Photo by Peggy Zinn
4.04 | 10.09.20
Welcome to a special two-part series about the looming clash over the future of America. In Part 1, we look at the tattered state of our democracy as the election approaches, and we assess nonviolent ways to respond to the twin threats of political polarization and President Trump's thuggish behavior. (And now the story continues in Part 2, published on October 12.)
These are probably the last two pre-election episodes I’ll make, so I decided to try something a little ambitious and probably a little crazy: making sense of 2020 in all its perverse complexity. It’s a cliché at this point to say that Donald Trump isn’t the disease, he’s the symptom. But it’s true, and underneath all the name-calling and dog-whistling on the campaign trail this year, there’s a far deeper problem, which is that we’re more divided in our goals and our beliefs than at any time since the Civil War.
In the series I bring together ideas from a bunch of conversations I’ve been having with smart people who think about partisanship, polarization, the duties of citizenship, and the future of democracy, including (in Part 1) Sean Eldridge of Stand Up America and Protect The Results, Erica Chenoweth of Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, and Robert McElvaine of Millsaps College in Jackson, Mississippi. The episode explains why the threat of communal violence is so real right now. It also puts the current unrest in historical context, and looks at ways for citizens to usher the country through this perilous moment—for example, by mobilizing nonviolently to ensure that the election is fair and free.
The prospect of a Trump win in November—whether fair or fraudulent—is horrifying. The thing is, a Trump loss would create its own set of problems. As Yoni Appelbaum wrote in a 2019 Atlantic magazine article entitled “How America Ends”:
The president’s defeat would likely only deepen the despair that fueled his rise, confirming his supporters’ fear that the demographic tide has turned against them. That fear is the single greatest threat facing American democracy, the force that is already battering down precedents, leveling norms, and demolishing guardrails. When a group that has traditionally exercised power comes to believe that its eclipse is inevitable, and that the destruction of all it holds dear will follow, it will fight to preserve what it has—whatever the cost.
What form that fight might take is the unsettling and unanswered question now lingering over the nation. Armed extremists, like the participants in the Michigan kidnapping plot exposed this week, hope violent action will spark mass chaos and civil war. We can thwart extremist individuals and groups one by one. But can we stop the politicians who stoke extremism for their own cynical ends?
My goal in this episode is not to alarm listeners, but to equip them for what may be coming. My most memorable interview was with Chenoweth, a political scientist at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government who’s done extensive comparative studies of violent and nonviolent mass movements for social change.
“There's nothing inevitable about even low scale, low intensity conflict in the United States,” Chenoweth emphasized. “Those who claim inevitability of this are totally misguided and probably have some pretty cynical agendas behind that….There are many different things that we in our communities at the state and national level can do to prevent violence from escalating any further than it already has.” In the episode we cover some of those things, including actions citizens can take without leaving home.
Part 2 of this special two-part episode moves beyond the election to ask how we might reconfigure our politics to defuse the kinds of tensions that got us into this mess. Because the real question isn’t how we’re going to get through the election without a violent meltdown—it’s how we’re going to get through the next decade and the next century.
Mentioned In This Episode
Check out the essay version of “American Reckoning” on Medium, which includes extensive annotations and links to source materials.
The American Crisis: When Went Wrong, How We Recover, by writers of The Atlanic, 2020.
Erica Heilman, Karl Hammer and the Donkeys, Rumble Strip, September 24, 2020
Chapter Guide
00:22 The Birth of the Republic
02:33 “We’re Going to Have to See”
03:48 Sean Eldridge: “We Can’t Pretend This Isn’t Happening”
05:04 Welcome to American Reckoning, Part 1
08:54 Things Are Worse Than You Think
09:42 Demographic Realities
13:25 Minority Rule
15:46 “Beyond a Powder Keg”: Party, Identity, Polarization, and Violence
19:08: Trump, the Extremist Threat, and Ballot Paranoia
23:22 Sean Eldridge: “Mass Mobilization Is Really Key”
28:25 Erica Chenoweth on the Power of Nonviolent Civil Resistance
34:15 There Is Nothing Inevitable about Civil War
37:56 Robert McElvaine, historian of the Great Depression: “It’s Much Worse Now”
45:49 De-escalation and the Basics of Direct Action
49:38 Rediscovering Our Voices
50:33 End Credits and Acknowledgements
52:20 Meet Hub & Spoke’s Rumble Strip from Erica Heilman
Notes
The Soonish opening theme is by Graham Gordon Ramsay.
Additional music is from Titlecard Music and Sound.
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American flag photo by Peggy Zinn on Unsplash. Thanks Peggy!
Full Transcript
Audio montage: We can have the future we want, but we have to work for it.
Wade Roush: You’re listening to Soonish. I’m Wade Roush.
I want to start today by going back to the year 1797, to a critical turning point in American history. Or at least, Lin Manuel Miranda’s version of it. I give you King George III:
[Hamilton audio clip]
They say George Washington’s yielding his power and stepping away.
Is that true?
I wasn’t aware that was something a person could do.
I’m perplexed.
Are they going to keep on replacing whoever’s in charge?
If so, who’s next?
There’s nobody else in their country who looms quite as large…
John Adams?!
Wade Roush: That’s true. Adams doesn’t loom as large in American history. But I want to make a case that March 4, 1797, the day the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court administered the oath of office to Adams in Philadelphia, was the first day America could truly call itself a republic.
Washington didn’t have to yield power and step away. The Constitution was only eight years old at that point and it said nothing, as yet, about presidential term limits. If Washington had wanted to stay in office for life, his countrymen would have been glad to let him.
But when the old general decided to retire, he bequeathed to us the idea that presidents are constrained and should voluntarily and peacefully hand power to their successors.
