protest

What does nonviolence mean?

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Jun 15 JDN 2460842

As I write this, the LA protests and the crackdown upon them have continued since Friday and it is now Wednesday. In a radical and authoritarian move by Trump, Marines have been deployed (with shockingly incompetent logistics unbefitting the usually highly-efficient US military); but so far they have done very little. Reuters has been posting live updates on new developments.

The LAPD has deployed a variety of less-lethal weapons to disperse the protests, including rubber bullets, tear gas, and pepper balls; but so far they have not used lethal force. Protesters have been arrested, some for specific crimes—and others simply for violating curfew.

More recently, the protests have spread to other cities, including New York, Atlanta, Austin, Chicago, San Fransisco, and Philadelphia. By the time this post goes live, there will probably be even more cities involved, and there may also be more escalation.

But for now, at least, the protests have been largely nonviolent.

And I thought it would be worthwhile to make it very clear what I mean by that, and why it is important.

I keep seeing a lot of leftist people on social media accepting the narrative that these protests are violent, but actively encouraging that; and some of them have taken to arrogantly accuse anyone who supports nonviolent protests over violent ones of either being naive idiots or acting in bad faith. (The most baffling part of this is that they seem to be saying that Martin Luther King and Mahatma Gandhi were naive idiots or were acting in bad faith? Is that what they meant to say?)

First of all, let me be absolutely clear that nonviolence does not mean comfortable or polite or convenient.

Anyone objecting to blocking traffic, strikes, or civil disobedience because they cause disorder and inconvenience genuinely does not understand the purpose of protest (or is a naive idiot or acting in bad faith). Effective protests are disruptive and controversial. They cause disorder.

Nonviolence does not mean always obeying the law.

Sometimes the law is itself unjust, and must be actively disobeyed. Most of the Holocaust was legal, after all.

Other times, it is necessary to break some laws (such as property laws, curfews, and laws against vandalism) in the service of higher goals.

I wouldn’t say that a law against vandalism is inherently unjust; but I would say that spray-painting walls and vehicles in the service of protecting human rights is absolutely justified, and even sometimes it’s necessary to break some windows or set some fires.

Nonviolence does not mean that nobody tries to call it violence.

Most governments are well aware that most of their citizens are much more willing to support a nonviolent movement than a violent moment—more on this later—and thus will do whatever they can to characterize nonviolent movements as violence. They have two chief strategies for doing so:

  1. Characterize nonviolent but illegal acts, such as vandalism and destruction of property, as violence
  2. Actively try to instigate violence by treating nonviolent protesters as if they were violent, and then characterizing their attempts at self-defense as violence

As a great example of the latter, a man in Phoenix was arrested for assault because he kicked a tear gas canister back at police. But kicking back a canister that was shot at you is the most paradigmatic example of self-defense I could possibly imagine. If the system weren’t so heavily biased in fair of the police, a judge would order his release immediately.

Nonviolence does not mean that no one at the protests gets violent.

Any large group of people will contain outliers. Gather a protest of thousands of people, and surely some fraction of them will be violent radicals, or just psychopaths looking for an excuse to hurt someone. A nonviolent protest is one in which most people are nonviolent, and in which anyone who does get violent is shunned by the organizers of the movement.

Nonviolence doesn’t mean that violence will never be used against you.

On the contrary, the more authoritarian the regime—and thus the more justified your protest—the more likely it is that violent force will be used to suppress your nonviolent protests.

In some places it will be limited to less-lethal means (as it has so far in the current protests); but in others, even in ostensibly-democratic countries, it can result in lethal force being deployed against innocent people (as it did at Kent State in 1970).

When this happens, are you supposed to just stand there and get shot?

Honestly? Yes. I know that requires tremendous courage and self-sacrifice, but yes.

I’m not going to fault anyone for running or hiding or even trying to fight back (I’d be more of the “run” persuasion myself), but the most heroic action you could possibly take in that situation is in fact to stand there and get shot. Becoming a martyr is a terrible sacrifice, and one I’m not sure it’s one I myself could ever make; but it really, really works. (Seriously, whole religions have been based on this!)

And when you get shot, for the love of all that is good in the world, make sure someone gets it on video.

The best thing you can do for your movement is to show the oppressors for what they truly are. If they are willing to shoot unarmed innocent people, and the world finds out about that, the world will turn against them. The more peaceful and nonviolent you can appear at the moment they shoot you, the more compelling that video will be when it is all over the news tomorrow.

A shockingly large number of social movements have pivoted sharply in public opinion after a widely-publicized martyrdom incident. If you show up peacefully to speak your minds and they shoot you, that is nonviolent protest working. That is your protest being effective.

