I have a ton of things I need to do away from a computer today. So I won't have time to write another research-heavy post. But I will provide readers with a plan of what I intend to cover in future posts.
First, it appears increasingly undeniable that Joe Biden will become the President of the United States on January 20 of next year. Trump's courtroom challenges to the legal election results continue to be stricken down. Yet Trump continues with his courtroom challenges, even though these challenges have no merit. It can be clearly seen that Trump is trying to invalidate votes cast by people of color. It can also be seen that there are yet many Americans who continue to align themselves with White supremacy and with Trump as their leader. Therefore, I will continue my series of posts on Gene Sharp's book From Dictatorship to Democracy. Those of us who have been historical targets of oppression will need to continue to study the ways in which we can use strategic nonviolent resistance to neutralize the power of our oppressors.
Second, I want to continue to discuss the ways in which the outworkings of damnation move through an evil society. I have focused almost exclusively on the United States in my previous posts, but I want to shift the focus to include Russia, which is another evil society that is now reaping what it has sown.
Lastly, I want to write posts which explore how decent people can navigate these difficult days. Meanwhile, please read what the Reverend William Barber has to say about the United States of America. I like this man's perspective! "Well, I was trained in theology that whatever you call your spiritual experience, if it does not produce a quarrel with the world, then the claim to be spiritual is suspect..." Maybe this lack of genuine spiritual experience of conversion explains why so many American evangelicals who claim nowadays that they have been "saved" and "born again" look more like Freddy Krueger than the Lord Jesus Christ.
These days, I find myself battling a recurrent addiction - the addiction to reading the news. This morning I know that I have a ton of things I need to do. Therefore, I will most definitely stop Web surfing in a few minutes, grit my teeth, and get on with doing what I need to do. No more binge surfing.
Yet in my semi-compulsive news browsing, I have discovered a few things. First, it appears that Trump has finally stopped blocking the Biden transition (even though he still falsely claims that the election was stolen, which it wasn't). Second, it appears that Biden is picking a capable and competent leadership team to assist in cleaning up the monstrous mess left by Trump. Third, it also sadly appears that the United States remains deeply divided.
As I wrote previously, this division is the result of America's original sins combined with the engineering of a right-wing social movement over the last 45 years - a movement aided and abetted by a powerful right-wing media machine exemplified by the media empire of Rupert Murdoch. And one of the sharpest evidences of this division is the national response to the COVID-19 pandemic. By now, the states known as red states all have higher levels of COVID-19 infection than those states classified as blue states. And the most conservative of the western or prairie or mountain states have the highest levels of COVID-19 infection in the nation (and in the world). (See this also.) These states also contain populations whose flawed notions of liberty make them the most resistant to science-based guidelines for reducing the risk of infection.
Some of those stories of resistance to science are truly breathtaking. We have Republican governors finally, grudgingly, mandating that people in their states start wearing masks. Yet these mask mandates have so many loopholes that they are effectively worthless. We also have public health officials in a town in Wyoming who were shouted down by angry residents during a recent meeting in which these officials were discussing ways to limit the explosive spread of COVID-19. We have widespread regions of the United States in which the wearing of a mask is seen as a personal affront to "conservative" values. We have a U.S. Supreme Court whose newest member has helped to eviscerate the ability of states to impose limits on religious gatherings in order to limit the spread of COVID. We have an upstart right-wing "news" network (a network that is even farther out in fantasy land than Fox News) which was recently suspended from YouTube for falsely claiming a "guaranteed cure" for COVID-19. And we have people in red states who are dying right now in hospitals, yet who refuse to believe that it is COVID-19 that is killing them. According to a South Dakota nurse interviewed by CNN, "They tell you there must be another reason they are sick. They call you names and ask why you have to wear all that 'stuff' [personal protective equipment, or PPE] because they don't have COVID because it's not real. Yes. This really happens." There are nurses in other parts of the country who tell similar stories of being harassed (and even coughed and spit on) by Trump supporters and other right-wing types who are hospitalized.
And that last item reminds me of the power of cultic thinking. For it appears obvious by now that the people who identify as members of the Global Far Right or who are aligned with white supremacy or whose worldview has been shaped by right-wing media have all the hallmarks of people who have been indoctrinated into a cult. One of the hallmarks of a cult is that it convinces its members that the cult is good even while the cult is actually killing them. It boggles the mind that there are actually patients in hospitals in the rural U.S. right now who are insulting the doctors and nurses who are taking care of them because these doctors and nurses actually dare to wear PPE. It's almost as mind-boggling to read of patients who are dying of COVID-19, yet who refuse to acknowledge this fact. A deathbed is a bad place to tell lies.
Today's post continues our discussion of Chapter 3 of the book From Dictatorship to Democracy by Dr. Gene Sharp. This will be the last post that deals with Chapter 3. The next post in this series will begin to cover Chapter 4. The book From Dictatorship to Democracy (shortened in these posts to From D to D) teaches how oppressed peoples can use strategic nonviolent resistance to shatter the power of their oppressors. This knowledge is especially appropriate for these days, in which a number of racist, White supremacist and Global Far Right leaders have in the last decade come to power in many nations, including the United States, where Donald Trump was illegally helped into his seat of power by Vladimir Putin and the Russian government. (The Russians helped many of the other authoritarian strongmen come to power as well.) Mr. Trump has clearly and legally lost the 2020 U.S. Presidential election, yet he is refusing to concede his loss and he is resisting being ejected from the seat of power which he has occupied (a seat which he has been soiling) for the last four years. Therefore, it is quite possible that oppressed people in the United States will have to use the methods of strategic nonviolent resistance in order to achieve regime change right here in the U.S.A.
