During a whole semester reading and debating Martin Luther King Jr, I think my students and I built a richer understanding of nonviolence as a political tradition and alternative. Several students noted that they had moved from thinking of nonviolence as a restriction or limitation (i.e., you must exclude violent means) to a powerful approach of its own.

The Case for Nonviolence

1. It tends to work. Erica Chenoweth and Maria J. Stephan find that nonviolence has a higher rate of success than violent methods, at least in their sample of large movements aimed at major political change. (See Why Civil Resistance Works.)

One reason is that nonviolence actually draws larger and more diverse participants, and big and diverse movements are more likely to win. It is true that some people feel a need to employ violent means, but they tend to be tilted toward young men. Nonviolence broadens the base of a movement. I also think that nonviolent movements are more favorable to intense internal debate and discussion, and that is useful for success. (See the value of diversity and discussion within social movements.)

It is worth noting, however, that the success-rate of nonviolent social movements has fallen during the 2000s. I interpret both nonviolence and state repression as general approaches that evolve over time as their practitioners innovate and learn. I think that nonviolent strategies improved dramatically from 1955-1989 while autocrats stagnated, but the autocrats are learning fast. (See why autocrats are winning (right now).)

2. It improves the odds that the resulting system will be democratic.

This is another empirical finding from Chenoweth and Stephan. One reason is that nonviolence allows a negotiated settlement and the peaceful exit of the incumbents. Autocrats have reason to fear violent movements and may respond by fighting almost to the death. They are more likely to settle with a movement that demonstrates nonviolence.

Relatedly, nonviolence prevents a cycle of escalating violence that makes democracy harder to attain. And it compels a movement to use relatively democratic methods for making decisions internally, because the leaders cannot violently compel their own people. That prepares the movement to govern democratically if it wins. And it gives the participants the specific skills and values that will be most useful to them in democratic governance.

3. It is a variety of self-limitation, and self-limitation is valuable

Movements face twin risks: heating up too much (until they cannot sustain the intensity), or else dwindling away. It’s important to keep the intensity within bounds. One way to do that is to establish explicit or implicit norms of behavior. Nonviolence is not the only norm that works to regulate intensity. In the Intifada, the rule was to use rocks, not guns or bombs. From a pragmatic perspective, that worked–the effort persisted for two years. However, nonviolence has the advantage of being an intuitive, bright line that people understand, even under duress.

4. It brings a particular kind of dignity, self-respect or efficacy to the participants

Martin Luther King Jr. described his goal as “seeking to instill in my people a sense of dignity and self-respect.” He recalls that African American Montgomerians “who had previously trembled before the law were now proud to be arrested for the cause of freedom. … They looked the solicitor and the judge in the eye with a courage and dignity for which there was no answer.”

It is possible that nonviolence is especially likely to enhance self-respect, because nonviolent movements are self-reliant. They don’t depend on guns, which are impersonal tools (and are often supplied by outsiders of some kind). The accomplishments of a nonviolent movement are theirs alone.

4. It is compatible with uncertainty about one’s goals and strategies.

Gandhi emphasizes this point. If you do not know (for sure) what your ultimate objective should be, and you are not certain about the best path forward, you should prefer nonviolence. Violence is irrevocable and closes options. (see Gandhi on the primacy of means over ends.) As King says, nonviolence permits learning, including learning from the other side: “Here is the true meaning and value of compassion and nonviolence, when it helps us to see the enemy’s point of view, to hear his questions, to know his assessment of ourselves.”

I recently found a very nice statement of a similar idea at the very end of The Combahee River Collective Statement (1977) which is a seminal text for today’s social movements:

In the practice of our politics we do not believe that the end always justifies the means. Many reactionary and destructive acts have been done in the name of achieving “correct” political goals. As feminists we do not want to mess over people in the name of politics. We believe in collective process and a nonhierarchical distribution of power within our own group and in our vision of a revolutionary society. We are committed to a continual examination of our politics as they develop through criticism and self-criticism as an essential aspect of our practice.

