(Note: This is not Critical Conditions with Dan Perry. I just can’t figure out how to get rid of that logo.)
Recently, I had an exchange with our subscriber Josh Rosenberg—who on Substack goes by the name Josh of Arc, and writes at Sic Semper Tyrannis—about the use of violence in resisting authoritarianism. You’ll remember his essay, Force and Freedom: Contemplating the Unthinkable, in which he argues that those opposing Trump have become dangerously alienated from the fundamental fact of political life: It rests upon force.
Democrats may be capable of winning the most votes in the 2028 election, he writes. But this doesn’t mean they’ll retake the presidency, he continues, because they’re unprepared for Trump’s refusal to relinquish power:
… Whether the GOP puts Donald Trump on the ballot as a final insult to the Constitution, nominates JD Vance, or props up another Medvedev-style supplicant, Trump’s power, freedom, and reputation will again be on the line. Do we really expect him to relinquish power peacefully? Will his rogues’ gallery of cabinet members, chosen above all for their servility, suddenly discover they are patriots willing to imperil themselves to defend the Constitution? Will other administration officials tell the truth now that Trump has signed executive orders targeting people like Chris Krebs—the DHS official who refused to fabricate evidence to support Trump’s election theft lies in 2020?
He therefore offers the following advice:
The opposition’s strategy should become two-fold. A peaceful resistance movement should organize aggressively, with a scrupulous commitment to non-violence. But concurrently, we must assemble a network of private militias to serve as an insurgency-in-waiting. Like any deterrent force, its purpose would be to ensure that it is never needed. And it’s mission would be to convince anyone in a position of public trust who might enable a full transition to an American dictatorship, that such a world would not be an oasis in which they would prosper, but a hellscape in which they’ll be hunted.
I replied to this argument here in an essay titled Do Americans need an insurgency-in-waiting? Violence, non-violence, and getting rid of authoritarians. I am sympathetic to his moral point: I agree that if a usurper can’t be dislodged by peaceful and Constitutional means, force is permissible, and under some circumstances, morally obligatory.
But I argue that we have by no means exhausted the peaceful means available to us. Not even close. Not even close to close. What’s more, if it’s true that we have a moral obligation to confront a usurper, it follows that we have an obligation to do so in the way that is most likely to be effective. The empirical evidence about this is surprisingly clear. Historically, those who employ disciplined non-violence are far more likely to succeed than those who use physical force—even when confronting the most brutal authoritarians.
The benchmark study is Why Civil Resistance Works: The Strategic Logic of Nonviolent Conflict by Erica Chenoweth and Maria Stephan. Studying an aggregate data set of all known major nonviolent and violent resistance campaigns from 1900 to 2006, they found that campaigns of nonviolent resistance were more than twice as likely to achieve their political goals. This was true even under even the most brutal and repressive regimes. The findings were neither subtle nor ambiguous: If you’re in any doubt about whether nonviolence is an effective way to confront a lawless regime, this should settle it.
There is a reason for this. Nonviolent movements are generally viewed as legitimate, both domestically and internationally. This allows a nonviolent campaign to attract broad public support and participation. Violent campaigns tend to be repulsive to the public. It’s extremely hard to convince a significant number to take up arms against the regime, even if it’s justified. All experience hath shewn that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. Because the public recoils from violence, violent campaigns rarely achieve the numbers required to overwhelm an authoritarian government. Instead, they discredit their cause and offer the tyrant a justification for armed counterattack.
Nonviolent protest can, when sustained and focused, attract a very high level of public participation. It’s the rare regime that can ignore sustained civic disruption. The key to success, usually, is shifting the loyalty of core supporters, especially the military. But violent campaigns serve the opposite purpose, bonding the regime, its supporters, and the military together.
What’s more, successful nonviolent movements are more likely to lead to stable, durable outcomes. Compared to regimes that emerge from violent conflict, democracies that emerge from non-violent campaigns are less likely to regress to civil war. This is a particularly interesting finding: It seems that once people acquire a taste for settling their differences violently, they never fully lose it. Violent insurgency, Chenoweth and Stephan conclude, is therefore rarely justifiable on strategic grounds, never mind the moral arguments. Whether confronting a democratic or an authoritarian regime, a nonviolent campaign is far more likely to yield desirable outcomes.
Josh wrote another essay recently titled The Weak: Freedom’s Undertakers. He observes what he describes as a “collective malaise and paralysis among liberals in the West,” and suggests that this collective paralysis lies “at the heart of our present crisis.”
