Ungovernable: Nonviolent Mass Solidarity against Corruption and Despotism

TRANSCEND MEMBERS, 17 Mar 2025

Glen T. Martin, Ph.D. – TRANSCEND Media Service

10 Mar 2025 – Democracy is about human dignity and human rights protected by the just rule of constitutional law. Human rights do not mean that I can do whatever I please regardless of consequences or the well-being of others.  A constitutional democracy is necessarily about the good of the whole. A people committed to their democratic constitution must be a people committed to protecting the human dignity of each and every citizen.

When democracy is under threat, concerned people can and should use the law, the courts, and the constitution in their attempt to protect, restore, and strengthen democracy.  However, when the forces of corruption and repression have taken over the reins of government, then the capacity to use the constitutional system in defense of democracy approaches its limits. The situation begins to revert from one of resistance within the constitutional system to one of revolutionary praxis in defense of human dignity.

Mahatma Gandhi taught us that when the reins of government are in the hands of oppressors, then the alternative for a people is to make themselves ungovernable. Any oppressor requires a limited number of corrupt lieutenants to do his bidding unconditionally.  Under these corrupt lieutenants may be corrupt legislators, judges, and police who see their complicity with the system of domination as being in their self-interest.

Together the repressive forces attempt to use government and the so-called “rule of law” to solidify and execute their corruption. But these groups form only a tiny minority that can only govern the vast majority successfully because of the conformity and apathy of most people to their regime. The first and foremost rule is not to recognize the legitimacy of the tyrant and his lackies. Not apathy, but energetic, coordinated struggle and resistance.

The use of law for repression negates the legitimacy of law. Under these circumstances the “rule of law” claimed by the oppressor becomes illegitimate.  The obligation of citizens to “obey the law” becomes nullified.  Democratic law arises from human dignity, and when laws are constructed to repress and violate dignity, they lose their validity and it becomes the duty of decent people to break, resist, and violate those laws.  Instead of initiating a violent civil war (since war and violence ultimately never solve anything), a people must make themselves ungovernable.

The most admirable behavior at President Trump’s recent address to Congress came from representative Al Green. Despite “decorum,” he called out that travesty for what it was. A few others walked out of that charade in protest. But the majority, whether Democrats or Republicans, showed complicity with that declaration of totalitarian nonsense. To censure Representative Green for his act of resistance, including by some claiming to be on the side of democracy and the Constitution, constituted an obscenity of complicity with totalitarian power. Today, there are only a few voices out there warning that we have entered a crucial time requiring out-of-the-ordinary resistance and action, and they are correct.  What are the implications of this realization that totalitarianism is at the door and what immediate counter-measures are needed now?

There are 23 democratic attorneys general in the US who are using the law to try to stop the totalitarian takeover and destruction of the Constitution.  Their work is excellent and utterly fundamental to resisting the onslaught.  What the totalitarian executive branch is doing does indeed violate our constitutionally legislated laws.  But as things progress from bad to worse (and they will), we also must ask ourselves the question as to when and how the “law” no longer becomes sacrosanct in a totalitarian society.

Trump has blatantly usurped and violated the authority of the legislative branch, which is mandated to control funding. He is in the process of consolidating his power over the legislative branch and is working to threaten and denature the judicial branch as well, eliminating all checks and balances on his power. When laws (or the breaking of constitutional law in the name of false law) become mere instruments of unjust power, with immense cruelty and causing serious harm to persons, then the obligations of citizens to obey the laws is nullified.  To disobey law becomes a moral duty.

Under such circumstances a population must become ungovernable—breaking unjust laws, as Gandhi affirmed, because it is our duty to do so.  In these cases, the totalitarian system will try to use “violation of the law” as a cudgel to punish those who resist and those who engage in civil disobedience (which can be either overt or covert disobedience).  In such cases, prosecutors and judges who have moral integrity will need to look at the enforcement of law differently: to try to enforce unjust and illegitimate laws is to be complicit in this corruption.