4. It might be particularly relevant to a dispersed minority group that confronts a basically stable regime.

King depicted violence as futile in a situation like the USA in his time:

When one tries to pin down advocates of violence as to what acts would be effective, the answers are blatantly illogical. Sometimes they talk of overthrowing racist state and local governments. They fail to see that no internal revolution has ever succeeded in overthrowing a government by violence unless the government had already lost the allegiance and effective control of its armed forces. Anyone in his right mind knows that this will not happen in the United States. In a violent racial situation, the power structure has the local police, the state troopers, the national guard and finally the army to call on, all of which are predominantly white.

King thought that nonviolence looked promising in comparison.

4. It is compatible with ethical scruples, including the principle that you should not kill.

Maybe sometimes we do have to kill. I don’t see how Auschwitz could have been closed without killing the German soldiers posted to the beaches of Normandy (and many, many more). However, if nonviolence has at least as good a chance of succeeding as violence does, then surely, it is better not to kill.

II. The Case Against?

1. It doesn’t work all the time.

(Would it have ended slavery or defeated Nazism?)

2. It does not satisfy all kinds of people

Maybe more people will participate in a nonviolent social movement than an armed insurrection, but what about the people who feel compelled to arms? Don’t they need some kind of outlet?

3. It demands sacrifice–up to and including death–from the people who should be least obliged to sacrifice, those who are oppressed.

(Then again, a violent campaign is also bound to cause casualties, including completely innocent ones. And to leave the status quo unchallenged is to tolerate ongoing violence and oppression.) See: the kind of sacrifice required in nonviolence and the question of sacrifice in politics.)

4. It might rely on certain external factors, such as media and partisan competition.

Both Gandhi and King were able to play to audiences of voters who had reasonably free access to media and choices at the ballot box. Even though most African Americans and all Indians were disenfranchised, white British and US voters had the power to make change. That means that success is somewhat contingent on factors that cannot always be counted on. Contrary to I.4, above, nonviolence is not always self-reliant.

5. It requires a mildness or compassion toward opponents that they may not deserve.

(Then again, I am not sure that defeating an opponent by using effective non-violent means is all that kind.)

In “Antisemitic Attitudes Across the Ideological Spectrum,” my colleague Eitan Hersh and Laura Royden show that antisemitism is much more common on the right than the left in the US today and is particularly common among young people on the far right.

Their study is complex and nuanced, and the authors acknowledge room for disagreement about whether certain survey items, especially those related to Israel, measure antisemitism. I will zero in on a few findings that I find especially interesting.

First, a pretty clear way to test a traditional aspect of antisemitism is to ask whether Jews have too much power. Rates of agreement with that claim rise dramatically as we move from the political left to right. Young adults (18-30) drive most of the antisemitism on the right, and young right-wingers are by far the most antisemitic group.

Importantly, the people who say that Jews have too much power are not thinking about (criticizing) Israel. The next two graphs show responses by the people on the left and the right who think that Jews have too much power. (The antisemitic group on the right is much larger, but these graphs show percentages within each group.) Tiny proportions on both sides cite Israel/Palestine alone. News and entertainment media, finance, and even agriculture are cited frequently as domains in which Jews are too powerful.

In one part of this complex study, respondents were asked whether Jews should be held accountable for actions by the state of Israel, but also whether Indians should be held accountable for India, and Catholics for the Vatican. The differences are very small. People who think that one group is responsible for the policies of a foreign entity think the same about the other groups as well. In all cases, this attitude becomes more prevalent as one moves from the left to the right. Interestingly, conservatives seem more committed to collective responsibility. (So much for libertarian individualism.)

Liberals do seem to treat Catholicism a bit differently. They are somewhat more likely to hold Catholics accountable for the Church than they would Jews for Israel or Indians for India. Still, only 20% of liberals would do so, compared to 60% of conservatives.

Robinson Meyer’s Atlantic piece, “An Outdated Idea Is Still Shaping Climate Policy” led me to “Prisoners of the Wrong Dilemma: Why Distributive Conflict, Not Collective Action, Characterizes the Politics of Climate Change” by Michaël Aklin and Matto Mildenberger. I think the implications are profound.

Climate change looks like a tragedy of the commons. Most people stand to lose a great deal as the earth’s climate heats up. However, to prevent or mitigate that process, substantial numbers of individuals, companies, and countries would have pay or forego benefits. Each party will want the others to bear the burden and not make voluntary contributions by itself.