Four years later Adams sealed the deal, when his bid for re-election failed and he duly vacated the executive mansion to make room for his bitter rival, Thomas Jefferson. By doing that, Adams cemented an additional norm. It’s the one that says even a sitting president who loses an election should leave office without a fuss.
And that norm is the latest one Donald Trump is trying to disrupt. We’re still a few weeks away from the 2020 election, but Trump has already said multiple times that he’ll contest the results and try to continue in office no matter how the vote turns out.
Donald Trump audio montage: You don’t know until you see. It depends. I think mail-in voting is going to rig the election, I really do…I have to see. I’m not going to say yes, I’m not going to say no. And I didn’t last time either…We’re going to have to see what happens. You know that I’ve been complaining very strongly about the ballots. And the ballots are a disaster. Get rid of the ballots and you’ll have a very peaceful, there won’t be a transfer, frankly, there’ll be a continuation….As far as the ballots are concerned, it’s a disaster. They’re sending millions of ballots all over the country. There’s fraud. They’re finding them in creeks. This is going to be a fraud like you’ve never seen.
Wade Roush: And the president’s supporters are listening. Large numbers of them say they believe that the only way Trump can fail to be re-elected is through rampant abuse of the mail-in voting process by Democrats.
Of course Trump says crazy stuff every day. But this particular claim about rampant election fraud is unusually dangerous. In effect, Trump is holding a gun to the country’s head and saying either he wins, or he’s going to use every tool at his disposal to de-legitimize the election.
Sean Eldridge: We know that Trump is lying on a daily basis about voter fraud and vote by mail. And it's pretty clear what he's doing. He is laying the groundwork to contest the valid results of the election. So my view is we can't bury our heads in the sand. We can't pretend this isn't happening. Certainly, we can hope for the best case scenario, but we have to plan for the worst.
Wade Roush: That’s Sean Eldridge. He’s the founder of the progressive activist group Stand Up America, which recently helped to form an offshoot group called Protect The Results.
Sean Eldridge: He's behind in the polls. He's desperate. He's proven himself to be a bully. And I think he believes the only way he can win at this point is by cheating and bullying his way through the election. And so we're going to respond by ensuring that the American people mobilize to protect our democracy.
Wade Roush: We’ll hear more from Eldridge later about how that mobilization might work. But here at the top of the show, I just wanted to remind you what a vast moral gap has opened up over the last couple of centuries between our first and second presidents and our 45th.
If Trump follows through on his threats — and there’s no reason to think he won’t — then November 3, 2020, might be the last day America can call itself a republic.
Welcome to the latest in our series of episodes venturing into political futurism. If you’ve been listening to this season of Soonish, you know I’ve been talking with experts about how we ended up with an aspiring strongman like Trump as president, and why our election system is so vulnerable to someone like him, and how, when you add a global pandemic into the mix, becomes very difficult to comprehend what’s even going on in 2020.
In just the week before I recorded this, we learned, to no one’s surprise, that the president is in debt up to his toupee and makes so little money from his failed businesses that he basically doesn’t pay federal income tax. Then we witnessed a so-called debate where Trump spent the whole time playing a high school bully who couldn’t stop disrupting the class. Then we learned that the president himself had become infected with the coronavirus. Which is horrible, and I certainly wish him a speedy recovery. But jeez, dude, maybe you could have worn a damn mask.
These are probably the last episodes of Soonish I’ll make before the election. So this time I’m going to try something a little ambitious and probably a little crazy. I’m going to try to make sense of it all. I’m going to bring together ideas from a bunch of conversations I’ve been having with smart people who think about the future of democracy. And my first agenda item is to explain why the danger to the republic is so deep right now.
The days and weeks right after the election will be the window of maximum peril. I think there are ways we can make it through that window without violence, and I’ll talk about those. But when you look at all the forces afflicting our democratic institutions right now, it’s not a sure thing. And a peaceful outcome won’t happen automatically. Everyone who cares about democracy needs to have a plan for how they’re going to do their part.
And, spoiler alert, that plan should start with VOTING. Vote early, vote by mail, or vote in person in Election Day, but please, vote. The clearer the outcome of the election, the safer we’ll be.
Depending on your politics, your plan could also include preparing for possibility of nonviolent mass mobilization, if it turns out that that’s what’s needed to ensure the integrity of the election.
But here’s the thing. In the end the election will only settle one issue, namely which party controls the House and the Senate and who gets sworn in as president in January. It won’t resolve the underlying tensions that brought us to this crazy moment.
It’s a cliché at this point to say that Donald Trump isn’t the disease, he’s the symptom. But it’s true. Underneath all the chaos of 2020, there’s a far deeper problem, which is that we’re more divided in our goals and our beliefs than at any time since the Civil War.
And our political system has decayed to the point that it’s just not able to resolve these deep ideological differences or the anger and resentment that’s festering between political parties and between different regions of the country. The longer we try to deny that reality or put off a real reckoning, the worse the divisions will get.
So my second agenda item, which we’ll get to in Part 2 of this special two-part episode, is to sketch out four or five scenarios for the long-term future of the United States. Because the question isn’t just how we’re going to get through the next few weeks or months without a violent meltdown. It’s how we’re going to get through the next decade and the next century. Different candidates may have different ideas about how to bring the country together, but I’m not sure it’s realistic to expect Donald Trump or Joe Biden or anyone else to bridge the deepest chasms.
And one way through might be to let go of the idea that national politics is a zero-sum game where the only way one party can win is at the expense of the other. If we’re open to some new experiments with the structure of government, we might just be able to keep democracy alive.
So Here’s Part One: Civil Wars and How to Stop Them.
Maybe you haven’t spent the last few months immersed in the literature on polarization. Maybe you haven’t been interviewing historians and political scientists about the weak points in our election system and how populism and fascism get a foothold in democratic countries.
