What Kind of Revolution Do You Want?

The CEO murder is not just about choosing between violence and nonviolence. An urgent message to those condemning as well as those cheering the violence.

“First it must be emphasized that nonviolent resistance is not a method for cowards; it does resist. If one uses this method because he is afraid or merely because he lacks the instruments of violence, he is not truly nonviolent. This is why Gandhi often said that if cowardice is the only alternative to violence, it is better to fight.

He made this statement conscious of the fact that there is always another alternative: no individual or group need submit to any wrong, nor need they use violence to right the wrong; there is the way of nonviolent resistance.”

Martin Luther King Jr.

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They’re celebrating. Everywhere. It’s not just on social media. It’s in the New York Times comments, who are usually staid and older. It’s in people’s homes.

There are raps being written about it, and they’re going viral. Folk songs. Memes are everywhere.

It transcends the left and right. It’s not about the usual cultural wars. It’s about rage. Rage that’s personal, not theoretical or amped up artificially.

It’s from the people who have seen family members die. Who themselves may be suffering at the moment, in deep literal pain.

If they aren’t celebrating, they’re justifying. If they’re not justifying, they’re empathizing.

Whatever the case, the story of Luigi Mangione’s assassination of a healthcare CEO hasn’t just made waves: it’s hit the core of the American psyche in a way that’s impossible to underestimate.

Then there are the people who are horrified by this reaction. In their minds, this is not even a conversation. Murder is wrong, and those celebrating or condoning, no matter how justified their grievances, are thus not even worth listening to. Murder can’t be condoned, and even entertaining the discussion of the validity of the pain of those who may be celebrating is a dangerous precedent that could lead to more violence.

Instead, what we need is strong condemnation to shut down any celebration. Once we get past that, they argue, we can have a discussion and a fight for healthcare that is fair and equitable.

How can one reconcile these views? Is it even possible, or are we at an impasse where a large group in this country is fervently in favor of nonviolence, while another is past the point of nonviolence and feels so hopeless that it is willing to support anything that changes things?

How can these views be reconciled when both of these sides are judging the others for moral failures? And is even this argument a “both sides” one in which I am giving to equal validity to a horrifying choice?

A Short Rewind

Shortly after Hamas’s attack on October 7th, it was becoming clear that Israel’s response would be absolutely devastating. And just as clear was that President Biden would not stand in Netanyahu’s way: he made very clear he fully supported the response.

A massive pro-peace movement grew in America, with thousands taking to the streets to push for the United States to not provide blanket support for Netanyahu’s war. Their call: “Ceasefire now.”

They shut down Grand Central. Tens of thousands marched in the largest pro-Palestinian demonstration in American history.

It didn’t work.

Almost immediately, smears calling them “pro-Hamas” spread on right wing media and quickly became mainstream talking points. Despite their call for a ceasefire, they were all blanket treated as pro-violence against Israelis or even Jews. It did not help that many hurt their own cause by publicly tearing down hostage posters and insulting Israeli deaths. But that minority, as always, was treated as the norm.

Biden would not be shaken from his position. As the war crimes worsened, and as more horrifying stories came out of Gaza, Biden’s position remained unmoved.

What did change was the American response to the protests. As encampments spread on college campuses, police were brought in, sometimes in riot gear, to violently disperse the protesters.

A year into the war and into the protests, something shifted. Most noticeably, the “Ceasefire Now” calls were no longer the unanimous call they once were. While many Jewish protest groups stayed with that message, the calls of “by any means necessary” began to spread. A parody newspaper called “New York War Crimes” went viral when it celebrated the attacks of October 7th on its anniversary.

There were many reasons that this occurred, including that there was a concerted effort by the far right and other bad actors on X and beyond to spread antisemitism and dehumanize Israelis, an issue I wrote about extensively when it occurred.

But that was only possible because of an environment that became increasingly cynical and angry. And that had to do with the feeling of powerlessness that resulted from the failure of the ceasefire movement.

These calls for violence were not mainstream, but they were popular enough that the shift was significant enough to notice.

In other words, the slandering and violent shutting down of ceasefire demonstrators actually led to an increase in support for Hamas.

