Shikma reads Sharp

Why we're not Czechoslovakia

To subdue the enemy without fighting is the acme of skill.

-Sun Tzu, the Art of War

Professor Gene Sharp, the “Machiavelli of nonviolence”, made his living by writing blueprints for orange and velvet revolutions worldwide. His work (sponsored by Glowies) can be described as a series of setup and operating manuals for “dissidents” and “democrats”-perspective clients of the Global American Empire. Since we in Israel are having a protracted Orange Revolution ourselves, I wanted to review Sharp’s work and the ways in which it applies to us.

“Want some non-violent regime change, kid?”

A Midwestern Protestant preacher’s kid and the product of a Great Depression-era upbringing, Sharp comes from a completely unironic milieu. Having been raised in an era when freedom, democracy, human rights and social justice meant something other than blunt instruments with which to beat one’s enemies, he is completely and unironically on the side of the Good against its enemies-commies, tinpot dictators, putschist colonels with wacky uniforms and goofy haircuts, turbaned ayatollahs.

“Not Good.”

Legitimacy

Sharp identifies the major weakness of every state. States require subjects who recognize their rule, and more importantly, recognize the recognition of that rule by other subjects. So, legitimacy is a game-theoretical concept. A successful state is a Schelling point; it makes the behavior of others subjects predictable at scale, allowing efficiency, economies of scale and the creation of surplus wealth. This idea applied to violence underlies much of Western political philosophy since Hobbes’ Leviathan, and before that, Pirkei Avot. The perception of legitimacy is how a state scales its actual available force into potential force. This allows it to control far more in terms of population, resources and territory than it could through direct force.

In imperial policy, legitimacy is called credibility. In prisons, it’s called respect. Same concept.

Sharp’s work focuses on winning without fighting battles by attacking a regime’s legitimacy through incremental non-violent means, eventually leading to a preference cascade and regime collapse.

A conflict for legitimacy

It’s important to understand that legitimacy is multidimensional and can stem from multiple, incompatible sources. For instance, the Israeli left sees its source of legitimacy in its moral goodness. In their own eyes, our progressives represent the values of Freedom, Democracy, Human Rights and Social Justice which Sharp praises. They seem themselves as the defenders of these ideals against troglodyte North African mezuzah-kissers, penguin-suited parasites and insane Messianic settler racists, as an outpost of the International Community in the primitive and bloodstained Middle East.

Tellingly, the latest Israeli far left political alliance is called The Democrats. A bit hamfisted, but it has a better ring than its previous incarnation’s name-literally, Ratz.

“T-that’s one hell of an act. What do you even call that?” “…The Democrats!”

For their part, the Israeli right sees itself as the authentic representatives of the Israeli people who have more or less consistently been giving them electoral majorities for 50 years. Its legitimacy is not based on any concrete achievements other than being an alternative to the left, whose practical efforts all tend to involve getting lots of Jews killed by our enemies in order to get brownie points from the New York Times. There are also various religious factions of the elected government, whose sources of legitimacy lie in claiming to represent the Torah, more or less convincingly. Finally, there are various right wing patronage networks drawing their legitimacy from distributing budgets among their constituents.

Both sides see each other as illegitimate, but only the left’s attacks on its enemies’ legitimacy evidence a well planned out multidimensional strategy being implemented over a long timespan. In the mind of the left, the right wing coalition represents an ongoing and entrenched coup by the forces of retrograde populism against democracy. Of course, the difference between populism and democracy is determined completely by the side you happen to be on, and projection has always been a leftist specialty.

To defend the Good from the Bad, our progressives apply a local version of Professor Sharp’s playbook. It’s not difficult to imagine that, on their Wexner Foundation-sponsored sojourns at Harvard, our progressive leaders got to visit Sharp’s Albert Einstein Institution or Harvard’s Center for International Affairs. It may also be that they have friends in American NGOs and the US embassy who have studied Sharp and are advising them. In any case, it doesn’t much matter; the ideas are more important than the man himself, and the ideas have been in the air for many decades, long enough to spread virally.

Two books are key to understanding Sharp’s idea. The first, From Dictatorship To Democracy, is a manual for the Good Guys on taking power from the Bad Guys. The second, The Anti-Coup, is a manual on how to keep the Bad Guys from taking power back. The books are short, concise and well written in simple language, and I wholeheartedly recommend reading them for yourself.

