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Transcript:
Last month, I made a video a bit outside of my usual fare because it was focused on my opinions of what happened in the US election. But because I can’t help myself, I did namecheck some academics and the research they’ve been doing for the past few decades: “Why Civil Resistance Works: The Strategic Logic of Nonviolent Conflict” by Professor Erica Chenoweth, director of Harvard’s Nonviolent Action Lab, and Maria J. Stephan, Chief Organizer & Co-lead of The Horizons Project.
My point in citing that work was specifically to give hope to people who might not know that there’s a large database of evidence suggesting that collective action is an effective tool for protecting and even regaining rights and freedoms, which I think is important during a time when we in the US–and many people in other countries–are facing a future with authoritarians promising to visit violence upon our most marginalized people like immigrants, LGBT+, and women.
You can go watch that video if you’d like a slightly more detailed overview of their research, but the summary is that they examined historical revolutions that either failed or succeeded and were either primarily violent or nonviolent, to see what kind of patterns they might be able to find. Since publishing the original research in 2011, Chenoweth and Stephan have continued to update and refine the data. Overall, they find that nonviolent tactics are surprisingly effective (surprising especially to Chenoweth, who started out extremely skeptical that such tactics could actually work). A lot of the data suggests that nonviolent tactics are actually more effective than violent tactics, and when they result in a regime change, the new regime tends to be more egalitarian than those that take power through violent revolution.
I was interested to see that a lot of you took serious issue with me mentioning this research. Many commenters claimed that the research was too reductive, and others accused me of being a naive pacifist who ignores the power and necessity of violent resistance.
So I almost immediately decided that I would eventually do a follow-up video where I address those concerns, but I wasn’t planning to get to it until January. Unfortunately, or maybe fortunately, there are too many fascinating real-world events happening right now that make this topic extremely topical. Like, for instance, Syrian revolutionaries just took Damascus and toppled the Assad dictatorship, and they were very much using violent tactics! Of course, this has been more than a decade in the making, and HTS are Islamists who haven’t exactly published a cogent plan for guiding the country forward, so it remains to be seen if this is another data point in favor of violent resistance resulting in another authoritarian replacement.
And of course, last week a man gunned down Brian Thompson, the CEO of an incredibly corrupt corporation, in midtown Manhattan in broad daylight. The reaction from the entire internet ranged from “fuck yeah” to a slightly quieter “fuck yeah”–seriously, even the viewers of Ben Shapiro are leaving his channel because he tried to paint the killing and resulting anti-CEO rhetoric as an unhinged liberal reaction.
As of this recording, the police have detained a man they say has a fake ID, a gun, and an anti-big-healthcare manifesto. They released his name, because the US does not actually fundamentally believe in innocence until proven guilty, and people are combing his online presence for some kind of enlightenment. His politics are all over the place but seem to mostly be libertarian, but what I found interesting is that he has posted quite a bit about how violence is the only way to create change. I’m going to block out his name just because of my pesky ethics, but here’s a review he left on a random book on Goodreads, let’s see, a little something by one “Theodore John Kaczynski?” Ah well, probably doesn’t matter, but he specifically cites a Reddit comment (because this is the worst timeline) about it that he agreed with:
“Had the balls to recognize that peaceful protest has gotten us absolutely nowhere and at the end of the day, he’s probably right. Oil barons havent listened to any environmentalists, but they feared him.
“When all other forms of communication fail, violence is necessary to survive. You may not like his methods, but to see things from his perspective, it’s not terrorism, it’s war and revolution. Fossil fuel companies actively suppress anything that stands in their way and within a generation or two, it will begin costing human lives by greater and greater magnitudes until the earth is just a flaming ball orbiting third from the sun. Peaceful protest is outright ignored, economic protest isn’t possible in the current system, so how long until we recognize that violence against those who lead us to such destruction is justified as self-defense.
“These companies don’t care about you, or your kids, or your grandkids. They have zero qualms about burning down the planet for a buck, so why should we have any qualms about burning them down to survive?
“We’re animals just like everything else on this planet, except we’ve forgotten the law of the jungle and bend over for our overlords when any other animal would recognize the threat and fight to the death for their survival. “Violence never solved anything” is a statement uttered by cowards and predators.”
Again, as of this recording no one knows if this is the guy, but this is the discourse that’s happening right now. Is this guy right? Was the unabomber (kind of) right? Is the research on civil resistance overly simplistic and wrong?
First, let me clear up some misconceptions: I am NOT a pacifist in general, by which I mean that I do think that violence is sometimes necessary and effective. To use a really obvious and extreme example, I don’t think the Allies could have emptied the concentration camps with diplomacy.
And as I’ve stated several times before, I do not believe that nasty tactics are immoral by default, and the example I’ve used for that repeatedly is that punching is “bad,” but Buzz Aldrin punching a moon landing denier who is harassing him is funny and good actually.
Shooting a bunch of kindergartners and making schoolchildren fear for their lives for their entire education is bad, but shooting a CEO whose company is responsible for a tremendous amount of death and despair and making CEOs and billionaires fear for their lives is…well, I won’t say “good” but I think we can all agree that it’s definitely less bad. And maybe good? In Minecraft? Look, I’d like to keep my YouTube account so let’s leave it there.
Because yeah, sometimes violence gets positive results. Chenoweth and Stephan’s research does not negate that in the least: in fact, they explicitly point out revolutions that succeeded by using violent tactics, like when the Taliban overthrew the Afghan government in the 1990s. They also accept that revolutions often use both violent and nonviolent tactics: “Characterizing a campaign as violent or nonviolent simplifies a very complex constellation of resistance methods,” they write in the introduction to their continually updated dataset. But rather than throwing their hands in the air and deciding there’s just no way to distinguish between violence and non-violence, they dug into the details to create strict rules for whether to categorize an uprising as “mostly nonviolent” or “mostly violent.”
