Last week’s blog post, “Deep Dark Truthful Mirror,” was a form of immediate first aid for the psychic wound of Election Day and the appalling surrender of the American people to a fascist candidate……and not just any old fascist candidate, but one who had already been in office and shown us very clearly who he is and how bad he intends to be.

Now we move out of the teeth-gnashing phase of acknowledging what we just did to ourselves, and on to the struggle ahead.

In the coming weeks I will get into the nuts and bolts of what I believe the Democratic opposition in Congress can do, what blue state governments can do, what the courts can do, what the press can do, what civil servants and businesses and healthcare workers and teachers and soldiers and cops and artists can do….and above all, what all of us ordinary citizens can do. Much of that material will be drawn from my book, Resisting the Right: How to Survive the Gathering Storm, a handbook for surviving a second Trump administration that I published last summer and hoped would not be needed. (Buy it please and I’ll stop this pledge drive and send you a tote bag.)

But first we need the philosophical underpinning for this whole endeavor. To crib a famous line from Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, “Assembly of Japanese bicycle requires great peace of mind.”

So does fighting homegrown autocracy.

FREDDY GET IT READY

(From Resisting the Right, Chapter 9, with updates)

We are often regaled with Frederick Douglass’s famous line from 1857, that “Power concedes nothing without a demand.” But it’s well worth considering the longer quote, and the context of that maxim:

Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will. Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have found out the exact measure of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them, and these will continue till they are resisted with either words or blows, or with both. The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress.

The first thing to understand, then, is that the source of all political power, even in the most repressive police state, is the consent of the people.

Autocrats want you to be discouraged. Instilling a sense of apathy and resignation is one of their favorite and most frequently reached for tricks, as they prefer a public that believes it has no power to improve its lot and can’t change things. But we do and we can—and the ferocity of their gaslighting is evidence of that power and how much they fear it. Human history is thick with examples, even with regimes far more brutal than we have yet faced in the United States.

“Ordinary people are not powerless to challenge the political and economic élite who have such disproportionate authority over our lives,” writes Professor Keeanga Yamahtta-Taylor of Northwestern University. “But our power is often located outside of the institutions of tradition and influence.” In fact, even in the best of circumstances, when American democracy is functioning reasonably well, change typically comes from forces outside the government putting pressure on it—which is to say, from the people. Now that a truly repressive, retrograde right-wing government is coming to power in the US, the onus will shift even more in that direction.

But we need not think of this resistance as some gargantuan political thing, intimidating in its size and scope. The Filipina activist and Nobel Peace Prize winner Maria Ressa has spoken of democracy dying the death of a thousand cuts, and autocracy can be brought down in the same way. Many of those thousand cuts are in the seemingly small, quotidian actions of regular folks like you and me. Our starting point is the simplest of all, which is the very way we think about what we are doing.

The psychological preparation for the pro-democracy struggle requires full-time vigilance to the ways that autocracy demands our complicity.

In the very first chapter of his slim but seminal 2017 book, On Tyranny, Yale history professor Timothy Snyder advises us: “Do not obey in advance. Most of the power of authoritarianism is freely given.” This impulse to bend voluntarily to an oppressive regime is what Snyder calls “anticipatory obedience,” and need not even take the form of active support. It can be simple apathy, and a Niemöllerian indifference to the sound of marching boots and knocks on neighbors’ doors, and to the even almost-inaudible sound of democratic norms falling one by one.

A perfect example—which caused many observers to specifically cite Snyder’s rule number one—was Jeff Bezos’s craven decision, of his own free will, to block a planned endorsement of Kamala Harris by The Washington Post, which he owns. If the world’s richest man (or at least one of the top two, depending on the day) is that willing to bend the knee to Trump before he was even elected, and without even being pressured to do so, it tells you how right Snyder is. (Bezos’s wealth reportedly grew by $7.1 billion dollars in the 24 hours after Trump won the race.)

“Obedience is at the heart of political power,” wrote the political scientist Gene Sharp in his three-volume magnum opus, The Politics of Nonviolent Action (1973), calling the submission of the citizenry ”the most important single quality of any government, without which it would not exist.” The citizens of free countries give their obedience gladly, while those living under despotic regimes give it less so. But they give it nonetheless:

To say that every government depends on consent of the people does not, of course, mean that the subjects of all rulers prefer the established order to any other which might be created. They may consent because they positively approve of it—but they may also consent because they are unwilling to pay the price for the refusal of consent….The degree of liberty or tyranny in any government is, it follows, in large degree a reflection of the relative determination of the subjects to be free and their willingness and ability to resist efforts to enslave them.

In other words, repression only works when the people are cowed by it.

Sharp then asks a bold question: What happens if the people refuse to accept political oppressors—foreign or domestic—as their masters? His conclusion is that “noncooperation and defiance by subjects, at least under certain conditions,” has the power to thwart those rulers, and even destroy them.

“If this is true,” Sharp asks, “then why have people not long since abolished oppression, tyranny, and exploitation?” The answer, primarily, is that “The subjects usually do not realize that they are the source of the ruler’s power and that by joint action they could dissolve that power”—and tyrants have every reason to keep them from so doing.