Maybe you haven’t been reading everything you can find about domestic extremist movements or tracking the emergence of the Trump campaign’s core reelection strategy, which is to persuade the base that the election can have only one legitimate outcome.
But I have. And I want to say this in a measured way, but… it’s worse than you think. There are guardrails in the Constitution, our laws, and our political traditions that are meant to help us resolve disagreements peacefully. But one by one, those guardrails been removed or allowed to rust away.
To really understand this we’ve got to start with some demographic realities and how they translate into electoral politics.
First off, we’re becoming one of the most diverse and multiethnic nations on Earth. In 2020 roughly 60 percent of Americans are white, 18.5 percent are Latino or Hispanic, 12.5 percent are Black, 6 percent are Asian American, and 1 percent are Indigenous. The Census Bureau says that by 2045 whites will drop below 50 percent of the population for the first time, transforming the US into a nation where no single ethnic group has a majority.
White supremacist and anti-immigrant groups know this perfectly well, and when Donald Trump was elected they gained a sympathetic ear in the White House. Since Trump took office the number of white nationalist groups active in the US has jumped by 55 percent, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center, which tracks hate groups. Trump has catered to their concerns through measures like crackdowns on immigration, building his border wall, and interfering the census to limit the counting of immigrants.
The other big demographic reality is that rural areas are emptying out and people are clumping up in cities. Already 86 percent of people live in urban or suburban areas, and only 14 percent live in rural areas. By 2040, fully half of the population will be concentrated in the eight states that are home to our largest cities. The next seven states will contain another 20 percent of the population, and the remaining 30 percent of the population will be spread out across 35 states.
Unfortunately the Constitution wasn’t designed for a situation like this. Article 1 gives each state two senators, regardless of population. This means that by 2040, the rural 30 percent of the country will be electing 70 senators. Meanwhile the urban 70 percent will have just 30 senators.
Another ridiculously undemocratic provision of the Constitution is the Electoral College. That body also gives disproportionate power to the least populous states, since it’s tied to the number of representatives plus senators in each state. California has about 40 million people and gets 55 electoral votes, or one vote for every 720,000 people. Wyoming has 600,000 people and gets three electoral votes, or one for every 200,000 people.
I think it’s safe to say that if you were designing a constitution from scratch, you would not give somebody in Wyoming 3.6 times more power to choose a president than somebody in California.
Now, take all of those geographic and social realities, and lay across them the fact that rural voters are predominantly Republican and urban voters are predominantly Democratic. What happens is that you get a Senate and an Electoral College that are shockingly unrepresentative of the population.
Nate Silver at the politics website FiveThirtyEight calculates that the makeup of the Senate is 6 to 7 percentage points more Republican than the nation as a whole. That’s how Democrats lost two Senate seats in 2018, even though Democratic Senate candidates won 54 percent of the popular vote.
That’s also why, in close elections, The Electoral College tends to throw elections to Republican candidates. Nate Silver’s math shows that if Joe Biden were to win the popular vote by 1 percent, there would still be a 94 percent chance that he’d lose in the Electoral College. If Biden were to have a 3 percent lead in the popular vote there would still a 50 percent chance of Trump victory.
And it’s not just me saying this stuff. Norman Ornstein, a researcher at the conservative think tank the American Enterprise Institute, says that if Trump were to win again with a minority of the popular vote, it would erode Americans’ faith in free and fair elections. Ornstein wrote this year in the New York Times, “At some point, the fundamental legitimacy of the system will be challenged.”
Now, all of the imbalances I’ve been talking about so far come from pure demographic change, plus the structural flaws built into the Constitution. You can’t blame any of that on either of today’s parties.
But as I said earlier, Republicans know they’re on the losing side of demographic change. And what makes the situation much more volatile is that they’ve responded by engineering clever ways to hold on to power at the federal level, even though they have fewer voters behind them.
Republicans have used their majority in the Senate to block the Democratic presidents from placing judges on the Supreme Court and lower courts and they’ve rammed through the judges nominated by Republican presidents, as they’re doing right now with Amy Coney Barrett in the wake of Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s untimely death.
They’ve weaponized the filibuster to block legislative action. The rule was used only 385 times between 1917 and 1989 but 500 times during the Obama years alone.
They’ve mastered the black art of gerrymandering Congressional districts to create reliably Republican districts with few minority voters. To be fair, Democrats do the same thing, but they’re not as good at it.
And since 2013, when a conservative majority in the Supreme Court gutted the Voting Rights Act, Republicans in state legislatures have developed a devilish new array of voter suppression techniques like photo ID requirements and voter-roll purges.
The term for all of this minority rule. It’s a strategy born of desperation. And if and when it finally fails—say, if it looks like the presidential and senate races are tipping toward Democrats next month—you can bet there’s going to be a backlash.
One excellent summary of all this is from Yoni Appelbaum, a senior editor for politics at The Atlantic magazine. Here’s how he put it in 2019.
The president’s defeat would likely only deepen the despair that fueled his rise, confirming his supporters’ fear that the demographic tide has turned against them. That fear is the single greatest threat facing American democracy, the force that is already battering down precedents, leveling norms, and demolishing guardrails. When a group that has traditionally exercised power comes to believe that its eclipse is inevitable, and that the destruction of all it holds dear will follow, it will fight to preserve what it has—whatever the cost.
So those are the big trends that promise to make the divisions in politics even deeper. Now let’s zoom in and look at some more specific developments that could cause mere disagreement to descend into something much darker.
For one thing, it’s not just that Americans are divided up by race and region. Obviously, we’re also divided up by party and ideology. And the distance between us is growing ever larger and more baked into our psychology as individuals.
