Participation is our biggest advantage in the fight against authoritarianism

This article Participation is our biggest advantage in the fight against authoritarianism was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.

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This is part of a series of interviews with experienced organizers and movement thinkers on ways to defend and expand democracy amidst the rising authoritarian tide globally.

For more than 40 years, Scot Nakagawa has served as an organizer, political strategist and social movement analyst in the struggle against authoritarianism. A movement veteran, Nakagawa got his start in Oregon in the late 1980s, where he worked on anti-racist and LGBTQ+ organizing, drawing not only parallels between the threats communities were facing but also the potential organizing solutions. 

In the decades since, Nakagawa has worked with many organizations, including the Coalition for Human Dignity, the National Anti-Klan Network, the National LGBTQ Task Force and ChangeLab. He currently serves as co-director of the 22nd Century Initiative, a national strategy and action center he co-founded to help build widespread opposition to authoritarian movements and ideas. He also writes The Anti-Authoritarian Playbook newsletter and is co-host of the Anti-Authoritarian Podcast. 

I recently spoke to Nakagawa about organizing amid political violence, the lessons we can learn from anti-authoritarian movements abroad, and the importance of taking a long-term view when it comes  to building and sustaining an inclusive, multiracial democracy.  

In the aftermath of the attempted assassination of Donald Trump, you were part of a teach-in on political violence. Does it seem like people are more interested in getting trained and prepared to make political violence backfire?

We’ve gotten a tremendous amount of response to our political violence program, and I think that I’m seeing a really important pivot out there. Three or four years ago, I would have discussions with dozens of social justice activists in which they would say that this kind of violence is not their issue because it’s being driven by authoritarians, which is true. And because they are often the targets of it, someone else needs to step up and be the champion here. 

Now, people are recognizing that confronting political violence is a critical part of the struggle. We must be a part of that. It is built in and therefore must be addressed. No matter what issues we aspire to, no matter what we hope to achieve, we have to deal with political violence. It may come from the state, it may come from various different vigilante groups, but it will come — and we need to be prepared for it. 

What does that preparation look like?

The main thing is to get out of this “us and them” mentality. Campaigns tend to encourage us to think that way because campaigns are meant to polarize us, right? That’s the whole point. And polarization is not necessarily bad. It can be very good for democracy if people polarize conditions in ways that help us see problems of injustice more clearly and understand where the popular vote lies around particular issues. But what we need to do here is to start thinking about our work in the context of mutual interdependence. What I do affects you. What you do affects me. It’s all relational, and it means we have way more power than I think a lot of people think we do — each of us individually and all of us collectively. I think that we often don’t recognize how the acts that we undertake are interpreted by those who are most vulnerable to recruitment by the authoritarian factions. 

I think one of the things to avoid is shame. Shame is a powerful, radicalizing force — and a trigger of violence. We should recognize that all of us who are political people, who make our lives trying to create political change, can trace our stories back and find moments of humiliation that help to radicalize us and push us into action. I think we need to recognize that broadly. It’s not just an “us and them” problem, it’s an everyone problem. 

We need to understand that the reason there is a revolutionary authoritarian faction developing in the United States is because of extraordinary alienation on the part of those people and the shame that alienation breeds. It is also the reason why gender and misogyny, in particular, are such important triggers of political violence. These are themes that repeat themselves over and over again. We need to be on top of it, aware of it and clear that we do not want to take part in those kinds of dynamics. 

Any other advice regarding political violence, particularly in the wake of the shooting?

People also need to avoid conspiracy theories — and they need to avoid scaring people and doing the job of authoritarians for them. Political violence is a key strategy of authoritarians because it scares people, right? It scares people out of participating in the political system, and the fewer people who participate in the political system, the more likely it is that minority groups like these authoritarians can take over. So keep an eye on the participation advantage as one of the things we’re trying to build from election to election and try to increase it by turning out as many people to vote as possible. 

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At the same time, we also need to recognize that fear is a powerful suppressor of protest and organizing — so we can’t allow ourselves to lean too heavily on scare tactics to get people to recognize the threat that they are facing. Instead, we need to inspire people to recognize that political participation does actually make a difference and is, in the end, the solution. 