They also further simplified things by throwing out “partial successes,” which reduced the number of successful nonviolent revolutions. Despite that, they still found that, yeah, nonviolent revolutions in the past hundred years have tended to be more successful than violent revolutions, and they tended to end up with more egalitarian governments, and further researcher from Chenoweth and Evan Perkoski found that they also tend to have fewer mass killings, which is nice.
Chenoweth has obviously been extremely important to the previously understudied history of civil resistance, but it isn’t, well, revolutionary. By which I mean, there are many other historians, political scientists, and other researchers who have replicated those results and found similar reasons to take a fresh look at nonviolence as a serious political tactic.
So yes, the fact remains that recent historical data does suggest that civil resistance isn’t just effective at times, but may be more effective than violent resistance on a number of metrics. Chenoweth is very clear that this is DESCRIPTIVE, not proscriptive: they are examining what happened in the past, which may relate to the present and might inform future actions, but that’s not what their research concerns.
And again: this research does not say that violence is never the answer, or more accurately, HAS never BEEN the answer. Not only do they detail successful revolutions that used violence, but I can think of several smaller scale recent examples where violence led directly to positive change: just two years ago, a lone man assassinated the former Prime Minister of Japan, Shinzo Abe, and when arrested he announced that he did it because of Abe’s family ties to the Unification Church, a predatory cult that bankrupted the man’s mother. The cult’s ties to prominent politicians was thrust into the spotlight, forcing government officials to disclose their relationships, denounce them, and then enacting legislation restricting the cult’s powers. The assassin is still awaiting trial, but his act is internationally regarded as one of the most successful examples of political violence in our time.
Will this latest assassination of a CEO see similar success? Well, it may be a coincidence but another insurance provider, Blue Cross Blue Shield, had announced in November that they would put a limit on how much anesthesia would be covered for patients, meaning that if your surgery is approved but something goes wrong while you’re unconscious and they need to keep you under longer, you might wake up completely bankrupt. Immediately following Thompson’s killing, they reversed that policy.
The assassination has certainly helped inform people about just how evil insurance companies are, and UnitedHealthcare in general where Brian Thompson was CEO. For instance, a lot more people now know that UnitedHealthcare used a chatbot with a 90% error rate to deny patient’s medical claims, leaving them to either die or go bankrupt to access treatment their doctors thought was necessary. People now know that medical debt it the cause of the majority of bankruptcy in the US. They know that Americans pay more for medical care than any other country but see our doctors less frequently and have lower life expectancy, higher early mortality, higher maternal mortality, and more people skipping consultations because they can’t afford it. And mostly, a lot more people now realize that they aren’t alone in their anger about all this.
What will Americans do with this information? Well, we already voted in the party who promised to make everything worse for the next four years, so it doesn’t leave us with much, besides an increasingly frustrated population who happen to be heavily armed. If I were a CEO right now, I’d probably be at my 6th home in Barbados waiting for things to cool down a bit.
So considering these successes from violence, why did I choose to focus on civil resistance immediately following the election? For a number of reasons. First, these are outliers. An upset person doesn’t go out and buy a gun for the first time, head to Manhattan, and successfully assassinate the perfect person to make the political point they desire without retribution on a societal level. If we leave aside the thorny question of morality, we can make a basic cost/benefit analysis: assassins take extreme risks (to themselves, bystanders, and society as a whole) for a benefit that has very little chance of paying off in any meaningful way. I’m sorry, but there’s a very good chance that once Brian Thompson’s alleged killer is caught and convicted, things will continue on as usual here in the US. I mean, but worse, because Republicans are going to go after Medicare and the Affordable Care Act.
Meanwhile, collective action has very little risk and nothing BUT rewards. You make connections with other people. You improve your own skills and others. You lift each other up. You build strength in numbers.
And none of that takes violence off the table if and when necessary. For example, you could just go out and buy a gun right now, which would immediately increase your risk of dying by homicide or suicide, and also increase the risk of those around you. Or you could go to your local gun range and take a lesson. Meet some people. Join the gun club. Personally, I think that BECAUSE guns are so common in American society, every adult should go out and learn how they work, how to disassemble them, and how to safely handle them. Now instead of increasing your risk, you’ve joined a community and learned new skills. It’s a win-win. And yeah, if the Revolution breaks out, you can still go buy yourself a gun and join your neighborhood militia if that’s what your heart desires.
But as the data suggests, if we work to build those communities and build other skills and learn from successful revolutionaries of the past, then we can continue to fight injustice on every front: through protest, strikes, sit-ins, and generally fucking up the system with civil disobedience.
I’ll end with a book recommendation, because even though it’s ostensibly about climate change, I find it to be terribly relevant to our current moment: Kim Stanley Robinson’s Ministry for the Future. It’s a sprawling novel about how humanity responds to an existential threat, and in fact I see it as a blueprint for how humanity SHOULD respond to an existential threat. Not through scientific advancement; not through championing and enabling progressive politicians; not through mass protests; not through pointed assassinations of key targets; not through moderate capitulation to “enemy” capitalists; but through all of these things. I’ll warn you that the book starts off with a very depressing climate disaster, but it is ultimately a hopeful book about how humanity might pull itself back from the brink of dystopia. And I think we could all use a little of that hope right now.