These days you don’t just vote Democratic or Republican; you are a Democrat or a Republican. It’s part of your identity. There’s basically no such thing anymore as a split ticket, where you might support a candidate from one party in a Congressional race and somebody from the other party in the presidential race. Today people vote a straight party ticket 97 percent of the time.
And more and more, party politics defines who we’re friends with and even who we love. Mixed-party marriages are a thing of the past. Only 6 percent of married Republicans have Democratic spouses and only 6 percent of married Democrats have Republican spouses.
What’s even more disturbing is that people in one party are prone to dehumanize people in the other party and question their patriotism. Here’s what one 68 year old gentleman attending a Trump rally in Latrobe, Pennsylvania, told a reporter from the Atlantic in early September:
Democrats have sealed their own fate. They’ve proven that they’re not true Americans. They’re not for this country and they’re not for our freedom. We’re just not going to take it anymore.
In a recent survey, a group of political scientists asked Democrats if they thought Republicans were less evolved than they were, and 77 percent said yes! And just as many Republicans were willing to say Democrats are less evolved.
That’s chilling, because we also know from social science that when voters are willing to dehumanize people from the other party, they’re more likely to tolerate or even support partisan violence.
The Voter Study Group at the Democracy Fund surveyed almost 6,000 Americans in late 2019. Among people who described themselves as Democratic or Republican partisans, one in five said if the other party won the 2020 presidential election, violence would be at least a little justified. One in 10 said there would be a lot or a great deal of justification for violence.
Now, there’s nothing wrong with being ready to resist an election outcome that you see as illegitimate. Far from it. The danger as I see it is that partisan feelings going into the election are already at a fever pitch. Nerves are raw after a summer of nonstop trauma and tension, from pandemic and its horrific death toll to the protests over the police killings of Daniel Prude and Breonna Taylor and George Floyd and so many others.
Don’t forget the catastrophic wildfires in the West, and ongoing disinformation campaigns on Facebook and other social media sites, and the crazy twists and turns of the presidential campaign itself.
On top of all that, there’s the fact that in America there are 120 guns for every 100 people. That’s far more per capita than any other country on Earth. And as if we couldn’t already kill each other many times over, there’s been a huge additional spike in gun purchases this year, by both conservatives and liberals.
And well, when you add it all up, it gets pretty difficult to ignore the possibility of violence. Miles Taylor, a former official at the Department of Homeland Security, told the Atlantic, “This is beyond a powder keg. This is the Titanic with powder kegs filled all the way to the hull.”
A lot of the guns flooding our nation are owned by members of paramilitary groups like Oath Keepers, the Three Percenters, the Proud Boys, and the Boogaloo movement. Some of these groups are made up of anti-government extremists and others are mainly white supremacists. But they all “want to tear the nation apart,” according to J.J. MacNab, an extremism researcher at George Washington University.
Here’s a snippet of some testimony MacNab gave in July to the House Homeland Security Subcommittee on Intelligence and Counterterrorism.
JJ MacNab: Like any large movement, this group goes through cycles, and in the months following the 2016 election alt-right and white supremacy groups experienced a meteoric rise and militant extremists either joined these movements or went relatively quiet. In general, they approve of the current administration and so their anti-government rage abated for a time. However, renewed conversations about gun control laws, stress from the covid-19 pandemic, the mainstreaming of deep state and anti-vaccine conspiracy theories, high unemployment rates, civil unrest in major U.S. cities, and the extreme divisiveness plaguing the upcoming election have triggered a recent rebirth in the militant groups…How they react to current events and to each other raises many red flags. For example, I am worried that any attempt to pass gun control legislation would trigger one or more significant violent events….. I am also concerned that the upcoming election will spark one or more violent events if the president loses his re-election bid. The risk that worries me most right now, though, I am concerned that there will be a shootout at one or more of the Black Lives Matter protests where too many guns at these events held by too many groups with conflicting goals.
Wade Roush: According to MacNab and other researchers, extremist groups often don’t have elaborate plans or strategies. They just have a vague goal of fomenting disorder, in the hope of setting off a chain reaction that could lead to a full-scale race war or a revolution against the US government.
But the fact that extremists don’t have a plan doesn’t stop conservative politicians or conservative media from exploiting their actions as part of a national scare campaign.
When a teenager from Illinois named Kyle Rittenhouse allegedly shot and killed two Black Lives Matter protesters in Kenosha, Wisconsin, in August, the right instantly elevated him to hero status. Rittenhouse’s own lawbreaking became part of their twisted argument that Democrats are promoting rioting and lawlessness. Speaking on Fox News, Trump adviser Kellyanne Conway made this strategy very clear.
Kellyanne Conway: The more chaos and anarchy and vandalism and violence reigns, the better it is for the very clear choice on who’s best on public safety and law and order.
Wade Roush: Now, as everyone knows at this point, the president himself has an odious wink-wink, nod-nod relationship with violent extremist groups. Reporters have given him numerous opportunities to denounce violent white supremacists, and he has declined. In the first presidential debate he did just the opposite, hinting that these groups should be ready to swing into action.
Donald Trump: [unintelligible crosstalk] Proud Boys? Stand back and stand by.
Wade Roush: Under what pretext would Trump want to call in these kinds of supporters? Well, that’s pretty clear. Thanks to the pandemic, Americans will vote by mail in record numbers. We know that more Democrats will vote by mail than Republicans, and we also know that it might take days or weeks to count all those ballots.
So Trump has spent months priming his supporters with the false idea that mail-in ballots are untrustworthy. In any scenario where the election is close enough for the mail-in ballots to matter, the president and his party operatives could try to cut short the vote counting, and he’s hoping his supporters will ride to his aid and add to the chaos and uncertainty.
But interestingly, Trump has been so good at signaling his intentions that groups supporting Democratic candidates have had plenty of time to plan a potential response.
