Rogelio V. Solis/AP Photo
Jason Lavoie of Raymond, Mississippi, protests the Electoral College vote at the State Capitol in Jackson, Mississippi, January 6, 2021.
By a grim convergence, Dr. King’s birthday weekend this year coincides with plans by far-right armed militias to invade state capitols, believing that they are engaging in civil disobedience. And right-wing politicians and editorial writers are brimming with claims that “the left does it, too.”
It’s worth taking a moment to reflect on what civil disobedience is, and what it isn’t.
Henry David Thoreau’s 1849 essay “Civil Disobedience” held that citizens were responsible for the unjust actions of their governments and needed to distance themselves. He practiced a token act of civil disobedience—refusing to pay the poll tax and spending a short term in jail—as his way of protesting slavery and the Mexican-American War.
Thoreau directly influenced Gandhi, who grasped that civil disobedience could be a mass tactic to demand drastic reform; and both men influenced Dr. King. What they had in common with each other—and not with today’s militias—are two core elements.
First, their concept of civil disobedience was above all nonviolent. The militias are above all violent.
Second, they were engaging in civil disobedience to redeem core democratic rights. The militias are substituting their own violence to sack democracy.
But here’s where things get a little tricky. The Trumpian right is convinced that the election was stolen from them. By their logic, they are the ones defending democracy, and by any means necessary. The Times quotes the chairman of the Cleveland County, Oklahoma, Republican Party: “What the crap do you think the American revolution was? A game of friggin pattycake?”
Indeed, the oft-quoted preamble of the Declaration of Independence holds that when government becomes destructive of inalienable rights, “it is the right of the people to alter or abolish it.” The white nationalist militias consider themselves the true patriots, heirs to the American Revolution.
What’s notable here is the central role of slavery and the legacy of slavery in this misappropriation of the right of democratic revolt. For the entire pre–Civil War era, the slaveholders insisted that they were defending their liberties as free white men; it was the abolitionists who were supposedly trampling them.
Gandhi experienced British democracy as a young barrister in London, hoping to assimilate, where he was treated as inferior as a nonwhite. It was that experience which set him on his course of returning home to practice passive resistance and ultimately to overturn British rule.
And of course, the extensive civil disobedience of Dr. King was all about redeeming basic democratic rights, at a time when the holders of state power were the ones destroying justice.
Today’s militias, with their fantasies of being patriots, are heirs to that legacy of state-sponsored racism. Indeed, if Republicans had not succeeded in denying so many Blacks the right to vote, Joe Biden would have carried several more states, and the claim of a stolen election would have been that much more preposterous.
What of the claim that the left does it too? The Wall Street Journal editorial page claims that “the zero tolerance for violent protest now popular among Democrats wasn’t their reaction during the summer.”
Excuse me? The Black Lives Matter protests were exemplary for their self-control and self-discipline at a time when law enforcement was practicing violence. It’s an old story. The official Walker Report on the violence at the Chicago Democratic National Convention of 1968 termed it “a police riot.”
I was at many of the anti-war demonstrations of the 1960s, and nobody carried weapons. Though demonstrators encircled the Pentagon and the Justice Department, nobody tried to invade.
The Weathermen fringe that did practice violence in that era was disowned by the rest of the left, and of course by the Democratic Party. By contrast, something like half the Republicans in Congress condone the invasion of the U.S. Capitol and the coming violent efforts to disrupt state government.
Come to think of it, the juxtaposition of this weekend’s violent protests with the counterexample of Dr. King is not grimly ironic. It’s perfect.
