The defeat of Donald Trump in the U.S. election marks another significant victory for nonviolent resisters over those who would hold on to power.  In the face of strategies of voter suppression and outright disenfranchisement of voters of color, the U.S. voter turnout was the largest in history.  For many U.S. citizens, the election will be remembered as the only national election in which the current administration orchestrated a campaign to subvert and ultimately reject the outcome. 

From jeopardizing the safety of mail-in absentee ballots to pressuring Republican election commissioners to withhold or oppose certification of the results, the subversion of the voting began early and continued after the Biden win had been declared.  Two weeks after the election, the President hosted at the White House the two white commissioners in Detroit, an 80 per cent African American city, in an effort to discredit the voting in the swing state of Michigan.   

That Trump and the Republicans failed can be attributed primarily to unprecedented participation in the election by persons of  color and the impact of voter registration drives especially in Georgia. A southern State which a Democratic presidential candidate had not won since 1992 went for Biden and will determine who holds a Senate majority with their run off voting for their two allotted Senators in January.  Georgia is a prime example of effective nonviolent resistance to voter suppression and other Republican efforts to rig the election.

We can now include the United States in the list of countries where nonviolent civil resistance has protected the democratically expressed will of the people.  Also in 2020, massive demonstrations in Malawi in southern Africa denied an incumbent president’s third term.  The election there followed the ruling by the nation’s highest court that the 2019 announced results defied credibility and demanded a rerun of the voting. Multiple examples of the defense of people’s rule by movements of civil resistance have attracted the attention of more political scientists in the U.S. and elsewhere.

A post-election article in The New Yorker titled “How to Stop a Power Grab” focused on the work of Harvard political scientist Erica Chenoweth. In her 2011 book Why Civil Resistance Works Chenoweth and co author Maria Stephan analyze how in the last century nonviolent campaigns of resistance proved more than twice as effective as those employing violence in achieving their goals.  A memorable example cited by the two authors is the mass organizing of protests which rule brought the Shah of Iran’s regime to an end in 1979

Apart from the effective mobilization of voters in the U.S., we expect to experience more change resulting from the Black Lives Matter nonviolent protests in cities across the nation in 2020.  Reforms in oversight of policing and in budgeting for public safety and mental health are among the topics prioritized now in many City Councils. Despite the administration’s attempts to blame outbreaks of violence on protestors, evidence has emerged that counter-protestors, many of them heavily armed white supremacists, provoked the violence and any looting that occurred.  This year of 2020 highlights then a major shift from expressing rage and opposition by endorsement and practice of violent practices such as those the U.S. and Europe experienced in the 1960’s and 70’s to the recognition and embrace of nonviolent resistance in this nation today.

U.S. citizens, young and old, intent on helping create a more just, equitable economic order and further democracy are intent on applying nonviolent tactics in making change possible.  This is cause for celebration and gratitude among those who will always lament the suppression of the movements for change fifty years ago which succumbed to and foundered on their resort to violence.  Armed with the experience of the Gandhian movement for Indian independence, the civil rights gains of nonviolent protestors in the 60’s and  multiple nonviolent social change achievements of the last century, change agents and activists today represent a “force more powerful” than the armies of empire and autocracy.

So who holds now “the spiritual atom bomb”? In 1965 Chinese Defense Minister Lin Piao coined the phrase in an article in the Chinese Communist Party newspaper when he declared “the spiritual atom bomb that the revolutionary people possess is a far more powerful and useful weapon than the physical atom bomb.” In an essay entitled “Who Has the Spiritual Atom Bomb?” Rev. A.J. Muste envisions U.S. unilateral disarmament as the answer to Piao’s advocacy of violence and the world’s acceptance that “power comes out of the barrel of a gun”.  With ample evidence provided in this year’s political developments “revolutionary people” in the U.S. know mass nonviolent resistance will represent the “spiritual atom bomb” for years to come.

Note:  For more on A.J. Muste, the organizer of nonviolent resistance protests from the era of WWI through the Vietnam War, see this website’s 2020 blogs of March 3, April 1 and April 21.