In early July, historian David Greenberg issued a kind of warning about the current state of American politics, the latest entry on the hand-wringing over civility on the anti-Trump left. He’s not alone: recently a CNN anchor chided a commentator for calling Stephen Miller, the ostensible architect of Donald Trump’s “zero-tolerance” immigration policy, a “white nationalist.” Democratic Party leaders also criticized Rep. Maxine Waters after she encouraged supporters to “push back on” administration officials in public, as when protesters confronted Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen at a Mexican restaurant in Washington, DC. (Waters did not, as Donald Trump tweeted, incite anyone to violence.)
What makes Greenberg’s take different is that while others suggest that Trump opponents are “going low” by making the political personal and public, he also points to the historical record as evidence that such incivility portends something much darker. Greenberg warns that in the late 1960s the United States was in a political place very similar to where we are now, when anti-war activists saw fit to “[accost] administration officials and family members when they ventured out in public.” That kind of norm-breaking, he argues, is just a short slide away from the lethal violence practiced by the infamous Weather Underground during the 1970s. But Greenberg gets the politics of this moment fundamentally wrong.
I’ll step back for a moment and tip my hand: I’m writing this as both a historian of activism and an activist. Over the last year, I’ve been arrested on Capitol Hill and confronted elected officials in public as well. As a historian and citizen, I argue that both tactics are not only justified, but necessary.
Let’s be clear as to what David Greenberg gets wrong about the history of the American left. For one, the Weather Underground and similar groups occupy a much larger place in our historical imagination than they did in the massive anti-war and anti-racist movements of the 1960s and 1970s. But a lot has also changed since then. As historian Dan Berger pointed out on Twitter, the radicals in Greenberg’s piece “were inspired by Leftist, anticolonial armed revolts the world over.” At that point, armed struggle seemed to win freedom for oppressed people elsewhere, and groups such as the Weather Underground and the Black Panthers adopted those tactics in turn. But that has changed: today, global freedom movements are relatively non-violent, and over the last four decades the U.S. left has largely used the kind of non-violent tactics (in notable contrast to the alt-right and its antecedents) that we’ve seen come back under the Trump administration. And many of those tactics were downright “nasty.”
In the late 1980s and early 1990s, the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT UP) used direct action to demand important changes to the way that AIDS was researched and treated in this country. Their work ultimately helped to save millions of lives. In the process, they broke all kinds of civic norms — they shouted down public officials, carried the bodies of dead friends through the streets of New York City, flaunted their queer sexuality, and wrapped notoriously anti-gay Senator Jesse Helms’ vacation home with a giant condom. They also caught hell for it. Just a few weeks ago ACT UP veteran Peter Staley posted on Facebook, “If I had a dollar each time ACT UP was told to ‘be civil’ I’d be a rich man. If we had listened, I’d be dead.”
It’s no accident that ACT UP-style protest tactics have resurged under Trump. Since November 2016, veteran and novice activists have linked up and learned from one another. In early 2017, ACT UP offshoot Rise & Resist staged a “cough in” at a restaurant in Trump Tower to protest the possible repeal of the Affordable Care Act. AIDS activists were also responsible for some of last summer’s demonstrations on Capitol Hill against the repeal of the Affordable Care Act. I know because I was there with them on more than one occasion. The first time that I went to Washington to practice civil disobedience, I was trained by activists who have spent decades using the tactic. Later that day, I was arrested with others whom I have admired since I began studying the history of activism as a graduate student.
Those actions exemplify the kind of protest that meets with Greenberg’s approval, which he sees as of a piece with the Gandhian nonviolence preached by Martin Luther King, Jr. in the civil rights movement. But this kind of analysis represents what Dara T. Mathis has described as a “flattened” vision of King’s worldview. For King, she writes, “nonviolence did not constitute passivity or mollification, but a militant commitment to change.” Remember — as historian Tom Sugrue has urged — that King’s most famous piece of oratory lauded “the marvelous new militancy which has engulfed the Negro community,” and exhorted listeners to seize on “the fierce urgency of Now.”
In fact, the same activists who last summer taught a roomful of us the ins and outs of sit-ins also trained me — and hundreds, if not thousands of others — in “bird-dogging,” which Greenberg seems to suggest is downright dangerous. If you saw any of last year’s videos of constituents angrily confronting their Congressional representatives over the Republican health care agenda, then you’ve seen bird-dogging. It’s also the tactic that protesters employed recently when they confronted Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell outside a restaurant in Louisville. And while bird-dogging is frequently passionate and impolite, it is definitely nonviolent.
