The United States of America no longer exists. It ended on July 1, 2024, almost exactly 248 years after the Declaration of Independence was unanimously ratified by elected representatives of 13 rebellious British colonies — now “states” — on the East Coast of North America. The major premise of this iconic founding document is set forth, clearly and unequivocally, in the second paragraph: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal…” This statement was — and is — a resounding refutation of the ideology of hereditary monarchy, the idea that the King has a divine right, inherited from his paternal line, to rule over all his subjects, who in turn owe him fealty and obedience, no matter what he does. In 1776, this medieval ideology held sway not only in Britain, but throughout Europe and the rest of the world.
But America — uniquely at that time — was founded on the lofty principles of the European enlightenment — the ideals of universal human equality and natural rights, from which it follows that the only legitimate government is one derived from consent of the governed (i.e. voting), and that its sole legitimate purpose is to “secure the rights” of the people to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, through the exercise of “just power” — not absolute power, but power constrained by law. Implicit in this foundational theory of government is that no one, especially a president or leader, is above the law.
All this just ended, with our corrupted Supreme Court’s decision to grant presidential “immunity from prosecution” for any “official act” performed by a president. In short, although our founding as a nation was a resounding rejection of the idea of kingship, we now will have a king, a ruler who is above the law, and can do anything he wants, as long as it’s part his “official” duties as president — a criterion determined solely by himself, since the Court already has deemed “official duties” to include Trump’s efforts to cajole his Vice President into violating the Constitution in order to keep him in power.
So again, the United States of America just ceased to exist, and Donald Trump now stands poised to become king — not just king, but a tyrant — if he wins (or steals) the election in November. While many say, with justifiable trepidation, that it feels like 1933 all over again, I would add, with the resolution of our founders, and with the courage of all who have struggled throughout our history to realize the ideal of equal rights under the rule of law, that it feels like 1776 all over again as well. The time may well be coming soon when good people have no choice but to stand up and fight back! So let us all remember, and take to heart, the further stirring words of Thomas Jefferson in the Declaration which established our (former) nation: “When a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same object, evinces a design to reduce them under absolute despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such government, and establish new guards for their future security.”
But how? Realistically, they have all the money for advertising and pervasive propaganda, and surveillance and persecution of their “enemies,” while their brainwashed, thuggish MAGA cult followers have most of the guns and can easily be manipulated into forming death squads upon the command, or even the insinuation, of their orange god. We may soon face a dreaded reign of terror, like that of Hitler or Stalin, where we fear a midnight knock on the door if we publish or even speak anything critical of King Donald and his mindless paramilitary thugs.
None of us in the US has ever faced this kind of tyranny, where all the constitutional rights we took for granted quickly erode and disappear. So how can we resist, if they (and their billionaire underwriters) have all the legal sanction, media, technological devices, and firepower they need to spy on us, to demonize us, to arrest us, to brainwash our children in “Bible-based” public schools, to round us up in secret detention camps, or to murder us at their ruler’s whim? When they have all the big guns and feverish paramilitary thugs willing to do their bidding, violent resistance is futile, and will only make everything worse for everyone. It will only give them fodder for their hateful Fox News propaganda, labeling us all as “terrorists” and authorizing massive, bloody purges of all who oppose their king.
We therefore need to be more subtle than that. So here is what I suggest for fellow patriots of our lost country, if King Donald ascends to his throne in November:
Satyagraha. This was the word that Mahatma Gandhi and his followers coined to describe their nonviolent revolution against British colonial rule, first in South Africa, and then in India itself. Gandhi himself defined Satyagraha (which literally means “adherence to truth”) as “nonviolent noncooperation with evil.” It is based on three cardinal foundations, as Gandhi instructed: Ahimsa (doing no harm); Satya (resolutely speaking truth to power, regardless of consequences), and Swaraj (self-reliance, and if necessary, self-rule, or creating our own institutions of governance in the shadow of tyranny). This spiritually grounded method was adapted, with varying degrees of success, across many other cultures throughout the Twentieth Century, inspiring charismatic leaders of nonviolent resistance such as Martin Luther King in the US, Lech Walesa in Poland, Vaclav Havel in Czechia, Nelson Mandela in South Africa, and Wangari Maathai in Kenya, as well as inspiring recent practitioners like Thich Nhat Hanh in Vietnam, the Dalai Lama for Tibet, and Vandana Shiva in India. The three characteristics of any action taken in the spirit of Satyagraha are that it must be mindful, strategic, and relentless. Let’s look at these characteristics, as they reflect the three foundations of Satyagraha in theory and practice.
Mindful…
Gandhi, King, and all other great Satyagrahis all repeatedly emphasize the importance of swaraj, one translation of which is “self-control,” as the foundation of Satyagraha practice — regardless of which religious tradition nurtured them — Hindu for Gandhi; Roman Catholic for Walesa, the Black (Protestant) Christian Church for King, Buddhism for the Dalai Lama and Thich Nhat Hanh, and even secular Marxist and/or traditional African wisdom for Mandela and Wangari Maathai. King, for example, cites four essential steps in any successful campaign of nonviolent resistance: investigation, negotiation, self-purification, and direct action, the latter two steps initiated by the failure of the previous two to resolve the injustice. He insisted, moreover, that self-purification — the practice of mindfulness as understood within his own Christian tradition — is an essential prerequisite to organizing any form of nonviolent direct action (i.e. strikes, boycotts, mass demonstrations, civil disobedience, etc.)
