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History Still Shows a Path, and Many are Joining In [1]
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Date: 2025-04-19
This is a largely expanded 2nd Edition of a post originally published at Daily Kos Dec. 20, 2020 and at www.philosphical-ron.com Dec. 31, 2020
Well, isn’t this embarrassing to my writer’s ego?
I’ve been working, between many other family and family business tasks, to re-new my piece from 4 years ago that tried to spread the word that historical research showed that nonviolent (yet determined) actions by citizens can in fact overcome dictatorial regimes. I am too old now, all types of work are going more slowly than just a couple of years ago. I wanted a good work session Thursday night, instead I had my first bout of illness in 3 years (all better now, thanks.).
But overnight, a much more famous writer comes out with an article highlighting the same historians I’ve been using, to argue for very radical, very determined nonviolent mass actions to help save America from wanna-be dictator Trump – and it’s David Brooks, New York Times columnist. I remember him as a conservative writer I never cared for, yet who has in 2025 changed his tune to recognize Trump’s extreme danger to all American values and citizens.
In other words, my writer’s ego has been “trumped” by David Brooks !
Twenty years ago I might have re-examined my whole life if I thought I shared any of David Brook’s ideas, yet he’s the one who’s changed, and evolved . And he may be more radical today than some of the deepest radicals we have on DK who are constantly demanding stronger action!
Nevertheless, I am still going to reinforce the message that history shows a path for changing destructive dictatorial governments, and it more shows that intelligent non-violent mass (and individual) actions are generally more effective at changing dictatorial governments than violent rebellion. And of course I want to join thousands of American writers to reinforce the message that we need to be acting and working and talking, with all the might we can muster while staying healthy, against Donald Trump and his crew of crazy bootlickers, before they destroy all that’s good and worthwhile in America, completely.
And so here’s a bit of introduction to today’s presentation. I am going to re-print my article from 4 years ago, featuring historian Erica Chenowith and colleagues, who has amassed the evidence that nonviolent actions can and do work, just very slightly revised., it wasn’t long to begin with. And at the end I will summarize and support both Chenowith and Brooks and others in their visions of what Americans can and should be considering and acting on today, and bring in a few other suggestions for action to STOP TRUMP’S illegal, un-constitutional and destructive attempt to change a nations of 330 million people into his own plaything. Now we’re going back to my article of 4 years ago, “History Shows a Path” (refs), where I was trying to write calmly in a scholarly tone.
My writings have done their best to show that the existing political dictatorships in some of the largest nations of Asia by territory and population, Russia and China, and far too many other global nations, are the main obstacle to a happy and progressive future for any of the world’s billions of people. The problem of dictatorship is intimately linked with the two other huge global problems of climate change and income inequality, yet because of the resources available for the dictatorships to force their will on their own subjects and the international sphere, the dictatorships are arguably the hardest obstacle in the great work we will have to be doing over the next twenty years to bring about a world that is worth living in.
So I am very pleased to be able to bring the news that patient historical research has been able to identify paths of ‘nonviolent mass action” that have proved, in general, to be more effective than strategies of violent revolution in gaining increased citizen rights in the face of governments that are determined to repress those rights.
This will be a relatively short article, sourced from one magazine article (behind a paywall, sorry), “The Anti-Coup” by Andrew Marantz in The New Yorker, Nov. 23, 2020 (article title may vary between print and online editions), which relates the story of an emerging group of historians, of whom the most prominent currently is Erica Chenoweth, the Berthold Beitz Professor in Human Rights and International Affairs at the Harvard Kennedy School. All material here in quotes (in this portion of the article today) is from Marantz’s article, all other material here I am summarizing greatly to respect “fair use” of copyright.
Building on the work of historians and activists going back to the 1950’s, and particularly a 1973 book “The Politics of Nonviolent Action” by political scientist Gene Sharp, they start from a rejection of the traditional political science perspective that power is a top-down phenomena. Instead, they hold that political power comes from the ability to bring about the voluntary obedience of others – which is of course backed by the police and military hardware of the state in most cases, yet still relies on the voluntary obedience of all the government underlings and economic actors and media and ultimately all the janitors and nurses and food-servers as well. (My own historical writings have come to the same conclusion, and I try to show how every one of us in the world is making political choices in our every thought and action.) Those investigating this history make it clear that “nonviolent conflict” is very different from any kind of acquiescence or surrender to government power, but instead stress how protesters initiating violence often lose sympathy and legitimacy from the general public, while the government’s initiation of violence against protesters tend to bring public sympathy back to the government.
To summarize greatly, Sharp, working from historical examples, identified 198 “methods of nonviolent action,” such as vigils, strikes, boycotts, “slow-working” labor actions, mock funerals, and so on. He further noted whether these tactics were “methods of concentration” (bringing people together in large groups), or methods of dispersal and non-cooperation. Building on this Chenoweth and colleagues have built a database that attempts to account for every significant revolutionary-type political rising with over 1000 participants since 1900; their total is over 320 such movements.
