Dissent, Organizing, and Direct Action in Modern American Politics
BY CHARLES EUCHNER
Nonviolent movement building is one of the greatest of 20th-century inventions, a way for the powerless to stand up to the powerful. But we don’t study it systematically—there’s no West Point for activists. That makes a book like this, rich in detail and history, tremendously useful to everyone trying to make change happen.
—Bill McKibben, founder of climate crisis group 350.org and author of The End of Nature
Wow! It’s superb! Timely, readable, clear, extensive, a mix of theory and wonderfully textured examples and case studies. Reading through it, I realized that in my neck of the woods, academic political theory, there is a dearth of literature on activism as such, and certain no comprehensive field guide. Oh, there have been some abstruse theoretical renderings, but nothing with a go-to, can-do comportment that doesn’t compromise one’s intellectual chops … I don’t think they make the transition from theory to action in the way that you have.
—John Seery, professor of political science at Pomona College and author of Political Theory for Mortals
“I can’t breathe!”
Pinned on the pavement with a police officer’s knee, for more than eight minutes, a Minneapolis man named George Floyd cried out for mercy. Two officers watched as Derek Chauvin used his knee to press Floyd’s neck to the ground on May 29, 2020. Finally, Floyd stopped breathing.
The George Floyd tragedy began when a shopkeeper called 911 to report that Floyd had used a fake $20 bill to pay for a purchase. When police approached his car, Floyd “appeared to be under the influence” and he “physically resisted” arrest, according to police. When Floyd was handcuffed and sat on the ground, police later said, he “appeared to be suffering medical distress.” A bystander recorded the encounter using Facebook Live.
Chauvin arrived on the scene and, within minutes, pulled Floyd out of the car and pinned him to the ground with his knee. “I can’t breathe,” Floyd said. “Please!” A bystander pleaded with police: “You got him down—let him breathe!” Others begged police to let up on Floyd. When Floyd became silent and motionless, the officer kept his knee on his neck until emergency medical workers arrived. Floyd was pronounced dead at the hospital.
When the Facebook video went viral, thousands gathered to create a makeshift memorial and to protest and comfort each other. They marched to the precinct station where the officers were said to work. After most of the crowd dispersed, a small group stayed behind and spray-painted the building, threw rocks and bottles, broke windows, and damaged a squad car. When demonstrators tried to stop the vandals, police fired rubber bullets and threw tear gas.
The next several days set a pattern. Peaceful daytime protests were followed by nighttime rioting, looting, and fires. The protest expanded and became more violent as counter-protesters, including white supremacists, got involved. Days of protests and riots resulted in two deaths, 604 arrests and more than $500 million in damage. It was the deadliest and costliest urban uprising since the Rodney King riots in Los Angeles in 1991.
Angered and alarmed that yet another black man had been killed by police—at the time of Floyd’s death, 1,100 people were killed annually by police in the United States—protests spread across the country under the banner “Black Lives Matter.” On June 6, a half million people protested in 550 communities across the U.S. Protests shut down Seattle, Brooklyn, Los Angeles, and Chicago. In a “Strike for Black Lives,” workers across the U.S. walked off the job for eight minutes on July 20 to commemorate George Floyd’s death. The protests continued throughout the summer. President Donald Trump issued a series of incendiary statements. On Twitter, he posted. “When the looting starts, the shooting starts.” He regularly attacked city officials where protests took place, threatening to send federal troops to “restore order.”
By the end of the summer, the BLM protests had become the biggest outpouring of protest in American history. Experts on crowds report that between 15 and 26 million Americans took part in George Floyd protests in 2020—making them the biggest demonstrations in history. “Really, it’s hard to overstate the scale of this movement,” said Deva Woodly of the New School for Social Research. “If we added up all those protests during [the civil rights movement], we’re talking about hundreds of thousands of people, but not millions.”
The BLM protests dramatized not just racism but also a broader crisis of inequality. Despite the successes of the civil rights movement and the growth of a black middle class, blacks in twenty-first-century America are subjected to everyday acts of racism and discrimination, poorer schools and job discrimination, unaffordable housing and environmental racism.
For the first time in modern history, the protests attracted huge numbers of whites and other minorities. Blacks were not fighting for themselves alone. They had support, particularly from young people and members of the “resistance” to Trump’s regime that began with the Women’s March of January 2017.
History will reveal the true measure of the BLM protests of 2020. The early tally shows a raft of reform, the election of President Joseph Biden, a spate of state and local reforms, and a stronger and more cohesive coalition of minorities and white progressives. When a jury convicted Derek Chauvin of second-degree murder in April 2021, supporters celebrated. But at the same time, a new wave of police brutality unfolded across the U.S. Clearly, real reform required more than a global audience.
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Looking back, did the BLM protests make any difference? Did they transform policing, spur changes in race relations, or spur a new age of grassroots activism?
Does activism make any difference? Can it empower Americans to force their rulers to address the issues that were tearing the nation apart?
To understand that issue requires more than an in-depth analysis of BLM, the Women’s March, Trumpism, Occupy, or a resurgent labor movement. It requires understanding the many dimensions of activism—when it happens, how it is organized, why people join, what strategies they choose, what tactics they deploy, how lawmakers and public opinion respond, and what kinds of backlash it produces.
Amazingly, no single book provides a complete overview of all of the key challenges that activists and organizers need to understand this extraordinary form of politics. How can activists understand what they need to do to succeed? And what do scholars, journalists, political actors, and others need to understand activism?
That is why Charles Euchner, author of the acclaimed Nobody Turn Me Around: A People’s History of the 1963 March on Washington (Beacon Press), has produced this comprehensive overview of the history and theory of activism. Inspired by the bestselling works of Robert Greene—e.g., The 48 Laws of Power, The 33 Strategies of War, and The Laws of Human Nature—Euchner distills the vast literature of activism in America to 15 rules of activism. These laws apply to a wide range of causes, from civil rights to gay rights, from labor rights to environmentalism, from feminism to the peace movement.
The book has a simple format. After a prologue, which explores a mind experiment—What would America look like today without its rich tradition of protest and activism?—the book uses a simple but powerful format to describe the 15 rules of activism:
- Precis: Each chapter opens with a short description of the rule and its logic. This preview frames the whole discussion.
- Case studies: One to three brief case studies illustrate each rule. Case studies in this book include the crusades for civil rights, feminism, gay rights; Greenpeace and radical movements on the climate crisis; the Seattle campaign against globalism and radical campaigns against the global climate crisis; the Seabrook occupation and toxic wastes at Love Canal; the movements against wars in Vietnam, Central America, and Iraq; community organizing from Baltimore to Los Angeles; labor movements including Jobs for janitors and the United Farm Workers; the underground campaigns of the Sanctuary movement and AIDS buyers clubs; and much more.
- Analysis: Each case study is followed by a discussion of the concepts and how those concepts might be applied to other issues and activist movements. These principles provide a lively Gladwell-style exploration of concepts from coercion to consent, from the free rider problem to the Iron Law of Oligarchy, from nonviolence to direct action, from micropower to organizational dynamics to leadership styles, and much more. Rather than getting caught in a web of academic debates, this book uses the best thinking on activism and politics to draw out the meaning of actual events and controversies.
- Variations on a theme: To fill out the discussion, the chapter provides further discussion of key concepts, cases, and evidence.
In an afterword, Euchner describes the “activist’s code”—a clear set of values, articulated by the best activists of modern times, to create positive change rather than just disruption.