Prosecutors, judges, and even morally grounded police, must become clandestine partners in the resistance. They must use their positions of authority to defend human dignity and subvert laws that are destructive of human dignity. They must stand in solidarity with the disobedience of the masses, who join in resistance and solidarity. People should unite with others to magnify their ability to resist—organizations such as Indivisible, Our Revolution, Bold Progressives, Red Wine and Blue, MoveOn.org, or many labor unions. These serve as spaces where people can come together to speak with one voice and to plan many lines of resistance.

Those resisting the regime must embrace solidarity with one another and with those at the forefront of the resistance.  There must be solidarity with the oppressed poor, with all those resisting the regime, and with human dignity. There must also be the vision of a liberated future in which things are truly just and truly different (more about this below). Gandhi said correctly that resistance to, and “noncooperation with evil is a duty,” and emphasized the necessity for courage in the face of repression. Our goal must not be to do harm to an opponent, but to reunite everyone on a higher level of shared justice and unity.

His point is well-taken. Better to be in jail than to be complicit with these cruel and evil sociopaths of power and corruption. Gandhi said to speak the truth to their power is also a requirement, but it must be a truth without hate or vitriol.  In the US, Henry David Thoreau went to jail for not paying a tax that supported slavery. When Ralph Waldo Emerson visited him in prison and asked “Henry, what are you doing in here?”  Thoreau answered: “Ralph, the real question is why are you still out there?” True supporters of democracy are about love, justice, solidarity with the oppressed, and dignity.

Every victim of their cruelty must be protected even at our own expense.  There are people putting themselves on the line as we speak to stop the ICE raids on law-biding families of immigrants.  The question we all need to be asking is, how can we disrupt business as usual?  How can we disrupt the corrupt use of law to consolidate the totalitarian regime?  How can we derail and impede a corrupted FBI that now serves oppression rather than the constitutional rule of law?

When I was in college, it was in significant measure the students of the USA that helped shut down the Vietnam War.  Nearly every college campus in the country had become ungovernable. Students were taking over administration buildings and blocking operation of the ROTC war programs on their campuses.  In the late 60s and early 70s the smell of tear gas was always in the air on campuses, along with broken windows and anti-war graffiti on the walls. The government in Washington realized that the country was becoming ungovernable (even in the military there was subversion and resistance), and they soon decided to shut down that evil war.

As a student working my way through college, one job I had was to staff the “Information Booth” at the University of Buffalo Main Street campus.  The entrance to the university was at Hayes Hall and the Information Booth was just inside the front door.  On occasion, FBI agents would enter the building and ask me for information to locate a certain student.  I would politely and helpfully tell them that student information was confidential and that they would need to see the Registrar about this.

I would give them directions to the Registrar’s office.  As soon as they left to go to the Registrar, I would call the student they were asking about and let him or her know what had just happened.  I did not know these students that they were after, but I did know that solidarity against oppression brings us all together in the resistance.

I have read about resistance to the Nazis in the occupied countries such as France or Czechoslovakia that had similar characteristics to it. In our recent visit to the Netherlands, my wife and I went to several museums where many diverse acts of resistance against the Nazis by ordinary people have been recorded and preserved. Under Nazi rule, it was necessary to mislead, misinform, and manipulate ordinary interactions with the oppressors in such ways that impeded them from effectively doing their jobs.  Those bureaucrats who have retained whatever jobs are left in the US federal government (at least those who are not complicit “fools or cowards”) can serve an important function of impeding the oppression, as can the people in general.

The right-wing echo chamber has come up with many truly bizarre “conspiracy theories” in order to discredit thoughtful people who try to point out that the right wing has long been conspiring to destroy whatever democracy has existed in the USA. However, morally grounded “conspiracies” can and do exist.  Solidarity in resistance must involve endless smaller and larger discussions on how to subvert and overthrow the oppressors. People must think together in private meetings and conversations about how to make the country ungovernable. The resistance must be both overt and covert.

