Category: Non-Violence

UNC Now Spies on Its Students

Spying on the students.  The disheartening actions of Chancellor Carol Folt’s administration at UNC, Chapel Hill just keep coming.

Last Friday, the university community learned that an undercover policeman spied on the students who participated in an eight day vigil to protest the continued presence of Silent Sam, UNC’s Confederate monument, on campus.  Claiming to be an auto mechanic named Victor, sympathetic to their cause, the undercover policeman from UNC’s Department of Public Safety, chatted up those at the vigil.  Does the university now have dossiers on students that contain information gathered under false pretenses?  What exactly was the spy fishing for?  What threat did the administration imagine these protestors—conspicuously non-violent throughout their vigil—posed?

The student vigil at the Confederate statue lasted from August 22nd to August 31st, at which point the administration intervened and insisted that it come to an end.  The vigil itself, the two mass rallies that took place during its eight days, and its dismantling (which the students did not contest) never disrupted normal operations at UNC and, apart from two arrests for very minor infractions the night of August 22nd , never involved any illegal or violent behavior. At least two uniformed police officers were on site at every moment during the vigil.  Their presence (in my view) was completely appropriate. Maybe even having a plainclothes policeman on the scene can be justified.  But to infiltrate the student group gathered around the statue?  Those are J. Edgar Hoover tactics.

These are our students! The university’s educational mission is predicated on the free and open exchange of ideas.  When there are disagreements or even more serious conflicts on campus, we address them by talking to our fellow community members with whom we disagree.  If the matter at hand is too delicate, that conversation may have to take place in private. Ideally, however, –and in 90% of the cases in actuality—the dialogue is public, starting with frank discussions in our classrooms and spilling over from there into the other spaces our campus provides for open inquiry and spirited debate.

Yet no one in the administration ever approached the student protestors and asked for an opportunity to talk with them about their opinions or goals.  The only meeting of administration personnel, including the Chancellor, with the student protestors was a belated gathering on September 23rd, held in response to threats the students had received.  The students were told at this meeting that “we are not here to discuss Silent Sam, but only your safety.”

Where does the fear, the suspicion, that would motivate sending a spy to infiltrate the students camping out around the statue come from? Why should they be treated as potentially dangerous criminals instead as participants in the general conversation that is at the heart of education? These are our students, whom we work with every day, trying to give them the knowledge and skills they need to grow and prosper.

Is this the message we want to send to prospective and current students: you attend a university that instead of talking with you will accord itself the right to spy on you?

If Chancellor Folt did not authorize this over-the-top response to a student protest, then the person who did so should be fired.  The undercover police officer should be suspended, pending a full investigation, not for following orders and doing his job, but for his behavior when “outed” by students who recognized him on campus in his police uniform.  According to reports (and video of the incident), he told the students they could not film their interaction with him, a clear violation of their unambiguous rights, while also threatening them as they tried to walk away.  There should be no rush to judgment here, but what exactly happened needs to be discovered—and appropriate action taken once the facts are determined.

If the Chancellor herself authorized this undercover operation, she owes the campus community an explanation—and an apology.  What was the administration aiming to accomplish and how has it used the information collected?  The apology is for spying on students, a practice that only the most extreme circumstances could ever justify.

If neither an explanation nor an apology is forthcoming, the disintegration of our educational community, based on transparency and open dialogue, will continue apace.

Leverage, Round Two

To summarize: a movement needs to generate mass disobedience to an objectionable governmental practice or law–and win the approval of non-movement members in the process.  For the civil rights movement, that meant refusing to abide by the practices and legal statutes that were segregation de facto and de jure.  The mass disobedience found that sweet spot where, finally, the government lost its will to uphold those practices and laws.  Yes, it took some time.  But, finally, the spectacle of arresting people who were just trying to be treated equally was no longer supportable.

For the anti-war movement, it was draft resistance.  Not as clear that public opinion was won over to the side of the resisters, but draft law came close to being unenforceable and the easy way out was to create the “all volunteer” army.  That move, of course, was the government’s way of sidestepping the larger issue of the anti-war movement: citizens’ ability to stop the government from waging war.  That ability has not been gained, while ending the draft took away a crucial leverage spot and made anti-war movements much more difficult to sustain.

