If Trump Goes Even Lower, We’d Better Be Prepared

Bill McKibben / The New Yorker

 (June 4, 2020) — Events are now moving at high speed in this country — every day, President Trump and his crew gallop past new lines, so that the morning’s flagrant usurpation is legitimized by the evening’s even more outrageous improvisation. (Firing tear gas at a crowd in order to be able to stand menacingly in front of a church holding a Bible is hard to top, but I wouldn’t bet against it.) A danger of this is that we’re always reacting to what came before. So perhaps it’s worth skipping a few steps ahead, to places where we haven’t gone yet but very well may.

What I’d like to talk about is civil disobedience, and its uses in authoritarian states. I’m not talking about what’s going on in this country this week — I have no more interest in telling people currently in the streets that they shouldn’t be destroying property than they have in listening to me.

If you live a life, as black Americans clearly do, in which a police officer could kill you for allegedly passing a counterfeit twenty-dollar bill, or if you live a life in which the incompetence of the nation’s leaders has helped precipitate an economic crisis that has left you with no job and no prospect of one — well, I’ve been impressed with how peaceful the vast majority of the people in the streets have been.

In fact, Tuesday night may turn out to have been significant. Unintimidated by Trump’s heavy-handedness and local curfews, lots of people once again took to the streets, and a frequent chant — “Why you got your riot gear? We don’t see no riot here” — was both a powerful taunt and accurate reporting.

What I’m talking about is what happens if Trump, indeed, goes further still, and manages to make himself a full-on tyrant. It wouldn’t take much. The Justice Department seems to have become his Justice Department. Congressional Republicans seem unwilling to stand up to him about anything; and, at the moment, some of them, such as Senator Tom Cotton and Representative Matt Gaetz, are egging him on. The courts are ever more packed, and the Pentagon seemed willing to funnel troops and materiel to D.C., then participate in Trump’s political stunt on Monday, which is a bad sign.

The President’s constant shout-outs to “the Second Amendment people” are not a dog whistle — they’re a clarion call. Even as Trump keeps escalating, one keeps hoping that he’s merely trying to impress his base — but as we near an election in which he trails in the polls, the danger seems to mount. It’s hard to know what, precisely, a coup looks like if the leader is already the President. Try to imagine troops ordered to use live rounds rather than rubber bullets, no social media on which to talk about it, and Fox News as the only sanctioned TV channel.

It seems a stretch, but such things are commonplace in many parts of the world. (Indeed, if you’re black, facing live ammunition is already an outsize reality here.) If they came to pass, Americans would be in a difficult predicament: whether to submit to that rule or stand up to it. And that’s where civil resistance comes in.

I’ve spent much of my adult life organizing a certain kind of nonviolent action — I’ve been in handcuffs more times than I might have imagined — and it’s had some real effect on the paths of pipelines and the flow of money. (As it happens, the first big civil-disobedience actions I helped organize were staged from Lafayette Park, the same place that Trump cleared for his photo-op stroll.) But the kind of civil disobedience that I know how to practice happens in the relatively open society that we’ve been living in (and is much harder for people of color).

Other people in other places have worked with far less freedom, and accomplished far more — and their faithful chronicler was a man named Gene Sharp, who died two winters ago, at the age of ninety. I first wrote about him for this magazine thirty-six years ago, when he was already well into his life’s work of cataloguing and explaining all the “methods of nonviolent action” that people had used to stand up to authority.

He eventually came up with a list of a hundred and ninety-eight, and could describe in great detail how they had been used, singly or in combination. Some of them are dated — skywriting as a form of resistance — and his list doesn’t stretch to cover the myriad possibilities that the Internet presents. But most of them suggest things that could be tried now: walkouts, silence, selective boycotts, student strikes, wildcat strikes.

Some have been made harder by the pandemic (it’s hard to stay away from sports and cultural events if there aren’t any taking place), and some have been made easier (people are already experimenting with rent strikes in many cities). Sit-ins are on the list (and stand-ins, wade-ins, mill-ins, pray-ins); so are alternative markets and transportation systems, the “overloading of administrative systems,” and fasts.

There are remarkable new additions to this list coming from places such as Hong Kong; there is recent learned history from places such as Standing Rock; and, if there are not quite leaders on the scale of a Gandhi or a King, there are nonetheless powerful examples and teachers: Greta Thunberg, the Reverend William Barber. And there are plenty of largely leaderless movements that have stood up and succeeded: Otpor, which brought down Slobodan Milošević, in Serbia, for instance. Indeed, a whole new area of scholarship has followed Sharp’s lead, and, in recent years, studies of nonviolent civil resistance have made a couple of things very clear: nonviolence is far more effective than violent revolution, and it doesn’t take everyone’s participation to make it effective.

As the Harvard researcher Erica Chenoweth has shown, less than five per cent of a population engaged in resistance is often enough to cause huge shifts in the zeitgeist and make it much harder for illegitimate authority to rule.

That doesn’t mean, of course, that it’s easy for that five per cent who take part. Even in the more benign recent American past, getting arrested and sent to jail was physically and psychologically hard; this would be much harder. The fact that one acts nonviolently does not guarantee a nonviolent response — in fact, history indicates that it often guarantees the opposite. (Though the strange alchemy of nonviolence, the moral power of unearned suffering, can bend some hearts; the images from this week of cops taking a knee with protesters tell a story, even if it’s nowhere near the whole story.) But the calculation should be figuring out ways to fight — and to live to fight another day.

It’s tragic that black Americans have had to think in such terms throughout our history; it’s the definition of both privilege and our current insanity that white Americans now think in them, too. (And it’s certainly a useful education for many about the realities of race.)

But, by now, the illusion that something somehow will stop Trump and his cronies from devolving should have been shattered. So spend some time with Sharp’s list. It could come in handy — soon.

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