Why Civil Disobedience is a Delicate Pillar of Democracy.
“I hold it that a little rebellion now and then is a good thing, and as necessary in the political world as storms in the physical.” — Thomas Jefferson
It’s all the rage; literally, metaphorically, and culturally.
Every day it’s a new ideological fight. From world leaders on Twitter to disgruntled quarterbacks on ESPN, someone is speaking out about a grievance that they feel needs to be addressed. In a world more engaged than ever, you can promote a cause at the push of a touch screen, and a host of people who agree with you will signal their virtue along side yours, but be prepared; waiting on the sidelines are those who aren’t kneeling for your cause but their own, and they’ve got virtues to signal too.
We seem to have rather fickle standards for legitimacy and will generalize those that don’t follow the rules as ignorant regressives, unpatriotic traitors or overly sensitive snowflakes; but I believe those that feel this way fail to recognize some very important points: To speak against injustice, perceived or not, but especially in ways that go against the grain, is a part of human nature that the United States was built on. And yet, in a social media driven world, when it comes to making our opinions known, we often broadcast our beliefs to those who already agree with us so much of our virtue signaling serves no purpose and we all end up playing the same zero-sum game, meanwhile the overreactions to those who protest in favor of movements we disagree with, only serves to infuriate and inspire them.
The pillars of democracy that are most commonly recognized have almost become platitudes in American political discussion. Once-fundamental values like representation, equality, justice, and freedom have morphed into buzzwords that can be thrown down like an ace in the hole; but if we neglect the outcries of any citizen because it breaks with our normal way of doing things, we betray our disregard for each of those virtues we claim as essential, and insult the men and women who have sacrificed their lives to secure and protect them.
“Tyranny Like Hell Is Not Easily Conquered…”
In 1765, frustrations between Colonial patriots and British loyalists in America were reaching a breaking point.
The British economy was suffering from various wars across the world, as well as financial setbacks from the American Colonies; so King George III and the English Parliament instituted legislation to enforce trade laws and increase tax income, such as the Stamp Act, placing a tariff on paper and printed goods. Just a year before, they passed the Currency Act, preventing colonials from issuing any form of legal paper money. In order to enforce these new laws, they also passed the Quartering Act, forcing colonials to feed and house British soldiers without question. Many Americans were so drastically effected by the overwhelming amount of legislation coming from across the pond, that a boycott of all taxed products ensued.
In May of that year, famed American politician and patriot Patrick Henry came to the Virginia House of Burgesses with his Seven Virginia Resolutions, also referred to as the Virginia Resolves, to make some seemingly bold claims: that as free British citizens, they deserved the same rights as those born in England, that only Virginia representatives deserved the right to set taxes for Virginians, and that they were not merely free, but obligated to disregard laws and taxes set by a King and parliament of officials that refused to recognize their voices as natural citizens. No taxation without representation was the creed, and Patrick Henry told that Virginia assembly,
“If this be treason, so be it.”
It was an act of defiance that would inspire many and set the stage for arguably one of the most influential revolutions in history. Over the decades following that event, the American Colonists were so moved by the anti-establishment rhetoric of Patrick Henry, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Paine and others, that in an attempt to disrupt a system they did not believe in, they made moves that thousands would give their lives for; but in doing so, they built the framework for a country that would guarantee the right to have a voice for exponentially more.
While the war that American men fought and died in was essential, it was not inevitable. It required the actions of that dedicated few to motivate enough people to the point that they felt it necessary to take on the largest empire in the world. They knew that if you want someone with power to pay attention, you have to upset the system. Some of those actions resulted in straight up riots; The Boston Massacre started as a street brawl with a British Soldier and culminated in the deaths of five citizens, including a man named Crispus Attucks, a former slave of a deacon, and the first African-American to die in the cause of a country that would still see him as a second class citizen for another 200 years. A young silversmith named Paul Revere popularized an engraving of that riot that became one of the most famous pieces of propaganda in the war. Other famous acts of protest like the Boston Tea Party were such an upset to the social and economic status quo, that even George Washington spoke against the perpetrators. It was so effective, it inspired waves of new legislation and military action from the Crown that only served to stoke the fires of the oppressed.
