Americans Have Defeated Tyranny Before
A Few Lessons from Past Struggles
In the midst of an authoritarian takeover, wondering what we can do to make a difference, we can take heart and inspiration from the heroic men and women who came before us. Again and again patriots have braved seemingly impossible odds to move America’s experiment in liberal democracy forward.
To have a shot at carrying the story on from here we’re going to have to do what they did—often under more difficult conditions and facing bigger challenges. We will need to confront authoritarians with strategies that turn their strengths into vulnerabilities and our vulnerabilities into strengths. We will win by draining popular support away from the autocratic right and building an effective pro-democracy force that can beat them while it’s still possible.
This is not the first time that the American project has been threatened. And it’s not the first time that Americans were fragmented, discouraged, and unsure as they faced off against authoritarians with apparently overwhelming advantages. In fact, from the Revolution to the battles against slavery, patriarchy, concentrated economic power, and Jim Crow segregation, the American story is all about patriots defying tyranny against formidable odds— and winning.
American history is inspiring and troubling and a lot more, and it’s a mistake to believe anyone who claims it’s all good or all bad. Whether we take American greatness for granted or look away in disgust, we forget the real people who sacrificed everything to realize the nation’s promise—whose brilliance and bravery can give us courage, if we let them. Here are five lessons they can teach us in our time of crisis:
1. Leadership, strategy, and discipline matter more than numbers and power
“A genuine leader is not a searcher for consensus, but a molder of consensus.”
Martin Luther King, Jr.
We can take inspiration from the fact that the last great battle for American democracy, fought by the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s, may have benefited from the movement being relatively small. Author Samantha Hancox-Li argues in “How to Win a Rigged Game”:
The Montgomery bus boycott involved about seventeen thousand people; the Freedom Rides and the Freedom Summer only a few thousand each. The largest protest the movement ever assembled, their moment of maximum effort, was the March on Washington, which clocked in at around 250,000 participants. The George Floyd protests put more than fifteen million people into the streets in cities across the country. It is simply far easier to maintain ideological and emotional cohesion in small groups than in chaotic masses.
The Civil Rights Movement was made up of people who had no legal power and were constantly at risk of being taunted, beaten, bombed, or lynched. Their opponents controlled all the formal levers of power, had the media and voters on their side (Black Americans being systematically denied the right to vote), could unleash organized violence at will, and controlled vastly greater resources and economic power. Hancox-Li reports that the movement’s success reflected a consistent, well-thought strategy that hinged on its ability to frame the narrative of violent segregationists assaulting peaceful protesters. Leaders chose their battles deliberately, understanding that victory would come by confronting white supremacists in situations where protesters had the moral and narrative high ground.
The crucial value of strategic discipline is illustrated by the Movement’s commitment to nonviolence. Nonviolent engagement with the organized violence of white supremacists required almost super-human effort, but it shifted public opinion exactly as the movement’s leaders planned. Black Lives Matter, on the other hand, gained historically broad public support until protests turned violent; images of looting and arson gave opponents exactly the ammunition they needed to discredit the movement and fuel a powerful backlash.
2. Shaping political reality - public sentiment is everything
“In this age, in this country, public sentiment is everything. With it, nothing can fail; against it, nothing can succeed. Whoever molds public sentiment goes deeper than he who enacts statutes, or pronounces judicial decisions.”
Abraham Lincoln
Every one of Americans’ fights for freedom focused on shaping political reality by telling a story that shaped public opinion. In each case, the pro-democracy side understood that they couldn’t beat their opponents on their opponents’ terms. Instead, they had to shift the field of conflict to one where they could win—steadily undermining their opponents’ legitimacy, authority, and morale, while simultaneously building up their own.
