The Ordeal of Brenda Sheridan

...and the slow growth of ordered resistance

In a podcast interview two days ago, Loudoun County School Board President Brenda Sheridan helpfully explained that critics of that board are the irrational tools of partisan manipulators. The pretend-anger of stupid parents, those rubes, is being ginned up “to impact elections,” she said. “There is a fire lit every week in Loudoun County on a new topic just to keep the anger flowing.” Smart stuff, Brenda. You’re a sophisticate for sure.

The view that political opponents are stupid, mindless, unable to understand their own cause, and being used as puppets in a game by people inventing fake issues for partisan gain is all old, familiar, empty stuff. Among many other examples, it’s what British officials thought of the idiots in the colonies who were babbling nonsense about stupid things like resisting the Stamp Act: can you even believe these idiots? Of course their co-called grievances are pointless and illegitimate — how could it even be otherwise?

Nothing infuriates people more than this message — the message that an opponent doesn’t just disagree, but sees all forms of criticism and disagreement as inherently without merit and unworthy of a fair hearing. Honest and respectful rejection of a grievance can deliver an institution to the other side of a crisis; condescending dismissiveness turns grievance into hatred. It starts a cultural grease fire, easy to spread and hard to extinguish. Ditto the growing habit of deplatforming and direct silencing, of closing accounts and removing social media posts for crimethink. If you’re trying to grow popular rage, that’s how.

Americans have a long tradition of violent responses — flatly, of violent responses — to this kind of institutional deafness. But the interesting thing about that violence is its structure, the carefulness and deliberateness of it. And I think it’s pretty clear we’re sliding toward a new cycle of political violence¹. The new cycle won’t be Antifa or BLM violence, Ferguson or Minneapolis; rather, it’s the kind that’s sometimes called bourgeois violence or middle-class rebellion, the moral revolt of the middling productive classes.

In a history of the late-colonial Regulator movement, the military historian Wayne E. Lee has described the practice of the “careful riot”: an apparent explosion into violent confrontation with government that takes place within a system of implied rules and boundaries. Regulators attacked officials in symbolic and limited ways, gesturing at violence in acts designed to communicate rather than to destroy. They tied up a sheriff and marched him around town, then let him go. They fired a couple of shots into the roof of a county official’s house, but not into the county official. The careful riot sought, above all, to suggest legitimacy:

The Regulators played for legitimacy by playing fair, by observing the old rules, and therefore, according to those same old rules, they expected a positive response from authority. Their use of form and restraint to legitimate their actions was not merely in order to avoid or lessen possible retaliatory punishment. It was done to certify that their grievances were legitimate, and that if no other method obtained for gaining the attention of authority, controlled violence would…They expected authority to react in a traditional authoritarian paternalist manner: to officially deplore the violence on the one hand and to move to fix the problem with the other.

Lee argues that this kind of performative violence goes wrong — as it did for the Regulators — when people who think they’re signaling in a system of shared values and settled rules find out that they’re facing opponents who aren’t using the same script. More about this a bit later.

Writing a similar story about failed gestures of grievance and their ultimate consequence, the unusually gifted historian Pauline Maier described the journey of American colonists — here comes a book title — From Resistance to Revolution.

“No leader, not even the most outspoken American partisan, was anti-British when the long evolution of of events that culminated in revolution first began,” Maier wrote. A deeply developed ideology gave British colonists a vocabulary for resistance to policy they perceived as unjust, and they used it: first in respectful petitions that offered assurances of patient loyalty to the political institutions of the mother country, then with growing intensity and directness and backed with a carefully enforced consumer boycott, and finally with naked references to the perfidy of the king himself, a choice that implied revolutionary intent (as colonists prepared for armed conflict).

Along the way, the colonists were careful. They traveled through the steps, in order, by the rules. The associators of the nonimportation movement — who I wrote about here — managed their shared effort through an exhausting routine of committee meetings and negotiation. Leaders of the growing resistance relied upon the technique of “curtailing individual violence by organizing, in effect institutionalizing, mass force.” A mob assembled on Cape Cod in 1774 “to ferret out British partisans” first took care to establish rules — “outlawing,” among other things, “intemperate use of liquor” and “profane language.” They made careful riots, which built a base of support for a growing confrontation that was widely perceived as legitimate and appropriate — even among a range of people who didn’t always wish to actively participate.`

“This continued concern for restraint and order within the revolutionary movement explains in part the breadth of its internal support,” Maier concludes. “The creed of ordered resistance, gradually transformed into ordered revolution, also accounts for attitudes toward the American military effort after April 19, 1775.”

The trap in our own moment is that, first, governments have in many cases entirely stopped listening, as officials signal with growing clarity that they regard all grievances to their right as inherently without merit. You express a grievance, and the school board orders the police to clear the room (and the police, incredibly, always do). But, second, resistance is coded as domestic terrorism at the first sign of raised voices, even if Merrick Garland pretends to be coy about the maneuver. If you don’t resist, you won’t be heard; if you do resist, you’re a terrorist and a criminal and FBI SEARCH WARRANT GET ON THE GROUND. The game is that everyone takes their turn and then, whatever moves any players make, you lose.

Related, the third trap is the one the Regulators faced. They signaled that they were staying within cultural boundaries, they demonstrated their restraint, they used the political script, and the colonial government responded with artillery. Political exchange requires someone on the other side who can respond in kind, and who wishes to. We don’t have much of that.

The solution to this series of political dangers is order, patience, and care, a long and disciplined assertion of a right to resist that balances firmness and clear signals of an intent to honor a basic system of shared rules. Here’s a brilliant tutorial on how to do that, in the crucible of a real world setting:

In time, governments will learn to listen again, or the resistance will escalate into its later stages. TBD. Will be an interesting ride.

1. Which I mean to describe, not to prescribe.