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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.
If you really believe this there's not much productive discussion we can have because we will keep running into endless disagreements over basic facts about Trump. Is it even possible to prove that Trump does have consistent beliefs and has often suffered consequences for them? Not if we assert, a priori, that Trump just had those positions because they were convenient, so there must be some explanation of how those consequences were convenient. Now we can predict anything Trump ever does with a theory that can never be wrong.
There are still DHS forces in Minneapolis.
I will grant you that the attack ad he paid for after then Central Park Five case was not something which obviously benefited him.
But my impression is that most of the times he sticks his neck out for an unpopular belief, it is a belief which is directly about himself. He genuinely believes that he deserves the Nobel prize. He might even genuinely believe, against all evidence, that the Democrats stole the 2020 election. Or that of course the international trade could be much improved upon by having a genius dealmaker such as himself renegotiate everything. (Very charitably, one could claim that he genuinely believes in protectionism.) He believes that his allies should be rewarded and his friends should be punished.
I will also grant you that it is hard to know what he genuinely believes because his home ground is Simulacrum level four, where words have no relationship to anything in physical reality. Perhaps he genuinely believes every conspiracy theory he has ever pushed, starting from the Birther thing. Perhaps he believes some of the stuff he has said. Perhaps he has, in his mind, the ability to track which of his statements agree with his world model and which don't. Or perhaps he has long lost that ability.
Some big CW topics are abortion, gun rights and immigration.
Trump is very much not part of the Christian Right (which opposes abortion). He certainly does not believe that sex should be between husband and wife only (which is at the end of the day what the Christian Right is all about).
Nor does he seem to really care about gun rights. His administration was quick to blame Pretti for bringing a gun to a protest. Are you telling me that in a world where he could win the mid-terms by passing gun bans, he would decide to lose instead out of a principled belief in 2A?
Immigration is certainly the topic most central to his political persona, and he is rather consistent about it, cracking down on illegals and restricting legal avenues to migrate to the US. In his personal life, he is a bit less anti-immigrant, of course. My take is that he made a conscious decision to make this his political niche ca. 2015.
What are your examples of Trump suffering for his beliefs, preferably beliefs which are not about him?
The Central Park Five were guilty.
His political career started by mainstreaming illegal immigration and deportations into a political arena that did not want to talk about it, even though it immediately resulted in him losing contracts and business opportunities. He stuck by Corey Lewandowski when he was accused of assaulting a reporter for lightly brushing past her. Trump maintained a strong position on tariffs for decades against much ferocious opposition and no obvious benefit for his own interests. He was happy to be booed by a crowd of Republicans for criticizing Bush for lying about the Iraq War. He got gay marriage out of the Republican platform. He built a wall. They dragged his name through the mud with all manner of fake accusations, women he assaulted who couldn't even remember when it happened, they tried putting him in jail. Most famously, he dodged a bullet to the head and then stood up before a crowd of his supporters and pumped his fist and told them to keep fighting.
I could go on, really, but this is all tedious repetition of the obvious truth. Trump does not enter politics, does not run for president, does not become president, without big, massive, huge personal sacrifice. He could have sat on a beach in Miami with his billions and his tower in New York after a very accomplished life, and nothing would have happened, and he would be fine. You don't have to like what he did but you can't seriously deny that he sacrificed a lot, that for one small alteration in fate here or there he would have lost everything. That it has worked out so far and made him more successful is not actually evidence that he did this out of his own self-interest. If it was that easy you would see a lot more imitators trying to do what he did.
And most of his successes in politics are based on promises he made long ago, because he has actually been extremely consistent in attempting the things he said all along he wanted to do.
I just do not think this is a serious belief you can actually credibly defend. Maybe it sounds nice as some kind of slapdash pubtalk barcrawl locker room talk. But do you really, honestly, earnestly, believe that Trump is best modeled as a kind of void whose words bear no relation to anything whatsoever? Not just that he lies, or even that he lies more than other politicians. But that for Trump "words have no relationship to anything in physical reality"? What does that do to your view of the world?
I'm not sure why you invoke the Christian Right here actually, except as maybe a comparison or metaphor, but I have to point out that the Christian Right is peaked. Trump killed it. They are not the animating force in Republican politics anymore, as much as they'd like to be.
Yeah you can think it's stupid to bring a gun to obstruct police officers and also believe in the 2nd Amendment. There's no part of the 2nd Amendment that logically entails ignoring cause and effect. Support for the 2nd Amendment doesn't require that every time a guy has a gun I declare he's justified and in the right. Notably, if Trump wanted to take the opposite position, and didn't believe in the 2nd Amendment at all, he could have run as a Democrat. Like he was in the 90s.
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