A Moral Duty To Rebel
“But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.”
— The Declaration Of Independence
It’s written into the documents that define what the country was founded on, but the people who wrote that powerful literature realized it’s about much more than claims by mobs of angry snowflakes; it’s the obligation that some feel to speak out against a system has been or has become corrupt and oppressive and it’s a fundamental part of human nature. It’s the only way to break the shackles of feudal, autocratic governments that can usurp the power in the social contract.
18th Century Genevan political writer Jean Jacques Rousseau inspired many revolutions with his work, “The Social Contract.” In it, he lays out some political theories that were decades and centuries ahead of their time but absolutely essential for human progress. He proposed that any form of government was a kind of agreement between the people and the ruler or rulers, and many times the people get the bad end of the deal. He proposed that the ability to force someone to do something does not make you right, which was a rare idea in a time when those with the most gold and the biggest guns made the rules. He also claimed that for a country to be free, there must be two groups: The government and “the sovereign,” or the people who dictate the actions of the government democratically. Those groups must remain distinct because they serve different, but supportive goals. It’s why The United States is a democratic representative republic, as opposed to pure democracy. A powerful, elected government must be maintained to uphold the rules of law; but if members of that government abuse the power granted in the shared agreement, or social contract, as outlined by the people in the form of a constitution or similar document, then the members of that sovereign body have a right and moral obligation to act against the government in a way that sets things right again.
If we see something wrong with the way our country is being run, there are options we can take to make our voices heard, short of full scale revolution and they’re spelled out in the First Amendment of our Constitution. Many Americans equate the right to peaceably assemble as defining our right to protest, and while that may be true in a way, our founding fathers made important distinctions by including but separating and generalizing the right to petition the government for a redress of grievances; because sometimes, part of petitioning requires taking steps that counter specific norms and traditional systems in order to make a difference for our cause.
The Power of The People
The subject of intense news coverage for several weeks was the appointment and confirmation hearings of Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh. Before the swamp of sexual assault allegations that inexorably derailed people’s trust in the system on both sides; only minutes into the first day of hearings, those opposing Kavanaugh’s nomination began concerted efforts to voice their concern for his qualifications. Before the chairman could even introduce the appointee, Democrat Senators of the judiciary committee spoke out to signal their concerns over the unprecedented use of executive privilege to withhold documents from Kavanaugh’s time serving as a lawyer in The White House for President George W. Bush. These were quickly followed by outbursts from protesters in the audience, many of whom were there to express their objection to Kavanaugh’s disregard for pro-choice rulings like Roe vs. Wade. As the disruptions got harder and harder to ignore, security acted to control the situation, taking the more unruly protesters from the hearing and placing them under arrest.
These acts of defiance and disturbance of the normal justice selection process were met with universal panning by Conservatives inside and out of the judiciary committee. In a report by Fox News, they referred to the events as “Political Theatre of the absurd,” but in the furor of maintaining partisanship, and inadvertently swallowed by the special hearing and subsequent FBI investigation following the revelation of a 30 year old alleged sexual assault by Kavanaugh on a high school associate, we failed or refused to think any deeper about why Senators chose to break from procedure and 70 people went to the trouble of acting out in front of national television cameras and being dragged out and arrested, all to upset a lifetime appointment.
Our government was founded to serve its citizens and this truth has since been bred into the very nature of being American so when people react so disruptively to the actions of our government, there should be, at the very least, a moment of pause to understand their motives; but with the intensely divisive partisan nature of our politics, we draw all the understanding we need by deducing what group our opponents are in based purely on the fact that they’re opposing us. Instead of seeing each other as Americans who want to see the country flourish collectively, we recognize and demean each other by party affiliation, so Republican-Americans are portrayed as power-hungry and inept of virtue, and Democrat-Americans as fragile and vindictive; meanwhile, the people we elected and gave power to serve us are making a lot of money to keep us at each others throats.