Chapter 3 of From D to D explains how an oppressed population can shatter the power of a dictator or oppressor by the mass withdrawal of political and economic cooperation from the oppressor's regime. But that noncooperation works best when it is exercised as a coordinated effort by the independent institutions and groups of the oppressed society. Note that by "independent" we mean those groups and institutions that are not controlled by the dictator or his administration. Sharp listed a number of normally independent groups and institutions which are also normally apolitical, such as families, gardening clubs, sports clubs, musical groups, and the like. As noted in an earlier post in this series, in order for such normally apolitical groups to become part of a strategic nonviolent resistance movement, they must be politicized or co-opted by movement organizers.
But the organizers must also know how to build organizations from scratch. And the organizers of a movement of strategic nonviolent resistance against oppression will want to build organizations whose main purpose from the outset is to contribute to the liberation struggle. Such organizations are called social movement organizations. To learn more about how these work, we will today consider the teachings of Saru Jayaraman (who is featured in the video above, in which she gave a lecture to the Resistance School Berkeley), Sidney Tarrow, Asef Bayat, and Marshall Ganz. I will try to summarize below some of the key points in the video lecture which Saru gave in her lecture.
So first, what is organizing? Many people today who talk of organizing use the term to refer to getting a bunch of people together for a short-term, limited engagement like a protest march or rally. However, according to those who study organizing, the correct term for such activity is actually mobilizing and not organizing. Similarly, get-out-the-vote drives are not really organizing, but mobilizing, as are such activities as getting people to sign petitions or getting people to click on an Internet link, or to put bumper stickers on their cars.
Another activity that is often called organizing is getting people who are well-off and who have disposable income and free time to advocate for people who are not well-off. But again, students of organizing would not call this organizing, but activism or advocacy. This is because the people who are active are usually people with power and resources who are active on behalf of those without power and resources, and the people with power therefore assume that the people without power have no agency over their own lives. Advocacy and activism can also be expressed in the providing of services, in which the people without power are provided with things like clothing, food, educational programs, and the like - things which are normally denied to the people without power because of the structural imbalances between the people with power and the people without power.
Activism, services and mobilizing have their place. But they by themselves do not fundamentally shift the imbalance of power between the powerful and the powerless that causes the deprivations suffered by the powerless in the first place. This can only be done by organizing, which Saru defines as "collective action led by the people most affected [by the power imbalance], in which the people most affected are engaging in direct action targeting those with power." The people most affected by institutional racism in the United States are the people who are not white. The people most affected by U.S. immigration policies and by the immigration policies enacted by nations aligned with the Global Far Right are the people who live in countries whose economies and societies have been trashed by the United States and by the nations of the Global Far Right. The people most affected by mass incarceration and the prison-industrial complex are those people who have been locked up (either through excessive sentencing or through wrongful conviction), and their families. The people most affected by the collapse of the power of organized labor in the United States are the people who have to work low-wage jobs in dangerous conditions - for instance, people who work for Amazon, or who work in meatpacking plants.
According to Saru, "direct action means face-to-face action that involves risk. [It is] direct confrontation, meaning face-to-face confrontation with a target who has the power to make the decision that affects the people who are most affected...When I say risky I mean that they are doing something that actually involves them showing that they are willing to stand up physically and in a live space." It is this kind of action that challenges and shifts an unjust power structure. So when the British who ruled India decreed that Indians could only buy British goods for which the Indians had to pay British taxes, Gandhi and his followers engaged in the physical act of boycotting British salt by making their own. This was a action by the people most affected, and it involved risk even though it was nonviolent. This action also challenged the existing power structure, and was the beginning of the crumbling of that power structure. This action also was the beginning of Indians winning concrete improvements in their lives. A social movement organization is therefore a group composed of and led by the people most affected, "who are engaged in direct, collective action against those in power but with the goal of winning concrete improvements in people's lives and challenging the power structure."
According to Sidney Tarrow, this collective action must be sustained collective action in order to be considered the basis of a social movement. To quote Saru again, "So, according to Tarrow, a social movement occurs when people with limited resources - in our world, we call that the people most affected - are able to sustain - that word is important - contentious actions in conflict with powerful opponents." (Emphasis mine.) Social movement organizations are the basis of social movements; therefore, social movement organizing is much more than just organizing a march or a petition drive or a mouse click campaign. For a social movement organization is a collection of people who are willing to work together collectively in a sustained manner in order to shift the balance of power between themselves and powerful opponents.
Now the work of a social movement organization is not just to engage in sustained collective action as an organization, but to create an environment in which, according to Saru, "something else happens and gives way to a much broader, much wider movement in which many more people...who are not affiliated with any organization...are suddenly across a very wide swath of society engaging in contentions actions over a long period of time." When the social movement organizations trigger this kind of sustained societal shift in behavior, that's when a social movement is born. These movements, are, however, built on the ongoing, patient work of social movement organizations. It is a series of patiently accumulated small steps and small victories which lead to the big breakthrough movement moments.