From the 1850s onwards, free Blacks and formerly enslaved people used photography as a powerful way to expose the public to the truth of slavery. In the 1930s and ‘40s, unions used radio to bring the voices of workers directly to the airwaves and build public sympathy during labor disputes. In the ‘60s, leaders of the Civil Rights Movement made skillful use of television, making sure that when Southern sheriffs turned fire hoses and attack dogs on peaceful protesters, it was seen in America’s living rooms.
Consider the remarkable story of women’s suffrage. In the decades leading up to 1920, over half of the nation’s adult population won the right to vote, managing, against overwhelming opposition, to enfranchise itself. In the final decisive phase of the battle, having no vote themselves, Alice Paul and the National Women’s Party (NWP) focused on marshalling public opinion to pressure President Woodrow Wilson to support the cause. The day before Wilson’s 1913 inauguration, NWP organized 8,000 women to march down Pennsylvania Avenue wearing white dresses and gowns. The event drew over half a million spectators, but police stood back and allowed the event to devolve into a near-riot. Extensive newspaper coverage of men beating and abusing American mothers, sisters, and aunts embarrassed Wilson and built sympathy for the women.
Paul later organized over 2,000 women to protest nonviolently in front of the White House (the first group in history to do so). They successfully contrasted Wilson’s campaign to send American troops to defend democracy in Europe with his continued refusal to endorse women’s right to vote. Nearly 500 women were arrested, and 168 served time in prison, where some were beaten, starved, and chained. Damaging newspaper coverage helped convince the President to change his mind, and he finally went to work to deliver the congressional votes needed to add the 19th Amendment to the Constitution.
3. Take the initiative, be the story
“To hell with circumstances; I create opportunities.”
Bruce Lee
Time and again, America’s counter-authoritarian movements succeeded because their leaders anticipated their opponents’ moves and found ways not just to act, but to go on the offensive— taking and holding the initiative. They made the story rather than reacting to it.
The scene: Early morning, May 13 1861, on the deck of the Union Navy ship Onward, resting just outside the reach of the Confederate Army’s guns at Fort Sumter. The Onward’s crew spots a Confederate ship headed in their direction and, just as they prepare to fire, someone cries out:
“I see something that looks like a white flag”; and true enough there was something flying on the steamer that would have been white by application of soap and water. As she neared us, we looked in vain for the face of a white man. When they discovered that we would not fire on them, there was a rush of contrabands out on her deck, some dancing, some singing, whistling, jumping; and others stood looking towards Fort Sumter, and muttering all sorts of maledictions against it. As the steamer came near, and under the stern of the Onward, one of the Colored men stepped forward, and taking off his hat, shouted, “Good morning, sir! I’ve brought you some of the old United States guns, sir!”
That man was 23-year-old Robert Smalls, who, along with seven or eight other enslaved men had stolen the Confederate ship Planter, loaded their wives and children aboard, donned disguises and sailed it past five Confederate harbor forts without incident, giving the correct steam-whistle signals at checkpoints. The daring escape to freedom made Smalls a hero in the North. Newspapers and magazines followed his story. He went to work for the U.S. Navy and raised money for formerly enslaved people. Smalls helped convince President Lincoln to enlist Black troops, a move that proved crucial to Lincoln’s decision to enshrine Black emancipation with the 13th Amendment. He transferred to the Army in 1863 and fought in 17 major battles and engagements in the Civil War. Smalls was elected to Congress and served five terms, becoming a leading opponent of racial segregation.
Contrary to the idea that Black Americans waited passively for the Union Army to free them, Smalls was one of thousands of Black Americans who took direct action to end the power of the slavers. Only a few decades after the country was founded, free and formerly enslaved African Americans organized the Colored Conventions Movement to end slavery and expand the Founder’s vision to include them. With everything at stake— family and friends still in chains in the slave states, their freedom under constant threat—they gathered a few hundred or a few thousand people at a time in the decades before and then after the Civil War.
