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.