I never said that nonviolent protest was easy or safe.

What is the core of nonviolence?

It’s really very simple. So simple, honestly, that I don’t understand why it’s hard to get across to people:

Nonviolence means you don’t initiate bodily harm against other human beings.

It does not necessarily preclude self-defense, so long as that self-defense is reasonable and proportionate; and it certainly does not in any way preclude breaking laws, damaging property, or disrupting civil order.


Nonviolence means you never throw the first punch.

Nonviolence is not simply a moral position, but a strategic one.

Some of the people you would be harming absolutely deserve it. I don’t believe in ACAB, but I do believe in SCAB, and nearly 30% of police officers are domestic abusers, who absolutely would deserve a good punch to the face. And this is all the more true of ICE officers, who aren’t just regular bastards; they are bastards whose core job is now enforcing the human rights violations of President Donald Trump. Kidnapping people with their unmarked uniforms and unmarked vehicles, ICE is basically the Gestapo.

But it’s still strategically very unwise for us to deploy violence. Why? Two reasons:

  1. Using violence is a sure-fire way to turn most Americans against our cause.
  2. We would probably lose.

Nonviolent protest is nearly twice as effective as violent insurrection. (If you take nothing else from this post, please take that.)

And the reason that nonviolent protest is so effective is that it changes minds.

Violence doesn’t do that; in fact, it tends to make people rally against you. Once you start killing people, even people who were on your side may start to oppose you—let alone anyone who was previously on the fence.

A successful violent revolution results in you having to build a government and enforce your own new laws against a population that largely still disagrees with you—and if you’re a revolution made of ACAB people, that sounds spectacularly difficult!

A successful nonviolent protest movement results in a country that agrees with you—and it’s extremely hard for even a very authoritarian regime to hang onto power when most of the people oppose it.

By contrast, the success rate of violent insurrections is not very high. Why?

Because they have all the guns, you idiot.

States try to maintain a monopoly on violence in their territory. They are usually pretty effective at doing so. Thus attacking a state when you are not a state puts you at a tremendous disadvantage.

Seriously; we are talking about the United States of America right now, the most powerful military hegemon the world has ever seen.

Maybe the people advocating violence don’t really understand this, but the US has not lost a major battle since 1945. Oh, yes, they’ve “lost wars”, but what that really means is that public opinion has swayed too far against the war for them to maintain morale (Vietnam) or their goals for state-building were so over-ambitious that they were basically impossible for anyone to achieve (Iraq and Afghanistan). If you tally up the actual number of soldiers killed, US troops always kill more than they lose, and typically by a very wide margin.


And even with the battles the US lost in WW1 and WW2, they still very much won the actual wars. So genuinely defeating the United States in open military conflict is not something that has happened since… I’m pretty sure the War of 1812.

Basically, advocating for a violent response to Trump is saying that you intend to do something that literally no one in the world—including major world military powers—has been able to accomplish in 200 years. The last time someone got close, the US nuked them.

If the protests in LA were genuinely the insurrectionists that Trump has been trying to characterize them as, those Marines would not only have been deployed, they would have started shooting. And I don’t know if you realize this, but US Marines are really good at shooting. It’s kind of their thing. Instead of skirmishes with rubber bullets and tear gas, we would have an absolute bloodbath. It would probably end up looking like the Tet Offensive, a battle where “unprepared” US forces “lost” because they lost 6,000 soldiers and “only” killed 45,000 in return. (The US military is so hegemonic that a kill ratio of more than 7 to 1 is considered a “loss” in the media and public opinion.)

Granted, winning a civil war is different from winning a conventional war; even if a civil war broke out, it’s unlikely that nukes would be used on American soil, for instance. But you’re still talking about a battle so uphill it’s more like trying to besiege Edinburgh Castle.

Our best hope in such a scenario, in fact, would probably be to get blue-state governments to assert control over US military forces in their own jurisdiction—which means that antagonizing Gavin Newsom, as I’ve been seeing quite a few leftists doing lately, seems like a really bad idea.

I’m not saying that winning a civil war would be completely impossible. Since we might be able to get blue-state governors to take control of forces in their own states and we would probably get support from Canada, France, and the United Kingdom, it wouldn’t be completely hopeless. But it would be extremely costly, millions of people would die, and victory would by no means be assured despite the overwhelming righteousness of our cause.

How about, for now at least, we stick to the methods that historically have proven twice as effective?

Why nonviolence?

