Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – In the 1820s Greece waged a successful war of independence against an authoritarian king, the Ottoman Emperor Mahmoud II. The American public, enthralled with this saga of a quest for liberty, idolized the revolutionaries, who were led for a few years by Demetrios Ypsilantis. They took his name for the name of their town, Ypsilanti. The people here therefore have a very long history of despising tyrants, and they demonstrated it again on Saturday.
Some 3500 demonstrators came out for a march against Trump policies on No Kings Day, October 18 in Ypsilanti, Michigan, according to Lilly Kujawski. People chanted “What does democracy look like? This is what democracy looks like!” and “Hey, hey, ho, ho, Donald Trump has got to go.”
Ypsilanti is a majority white, predominantly Democratic town of about 20,000 residents in the southeast corner of the state, with several factories (including the Rawsonville Ford plant) and Eastern Michigan University, with its WEMU NPR jazz station.
As a blue collar town, it shows that the slight swing to Trump among working class families nationally did not happen everywhere. Trump’s workers often don’t have a high school degree or are evangelicals. In 2024, he “lost majorities of blue-collar blacks, Latinos, and non-evangelical whites,” according to Brookings. The roughly one quarter of the residents in the town who are of African-American heritage suffer from the openly racist discrimination of Trump’s minions.
Trump policies favoring the rich fat cats and harming blue collar workers hurt Ypsilanti residents. His tariffs will raise the cost of the things they buy. His attack on their health care will put up their doctor and hospital costs. For those between jobs, the cuts to SNAP and other benefits hurt.
Or by check:
Juan Cole
P. O. Box 4218,
Ann Arbor, MI 48104-2548
USA
(Remember, make the checks out to “Juan Cole” or they can’t be cashed)
When Demetrios Ypsilantis mounted his rebellion against the Ottoman Empire, among his goals were a rule of law and a constitutional order. The Ottoman Empire was an absolute monarchy that in the 1820s had no constitution, no legislature, and the judges in which were Muslim clerics appointed by and paid by the state, so that they had no independence of the sultan.
The French political philosopher Montesquieu (d. 1755) had laid out the problem in his Spirit of the Laws, which deeply influenced the American Founding Fathers. He wrote,
- “There would be an end of everything, were the same man or the same body, whether of the nobles or of the people, to exercise those three powers, that of enacting laws, that of executing the public resolutions, and of trying the causes of individuals.
Most kingdoms in Europe enjoy a moderate government because the prince who is invested with the two first powers leaves the third to his subjects. In Turkey, where these three powers are united in the Sultan’s person, the subjects groan under the most dreadful oppression.”
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Of course, Ottoman rule was more complex and nuanced than Montesquieu imagined. There were constraints on the sultans. Some were overthrown and killed by popular uprisings, for which reason Ottoman chroniclers did not seem to think the French Revolution was anything out of the ordinary. The Muslim clerics in the judiciary sometimes made a stand for Islamic ethics against the demands of the nobles. Then, too, Mahmoud II was a reformer who worked in his own way for a more rational bureaucracy. Still and all, Montesquieu was correct to say that the Ottomans did not have a division of powers, and that the sultan was an absolute monarch.
Today, Donald Trump is very like Montesquieu’s, and Ypsilantis’s sultan. The MAGA justices on the Supreme Court very seldom tell Trump “no,” even when he does and asserts things that are blatantly unconstitutional. The Republican-dominated Congress does whatever he instructs them. Trump routinely overrules the judiciary by his unprecedentedly wide use of the presidential pardon. His ICE myrmidons appear to have defied judges’ injunctions against arbitrary deportations. Trump has widely usurped the powers of the purse of the legislature, declining to spend appropriated funds as the Congress intended, or moving money from one purpose to another, arbitrary one, with no legislative mandate.
Ypsilantis knew what to do about this “most dreadful oppression.” So does Ypsilanti.
Here are some iPhone pictures I took of the rally. I’ll let them speak to the the MAGA troglodytes’ indictment of it as a coven of Communists and a hotbed of anti-American sentiment.
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