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**JANUARY 15, 2021**

Kuttner on TAP

On Civil Disobedience

****

By a grim convergence, Dr. King's birthday weekend this year coincides
with plans by far-right armed militias to invade state capitols,
believing that they are engaging in civil disobedience. And right-wing
politicians and editorial writers are brimming with claims that "the
left does it, too."

It's worth taking a moment to reflect on what civil disobedience is,
and what it isn't.

Henry David Thoreau's 1849 essay "Civil Disobedience" held that
citizens are implicated in the unjust actions of their governments and
need to distance themselves, both as a moral act and as a way of
pressing for change. He practiced a token act of civil
disobedience-refusing to pay the poll tax and spending a short term in
jail-as his way of protesting slavery and the Mexican-American War.

Thoreau directly influenced Gandhi, who grasped that nonviolent civil
disobedience could be a mass tactic of solidarity and shaming to achieve
drastic reform; and both men influenced Dr. King.

What they had in common with each other-and not with today's
militias-are two core elements. First, their concept of civil
disobedience was above all nonviolent. The militias are above all
violent.

Second, they were engaging in civil disobedience to redeem core
democratic rights. The militias are substituting their own violence to
sack democracy.

But the Trumpian right is convinced that the election was stolen from
them. By their logic, they are the ones defending democracy, and by any
means necessary.

What's notable here is the central role the legacy of slavery plays in
this misappropriation of the right of democratic revolt. For the entire
pre-Civil War era, slaveholders insisted that they were defending
their liberties as free white men; it was abolitionists who were
supposedly trampling them.

Gandhi experienced British democracy as a young barrister in London
hoping to assimilate, where he was treated as inferior as a nonwhite.
That experience set him on his course of returning home to practice
passive resistance and ultimately to overturn British rule.

And of course, the civil disobedience of Dr. King was all about
redeeming basic democratic rights, at a time when the holders of state
power were the ones destroying justice.

Today's militias, with their fantasies of being patriots, are heirs to
that legacy of state-sponsored racism. Indeed, if Republicans had not
succeeded in denying so many Blacks the right to vote, Joe Biden would
have carried several more states, and the claim of revolting against a
stolen election would have been that much more preposterous.

Come to think of it, the juxtaposition of this weekend's violent
protests with the counterexample of Dr. King is not grimly ironic.
It's perfect.

~ ROBERT KUTTNER

Follow Robert Kuttner on Twitter

Robert Kuttner's latest book is
The Stakes: 2020 and the Survival of American Democracy
.

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