When Democracy Fails
As the Kavanaugh investigation and confirmation hearings drew to a close, the judiciary committee chairman, Senator Chuck Grassley accused Democrats of encouraging what he called “mob rule,” But the Senator was confused about the source of the disruption, because like the majority of us, he’s blind to half of the bipartisan nature of our biggest problems.
The “mob rule” phenomenon that Senator Grassley referred to was brought to public attention by some founding fathers who saw that egalitarian societies were prone to being overrun by demagogues through the controllable and arbitrary whims of the people. James Madison made his concern for this known in his famous Federalist Papers, when helping to draft the Constitution. He saw how the direct democracies of Ancient Greece fell to the sways of certain factions who made mobs of their supporters, and he hoped that the separation of powers by way of a representative system, as well as vast amounts of land on which Americans had to spread, leading to a slower pace of communication between people, would prevent those groups from cropping up.
Madison could never have counted on the introduction of the internet and social media, bringing groups of people together who aren’t operating on reason but on ideas they feel intuitively, and its the breeding ground for exactly what he wanted to avoid. Fact-claims and opinions aren’t thought about deeply in any way for more than a few seconds before they’re displayed and promoted and reinforced by others who just happen to agree in that moment. As ideas are shared between people who already agree, there’s no criticism of the ideas being circulated, so misinformation and scare tactics can spread unchecked. Then, those harmful notions are reinforced because the leaders we elected in this dilapidated structure of emotion-based democracy consistently say that anyone who disagrees, questions your ideas, or brings counter-intuitive claims to the table is trying to deceive and manipulate you. In a system that operates like that, any run-of-the-mill, orange, narcissistic megalomaniac can be elected to an important position by hijacking the emotions of as many as they can, and driving those constituents ferociously against the ones they can’t influence, creating a willfully ignorant democratic majority, Madison’s definition of mob rule.
The idea behind the American Experiment is that our government is an assembly of the people, and we have the same power to assure freedom and equality as the elected members of our representative government, but as we know how easily political status can corrupt, the power to regulate that government must rest in the hands of the people. We drew up an agreement with those we elected to govern, but we’ve strayed from that principle in favor of partisanship and our government reflects that. We vote based on party rather than rationality and then expect our public officials to act rationally; And thus on both sides of the aisle, we have representing us those willing to abuse the system in order to put party before country. When democracy fails in these ways, we must have ways to make our dissatisfaction known, particularly when it comes to parts of our government like the Supreme Court that don’t involve elections and yet have lifelong consequences. But if we allow those methods to be narrowly defined and dismissed by our own officials as the grumblings of a “mob”, we’ve already surrendered our last line of defense against the ones we give power to.
The factions that Madison worried about have been built around the parties essential to the democratic elements of our institution, but if we recognize where the emotions of the electorate are being manipulated by certain individuals to secure power, we can act against our intuitions, reason through the partisan claims made by our politicians, and affect change from the voting booth. However, like our two parties, sometimes the issue at hand is ingrained in our system and can’t be voted away, so it demands acting in ways that actively disrupt the system.
Affecting Change Through Civil Disobedience
19th Century poet and writer Henry David Thoreau wrote an essay on this subject entitled, “Civil Disobedience,” in a time when abolitionists like Thoreau were trying to end the institution of slavery, he discussed how governments like ours were made up of the ideals of the people they represent and as such, were subject to the same fallacies and failures of rationale that made the people themselves so fallible. He argued that governments were not just open to the potential of corruption, but corrupt by default and laws enforced by corrupt governments can and should be ignored. After being arrested and jailed for a day over an unpaid tax, Thoreau felt that the best place for a just person to be is in an unjust government’s prison because it showed unrelenting dedication to valuing the idea of justice over country.