A 2011 book by Chenoweth and Maria Stephan, “Why Civil Resistance Works: The Strategic Logic of Nonviolent Conflict,” presents detailed narrative case studies of some of these movements, closely studying why one was more successful than another. Even using fairly restrictive definitions of ‘success” for these movements, they found that over half of the movements in their database were successes, and that nonviolent civil resistance movements were twice as successful as armed movements. In the words of Tom Hastings, identified as “a longtime activist and scholar of nonviolence,” “I’ve been at this since the sixties … For a long time there have been those of us who had a philosophical commitment to nonviolence, or an intuition that nonviolence puts you at a strategic advantage. Erica and Maria took that intuition and empirically proved it.”
In conversations with activists this fall, Chenoweth identified Thailand in 1992 and Serbia in 2000 as examples of popular movements that were able to overcome post-election power grabs by authorities, and attributed their successes to four general characteristics: being able to mobilize mass popular participation, encouraging defections by people with various different types of authority, not relying only on mass demonstrations but also using “methods of dispersal and noncooperation, like boycotts and strikes,” and finally to be able stay “disciplined, even when repression escalated.”
That finishes my summary of this important and inspiring article, which should give hope to all of us who hope that repression and authoritarianism can someday be banished from all human societies. Again, I am the historical writer who tries to emphasize (link) how we are indeed creating our futures with our every action, our every thought, we are constantly making choices of what persons and which behaviors we wish to honor and respect in our societies – even when we may think we’re not making any conscious choices at all.
That’s what I was writing in 2020, when the threats of dictatorship in America were only theoretical. Today in 2025, with Trump’s ignorance, incoherence and malevolence on full display, using all the powers of the Federal Government that he can grab lawfully or otherwise to tear up all the pillars of America’s greatness, the threat is very real and very frightening. Can ordinary Americans really do anything that matters that will help?
In a March 2025 article, Erica Chenowith and colleagues Jeremy Pressman and Sona Hamman, declare that “Our research affirms that resistance is alive and well” against Trump in America. While the very first demonstrations after Trump’s inauguration in January may have been smaller than some in 2017, there have been more protests in more cities than in 2017 even by February, and the number and breadth of other citizen-organized acts of resistance is even more impressive: field workers in California using stay-at-home strikes to evade ICE agents, businesses helping their undocumented workers evade agents, protests all across America at Tesla outlets. Unions and others helped organize quick demonstrations at agencies in Washington DC that were being targeted by DOGE, and thousands of citizens turning out and standing on the roads in rural Vermont shamed J.D. Vance from having a skiing vacation. The Hands Off protests on April 5 (and planned again for April 19 and future dates) were very successful and certainly advanced the total of American demonstrators far above the comparable numbers from 2017, activists are maintaining lists of the many, many actions of resistance in America in 2025 here.
Chenowith and her colleagues, in their analysis of successful non-violent methods for countering authoritarianism, find that citizen movements are most successful when they can use economic types of non-cooperation which by pressuring some economic activities, help to “split” factions of the power structure against each other because certain power-holders are losing too much income. “In anti-authoritarian movements of the 20th century, economic noncooperation — more so than protest alone — was the coordinated activity that split elites and made way for democratic breakthroughs. In apartheid South Africa it was the enormous economic pressure — through boycotts of white-owned businesses, general strikes, divestments and capital flight — that brought the white supremacist National Party to heel and elevated reformers who were willing to do business with Nelson Mandela and the ANC.” (link) The historians advise American activists in 2025 that “the public’s most powerful options are often withholding labor power and purchasing power. Calling in sick from work or school, refusing to buy and stay-at-home demonstrations are notoriously difficult to police. … The prominence of billionaires in the administration and populist anger toward them make this type of approach even more viable in today’s climate.”
I stopped having time and money for the New York Times years ago, I haven’t followed Brooks career or writings, I see now that he has never been a fan of Trump and has urged Democratic votes in recent elections. The NYT does say they allow free subscriptions, but they screwed up the one I had in 2014 and have never provided a way to actually get a complaint into their circulation department about that, and I wrote them my own letters thru the mail and they never responded to that either. So I only have access to a brief summary of what Brooks wrote, which seems to be pretty straightforward application of Chenowith’s teachings: get organized and apply pressure to the elements of the dictatorial elite as intelligently as possible.
The one quote I have from Brooks today is “It’s time for a comprehensive national civic uprising. It’s time for Americans in universities, law, business, nonprofits and the scientific community, and civil servants and beyond to form one coordinated mass movement. Trump is about power. The only way he’s going to be stopped is if he’s confronted by some movement that possesses rival power. “
The verb “to form” in Brooks’s quote is on the passive side; saying we or they “need to organize” is stronger and more determined. I’ve tried my hand at organizing, I’ve stood on street corners handing out pamphlets in various decades; doing cold fundraising calls off old lists can be even more disheartening to the would-be organizer. And I have argued that the main failing of our liberal and positive side of American voters is that we haven’t been willing to organizes ourselves, not a fraction as much as the other side. This is largely a function of the sociological fact that they are mostly all coming out of a traditional culture with very defined roles (but they also work harder at organizing than our side), while we are the folks whose life experiences have been much more varied, which makes us each more unusual, we have to take much more testing of roles as we get to know each other Our organizing efforts are tangled by folks who wish to be the smartest person in the room, and folks whose standards are so high they can’t seem to find anyone to work with. Yet I strongly feel we need to make more efforts, and to learn more about helping people help each other in working through the inevitable setbacks in working towards common goals.
