This past week, a Republican supermajority voted to expel two young African American men from the Tennessee legislature; a third Democrat – who happens to be white and female – only narrowly escaped this punishment. The charge? The lawmakers, who are now being called “the Tennessee Three”, had participated in a protest against the GOP’s cynical inaction after the elementary school shooting in Nashville on 27 March.
According to Republicans, using bullhorns breached the “decorum” of the legislature. This de facto disfranchisement demonstrates yet again that the problem with the GOP is not one lone demagogue (who may or may not be consumed by lawsuits), but a commitment by plenty of its members to authoritarianism at federal, state and local levels.
What’s more, Republicans, in a typical form of projection, now present themselves as defenders of democracy, and Democrats as a source of “disorder” and “dishonor” for sacred political institutions. They even draw a parallel between peaceful protest and the January 6 insurrection. We must not fall for this false equivalence; and we must remember that even measures beyond ordinary protest – namely civil, which is to say peaceful, disobedience – can be legitimate if they serve democratic ends.
US states have long functioned as laboratories for autocratic measures, be it vote suppression or gerrymandering. Ron DeSantis and other pioneers of what scholars call autocratic legalism are experimenting in state assemblies to see how they can entirely disempower their opponents through measures that violate the spirit of democracy, but are passed in procedurally correct ways.
This happens even in situations where Republicans already have supermajorities and Democrats appear to be condemned to griping from the sidelines. In Oklahoma, a Black, Muslim and non-binary representative, Mauree Turner, was censured and relieved of committee assignments by the GOP-controlled legislature after a transgender activist found refuge in their office. Such measures obviously have a chilling effect; they also send a not-too-subtle signal of what kind of minorities Republicans deem dangerous.
Of course, as we have learned the hard way in recent years, knowing how to lose matters greatly in a democracy. Rightwing politicians will charge that protesters against outcomes they don’t like are simply sore losers who throw “temper tantrums”, as the Tennessee GOP sponsor of the expulsion measures put it; maybe not insurrectionists, but, ultimately, in the same category as the January 6 rioters. The right thus turns the charge habitually levelled against Trump and his autocratizer allies around: it is the “woke mob” that is breaking both formal and informal norms on which democracy ultimately depends.
This is the politics of false equivalence. For one thing, losers in a democracy do of course remain free to criticize the outcome; all the losers are asked to do is put up with the results, not to shut up about the results. And, at the risk of stating the obvious: a noisy protest is not the same as trying to hang the vice-president and kill the speaker of the House. In situations, however, where results evidently do not reflect what majorities actually want, it is also perfectly legitimate to dramatize this fact in a peaceful manner. After all, the reason why the US remains a country where civilians can brandish assault rifles is not due to some age-old American tradition, nor to the second amendment (which – do we really need a reminder? – regulates militias and does not license individuals to acquire technology made for mass shootings). Rather, it is the multiple veto points that allow well-resourced minorities to block legislation which, in less dysfunctional democracies, would long have long been pushed through. It is not protesters who cause “disorder” and “dishonor” here; it is the cynical defenders of a long-discredited status quo.
In the face of such a tyranny of the minority, what some legal scholars call a distinctly democratic form of disobedience – which is to say, peaceful and primarily symbolic, lawbreaking – can be justified. The idea is different from the kind of peaceful law-breaking associated with the civil rights movement; the latter was alerting majorities to a fundamental injustice which absolutely had to be rectified. Democratic disobedience, by contrast, gives leeway for people to decide what they consider legitimate outcomes – but it has to be genuine majorities who make the call, as opposed to special interest groups, or, for that matter, justices apparently beholden to such groups.
Democracy is not about decorum or, as the communitarian kitsch endlessly repeated in our age has it, “civility”. Its purpose is to help us deal with disagreements and divisions; the latter will not magically heal if we just keep our voices down or refrain from grabbing bullhorns. Those targeted by the radical right now dominant in many GOP-controlled state legislatures have every reason to make what John Lewis famously called “good trouble, necessary trouble”.