One classic solution to such dilemmas is a top-down rule that alters everyone’s incentives–in this case, a tax on carbon. However, the United Nations can’t tax anything. Each country’s carbon tax costs its own economy without (by itself) solving the climate crisis. Thus the tragedy reemerges at the international level and predicts that satisfactory carbon taxes will be hard to enact. Although 64% of Americans agree that “the U.S. should reduce greenhouse gas emissions regardless of what other countries do,” the theory suggests that this belief is soft and not likely to support ambitious policies. I’ve even made a simple online game to simulate this problem in teaching.

However, evidence seems to be building for a different model. Some people gain tangibly and immediately from decarbonization. Consider firms that build solar panels, low-carbon farmers, individuals who teach environmental science in high school, environmental engineers, and even residents of cities that are powered by renewables and compete with cities that depend on coal.

If some gain while others lose, it is no longer a Tragedy of the Commons. It is regular game in which the winners obtain benefits and the losers bear costs. Aklin and Mildenberger call this a “distributive conflict.”

In a mixed economy, the winning is side is likely to be more numerous (with more votes) and richer (with more buying and investing power). The size and wealth of both sides may change over time.

A distributive conflict makes new solutions appear possible. Governments can borrow or tax and spend the revenue to expand the size and power of the coalition that favors decarbonization. They can also compensate the losing side for reasons of equity or to reduce opposition. The game is rivalrous but not strictly zero-sum; everyone can gain in important respects even if some pay more than others.

According to the Tragedy of the Commons model, spending money will not solve climate change. This model views both costs and benefits in a static way: each dollar reduces carbon by a certain amount. The results are not necessarily very impressive, and they face a limit. There is still a lot of carbon under the ground; it has market value; and subsidizing renewables does not make the carbon worthless. Thus it will be burned. Besides, governments will surely–and perhaps rightly–fail to use spending to minimize carbon emissions. Since they will also be interested in other goals (jobs, health, equity, or ensuring their own reelection) they will not buy as much carbon reduction as they could.

But the alternative model offers hope that spending may be dynamic. Dollars invested in renewables, a new power grid, R&D, an electric car for one’s family, and even environmental education build constituencies for decarbonization. As these constituencies grow, they will use their economic and political power to demand more decarbonization–including the harder solutions of taxes and regulations. In that case, subsidies have leverage.

See, for instance, Liu, Lixia, Yuchao Zhu, and Shubing Guo. “The evolutionary game analysis of multiple stakeholders in the low-carbon agricultural innovation diffusion.” Complexity 2020 (2020). See also: public event on Governing the Commons: 30 Years Later with discussion of policing and climate change; A Civic Green New Deal; a Green recovery; taxing and spending are more compatible with democratic values than regulation is. And see our Civic Green project.

Here is a sample of articles published within the past week alone: “The Right’s Anti-Business Turn“; “The GOP-Big Business Divorce Goes Deeper Than You Think“; “Republicans Will Regret Their Breakup With Big Business“; “Existential Threat-Or Politics as Usual,” and “Is the Business Community At Last Falling Out of Love With the Republican Party?“

The situation is fluid and hard to interpret. Our predictions are inevitably influenced by our assumptions about how business generally relates to politics in the USA. In that spirit, I’ll disclose my own premises.

First, businesses influence government. There is no consensus among political scientists that campaign contributions and paid lobbying matter very much. It’s certainly not evident that companies can decide who wins elections. The main source of influence is what Charles E. Lindblom called the “privileged position of business.” The basic idea is that businesses create jobs in a capitalist economy; politicians want jobs to be created; therefore, politicians cater to business. Direct communications from corporations to politicians are effective mainly because they convey information that politicians are eager to hear. Although companies may exaggerate the costs of taxing and spending, politicians take their predictions seriously because they think their own interests are at stake. Compared to other politicians, liberal Democrats are more skeptical of business and more likely to want to hear from labor, but even most liberals listen hard when a company is deciding whether to move in or out of their own district. This dynamic is built into a mixed economy (or what Lindblom called, following Dahl, a “polyarchy”).