Why is this? Very simple: hatred breeds reciprocal hatred, and violence breeds counter-violence. This happens in every war, every violent struggle: as time goes on, they tend to get worse and worse — more bloody, more vindictive, more brutal, so that the “winners” have no choice to become oppressors of the “losers” if they wish to retain power. Mindfulness, then, refers in all these traditions to the exacting discipline of breathing, observing, and letting go, (and thereby, for Christians and other monotheists, “letting God…”) whenever a violent emotion — rage, hatred, or (with advanced practice) even fear or resentment arises, so that you can respond to hateful or violent provocation with equanimity, moral clarity, and patience, and — as Dr. King once put it, “loving your enemy, even if you don’t like him.” It is no accident, therefore, that all these great pioneers of Satyagraha maintained, within their own traditions, a robust and ongoing spiritual practice, and taught these mind-training techniques to their followers as well. They knew that the minute they abandoned mindfulness and give in to rage or hatred, they would become indistinguishable from their enemies, and more vulnerable as well.
This practice of mind training is extremely difficult, and requires ongoing inspiration and practice, especially in the face of political turmoil. For this reason, successful Satyagraha campaigns have always required charismatic leaders of extraordinary moral character and self-discipline, such as Gandhi, King, Mandela, and Thich Nhat Hanh. We can all continue to look to these great souls for inspiration in our upcoming struggle against domestic fascism in the (former) United States of America.
Many, of course, have criticized Gandhi and his followers as ineffective, because they eschewed violence. They love to ask questions like “if someone were attacking your wife and children, would you just stand there and ask him politely to stop?” Gandhi, however, anticipated this objection, by constantly drawing a sharp distinction between passivity and nonviolence, on one hand, and between violence and self-defense on the other. He vehemently condemned any form of cowardice, arguing that true nonviolence requires even more courage than violence, and if people lack that courage, it is better to be violent than cowardly. In response to the above challenge, therefore, Gandhi would probably say that he would do whatever was necessary to protect his family from a violent aggressor, even if that requires killing the aggressor. The important distinction he made was between acting in immediate self-defense and acting out of hatred or spite. But he was likely to reject any argument that “the best defense is a good offense.” Such attitudes can lead only to endless war and bloodshed. Rather, the Satyagrahi follows tactics analogous to various martial arts traditions throughout the Far East, as summed up by the oft-repeated paradoxical proverbs of Lao Tzu: “Yield and overcome; bend and be straight…”
Strategic…
The word “strategic” derives from the Greek word strategos, meaning “general” or military leader. And this is appropriate, for Gandhi always characterized Satyagraha as a form of warfare, although the ultimate goal is to win over one’s enemy, rather than to destroy them. So strategic planning is essential to any Satyagraha campaign, and this entails maximizing publicity for any planned boycott or act of civil disobedience, and continually engaging the media and garnering favorable publicity, in order to win over adherents to one’s cause. This is why actions like Gandhi’s march to the sea in response to the British control and taxation of the salt trade was successful, for he mobilized thousands of people to join him as he marched through each village, and knelt symbolically to taste the sea salt. Similarly, King could not have mobilized Congress to pass sweeping civil rights legislation without his massively publicized March on Washington, culminating in his iconic “I Have a Dream” oration, after many other publicity-building mass actions, both in the South and throughout the rest of the country.
Conversely, a pointless act of civil disobedience, such as occupying a dean’s office, simply to feel good about getting arrested (as often happens on college campuses) is frivolous because it seldom gains any sympathetic press coverage or public attention. So any such act of defiance against illegitimate authority must be well planned in advance for maximum sympathetic publicity; otherwise, (as my father once told me during the Vietnam protests of the early 70s), “if you want to be a martyr, don’t be surprised if you are a martyr.”
One excellent source for a comprehensive listing of useful acts of defiance against tyrannical regimes can be found in the handbook by political scientist Gene Sharp entitled From Dictatorship to Democracy, which is essential reading for anyone engaging in a Satyagraha campaign. Fortunately, this book is available for free download from the Albert Einstein Institution. Another essential reading for Satyagraha study groups is Thomas Merton’s brief anthology of quotes from Gandhi, entitled Gandhi on Nonviolence.
Relentless…
Outright war is attractive, especially to tyrants, because with effective planning, military buildup, and sufficient firepower, they can quickly subjugate or destroy opposition, leading to successful conquest. In the first two and a half years of World War II, Hitler quickly overran Poland; then many other European nations, even France, succumbed fairly rapidly to the overwhelming power of Hitler’s mobile armies.
But Satyagraha campaigns have no such luxury of a quick or decisive victory. Gandhi, for example, began his nonviolent campaign against discriminatory laws for Indians in South Africa in 1906, but was not successful until 1915. After he returned to India to launch his Satyagraha campaign against British Colonial rule, he did not succeed until 1947 — the year before his assassination. Similarly, Mandela had to spend 27 years in prison for treason before his lifelong campaign against Apartheid finally succeeded and he was elected the first President of a free South Africa.
So a quick victory is generally not an option for a Satyagraha campaign. But on the other hand, as Gandhi constantly maintained, there is no such thing as defeat for a Satyagrahi — only setbacks. Truth, he maintained, is indestructible. For this reason, the third characteristic of any Satyagraha campaign is relentlessness — a determination never to give up, regardless of success or failure. As Martin Luther King, Jr. put it, “The arc of the universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” Let us all vow, in the spirit of our own Declaration of Independence, to defy and resist Trumpian tyranny and restore democracy and the rule of law — mindfully, strategically, and relentlessly.