrollable force: peer pressure.

But where did this current wave of anti-authoritarian peer pressure in the U.S. come from?

One of the hard lessons of the second Trump administration (for me, anyway) has been to downgrade the importance of civil society per se as an effective bulwark against authoritarianism, at least as usually supposed by democracy-promotion theory. The preeminent scholar of liberal democracy Larry Diamond describes civil society as “the entire range of organized groups and institutions that are independent of the state, voluntary, and at least to some extent self-generating and self-reliant. This of course includes non-governmental organizations … but also independent mass media, think tanks, universities, and social and religious groups.”

But if you have been an American belonging to any of those groups or institutions over the past couple of years — during a period FT data columnist John Burn-Murdoch has identified as “the most rapid episode of democratic and civil erosion in the recent history of the developed world” — you are likelier to have experienced your slice of organized civil society as a site of treacherous internal struggle rather than a self-confident launching pad for the Resistance 2.0. Law firms have been strong-armed into deals with the presidential administration, NGO funders have been menaced, major media institutions have curbed the too-progressive voices in their ranks, and universities have cracked down on campus protestors, student media, professors and their syllabi alike. In my own corner of the world, the words “democracy” and “journalism” have been flagged via focus group as polarizing terms to be handled judiciously or avoided entirely.

So it seems that if the pro-democracy movement were to reconstitute itself and rebuild confidence in the U.S. in the face of an increasingly murderous blitz of democratic backsliding, that movement would need to be principally regenerated by something other than civil society. Perhaps that democratic regeneration is coming instead from our great tradition of American neighborism.

The Atlantic’s Adam Serwer saw how the civic ethic behind “Minnesota nice” boiled into a collective rage against the massive, violent incursion of brigades of U.S. immigration agents who far outnumbered local law enforcement. In Minneapolis, it was the intruding federal agent, not the Somali American family next door, who was the real alien to the local way of life:

In Minnesota, all of the ideological cornerstones of MAGA have been proved false at once. Minnesotans, not the armed thugs of ICE and the Border Patrol, are brave. Minnesotans have shown that their community is socially cohesive—because of its diversity and not in spite of it. Minnesotans have found and loved one another in a world atomized by social media, where empty men have tried to fill their lonely soul with lies about their own inherent superiority. Minnesotans have preserved everything worthwhile about “Western civilization,” while armed brutes try to tear it down by force.

No matter how many more armed men Trump sends to impose his will on the people of Minnesota, all he can do is accentuate their valor. No application of armed violence can make the men with guns as heroic as the people who choose to stand in their path with empty hands in defense of their neighbors.

There’s no need to compartmentalize the neighborist resistance as a Minnesota-only phenomenon, notwithstanding Christopher Rufo’s finger-pointing at nefariously egalitarian Norwegian Americans (though I’m proud to be one of them). If there’s something the current regime forgot to do during its long goose-step through the institutions, it was to turn off Instagram Stories, where my local businesses were posting about their planned activities this week for a national day of protest spurred by University of Minnesota student groups inspired by that city’s recent general strike. Even the shops that stayed open posted fundraisers and goaded their clients to head to City Hall. The Fortune 500 were nowhere to be seen.

It’s the centrality of small businesses as characters in this wave of resistance that beguiles me, not least because the small business owner is often classified as the political backbone of the Trumpist bloc. In Melinda Cooper’s excellent 2022 essay “Family Capitalism and the Small Business Insurrection,” it was Trump the family businessman who deftly navigated the natural tensions between big business and small producers, the latter being especially resentful of onerous regulations and their (often Democratic) perpetrators:

For all his billions, Trump was fluent in the language of small business resentment. “I’ve never had the ‘security’ of being on the government payroll,” he boasted. “I was the guy who made the payroll. It hasn’t always been so easy either. In the 1990s, the government changed the real estate tax laws and made those changes retroactive. It was very unfair. . . . Now we have crazy overregulation. You can barely buy a paper clip without being in violation of some government policy.” Addressing a crowd of small business owners invited to the White House in the first few months of his presidency, Trump told them: “I understand you. I have been there.”

Well, if there’s anything I know about small businesses, it’s their existential dependence on cheap goods and cheap labor, both of which have been threatened by Trump 2.0’s pell-mell tarriffing and exploding deportation actions against noncriminal immigrants. It’s small businesses, not diversified corporate giants, that must suffer harder when a line cook suddenly disappears or federal agents start frisking the clientele. Above all, the small business is local business and must experience reality locally, with pain receptors fully activated. Bloomberg News:

Wrecktangle Pizza, in the heart of busy Lake Street in the Lyn-Lake neighborhood, was visited by federal agents a day after posting on social media that it would accept contributions and donate food to locals affected by the crackdown. Co-owner Jeff Rogers said the restaurant was closed at the time and that staff members inside reported the agents tried multiple doors.

The pizza shop has since cut back its hours, limited access to a single door monitored by a staffer and made clear that anyone is welcome, except immigration agents.

“It’s just all safety concerns,” Rogers said.

I wouldn’t exactly expect some kind of left-wing revolution launched from Main Street — all things considered, business is pretty good, notwithstanding persistent complaints about a lack of qualified job applicants (for the wages on offer) — but it’s easy to understand the small business’ growing visibility in recent events. Melinda Cooper’s diagnosis of a dangerously clientelistic relationship between Trump and family business in 2022 seems weaker from the perspective of 2026, in which it’s now the multinational CEO class most dangerously enabling the president’s authoritarian incursions, while small businesses activate as distributed nodes of resistance. Any theory of democratic power and democratic renewal needs to adequately account for why a lot of coffee shop owners sound more socialist than the Teamsters right now.

There’s an American tradition of the incorrigible small producer serving as a check on concentrated power, perhaps imperfectly, but ever-presently. From UC Berkeley sociology professor Dylan Riley early last year:

“What was the fundamental idea animating the Revolution of 1776? It was to establish a society that was democratic in the special sense that it would give people the capacity for self-determination: that is, freedom. The American Revolution in its origins was not based on representation, procedure, and formal rights, but rather a claim to substantial equality and self-determination. The country in its origins was to be a republic of economically independent agrarians. This democratic idea was basically like Aristotle’s definition of democracy: a social rather than a narrowly political concept embodying a concept of active citizenship against an arbitrary and distant authority. … There is, in short, a revolutionary tradition [in the U.S.] that is both radically egalitarian and in a deep sense defensive. This seems highly appropriate to the current moment.”

In this vision of American democracy, it’s the little guy, not Chuck Schumer or John Roberts, standing on the front lines for their little local slice of freedom, neighbor versus nationalist, neighborhood before nation.