As we have just observed, inculcating a sense of resignation, hopelessness, and despair in the citizenry is the ruler’s greatest tool. Sharp goes on to cite the South African philosopher Errol E. Harris that, consequently, a public subjected to despotism “become[s] its accomplices at the same time as they become its victims. If sufficient people understood this and really knew what they were about and how to go about it, they could ensure that government would never be tyrannical.”

“A nation gets the government it deserves,” Harris wrote. That is not to blame the victim or to allege weakness, only to say that a despotic regime can only remain in power if the citizenry is unwilling to mobilize sufficiently against it (without underestimating how difficult that mobilization might be). That is bitter pill for any nation to swallow, but it can also be inverted. If it is only the complicity of the ruled that enables their oppression, that acquiescence can also be withdrawn. Therefore, it is within the power of the oppressed to be the means of their own salvation. 

It is this understanding that is central to any American defiance of an autocratic right-wing regime that seems likely to arise under Donald Trump and the Republican Party.

NEW AND IMPROVED: THE WHEEL

Fortunately, in summoning a movement to oppose an autocratic regime in the United States, it is not necessary for us to reinvent the proverbial wheel. Models abound.

In Poland, a trade union born in a shipyard—illegal at first, in that totalitarian country—grew into a broad antiauthoritarian movement that eventually forced free elections in which its leader was chosen as the country’s president. In the Philippines, the flagrantly corrupt Marcos regime, which robbed the country blind during its twenty-one-year reign, instituted martial law, stole elections, and even murdered political opponents like Benigno Aquino, was finally brought down by the People Power movement led by Aquino’s widow, Corazon. In South Africa, Nelson Mandela and the African National Congress led a decades-long campaign to end apartheid and eject the white minority government, a campaign that saw Mandela himself imprisoned for twenty-seven years. That imprisonment was a particular object lesson in the weak spots of autocracy, as Pretoria’s ham-handed brutality turned Mandela into a global hero, shaming the regime and bringing international pressure onto it. (Putin may have made that exact mistake with Alexei Navalny).

And these are but a handful of prominent case studies. In recent decades, surely the most dramatic example of popular unrest leading to political change was the fall of the Berlin Wall on November 9, 1989—35 years ago this past weekend—and the collapse of the USSR and the entire Soviet empire in August 1991. In neighboring Czechoslovakia, a peaceful movement of students and activists led to the Velvet Revolution that ended four decades of communist rule in favor of liberal democracy under the playwright/dissident Vaclav Havel. Similar bloodless revolutions took place in other former Warsaw Pact countries.

Notably, Havel, following Gandhi’s example, aimed his activism not at overthrowing the regime but at “immediate changes in daily life….an unshakable commitment to achieving modest, concrete goals on the local level,” as Jonathan Schell writes in his 2003 book The Unconquerable World. These measures included financial aid to dissidents at odds with the authorities and the families of jailed workers; an underground press; and a clandestine university teaching uncensored material in private homes. Schell recounts how Havel, along with fellow activists like Gyorgy Konrad in Hungary and Adam Michnik in Poland, “lowered their field glasses from the remote heights of state power and turned their gazes to the life immediately around them…..Their new rule of thumb was to act not against the government but for society—and then to defend the accomplishments.”

In this country, there is no better example of a successful pro-democracy struggle than the Civil Rights Movement, itself the heir to the abolitionist movement that predates even the founding of the US.

Shall we quibble with the word “successful”? Racism remains a pox on our country, and discrimination, bigotry, police brutality, economic injustice, and other longstanding ills continue to roil the nation. But that in no way minimizes the achievements of the Black liberation movement, which carries on even now into the continuing campaign against racism and poverty led by successors to Dr. King, like the Rev. William Barber II.

Malcolm Gladwell notes that the Civil Rights Movement was a highly disciplined, rigidly organized hierarchical endeavor with centralized control, distinguished by formal planning, training of volunteers, and reconnaissance of locations and targets, under the auspices of groups like the NAACP, SNCC, and SCLC. In the same way that Rosa Parks’s historic refusal to give up her seat was no impulsive act but a carefully planned and deliberate operation, the entire movement was similarly strategic, targeted with near-military precision at very specific objectives.

Subsequent movements in the 1960s, ‘70s, and ’80s proved again the power of the people as a political force. The anti–Vietnam War movement, which galvanized millions across the country, undeniably helped bring significant pressure to bear on successive administrations to end its war in Southeast Asia. Anti-war fervor helped drive LBJ out of the 1968 presidential race, and—in a bitter irony—helped Nixon take his place, only to continue the war for another five futile years at a cost of 21,000 additional American dead and hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese lives. But ultimately even he had to bend to public clamor, accelerated by the revelations of Daniel Ellsberg.

The nuclear freeze movement played a substantive role in forcing the US to scale back the madness of the arms race and helped prompt landmark nonproliferation treaties in the Reagan era, while the anti-apartheid movement shamed universities and other organizations into divesting from financial interests in South Africa and helped spur the passage of the Comprehensive Anti-Apartheid Act of 1986, enacted over Reagan’s veto by a Republican-controlled Senate.