Pretty obviously, protesting–and rectifying–discrimination is harder.  In the cases of segregation and the draft there is a law to disobey.  But in the case of discrimination, you are trying to get the government to enforce the law against your opponents.  Now the government and the legal system needs to be your adversary, and is not your antagonist.  That greatly limits the stage, doesn’t provide for dramatic confrontations, or mass disobedience.  Prodding the government to action is a tough one–and, I am starting to think, the real source of my perplexity about what forms effective action today could take.

That would seem to go in spades for a constitutional crisis.  Since the 2000 election, with the follow-ups of the illegal Iraq War and torture, and now the shenanigans of the Trump administration, we have seemingly discovered that it is very difficult, if not impossible, to call the government to account.  If the “system” worked in calling the Nixon administration to account for its crimes, that still suggested that only the government could successfully curb the government. And since 2000 there is no evidence of the government having the wherewithal to call itself to account.

I read the other day someone talking about how the people would take to the streets if Trump fired the special prosecutor or pardoned himself and his family.  But it is unclear how taking to the streets would have any impact.  The pessimist in me says that as long as daily life was not disrupted, the republic would tolerate massive malfeasance.  One, because the issues–the rule of law etc.–are so arcane, and two, because it doesn’t feel like it hits people where they live.

Oddly enough, Trump’s crimes are sort of victimless; they damage our democracy, perhaps irreparably, but they don’t seem to harm anyone in particular.  I was wondering about this in terms of “standing.”  Could I sue (and who would I sue) for damages because my vote was rendered meaningless through election fraud?  Would I be granted “standing” to bring such a suit?  And what would be the remedy if I won such a case?  It is unimaginable that there would be a “do-over” of the election?  And yet, what else could be suitable recompense?

I wish I had something better to offer.  A successful movement has to get a large number of people to consider themselves as members of a wronged collective.  Post-2008, the unemployed and the defrauded quite conspicuously failed to make that leap.  Somehow losing your job or losing your home was experienced as an individual misfortune, not something that tied you to many others with whom you should unite to protest against your lot.  And, again, that would have been a case of trying to get the government to do something, rather than protesting against or disobeying a government action.

As long as normal life is mostly left in peace, we seem to be left with the ballot box.  But not only have Republicans worked hard to shelter themselves from democracy (through gerrymandering, voter suppression and the like), but politicians have more reasons than ever to listen to the powerful few as opposed to the powerless many.

North Carolina’s Moral Mondays seem to prove this point.  They have been sustained over an admirably long time–and seem to have had no impact at all except to harden the hearts of our Scrooge-like state legislators.

All of this might mean that party politics is really the only game in town.  Leftists need to engineer a take-over of the Democratic party akin the the take-over of the Republican party by its right-wing.  Only the primary threat makes politicians answerable to voters when the general election districts are gerrymandered.

 

Leverage

Back to Todd May’s Nonviolent Resistance (Polity, 2015) after a long hiatus.  And when he gets to a discussion of how nonviolent movements can succeed, I find a good way of thinking about my earlier expression of skepticism about the usefulness of mass marches in DC or elsewhere.

Basically, a social movement’s success (May is drawing on the work of Gene Sharp here; another source identifies Sharp as the leading proponent of the “pragmatic” as opposed to “moral” school of non-violence advocates) depends on its understanding power in its given society.  “Leverage refers to the ability of contentious actors to mobilize the withdrawal of support from opponents or invoke pressure against them through the networks upon which opponents depend for their power” (This is Sharp, not May, but taken from page 93 of May’s book).

The premise is that power is something given to certain people or certain institutions by voluntary obedience, by consent. Power, therefore, is dependent on the cooperation of those who we normally think of as subject to power.  At least in theory, a government cannot sustain itself in the absence of such consent.  Laws against drinking alcohol or having homosexual sex prove unenforceable in the absence of voluntary obedience.  (It’s an empirical question as to what the “tipping point” is.)

The non-violent movement, then, is working to promote wide-spread disobedience.  It must represent certain laws—or the government tout court—as morally reprehensible, illegitimate, or unacceptably oppressive.  It will succeed when it makes a specific policy—or, again, a whole government—unsustainable.

Two things follow from understanding the ultimate goal of the movement this way.  Again, quoting Sharp:  “Two basic conditions must be met for a challenge to contribute to political transformations: 1) the challenge must be able to withstand repression and 2) the challenge must undermine state power” (92 in May).