It’s also a tactic that I have used myself. Two weeks ago, I ended up on a flight with Carlos Curbelo, a Republican who represents the South Florida congressional district adjacent to mine. When we deplaned, I had some questions for him about his stance on immigration — would he oppose family detention for people seeking asylum? Would he stop taking money from private prison companies that profit from immigrant detention? (His answer to both questions was no.)
Being questioned in the middle of the airport terminal probably made Curbelo uncomfortable, but in South Florida we have little other choice. According to the Town Hall Project, which tracks elected officials’ public events, he hasn’t held an in-person town hall since before Trump took office. Instead, he prefers “tele-town halls,” conference calls that are not open to the public — and he’s far from the only Republican lawmaker looking to avoid constituents. And then there’s Trump’s cabinet secretaries, who mostly seem determined to gut the agencies they oversee while enriching themselves as much as possible in the process. We have no hope of voting them out before 2020. (However, EPA chief Scott Pruitt did resign the same day that Greenberg’s essay ran; days earlier, a woman had confronted him at a DC restaurant, urging him to step down.) Now, I don’t like confronting people in public — in fact, it makes me very anxious. But in a political environment where people with power flout accountability, we have little other recourse.
That’s all well and good, Greenberg says, but isn’t there value in preserving “a nonpolitical space of human interaction”? The problem with this argument is that restaurants and airports are political spaces. Many people — especially those who are most vulnerable under the Trump administration — would be hard pressed to find spaces that, for them, aren’t political. If you think restaurants aren’t political spaces under an administration that demonizes immigrants, ask yourself who’s cooking your food, or clearing your dishes. If you think airports aren’t political spaces, watch Jorge Garcia say goodbye to his family in a Detroit airport terminal after 30 years in the United States, or think back to last year’s airport protests over Trump’s Muslim ban. The fantasy of non-political space, it seems, is a luxury afforded to those least likely to suffer in the years to come.
No serious person in the broad anti-Trump movement advocates violence, and we are horrified at the use of violence against peaceful protesters, no matter its source. But to draw a direct line from confronting politicians in public to throwing things at them, much less to planting bombs, is intellectually dishonest. It’s also the kind of response that disruptive, nonviolent protest tends to inspire. It’s no accident that King wrote his most celebrated treatise on civil disobedience as a rebuke to the tut-tutting of white moderates in Birmingham, Alabama. Confronting public officials may be “definitely becoming a thing,” but counterproductive criticism from would-be allies is a much, much older problem for those who speak truth to power.
Dan Royles is an assistant professor of history at Florida International University. He is working on a book about African American AIDS activism. You can follow him on Twitter @danroyles.
Dear Professor Royles,
This is a thoughtful piece– esp. the section on public space and those who are privileged to claim it as private. It was also good to see reminders from ACT UP. Thank you.
My only reservation is about the use of the term “militant.” It means, in conventional English, the use of confrontational or violent methods and is rooted in the experience of serving as a soldier by its etymology. At the end of chapter 2 of Where Do We Go from Here?, Dr. King re-appropriates the Renaissance idea of the new human, as well as the Nietzschean idea of the overhuman to think about a human being who is past violence. Earlier in that chapter, he discusses the politics and morality of reworking language — thinking there of “black” and “white” and their connotations. I think the term “militant” should be jettisoned and language reworked mainly because Dr. King is right that the human beings need to outgrow cycles of violence and grow up. I also think that the discourse of militancy comes to close to what I have called “arbitrarianism” — the social and amoral condition that is underneath the current U.S. administration’s undermining of norms and opportunistic playing into fascist undercurrents. Finally, if there is one thing that is basic to fascism, it is identification with a military ethos. Just being militant does not make one a fascist, of course, but in an environment where abritrarianism is trading on fascism for support from a voting base and to polarize Leftists and produce greater reactivity in the system, it is important to steer far away from fascist characteristics.
Rather than talk about militancy, I think we should talk about accountability. Squaring up with folks who represent us in airports is a form of accountability. So is protest when it works well.
Thanks again.
Jeremy Bendik-Keymer
Beamer-Schneider Professor in Ethics
Case Western Reserve University
Dear Professor Royles,
This is a thoughtful piece– esp. the section on public space and those who are privileged to claim it as private. It was also good to see reminders from ACT UP. Thank you.