Overtly, there must be public outrage and coordinated campaigns to express this outrage.  Public demonstrations must be coordinated and conducted in ways that impede “business as usual.”  During the Vietnam war the government began to designate “free speech zones” far away from their public events and speeches in order to prevent public protest from interfering with its functions.  Public demonstrations must find creative and clever ways to interrupt the so-called free expression of the oppressors (as did Representative Al Green at the recent address to Congress charade).  Social media can put these protesters and their signs online to show the world our resistance, but we must be out there visibly resisting.

Their oppression also must be made visible. People must be seen taken away by the police, and new visible protests must pop up everywhere in unexpected places, on bridges over highways, signs high up on buildings, roads suddenly blocked. Covertly, nonviolent guerrilla tactics both keep the oppressor off balance and expose his brutality and cruelty. One incredible guerilla tactic that was very powerful in Buffalo, NY, while I was a student there involved some clandestine group that was stenciling the word “war” beneath the word “stop” on all stop-signs in the city.  Everywhere the signs read “Stop War.”

The City of Buffalo was spending immense sums of dollars repainting signs and they could not keep up. You could not drive anywhere in the city without stopping at one of these “Stop War” signs. The police even offered a monetary reward for the people committing this civil disobedience, but to my knowledge the group was never caught. What if stop signs everywhere in the USA could be made to read “Stop Trump”?

One imagines that it would be something quite easy to do, even today.  Heroes of the resistance, with their faces covered to protect from the security cameras that are everywhere today, in the middle of the night, could liberate a stop sign in seconds using a stencil and spray paint.  In cities and towns across the nation, stop signs would begin reading “Stop Trump.”  Like the posters of Elon Musk being promoted today reading “Elon is stealing from you,” so Trump is stealing not only wealth, but democracy, freedom, and dignity from us all.

Is it wrong to deface public property?  But Trump, Musk, and their conspirators in the Republican majority Congress, are stealing our public property, which is invested in Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and all the other programs that belong to the people of the USA and are part of our public wealth. They are ransacking our public property in order to grant themselves and their super-rich co-conspirators in his Cabinet and in Congress massive tax breaks, defrauding us from both angles. (The top Republican congressman and Senators today are worth tens of millions of dollars and Trump’s cabinet members are mostly billionaires.)

The oppressors will start complaining about “violence” against private or public property, but the use of this word is deceiving.  They do not want you to know that there is a long tradition in western political thought asserting “private” property itself is a form of violence, at least in the form of its massive accumulations. This was declared by democratic theorist Jean-Jacques Rousseau and later by egalitarian democratic philosopher, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon. As Proudhon put it, “property is theft.”  Who owns public property? Well, we do, as long as there is no legitimate government representing us to claim it in our name.

It is easy enough to distinguish between “personal property,” which everyone has a right to, and the unlimited accumulation of private wealth, which no one has a right to.  Public or private property that is used to consolidate and implement an illegitimate totalitarian regime has no moral right to protection. It must be made clear to everyone that the totalitarian regime has no right to govern.

There must be boycotts, walk outs (as there should have been a massive walkout from Trump’s State of the Union speech), sudden strikes, disruption of commerce, of transportation, of communications: everywhere, disruption of “business as usual.” The big corporations have no problem at all with the totalitarian ascendency of oligarch billionaires as long as they continue to rack up their profits.  Disruption of the process of maximizing profits for the rich and corporations must be encouraged, and the disruption must be publicized so that their image becomes tarnished.

In dozens of creative nonviolent ways, the people must make it clear that they are ungovernable.  Gandhi’s Salt March was not simply a protest march to the sea to “make salt.” It was a call to the people of India to publicly break the law by making salt everywhere themselves, which they did in great numbers.  Are there laws that we could massively break that would disrupt the agenda of the oppressors? What if we had a nation-wide “Adopt a Stop Sign” campaign, and every citizen pledged to stencil the word “Trump” after the word “Stop” on their neighborhood signs?

