What To Do, What To Do? (Hands Off!) Plus

National security leaks are invariably good, plus music

Spy v Spy (credit Weldon Berger)

What To Do, What To Do? (Hands Off!)

The escalating protests against Tesla are well and good and richly deserved, aimed as they are at a man who is gleefully wrecking the decent parts of government and has pronounced the exercise of empathy to be the greatest threat to western civilization. Elon Musk is incapable of original ideas, and this one is no different: it’s a grander version of “making the tough decisions” that inevitably mean taking the flensing knife to people who have little to give but their skins, and he undoubtedly copped the phrasing from some or the other reactionary pseudo-philosopher.

So the protests are good—anything that dents Musk’s unfathomable wealth and contributes to his bafflement about why large numbers of people don’t like him is good—but they’re not going to bring down or appreciably hamper the regime and, in isolation, they offer the increasingly beefed up and bold national security state an opportunity to make examples of people willing to protest stuff. The threat to classify people who damage Teslas or dealerships as domestic terrorists should be taken seriously, and shouldn’t be taken as limited only to people causing property damage.

The best way to insulate non-violent Tesla protesters from being made examples of is adding to their numbers. People have lately been referencing research by Harvard’s Erica Chenoweth suggesting that non-violent protests engaging about 3.5% of a nation’s population have never failed to bring down a targeted regime.

“There are more options for engaging and nonviolent resistance that don’t place people in as much physical danger, particularly as the numbers grow, compared to armed activity,” Chenoweth says. “And the techniques of nonviolent resistance are often more visible, so that it's easier for people to find out how to participate directly, and how to coordinate their activities for maximum disruption.”

These are very general patterns, of course, and despite being twice as successful as the violent conflicts, peaceful resistance still failed 47% of the time. As Chenoweth and Stephan pointed out in their book, that’s sometimes because they never really gained enough support or momentum to “erode the power base of the adversary and maintain resilience in the face of repression”. But some relatively large nonviolent protests also failed, such as the protests against the communist party in East Germany in the 1950s, which attracted 400,000 members (around 2% of the population) at their peak, but still failed to bring about change.

In Chenoweth’s data set, it was only once the nonviolent protests had achieved that 3.5% threshold of active engagement that success seemed to be guaranteed – and raising even that level of support is no mean feat. In the UK it would amount to 2.3 million people actively engaging in a movement (roughly twice the size of Birmingham, the UK’s second largest city); in the US, it would involve 11 million citizens – more than the total population of New York City.

Chenoweth says that number can include actions like consumers boycotting companies economically vital to the regime or its oligarchical supporters, which offer the protection of anonymity to participants, as well as general strikes and other non-violent street protests that likewise interfere with the economy and the ability to govern. One of the keys, she says, is instilling the fear in security forces that their friends and families may be participating in the protests they’ve been ordered to suppress, and one of the keys to engaging enough protestors to instill that fear is non-violence.

Most of the examples she cites involve capitol cities with large populations and significant economic activity, such as Manila in the Philippines, where the Marcos regime fell, and Khartoum in Sudan. The U.S. is unusual in having a national capitol with a small population and little economic significance beyond serving as the seat of government, and in having such a dispersed population; there’s no immediate dual purpose to clogging the capitol streets, and no local population sufficient to do so.

The broader Occupy Wall Street protests are an example of widely publicized, relatively popular and ultimately unsuccessful actions, although that latter judgement may be open to question if future protests ultimately succeed in unmanning the current regime. The encampments across the country drew two notable responses: the first, a low-calorie speech reflecting some of Occupy’s concerns, chiefly those of economic inequality, money in politics, and equal opportunity, delivered by then-president Barack Obama in Osawatomie, Kansas, the scene of a radical post-presidency Teddy Roosevelt speech 100 years and change earlier; the second, a simultaneous, violent crackdown on Occupy encampments across the country with assistance from Obama’s security services, including homeland security and the FBI.