How can the movement “sustain itself during the inevitable repression that will result from a challenge to state power” (92)?  Sharp’s answer is that the movement’s resilience is tied to “decentralized yet coordinated organizational networks, the ability to implement multiple actions [in multiple modes from persuasion, to noncooperation, to intervention] and the ability to implement methods of dispersion as well as concentration, and tactical innovation” (92).  Sharp has a wonderful list of 98 types of non-violent action.  Multiple forms of action greatly increases the opportunities for participation by people of varying degrees of commitment (from general sympathy to obsessive commitment).  Plus those multiple modes of action keep people involved over time, instead of just getting them into the street for one-off demonstrations.  And having acted multiple times increases people’s commitment, so they won’t wilt away at the first sign of push-back from the opponents.

What Sharp and May don’t take up is that protest is not cost-free.  It is getting a critical mass of people to the point where they put something real on the line that’s the hard part.  Demonstrations are cost free—as, for the most part, is getting arrested one time.  But the movement is going to collapse in the face of repression unless a significant number of people are going to accept fairly serious trouble.  It’s been a fairly long time (really since the early 1970s) since we have witnessed that kind of commitment on the American scene.

On to point two: leverage.  In theory, the contest is played out in the court of public opinion.  In a democracy, ideally, you are working to convince a majority that your view, not the opponents’, is the right one.  You are soliciting their vote (minimally), but, more substantially, their withdrawal of consent from the policy or practice that is being protested against.

And that is still somewhat the case.  But the leverage points in American politics are way more complex than that—and not a reason for optimism.  For starters, politicians are very insulated from the popular vote.  (I won’t get into this is worse now than it was fifty or a hundred years ago).  But between the first need to raise huge amounts of money to run on to the dynamics of primaries and of gerrymandering, it is quite obvious that our elected officials are much more beholden to and frightened of certain power brokers than they are to the public at large.  The spectacle of a Republican party nearly passing a health law supported by 20% of the population is just one proof of that point.  Our absurd gun laws is another.

So a successful protest movement today has to develop a realistic appraisal of where power resides in our plutocracy and a strategy for leveraging that power.  Demonstrations are not going to do the trick.  Boycotts seem to me much more likely to be effective—both because they hit power where it hurts and because they are sustained over time (or need to be in order to work).  One instance is the fact that corporate pressure and high-profile actions like moving the Super Bowl from one state to another have been much more effective in blocking certain kinds of discriminatory statutes than citizen protests.  That’s a lamentable fact, but it’s a fact.  So perhaps our protest movements should aim more at corporate power centers than at political ones—and then try to move those corporations to bring pressure to bear on the politicians.

The general point, I assume, is clear.  Moving public opinion is a good thing (although I see little evidence that demonstrations do that very often).  Building up your fellow travelers is also a good thing—and demonstrations may help with that.  But applying pressure at the right places is really, really crucial.  And, for now, I don’t see the left as having a good game plan in that regard.  Like it or not, our opponents are not going to do the right thing because we convince them that we occupy the moral high ground.  Things are only going to change when they are made to pay a price they find unacceptable for keeping things the way they are.  Leverage is about finding the ways to make them pay such a price.  In the meantime, pushing to get to that point requires our side having a sufficient number of people willing to pay a price for initiating and sustaining a protest against the way things are.

More to say about this in subsequent posts, specifically about counting on the courts for help and about constitutional crises.

 

 

Non-Violence (Continued)

I am reading Todd May’s Nonviolent Resistance: A Philosophical Introduction (Polity, 2015) to push my thinking along.  May’s definition of nonviolence is somewhat odd: “political, economic, or social activity, that challenges or resists a current political, economic, or social arrangement while respecting the dignity (in the sense defined above) of its participants, adversaries, and others” (59).

The oddity is the emphasis on dignity, which is the result of May’s understanding violence as actions that do not grant to the subject of that violence the ability to live an unimpeded life.  He recognizes that his definition of dignity is essentially Kantian—except that it does not ground the right to be treated with dignity in one’s status as a “rational being” and does not ground the recognition of that right in some kind of rational deduction toward a categorical imperative.  Rather, it would seem, treating others with dignity is an ethical choice, not particularly grounded in anything beyond the choice.  He does differentiate between “pragmatic” and “principled” nonviolence, where the pragmatists adopts the stance of treating all with dignity because actions guided by that rule are more likely to prove effective in resisting current arrangements.  The principled position is not guided by questions about tactics and effectiveness, but takes an absolute stance. Dignity means recognizing that every person has the right to live the life s/he chooses (Kantian autonomy, which entails never being a means to another person’s ends).  The principled position is very close to pacifism, although not absolutely identical because it could still be situational (admitting some situations in which violence in necessary or justified—such as self-defense) in ways that pacifism is not.