From Dictatorship To Democracy

Are you oppressed? Downtrodden? Unjustly ruled by a regime of repressive Neandertal Chuds? This is the book for you.

Sharp does not recommend going full-on De Oppresso Liber on your oppressors. His target audience is dissidents, and dissidents don’t tend to be very good at violence compared to jackbooted thugs. Guerrilla warfare causes massive casualties and takes a long time. Victorious guerrillas tend to be worse than the guys they beat.

Sharp also doesn’t recommend coups, elections or foreign interventions for practical reasons. This is more a function of his target audience than of realpolitik; in practice, dissidents using Sharpian means and methods tend to prepare the battlefield for a foreign intervention or coup more often than securing their victory independently. Even successful Sharpian movements are usually precursors to foreign client states, as was the case in post-Soviet Eastern Europe throughout the 1990s and early 2000s. Our Quislingsteins don’t take this part too seriously. You can see Amos Schocken, our very own Sulzberger, take a break from abusing rent boys to call on Daddy Biden to punish his Israeli class enemies.

Sharp advises against negotiation and compromise with the incumbent regime when fundamental issues are at stake. “Only a shift in power relations in favor of the democrats can adequately safeguard the basic issues at stake.” The regime can not negotiate in good faith and is inherently untrustworthy, because compromise on the essential issues would pose an existential threat to it.

Rather than negotiations, Sharp advises “another option…for those who want both peace and freedom: political defiance.” This defiance, properly applied, strips the regime of its legitimacy. In game theoretical terms, this removes the utility of the regime as a Schelling point and causes coordination failure.

Political defiance involves a large toolbox of methods including protest and persuasion, noncooperation and intervention. It may even involve violence, which Sharp suggests compartmentalizing “in terms of geography, population groups, timing and issues” so that it doesn’t contaminate the overall struggle. In our case, violence has been largely compartmentalized to proxies such as Hamas and Islamic Jihad.

Secrecy and openness should be used judiciously; secrecy is sometimes required to maintain key activities like intelligence gathering, while openness contributes to the image of the movement as extremely powerful. The Israeli leftist protest movement has public leaders with names and faces, but if you look closer, you can see something larger in the shadows behind them.

The effects of Sharp’s political defiance are conversion of the enemy to one’s cause (rare,) accommodation (not relevant to fundamental issues, see above,) nonviolent coercion (the destruction of the regime’s ability to impose its will) and disintegration (the collapse of the regime.)

Sharp emphasizes the importance of long-term planning and a comprehensive strategy manifesting itself into tactics and methods applied appropriately. Sharp separately deals with securing international support, “as a modest supplement”. As discussed above, in practice this modest supplement is often the deciding factor in a power struggle, and our left operates from the starting point of having this advantage in every struggle.

For Sharp, strategy needs to start off with symbolic “specific limited issues or grievances” (such as the Submarine Protests, opposition to the settlements, or demands for a Haredi draft) and progress through a series of campaigns, building momentum through concrete achievable victories and gradually spreading through various population groups, eventually inducing disobedience in the armed forces. Sharp warns against a coup d’etat and advises focusing on “spreading disaffection and noncooperation in the military forces, encouraging deliberate inefficiencies and the quiet ignoring of orders.” Similarly, rather than encouraging the police to mutiny, democrats should encourage them to quietly sabotage their work, fail to report important information, and in generally become inefficient in the performance of their duties, especially when those duties involve enforcing the law against the democrats.

All of this activity ideally culminates in a preference cascade and the disintegration of the regime due to loss of legitimacy, with its orders no longer being obeyed by its civil servants and security forces, a loss of control over the population, access to material resources and means of communication. A “democratic parallel government” should be established and act as a rival source of authority and control, gradually replacing the incumbent regime. Eventually, a well-planned transition takes place, with sections of the old government abolished, others reformed and the high officials of the dictatorship tried in court, exiled or otherwise neutralized. A long-term reform can then be implemented, securing the new regime’s position and preventing a counter-coup by competitors for power. Which brings us to…

The Anti-Coup

Congratulations, my democrat dissident friend-you’ve hollowed out the old regime and seized that sweet, sweet power. How do you keep that regime’s more competent members from getting together on the sidelines and using their fascist tricks to seize it back from you? You’re in luck-Professor Sharp’s got you covered.

