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Progressive Christian
Don't you know that you can count me out

Don't you know that you can count me out

Last updated on: August 4, 2013 at 1:22 am by Fred Clark

Don't you know that you can count me out 2013-08-04T01:22:34-04:00 Fred Clark

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The tea party and the loudest, most strident voices of anti-abortion politics love to flirt with the idea of armed revolution. This is, for the most part, just adolescent foolishness — a kind of fantasy play-acting that can be summed up in a single word:

Wolveriiiiiines!

By pretending to believe that America is on the verge of collapse into a totalitarian tyranny, they can pretend to themselves that they are the vanguard of a courageous resistance. The Red Dawn fantasy isn't all that different from any other childhood fantasy about what if there were dragons? And what if I was brave and good and strong? And what if I slew the dragon and everybody cheered for me because I was brave and good and strong and I slew the dragon? Wouldn't that be cool?

The problem arises when, finding the world sadly devoid of dragons, they decide to invent other monsters with which to do battle — assigning the role of monster to their neighbors, their political opponents, their elected officials. Those People, they say, are monsters, demons, baby-killing Satanists, kitten-burning apologists. They're evil. They must be stopped.

This problem is further compounded by the demagogues of talk radio and cable TV who find this timid, fantasy-obsessed demographic to be a lucrative audience. Unlike other listeners or viewers, you can guarantee their loyalty by reminding them that everyone else is a monster and must be avoided. And their obsession with the thrilling fantasy of impending revolution makes it easy to sell them things — to get them to invest in useless, inflated gold coins, for example. They present a con-man's dream — people who will thank you for ripping them off.

The con-men and hucksters feeding off of these Red-Dawn fantasists are constantly turning up the volume, turning up the temperature, making the fantasy more and more thrilling by making the imaginary threats more and more extreme.

And, yes, that sort of thing creates a climate in which unhinged people, not appreciating the fantasy play-acting function of all of this, will inevitably arm themselves and go forth to slay the monsters — they'll shoot doctors in churches, shoot Unitarians, shoot museum guards, the Tides Foundation, immigrants, Pittsburgh police officers, IRS offices, the Pentagon or judges, children and members of Congress.

This is not rare. This is not unusual. It has become nearly commonplace.

But what of those who are caught up in this fantasy who are not unhinged? What of the millions of tea-partiers or decriers of the abortion "Holocaust" with their signs calling for "refreshing" blood and "second amendment remedies"? What are we to make of their fabricated fears of imminent tyranny and their ridiculous pose of revolutionary vigilance?

I continue to believe that when you encounter someone who is saying something that they know is not true, there is great power in saying as much. When someone says that they believe health care reform will lead to socialist tyranny, simply tell them that, "No, you do not believe that. It is not true and you know it is not true." When they say that "abortion is murder and America is a blood-stained, murderous country," simply say, "No, you do not believe that. It is not true and you know it is not true." You will not need to raise your voice. Truth doesn't require amplification to dispel falsehood. The falsehood wasn't ever really there in the first place.

I also think it's important to look past the symptoms to the underlying disease. At the core of their pretense is that fantasy I described above: "What if I was brave and good and strong … wouldn't that be cool?" The attraction of this fantasy is the fear, or the knowledge, that the fantasist is not brave or good or strong. Liberating them from this fantasy, then, should involve giving them the opportunity to acquire or develop those characteristics in reality rather than in fantasy. It should involve inviting them to be brave and good and strong and pointing to the myriad real-world opportunities to exhibit or develop those traits.

There are few dragons here in the real world, but there are wounds that need binding, messes that need cleaning, houses that need building, children that need mentoring, elders that need respecting, stories that need telling, projects that need volunteers. With all the real problems of the real world, who has time for slaying imaginary dragons? Get them involved in reality and the fantasy can't compete.

But but but but — what if there really were an impending situation that called for armed revolution or violent resistance? Can't I at least concede that such a situation might be possible, in theory at least?

No. Not here. The United States is a constitutional democracy with a free press, freedom of religion, a robust civil society and an unqualified right to petition the government for redress of grievances. This ain't Burma, people. We all want to change the world, but when you talk about destruction, don't you know that you can count me out.