How We Got Here and Where We’re Going

When people feel powerless, they become cynical. When the problem they’re facing is serious enough, that cynicism can turn into support for violence. And as the support for violence is normalized, it creates an environment and culture in which violence actually occurs.

It should not be surprising, then, that support for violence has become more and more normalized in parts of our society that have largely decried that violence until recently. You cannot keep destroying nonviolent movements without popularizing violence as an alternative.

This is about more than just violence. The violence directed at a CEO and its popular support are not simply about revenge for inhumane insurance practices. It is about something larger: an expression of powerlessness. One where people begin to pin their hopes on extreme acts to make change when other options have been exhausted.

Americans have been hoping, begging, and mobilizing for a revolutionary change to this country. Occupy Wall Street, Black Lives Matter, the Dakota Access Pipeline protests, #MeToo, the Women’s March, the ceasefire protests, and others were all met with repression, backlash, and often violently oppressed. Meanwhile, inequality, racial inequity, misogyny, militarism, and climate change have all worsened.

A society cannot sustain this level of inequality combined with state repression of nonviolence without some of those who want revolution turning violent. And the longer it continues, the worse and more popular the violence becomes.

This is not just about violence, then. It is about violent revolution.

In other words, as nonviolent revolution falters, violent revolution becomes more likely.

American exceptionalism has blinded us to this possibility, however. In the same way that many couldn’t imagine democracy falling here, so have many refused to imagine that we might experience a violent revolution. This despite the fact that violence in America has long been normalized, just more when it targets Black people, schoolchildren, immigrants, Muslims, Jews, and more people our society considers other. But as we have seen, the powerful can only deflect violence to the vulnerable for so long before it turns back on them.

The French Revolution, Russian Revolution, Cuban revolution, and Iranian Revolution are examples of what happens when these problems worsen enough. America is not an exception to the rule simply because it is America.

In a country with the most public mass shootings in the developed world and where 44% of the households own a gun, ignoring that possibility is deeply dangerous.

It shouldn’t surprise anyone that so far that the most prominent assassination of a CEO has been committed by someone on the right: this is still the sector of our society that has normalized this violence the most. It was only a matter of time until some began to catch on that their oppressors were actually those in power.

The surprise here is less who committed the act but how the act was celebrated on all sides. There was no left/right polarity. While it was initially framed as a left wing attack and celebration, the truth was that it transcended politics and got closer to addressing something primal in the American people.

It is a seismic and important shift, but it also isn’t actually surprising when we think of the pain all Americans are in, no matter the political polarity: the CEO had oppressed them both.

As Marisa Kabas notes:

“And as it turns out, United has one of the highest rates of denial; according to one statistic, the company denies 32% of claims. A lawsuit last year alleged the company used artificial intelligence with a 90% error rate to strike down pleas from the people whose lives were literally in their hands.

ProPublica published a damning investigation into United’s denial of coverage to a chronically ill college student who filed a lawsuit against them. His story is just one of thousands told and untold.”

Even in death, his life is treated as more valuable while the entire NYPD spends their time searching for his killer while the coldblooded murder of a 17 year old immigrant after he was asked if he spoke English hardly gets the same attention from both the NYPD and the media.

This is what those who’ve given blanket condemnation of the act have missed: the CEO and many others like him have caused real suffering. They are, in essence, mass murderers and torturers, it’s just that our society has largely normalized state violence, corporate oppression, and other forms of suffering and death meted out by the powerful.

Society can’t sustain that forever. The suffering people are going through is real and felt, whatever the popular narrative is, and at some point a reckoning comes if nothing changes.

A Message to the Condemners

There is a simple difference between many of those who have decried the murder and the murderer himself. He did something. And it had an impact. That is what is resonating.

This was the equation that Biden and Harris missed when they tried to convince people that slow, steady, and institutional was the way. Trump is purely destructive, bigoted, and psychopathic. But to many people, that something is better than nothing, and unfortunately since they have been convinced to throw immigrants, trans people, Black people, and others to the wolves for their own gain, this can feel like something.

This is what the condemners are missing as well.

Yes, one reason movements have failed is because they were repressed. But the bigger reason they failed was that they did not get enough support. Many if not most of the same people who condemn the support for violence today are also the people who have condemned the nonviolent movements for being too extreme. Or if they agreed they didn’t participate actively. Or if they participated it was briefly, at the height of popularity, when it was less repressed and less taboo.

