Nonviolent movements succeeded twice as often as violent armed movements, against armed
authoritarian regimes.

​by Dave Lewit

The handwriting is on the wall. Centrist President Joe Biden notwithstanding, disaffected millions of Americans seem willing to consider the likes of Donald Trump in the 2024 election. Can pro-democracy Americans prevail?

Harvard political scientists Erica Chenoweth and Zoe Marks are not sure. They want pro-democracy people and sympathizers to be prepared and active. Their 34-page comprehensive, no-nonsense October 2022 report Pro-Democracy Organizing against Autocracy in the United States: A Strategic Assessment & Recommendations is essential and practical. 

Chenoweth is well qualified: she and colleagues studied 323 significant twentieth century (1900-2006) revolutionary movements worldwide, finding that nonviolent movements succeeded twice as often as violent armed movements against armed authoritarian regimes. But supporting authoritarian regimes are “corporations, business and economic elites, media, party officials and staff, civil servants, security personnel, cultural influencers, foundations and philanthropists, religious leaders, organized labor, and other elite and local authoritarians.”

Drawing on their scrutiny of these nonviolent pro-democracy, revolutionary movements,
Chenoweth and Marks prescribe actions in four essential categories:

• Build and maintain a large-scale, multiracial, cross-class, pro-democratic United Front;
• Protect, hold, and build local and community power through alternative institutions;
• Build pressure to induce defections among autocrat loyalists;
• Strengthen resilience against increased state “security” or paramilitaries.

Wow, a tall order! The authors then go into important details for each action. These are helpful because they can engage the talents and drives of the mere five percent necessary for a winning movement, who otherwise might despair of the complexity of effective organized activity. Broadly, a United Front “will require a general secretariat with a federated structure. . . a resource bank that can fund legal support, strike relief . . . and other support for chapters to organize and mobilize people.” It should “develop intelligence, community power building, scenario planning, communications, education, training, conflict resolution, and diplomacy.”

Where to begin? First may be calling out illegal, mendacious, and antisocial behavior by authorities’ agents. When too many municipal and state institutions become controlled by a system of white-only, law-and-order, elitist officers and their favored institutions, people seek companionate support. Some nonprofit organizations can help, but face-to-face, left/populist, movement groups—anti-corporatist, ecological, localist, anti-racist, police-reforming, anti-sexist, pro-immigrant, anti-war, socialist—may be more amenable to “intersectionality’s” call for collaboration, and form alternative institutions.

As corporate and government institutions depend more and more on digital controls, physical proximity of local people may encourage “economic cooperatives, fresh food provision, public health institutions, mutual aid, community safety, strike funds, and other forms of cooperation that dramatically reduce the reach, impact, and legitimacy of the authoritarian state.” To promote defections they emphasize “mapping” of authoritarians’ structures and networks to identify key persons and links to overlapping neutral or pro-democracy groupings. Partnering with foreign resistance groups can provide moral authority for local movements, partly by engaging certain international agreements.

But Chenoweth and Marks outline so much more than we can discuss here. For the short and longer terms we must survey what resistance structure we have, and quickly build a more deliberate, comprehensive “pro-democracy infrastructure.”

We know that our movement, our United Front, must be nonviolent. Mahatma Gandhi’s nonviolent movement was top-down — personally driven. Politically, it failed. He had heart and drive, but lacked social infrastructure. Martin Luther King had Gandhi’s drive, and engaged existing organizations like churches as rudimentary infrastructure. Chenoweth and Marks offer a spreadsheet with dozens of critical infrastructure elements, but lack participatory fire — drive, staging, and progressive dynamism. A Trumpist president in 2024 may be a slap in the face — a sting for serious infrastructure building.

Dave Lewit is Professor Emeritus and frequent contributor to Justice Rising. He is the Ombudsman of the Alliance for Democracy.

by Jim Tarbell and David e. Delk

Establishing peace in a world without war requires building a culture of peace while
implementing public policy to rid the world of war. Paul Chappell and his Peace Literacy
Institute published seven books in their Road to Peace series that establishes a clear, doable
path for establishing a culture of peace. Book five in that series, Soldiers of Peace, will turn us all into non-violent warriors for peace. It builds hope, one of their most important muscles of peace, by outlining the sweeping cultural transformations democracy and education can nourish. Their Peace Literacy program can instigate similar changes to our antiquated acceptance of war as inevitable.

After the horrors of both World Wars, politicians, jurists, scientists and publishers were
all enthusiastic to create both a culture of peace, and public policy to make global peace
a reality. Notables from Albert Einstein to Senator J. W. Fullbright endorsed the rationale
and route to international peace laid out in Emery Reves' 1945, world-wide, best selling book, The Anatomy of Peace. Reves, internationally known author, publisher, and close friend of
Churchill and others, calls out the failures of capitalism, socialism, religion and fascism, along with the evils of nationalism and the nation state system. He then goes on to declare “we can protect ourselves against international wars only through the establishment of constitutional life in world affairs by freely elected and responsible representatives.”

World leaders planned for the United Nations to become such an institution. But the UN bogged down in the “evils of the nationstate system.” It took fifty years for the movement calling for international democratic decision making on global issues to reemerge. Now that idea has been updated in A World Parliament: Governance and Democracy in the 21st
Century by international parliamentarian Joe Leinen and Democracy Without Borders co-founder and director Andreas Bummel. They point out that the need for a world parliament goes way beyond just international peace. Now we need this international, democratic institution to deal with the climate crisis, migration, depletion of global resources, pollution of the earth, multinational corporate tax evasion, and so many other world-wide problems that the nation-states can not deal with.

Unfortunately, the international peace movement is being stifled by multinational corporations and their allied military-industrial complexes. Joan Roelofs lays out how this
works in her book The Trillion Dollar Silencer: Why there is so little Anti-War Protest in the
United States. She documents how corporations and their military allies have infiltrated every level of American society with unlimited funds to compromise any movement toward global peace. Then she shows her readers on how to educate themselves and reverse the trend by
hounding their politicians, joining a peace group, creating a peace culture with a national
service organization, and pushing a green New Deal that will convert our war economy into a peace economy.

Medea Benjamin, probably the greatest peace organizer in the United States, and Nicolas
J.S. Davies bring all this together in their seminal book War in Ukraine: Making Sense of a
Senseless Conflict. While condemning Russia's invasion of Ukraine, they also point out that the West helped cause the conflict by reneging on promises to not expand NATO into Eastern
Europe, before relentlessly pushing NATO bases toward Russia's border. The West's courting of Ukraine aims at completing that process, while ignoring President Kennedy's warning not to corner a nuclear power, leaving nuclear war as its only option, and causing the annihilation of life as we know it.

Meanwhile, Norman Solomon’s new book, War Made Invisible: How America Hides the
Human Toll of Its Military Machine is a must read. Americans don’t know how the US military dominates America and the world, fighting or inciting endless wars, spending the
American taxpayers tax dollars without being held accountable.

How can the US military and its corporate contractors receive more than half of federal discretionary funds while the American people are kept in the dark, unable to rise up to say “Enough is Enough?” Norman's book shows how the American “free” press hides all
stories, which would inform the American people, and helps explain how and why our
“free” press makes invisible the American military death machine.