When you want to find the true opposition to president trump, Washington is not where to look. Instead, try some of the state's attorneys offices and far off judges chambers. Or interview some folk almost anywhere who have been scared by one thing or another that Trump has said, signed or done.

In Georgia, in suburbs north of Atlanta, there is a stirring. The New York Times says something like a movement is growing. It is people knocking on doors and sending cards and doing the things you do to win elections. They are emboldened, the Times says, by anger at the Trump administration.

Myriad causes

The causes of the anger are many. There is Jessica, 32, hearing her son Noah tell her of a Muslim student who was told he had to leave. She never "did activism." But she got mad at her own inaction and now she is active. Social networks are playing their part. Another woman, Lesley, sent a spreadsheet seeking drivers to her closed Facebook group and got an immediate response.

Newt territory

This is small but growing in a district Newt Gingrich once represented which became vacant when Rep.Tom Price became Trump's secretary of health and human services. A 30-year-old Democrat named Jon Ossoff hopes to win an open primary later this month. The race has become a national test of whether the Trump tide can be reversed by grassroots liberals and progressives who have become bolder since the election.

Who knows?

Even if Mr. Ossoff should lose, it would not be the end of the world. If he wins the danger will be that the party will think it can continue and win without a clear sense of where we need to go.

The elephant in the room is the end of oil and the end of work and the end of a permanently expanding consumer economy. These are monumental issues democrats have avoided for decades.

Republicans are maintaining all three of the illusions on which our lives are now based. Democrats need to think of a future beyond anything currently on the table. We are talking the world in which every institution will need to be remade from the ground up. Every person will need to inch a little bit more toward responsibility. The change will be real.
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