Trump wants protests to turn violent. Don’t give him what he wants.
Lewis’s nonviolence was not only the right moral choice but also a shrewd tactical decision. A young reporter named David Halberstam described the power of Lewis’s approach during a 1960 sit-in at a segregated lunch counter in Nashville: “The protests had been conducted with exceptional dignity, and gradually one image had come to prevail — that of elegant, courteous young black people, holding to their Gandhian principles, seeking the most elemental of rights, while being assaulted by young white hoodlums who beat them up and on occasion extinguished cigarettes on their bodies.”
Nonviolent protest doesn’t work in dictatorships such as Nazi Germany or the Soviet Union, but it is a powerful weapon in a liberal democracy. By remaining nonviolent, civil rights leaders such as Lewis gained the moral upper hand and brought white public opinion — shamed by the violence of the Southern segregationists — over to their side.
Lewis’s example is one that protesters today would do well to remember. Most have. The Black Lives Matters protests, which may have been the largest demonstrations in U.S. history, have been overwhelmingly peaceful. Far more violence has been perpetrated by the police than by protesters. But violence and looting have occurred around the edges of the protests — and those tendencies were particularly pronounced this past weekend.
Protesters in Portland, Ore., pointed laser beams at U.S. marshals (which can cause eye damage), threw rocks and water bottles at them, and fired fireworks at the federal courthouse. In Seattle, protesters set fires and smashed windows; the Seattle Police Department reports that 59 officers suffered mostly minor injuries. There were similar scenes in Los Angeles, Oakland, Calif., and Richmond, among other places, leading to dozens of arrests. Police claimed that the trouble in Richmond was instigated by white supremacists, but that obviously was not the case everywhere.
The anger of the protesters is fully understandable — and it is being deliberately stoked by the unnecessary deployment of federal forces to Portland over the objections of local leaders. The heavily armed Department of Homeland Security tactical teams are using tear gas and batons on peaceful protesters, including mothers and veterans. These federal abuses inspire rage — and that’s precisely the point.
Trump appears to be deliberately goading protesters into a violent response to feed his narrative that the white suburbs are threatened by anarchy and lawlessness from Democratic-controlled cities — and that he alone can protect them. This is authoritarian theater. The Post reported that “the White House had long wanted to amplify strife in cities” — and quoted an administration official as saying “it was about getting viral online content.”
Trump is not exactly subtle: Trump regularly blasts the protesters on Twitter as “sick and deranged Anarchists & Agitators” who “would destroy our American cities, and worse,” if Joe Biden, “the puppet of the Left, ever won.” These charges are ludicrously over the top: Trump’s abuse of his authority, not some scattered vandalism, is the real threat to our democracy. But Trump is desperate to salvage his failing campaign, and he is gambling that televised images of mayhem might allow him to do that.
Protesters should refuse to become extras in a TV show scripted by the reality-show president. “I’m furious that Oakland may have played right into Donald Trump’s twisted campaign strategy,” Oakland’s Democratic mayor, Libby Schaaf, told the New York Times. “Images of a vandalized downtown is exactly what he wants to whip up his base and to potentially justify sending in federal troops that will only incite more unrest.”
The mayor’s warning is far more compelling than the attempts of some protesters to justify the use of force. “I don’t consider property destruction violence,” says one organizer in Oakland. A protester in Portland says she’s not throwing water bottles at police, but “if people want to express their frustration in that way, I’m not going to stop them.”
That’s not how John Lewis operated. He didn’t make excuses for violence. He transcended it. If protesters want to defeat Trump, they should heed the wisdom of that heroic civil rights leader who said: “I believe in nonviolence as a way of life, as a way of living.”
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