Are there lessons from previous movements overcoming political polarization that you think are good lessons for today?

My grandparents were involved in the Hawaiian Sugar Strike of 1946. They were immigrant workers. They did not speak English. They were disenfranchised. There was no route to political power for them. At the time, a white supremacist oligarchy modeled after Jim Crow was in charge of the territory of Hawaii, ensuring that, for at least three generations, those circumstances would continue. As a result of World War II, the Masters and Servants Act was shut down. That meant Hawaii was unable to import laborers from Asia to take the place of people in the fields as replacement workers — and Japanese Americans in Hawaii, in particular, were saved from internment. 

They saw that opportunity and they took it. They brought in the ILWU, organized a union and brought that white supremacist oligarchy to its knees, forcing it to negotiate. That all occurred because people were able to keep their heads up and look for opportunities, even in the most difficult circumstances you could imagine. They went to work in the fields with men on horseback with whips supervising them. It did not feel as if organizing could overcome the power of the plantation, but they were able to do it. So Hawaii went from being basically a plantation state based on Jim Crow to being the most liberal state in the United States. That is largely the legacy of the organizing that happened in those years, changing the political relations in the state, as well as the culture. So even in the darkest moments, there’s always possibility. We just have to keep our eyes open and be hopeful enough to see them. 

What about from your early work in the LGBTQ+ movement? Any lessons on organizing while facing threats and violence?

In 1992, the Oregon Citizen Alliance, put Ballot Measure 9 on the Oregon ballot. The measure was an attempt to amend the Oregon Constitution to have LGBTQ people named abnormal, wrong, unnatural and perverse within the Constitution — and make us basically the legal equivalent of child molesters. The early polling showed that we did not have a significant advantage. So we needed to get organized, and we did very quickly. 

There were many lessons that came from that. One was that — because of the environment created around the ballot measure — political violence rose quite dramatically. Two people actually died in a firebombing incident that year. We know of many other incidents of extraordinary violence that happened that year largely in the name of this ballot measure. We set up something called the Homophobic Violence Documentation Project that referred people to services, but also documented their stories and then got their permission to share them with the public. Through that, we were able to illustrate to the public what bigotry looks like in its worst expressions. That created political space for many people to say, “Well, I’m not sure if I agree with the so-called ‘gay agenda,’ but I disagree that this is how you go about trying to stop it.”

It also catalyzed a kind of huge upsurge in volunteerism, donations and visibility in the media — not just in Oregon, but across the country. We had nine consecutive featured editorials in the New York Times to oppose Ballot Measure 9. That kind of national media visibility then opened up fundraising all over the United States, which allowed us to be able to develop the kind of war chest that was necessary to defeat them on election day. 

All of those things happened because of the way in which we reacted to the political violence we were facing. We didn’t back down, but we did make the public aware of it. We humanized the target and redeemed them as being other than what they were being characterized as by our opponents, and we exposed the injustice, causing many people to be able to relate to the LGBTQ community. That was a huge change, an earth-shaking moment in Oregon around LGBTQ identity. We, finally, were able to consolidate a majority in Oregon in support of LGBTQ civil rights protection through that campaign. 

What can organizers in the United States learn from others around the world who have been defending democracy and resisting authoritarianism? 

According to one democracy watchdog organization, over 70 percent of the people of the world are governed by authoritarians — and that is the result of year over year gains, over a 40 year period at this point. I am regularly reminded when I hear stories of people who are struggling in places like Argentina, Brazil, Myanmar, Thailand and the Philippines that — had we been paying attention to what was happening in those places, as if we were part of a global community that would be affected by those changes — we would be far ahead of where we are now. So one thing I would encourage people to do is to think about how what’s happening here in the United States fits within what’s happening in the world. 

There are networks out there of people in Latin America, in Southeast Asia, in Europe, who are working together and learning from one another. People from the U.S. have not been as present in those networks and should be. But I think the key lessons we’re learning all basically follow the same logic being shared with us by civil resistance activists in the United States. 