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Aug 16 JDN 2459078

You are no doubt aware that there are widespread protests going on right now. You may even have marched in some of them. Nearly 30 million Americans have participated in the Black Lives Matter protests, located in cities all around the country; this makes them quite likely the largest protests in American history.

The right wing is of course making much of the isolated incidents of violence that have occurred, often but not always actually provoked by the police or federal agents assigned to quell the protests. They have also made much of the property destruction caused by riots that have emerged from the protests, typically eliding the distinction between property destruction and violence. Since there has been far more property destruction than actual violence, this allows them to effectively inflate the level of violence.

In reality, the total deaths caused by these protests over two months and counting is clearly less than the number of Americans who are shot by police in an average week. And the total amount of property destruction is clearly less than the tens of billions of dollars per year that are stolen in wage theft, let alone the hundreds of billions of dollars per year that are stolen by white-collar crime. If violence and loss of property are really what you care about, these protests should not be your main concern.

Yet, I am concerned that too many on the left are too willing to accept violence. I have seen far too many people sharing and endorsing this quote:

“Dr. King’s policy was that nonviolence would achieve the gains for black people in the United States. His major assumption was that if you are nonviolent, if you suffer, your opponent will see your suffering and will be moved to change his heart. That’s very good. He only made one fallacious assumption: In order for nonviolence to work, your opponent must have a conscience. The United States has none.”

~ Stokely Carmichael

Nonviolence does work. Nonviolence did work for the civil rights movement. No, it doesn’t depend upon your opponent having a conscience—it only depends upon bystanders having a conscience. (Also, “the United States has no conscience” is only true insofar as socially constructed institutions don’t have feelings. Clearly most of the people in the United States—probably even most of the people in the US government—have a conscience!)

In fact, nonviolent protest is typically more effective than violent protest. When protesters turn to violence, they alienate the public whose support they need, and they allow the government to feel justified in responding with even more force. Campaigns of nonviolent civil resistance have been historically more effective than violent revolutions, even against authoritarian governments. On average, nonviolent protests are twice as likely to achieve their goals than violent protests.

Even worse than the Carmichael quote are the memes that have been shared saying things like this: “You want to fix the system, but not use violence; so, by magic?”

Nonviolence doesn’t mean politely asking for rights. It doesn’t mean being calm and non-confrontational. It doesn’t mean waiting patiently.

Nonviolence doesn’t even mean following the law or never damaging property. Some of the most important and effective acts of nonviolent protest involved breaking laws and damaging things—Rosa Parks was breaking the law, and does the Boston Tea Party ring a bell?

Nonviolence doesn’t even mean that nobody gets hurt; it often means strategically placing your own people in harm’s way knowing that the government’s violent overreaction will stir support for your cause. It’s a kind of ethical and political judo: Instead of directly resisting your stronger opponent, you maneuver so that their own power ends up damaging them. You use the government’s repression as a weapon for your own cause.

What does nonviolence mean?

Nonviolence means you don’t hurt people.

It sounds so simple and obvious, but a lot of people still don’t seem to get it. They seem to think that our only choices are “ask nicely” or “start a civil war”. Asking nicely obviously would not be effective; only someone deeply naive could imagine otherwise. Working legally within the system can sometimes be effective, but when really deep reforms are needed urgently it is often not enough. Starting a civil war might work—it has sometimes worked in the past—but it would come at a horrendous cost, probably thousands if not millions of lives.

Fortunately, these are not our only options. We don’t have to ask nicely; we don’t even have to obey the law. We can even break things. We just need to not hurt people. That still allows for a variety of forms of protest, confrontation, civil disobedience, and direct action. Jacobin, oddly enough, gets this right.

In reality, any movement is going to have extremists who act violently. A protest movement can still be considered nonviolent as long as such incidents of violence can be kept to a minimum, and never condoned by the leaders of the movement. Thus far, Black Lives Matter has absolutely fit that description—indeed, impressively so, given the sheer scale of the protests.

Some degree of self-defense can even be consistent with nonviolence, though it must be of a very minimal sort. Wearing armor and carrying a shield is entirely consistent with nonviolence. Hitting back after you are hit is a finer line. This is morally still nonviolence as long as you use only the minimal necessary force—but politically it will only work if the public clearly knows that you are not the ones who hit first.

The ethical case for nonviolence is simple, but worth repeating: Human lives have intrinsic value. Yes, even if those human beings work willingly for a corrupt and evil system. Yes, even the average Nazi was a sentient being of intrinsic moral worth.