Obama’s speech was stylish, folksy, and at once gracious and scolding to both oppressor and oppressed, as is his wont, while Roosevelt went so far as to quote from Abraham Lincoln’s 1861 State of the Union address on the primacy of labor above capital: “Labor is prior to, and independent of, capital. Capital is only the fruit of labor, and could never have existed if labor had not first existed. Labor is the superior of capital, and deserves much the higher consideration.”

Afterward, Obama went home to continue shepherding the country through the slowest, most anemic and top-heavy recovery on record as inequality of all sorts exploded. Labor did not get the higher consideration Lincoln and Roosevelt said it deserved. Sales of Thomas Frank’s “What’s the Matter with Kansas?” remained steady.

You can read the Roosevelt and Obama speeches side by side on the Obama White House archives.

Occupy was never intended to bring down a government, and the protests collectively drew only a tiny fraction of Chenoweth’s 3.5%, but they did poll well above 30% favorability at their height, sufficient to earn economic and wealth inequality a permanent home on the political landscape and to be seen as sufficiently threatening to warrant forcible suppression under a Democratic administration.

Those polling numbers suggest a potentially huge base for opposition to the current regime, hell-bent as they are on shredding the government, labor rights, voting rights, women’s rights, minority rights, our pathetic social safety net, the economy, and the nation’s shields against widespread disease—among other things.

That’s a lot of angry people, and we’re not even 100 days in.

With all their potential for drawing mass local turnouts, and with the possibility of folding in Trump supporters who are being egregiously harmed by the regime’s policies, the April 5 Hands Off! protests will offer a solid measure of where we are on the protest meter, what the regime’s reaction will be to large, diverse, nationwide crowds, and what the immediate future of a resistance could look like.

Hands Off! protesters can be expected to both outnumber and overlap considerably with the anti-Musk, anti-Tesla crowd, adding to the latter’s number and providing them with a future buffer against potential security forces violence. It is exactly the kind of action that Chenowith refers to when she says that “the techniques of nonviolent resistance [make it] easier for people to find out how to participate directly, and how to coordinate their activities for maximum disruption.”

Success breeds success, but as early on in the regime as we are, no one should misunderstand the dire position we’re in. Other regimes have sometimes taken years to seize such thorough control over all the state security services as this one has in fewer than three months, and to cow or dismember the federal legislature and the civil service to such a degree. So despite the early days, a substantive protest movement of sufficient size, inclusiveness and vigor may well be taking shape too late.

But it may be not, which is what we have to think. What we must absolutely not think is that waiting for the 2026 midterms to hogtie these grifters and thugs and zealots constitutes a plan.

See you at the town square tomorrow. This is important. This could work.

National security leaks are invariably good

The current brouhaha over the inclusion of Atlantic Magazine editor Jeff Goldberg in an off-the-books national security group chat about bombing Yemen mostly misses two salient points. One is that it exposed both a war crime—bringing down an entire apartment building in order to kill one guy, whose death hasn’t been independently confirmed—and the passive liberal dismissal of the crime in favor of attacking the leak itself, and the other is that Goldberg has been so far up the national security state’s ass for so long that it’s a miracle he found his way out long enough to expose the leak.

Very little of what the government does should be secret. We need leaks, and the best leaks are those which don’t place whistleblowers or other sources at risk. Substantive leaks which can be immediately pinned on the stupidity of regime officials . . . well, those are as good as it gets.

People have been broadly excoriating that very stupidity, but one can make a case that stupid people in a national security establishment which leaks like a sieve are better for the country than smart ones who know how to keep the horrible shit they’re doing under wraps until they’re done doing it and can call bygones when it comes out.

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Music

Jonathan Richman, I, Jonathan, “That Summer Feeling;”

WitchDoktors, Brain Machine, “Dr. John;”

Jack White’s sometime-backing band features solid musicianship and a drummer who beats the living shite out of the skins. The Black Belles, The Black Belles, “Wishing Well;”

Gaz, My New Skin, “Pay to Breathe;”

Peter and the Wolves, Absolute Waterfront Plastic, “Absolute Waterfront Plastic;”

Kim and The Cinders, Kim and The Cinders, “Today Is a Good Day;”