Dissent Doesn't Mean Burning Police Cars

Democracy depends on peaceful dissent and protest. It is undermined when protesters riot in the streets.

The right to peaceful and non-violent dissent is a cornerstone of democratic politics. In non-democratic states, dissent has at times been very effective – and certainly less violent – at toppling autocratic regimes. Protest has also been the major instigator of political change – from the hundreds of thousands of citizens in the United States who protested the Vietnam War to those in similar numbers who took to the streets in 1989 to demand the end of authoritarian communism in eastern Europe.

Most effective and long-standing social movements have nurtured their causes and expanded the reach of their voices by taking to the streets. Suffragettes demonstrated the hypocrisy of denying women the right to vote. Later generations of women “took back the night” to bring attention to violence against women. The global environmental agenda would be nowhere without the decades-long and sustained action of many dedicated activists. The same is the case for the rights of gays and lesbians. Why is this the case?

In authoritarian states, the very existence of resistance and dissent holds out one of the very few hopes of non-violent change and political evolution rather than revolution. This does not mean that courageous dissidents can always avoid violence – often at the hands of the state itself – as the cases of Burma and Iran soberly remind us. But when the state turns to violence to systematically suppress dissent, legitimacy is generally gone for good. In democracies, we need dissent to safeguard and expand our most basic rights and freedoms. The extent to which liberties are traded away – even temporarily – for enhanced security must be subject to open and public challenge. This is done in the media, in the courts, in general elections, and in the streets.

Human psychology in all societies pushes us toward conformity. It is easier, safer, and certainly less taxing on our physical and emotional energy. The voices of dissenting minorities – and they often are tiny minorities at first – awaken us from our collective slumber and protect us from what Mill and de Tocqueville called “the tyranny of the majority.”

However, the first major caveat in this lesson from history is that, to be most effective, dissent must not only embrace non-violence as a tactical necessity but also as a strategic imperative. Polish dissident intellectual Adam Michnik, in a damning condemnation of revolutionary violence, once wrote that those who tear down Bastilles end up building their own. Violence begets violence, and the results are never purifying or necessary, and nearly always tragic.

The second sober qualification is that, like it or not, it is ultimately up to social movements to police themselves, or else the power of the message is quickly lost. When peaceful protesters are met with the brutality of unprovoked state violence, they can sustain the moral high ground, and usually both the method and the message get coverage. However, when protesters are infiltrated by violent ideologues bent on disruption and damage – as happened during the G20 demonstrations in Toronto this past weekend – the media tend not to focus on the message, but on the results. Legitimate protest is marred by the actions of a few, and their many voices are silenced by voyeuristic commentary, broken windows, and the detention of those suspected responsible. After all, who heard about what the demonstrators were protesting against or advocating for once the Twitter feed began to fixate on burning police cars?

The police response will be extensively discussed over the coming weeks. Among the chattering classes, some will praise their restraint (no one was killed; most of the damage was done to property), while others will be appalled by methods used to subdue and detain the unruly. No doubt excesses and mistakes were made in such a large and unprecedented security operation, complicated by location and numbers, but they will come to light through investigation and debate.

However, at the same time it is crucial for those involved in organizing and planning protests and the social movements of which they are a part to openly and loudly discredit such violence. The violent minority who hijack demonstrations should be exposed and not sheltered. These few deserve the label of criminals, not protesters. Leaders need to distance themselves and their organizations from such tactics, rather than demurely refusing to criticize them. To do otherwise is to damage not police cars but the credibility of their cause.