The rules for armed revolution are no different than the rules for any other form of armed conflict. It may be helpful to review those rules and thus to illuminate why the right-wing vogue for revolutionary fantasy is such foolishness.

The jus ad bello, the right to wage war, must meet six basic criteria: Just cause, proper authority, right intention, reasonable hope for success, proportionality and last resort.

Just cause and right intention are the two criteria there that everyone blithely sort of assumes that their proposed conflict easily meets, although both are actually quite a bit more complicated than that. But for the sake of argument, let's bracket those two along with the thornier question of proper authority (which in the case of revolution gets even trickier).

Proportionality seems a major, perhaps insurmountable, obstacle to any proposed armed revolution. Regardless of every other aim or cause of that revolution, one consequence of it would be to destroy — perhaps irreparably — the tradition of the peaceful and voluntary transition of power in a constitutional democracy. Armed revolution, the history of numerous countries sadly illustrates, is habit-forming. To overthrow a constitutional democracy by force creates a precedent for the transition of power by force. The constitutional democracy cannot very well be replaced with a new, more just constitutional democracy because the very act of violent revolution establishes a new regime of attaining power by violence. No matter how well-written or enthusiastically ratified, the post-revolution constitution will not likely be strong enough to prevent the next armed revolution from occurring, or the next wave or series of armed revolutions.

Reasonable hope for success also seems to be an insurmountable obstacle for our hypothetical revolutionaries. They're hopelessly outgunned. I don't just mean that they're up against the federal government with it's Marines and drones and a thousand different forms of laser-guided death. Forget the military, they're outgunned by the constabulary.

A group of armed revolutionaries was stockpiling weapons for the apocalypse about 10 miles from my old apartment. They were blown up by the mild-mannered Baptist deacon then serving as mayor of Philadelphia. My point here is not whether Mayor Goode's actions were appropriate or wise or legitimate. My point here is that those revolutionaries didn't turn out to have a reasonable hope for success against Wilson Goode. (God only knows what would have happened to Move if Rizzo'd been mayor.)

The word "reasonable" is important here. The criteria is not met by a hypothetical pipe-dream scenario in which hitherto nonexistent support springs to life universally due to the valiant display of your vanguard action. That mythology — the defiant vanguard will wake the sleeping giant! — is not a reasonable hope.

Finally, and disastrously for anyone seeking to justify violent resistance or armed revolution, we come to the criteria of last resort — the criteria, but not the last resort itself. That last resort, in a constitutional democracy with a vibrant civil society, is unreachable. The list of possible actions, possible legitimate avenues that have a real — and better — chance at remedying wrongs and correcting injustices, is inexhaustible. You could not in a lifetime or a generation exhaust every last resort before reaching the last resort.

We Americans have multiple levels of courts and legislatures. We have innumerable forms of media, journalism, theater, art and protest. We have innumerable forms of associations and innumerable examples of each of those forms. We can run for office, throw the bums out of office, impeach or recall those who break the law, demand their resignation. We have the monumental example of the civil rights movement — the legacy of geniuses like King and Rustin and Gene Sharp. Their ideas and examples demolish any potential claim by advocates of violence to have exhausted every last resort.

And again, every one of those other means and resorts — the election process, legislation, lobbying, the courts, moral suasion, organizing, protest, art, journalism, media campaigns, the whole remarkable universe of nonviolent resistance — has a much more viable, much more reasonable hope for success than does any prospect of violent resistance or armed revolution. When done in concert, those approaches will almost certainly succeed.

We all want to change the world. And we can. But it takes work, faithfulness and dedication. It's not something that can be done by adolescent fantasists just looking for the kick of imagining themselves the heroes of the bad '80s action movie playing in their heads. It's not something that can be done by people primarily interested in boosting their own self-esteem by demonizing others, obsessing over imaginary threats from imaginary monsters and thrilling themselves with daydreams in which they are revolutionary action heroes.

Let them build their make-believe barricades. I'd rather plant actual trees.

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