It wasn’t just that state violence led to repression. It was that popular support faltered just when it was most needed. Black Lives Matter faltered in many ways because people decided to shift away from the cause as politicians and the media framed an increase in crime as only solvable through increased policing, often blaming BLM for the crime itself.

Black Lives Matter still exists. The cause still exists. The revolution is still there. But those who have supported it have checked out. And many were never there to begin with, condemning in ways they do now as well.

In other words, the likelihood of violent revolution is just as much in the hands of many of the condemners as anyone advocating for violence.

If those who think the murder was wrong want to prevent more such violence and more broadly prevent a violent revolution, they have to commit to nonviolent revolution.

Martin Luther King Jr. made this point often, and unfortunately people have still come away with the lesson that they don’t have a part to play in change, let alone revolutionary change.

Many of us have heard this famous quote in Letter from a Birmingham Jail:

“I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro's great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen's Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to "order" than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice…”

But there is another section shortly after that should be read carefully because it is prophetic about our current moment:

“You speak of our activity in Birmingham as extreme. At first I was rather disappointed that fellow clergymen would see my nonviolent efforts as those of an extremist. I began thinking about the fact that I stand in the middle of two opposing forces in the Negro community. One is a force of complacency, made up in part of Negroes who, as a result of long years of oppression, are so drained of self respect and a sense of "somebodiness" that they have adjusted to segregation; and in part of a few middle-class Negroes who, because of a degree of academic and economic security and because in some ways they profit by segregation, have become insensitive to the problems of the masses.

The other force is one of bitterness and hatred, and it comes perilously close to advocating violence. It is expressed in the various black nationalist groups that are springing up across the nation, the largest and best known being Elijah Muhammad's Muslim movement. Nourished by the Negro's frustration over the continued existence of racial discrimination, this movement is made up of people who have lost faith in America, who have absolutely repudiated Christianity, and who have concluded that the white man is an incorrigible “devil.”"

What he describes here happens to be about his own community, but it is an aspect of human nature and the sociology of our country at large as well. That is why he said that economic oppression must be fought alongside the fight against racial oppression: if both are not fought with equal fervor, this anger grows in the populace at large and we turn on each other.

The two opposing forces King describes that have been building now for decades, but that are now meeting in the more extreme ways King warned us about.

He goes on to explain the way between these two forces as he lived out, and as we saw was one of the moments in American history where a nonviolent movement rocked the country in a truly revolutionary way:

“I have tried to stand between these two forces, saying that we need emulate neither the "do nothingism" of the complacent nor the hatred and despair of the black nationalist. For there is the more excellent way of love and nonviolent protest.

I am grateful to God that, through the influence of the Negro church, the way of nonviolence became an integral part of our struggle. If this philosophy had not emerged, by now many streets of the South would, I am convinced, be flowing with blood.”

This is the trap many who believe in nonviolence have fallen into in America. They are not nonviolent so much as they are passive. “Do nothingism” is the infrastructure on which violence becomes the norm.

The answer, then, isn’t shaming. It is doing. There needs to be an alternative to violent revolution that is equally or more impactful, and that’s a nonviolent revolution.

A Message to The Applauders

While I’ve addressed those who have condemned the violence, those who are celebrating it need to understand their role in this as well.

As hopeless as things seem right now, applauding a shooter, let alone encouraging more is not the actual way to get the world we want to get to.

Yes, revolution is inevitable. But the revolution you choose matters more than ever. And nonviolence is and always will be not only an option, but the most viable and effective one.

The evidence is overwhelming:

1. Nonviolent revolutions are more likely to succeed.

2. Nonviolent revolutions are far more likely to lead to democracies once they succeed. And those democracies tend to be more durable.

3. Violent revolutions tend to result in authoritarian governments or dictatorships even when they are fights for democracy. And those authoritarian governments tend to be more durable than even the governments they depose.

These are all facts that tend to be obscured when it feels as if nonviolent solutions have failed. As we see now in the case of the CEO murder, the drama of a public execution feels as if it has made more of an impact than decades of nonviolent struggle. This is a myth borne out of our hope for a solution, hopelessness, and the dizzying effects of our media consumption, though.

