"Only We Can Save Us." "We Keep Us Safe." I've seen such bread-and-butter slogans of mutual aid proliferate in the past few months, espoused by (former) federal workers and die-hard liberals—that is to say, not voiced only by their usual purveyors. As the revanchism of the second Trump administration takes full form in a well-telegraphed, all-out assault on government institutions, Americans used to insulation from the most hostile whims of prior governments have rightly clocked that they are no longer so protected by abstract bodies. They have realized that they are both in the cross hairs and part of the bulwark needed to beat back collapse.

 

This is a good realization, right? What's not to like about a broader sense of solidarity, about an awakening of a wider "we" in a moment of constitutional crisis? And yet, I've looked on with unease as these phrases pass into the mainstream. Who is really part of this "we"? Who gets to be a part of that "us"?

The ill-defined and self-referential quality of these statements exercise a kind of rhetorical magic. "We" becomes a flexible container that can expand and contract with ease, both broadening, in theory, the realm of solidarity to include everyone except those "we" are obviously against—ICE, DOGE, Musk, Trump—or narrowing, in the confines of one's own imagination, to make some small group feel closer, or more secure, amid the chaos. But the inflatable nature of "Only We Can Save Us" has two very key drawbacks.

 

For one, this vague grouping shifts dramatically over time. It may balloon now, when those not used to such vulnerability now find themselves impacted. But what happens when they move on to a new position, or when a court injunction comes in to temporarily save their job, their upper middle-class existences re-secured? This is the flip side to the remarkable ways communities show up for one another in disaster. I've seen it happen on a micro scale among the housing cooperatives I studied in New York for Homes for Living. Residents at Southbridge Towers, hard up against the Brooklyn Bridge in Lower Manhattan, banded together when 9/11 left them stranded without power with soot sneaking through closed windows, and did the same a decade plus later when the harbor poured into their elevator wells in the midst of Hurricane Sandy. But over time the mutual care that existed in a time of acute crisis dissipated, the "we" fractured, and the community split as one faction sought to attack their wider infrastructure of care—the cooperative's mechanism for maintaining their housing's affordability, for themselves and future generations—in a bid for personal profit. 

This is the other challenge with this framing: coming as it does from mutual aid's anti-institutional roots, the implication is that "we" will take care of us, not our institutions. That perspective, though no doubt born of state institutions executing or abetting the assault, or simply abandoning communities, is a tricky one in our current crisis, when our institutions are among those things needful of defense. That's precisely because, as the Trump administration's attempts to cull the federal workforce and the laudable attempts of federal workers within these institutions to halt their full capture demonstrate, there is not such a clean distinction between that "us," especially the expanded one we're seeing, and our institutions. The microcosm of those co-ops is a potent illustration of this fuzzy boundary: their boards are peopled by neighbors, the ultimate decision on the institution's capture for private wealth extracted from a public good one that's up to all of its resident-owners, not some faceless, conceptual acronym. Strip away the gloss of letterhead and the pomp of protocol, as the destructive intent of the Trump administration does so neatly, and it becomes clear that our institutions are nothing but this broader "we," and the fragile norms that bind us. To protect those institutions, these embodiments of "us,"  means ditching the discriminatory cherry-picking of who we are willing to defend. Perhaps you'll get behind the USAID workers ousted from their jobs, but will you stand up for Mahmoud Khalil and Leqaa Kordia, political prisoners detained for the "crime" of opposing a genocide, or the growing number of deportees denied due process and targeted for their political views? 

Our institutions should be infrastructures for mutual care, built to meet moments of acute crisis and, crucially, to endure beyond them, when individual support erodes back into the demands of day to day life. They should broaden the realms of our regard to all and to secure the bases of our collective lives—water, the climate, a right to live without fear of retribution for one’s race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, religion, immigration status, what have you. That many institutions were built in opposition to these ideas, poisoned from their very outset, or have since been captured for the benefit of a select few by dividing the many is at the root of both the earned mistrust of institutions among some on the left and the desire to destroy them, by electing Trump, among some on the right. It’s a predictable outcome of elite capture and a lack of willingness to remake these institutions, especially the Democratic Party’s weak defense of the status quo, in many cases by seeking to preserve all aspects of institutions, even their worst, instead of reworking them to align with the party's supposed values. Just look at the Biden administration’s continual shift to the right on asylum policies and immigration-related incarceration, or, of course, its full-throated endorsement of Israel's extermination campaign in Gaza. If anything, the most powerful elements of the Democratic Party laid the groundwork for the kidnappings and retribution we're seeing now.

 

So why would someone who says “We Keep Us Safe” from a place of lived experience with barbaric immigration policies under any administration trust a widening “we” that includes their very implementers? Why would they feel compelled to save the very institutions that preyed upon them? I saw a similar dynamic among some Black cooperators in those co-ops who, tired of the double-speak of government bodies telling them to keep their homes affordable while doing little to remove the racism of a real estate system that has kept them from accruing wealth elsewhere, sought to tear apart the institutional mechanism that had insulated them from that system. 

And yet we need some of these institutions. Those that we should not maintain in their current form need a remake, not a demolition. This moment requires a level of nuance that most political parties in the US are incapable of, and thus “we” need to interject. We need to protect institutions with the understanding that we make them. And we need to remake them for all on whom they currently prey or whom they do not serve—that is to say, most beyond the rich. “We” must save us in the meantime, and “we” must also build a new infrastructure of mutual care that extends beyond the moment of crisis for the future. That’s impossible to do so without those newcomers to this mutual aid ethos acknowledging that these institutions were under threat, were broken, long before Trump and in some cases by their own doing. Any new infrastructure will not endure without their staying committed to an ideal of mutual care past their moment of personal vulnerability, when a status quo that largely functions for them returns. They must become stewards of that infrastructure, not unthinking defenders of the rot within.