The necessary initial work of a social movement organization must first be to teach the people most affected to begin to reclaim agency over their lives. This is done by building structures of self-reliance. As Gene Sharp says in Chapter 1 of From D to D, "A liberation struggle is a time for self-reliance and internal strengthening of the struggle group." Therefore, the movement organization must begin to build its own means of taking care of the needs of its members. To illustrate this, let's look at some of the demands of some of the Black Lives Matter chapters in the United States. One of those demands is the demand for equal access to quality education for Black and Brown children. But the people who have set up inequitable systems of education did so for a reason. Therefore, what makes BLM think that these people will respond to the demand of the people most affected to change these systems? Instead of demanding decency and humanity from people who don't have any, why doesn't BLM organize its own education system as a necessary prerequisite to organizing a crippling mass boycott of the system set up by the dominant culture? When racist teachers who are part of punitive schools face empty classrooms, they learn quickly that their jobs are in danger! Similarly, the low-wage workers who are employed by exploitative employers must begin to build the self-reliance they need in order to go without work for a while in the event of a strike. Building self-reliance of this kind is not easy when you're being exploited, yet it has been done time after time by people who successfully liberated themselves. The United Farm Workers did this very thing when they built the structures which enabled them to use strikes and boycotts against large California farms in the 1960's.
The building of structures of self-reliance is also the means by which social movement organizers chip away at the legitimacy of the structures of the dominant culture. For if the structures built by the powerless actually work better than the structures built by the powerful, people will start to notice! Thus Asef Bayat, in his book Life as Politics, says "I envision a strategy whereby every social group generates change in society through active citizenship in their immediate domains: children at home and at schools, students in colleges, teachers in classrooms, workers in factories, the poor in their neighborhoods, athletes in stadiums, artists through their art, intellectuals through media, women at home and as public actors. Not only are they to voice their claims, broadcast violations done unto them, and make themselves heard, but also to take responsibility for excelling at what they do. An authoritarian regime should not be a reason for not producing excellent novels, brilliant handicrafts, math champions, world- class athletes, dedicated teachers, or a global film industry. Excellence is power; it is identity." (Emphasis added.)
This concludes our study of the necessary groundwork that must be laid by the people most affected by oppression in today's world, the people most threatened by White supremacy, the Global Far Right, and the collection of strongmen who want to Make Their People Great Again by trashing all the other peoples on earth. We will next begin a discussion of strategy. However, I may also decide to write a post describing the Global Far Right in terms of a religious cult, and describe in that post how we might use some of the resources created by cult researchers such as Steve Hassan to reach out to those who are trapped in that cult mindset.
This post continues our discussion of strategic nonviolent resistance, and is based in the book From Dictatorship to Democracy by Dr. Gene Sharp. This discussion is especially relevant for those of us who live in the United States and who have been struggling to create a nation and a world in which each of the world's people has equal access to the things they need to fulfill their human potential. The emergence of such a world is currently being blocked by people such as Donald Trump and his supporters, who want to make themselves great by trashing everyone else on earth. As an example, key members of the Trump administration have already clearly signaled their intention to refuse to accept the legitimate results of the 2020 U.S. Presidential election which Donald Trump clearly lost. Therefore the study of strategic nonviolent resistance and of nonviolent liberation struggles is very timely.
The most recent posts in this series have focused on Chapter 3 of From Dictatorship to Democracy (shortened in these posts to From D to D). You can find those posts here, here, and here. A key point of Chapter 3 was that the kind of economic and political noncooperation that destroys a dictator's regime works best when it is applied on a mass basis as a coordinated effort by the independent institutions and groups of the oppressed society. Note that by "independent" we mean those groups and institutions that are not controlled by the dictator or his administration. Sharp made the point that if the independent institutions of the oppressed society have largely been destroyed or taken over by the dictatorship, the democratic resisters against the dictatorship will need to rebuild these independent groups so that these groups can contribute to the liberation struggle by their mass withdrawal of cooperation from the dictator's regime. The building, rebuilding, and redirecting of organized groups of people requires people who are willing to take on the role of community organizers, as we showed in the last post in this series. Therefore, today we will consider some supplemental material that describes what tools organizers use in order to successfully create organizations that can wield power. And we will be looking at some further material from a veteran community organizer and social movement scholar named Marshall Ganz.
Dr. Ganz has created an entire curriculum designed to teach the craft of organizing. I had the opportunity a while back to take one of his online classes in organizing, titled, Leadership, Organizing and Action. I will not attempt to reproduce the entire class here, but rather to summarize some of its key points. To quote Ganz, "Organizing is a form of leadership. Organizers identify, recruit, and develop the leadership of others; build community around that leadership; and build power from the resources of that community. Organizers do not provide services to clients or market products to customers. They organize a community to become a constituency - people able to stand together on behalf of common concerns. Organizers ask three questions: Who are my people? What is their urgent problem? How can they turn their resources into the power to solve their problem?" (Emphasis mine.)
