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Notes -
Last Friday, Bret Deveraux of ACOUP waded deeper into the Culture War than usual by writing about the anti-ICE protests, and insurgencies and non-violent resistance in general.
What unites both strategies is that the difference in power between the state and the dissidents is very large, so large that both conventional military operations and even a protracted war are not an option for the weaker party.
If you can not face your enemy in the field, and can not even hope to sap his strength through a thousand papercuts until you can face him, what can you do?
As a military theorist, Deveraux naturally uses Clausewitz to identify three factors which can limit the escalation of force and thus be employed by the weaker side to hamper the stronger side.
Friction (the natural tendency of stuff to break, things not going according to plan, your forces not being where you would want them to be) is a bit of a sideshow. If you are able to weaken your enemy sufficiently through friction, you are fighting a protracted war, not a terrorist insurgency.
Will means the emotional backing of the conflict by the politically relevant part of the population, which might be the body of citizens or some elites, depending on the system. This is a prime target in these highly asymetrical conflicts.
The third limiting factor is the political object of the enemy leadership. Unlike the population, which is modelled as being emotional, the leadership is modelled as rational. The idea here is that if you can inflict sufficient costs on the enemy, they might decide that it is no longer worth it to enforce their goal.
Will is the central point to attack for the weaker party:
For terrorist insurgencies, this means that the main goal of their attacks is actually sending signals. So the point is not to weaken the enemy's military by blowing up their troops and materiel, but rather to message audiences on both sides of the conflict (as well as these in between) that their cause is viable. If you could convince everyone that your victory is inevitable, that would be a great boon to your side. In practice, this means that terrorists favor flashy targets to military relevant ones. 9/11 is a prime example.
A key strategy is to bait your enemy into striking against you while you are hiding among the civilian population, thereby causing civilian deaths which result both in local dissatisfaction as well as in winning a propaganda victory -- which is the kind of victory which brings you closer to your objective. The main dilemma for the insurgent is that they need gruesome violence to further their cause, but that such violence may also serve to alienate the local population and strengthen the resolve of the enemy. While 9/11 was great for making Al Qaeda a household name, it was ultimately bad for the Jihadist cause.
Deveraux then contrasts this with a deliberate strategy of nonviolence, which does not have that dilemma. He is actually rather realist about why movements employ non-violence:
Of course, non-violent protest does not mean staying on the sidewalks:
If your protest can be simply ignored, it is likely that it will be ignored, so you do not get the desired escalation and attention. This means that you will have to commit transgressions to goad the enemy into strikes against you which will be terrible PR for them.
Bret talks about the Nashville campaign during the Civil Rights Movement, where Blacks would organize sit-ins on segregated lunch counters. This caused violent repercussions, which eventually eroded popular support of the segregationist side.
He also concedes that there are regimes which are impervious to non-violent protests, where the political relevant parts of the population are very willing to employ and support violence, but argues that societies which are running on violence are very inefficient.
Finally, he talks about the anti-ICE movement, of which he seems sympathetic.
He continues:
He points out that mass media help the protests a lot, as their position has gained massively in popularity over a relatively short time span (compared to the Civil Rights Movement).
I think that the gist is that the median American voter -- like the median Motte poster -- is very willing to vote for Trump's anti-immigrant platform, but unlike the median Motte poster they are totally unwilling to tolerate the Pretti shooting as a natural consequence of enforcement actions. Of course, the Trump administration did not help itself by reflexively claiming that the shooting was justified instead of spinning it as a sad mistake.
Deveraux:
When he was posting this, the decision to pull the DHS forces out of Minneapolis was already made, but it would hardly have been surprising from his point of view. At the end of the day, the only political idea Trump truly believes from the bottom of his heart is that he should be president. Toughness on immigration (spouses excluded) so far was of instrumental value for him because it gained him a lot of support, but if it no longer delivers the votes for him, I expect him to change policy.
I applaud his ability to keep his personal views mostly in check and approach most topics on his block with care, but he posted a link to one of his bluesky posts in this article, and I took a look. Yep, he is a very bluesky user all right.
In this article, he mentioned a police chief that fought desegregation attempts in his town with clever tactics. As you might have guessed, the only difference in the outcome was that he's not vilified by history textbooks today, he still lost. I'd rather Bret gave a different example of successfully dismantling a popular non-violent movement by a regime that is not resilient enough to just gun them down and then forbid the press to write about it.
If your policies are actually adaptive for society, in a darwinistic sense*, then all you need to do is hold your ground, maybe perform non-salient actions to advance your cause, and eventually people will stop fighting you. In particular, they will begin to adopt the policy voluntarily as your correctness becomes more and more obvious, though perhaps in a way just distinct enough to preserve their ego and in-group identity. (e.g., the emergency of "sex negative feminism" as traditional gender roles re-establish themselves out of pure darwinistic imperative.)
This might seem like a naively optimistic strategy, but that's just an artifact of survivorship bias in favor of how mass movements are commemorated. Pretty much every change to the status quo has some sort of popular support, and is matched by some sort of popular protest. But we only remember those changes as being "non-violent movements" when they advance motives leftists are primed to recognize. When they fail, they get condensed into a memory hole labeled "reactionaries scared about change". For example, the luddites and before them the anti-enclosure protests. Leftists would be a lot more gleeful about claiming them as proto-anarchist movements if they'd succeeded... but instead, nobody even remembers them.
* I use this terminology to emphasize that a policy being a utilitarian or moral good is neither sufficient nor necessary. Policies that help a society self-perpetuate succeed because societies without them collapse and therefore lose the ability to fight.
Amusingly, "open range" versus "closed range" remains a salient political topic in the US from time to time.
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