The New Yorker - USA (2020-11-23)

38 THENEWYORKER,NOVEMBER23, 2020

in the first place,” Chenoweth said. “If

Trump loses, and his lawyers are trying

to decide how hard to fight the results,

maybe they look around and see people

mobilizing and decide it’s not worth it.

That could make all the difference.”

When we spoke the next day, Cheno­

weth used a metaphor that was both

nonviolent and quite urgent: “If a bunch

of us pull the fire alarm on our democ­

racy now, and it turns out

that this wasn’t the moment

of emergency that we were

all fearing, in no way would

that be a waste of time.”

After all, there are good rea­

sons to hold occasional fire

drills, especially when you

live in a building that’s more

than two hundred years old

and full of structural flaws.

“Whatever happens in this

moment, it’s not as if our very deep prob­

lems go away, and it’s not as if the glo­

bal trend toward authoritarianism goes

away,” Chenoweth continued. “Maybe,

next time there’s an emergency, we won’t

have to waste time looking for the fire

extinguishers and figuring out how to

use them.”

W

hen Americans talk about non­

violent protest, they usually have

in mind the spiritual lineage connect­

ing Jesus to Thoreau and Gandhi and

Martin Luther King, Jr. Nonviolence is

often conflated with pacifism, the faith

of robed ascetics and secular saints. The

caricatures are familiar: flowers placed

in the barrel of a soldier’s gun; Insta­

gram hashtags intended to “raise aware­

ness”; an emphasis on principle over

pragmatism. But the “civil” in “civil re­

sistance” refers to civic engagement, not

to decorous quiescence, and “nonviolent

conflict” is hardly an oxymoron. “Non­

violent action means that the movement

is not initiating or threatening violence,”

Maria J. Stephan, a political scientist

who studies civil resistance, told me.

“There’s no guarantee that violence won’t

be initiated by the state.” Omar Wasow,

a Princeton University professor who

studies the American civil­rights move­

ment of the nineteen­sixties, told me,

“King and others understood that, when

protesters initiated violence against the

state, in the eyes of the public the pro­

testers lost legitimacy. When the state

the LGBTQ+ rights movement, and
the democracy movement in the U.S.”
(It’s worth remarking on how unremark­
able it seems, in 2020, that the U.S. is a
country badly in need of a democracy
movement.) Chenoweth disclaims a cen­
tral role in any of them, however. “As a
scholar, I think I’ve made some original
contributions,” Chenoweth told me.
“In terms of movement stuff, it’s really
just me trying to follow
other people’s leads.” If a
friend wants feedback on an
action plan or a press release,
Chenoweth makes com­
ments in the Google docu­
ment, sometimes suggest­
ing a relevant historical
detail. When there is a Black
Lives Matter rally or a march
against child separation,
Chenoweth shows up. The
image that comes to mind is that of Gre­
gor Mendel volunteering at his local
community garden.
During the Zoom, Chenoweth men­
tioned several ad­hoc groups (Hold the
Line, Choose Democracy, Protect the
Results, and others) that were creating
contingency plans for the election and
the post­election period. Chenoweth
rattled off a few cases of civil­resistance
campaigns that had managed to reverse
post­election power grabs—Thailand in
1992, Serbia in 2000, Gambia in 2016—
and said that such successful campaigns
generally did four things: “They mobi­
lized mass popular participation. They
encouraged defection by people in po­
sitions of authority, like economic and
business élites, security forces, even mem­
bers of the opposition party. They tended
not to rely solely on mass demonstra­
tions but instead used methods of dis­
persal and noncoöperation, like boycotts
and strikes. And, finally, they stayed dis­
ciplined, even when repression escalated.”
Chenoweth opened the floor for ques­
tions. Enrique Gasteazoro, an activist
from Nicaragua and a recent graduate
of the Kennedy School, asked, “Do you
think that this resistance muscle that is
being activated now, or potentially acti­
vated, could also be used as a deterrent?”
Chenoweth nodded and grinned—
the satisfied reaction of an educator whose
student has independently arrived at the
right answer. “The best way to prevent a
power grab is to keep it from happening

initiated violence against the protesters,

the protesters won public sympathy. So

that became part of their strategy.”

Contemporary protesters, Wasow

added, “sometimes complain that the

media has its own interests. And they’re

right: a thousand people march peace­

fully, three people set a car on fire, and

the car is the lead segment on TV news.”

This is hardly fair—nor is it fair that

reactionary militias are often portrayed

as defending “law and order,” whereas

anti­Trump protests may be portrayed

as undermining it—but, Wasow notes,

civil­rights protesters in the sixties dealt

with a similar dynamic. Today, there’s

Fox News; in the sixties, there were

pro­segregation newspapers. Wasow

said, “King is remembered as an ide­

alist, but his attitude on this stuff was

much closer to Realpolitik: How can

we use the media to advance our goals?”

As you dig into the civil­resistance

literature, the notion of people power

starts to seem less “Kumbaya” and more

Sun Tzu. Lissy Romanow, the execu­

tive director of the activist training in­

stitute Momentum, said, “In theory, it

might sound wishy­washy—Repressive

regime, please take pity on us!—but actu­

ally it shows how to strategically wrest

power away from people who have no

interest in conceding any power. There’s

nothing more hard­core than that.”

Andre Henry, a thirty­five­year­old mu­

sician and organizer, told me, “As a Black

person from the South, of course I knew

all about the civil­rights movement, but

it was taught to me as history. Then I

started reading about how the same

strategies of civil resistance are being

used, within my lifetime, to topple to­

talitarian regimes all over the world.”

Hardy Merriman, the president and

C.E.O. of an educational organization

called the International Center on Non­

violent Conflict, told me that, during

the Cold War, “if you were a scholar of

terrorism, or of Kremlinology, you could

be a professor in a prestigious interna­

tional­relations department. But, if you

wanted to research how people win rights

for themselves without blowing things

up, you were basically on your own.”

Even well into the two­thousands, the

study of nonviolent struggle was often

confined to departments of history or

religion, or else it was banished from the

academy altogether, relegated to musty