In reality, as famous political scientist Gene Sharp, who specializes in nonviolent revolutionary movements, has argued in his book From Dictatorship to Democracy: “By placing confidence in violent means, one has chosen the very type of struggle with which the oppressors nearly always have superiority.”

In terms of achieving a democracy, the logic is straightforward: violent solutions tend to succeed when they employ hierarchical structures and whatever their intentions this is the structure that takes control. In addition, whether the method is straight warfare or guerrilla warfare, whatever democratic institutions that once existed by the time of success are likely to destroyed. Democracy needs to build from scratch, and yet those in power will only have authoritarian power at their disposal.

Nonviolent revolution succeeds for the same reason violent revolution fails. That’s because the tactic attacks authoritarianism and fascism where they are weakest instead of where they are strongest.

Authoritarian power structures are centralized, while nonviolence requires a broad distribution of power and buy in by the populace. That makes it more flexible, and less likely to be shut down by violence or intimidation. The centralization of power among authoritarians makes their power far more brittle in the face of such decentralization. Ironically, the success of the far right against the very non-democratic Democratic Party is an example of such a success (more on that in a future article).

All of this also points to the reason nonviolence tends to lead to durable democracies: it is itself democratic, and thus the more it succeeds the more it creates democratic institutions and power structures.

The means are the ends: we achieve democracy by creating democracy. Whether it comes to resistance and revolution itself or whether it simply comes to building out democratic institutions and communities around us.

And as much as all of that matters, successful or not, the reaction to violence by the state will be harsh and swift. If you actually want to cheer a shooter, and you actually think it’s an effective method of resistance, it is important you actually think through what the reaction will be if your hope for more such violence succeeds.

The violence will be used to justify far more oppression, and specifically oppression targeting the vulnerable. As we have seen, the right wing in America uses these moments to justify detention camps, increased policing, and more. Immigrants, Black people, and others will take the brunt of the reaction since it will justify power grabs and oppression. There are many far right grassroots violent movements ready to act as well, and they are heavily armed and less likely to face consequences.

Innocent people will be hurt. Power will be further centralized. And it is likely that as the violence spreads we will see atrocities we cannot even begin to imagine in our own country.

Just as some people cannot imagine a violent revolution occurring in this country due to American exceptionalism, many cannot imagine a counter-reaction that we tend to see in countries around the world. But it is not only possible, it is likely.

Finally: America’s nonviolent revolutionaries have been carrying us forward and have succeeded despite all the setbacks we are facing. In many ways, the setbacks are also a result of nonviolent movements succeeding. To fall to violence is to throw away those gains, reject the work of these nonviolent revolutionaries, and throw aside the efforts of those who have been in the trenches now for their entire lives.

Our job is not to abandon them. Our job is to join them. And to encourage the passive believers in nonviolence to become active participants.

With more popular support and a stronger commitment, we can and will get there.

The Sides

So is it the false equivalency of “both sides” to criticize both those who celebrate and those who condemn Luigi Mangione’s assassination?

I would argue that this binary doesn’t properly define what the sides in this actually are.

In reality, we have far more than two sides:

1. Those who want action and revolutionary, transformative change achieved through nonviolence.

2. Those who want action and revolutionary change achieved through violence.

3. Those who want action and revolutionary change but are not participating in it.

4. Those who believe in incremental change achieved through institutional means.

5. Those who believe time itself and other people will solve our problems.

It is broader than this, of course, but in many ways these are the options most of us are presented with. And since revolution is inevitable, the actual choice here is between the first two sides and our place as actors within them.

The Question

We are presented, then, with a far different set of questions than simply will we choose violence or nonviolence?

The question is more: How will you deal with the fact that revolution is coming?

Will you bow out?

Will you shame?

Will you cheer violence?

Will you join in violence?

Or will you be an active participant in nonviolence?

When we know what is inevitable, we can know our place. And we can take responsibility for the consequences and results of our actions.

Today, we stand on the precipice of the two opposing forces that King warned us about. We all, every one of us, have a part to play in addressing those forces and in creating a better world.

All we have to do is answer the question.