IIt was 70 years ago when four African Americans sat in the fifth row of a bus in Montgomery. Since a white man was to stand at the front, the driver asked all four to get up and move to the back of the bus. Three did; Nobody did – the rest is history. Or so many American children might think when they read the story of Rosa Parks for the first time in school.
It is a story of courage, but, lest anyone forget, it is also a story of breaking the law. And the question for us today is what civil disobedience means in an era when the federal government is signaling its readiness to punish even perfectly legal dissent.
Before getting into any debate about how defiance might ultimately strengthen democracy, it is worth reminding ourselves that Parks’s textbook version is generally not the whole story. She wasn’t just a tired seamstress who, after a long day at work, spontaneously decided to protest against injustice. Rather, Parks had been a member of the NAACP in Montgomery since 1943; She led the youth organization, and she was investigating the rape of African American women in Alabama.
What Obama once claimed — “that any of us ordinary people, without office or money or title or fame, can somehow expose the flaws in this nation, and come together, and challenge the status quo, and decide that it is in our power to remake this country we love until it more closely aligns with our highest deals” — is true, but that’s not the whole truth: Parks had no position or wealth, but he had many fellow workers and friends.
Resistance is a matter of coordination, and having an effective organization behind you helps coordination. The bus boycott – which lasted 381 days – relied on organizers quickly distributing leaflets in the black community and volunteers driving “private taxis” (in December 1956 the US Supreme Court had ruled segregated buses unconstitutional). Parks said on the record: “I was the only one tired, tired of giving up.” Others were also tired of it, but they had the energy and courage to organize.
What political theorist Brandon Terry has called “the binding context of the civil rights movement in our culture” and, in particular, “the apparent consensus of civil rights celebrations” ignores that nonviolent protest against injustice was hardly popular among whites across the country. This is something that Trump’s court historians, starting with the ill-fated 1776 commission, omit from their narratives; They make it seem as if the entire country loved coming together around the idea of “color-blindness” in the 1960s – and it was the only crazy leftist proponents of identity politics who undermined that happy consensus.
Civil disobedience is a “public, non-violent, conscientious yet political act”, the most influential definition of which was put forward by John Rawls, a great figure in late 20th century political philosophy. There are several reasons to think that Rawls’s approach has become objectively more difficult to apply today. Rawls claimed that breaking the law to point out injustice could persuade the majority to bring about change. But he was relying on a media system that allowed the majority to see injustice – think of the brutal attacks by policemen (and their dogs) on civil rights protesters in Birmingham. While information is more accessible today – and Black Lives Matter relies primarily on acts of police brutality going viral – our media landscape is also much more fragmented, with far too many on the right wing making sure that events are re-presented in what appears to be a polite way of looking at them: ensuring that their meaning is distorted.
Rawls also relied on the notion that, in an “approximately just” society, disobedience should involve being willing to accept punishment – as a demonstration of one’s overall “loyalty” to the law (which would make it harder to characterize one’s conduct as anarchism or worse). Of course, a common question is whether one considers America to be “approximately fair”; But, in particular, there is a clear trend by the Trump administration to weaken the rule of law.
The Attorney General appears to have given up any independence from the executive to follow Trump’s orders to retaliate against his perceived enemies. As members of the Justice Department have pointed out, the idea is no longer that cases are brought after fact-finding; Rather, cases are fabricated and then the race is on to find facts that fit. There have been vigorous protests by some judges; But the structural damage and corruption is already too great.
Rawls considered civil disobedience a form of “public speech”. It is not clear whether that speech will be heard or not. Even if so, one may doubt whether it will be given a good-faith hearing by the authorities. The philosopher held that “in a state of close justice, retaliatory repression of legitimate dissent is impossible”. Today, both legitimate and legal dissent is already being targeted by Trumpists and the President himself (most recently threatening to move against citizens who, in his view, are disturbing “domestic tranquility”). Anyone considering civil disobedience must answer those challenges, which, for all the injustices of the South, the “Mother of the Civil Rights Movement” did not face in quite the same way.
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