Autocracy Watch: Lawfully and non-violently withholding our consent for the attack on America’s governmental fabric

The Situation on Friday,  from Lawfare, urged the impeachment of Judge Emil Bove as soon as a majority in the House of Representatives exists to do it.

Today, my social media feeds are an incoherent melange of stories, some related to one another, some not, some important and meaningful, some emphatically neither. There are tariffs; there’s jobs data and resulting personnel actions; there’s a bit of Sydney Sweeney—of whose good jeans I have now heard; there are Texas Democrats fleeing their state; there are non-Texas Democrats pretending they are up to retaliating against Texas Republicans over redistricting. There’s famine in Gaza. And there’s still a bit of Jeffrey Epstein hanging around.

All of which is to say that it’s a good time to ignore the news and to return to the subject of non-cooperation with The Situation—a matter which I treated back at the beginning of March when I declared that “I don’t know about you, but I am not interested in cooperating any more.”

My point in that column was that we should all figure out ways, lawfully and non-violently, to slow things down, to make society work a little less efficiently, to withhold our consent for the attack on America’s governmental fabric.

I have spent a lot of time since writing this column thinking about what mass non-cooperation with The Situation looks like in practice, and I have been moved that others have gotten in touch with their own thoughts and ideas on the subject. Excellent experiments have taken place.

I have also been reading on the subject and thinking about it conceptually, trying to envision mass action based on highly-distributed forms of non-cooperation that are not destructive, not violent, yet are also more than just holding signs and chanting things. 

I have to say, after studying the problem for a few months, I have not yet come up with a magic bullet.

Let’s consider the pros and cons of a few different forms of non-cooperation:

Denying a quorum to the Texas legislature seems like an excellent form of non-cooperation. It will slow down redistricting in the Lone Star State. It gets a lot of attention. It may spur other actions. And it stands for a larger form of non-cooperation, which others may take up: that is, non-participation in official actions that may require one’s participation to take place at all. It’s great—as far as it goes.

The trouble is that most of us aren’t legislators and thus can’t band together with a few dozen of our colleagues to collectively shut down institutions from which The Situation demands anti-democratic action.

Most of us aren’t in a position to operationalize this particular form of non-cooperation—which is to say that it’s not scalable and can’t be done in a distributed fashion.

Here’s one that can be done in a more distributed fashion: I have exactly no intention of cooperating with ICE in its current roundup of undocumented aliens—and neither, it seems, do a lot of other people, both citizens and officials. What’s more, I would have no hesitation about filming any ICE raid which I might happen to witness and making that public—as many others are doing. 

The non-cooperation of civilian bystanders with these law enforcement activities—some by activists and some by people who just happened to be present—has been a salutary thing, raising a lot of awareness of what “mass deportation” really means. These policies have become increasingly unpopular as more and more people have seen them in action. As long as people are careful not to do more than express their views, take pictures, and film things—not, that is, to dox people or to interfere physically with lawful activity—it strikes me as a constructive form of non-cooperation with a dangerous policy. 

But again, there are limits—and risks to personal safety and liberty. As we’ve all seen, it’s not going to stop what ICE is doing. It’s not going to shame members of Congress into refusing to balloon ICE’s funding. And the administration is actively proud of these videos. It stages this sort of brutality and makes ads out of its own videos.

So again, useful, but not a silver dagger.

Here’s a third area of non-cooperation, one which hits close to home for me: For the first time in my life, there are whole categories of government actions in my field with which I will not assist and upon which I will not advise.

Only a few months ago, I was proud to serve on an advisory board convened by DHS on intelligence matters. I would not serve on such a board today. Similarly, I would not assist on or consult with NSA, FBI, the Defense Department, or the Justice Department on policy matters—all of which I have done proudly in the past under administrations of both parties. It’s not that I don't think that career officials in all of those areas are struggling with hard questions. They are. It’s that I don’t trust the leadership of these agencies to act in an apolitical fashion any more—even, perhaps especially, on national security matters. I don’t trust that my advice will be used for the benefit of the country, rather than for the benefit of The Situation. So I will not cooperate. I will not participate. And in that judgment, I am certainly not alone.

The trouble with this form of non-cooperation is that it is a bit bespoke—precious, even. Pam Bondi and Kash Patel and Tulsi Gabbard don’t want my advice anyway, so announcing that I won’t show up to a party to which I haven’t been invited is striking a bit of a pose. And that’s true even if to the limited extent my point scales. When I say I’m not alone, after all, what I mean is that there are a few hundred, maybe a few thousand people, who are self-consciously not participating in helping the executive branch with national security work. I imagine that there are a bunch more in other fields—fields like public health and climate science. And as the Lord High Executioner might put it, “they’ll none of them be missed.”

Trumpism is, at its core, a war on elites and expertise, so a small handful of elites declaring that they are withholding their expertise is very far from a pressure point; it is threatening The Situation with a good time.

None of this is to criticize the people who are taking these approaches. They all have a place in the mood of non-cooperation that an active citizenry should be contemplating these days.

There may be no single mass act of non-cooperation that everyone can participate in, that is more than momentary, and that paralyzes The Situation. It may be that diversity of non-cooperation is itself an essential part of the mood.

But I keep thinking about it. I keep stewing on it. 

“In this country,” wrote Ralph Waldo Emerson in an essay published in 1844, “we are very vain of our political institutions, which are singular in this, that they sprung, within the memory of living men, from the character and condition of the people, which they still express with sufficient fidelity, — and we ostentatiously prefer them to any other in history.” Emerson was contemptuous of the preference: “But our institutions, though in coincidence with the spirit of the age, have not any exemption from the practical defects which have discredited other forms. Every actual State is corrupt. Good men must not obey the laws too well.”

Eventually, every actual state is corrupt—and the corruption of this one is happening before our eyes. The search for ways to undermine that corruption, to withhold consent, to not participate in it and to not cooperate with it, to not obey its laws too too well, strikes me as an essential part of maintaining goodness.

The Situation continues tomorrow.

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