Fighting Back: A Citizen’s Guide to Resistance – The New Republic

Let’s Go!

Ordinary people have more power than they know.

Democracy is not a spectator sport.

That truism has been repeated by notables from Gen. Jim Mattis to Barack Obama to George Shultz, Ronald Reagan’s secretary of state. But it’s fitting that the person credited with first saying it was a private citizen whom nobody particularly remembers.

Lotte Scharfman (1928–1970) was a Jewish refugee from Nazi-occupied Austria who became president of the Massachusetts chapter of the League of Women Voters. Her cause was an obscure one: She wanted to reduce the size of Massachusetts’s bloated House of Representatives from 240 members to 160. The measure failed on its first vote in the House in 1970, for the obvious reason that no representative wanted to risk losing their own seat. But after several House members were voted out later that year for opposing the reform measure, it cleared the state legislature, and in 1974 it won overwhelming approval from Massachusetts voters.

Corruption was “a way of life” in the Massachusetts state House of the 1960s and 1970s, a state investigating panel later concluded—it was rife with bribery, extortion, and money laundering. Yet even in that civic sewer, a legislative body was persuaded to do something that most political scientists would tell you is a logical impossibility: put one-third of its own members out on the street. That should clue you in to the power of participatory democracy.

“People know deep inside them,” Ralph Nader told me recently, that “if they really blow their top, nothing can stop them.” Is Nader, who at 91 has logged six decades walking the citizen-action beat, feeling optimistic that President Donald Trump’s multifront assault on constitutional government can be stopped? “Not optimistic,” Nader replied. “Just realistic…. As some people stand up to power, it becomes contagious.”

Granted, this country has never witnessed an abuse of presidential authority so extreme as what Trump is right now wreaking in every conceivable direction. But as I write this, an extraordinary national mobilization is underway. Every conceivable method of lawful opposition is being applied to arrest Trump’s bizarre and frequently illegal sabotage of the very government he was elected to lead. Some acts of resistance will work; others will fail. It will be some time before we have a clear sense of what works best.

Source Links: https://newrepublic.com/article/193193/citizen-guide-trump-resistance-fighting-back