Let’s hear from Sean Eldridge again. He’s the founder of an anti-Trump nonprofit called Stand Up America. That group has joined up with the progressive group Indivisible to form an effort called Protect The Results.
Sean Eldridge: I think what's important to keep in mind is that in any of the scary scenarios and the ways in which Trump might try to undermine the election, the role of mass mobilization is really key. The importance of people taking to the streets, making their voice heard, I think could be incredibly important in shaping public narrative in that moment. … So, you know, one scenario that I think is top of mind for for a lot of people right now is what could happen on election night and the possibility that Trump would try to prematurely declare victory before millions and millions of votes would be counted. As many of your listeners might know, vote by mail has existed for decades and decades in the United States of America. And it's proven to be a safe and secure way for folks to cast their ballot. But this year, we're going to see a much larger influx of voters using vote by mail. And so there's this one scenario that seems possible where there could be a Red Mirage, as it's been called by some, where before millions of absentee ballots are counted, it could look like Trump is ahead on election the night before we know where those millions of the rest of the ballots go. And in that kind of scenario, if Trump were to say "I won" when we don't in fact know who has won in a number of key states, then I think it would be really important for there to be mass mobilization and for there to be pressure on state election officials to ignore any corrupt influence from Trump, to count every single vote to move forward with a process, even if it takes days, even if it takes weeks to make sure that every single vote is safely counted…So we need to be ready at every step along the way and in many different scenarios.
Wade Roush: Ok, let's hypothetically imagine a scenario where it is necessary for people to take to the streets. I want to ask you: what are the conversations like behind the scenes about how to keep people safe in those circumstances and how to avoid falling down a slippery slope toward, well, toward violent conflict, given that President Trump and a lot of his supporters have expressed a willingness to bring violence into the picture?
Sean Eldridge: Yeah, well. We are certainly committed to non-violence and at Protect The Results, we are planning non-violent mobilization if needed across the country. You know, I am concerned about violence. I'm concerned about violence from this White House. Right. I mean, we have we have seen this White House gas peaceful protests to make the way for Trump to have a photo op outside the White House. We have seen Trump threatened to mobilize the United States military against the American people. So I think there's reason to be concerned. I believe if you look at the history of of movements in the United States of America and across the world, nonviolent protests and actions and mobilization have a real impact. And there we live in a democracy that is the way to make change, right? The most important thing to do is cast your ballot, that is your voice, and then also to mobilize and protest to protect our democracy. So we are we are focused on nonviolent mobilization, but certainly can't control the other side and recognize both the violent rhetoric we've seen from the White House and actual violence we've seen and things like gassing peaceful protests. But our goal is to the best of our ability, to equip activists and protest leaders with resources to de-escalate and to try to mobilize nonviolently and as peacefully as we can.
Wade Roush: Eldridge told me that Protect The Results has signed up more than 1,500 veteran activists across the country to organize demonstrations after the election if needed. The theory behind the planning is that large and sustained protests and other tactics would put pressure on decision makers to decide how far they really want to go to enable a Trump victory.
Sean Eldridge: Trump might be screaming from the rafters and saying that he won, even if he hasn't. But everyone else from Mitch McConnell on down all the way down to state legislatures and state and local election officials will have to decide whether or not they would go along with Trump in that kind of scenario. And I think they will be looking around and reading the room, so to speak, and reading the nation and see how the American people respond. And even certainly somebody like Mitch McConnell could, even though I have very little faith in him and his record of protecting our democracy, we did see him say when Trump made comments about changing Election Day, which is not something he has the power to do. We saw Mitch McConnell say, ‘That's not going to happen. The election is moving forward.’ So I do I do think the power of Americans taking to the streets, potentially staying in the streets and if needed, making phone calls or other grassroots advocacy actions to state local election officials, I think it matters. I think it can make a difference all the way up to the Supreme Court where no one lives in a vacuum. And it's really important that every decision maker see it as the American people respond.
Wade Roush: After talking with Eldridge, I wanted to learn more about how we can find a peaceful way through such a combustible situation. And I was curious about whether the kinds of techniques Eldridge outlines have proven effective in past conflicts. So I reached out to Erica Chenoweth. They’re a political scientist at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government and they’re best known for their work on civil resistance movements.
Wade Roush: So you've done a lot of work comparing the effectiveness of nonviolent mass mobilization campaigns around the world over the past century or more to the effectiveness of campaigns that do involve violence. I know that’s a lifetime of work for you, but I want to aks you to sum it up. So what's what's your high level takeaway from that research?
Erica Chenoweth: The main takeaway is that among revolutionary campaigns, which are those that are trying to either overthrow an incumbent government or create an independent territory, nonviolent campaigns were about twice as likely to succeed than their armed counterparts. And when I talk about nonviolent campaigns, what I mean is a coordinated series of methods where unarmed civilians are using protest strikes, boycotts and lots of different forms of non-cooperation in order to achieve this outcome. And when I talk about success, what I mean is basically that they were able to achieve either the removal of the incumbent national leader within a year of the peak of the campaign and that they had a decisive effect on that outcome.
Wade Roush: Ok, I'm curious about how transferable you think those findings are to other kinds of situations. So those are maximalist kinds of conflicts that you're talking about, where the outcome would be a transfer of territory or the overthrow of a government. But I'm curious, for obvious reasons right now, about situations where maybe, for example, activists are trying to assure a fair election outcome or a smooth transition of power. So in those kinds of situations, is there evidence that there are tactics for mass nonviolent civil resistance that actually work?