Predating and presaging the white abolitionist movement, Black religious leaders, businessmen, politicians, writers, publishers, and editors gathered by the movement worked to bring an end to the slave power that controlled the South and the world’s most profitable industries. They discussed abolition strategies and envisioned the elements of a post-emancipation world. The University of Delaware’s Colored Conventions Project debunks the idea that Blacks passively accepted their fate, showing how actively involved Black leaders were in fighting slavery and winning emancipation, and in imagining the (still only partly realized) democratic possibilities of the “second founding” represented by the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments.
4. Choose patriotism over purity
My quarrel with the “no-win” tendency in the civil rights movement (and the reason I have so designated it) parallels my quarrel with the moderates outside the movement. As the latter lack the vision or will for fundamental change, the former lack a realistic strategy for achieving it. For such a strategy they substitute militancy. But militancy is a matter of posture and volume and not of effect.
Civil Rights Strategist Bayard Rustin, 1965
Another pattern that repeats itself throughout American history is the divide between strategists who do what it takes to beat authoritarians, and professional activists who choose to be ideologically pure rather than politically effective. History shows that winning strategies are anchored in the universal values proclaimed in the founding documents, reflecting an authentic and realistic patriotism that shifts public sentiment and gains majority support.
White abolitionists, the Wobblies, the communists, Black Panthers and Black Nationalists all insisted that the system imagined by the Declaration of Independence and defined by the U.S. Constitution was fundamentally corrupt—and that to agree to deal on its terms was a mistake and a betrayal. Strategists including Frederick Douglass, Bayard Rustin, and Dr. King disagreed, arguing that the founding documents contained principles that could be wielded against the very institutions of oppression the founders participated in. Douglass understood this when he asked, ‘What to the slave is the Fourth of July?’ He wasn't rejecting the Declaration—he was claiming it, insisting that its promises be fulfilled for all Americans.
Taking that position got the formerly enslaved Douglass kicked out of the largest of the abolitionist societies. In a well-publicized debate with abolitionist leader William Lloyd Garrison, Douglass argued that the slavers had bent the Constitution to their ends “by disregarding the plain and common-sense reading of the Constitution itself . . . by claiming that the Constitution does not mean what it says, and that it says what it does not mean . . . [b]ut it does not follow that the Constitution is in favor of these wrongs because the slaveholders have given it that interpretation. . . .” Douglass had no illusions about the founders as men, but, presciently, he saw the through line—the fundamental principles to which they had committed the American project and to which he meant to hold the nation: “Slavery, so far from being among them, is a foe of them all.”
Fast forward a hundred years, and King and Rustin find themselves in disagreements with the Black Panthers and Black Nationalists that are startlingly similar to Douglass’ arguments with the abolitionists. Rustin says, in effect: Look, of course you’re right about white supremacy, but you have to have a realistic plan to defeat it. Rustin echoed Douglass, insisting on the central importance of coalition building and political engagement. Rejecting a course of “majestic isolation” based on racial identity, Rustin argued instead that “We need to choose our allies on the basis of common political objectives.” Rustin, like the great American strategists across time, was a patriot who engaged the argument but refused to be distracted by the purists, aiming his fight at the real enemies of liberty.
5. Nothing happens without the right resources
"We should never despair, our situation before has been unpromising and has changed for the better, so I trust, it will again.
George Washington
Strategically brilliant initiative, discipline, public support, and inspiring values are meaningful only if you have the resources and infrastructure needed to make any of it actionable. Imagine the 12,000 amateur soldiers of Washington’s Continental Army, freezing and starving in the Valley Forge winter of 1778. They could never have defeated the world’s best, most well-equipped military without the help of the French. At the end of the war it was the French who paid and supplied the American troops and agreed to use their fleet to draw British forces into a trap at Yorktown. The Franco-American victory that ensued ended the war and the tyranny of the British King, and created the possibility of America's liberal democratic journey.
Now it’s our turn. Like Washington, we have to raise the resources and build the infrastructure needed to win against apparently terrible odds.
Join us at The All American on Substack