I guess I am still a moralist (in the ways that Bernard Williams uses that term) because I am not terribly concerned with the dignity of certain opponents. (Williams thinks politics is poisoned once it gets “moralized” because then I do not accept the legitimacy of my opponents’ position.  Democracy requires the notion of a “loyal opposition.”  Otherwise, I will not cede power to my opponents when they win an election.  We are semi-close to that position in the US today.  We don’t keep the winners from taking office, but we do–in the Senate during Obama’s tenure and in my home state of North Carolina right now–work to prevent those office holders from exercising power.)

I am a moralist insofar as I believe that people who use privilege to their own advantage and to the hurt of the less privileged do not earn my respect or deep worry about not interfering with the ways they choose to live their lives.  But I don’t think I am just, in May’s terms, a pragmatic believer in nonviolence.  I think the taking of life—or the use of physical violence to coerce, intimidate, or threaten—is impermissible because causing suffering is to be avoided and arrogating to oneself the right to inflict suffering is never justified.  This raises the very tough question of punishment.  Something very deep in me revolts against all forms of punishment.  In that sense I share Williams’ deep suspicion of moralism, of the self-righteous condemnation of others.  Yet I don’t have any compunction about depriving others of their ability to inflict suffering.  I do judge them morally—and think various ways (short of punishment?) of halting their immoral actions are justified.  Is there a way to divide punishment from such deprivation of means?  Not sure there is, but it seems to me a different thing to take away the money and power that allows senators to take away health care from millions than it is to send them to prison, to cause them direct harm.

That’s the trouble with philosophy.  It sends you off into these kinds of debates that slice thinner and thinner the conceptual loaf.  Over-scrupulosity seems to me endemic on the left—that’s what generated political correctness in the first place.  It also generates the sometimes justified charges of hypocrisy against leftists.  Their stated principles, because so exacting, don’t jive with how they actually live their lives.

So back to the rough ground.  May takes from sociologists Erica Chenowith and Maria Stephan a definition of “campaign” that pushes toward my thoughts (in the last post) about a “Movement.”  A campaign is “a series of observable, continual acts in pursuit of a political objective” (60). One-offs, May concludes, barely count as non-violent resistance.  Sending a letter to your senator is certainly a non-violent act, but not one of very much significance, and not clearly an act of resistance.  It seems as if non-violence only gets its point, only rises to a true challenge, when it actually places itself in a place of risk.  The non-violent actors have to be doing something that (at least) tempts the powers that be to shut down their actions.  In short, it has to be disruptive in some fairly dramatic way—and it has to contain the potential to continue this disruption in the name of an articulated objective.  Otherwise, I am arguing, it will change nothing.

In short, the left is going to have to decide on what basis (what outrage) it is going to resist the current administration and is going to have to devise a set of sustainable and disruptive non-violent actions for its resistance to be effective.  Shutting down various government functions will not, I think, do the trick.  The Republicans don’t like government so are hardly going to be stirred by disrupting its activities.

The obvious alternative is to disrupt economic functioning.  Either widespread boycotts or something like a general strike are the best bets here.  Specific actions against specific companies are very hard to sustain these days.  It is a measure of how much power has been accumulated by corporations that tactics that worked forty years ago (most notably strikes, but also work to rule and sit-downs) are pretty much non-starters now.  And the upping of security measures that make both business places and government offices fortresses in our day also precludes the kind of guerilla theater tactics used by 60s radicals like the Berrigans.  Massive organization on the scale of the civil rights movement is needed if there is to be any chance of success. And the nonviolent actions will have to be conducted on public streets.  Marches (that have dutifully gotten their permits) will not cut it.

So I am back to the hard work, the grunt work, of building a movement (that can then launch a campaign).  Anything less grand is simply way too easy to ignore.

The other alternative, of course, is to go the constitutional route—to depend on elections and the courts.  My next post will consider that possibility.