Western liberal elites continue to demonstrate an almost congenital inability to resist identity-inflected guilt trips, moral blackmail, character assassination, and other weapons of the weak—often wielded by low-level staffers. It’s as if, sometime around 2014, the editors of Teen Vogue stormed every newsroom in America, said “Alright, if nobody resists, nobody will get hurt”, and everyone just immediately surrendered.
Theories differ as to how this happened. But it appears that the introduction of viral social media combined with the already risk-averse, legalistic culture of many of these institutions produced a supernova of neuroticism, pettiness, and crippling fear. Leadership positions increasingly involved putting out (or avoiding) fires, minimizing negative publicity, and avoiding being sued. This tended to attract and produce risk-averse, rule-following bureaucrats who live in a perpetually defensive posture; small, unserious people consumed with trivialities. Is it any wonder that such “leaders” cannot recognize when defining moments arrive—when half measures must be abandoned in favor of giant historical leaps?
Consider the spectacle of the last few DNC meetings: In the midst of budding fascism they begin events with land acknowledgements, and meticulously document their compliance with official party quotas on the number of people from each marginalized identity group who must be appointed to leadership positions. A party that regards itself as the last bulwark against fascism turns the selection of its leaders into farcical public group therapy sessions that confirm every negative stereotype about Democrats and “the Left.” Can dingbats like this who cower in the face of the gender identity lobby rise to the challenge of reversing a process of authoritarian consolidation that is now well past its preliminary stages? Can people who flinch at the prospect of enforcing their own immigration laws or keeping violent criminals off the streets really summon the resolve to compel other people’s children to fight and die? This, I believe, gets to the heart of the crisis of modern liberalism. It has no answer to the following question: What’s worth dying for?
What does his argument entail?
What it means is selecting certain rules that tie Democrat’s hands in their ability to fight back in defense of their most basic rights, and setting them aside. …
While Congress reduces itself to a useless appendage and the six “conservatives” on the Supreme Court beclown themselves in order to sanction a ludicrous interpretation of executive power that would even make Aileen Cannon do a double take, Trump now largely governs around the Constitution by declaring phony national emergencies. The military is selectively redeployed to blue cities for domestic law enforcement purposes based on a so-called “crime emergency.” Trade policy is dictated from the oval office, upended on a whim, and altered in exchange for personal bribes that nobody is even bothering to conceal at this point—all predicated on the idea that it’s an “emergency.” The regime’s rationale for their ongoing unconstitutional crackdown on free speech—which they’re now escalating dramatically in the wake of the Kirk killing—is again justified on the basis of a so-called “national emergency.” There’s a name for this form of government, and it isn’t democracy—regardless of what the credulous Mr. Fetterman may believe.
Remarkably—starting with the outrageous immunity decision—the six monarchists on the court have sanctioned this anti-constitutional farce, and in so doing, have unleashed a bloodthirsty predator on the nation, completely unbound by law and empowered to use the military, the FBI, and every other part of the federal government to pursue his revenge fantasies against domestic enemies—be they individuals, corporations, or entire states. The monarchist majority has over the last 18 months, in effect, cancelled the Constitution in service to Donald Trump’s will to power and told those seeking their relief that their rights no longer apply when they collide with his royal prerogatives. Under these extraordinary circumstances that the court has created, it is time for Democrats to reject the cautious half-measures favored by unconditional liberals, accept that the monarchist majority has breached the social contract in abandoning their oaths, and embrace a bold new doctrine: There are no limits to how far blue state governors and legislatures can go to protect their citizens and their elections from the autocrat in the White House.
What does “no limits” mean? It can mean many things depending on how far the regime chooses to go themselves. Currently, officials in Chicago have arranged to have ICE officials followed and monitored to ensure they do not violate the rights of citizens. This is a good start. But it leaves a lot of open questions such as: What happens when federal officials cross the line? The monarchist majority on the Supreme Court has made it abundantly clear that they’re worse than useless, and that they now view their jobs not as interpreting the law, but rather as serving as six glorified notaries who rubber stamp Donald Trump’s anti-Constitutional revenge presidency. So when such a confrontation occurs—and it will—whichever Democratic governor or mayor is in charge will have a critical decision to make: cave or escalate? Should they hang their citizens out to dry in deference to a Court that has shredded the social contract, doesn’t even respect itself, and can’t even be bothered to come to the defense of lower court judges who’ve been under siege and subjected to constant violent threats as a result of the regime’s rhetoric and behavior? If “no limits” is to have any meaning, then the answer has to be no. And if you’re thinking that this sounds a lot like Supreme Court nullification, then you thought right.
We discuss this—and more—in the podcast. Listen, read his essays, and tell us what you think in the comments.
Who wants to come on the podcast next?