One American voice whose organizing efforts have been tireless over the years is writer and broadcaster Thom Hartmann. He’s posting great stuff every day, his post of April 16 features authors Liz Theoharis and Norm Sandweiss-Back, whose new book is “You Only Get What You’re Organized to Take: Lessons From the Movement to End Poverty.”
As the subtitle suggests, the book stems from Liz’s long history with radical antipoverty efforts in East Coast cities starting in the 80’s and 90’s, helping homeless folks organize themselves, often taking over abandoned buildings for shelter yet also working to have laws relaxed and programs established for the direct benefit of the homeless.
They note that in many difficult situations, “it is often the people whose backs are up against the wall who are willing to take decisive action. In every popular, pro-democracy movement, there is a leading social force that, by virtue of its place in the economic pecking order, is compelled to act first, because for them it’s a matter of life-or-death. And by moving into action, that force can awaken the indignation and imagination of others.”
They see an American landscape today of threatened communities facing “projects of survival,” such as \”food banks and neighborhood associations; churches and other houses of worship providing sanctuary for the unhoused and immigrants; women, trans kids, and other LGBTQ+ people fighting to ensure that they and their loved ones get the healthcare they need; community schools stepping into the breach of our beleaguered public education system; mutual-aid groups responding to environmental disasters that are only increasing thanks to the climate crisis; and students protesting the genocide in Gaza and the militarization of our society,” and move on to “imagine what might be possible if so many communities were operating not in isolation but in coordination. Imagine the power of such a potentially vast network to shake things up and assert the moral, intellectual, and political agency of those under attack.”
Doesn’t that sound like exactly what America needs today ?
Eager to do my part, I engaged in a little test/trial today. I am into business and economics, I was the hippie reading my Dad’s Fortune magazines in the ‘60’s and pecking around economics in college, and running my own and my chosen-family’s businesses most of my life, and I have been wondering what we can do to “peel off” businesses being harmed by Trump’s insane economics from the generalized Big Business, pro-Republican pro-Trump clump on that side of the aisle. So I looked up some good phone numbers from investment-industry sources for five of America’s biggest banks, and I was able to get through to someone with four of them.
I lied that I had index funds that owned their stock, and as an investor and a concerned citizen, my message to the bank executives was. ‘do they recognize that the banking industry depends on the Rule of Law, and if they don’t they need to study up on it. My bank account, your personal bank account, the profits of your corporation will all be at risk in 3 to 5 years if we lose the Rule of Law, where a President can break treaties and break laws and there’s no courts. I understand no individual bank can speak against Trump, he will retaliate, but the banking industry as a whole needs to get together and publicly support the Rule of Law, you have the American Banking Association, you need to talk to the other big banks, you Need to Support the Rule of Law in the Name of the Banking Industry.’ And three receptionists were very glad to take that message, with one at a leading NYC bank promising to take it into a meeting that afternoon.
So I’m fairly heartened by that, and I will be trying it again. I’m hoping some of my readers may be inspired to take similar actions. The three big American automakers are probably frantically talking to whatever contacts they have every day, they’re fairly vulnerable to retaliation (and the big Import automakers have their own problems) but how bad will the tariff pain get for them? If you are involved in any aspect of the auto industry, it’s all the local folks who need to organize their economic pain against Trump, all the rubber for tires is imported, isn’t it, and now there’s tariffs on every bit of steel and aluminum, there’s going to be pain all over every facet of the widespread auto industries. We all need to be asking our local auto dealers, “I assume you’ve given $ to Republicans over the years, can you finally cut that off forever?”
Words are cheap, action is expensive. We’re all feeling the tension. We all have our own lives to live, we all have our own ways of doing things. We all need to maintain mental and physical health while doing intense political work, entertainment and escape are human needs that will need their time. I know I don’t have all the answers, and that it’s probably more productive to focus on what specific things I can do today and tomorrow than to worry about all the bad possible futures that may be out there.
The time is RIGHT NOW, the next 3 to 6 months at least. There are dozens of aspects of Trump’s crimes to focus on, maintaining the Rule of Law is near the top. There will be no excuses that can salve feelings if we fail.
Let’s go with positive nonviolent action, using the other resources we may still have (maybe 7 judges on the Supreme Court?), to stop the dictatorship Trump is trying to erect.
It’s only our lives and our children’s lives and the future of the world that’s at stake.
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