Civil Disobedience and Democracy

As my last few posts indicate, I have been reading A Force More Powerful, a book describing the history of how non-violent conflict has been applied as a political strategy in several situations.  I think some thought ought to be put into determining when it is appropriate to use various forms of non-violent conflict.  I am not trying to argue about when it should be legal to use non-violent conflict, but when it is moral to do so.

One of the blogs that I regularly read covered the subject of civil disobedience.  Basically he argues that this must involve openly breaking the law as a form of political protest.  It should be civil in that it doesn't involve violence or the destruction of other people's property.  One point that he made was that people who engage in this type of protest must allow themselves to be arrested and will then undergo a trial by jury.

The book covers forms of non-violent conflict that go beyond civil disobedience.  I think that some of these are ones that most would acknowledge are moral.  For example, hiding Jews from the Nazis and transporting them to another country.  This involves secretly flouting the law.  I would say that when you have a liberal democracy, by which I mean a government that has free speech and elections, that this sort of behavior cannot be seen as moral.

However, there might be some exception to this.  Take the case of the Japanese internment.  Would we consider it moral to hide Japanese in some parts of the U.S. in order to flout a law that is almost universally acknowledged to be immoral?  I suspect that this would be considered moral by most people.  Do you think we would think about this issue differently if it turned out that a sizable number of these Japanese Americans were indeed involved in espionage or sabotage?  We need to rely on principles.  We cannot simply judge actions based on how they happened to turn out.

I suppose that part of the difference in the way that we see cases like these are what would be the consequence of allowing our disobedience to be known.  Obviously it would do no good to conceal Jews or Japanese from the government and then let this action be known by both the government and the general public at least for the Jews or Japanese involved.  Of course it would be a way of making a political statement, but if you wanted to do that you would need to inform the Jews or Japanese about what you had in mind.

I don't want to imply that they internment of Japanese during WWII and the Nazi's treatment of the Jews have the same moral status.  I am only pointing out similarities between the two cases.  I suppose the basis on which we must make this determination is to what extent do we have reason to believe that the basic rights of the people in question will be violated.

As another case, I want to consider the recent conflict in Wisconsin.  As I see it the Democrats were concerned that a bill that the Republicans were likely to pass would unduly restrict the rights of government workers to collectively bargain.  Whether or not they have this right goes beyond the scope of this post.  What I want to examine is which actions of the Democrats were just in protesting this action.

First the Democrats decided to leave the capitol and even the state so that quorum calls would fail and the measure couldn't pass.  I understand that this is a common way of conducting legislative business in Wisconsin.  Each legislative body must set its own rules.  If they set rules where this is an effective form of blocking legislation that is available for supporters of any political position, then I suppose this is legitimate.

Next they staged a protest around the capitol.  This, too is legitimate, so long as they are not too disruptive.  I would suggest that allowing any group of people to stage a protest that is so loud that the legislature cannot function, we need to take steps to deal with this.  There will always be enough people who oppose any action that the government might take to stage a disruptive protest that would shut down the legislature.  The legislature needs to function.

I would caution here that the rules that we have for dealing with this must be even handed and content neutral.  We cannot take different actions based on the content of the political point of view that the protesters are expressing.  That would be unfair.

Then the Republicans took some vote that went in their favor.  I don't really know if this was legitimate.  I suppose the courts will have to decide.  This hinges on procedural points on how legislative business is done in Wisconsin that go beyond my knowledge.  I would have to say that all of these actions were done publicly and none of them involved the destruction of property.

Now let's consider some other forms of protest.  Sometimes people have blocked traffic in order to protest a war or free trade.  On the latter point I am not sympathetic.  I support free trade.  I don't  regard blocking traffic as a legitimate form of political protest.  The police should deal with this problem the same way they would deal with any other instance of jaywalking.  This form of political protest does nothing to make the conduct of war more difficult and produces an inconvenience to people who do not necessarily support the war.

Another step that some people who oppose free trade have taken is to prevent people from entering buildings where free trade agreements were being negotiated.  This falls under the same category of blocking legislative business.  I believe that government should be able to function.  The minority has a right to be heard, but the majority must prevail.  The majority has expressed its opinion in electing the government that wants to form free trade agreements.  However, my objection here may be clouded by the fact that I'm not sympathetic to their cause.

What each of us should ask ourselves is if there is a political tactic that we want to use, would we consider it appropriate if we didn't support the cause.  If you support restrictions on trade and want to disrupt government from making free trade agreements, how would you view it if similar tactics were used by supporters of free trade?  Similarly if the other side uses a tactic that you disapprove of, how would you view things if people on your side used that tactic?

The government has enacted many tariffs and trade barriers that I believed are unjust.  Thus far the opponents of these measures have done nothing more than making speeches and writing papers opposing these measures.  Suppose they went further?  They could engage in civil disobedience, importing goods in violation of the laws and without paying the tariffs in question.  In order for this to be civil disobedience it would need to be done publicly.

Now suppose that they took steps to physically prevent the government from implementing these laws or preventing preventing the legislature from conducting business when it was about to pass such legislation.  I wouldn't see this as just.  I would think that the government would be well within its rights to take action against that sort of thing.