Let's not lose our heads

Why history says non-violent mass movements are the best way to defang Elonald’s power grab.

The problematic mythologist Sigmund Freud once wrote, “The first human who hurled an insult instead of a stone was the founder of civilization.”

While I don’t like thinking about Freud (or my mother) very much, that thought has moved into my frontal lobe to do some squatting, and I don’t expect it to leave. 

Why? I write a lot about billionaires. I write about American politics, so how can I not? But my current obsession is making this generation of billionaires the last generation. Why? If we don’t convince society to kennel hoarders of capital and massively leash their power, they’ll soon be trillionaires. Then, all hope will be lost.

This kind of talk brings out the Jacobin in people online, and I’ll often get replies glorifying the guillotines, celebrating how the French Revolution solved the problem of wealth gluttons. And honestly, it doesn’t please me. I’m not saying your job is to please please me. I’m not John Lennon. But I also think a lot about the song “Revolution” and the lines “You say you got a real solution/ Well, you know/ We'd all love to see the plan.” Then, as you probably know, Lennon says you can count him out or in of the Revolution, depending on the guitar he uses on the song. I don’t think of John as a role model for much unrelated to music. He’s unique among the men of his time in that he often elevated his wife as his equal and admitted he’d fucked up as a father and tried better the next time. But in “Revolution,” he doesn’t remind me of a Jacobin as much as Big “Centrist’ Democratic Donor. “Sure, I’d love to save democracy, but where’s your Powerpoint, and how can we blame trans people?”

But do I say that I want a revolution, of a sort, because nothing less will restore our Constitutional order. And I don’t have an exact plan.

But I know how this American revolution can happen because I’m a listener and a producer of “Next Comes What,” Andrea Pitzer’s podcast about what we can learn from history to thwart American authoritarianism.

It will be through the courts and crowds.

There’s nothing theoretical about this because that’s how America’s Civil Rights Movement, the greatest revolution of America’s three, worked. And it worked much better than the other two in terms of extending some basic dignity to all citizens until the Roberts Court destroyed the social compact that made the Civil Rights Movement possible by selling out our people with Citizens United and gutting the Voting Rights Act.

Non-violence doesn't guarantee peace from violent oppressors. But it does make their violence a potential weapon in your nonviolence arsenal, as the heroes who sat at lunch counters and marched in places like Montgomery and Selma taught us.

If we are to reverse what John Roberts, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, Leonard Leo, and a wax museum of rich freaks have engineered, it’ll be through courts and crowds, as Andrea explained in this episode:

Due to the response of the guillotine throwers saying, “What about the bloodshed? There’s gotta be some carnage?” she followed that episode up with another that included examples of how these two avenues were already paying off and addressed the question of violence:

Andrea cited a study by Erica Chenoweth and Maria J. Stephan. “They found that overall, nonviolent civil resistance is far more successful in creating broad-based change than violent campaigns are,” Andrea wrote in the post that inspired the episode. That's the study you may have heard cited that documents how 3.5% of a society is the tipping point to overwhelming an authoritarian regime.

Putting together the episode, I watched Chenoweth's TedX talk soon after the study was released, which explained why violence doesn’t work, as well as Gandhi/Dr. King path:

She notes that “every single campaign that surpassed that 3.5% was a non-violent one. In fact, the non-violent campaigns were on average four times larger than the average violent campaigns.” The reason why makes too much sense. “And they were often much more inclusive and representative in terms of gender, age, race, political party, class, and the urban/rural distinction.”

She summed up why this is self-evident, in a sentence now living in my lobe next to Dr. Freud’s quote, “ If you think about it, everyone is born with a natural physical ability to resist non-violently.”

I’ve been thinking a lot about violence and why I hate it and even the suggestion of it in terms of political upheaval. Though I am not observant now at all, I spent my childhood in Hebrew School surrounded by Holocaust survivors. The first time I heard about the Shoah was when my first Hebrew School teacher showed us her tattoo from Auschwitz, I believe, and then had to leave for the day because she couldn’t stop crying. I was shuffled into events like seeing veterans of the Warsaw Uprising speak at temples off Fairfax in LA. My reverence for their suffering and the bravery it took to survive and, when possible, resist is both spiritual and embedded into my nervous system. I think I understand how bad things can get. I live in awe of the horrors and heroism humans will find themselves unexpectedly capable of.

History rhymes. But we are not Nazi Germany yet. We are the world’s oldest democracy that has repeatedly overthrown its constitutional shackles to imperfectly expand the promise of freedom.

I agree that this is the most severe test of our ability to rule ourselves we will likely face. I get the hatred for those who are seeking to rule us out of revenge fantasies and contempt for the idea of us all being created equal. But honestly, save the guillotines—unless you know how to actually build one and prove that with either a working model or full-sized version.

The reason I prefer ridicule and refusal to stones is because I have a terrible arm. So do you, probably. And it’s much easier to hit someone with an insult than a rock. And the consequences are less likely to ruin your life and the lives of everyone around you.

We will do this non-violently because that brings people in, and it can actually work. It’s what makes sense now. Yes, we want them to lose their heads, metaphorically, but the greatest pleasure will be seeing the realization that they’ve lost in their working eyes.