On violence

Tutor and computer engineer Cole Allen entered his plea of not guilty this week in federal court in response to charges against him, which stem from showing up with weapons and trying to access the Washington Hilton ballroom during the White House Correspondents’ Dinner in April.

One quarter of Americans surveyed think that this was a faked assassination attempt, with even more Democrats than Republicans believing that’s the case. There is, of course, the prior case of John Hinckley shooting President Reagan at the same hotel. And I’ve had my own strange experiences with that ballroom, ranging from being present at a huge event for Amway distributors there as a kid in the 1980s, as well as attending and (later the same decade) running model UNs in the same space.

The Washington Hilton as a site of cultural framing and the expression of power in weird or marginal ways fits with my experience. And while I don’t see any reason to think that whatever happened at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner last month was faked, I do think it’s a good moment to consider how we think about violence and power, and how they affect people, particularly when projected on our screens.

Today’s post will be less of an overarching history lecture and more an attempt to give you some food for thought on violence. For some, all this might be old hat, but I’m hopeful it might introduce approaches to thinking about these issues that don’t always get considered.

The times we’re living through can feel desperate. It’s easy to get exhausted, or even to imagine nothing short of armed revolt will ever change anything. But I personally embrace and recommend nonviolence as political strategy. I do this is for a few reasons. And though I don’t think most of my readers are planning tactical operations or sitting at home making Molotov cocktails, you never know who could use advice about productive paths to social change. So here are some of my reasons for embracing nonviolence.

Political violence tends to beget more political violence and long-term instability. When people think of the strategic removal of one person or a small group—as the government is arguing that Cole Allen did when he went to the Washington Hilton—even if the violent actor were to achieve their goals, they actually have very little control over how it all plays out. Which means that the results often have little to do with the thoughts or goals of the would-be assassin. Violence easily morphs and warps and does harm far beyond the intentions of the person, party, or government that inflicts it. What practitioners imagine as the aftermath of righteous violence often gets hijacked, interrupted, and reinterpreted.

Another thing to keep in mind is that it’s hard to make substantial gains without strategy, and you can’t be strategic without discipline. Discipline in action is important to build community and coalition. Violence tends to overwhelm other strategies, and often becomes antithetical to discipline.

While communal violence can build interpersonal bonds in some cases, it often does so in destructive ways that are hard to transition to nonviolent models. And if you never manage to transition or don’t plan to, well… communities organized primarily around committing violence don’t have a great long-term prognosis.

This last point probably boils down to personal preference. Nonviolence is what I’ve studied. I know what tends to work within its frameworks and am aware of its shortcomings. If I’m going to be strategic, I want to use a tool I understand. Sometimes that might limit my toolbox, but I feel a responsibility when I swing a hammer—I want a sense of what I’m building and how to put it together.

Nonviolence isn’t refusing to embrace or use power. It’s learning to develop and use it in different ways.

Violence is the default

At the same time, I understand that violence is the default for many facets of American society. We’re an extraordinarily policed society, with violence as a core part of daily life. We can see it in the allocation of money to law enforcement in our municipal, state, and federal budgets. We see it in the fetishization of law enforcement and the military as quasi-religious figures to whom the state enthusiastically gives the power over life and death. It’s further revealed by the impunity that law enforcement has to commit violence against and kill noncitizens and citizens alike.

And to be clear, nonviolent efforts often get met with state violence as well. So why not commit violence then? On a more panoramic scale, because recent research has shown that political violence doesn’t seem to have an effect on most citizens. But on a personal level, I grew up with violence and am interested in creating power that is not violence, that chooses to act outside a frame of violence and actively doesn’t replicate it.

But I’ll admit that change requires hard work that often proceeds slowly, and it’s frustrating a lot of the time. Yet nonviolence isn’t an abandonment of physical tactics. Noncooperation and nonviolent resistance are both ways of using power—even physical power—in the pursuit of a political end without committing violence against another person. I want to build something different than a kind of police state–lite society.

State violence

Political actors in the U.S. and elsewhere often try to scare the public, in order to make the argument that people are in danger and the state needs the ability to commit more violence in order to protect them. This brings additional power both to those politicians and to law enforcement.

This may sound obvious, but in my experience, a system that increasingly puts its resources toward a capacity for greater violence will beget more violence. In general, I don’t want to contribute additional violence to a violent system, because it rarely ends the violence. I’m not saying it’s never worked, but I’m saying it’s a very high-risk strategy and unpredictable in terms of success.

And as I’ve written about before, the involvement and persistence of determined people who keep showing up is undergirded with a different kind of pressure—implicit pressure that’s both physical and psychological, which can also be very powerful. The implicit psychological dynamic occurs when you work to make your position the normal one in society, the reasonable one that people have come to perceive as correct, so that those who embrace hate and violence or target vulnerable groups feel their own ideas are the outliers and put them outside the social norms in a way upsetting to some of them. Others may not mind, but you only need to peel off the margins to secure significant shifts in political power.

Implicit physical pressure has to do with bodily presence. A larger and larger crowd of people who are unhappy with an existing policy creates impetus for change. Gathering together in public keeps people with less power from being picked off in isolation and having their demands ignored. This kind of implicit pressure wears powerholders down over time, unsettles them, and can exact concessions.

Despite a commitment to nonviolence, I’ve tried in my life to understand how violence is used and how it functions. I studied and taught martial arts for years, and worked with refugees who had faced torture, with survivors of sexual assault, and collaborated on hate-crime prevention and public health outreach. I’m uninterested in owning a gun but learned to shoot a variety of rifles to get certified to carry one for defense against polar bears in the Norwegian Arctic. I created a violence prevention bulletin decades ago to look at research on interpersonal violence, which is different than political violence but can have parallel effects, and I think is often applied in similar ways.