As a principle, people can make up their own minds about how they will or won’t defend themselves, but nonviolence is a very effective political strategy and nonviolent movements succeed more often than those that deploy violence. The reason for that is largely because nonviolent movements have a built-in participation advantage. When violence starts to interrupt, protest becomes the milieu of those with the highest risk tolerance — and that’s not a whole lot of people. I have a friend who sometimes reminds me when I get ahead of myself that most people, when there’s a fire somewhere, run away from it. Only certain people run to the fire thinking, “What can I do with my little glass of water?” We’re a really unusual personality type. Most people are not like that. So you can’t allow that personality type to become the dominant one because otherwise it will repel people. You need to assemble majorities. 

The other thing is promoting diversity within our movements, centering women’s leadership, and making movements not all about doom and gloom. The movements that are succeeding are built on the idea of community and joy and possibility and hope. 

Are there any good examples of movements doing this?

The Thai people are a really good example of this. There have been, I believe, 13 coups in about 30 years in Thailand. So you can imagine the exhaustion that pro-democracy activists must face. They were able to win some seats in government a couple election cycles ago through the Move Forward Party, but then that party was banned and made illegal — so they had to form another party. They came up with a different party name, they fought again and they won even more seats in government. In fact, it got to the point where they had a majority, and they still are being pushed out again by the junta, which controls the Senate. 

When I asked leaders of that movement how they would respond to the fact that they had won seats in government the first time, the woman who I was speaking with said, “We will try to do as much good as we can until the junta pushes us out.” Then, the second time, another woman I spoke with said that they’re just going to come back again and next time, they believe they will win because they’ve learned from the mistakes of the past. They see how they built momentum and where it could be built even further and believe that they will be able to organize a wave election so big that they will finally win. That kind of enthusiasm makes a huge difference. It gets echoed throughout their campaigns and has kept that base active and moving for a very long time now and is engaging young people in massive numbers. Those are all the kinds of things that we need. 

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As another example, for most of the last 50 years or so, the Philippines has lived under a super authoritarian government. Philippine activists have responded to their circumstances by coming up with a multi-year plan that anticipates when the base for the authoritarian government they have in place will start to age out and younger people will take control. At that point, they will reach out to young people in order to organize them to be part of a pro-democracy push. So they’re thinking not just about the next election and the one after that, but about multiple elections into the future and they’re really digging in and thinking, “What I do today will result in this in five years, which will result in this in another 10 years,” such that when the time comes, they’ll be in a really competitive position, if not in the majority. 

That kind of thinking comes out of places where people have lived under repressive governments for a long time. Here in the United States, when we think about that, we should think about people in conservative rural communities and especially people in the South, which has been, basically the mother of all authoritarian reasoning and politics in the United States. 

What do you think about the renewed energy for this election since President Biden stepped aside? Is it something movements can tap into as we move forward?

People allowed themselves to become quite scared of what potentially could happen in this election, and simply having that tension relieved has served as an injection of energy. We need to continue to build on that energy by being hopeful.

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The political parties are going to make the case that one or the other side is demonic and bad and about to destroy all that we love. The rest of us should be looking at what it is that people aspire to and recognize that this is a moment for us to start to actually lift up those things because we’ve seen from the change of guard in one of our two major parties, how small things can lead to changes and shift the momentum really dramatically. So stay focused on the positive, keep people open to the possibility that anything can happen and remind people regularly that everything we do now will make up the history of the future. All the small acts, all of the big acts, all will contribute to the future that we are looking for. 

What are some of the ways, such as the role of art, that movements can build and sustain hope while organizing?

People think of art and culture as ways of decorating movements, but art is actually really important to us. It’s a measure of our free expression, and art can ignite the imagination in ways that ordinary discourse can’t. I always think that people learn better from demonstration than discourse. When I think of that, I think about movies, theater, performance art, lots of different things that can happen within those creative mediums that take us beyond words and allow us to see and feel what it could be like to experience freedom or repression or whatever it happens to be. So we should really be making room for art in our movements. But we should also remember that works of art are often the last things to survive authoritarian takeover. When they do, they serve as symbols of resistance, as reminders of what we were and what we could be again. For that reason they are also incredibly important. 

