Mark Engler and Paul Engler write:

In the wake of two horrifying killings of legal observers in Minnesota, on top of the abduction of countless immigrant community members, the country has reached a turning point. Backlash against ICE’s lawlessness and aggression has reverberated so loudly that even Trump has heard it. But the effects on ordinary Americans contemplating what they would do if they lived in Minneapolis or St Paul is perhaps even more profound.

The extraordinary level of grassroots solidarity and creative resistance in anti-ICE protests in Minnesota has given people a new appreciation for the power that mass non-cooperation can have in resisting the Trump administration’s drive toward authoritarianism. And it has created an awareness of why such action is clearly needed.

Early in Trump’s second term, an array of mainstream critics expressed skepticism about the value of continued protests in the streets. They invested their faith in institutions such as Congress and the courts. But as these institutions – along with law firms, universities and the business community – have each caved in to the administration’s demands and proven themselves unwilling to catalyze an ardent defense of democracy, it has been left to the people themselves to do this essential work.

The Twin Cities were not the first to stand up. We have seen robust resistance in Chicago, Los Angeles, Charlotte, Washington DC, and other metropolitan areas previously targeted by ICE or occupied by federal troops. In the past year, there have been huge No Kings marches and coordinated consumer actions such as Tesla Takedown. But Minnesota has raised the stakes and expanded public awareness of what a community-wide refusal to submit can look like.

As more people consider joining in such acts of refusal, it is important to recognize that they can build on a rich history of past action. While popular revolt is often treated as wholly spontaneous and emotional, there is a whole body of study exploring how mass protest can be deployed in a deliberate and strategic manner – a field with rich insights that new participants can draw from today.

A decade ago, we wrote a book called This Is An Uprising, about the evolution of the theory and practice of nonviolent direct action over the past 100 years. More recently, in preparing a new and expanded 10th anniversary edition, we reflected on how the field known as “civil resistance” has changed since the Barack Obama era. This meant examining how the craft of mass mobilization has become ever more important in the face of growing tyranny, in the US and beyond.

Today, we need democratic uprisings that are bold enough to confront the scale of the crisis we now face and strategic enough to outmaneuver the systems that created it. For this reason, looking at lessons from the field of civil resistance is vital. [Continue reading…]