From this description we see that the organizer's job is not an easy one! This is especially true in the United States, where many oppressed peoples and communities have become so passive that they look for "saviors" or "programs" from the dominant culture instead of building their own power in order to become independent of that culture. Because the "saviors" never quite seem to adequately "save", and the "programs" never seem to effectively eliminate the problems they are supposed to solve, these communities continue to passively suffer the effects of institutionalized oppression. The organizer's job is to bring the members of these communities to say, "Hey - no one is coming to save us. What therefore are WE going to do to turn our resources into the power we need to save ourselves?" How can organizers effectively call their people out of passivity? The organizing framework of Dr. Ganz is a way of answering that question, and it has five elements:
As I have said above, the organizer must ask "Who are my people?" But the people whom the organizer seeks to organize will want to know, "Why are you trying to organize us? Why do you care about our problem?" So the organizer needs to have a clear story of why he is trying to organize. And this story must not just be a story of factoids and statistics, but of the moments which called the organizer to be an organizer. These are the moments when the organizer faced not the mere statistics of the challenges facing his people, but the physical incarnation - the embodiment - of those challenges. For one particular organizer whose story I heard on a podcast, a particular series of such moments consisted of her childhood experiences of crossing a bridge from Jordan to Palestine to visit her relatives. As part of that bridge crossing, she had to endure being forced with her mother and sisters to strip naked in front of the Israeli army soldiers at the bridge checkpoint in order to be searched. For me, one such moment came during an afternoon in the summer between my 6th and 7th grade, when three racist bullies from my school came to my house to steal water from our water hose and I had to fight them.
Moments like these are activizing moments - and they form the basis of the organizer's story of self. The organizer must also have a story of us - a story of his response as a member of his people to the collective challenge faced by his people, and a story of now - the response he is asking for from his people. But the story of us and the story of now are not just the creation of the organizer. They are developed and enlarged as the organizer forms relationships with the members of his people and as he hears their stories of self. This is a key to the development of shared strategy later in the organizing process. This is why Mohandas Gandhi spent many months traveling through India listening to the stories of his people before he began his campaign of Indian liberation. This is also why the Reverend James Lawson spent several months listening to the stories of hardships suffered by African-American mothers who had to shop in segregated stores in the Jim Crow South before he began organizing his campaigns of civil disobedience. This listening and collaboration is key. Without it, you may have an organizer who is activized well enough, yet who in his rage tries to shove solutions down the throats of his people. (I've been guilty of this, I'm afraid!)
SHARED COMMITMENT
From the sharing of stories of self between the organizer and other members of his people there arises a set of shared relationships. These relationships become relationships of commitment to a common cause. These relationships, moreover, are based on shared values. As Marshall Ganz says, "In organizing the 'moment of truth' is when two people have learned enough about each other's interests, resources and values not only to make an 'exchange' but also to commit to working together on behalf of a common purpose...Relationship building is thus the key to organizing because it is the association of people with each other, not simply the aggregation of individual resources, that can create a whole that is greater than the sum of its parts." That is why my previous post in this series began with a quote from a romantic song - because relationship-building requires skill! And maintaining relationships requires ongoing work.
SHARED STRUCTURE
From a network of relationships of common purpose, the various people involved in those relationships build a shared structure for action. As I mentioned a couple of posts ago, that structure must be explicit and mutually agreed upon by all its members. Remember - successful social movements are always planned and never purely spontaneous. And the organizations that produce successful social movements always have an explicit structure, including an explicit, mutually agreed method of making decisions. The kind of structure that is adopted by a group has a great impact on the effectiveness of the group. A group where one person does all the thinking for everyone can be easily defeated (or worse yet, decapitated). On the other hand, a group which doesn't do anything unless all its members come to a consensus on what needs to be done never gets around to doing anything. The "snowflake" model of leadership development proposed by Ganz is a way to strike a happy balance between the two extremes and to create leadership that is maximally effective.
SHARED STRATEGY
Shared strategy is the outcome of shared story, shared commitment, and shared structure. Strategy is the answer of your group to the question of how to "turn the resources you all have into the power you all need to make the change you all want." Just as leadership is not as effective when it is done by only one person in the group, strategy is most effective when it is developed as a team effort. Effective strategy is important for groups of oppressed people who are struggling to liberate themselves from their oppressors, because this strategy is the way such groups make up for a lack of resources by becoming more resourceful in using what they do have. Effective strategy also is how such groups overcome the advantage of the much greater resources of their oppressors. Ganz uses the term "strategic capacity" to describe the characteristics of teams that are most likely to develop effective strategy. (See this also.)
SHARED ACTION
The final outcome of shared story, shared commitment, shared structure, and shared strategy is shared action - a unified campaign by the oppressed to shift the balance of power between the oppressed and the oppressors. Organizations work through campaigns that have strategic goals or milestones. This setting of milestones provides the necessary discipline for organizers to achieve concrete goals. One campaign I know of organized poor villagers in the Middle East to teach themselves to read. This campaign achieved certain milestones of success that had been developed during the strategy and planning phase of the campaign. The phase of shared action is the time when your organizing skill and effort is put to the proof.
WANT TO KNOW MORE?
