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.

David Delk has given this talk on Citizens United v. FEC to several groups in Oregon. In it, he explains the need for an amendment to the Constitution saying that its rights belong to people, not corporations, and that governments must regulate campaign finance, and gives a call to action to support a Senate version of HJR48, the We the People Amendment.

My topic today is Deepening Democracy.
 
You might expect that I will talk about how to get out the vote, how to get rid of the Electoral College, how we need to reinstate the Voting Rights Act of 1964 which the Supreme Court punched a big hole in recently.  Or maybe about, here in Oregon especially, how to control the flow of unlimited money into the political process, specifically by supporting the legislative referral to the Nov 2020 ballot amending the OR constitution to allow limits on political campaign contributions in Oregon.   We all need to support this referral in our communities.
 
But instead I want to talk about Citizen United, because Jan 21st is the 10 anniversary of that awful decision.  It struck yet another blow against democracy by allowing even more special interest corporate money into the politics system, swamping the voices of ordinary people like you and I.
I want to talk about corporate personhood and the court system’s granting of human rights to corporations. Court-created corporate personhood has given the rights and privileges of human beings to corporations while removing them from the duties and obligation of being our servants.   

Oregon’s legislature has approved a ballot measure for the Nov 2020 ballot to amend the state’s Constitution to allow limits on campaign contribution at the state, county and city levels, to allow disclosure of contributors, and to allow political advertisements to also include information on who paid for them. But that hasn’t put a stop to a citizen effort to collect enough signatures to get a similar measure on the ballot.
 
Oregon is one of only five states that have no enforced campaign contribution limits—the others are Alabama, Nebraska, Utah and Virginia. The result is outlandish amounts of money given and spent in elections--$37 million in the last gubernatorial race, with $2.5 million coming from Nike founder Phil Knight alone--and an increasingly clear line between money and inaction on issues of concern to voters. For instance, Republican legislators who skipped the state to block a vote on a clean energy jobs bill also received large donations from companies whose bottom lines would have been impacted by the legislation. 
 
Still, Oregonians are continuing to collect 220,000 signatures statewide to get the a similar measure on the ballot, since it’s possible for the state legislature to rescind their approval.  Alliance council member Joan Horton said that legislators take the signature drive seriously, and knowing that people in their districts were out working for the measure spurred them to support a referral “A continuing signature drive is “insurance” that the legislature will not rescind their referral of SJR18 during 2020’s short session. According to our attorney, we are not on the ballot for certain until that short-session is over next year. He says it’s very unlikely to be rescinded, but it’s a chance we don’t want or need to take”, she said.
 
Alliance national co-chair David Delk noted that in Portland, the local chapter’s efforts will be focused on having the 2020 state ballot measure approved by city and county voters and supporting efforts elsewhere in the state. Every expectation is that it will pass locally, since Portland and Multnomah county voters have already approved two other local ballot measures by about 90%, though implementation is still partly tied up in court. The chapter will also join with other supporting organizations to make sure that when the question passes, contribution limits established under it are not too high and the implementing legislation is loophole-free.
 
In another legislative win Oregon also approved two legislative study committees on a single payer health care plan for the state, and a state public option. David, who also leads the Health Care for All Oregon Metro chapter, said “The single payer study committee is expected to write legislation to implement such a program in Oregon.  Passage of this study committee is quite exciting for Oregonians and moves the ball forward for Oregon to be the first state in the nation to create a single payer health care system.  Remember, everybody in, no one out!"

 

The Portland OR Alliance for Democracy chapter recently welcomed Ellen Brown, founder and chair of the Public Banking Institute. Ellen participated in a Strike Debt Debtors' Assembly as well as a public talk on how Portland and Oregon would benefit from formation of public banks. In addition, chapter members arranged for her to visit with the Portland City Attorney's office, and to meet with candidates running for city council.  

The Portland chapter has not just been working on public banking. They're organizing to enact a city charter change to end political bribery in city elections.  Using their local initiative process, they are trying to enact limits on political contributions/expenditures and to require that political ads disclose the top five entities paying to run the ad.

In working for these reforms, the chapter is going up against a state Supreme Court that has declared all such limits to be an unconstitutional infringement on individual free speech rights.  Individual is understood to include corporations.  But the proposed charter change would ban all corporate contributions, directly challenging the OR Supreme Court rulings.  

Chapter activists have also begun the process for a state-wide initiative to amend the state constitution to allow limits.  When they are successful, we will have this initiative on the ballot in Nov. 2020.