People tend to go along with majorities. If we say the majority of people are becoming hateful, people tend to become more hateful, for instance. Spreading messages of hope can make people more hopeful. And hope is the cure to nihilism, and nihilism is the fuel of authoritarianism. So we need to be hopeful — and we need to be hopeful in ways that are concrete and not just about flowery language and lovely platitudes. We need to actually talk about what can be achieved. 

At the same time as there may be a renewed sense of optimism for this election, there’s also the sentiment that every four years voters are asked to choose between the lesser of two evils. How can organizers help mobilize voters who feel that way? 

Liberals have been demanding that we vote for the lesser of two evils for a long time now and many arguments have been made to get us to do that. I think what we need to understand is what we’re choosing here. We’re choosing between two different approaches to government, and the approach to government that serves us best — for those of us who believe in democracy and are struggling for it — is the form of government that allows for free expression, that allows us to organize legally, that protects the right to protest and that’s what we need to fight again another day. 

So whoever the candidates are that you’re facing and whether or not you find any of those choices satisfying, you need to ask yourself the question: If I don’t like any of what I’ve been given to choose from, what do I need to do in order to change that? And in order to change that, we need to be able to protest, to organize, to have a free press, to have all the kinds of democratic freedoms that are necessary for people power to make a real difference. So, yes, the policies matter, but ultimately what’s on the line is whether or not we actually have the right to demand changes in policies that govern us. 

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How does the knowledge about Project 2025 potentially impact organizing before and after the election?

Even now, not enough people know about Project 2025. That’s been really clear to me at a couple of gatherings I was at recently where people were not entirely aware that it’s happening. The word needs to get out. But the other thing is that people say, “This is what it would look like under an authoritarian administration.” I think we should say “This is what it could look like.” I can’t imagine a reality in which all those goals could be achieved easily. I mean, the bureaucracies will resist. They’re not tooled for that. People don’t have that kind of expertise. There’s so much that needs to happen, so we will have time. There might be things they’re able to do right away, but I don’t think we should lose hope. People are organizing under authoritarian governments all over the world. They’re doing so publicly. They’re able to keep alive the ideas, the dream of democracy in those places through all the work that they’re doing because they just don’t give up and they recognize that anything is possible. We make history, but we do not control it. 

How do we make and measure progress under an authoritarian government — in this case, a potential second Trump term?

There are so many nonprofits in the United States, and the 501c3 and c4 nonprofit has become kind of the base for social justice organizing and pro-democracy organizing in the United States. It is a key strategy, but we need to be able to think beyond them and anticipate the possibility that we’ll have to organize differently. 

In Nicaragua, for example, there are activists who have offshored their nonprofits to Costa Rica to put them under different government scrutiny. So they’re operating out of a different jurisdiction. There are ways in which we can engage with faith communities in order to be able to house the work that we need to be involved in. There are lots of other alternatives, and we should be thinking about those actively all the time. 

The 501c3 and c4 can do some things and not others. They can be very limiting, not just in how they limit political speech and activity, but also just in the corporate structures that they demand of us. In times like this, when you need to be extremely nimble, they can be obstacles to taking the kind of risks that we need to take. So people should be thinking about the spaces across and between nonprofit organizations as important territories to be organizing in.

Ahead of the election, what’s one way we could be organizing more strategically?

One important point of strategy is to recognize that we are about to face what is likely to be a long and protracted struggle. This election will be one inflection point, a very important one in that longer process, but we should not put all of our eggs in one basket. 

In other words, we shouldn’t think of our struggle as a finite game, but an infinite game in which there will be many different opportunities to engage. We should be learning how to do better from our failures and our successes. Power may go back and forth over that period of time, over the years ahead of us, so don’t despair too much about whatever happens in the next couple months. Stay hopeful, stay engaged, and recognize that even if the pro-democracy movement loses some ground in this election year, we could also win.

This article Participation is our biggest advantage in the fight against authoritarianism was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.

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