The person of the organizer and the work of organizing is so important to successful social movements that it deserves a much fuller treatment than I can give to it in a limited space on a Sunday afternoon. However, if you want to know more about how the powerless can build their own power for their own liberation, Dr. Ganz will have another online class through the Harvard Kennedy School next winter and spring. You can find out more about it here. The class is definitely not free - but maybe if you're part of a group, a number of your friends can chip in and you all can pay for one member of your group to attend. (If you're an African-American leader in a Black Lives Matter group, you should definitely attend!) There are also the following free online resources:
Things in the United States are turning out about as I expected in the aftermath of Joe Biden's election victory over Donald Trump. Trump's response has been what he told us all along that it would be. Indeed, even when Trump ran against Hillary Clinton in 2016, he had told us that he would not accept a legitimate election loss. The deep existential foundations of Trump's malignant narcissism are the motive behind his refusal in 2020 to accept a loss that is becoming more painfully obvious with each passing day.
Over the last four years, Trump has managed to pack many offices of the Federal government with sycophants who have no principles other than self-seeking loyalty to Trump. Anyone with competence and principles who was part of his administration at any time has by now left. He has packed the Federal judiciary with unrighteous judges. And he is now packing the Pentagon with loyalists.
All of this leads naturally to the question of what decent people in the United States should do if Trump refuses to leave office, or if he succeeds in getting corrupt courts to void a legitimate election, or if he stages a military coup. My answer to such a question is contained in the many posts I have written which explain strategic nonviolent resistance on this blog. Strategic nonviolent resistance is a key component of the struggle of an oppressed people to liberate themselves from a tyrant, dictator, or oppressor. If you're looking for what you can do to contribute to that struggle, please read these posts.
A few points must be made. First, you must get ready to organize with your neighbors. Second, you must organize to massively and collectively withdraw your economic and political cooperation from the system. This will massively raise the costs borne by a Trump dictatorship and make such a dictatorship unsustainable. (Think of such things as strikes and boycotts of large businesses (such as Fox News) that support Trump. DO NOT base your struggle solely on mass protest marches!) Third, you must remain nonviolent in your struggle. This is not just for moral reasons! It is also because the moment you allow violence, you decrease your chances that your liberation struggle will succeed. (If you don't believe me, please read Why Civil Resistance Works: The Strategic Logic of Nonviolent Conflict by Erica Chenoweth and Maria Stephan. Or watch some of the YouTube videos of Erica Chenoweth.)
Fourth, you must begin NOW to study strategic nonviolent resistance if you haven't yet started. Fighters who lack skill never win. If you want to win, you must study. But learn only from reputable sources. Here is a short list of sources I consider trustworthy:
One source which I would urge you to stay away from is the International Center on Nonviolent Conflict (ICNC). From their founding up to the end of 2016, their courses and publications presented valuable information and good advice. But from 2017 onward, something began to change. Thus in one of their online courses which took place after 2016, Daniel Dixon of the ICNC suggested that violent and nonviolent forms of resistance could be combined in a movement to make the movement stronger. (By the way, all available evidence on social movements proves the exact opposite.) His exact words were, "An organizing friend of mine likes to talk about 'synergy of tactics' as opposed to 'diversity of tactics'. By this he means that violent forms of protest can work alongside nonviolent forms of protest to create something that is more powerful than either could accomplish individually." This is complete garbage. He is not the only one to make suggestions that are harmful to liberation struggles. Tom Hastings of the ICNC suggested this year that there were times and cases in which a nonviolent resistance movement could help its cause by destroying property. That too is garbage. If you engage in violence (including property destruction) you will make it harder to shift the pillars of support of the dictator's regime. And we want to make it as easy as possible for people who now support Trump to walk away from him.
This weekend, God willing, I will be continuing my series on the book From Dictatorship to Democracy by Gene Sharp. Stay tuned.
For everyone who exalts himself shall be humbled, and he who humbles himself shall be exalted.
- Luke 14:11
Whenever a person quotes a Bible verse as a maxim, there is a very natural tendency among those who hear him to regard his words as mere moralizing that have no immediate bearing on physical reality. The effect is similar to the effect on people who hear exhortations to quit smoking or to start exercising because of the bad consequences that will come someday - someday... - if they don't. But I have argued in several places on this blog (such as here) that the "someday" consequences of moral choices begin right now, the moment the choices are made, and that they can be observed and empirically measured just as physical phenomena in the natural world can be observed and measured. Therefore it should be possible to observe objectively the outworkings of the Divine humiliation of a person the moment that person begins to exalt himself.
I have also argued that these outworkings (known in this blog as the outworkings of damnation) are now being seen in the United States of America, and that these outworkings can be objectively traced. The United States is a nation that made itself great by oppressing and/or dispossessing people who were poor and nonwhite. But the United States has gone through periods of awakening of conscience in which many of its citizens sought to right the wrongs that were done by the dominant culture against other people. The efforts of these awakened people were, however, opposed and often thwarted by those members of the dominant culture who wanted to remain dominant at all costs. Thus the nation endured a civil war in which Southern plantation owners were economically wiped out because they had built their wealth on the backs of slaves. These Southerners refused to learn the moral lesson of their suffering, and went on to try to recreate as much of their old supremacy as possible. So the United States had to go through a second struggle of conscience, namely the 1960's Civil Rights struggle. However, the gains won during that struggle were again seen by certain members of the dominant culture as an unacceptable threat to their dreams of domination at all costs. For the Civil Rights struggle sought to create a nation (and eventually a world) in which everyone on earth shares the earth on a basis of equality. Those members of the dominant culture who felt threatened by such a world therefore engineered a social movement designed to undo all the progress made by the Civil Rights struggle in order to create a world in which one group of people gets to Make Itself Great Again by trashing everyone else on earth.