The only people who really deserve to die are the psychopaths at the top pulling the strings—and they are almost never the ones on the front lines getting shot or bombed. If you had a plan to kill Donald Trump, I would have no particular moral objection. I think such a plan would be very unlikely to succeed, and I would never attempt such a thing myself; but does Donald Trump deserve to die for his brazen authoritarianism, overwhelming corruption, and depraved indifference for over 160,000 dead Americans? Yes. But how does that justify killing random police officers?

Nonviolence also has another great advantage, which is that it works better when you are on the right side. The effectiveness of violence is proportional to your firepower; the effectiveness of nonviolence is proportional to your righteousness. Why in the world would you, who are righteous but have little firepower, want to use violence against an enemy that is unrighteous and has more firepower?

Nonviolent protest actually works best when your enemy is violent and repressive; it is precisely that contrast between your nonviolence and their violence that wins people to your cause. Probably the smartest thing a government could do to respond to nonviolent protests would be to sit back and calmly watch them, then make whatever was the minimal level of concessions in order to make the protests lose momentum. When you bring out the tear gas, you have basically already admitted that you are on the wrong side of history. But repressive governments don’t think that way; if they did, they would have given those same concessions before the protests even gathered steam. They imagine that by simply cracking down harder they will be able to win—but they are usually wrong.

And even if the ethical case for nonviolence means literally nothing to you, please consider the strategic case: The empirical data says quite clearly that nonviolent protest works better. In many ways, violence is the default; it’s the conflict revolution mechanism that we evolved to use, largely unmodified from the same instincts that motivate any other primate. Nonviolence is a recent invention, a high-tech solution to this ancient problem. Violence is easy; just about anyone can do it. Nonviolence is hard; it requires strategic cleverness, unwavering vigilance, and deep moral courage.

This is not to say that violence is never necessary: Against a truly totalitarian regime that is willing to murder people simply for speaking out against the government, violence may well be the only option. I certainly do not begrudge the French Resistance for using violence against the Nazis. But violence should be a last resort, not simply for ethical reasons—but also for strategic reasons.

This is a battle for the soul of America

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July 9, JDN 2457944

At the time of writing, I just got back from a protest march against President Trump in Santa Ana (the featured photo is one I took at the march). I had intended to go to the much larger sister protest in Los Angeles, but the logistics were too daunting. On the upside, presumably the marginal impact of my attendance was higher at the smaller event.

Protest marches are not a common pastime of mine; I am much more of an ivory-tower policy wonk than a boots-on-the-ground political activist. The way that other people seem to be allergic to statistics, I am allergic to a lack of statistics when broad claims are made with minimal evidence. Even when I basically agree with everything being said, I still feel vaguely uncomfortable marching and chanting in unison (and constantly reminded of that scene from Life of Brian). But I made an exception for this one, because Trump represents a threat to the soul of American democracy.

We have had bad leaders many times before—even awful leaders, even leaders whose bad decisions resulted in the needless deaths of thousands. But not since the end of the Civil War have we had leaders who so directly threatened the core institutions of America itself.

We must keep reminding ourselves: This is not normal. This is not normal! Donald Trump’s casual corruption, overwhelming narcissism, authoritarianism, greed, and utter incompetence (not to mention his taste in decor) make him more like Idi Amin or Hugo Chavez than like George H.W. Bush or Ronald Reagan. (Even the comparison with Vladimir Putin would be too flattering to Trump; Putin at least is competent.) He has personally publicly insulted over 300 people, places, and things—and counting.

Trump lies almost constantly, surrounds himself with family members and sycophants, refuses to listen to intelligence briefings, and personally demeans and even threatens journalists who criticize him. Every day it seems like there is a new scandal, more outrageous than the last; and after so long, this almost seems like a strategy. Every day he finds some new way to offend and undermine the basic norms of our society, and eventually he hopes to wear us down until we give up fighting.

It is certainly an exaggeration, and perhaps a dangerous one, to say that Donald Trump is the next Adolf Hitler. But there are important historical parallels between the rise of Trump and the rise of many other populist authoritarian demagogues. He casually violates democratic norms of civility, honesty, and transparency, and incentivizes the rest of us to do the same—a temptation we must resist. Political scientists and economists are now issuing public warnings that our democratic institutions are not as strong as we may think (though, to be fair, others argue that they are indeed strong enough).

It was an agonizingly close Presidential election. Even the tiniest differences could have flipped enough states to change the outcome. If we’d had a better voting system, it would not have happened; a simple plurality vote would have elected Hillary Clinton, and as I argued in a previous post, range voting would probably have chosen Bernie Sanders. Therefore, we must not take this result as a complete indictment of American society or a complete failure of American democracy. But let it shake us out of our complacency; democracy is only as strong as the will of its citizens to defend it.