Violence as theater

However specific your goal may be, violence is a blunt tool. As such it will often be read however people want to interpret it—or even how they automatically register it. I’m not sure that violence in opposition to the state changes peoples’ perspectives at this particular moment—it seems to either reinforce the public’s preexisting ideas or fails to affect them in any meaningful way at all.

People imagine violence to be surprising, but it’s so omnipresent in the U.S. that it actually strikes me as a predictable part of American life. As a result, many have become numb to it. Committing violence often leads people to respond in stock ways. It may be even more likely that, viewing it through a mediated frame, as most of us do, a violent act will simply fall into some preconstructed idea in peoples’ heads and not even enter their thought process in any complex way.

Our culture is saturated with violence. From superhero fantasy film to true crime and conspiracy videos, violence is a constant, and in our age, often inextricable from theater. There are definitely thinkers who consider these questions more rigorously, but I’m convinced some number of people who spend time on social media calling for violent uprising just want someone to put on a better show for them to watch.

Seeking excess violence

We see this violence/boredom agita with Trump, who never seems to feel there is enough violence happening. He uses the rhetoric of violence. He’s pleased when violence is done in his name. He was unhappy with generals in his first administration whom he thought weren’t subservient enough to his wish to commit violence.

My sense is that he does this because he likes seeing violence committed, he likes hearing about violence, and he likes it when other people know he has the power to inflict it.

And Trump’s whole ethos is to have no accountability at all. His most visible glee seems to come from his supporters or agents committing violence that exceeds what’s legally permitted—even though the category of what’s legally permitted by the president of the United States is incredibly expansive. This line of thinking sees extrajudicial violence as the best kind.

In my opinion, this is another reason why the U.S. civil rights movement’s model and approach to nonviolence is a good basic framework for us now. Firstly, it already has a track record, the country has some familiarity with it, and it’s seen by a majority of Americans as a good thing. Secondly, while the violence that was unleashed against Black civil rights communities and demonstrators was extraordinary, we’re again witnessing a level of extrajudicial authoritarian tactics held up by the government as the very model of what law enforcement (particularly ICE and Border Patrol) should be, with the justification that the targeted group is subhuman, terrorists, or a threat to national security. As a society, we’re facing a parallel kind of threat.

This is a perverted part of governance that Trump understands very well. He gave Stephen Miller the green light to bring ultraviolence to immigrant detention, and when that excess of violence finally managed to break through the jaded viewers of violence to actually offend white voters, as it did with the deaths of Alex Pretti and Renee Good, he understands the need to dial it back long enough to serve his own ends, and resort to it again later, at a point when it’s more advantageous for him.

You might remember that before Trump even returned to office, Aaron Reichlin-Melnick predicted in an interview with me that Stephen Miller and Tom Homan would represent the binary on U.S. immigration policy models in a second Trump administration. So now, for a while ahead of the November elections, we’ll get more Tom Homan, and less Stephen Miller.

And today, as in the Civil Rights era, highlighting the gap between the narrative the state wants to build to justify violence and everyday life in the communities they use that violence against is a more useful kind of theater than violence is. Think of it as a kind of nonviolence theater.

Meeting Trump-era violence with violence creates visuals that reinforce the image of him as a warrior—an image he very much wants to create—and risks legitimizing him as something more than a doddering, washed-up coward.

What you can do

The radical assertion of humanity in the face of violence is powerful. Again, nonviolent tactics don’t require a rejection of power, just an understanding that power can show out in different ways.

Polarization can be a fine, fine thing! But you want to frame the split around the values that will draw people to be part of what you want to accomplish. Playing hardball with ideas while creating compelling frameworks is more appealing than violence—if not on television, then in the real world, where we need to get moving.

No Kings and similar groups sometimes get knocked for not following up to take strategic actions on specific policies. But any of us can take on that role and set goals for something concrete in our communities.

As I mentioned in March, Dana Fisher’s research on No Kings demonstrations has shown that far more people are interested in next steps that are nonviolent than are prepared to engage in violence. Asked about non-violent civil disobedience like sit-ins or blockades, 98% supported groups engaged in these activities. 79% agreed with “social movements taking more confrontational action.” And 69% reported that they personally would participate in those kinds of actions, given the opportunity.

But at the most recent No Kings march, only 25% thought Americans might have to resort to political violence. Those statistics are an invitation to launch nonviolent actions and community events where you live.

Millions of bodies in the streets, organized boycotts, strikes—there are so many ways of expressing disapproval of policies that deliver an implicit threat of accountability and build power. Specific actions that draw attention to a problem or confront those with the ability to change it are a model for asserting a different kind of power.

But to make it work, you have to begin organizing to educate people and persuade them to the policy or political goal you want, or to create a community in which you set those goals together. Figure out what you’re moving toward, and invite people in.

It pays to be creative. The more you surprise people, the more you move out of abstract thinking and get an audience to consider something in a new way, the more you offer the of interaction that moves them outside of the predictable and the known, the more likely you are to get them to really engage.

Sometimes that means confronting powerholders in unusual ways or in unusual settings. Sometimes that means just getting public attention and finding ways to reach people—think community events, performances, interactive activities, and things that are fun.

If you look, you can find nonviolent tactics that play to your strengths. And over time, we can build the kind of power we can assert together—power that demands accountability in the physical world while rejecting the idea of violence as inevitable.

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