I’ll repeat that. A Republican-controlled Senate.

And these are not outliers. Throughout its history, American life has been shaped by determined dissident movements. The suffrage movement of the early 20th century—which itself grew out of the abolitionist movement of the previous century—got women the vote, a struggle that continues with the ongoing fight for equal pay, the fight against workplace discrimination and harassment, the fight for reproductive justice, and in the struggle of #MeToo. The labor union movement put an end to the most exploitative working conditions of American industry in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and—for a time—played a major role in remaking American life and reining in naked capitalism. The gay rights movement made astounding gains over a relatively brief period on behalf of a constituency that has been among the most reviled and persecuted in human history and remains so in large parts of the world.

But how, you ask, can we mobilize enough Americans to make this happen in the current situation? It might not be as tall an order as it seems.

We hear about the Three Percenters, a right wing militia akin to the Oath Keepers or Proud Boys whose name derives from the unproven claim that only 3% of American colonists fought against the British. (Self-flattering cosplay as Revolutionary War figures is big in MAGA World.) But that idea goes both ways. In Why Civil Resistance Works: The Strategic Logic of Nonviolent Conflict (2010), the political scientists Erica Chenoweth and Maria Stephan surveyed 323 resistance movements over the 106 years from 1900–2006. The authors’ research caused them to formulate the “3.5% rule,” which sets that number as the threshold of citizen participation necessary for a resistance movement to succeed. In their study, all the movements that met that standard were nonviolent.

Three and a half percent of the adult US population is about nine million people, the same number of people who bought Matchbox 20’s 1996 album Yourself or Someone Like You. That seems a highly achievable number for an anti-MAGA, pro-democracy campaign in America should a second Trump regime come to power. We’re not talking about Thriller here.

DOWN TO THE WELL

What do all these pro-democracy movements have in common? All were external to the elected government (though some had allies within it, on the opposition side), and all succeeded by means of a sustained campaign that swayed public opinion to its side. That is because all political struggle is ultimately psychological in nature.

Jon Else, the MacArthur-winning filmmaker and retired UC Berkeley journalism professor, was a student volunteer in Mississippi in 1964 and ‘65—what he calls a “lowest level pavement pounder” in SNCC (the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee), founded by Ella Baker, Julian Bond, and others. In that role, he was also on the steps of the courthouse in Selma, Alabama, when the racist sheriff Jim Clark went berserk in front of the national press. Else told me that it was the public nature of the Civil Rights Movement that gave their actions much of their power. They were informational acts aimed at galvanizing attention and changing minds, or what Sharp calls “political jiu-jitsu.”

“With SNCC and SCLC, we were always aiming at the folks in power who could actually change the laws,” Else told me. “Getting that mad dog sheriff to attack the demonstrators with dogs in Birmingham, or flushing the lynch mobs out of the back alleys in Mississippi—that was not designed for white folks in Alabama or Mississippi. It was designed for members of Congress. Because we were operating at a time when Congress and the executive were actually fairly functional, and you could actually shame Republican lawmakers into seeing what a bald-faced injustice was going on right in their backyard and doing something about it. It was all about finding the most effective targets with power high up in Washington.”

In the contemporary moment, in resisting the second Trump regime, shaming Congress into action is not in play. But changing the minds of our fellow Americans is the pressure point at which we must aim. Clearly, the verdict of the American people last Tuesday suggests that there is work to be done there; I will get into that challenge in detail in the coming weeks. But the important thing to remember is that perception is the fulcrum of political power, and that is not a matter of formal de jure authority, but of who controls the narrative. An autocracy maintains power only so long as it does so, and especially when it succeeds in making the resistance quit out of despair when its own struggle feels unwinnable.

Therefore, at its most basic, defeating Trumpism and getting a proper small “d” democratic government back in power will require winning the proverbial battle for hearts and minds. Some might say that sounds too ephemeral and insufficiently concrete….but they’re wrong. Others will say it’s not possible. They are also wrong. All the nuts and bolts stuff we have to do springs from that strategic objective.

“If there’s one thing that I feel very certain about,” Jon Else told me, “it’s that you have to figure out why you’re doing any particular action. Organizing movements and actions will always have an effect for the people who are involved. It gives people a sense of agency, which they may otherwise be missing. But is it actually gonna change things? Does that matter to you? Is it gonna change things now? Is it gonna change things a year from now, or ten years from now?”

“When we were in Mississippi in the summer of ’64, trying to mount a challenge to the segregated all-white delegation to the Democratic Convention, Lyndon Johnson and Hubert Humphrey came up with a compromise that was unacceptable to the folks who’d risked their lives for this effort. But getting Fannie Lou Hamer on national television that summer saying, ‘Is this America?’ set the stage in many ways for the Voting Rights Act, which followed only a year later. So the victory is not always right in front of you.”

In the coming weeks, this blog will continue to post other excerpts from Resisting the Right along with new material related to the pro-democracy struggle in which America is now joined. That is a well that is in no danger of running dry. But as we get into those specifics, let’s never lose sight of this bedrock principle: even in an autocracy, power derives from a mandate of the people. That is the one thing that is within our control, and even a small number of us can tip that balance.