My only reservation is about the use of the term “militant.” It means, in conventional English, the use of confrontational or violent methods and is rooted in the experience of serving as a soldier by its etymology. At the end of chapter 2 of Where Do We Go from Here?, Dr. King re-appropriates the Renaissance idea of the new human, as well as the Nietzschean idea of the overhuman to think about a human being who is past violence. Earlier in that chapter, he discusses the politics and morality of reworking language — thinking there of “black” and “white” and their connotations. I think the term “militant” should be jettisoned and language reworked mainly because Dr. King is right that human beings need to outgrow cycles of violence and grow up. I also think that the discourse of militancy comes too close to what I have called “arbitrarianism” — the amoral condition that is underneath the current U.S. administration’s undermining of norms and opportunistic playing into fascist undercurrents. Finally, if there is one thing that is basic to fascism, it is identification with a military ethos. Just being militant does not make one a fascist, of course, but in an environment where abritrarianism is trading on fascism for support from a voting base, to polarize Leftists, and to produce greater reactivity in the system, it is important to steer far away from fascist characteristics.
Rather than talk about militancy, I think we should talk about accountability. Squaring up with folks who represent us in airports is a form of accountability. So is protest when it works well.
Thanks again.
Jeremy Bendik-Keymer
Dear Professor Royles,
This is a thoughtful piece– esp. the section on public space and those who are privileged to claim it as private. It was also good to see reminders from ACT UP. Thank you.
My only reservation is about the use of the term “militant.” It means, in conventional English, the use of confrontational or violent methods and is rooted in the experience of serving as a soldier by its etymology (Oxford American Dictionary, 2005-2017). At the end of chapter 2 of Where Do We Go from Here?, Dr. King re-appropriates the Renaissance idea of the new human, as well as the Nietzschean idea of the overhuman to think about a human being who is past violence. Earlier in that chapter, he discusses the politics and morality of reworking language — thinking there of “black” and “white” and their connotations. I think the term “militant” should be jettisoned and language reworked mainly because Dr. King is right that human beings need to outgrow cycles of violence. I also think that the discourse of militancy comes too close to what I have called “arbitrarianism” — the amoral condition that is underneath the current U.S. administration’s undermining of norms and opportunistic playing into fascist undercurrents. Finally, if there is one thing that is basic to fascism, it is identification with a military ethos. Just being militant does not make one a fascist, of course, but in an environment where abritrarianism is trading on fascism for support from a voting base, to polarize Leftists, and to produce greater reactivity in the system, it is important to steer far away from fascist characteristics.
Rather than talk about militancy, I think we should talk about accountability. Squaring up with folks who represent us in airports is a form of accountability. So is protest when it works well.
Thanks again.
Jeremy Bendik-Keymer
Thanks for your thoughtful reply, Jeremy—you raise good points about militant/cy and the baggage that those terms carry. But I don’t think they’re without utility here—nonviolence can be militant in the sense of being strategic, organized, and directed without being martial, and at its best is about holding those in power accountable.
Dear Professor Royles,
I agree with your emphasis on organization, direction and – if I may add to the spirit – commitment and persistence. “Strategy” is still a martial term relating to warcraft, and so I think it is best abandoned.
The reason I am focusing on these words (“militant,” “strategy”) is because I am concerned about the concepts under them. They play into a reactive forcefield that reinforces arbitrarianism and, in some instances of protest, the police state. They do erode civility — not in the post 16th century sense of politeness, which I think is mostly shit in the contexts we are discussing — but in the earlier and more traceable sense of being a member of a city. Civility in this earlier sense is important to keep, because it is under attack now, especially in the way that “citizenship” is policed to include only some members of a city.
I think it is worth repeating a pre-16th century sense of civility as translated through the history of human rights and of solidarity. According to this non-polite sense of civility, being civil is being an active member of a city and sharing power in that city with all who are also part of the city, including especially “the part who have no part.” Civility then appears especially in those moments when we challenge social constructions that are unjust and exclude, dominate, or silence people.
I agree that the methods of this civility should be organized, directed, committed and persistent. They should square up with corruption and injustice and not give it room to avoid accountability. The process of doing that may be very uncomfortable for some who benefit from the injustice or who just want to be ostriches. But neither is it strategic or militant — dissolving the city into a war. That — war world – is just what the arbitrarianians and fascists believe and want.
I’m signing off commenting further on this. Thank you again for a good post.
Sincerely,
Jeremy Bendik-Keymer