And so we come to the present time in which Donald Trump has lost the 2020 U.S. Presidential election by almost five million votes and counting, yet both he and his supporters refuse to concede his loss. The reactionary social movement which put Trump into office in 2016 has been over 40 years in the making. Some of its heavyweight architects include people like Rupert Murdoch (media mogul and owner of News Corporation and the Fox TV network), Ralph Reed (chairman of the Georgia Republican Party and former president of the "Christian Coalition"), Ronald Reagan, and the Koch family. Some of its most influential mouthpieces include Wally George (Blast from the past! Anyone remember him?), Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Glenn Beck, and Tucker Carlson. Donald Trump, therefore, is not just a great big problem, but he is a symptom of a much larger problem.
Rupert Murdoch has famously called Donald Trump an idiot. Note that Murdoch's exact words included an unprintable expletive before the word "idiot", thus signaling Murdoch's extreme distaste and disgust for Trump. But Rupert Murdoch must realize that Trump is a creation of Murdoch and of his media empire. Has Trump played fast and loose with reality and truth? So has Murdoch, whose media outlets have lied about everything from anthropogenic climate change to the effect of bovine growth hormone on humans who drink milk to weapons of mass destruction in Iraq to the severity of the COVID-19 pandemic and on and on. And not only has Murdoch created a head of state whose relationship with the truth is "relaxed" (to quote one of Trump's fellow Republicans), but Murdoch's media empire has created an entire population whose relationship with the truth is similarly relaxed. In fact, it is so relaxed that the sole basis on which these people choose what they will believe is whether or not a statement of fact makes them feel good or grants them their hearts' desire. That desire is for supremacy at all costs. Without these people, there would have been no President Trump.
But reality does not make concessions, which is why, according to the Associated Press, in the 376 U.S. counties with the highest number of new COVID-19 cases per capita, 93 percent of registered voters voted for Trump. Also note that although Trump tried to use his recovery from COVID-19 to assert that the pandemic is no big deal, an analysis by Business Insiderreveals that the treatment he received would have cost the average American $650,000 out of pocket. That means that a lot of diehard true believers in Trump are going to die soon. And the attitude of Trump supporters concerning the pandemic is a symptom of their self-destructive attitude toward reality itself.
For it can be argued that malignant narcissism is a progressive disease with an ultimately terminal outcome in 100 percent of cases. The first stage begins with callous disregard of the rights of others and of our duty toward others. The last stage begins with flagrant, self-destructive disregard of reality itself. This is illustrated beautifully in a paper I read a few months ago titled, "Why Tyrants Go Too Far: Malignant Narcissism and Absolute Power." The abstract to this paper begins thus: "This article explores the puzzling behavior of tyrants who undermine themselves once in power..." The author, Betty Glad, outlines the following progression:
Stage 1: A narcissism which aspires for greatness, yet which is held in check by the reality of the challenges of climbing a ladder of success.
Stage 2: The diminishing of the narcissist's ability to test reality once he reaches his desired level of supremacy.
Stage 3: The narcissist's acting out his fantasies of greatness instead of grounding his actions in a reasonable response to reality.
Stage 4 (the final stage): The narcissist's crashing and burning against that cold, hard reality which he refused to acknowledge.
I would argue that Trump and his supporters are now somewhere between stages 3 and 4. I would like therefore to use an example from my own personal history to sketch how I think the Trump presidency might end.
As I mentioned way back in the early days of my blogging, I used to be a member of a religious cult (or if you want to be euphemistic, an "abusive church") known as the Assemblies of George Geftakys. George Geftakys was, of course, a classic malignant narcissist. And as such a narcissist, he soon passed into stage 3 of the progression I outlined above. That stage for him consisted of pretending that he and his family were the picture of perfection even though he was forcing young women in his assemblies to become his personal secretaries so that he could force himself on them sexually, and even though he knew that his oldest son was a wife-beater and child abuser. His crash-and-burn phase came when the sins of his family became widely known to the members of the cult he had built. What is interesting is what came afterward, when many members of the cult confronted George, and eventually forced his excommunication.
These members (many of whom became ex-members like me) thought that by confronting George and his henchmen we could get them to acknowledge their wrongdoing and repent. THAT NEVER HAPPENED. For it would have required George to admit that his whole life as he had presented it to us had been a fraud. Instead, he and his wife moved to an upscale retirement community in the California Inland Empire, where he continued to advertise himself as a great missionary and pastor, adding to this that he was a native of Greece even though he had told us that he was born in the U.S.A. To the very end of his life, George continued to live in a bubble of self-aggrandizing fantasy. Given the parallels between the demise of George Geftakys and the current state of Donald Trump and his supporters, I expect something similar to happen now. We should prepare ourselves to deal with it.
P.S. If you want to hear more about George's final crash-and-burn phase, click here.
You have lost your bid for re-election. I know that the Bible says that we are to be subject to our leaders. But you have two strikes against you. First, our subjection to our leaders carries only as far as their subjection to an impartial moral standard that is larger than them. You have refused to submit to that standard for most of your life, and you have refused to submit to that standard during every single day of your presidency. And you refuse to submit to the laws of a nation in which you legitimately and fairly lost the November 2020 presidential election.
