Can conservatives learn from Martin Luther King, Jr.? That’s the thing to ponder as we celebrate the birthday of America’s greatest non-violent protester.
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Dr. King learned his non-violent methods from Mahatma Gandhi, who used non-violent protest to ease the British out of India. Gandhi learned his trade fighting against racist laws in South Africa after he’d returned from studying law in Britain.
Non-violence worked for Gandhi because he knew how the British system worked and because the Brits actually believed in the rule of law. When it came to choosing between the force needed to maintain the Empire in India and the rule of law, the Brits chose law.
In the case of Martin Luther King, the correlation of forces was a little different. The American South was probably willing to use force to maintain its Jim Crow white hegemony. After all, it had worked pretty well for Southern Democrat whites ever since the Republican Party had given up on Reconstruction in the compromise of 1876.
But decent Americans in the North could not deal with the dogs and the fire hoses loosed on peaceful protesters if they appeared on the TV news every night. So the political establishment acted and Jim Crow was no more.
The unspoken question in the mind of every conservative is: Can non-violence work against the liberal hegemon, or do liberals, at last, have no decency? Will it take force to roll back their cruel and unjust big-government system? Or can we conservatives appeal to the better angels of their nature?
The simple answer is: we don’t know, any more than Gandhi knew when he returned to India in 1915 or Martin Luther King knew when he led the Montgomery Bus Boycott in 1955.
The key to success is to use the hard-liners as a foil, just as Gandhi and King did. The Kos Kidz and the MSNBCers are a godsend. They do not care about the hit-back-twice-as-hard Obama tactics and the flagrant violations of law in the Obamacare rollout; they are hardened activists and agree with Lenin that you can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs.
But ordinary nice liberals can be made ashamed of their leaders’ bully-boy tactics. They do not think like political activists; they are just decent people that have not noticed the mailed fist of oppression inside the velvet glove of compassion.
It is our job to strip away the camouflage and the hypocrisies so that nice people cannot avoid seeing the cruelty and the injustice and the corruption of everyday liberalism.
“First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.” Those are the words of Mahatma Gandhi. I’d say that in the epochal conservative struggle for freedom and dignity against the cruelty and corruption of the liberal hegemon, we are right in the middle of stage three.
And there is nothing to fear but fear itself.