However, people see the world through ideological frames. We do not just behold the truth and maximize our self-interest (profits for firms; reelection for politicians). Instead, we use conceptual frameworks to interpret the world. A politician who believes in “free markets” is primed to assume that a tax increase will cost jobs even if it won’t. At the same time, a business that sees itself as a fair and inclusive workplace is primed to see xenophobic rhetoric as bad for the bottom line (even if it isn’t).

The dominant framework in corporate boardrooms is pro-market, pro-technology, meritocratic/elitist, cosmopolitan, and self-congratulatory about the business’s own fairness and inclusivity. This is partly because of the demographics of the corporate ranks: heavily “coastal” and international and highly educated. The most coveted employees and consumers–the ones with the most buying power–share those characteristics. Businesses observe politics through this lens.

At the same time, businesses do not particularly want to engage with politics. Government can be helpful, particularly if you want big government contracts. But it also presents risks. Politics is controversial, so involvement can hurt your reputation. The last thing you want is to be targeted by boycotts from several directions. Politicians can also extract rents. Businesses contribute to candidates not only to get benefits but also to stave off harms. A stable policy that is fairly expensive to business (such as a higher corporate tax rate) may actually be preferable to a rapidly changing and highly contested policy environment.

Finally, it is much easier to advocate a narrow policy, particularly one that has low public salience, than to try to steer the whole ship of state.

As a result, most businesses probably prefer outcomes in this order:

1. A particular politician of any party and persuasion who champions their highly specific interests–a given tax break, an import permit, etc.
2. Traditional Republicans who instinctively favor business interests, focus on economics, and don’t court controversy.
3. Moderate Democrats, who are practically tied with #2.
4. Quite liberal Democrats, as long as they are forced to compromise. If Sen. Sanders could write the tax code, that would be expensive for corporate America. If he has a seat at the table, it’s OK.
5. Trump. He’s a loose cannon. He’s protectionist. Business doesn’t like his explicit stances on race and immigration; and he may hurt traditional Republicans against Democrats. For instance, with a different Republican president on the ballot in 2020, the GOP would probably control the White House and at least one house of Congress. right now Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez would be in the minority party now, rather than the majority. This means that Trump presents, overall, a bigger problem for business than Bernie does.

If this ranking is correct, then the relationship between business and the GOP is fraught; however, corporations’ calculations are complicated, and they will surely hedge their bets.

The New York Times published a chart showing the number of reported COVID-19 deaths per capita and deaths above normal this year for selected countries. My graph demonstrates that the two variables correlate quite well–except in Russia. That is circumstantial evidence that Russia (and only Russia, among these countries) is failing to report COVID-19 deaths, as Anton Troianovski suggests in the reported article.

I wanted to check this correlation because I am interested in what explains the very large differences in national death rates. An explanation is not at all obvious. Consider these statistics:

The first point you may notice is a very high variation in many of these indicators. The excess death rate is 20 percentage-points worse in Spain than Germany. The UK has lost almost 14 times more people per capita to COVID-19 than Finland. France spends almost twice as much of its GDP on social welfare as the nearby Netherlands. Germany is 26 times more dense than Russia. Sweden is far more urban than Austria. Americans spend an average of five times more on healthcare than Hungarians. The only column with a small range is age expectancy.

The second point is that none of these variables correlates impressively with COVID-19 deaths. In a simple OLS regression, nothing comes anywhere near statistical significance.

It far from obvious why some countries have fared so much better or worse than the others. This is a smallish sample of countries (the only ones for which the NYT presented excess deaths) and maybe patterns would emerge in a larger sample. However, the situation seems noisy because so many variables may matter, and they can push in different directions in the same country.

For instance, Anne Applebaum recently wrote, “if the United States is very, very bad at social trust and public-health systems, it is very, very good at large-scale logistics.” I would gloss her second point this way: once the US government pays big companies a lot of money to do something, we often see impressive results. In this case, firms like Pfizer, FedEx, and CVS are administering millions of doses of vaccine per day with federal support. Yet we do a relatively bad job at changing behavior en masse because we tend to be distrustful and hyper-individualistic. The shifting performance of the US compared to other countries probably reflects these cross-pressures–and every other country has its own mix.