Erica Chenoweth: Yeah, that's a great question. George Lakey has recently undertaken a series of studies to try to understand what happens when people are rising up in so-called social defense, which is trying to prevent against a coup or a power grab. And he often refers to basically four keys that prevent this from happening. The first is that there is large scale mobilization by the population. And we do know from research that the only way to get large scale mobilization genuinely is usually through some kind of commitment to nonviolent action, because people just mobilize in much smaller numbers if the campaign is violent. The second key is being able to create shifts in the loyalties of of the pillars of support or basically getting new alliances. And so in this case, it looks like getting politicians to publicly commit to counting every vote or getting police to commit to protect peaceful protesters or those calling for democratic processes to be followed, etc. And then in terms of the third key, I think he argues that discipline is very important, meaning that even if repression escalates, that the movement doesn't succumb to kind of chaos or demobilize. And then the final one is refusing to cooperate with those who are engaging in unlawful actions. So, in other words, not just street demonstrations, but a mass withdrawal of cooperation.
Wade Roush: Ok, you were kind enough to to kind of give me a sneak peek of your upcoming book that's all about civil resistance and how it works. And there's a chapter of the book, Chapter 4, where you deal with this question about how civil resistance campaigns deal with violence. We're talking about this issue because it feels like there is the prospect of post-election violence here in the US. And while it's hard to imagine that devolving into a full sort of Tiananmen Square style scenario where the government is crushing a rebellion, it does feel more likely that there could be a series of conflicts with, say, armed paramilitaries who are perhaps acting with the implicit, if not the explicit approval of government or at least of the Trump campaign. How do these movements prepare to deal with this kind of violence?
Erica Chenoweth: That's a great question. And there are lots of things that historically movements have done to navigate this. The first is many key organizers or community leaders will train in conflict de-escalation methods so that they know that when they are engaging publicly in some kind of manifest public action or direct action, that they feel personally equipped with skills of de-escalation.
Erica Chenoweth: The second thing is that often campaigns that are well organized well when when things become very risky, for example, in the streets, they will shift to methods of stay-in-home and non-cooperation strikes paired with stay at home, and they'll continue their protest from home if they have a home and if they don't go find a way to find refuge in other public spaces that are open. So there are lots of different techniques of kind of maneuvering in the context of the repeated violence.
Erica Chenoweth: And a lot of this is situational awareness. It's preparing people to understand that violence is a possibility and that if a protest is is taking place, then here are the things to do in the event that it breaks out. And there are lots of different training manuals like Training for Change has a handbook on nonviolent campaigns. There are websites like Beautiful Trouble and websites maintained by groups like the Blackout Collective that talk about tactical and political ways of securing resilience for a community and sort of preparing for and then responding to violence should it break out.
Wade Roush: Right. OK, one last question for you. So you help to edit a website called Political Violence at a Glance. You have an article on political violence at a glance called Preparing for a November Surprise. And in that piece, you say that if mass violence erupts after the election, the outcome could be a civil war. So I wanted to ask you about that term and ask you what you think civil war really looks like today, because I think there's a risk of maybe sliding into that situation without recognizing it. Especially here in the US, where when you say the word civil war, people have this picture in their mind that obviously is about the secessionist movement of the 1860s with rival geographic blocs and these well-funded armies and well-organized armies. But that's not really what you're talking about, right?
Erica Chenoweth: Well, first, I'll just say that I think it is fairly dangerous to raise false alarms or even exaggerate the risk of civil war in this country, because a lot of times the ways that these things start is people talking themselves into them by convincing themselves that they're inevitable. So there's nothing inevitable about even low scale, low intensity conflict in the United States. Those who claim inevitability of this are totally misguided and probably have some pretty cynical agendas behind that. And so I just want to make clear that I'm not a person that thinks that this is inevitable. And I do think that there are many different things that we in our communities at the state and national level can do to prevent violence from escalating any further than it already has.
Erica Chenoweth: That said, I think that that basically we do have, you know, a situation where... The scholarly sense anyway, there are sort of two different categories of civil war there, conventional civil wars and an unconventional civil wars. And conventional civil wars are those where you do have basically two two armies that are warring against one another using similar techniques, methods and materials. And so the US Civil War is arguably more of a conventional civil war because you had these these secessionist armies with the same types of weapons, at least that the North had. And in contemporary settings, but also in some historical settings, we have unconventional civil wars, which are where there's kind of an asymmetry in terms of the that capacities of the of the of the two different sides or there multiple sides of the conflict? So say the state has access to more conventional military materiel and weapons and training, and then opponents of the state might have more kind of guerrilla operations or that sort of thing.
Erica Chenoweth: There is also the category of political violence called communal violence, which is basically where you have different factions that aren't the state. Some may be roughly aligned with the state, but others they are actually totally autonomous. And in that context, it's usually the state does kind of pick a side. But it's not necessarily engaging directly in the operations and instead it's sort of paramilitaries versus communities…I don't want to say which scenario I think is most likely, because, like I said, I don't think it's helpful, in fact, to speculate, lest people start to talk themselves into a certain scenario at this point. But I, I do think that that the violence that I'm most worried about in the United States right now is as violence by those that are policing protests and those that are actively preparing for and talking themselves into a civil war. There's an important article that came out in the, I think, The Atlantic today about just how sophisticated and organized far right groups are right now and how kind of integrated they are with this kind of narrative about the inevitability of the coming civil war and sort of waiting for the penny to drop on that. And I think that that actually is is where we need to be focusing a lot of significant containment and de-escalation efforts as a country.
Wade Roush: That Atlantic article Chenoweth mentioned was about the Oath Keepers. The founder of that group, Stewart Rhodes, is indeed one of those people JJ MacNab described who are looking for opportunities to spark violent unrest. Rhodes has said in public that Black Lives Matter protestors are insurrectionists, and that “we have to suppress that insurrection. Eventually they’re going to be using IEDs. Us old vets and younger ones are going to end up having to kill these young kids.”
