“Many people across the United States are despondent about the new president – and the threat to democracy his rise could represent”.
In case you were wondering, that’s not Fox News lamenting Joe Biden; it’s The Guardian in 2017, being almost calmly analytical about Donald Trump. But the Grauniad’s Jeremiad contains an important lesson that conservatives in New Zealand as much as the United States could and should learn: organise.
Today, those seeking knowledge about the theory and practice of civil resistance can find a wealth of information at their fingertips. In virtually any language, one can find training manuals, strategy-building tools, facilitation guides and documentation about successes and mistakes of past nonviolent campaigns.
Material is available in many formats, including graphic novels, e-classes, films and documentaries, scholarly books, novels, websites, research monographs, research inventories, and children’s books. And of course, the world is full of experienced activists with wisdom to share.
Those activists, films and children’s books are of the left, naturally — but until the right learns from their experience, they will continue to lose.
As journalist Tim Poole points out, the far left’s greatest strength is not numbers, it’s passion. Instead of tut-tutting quietly at home and assuming that they can fix everything at election time, the left get out there: they march, protest, petition and lobby.
Of course, they riot and bully, too — but that’s far less effective. When BLM turned from protesting to burning down cities and shooting police, their support in America plummeted.
Consider how quickly Melbournians turned against “Dictator Dan” Andrews, when unionists stopped brawling and started marching — and were met with brutal violence from the state.
The United States has its own rich history – past and present – of effective uses of nonviolent resistance. The technique established alternative institutions like economic cooperatives, alternative courts and an underground constitutional convention in the American colonies resulting in the declaration of independence. In 20th century, strategic nonviolent resistance has won voting rights for women and for African Americans living in the Jim Crow south.
The right must learn to be less Huey Newton and more Martin Luther King Jr. Newton and the Black Panthers alienated middle America with their violent, divisive rhetoric and actions; King won them over with calm if impassioned, reason — and non-violence. Non-violence does not, of course, mean passivity.
And among the different types of dissent available (armed insurrection or combining armed and unarmed action), nonviolent resistance has historically been the most effective. Compared with armed struggle, whose romanticized allure obscures its staggering costs, nonviolent resistance has actually been the quickest, least costly, and safest way to struggle. Moreover, civil resistance is recognized as a fundamental human right under international law.
The Guardian
The effectiveness of organised, non-violent resistance can be gauged by the astonishing rapidity of the left’s advances in recent years. In less than a decade, gay marriage went from being a joke rejected by even most gay activists to being law in most of the West. Trangenderism went from an almost non-existent fringe nuttiness to unchallengeable dogma.
Numbers are almost irrelevant. As The Guardian article points out, “historical studies suggest that it takes 3.5% of a population engaged in sustained nonviolent resistance” to topple even the most brutal dictatorships. Joe Biden and Jacinda Ardern, no matter how powerful their media-political apparatus, could be a pushover by contrast.
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