Therefore, I will not submit to you at all or acknowledge you as the President of the United States after January 19th, 2021. If you are still occupying the White House on January 21st, 2021, I intend to do everything I can to build a nonviolent liberation struggle to oust you. Your narcissism, your nihilism, and your associations with thugs such as Vladimir Putin must end. To use a phrase of yours that has recently been much quoted, you're fired.
(My title being a nod to the 7th chapter of the Book of Acts... Note: as I've been listening lately to music from other corners of the world, you may find me including some of the lyrics in future posts if I think they are relevant to the topics being discussed in those posts. So if you're from outside the U.S., please keep making good music! For the rest, if you want to know what the lyrics mean, try Google Translate. However, I must warn you that using Google Translate is sometimes like trying to ride a horse that has a couple of broken legs.)
This post is a continuation of our discussion of Chapter 3 of Gene Sharp's book From Dictatorship to Democracy. I chose to dedicate a series of posts to the discussion of this important book because of the current global political climate, in which many democracies around the world (including the United States) have been hijacked by fascists, supremacists, strongmen and would-be dictators. (Yes, Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin are among the hijackers.) I have argued in my posts that the oppressed peoples who want to liberate themselves from these strongmen must do so through the means of strategic nonviolent resistance, as the nonviolent method has the greatest chance of success and the best social outcomes. From Dictatorship to Democracy (shortened in my posts to From D to D) describes what is involved in building a successful nonviolent liberation struggle.
Chapter 3 of From D to D began with what Gene Sharp called "the Monkey Master fable" (originally titled, Rule By Tricks in Chinese), an illustration of what happens to an oppressor when his oppressed victims choose to massively and collectively withdraw their cooperation from the oppressor. Sharp went on to make the important point that the noncooperation of the oppressed applies the greatest pressure when it is collective rather than being just a bunch of random, uncoordinated acts of isolated individuals. Thus, the emergence of collective, coordinated noncooperation depends on the emergence or existence of groups and institutions of the oppressed that are independent of the oppressor - that is, groups and institutions that are neither financed, supported, or controlled by the oppressor.
Note that Sharp lists among these independent groups a number of types of groups and institutions that are not overtly political, such as families, sports clubs, music groups, gardening clubs, and the like. Therefore, although the existence of such groups is a necessary precondition for a liberation struggle, it is not a sufficient condition. My most recent post in this series therefore discussed how it is necessary for such groups to be politicized (or co-opted) by movement organizers if such groups are to contribute to a nonviolent liberation struggle. In that post, we explored the writings of feminist scholar Jo Freeman in her description of the birth of the women's movement and other movements of the 1960's in the United States. One point she makes is the importance of the organizers of a social movement. For successful social movements are never spontaneous - that is, they never just "happen" out of the blue. And there are only two kinds of social movements: the spontaneous and the successful. Successful movements are organized by smart organizers. The organizers have to be smart, because their job is to co-opt existing groups and institutions so that their members begin to support the goals of the movement. Their job is also to create new movement organizations from scratch (a topic which will be explored in a future post, God willing). So what kind of person is an organizer?
To answer that question, we turn today to the writings of another movement scholar, veteran organizer Dr. Marshall Ganz of Harvard University. Ganz defines organizing as a particular kind of leadership. He defines leadership as "accepting responsibility for enabling others to achieve shared purpose in the face of uncertainty." And he defines organizing as "leadership that enables people to turn the resources they have into the power they need to make the change they want." Ganz makes the important point that leadership - specifically, organizing - is a calling. People are called to become organizers when life confronts them with the following questions:
If I am not for myself, who will be for me? If I am only for myself, what am I? And if not now, when?
-Hillel (Pirkei Avot Chapter 1:14)
So if organizers are people who have experienced a calling to organize, what kind of experiences lead them to hear that call? And where do these called people come from? To answer that question, let's look at three kinds of people:
THE LIMINAL
The word "liminal" literally means "on the threshold." The word can also be defined as, "on the edge." In the context of liberation struggles, liminal people are those members of an oppressed group who live on the edges, on the boundary between the oppressed group and the oppressor group. In many cases, such people are born into such liminal spaces. Moses from the Bible is such an example. He was born into a nation of slaves, and he was born at a time in which the Pharaoh, the earthly master of the Hebrew slaves had decreed that all male Hebrew infants were to be killed by being thrown into the Nile River. His parents did not throw him into the river, but instead hid him for three months, and then they carefully placed him into the river in a floating basket, trusting that God would take care of him. (Exodus 1 and 2). In a twist of Divine irony and providence, the basket was found by the daughter of Pharaoh, who decided to adopt Moses and raise him as an Egyptian. In another twist of Divine providence, Moses' mother was hired by Pharaoh's daughter to be his nurse from day that Pharaoh's daughter found him until the day that she adopted Moses as her son.