Finally, there is the media, mostly owned by the big corporations and the rich.  There is a huge media corporation named after a carnivorous creature of the genus Vulpes that calls itself “News” but is really simply propaganda.  Can the media be used by the liberation movement to project images and goals that inspire people to noncooperation and ungovernability?   Drama, inspiring images, tales of heroism, and powerful symbols need to get out there on social media as well as messaging about ways to make ourselves ungovernable.

At the women’s march in Washington DC (at the time of the second inauguration of Trump in January), my wife and I saw many women carrying signs with just one word: “ungovernable.” How about tee shirts, baseball caps, coffee cups, bumper stickers, billboard signs, yard-signs, and banners repeating this word?  How about an attractive logo built around this word?  Symbols of the resistance must be everywhere.

But perhaps the most important point of all is that the struggle for democracy cannot be framed as a return to the pre-Trump nightmare of complicity, political correctness, and cowardly catering to the rich and powerful with a mere window-dressing of concern for the poor and working-class people. Trump was favored by slightly less than half the voters because of the pitiful “democracy” that existed prior to that time. Billions of dollars spent on wars and genocides while ordinary citizens struggled to survive day to day. No decent health care, education privatized and denied to the poor, with most so-called Democratic politicians as corrupt as their Republican counterparts.  Democracy, before Trump, was a sham and a failure, a mere veil covering the greed and complacency of the ruling class and their educated elites.

Our present dire situation is an opportunity not only for courage and heroism. It is an opportunity to take democracy seriously which means to get rid of the clandestine rule by the rich and powerful. There must be an authentic, inspiring goal to make the USA into a real democracy “of, by, and for the people” as we were promised.  Be kind, do not be angry, but simply refuse to cooperate while articulating the ways things should be.

While there is much more that should and could be done than I can describe here, the key principles of our needed vision can be simply stated. It is important to make clear that simply taxing the rich and the big corporations at a fair rate, while curtailing the truly stupid and evil industrial-military complex and its endless foreign wars, would result in plenty of money—enough to give everyone in the country free, quality health care, to give everyone a guaranteed annual income sufficient to lead a life of dignity in the face of the fact that automation will soon be replacing many or most of the jobs in the country. There will also be plenty to establish a free, quality educational system, and to create a truly inspiring “Green New Deal” that puts everyone who needs a job to work on preserving and protecting the environment.

This requires that we give up the insane militarized imperialism (whether of the Joe Biden or Donald Trump varieties) and learn to live in peace with the rest of the world on the path toward global democracy. Once people regain control of their government, they need to pass new amendments to the Constitution both in order to prevent such a coup d’état from ever happening again and to prevent the billionaire oligarchs from destroying democracy by putting a cap on their unlimited accumulation of private wealth. We also need to institutionalize programs of moral and cognitive growth in order to produce a population that can distinguish truth from fantasy and maturely participate in democratic relationships. And, finally, we must open a path for the USA to become included within a truly global peace and freedom solution.

Only constitutional democracy, founded on human dignity, gives us legitimate government that we are morally obligated to obey.  When such constitutional democracy is subverted and government becomes “destructive of these ends, then “it is our right and our duty to alter or abolish it, and to institute such government as shall effect the people’s freedom, happiness, and dignity.”  The time to become ungovernable is now.

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Dr. Glen T. Martin:
– Member, TRANSCEND Network for Peace Development Environment
– Professor of Philosophy Emeritus
– Founder/Chairperson Emeritus, Program in Peace Studies, Radford University
– President, World Constitution and Parliament Association (WCPA);
– President, Earth Constitution Institute (ECI)
– Author of twelve books and hundreds of articles concerning global issues, human spirituality, and democratic world government; a recipient of many peace awards.
www.earthconstitution.world – Email: gmartin@radford.edu

This article originally appeared on Transcend Media Service (TMS) on 17 Mar 2025.

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