What is a coup, anyway? Usually, it’s a conspiracy of cops, soldiers, spooks who cook up a plot and quickly take over. Sometimes, it’s an auto-coup, with a head of state overthrowing the existing regime and reforming it along authoritarian lines. They keep the state going, the lights on and the trains rolling on time, and work to consolidate their control. Coups happen in times of crisis, when government legitimacy is worn away, for instance by the perception of corruption, incompetence and inefficiency, internal unrest, economic failure. From the perspective of the Israeli left, the right’s weak and flailing attempt at judicial reform, mildly limiting the power of the Supreme Court, was an auto-coup.

So, how do you stop these fascist Chuds from taking over your beautiful legitimate regime? You deny them the legitimacy they need to gain acceptance of their authority. Do not cooperate with them. Become unrulable. Subvert their troops and supporters. Secure international support.

General resistance and organized resistance need to be employed judiciously. For the same reason that Sharp recommends nonviolent means of seizing power, he recommends nonviolent means of resisting the seizure of power; the military, police and spooks have the advantage when it comes to violence, and nonviolent means are more effective at undermining their soldiers’ morale and reliability.

If the initial attempt at blocking the coup fails, a long term struggle ensues. This focuses on denying the coup regime access to control over areas of life such as the economical, ideological and the political through “resistance at key points”. This is done through “the protection of the autonomy of the society’s institutions…such as the courts, schools, unions, cultural groups, professional societies…such institutions are not only points of resistance. They are also actual or potential resistance organizations which can act to defend the society from dictators and to restore the legitimate political system.”

In other words, we are back to the situation described in From Dictatorship To Democracy, with the key difference that the institutions in our case are autonomous-our courts, schools and unions set their own agenda in the struggle against the regime. Preparations against a coup should be pre-emptive and involve the bureaucracy, legislation, NGOs, the media, international bodies, organizations and governments. This exactly describes the Israeli progressive coalition.

The Hummus House version

Israeli reality is a funhouse mirror version of Sharp’s scenario. His dissidents can’t use violence because their enemies control the military and security services, which are a lot better at it than dissidents. Our progressives include the leadership of the military and security services, but can’t use direct unfettered violence because it would harm their legitimacy. His democrats stand up to coup attempts. Our democrats launch them, breaking the chain of command at the point where it’s answerable to elected officials. Sharp’s dissidents have to sneak around putting up broadsides and organizing demonstrations covertly. The Israeli progressives own the media, and our corporations and spy agencies encourage their employees to attend demonstrations.

Paradoxically, the same factors providing our forces of Good with every conceivable short term advantage simultaneously keep victory out of their reach. Sharp’s grand strategy involves stripping the non-representative regime of its legitimacy and building an alternative based on a broad coalition representing the majority which eventually takes over openly, something like the Czechoslovak Velvet Revolution. But the Israeli elected government is already based on a broad coalition representing a majority, and that majority is growing. The deep sources of the right’s legitimacy are organic, and largely out of the left’s grasp. The final preference cascade is inhibited, and becoming more so. The left is stuck in the non-violent coercion phase of the conflict; Sharp’s disintegration step can not happen, except by systemic collapse and civil war. Progressives are Tantalus, tormented by the object of his desires just out of reach.

For the time being, until something explodes, we are stuck with endless replays of the same progressive scenario. It’s quite possible that the left will become frustrated and attempt to go beyond its current largely non-violent paradigm; if anything prevents it from doing so, it’s the age and enervation of its constituents rather than any moral inhibitions. In its eyes, the left is the Good, and what means are off limits when it comes to a struggle of Good versus Evil?

Postscript

The Good must be prepared to use its fists

-Soviet poem

The Good must be prepared to use its fists

And have a tail, sharp horns, a beard, a hood

It must be covered with a bristly fur

A fire-breathing Good, stomping its hooves

It comes for you! You hear its steps approaching

The poison-dripping fangs, a whipping tail

Ominous howling, horns scraping the clouds

The Good comes creeping closer

-post-Soviet poem