Rhetoric like that has raised the political temperature in this country to a level that feels unprecedented. But maybe it only feels that way because we’ve forgotten our own history. The actual Civil War has passed out of living memory and most people who are alive today don’t have direct experience of periods like the Depression or the civil rights movement of the 1960s.
To bring back some of that context I called up a historian named Robert McElvaine. He teaches at Millsaps College in Jackson, Mississippi, and he’s the author of one of the best-known single-volume histories of the Great Depression.
Wade Roush: Professor Robert McElvaine, thank you for joining me on Soonish.
Robert McElvaine: Happy to be with you.
Wade Roush: I want to ask you do a little comparative history here. So obviously, the 1930s were a time of great suffering, much greater suffering than we have any comprehension of right now, I think, and a lot of political unrest and a lot of political disunion and disagreement, I think. And so it was a time when a lot of people were being drawn to alternative political views, such as the populism of a Father Coughlin and communism and the attractions of what was going on in Soviet Russia and even fascism to some extent. And it's not hard to imagine how, like with a good firm push, democracy could have unraveled in the United States in the 30s. And it feels like ultimately it took World War Two to bring the nation back together…So I wonder how you would compare the level of division and polarization and disunion we're experiencing right now to what was going on in the 30s.
Robert McElvaine: I think it's much worse now. It certainly had the potential. You know, Sinclair Lewis wrote, I think it was in 1935, “It Can't Happen Here.” But the whole point of that was it can happen here. And the prospect of falling into a dictatorship of democracy being overturned in the United States was there. If you had to if I had to give a single reason why that didn't come close to happening, it would be Roosevelt. Roosevelt was able, although he was never willing to embrace Keynesian economics and really large scale deficit spending enough to actually get the economy going again, he was willing to go into deficit spending enough to ease the problems to keep people from starving…But he also was able to communicate with people, the fireside chats and everything in the way that people felt like he was talking directly to them, that he understood their problems. He was on their side. … So Roosevelt had all sorts of things wrong with him, but he put a very large role in saving both democracy and a modified capitalism.
Wade Roush: So do you see any one or anything that could bring us back together, maybe the way FDR kept us together in the 30s?
Robert McElvaine: I'm afraid I have to say no. I had some notion that the pandemic might do that… I foolishly, it turns out, thought that that might lead people to say we're all in the same boat. But it turns out that the division, particularly in how people get their information in this country, is just so deep that even the pandemic is seen as a red-blue issue and mask wearing in this. It is it fake? Is it really making it all up? And, you know, it's just it is very hard to see how anybody can overcome that, at least in the short run.
Wade Roush: So back in April of 2011, to help mark the one hundred and fifty eighth anniversary of the Battle of Fort Sumter and the outbreak of the Civil War, you wrote a piece in Politico where you observed that Americans in 2011 seemed just as bitterly divided as Americans had been in 1861. So I wondered, what made you feel that way?
Robert McElvaine: Well, obviously, I was wrong as far as that being as divided as they could get, we could get, because we've gotten a lot more now…. I think some people have largely correctly traced it back to Newt Gingrich in the 90s, deciding that the Republicans shouldn't cooperate at all and the growing division politically in the country. In some ways, with the election of Barack Obama, it seemed like that sort of thing was in the past. But we can now see even more clearly than we could in 2011 that one of the effects of that was just really scaring the people who have nothing going for them other than "We are white. And there's a floor below which we can't fall." And they now saw the future of the country going in that direction and were more and more outraged by it. And that became kind of the increasingly dry stuff that I guess in Trump's terms was not being raked up enough from the forest floors and could catch fire very easily, as it did in 2016.
Wade Roush: I do feel like the rhetoric building up around the election could become a trigger for violence on or after Election Day….It just feels like we're in a situation analogous to 1861 where…whichever side wins in this election, the losing side is going to find the outcome unacceptable. I just wonder whether any of that accords with what you're seeing. Do you feel like we're on the edge of of something rather unprecedented in our lifetimes?
Robert McElvaine: I wish I could say no, but I very much do think that that's where we are. I think we need to be careful, while neither side seems willing to accept the other side winning, to avoid a sort of moral equivalence, because the one side has just openly, as Trump has done recently said, "Well we're just going to throw away ballots. If I win the election, then it's OK. If I don't, it's not and I'm not leaving." … he talks about rioting in the streets and we have to have law and order and everything. But he's the one encouraging rioting in the streets. He's the one who's telling his supporters to take up arms, even to go to the polls on Election Day and intimidate minority people and try to stop people from voting. He's gone so far as to say that "We have the police and the military and the motorcycle gangs on our side. You know, we have the armed people on our side." And so it's very clear that if he loses—and the way things look now, unless they can really suppress the vote, if you have a fair count in the vote, he's going to lose, and probably by a fairly substantial margin—at that point—and the margin will matter; if it's really big, it'll be more difficult to do that—but his people are just going to believe, because he keeps driving home, ‘It's fake, it's fake, they're stealing the election,’ that no matter how big the margin is, they will think that he lost unfairly, that it was stolen from him. And it's hard to see how some substantial number of them aren't going out with their semi-automatic weapons in the streets. So, I am a congenital optimist, but I'm not too optimistic on that point.
Wade Roush: Okay. Deep breath. Look, I know how scary this all sounds. I think we need to takes Trump’s threats seriously. But I also don’t want to fall into the trap Erica Chenoweth described of raising a false alarm or exaggerating the risk of civil war. So let’s do a bit of de-escalation right now.
Peaceful conflict and disagreement are the life’s blood of a free country, and they’re nothing to be afraid of. The problem starts when disagreement corrodes into cynicism and despair.