Thoreau tried to push his political idea through a movement known as “anarcho-pacifism.” While there are a number of contradictions, potential dangers and mistakes when his movement is taken wholesale, many of the basic principles are founded on realistic observations of the way our political systems function and not the least of these is the moral necessity for people to take peaceful, but resilient stands on subjects we’ve thought deeply about and researched and reasoned through, especially when our representative government refuses to recognize them; and when that responsibility falls on the minority, many times, that means doing things directly against the status quo.
In the country of Sweden, an unlikely individual has taken up this idea in a big way and its bringing even more light to her cause. 15 year old Greta Thunberg noticed how politicians in her country and abroad were ignoring the increasingly pertinent issue of climate change and she decided to take what action she could, by refusing to go to school.
“I have my books here… But also I am thinking: what am I missing? What am I going to learn in school? Facts don’t matter any more, politicians aren’t listening to the scientists, so why should I learn?
I am doing this because nobody else is doing anything. It is my moral responsibility to do what I can… I want the politicians to prioritize the climate question, focus on the climate and treat it like a crisis.”
— Greta Thunberg
The level of profundity coming from such a young person is inspiring others to stand with her; before Sweden’s elections in early September, she spent school hours, five days a week, sitting on the steps of the Parliament Building in Stockholm speaking to politicians, citizens, anyone who will listen. She says many came to encourage her and offer their support but there were still plenty, including her parents, who said she should be in school, but that’s exactly why she was out there. She should’ve been in school but she saw a problem that wasn’t being changed or even touched on by politicians and the only way she as a teenager could get their attention was by doing something she wasn’t supposed to do.
It sounds counter-intuitive because it is. Our intuitions inform us as to how things should happen because that is their purpose, but because we are human beings capable of error, our intuitions can be deceiving and a highlight of proper reason is not being held down by our base evolutionary instincts because we can recognize problems and act accordingly. When this recognition shows us that those around us are simply going through the motions and accepting an injustice we perceive, its our moral duty to break from the crowd, even if it means doing whats difficult or unpopular to bring the change we want to see.
With the majority of our political and scientific discussion in such a divided, emotion-based state, we must value the truth more than arbitrary party loyalties, and we are obligated to apply serious research and thoughtful reasoning to the stances we take so we aren’t just falling prey to the swings of partisan politicians. That kind of attentiveness isn’t easy because of the way our intuitive reactions arise first in the brain, but when we take a moment to recognize how each of us are susceptible to the same pulls by our basic instincts, we will work harder to take them into account when forming our ideals. That way, when we think that the people in charge have become corrupt, we can know with confidence that we aren’t making claims based on the fallacy of tribal devotion, but we’re acting in the interests of supporting the flourishing of people at large and the ideals that free governments must be built on to survive.
When faced with those taking a stand in opposition to our interests, especially if we hold the majority, we should remember how it feels when our own attempts to rectify real problems are immediately dismissed as the rabble of the crowd, and try to grant good intentions to our fellow Americans who see things differently and feel the need to speak out, if for no other reason than that they stand to lose as much as we do if this experiment in democratic representative republic government fails.
We are more than just Republicans or Democrats. Much like climate change, the problems with the American government system are bigger than the parties that comprise it and if we want this country and the mission it was founded on to last much longer, we have to set aside our intuitions that are pushed around by politicians, journalists, and social media, and realize that Americans who stand up to disrupt the system have opinions that deserve to be acknowledged in a representative political structure. If we truly reinforce the virtues that make up a just society, we must recognize that protesters are a traditional and healthy part of maintaining that society and we can work together constructively on issues where we disagree strongly, but it must be done through calculated reason and regulated intuitions if we want to prevent the self-serving demagogues and the violent revolutions, but preserve the freedom, equality, and justice that can arise when a country is ruled its people.