Moses was thus raised as a member of the most privileged group of the most privileged class of people in Egypt. (To put this into perspective, imagine Ivanka Trump adopting a dark-skinned, non-English speaking child from among the groups of human beings now caged in "detention centers" by the Global Far Right and raising him as her own son with all the earthly privileges attached to the Trump name.) But he also learned of his identity as a Hebrew from his mother. Thus there were two potential identities within Moses. However, the sight of the treatment of his people by the Egyptians became an attack on his birth identity which Moses would no longer tolerate. The attack on the people of his birth became in his soul an attack on himself. So it is that "By faith Moses, when he had grown up, refused to be called the son of Pharaoh's daughter; choosing rather to endure ill-treatment with the people of God, than to enjoy the passing pleasures of sin..." (Hebrews 11:24-25)
That is frequently the experience of those who are liminal. This was the experience of many African-American servicemen from the American South who fought in World War Two, as for a time they inhabited a world which offered many more opportunities than the Jim Crow South. From their experiences came a set of rising expectations combined with an intolerable sense of shame and frustration at the Southern status quo that would serve as one of the motivations for the most important struggles of the Civil Rights movement. Other liminal figures include Robert Moses (one of the founding members of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee or SNCC), Ella Baker (of the NAACP and one of the founding organizers of SNCC), James Lawson and others who had the means and took the opportunity to attend college (something that many African-Americans could not do because of financial constraints).
And it has been my experience, for as an African-American child, I was a military brat and my dad was an officer. Therefore I got to inhabit a world in which there were not many kids who looked like me. I was "educated in all the learning of the Egyptians," to borrow a phrase from Acts 7. But I was subjected to constant attacks from children (and sometimes parents) from the "dominant culture" who treated me as if neither I nor my people had any right to inhabit the world which they enjoyed. An incident from the summer before middle school comes particularly to mind just now. The experience of possibilities combined with persecution on account of those possibilities had, shall we say, a radicalizing effect on me.
THE CONSCIOUSLY HUMILIATED
As noted above, the liminal are often very conscious of their humiliation under a system of oppression. But many who do not inhabit that liminal space often allow their sense of self to be submerged by that system to the point where they passively accept the structures of their humiliation as merely part of the background scenery, "just the way things are around here." While this happens often to members of minority groups who are oppressed by a dominant majority, it also happens when an entire society is taken over by a dominant dictator. So in his essay, The Power of the Powerless, Vaclav Havel writes about a grocery store owner in a dysfunctional country who is ordered by his government to place every day in the store window a sign which reads, "WORKERS OF THE WORLD, UNITE!" The government's purpose in ordering store owners to put up such signs is to convey the message that the government is on the side of the workers, and that the government is the sole legitimate leader of these workers, the sole legitimate treasury of their hopes and dreams.
But what if the government which makes grocers put up such signs actually treats the workers like animals? What if, in putting up such signs, workers are actually being forced to lie to themselves? Is not this act of forced lying a form of humiliation, an insult to the intelligence of these workers? And how long can someone be forced to lie to himself before his sense of shame becomes so overwhelming that he refuses to lie any longer? That is the point of Havel's essay. When that happens, people refuse to put up signs, or they start to put up signs that say "THIS ISN'T PARADISE AFTER ALL!" So Trump is trailing Biden in the polls right now because many people are beginning to realize that he hasn't made America great, and that voting for him will not "Keep America Great!" Rather, the United States is suffering from a number of wounds inflicted on the entire nation by Donald J. Trump.
THE ACTIVIZED
A sense of human possibility combined with an awareness of shame under the denial of that possibility is what produces many of the people who step up to become organizers. These organizers then go on to call others to become organizers. And they do so by opening the eyes of these others to the human possibilities that are being denied to them by oppressors. In other words, they produce in others what dwells within them - the same sense of possibility and the same refusal to tolerate ongoing humiliation. Thus it was that organizer Fred Ross found a young Latino laborer named Cesar Chavez and showed him "how poor people could build power." Thus it was that SNCC organizers persuaded poor African-Americans in Mississippi to fight for equal access to the polls.
The characteristic of organizers is that they have come to a point of "cognitive liberation". This term, "cognitive liberation", is defined in various ways by social movement scholars. But I define its beginning as a point in which an oppressed person decides that he or she will no longer tolerate the oppression and its accompanying humiliation, and that he or she will begin to live in truth from now on - even if it means suffering. (For an example of this, consider the life of Fannie Lou Hamer. "And they overcame him by the blood of the Lamb and by the word of their testimony, and they did not love their lives even to the point of death.") This cognitive liberation spreads when the liberated organizer sets before others not only a sense of possibility and an awareness of humiliation, but a plausible road map of change that can achieve the possibilities now denied to the oppressed. This is how an organizer becomes a "social arsonist who goes around setting other people on fire," as Fred Ross said.
But this setting of other people on fire is rarely instantaneous. Often it involves long, hard work in building relationships of trust among people whose experiences of hardship have taught them not to be trusting, and who must operate in an environment in which bad things can happen to them if they "step out of line." As Ella Baker once said, it is "spade work" - like the unglamorous work of hand-digging a field before one plants vegetables. And organizers frequently find that people will disappoint them - sometimes after the organizer has spent much time trying to build a relationship. So the organizer must be patient and resilient. (At aalis, magbabalik, at uuliting sabihin, na mahalin ka't sambitin, kahit muli'y masaktan...) You have to be kind of crazy (at least as some people count craziness) to do this kind of work - or at least you need the kind of undying righteous anger combined with a sense of enduring justice that will compel you to stick it out for the long haul. But there are tools which can help make the organizer's job easier. I will discuss those tools in my next post, God willing.