So that’s why it’s important to keep to the high road. Political violence is not a sign of the strength of the people who deal it out. It’s an admission of their weakness. And we know from history that nonviolent approaches to conflict are not only safer than violence; they’re also more effective.
When I was speaking with Robert McElvaine he described the civil rights movement of the 1960s as a nonviolent civil war. And what he meant was that protesters captured the moral high ground and ultimately won huge political victories by responding to violence with nonviolent forms of civil resistance.
So, going into this fall and winter, it’s going to be important for progressive and pro-democracy movements to keep things peaceful, just as they’ve already been doing for the most part in the nationwide protests against police brutality.
Erica Chenoweth points out that it’s almost inevitable for social change movements to encounter repression. But if they respond with violence themselves, they forfeit much of their own power.
And there are plenty of ways to ensure that nonviolent mobilizations succeed. One is to make them very large. Chenoweth has found in her comparisons across time and across many countries that civil resistance campaigns succeed when they can get at least 3.5 percent of the population involved.
Here in the United States that translates into about 12 million people. For comparison, that’s two to three times the size of the Women’s March in 2017, which was the largest single-day protest in American history. 12 million sounds like a lot, but in a scenario where Trump is attempting a coup, it’s not impossible to imagine a million people gathering to oppose him in each of the country’s 12 largest cities to oppose him.
But numbers alone aren’t enough. Mobilizations also need to be sustained. They need the kind of preparation and logistical support that would allow them to continue for weeks or months if necessary.
Chenoweth and other researchers say it also helps when these movements build alliances across many different groups and win the support of elites, which could include people like governors, mayors, national guard commanders, and police chiefs.
And finally, protestors can’t just protest. They may need to use a bunch of different methods, from lawsuits and litigation to work slowdowns or general strikes.
One completely safe way to engage in civil resistance is simply to stay inside at home, do no work, and buy nothing. It’s called economic non-cooperation. Staying at home does require some advance stockpiling of food and supplies. But it can be very effective. If you think about it, CEOs and bankers and Wall Street types and their allies in Congress might be far less likely to allow Trump to cling to power if the economy were collapsing beneath their feet.
There’s a great website about all this stuff called WagingNonviolence.org. And here’s part of an essay they published by George Lakey, the nonviolence researcher Chenoweth mentioned earlier:
The choice is in our hands: We can choose direct action tactics that strongly contrast with Trump’s likely call for armed members of his base to rise up to defend him. Through our own behavior we can take the moral high ground. Would-be dictators hate this. That’s why Trump tried to minimize the difference between nonviolent demonstrators at Charlottesville and violent white supremacists. “Fine people on both sides,” he said. Authoritarians fear the increased power that people have when they choose nonviolence.
Look, if Trump wins reelection fair and square, then fine. We’ve already survived four years of chaos, cruelty, and decline. We can figure out how to survive another four.
But if he tries to steal the election, I think he’ll find people rising up against him in unprecedented numbers. Who knows how that would turn out, but at least Americans would rediscover their voices.
You’ve heard the famous Margaret Mead quote: “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world: indeed, it's the only thing that ever has.”
Well, we’re not talking about a small group of citizens here. At least half of the country sees Trump for what he really is: a con man who cares nothing about democracy and craves only fame and power. And together they can take it away from him.
[Musical interlude]
Wade Roush: That’s it for Part 1. This is a special two-part episode of Soonish, and I hope you’ll go on and listen to Part 2, which is all about the world after the election, and what it would take to design a better America where we never have another president like Trump or another year like 2020. I’ll be publishing Part 2 on October 12th.
Soonish is written and produced by me, Wade Roush. Our theme music is by Graham Gordon Ramsay. All additional music in this episode is from Titlecard Music and Sound in Boston.
You can follow Soonish on Twitter at soonishpodcast. At our website, soonishpodcast.org, you can find the show notes and a transcript for this episode.
As a bonus I’ve also put together a feature on the website called the Soonish Save-the-Future Kit. It’s a playlist of all our political-futurism episodes along with a collection of resources that can help you be a more informed and prepared citizen as we enter this perilous election season. You can find all that right on the front page at soonishpodcast.org.
And I’ll be publishing The Great American Reckoning in essay form on Medium with lots of links out to my sources and the literature on elections and political polarization, so please go look for that too.
You might have noticed quite a few callouts to the Atlantic magazine in this episode. That’s because their coverage of the crisis of our democracy has been exemplary. And it’s all collected in a new book called The American Crisis: When Went Wrong, How We Recover. I totally recommend it.
Soonish is an independent podcast supported in part by you, the listeners. If you’d like to contribute, please go to Patreon.com/soonish and check out the cool thank-you rewards we offer at every level. Listener support is the rocket fuel that keeps this ship going!
Soonish is one of 10 indie podcasts that banded together over the last three years to form the Hub & Spoke audio collective. And this week I want to recommend the Hub & Spoke show Rumble Strip from Vermont-based producer Erica Heilman. While the rest of us are prattling on about politics, Erica is keeping it real and talking about stuff that touches people’s actual lives, like compost.
In her September 2020 episode she talks with Karl Hammer, who runs a composting business in East Montpelier, Vermont, that turns restaurant scraps and into fertilizer…and other things.
Erica Heilman: Twice a week, Josh the teamster takes the donkeys into town for buckets of food scraps, and these food scraps from town feed Karl’s chickens, and the chicken poop improves his compost and then the eggs from the chickens go back down the hill to the store in town.
Wade Roush: It’s the circle of life, Vermont style. You can find the episode “Karl Hammer and the Donkey” and the entire run of Rumble Strip at rumblestripvermont.com. And you can check out all the other Hub & Spoke shows at hubspokeaudio.org.
That’s it for this episode. Thanks for listening and please come back for Part 2…soonish.
