THE RIGHT TO RESIST

Rebelling Against Trump's Tyranny

In 1791, two years after the ratification of the U.S. Constitution, federal officials approved a tax on whiskey to pay for debt accumulated by the states during the Revolutionary War. There were widespread protests against the tax and many distillers refused to pay. Protestors in western Pennsylvania attacked federal officials who attempted to collect the tax. In September 1791, a group of men dressed as women attacked excise officer Robert Johnson, stripped him naked and then tarred and feathered him before stealing his horse and abandoning him in the forest.

The protests escalated and, in July 1794, it became an armed rebellion after 500 armed men attacked the home of a tax collector in Western Pennsylvania. President Geroge Washington dispatched a 12,000-man militia but the rebellion collapsed before the troops arrived.

There have been dozens of other rebellions in American history, including John Brown’s raid on Harpers Ferry Virginia in 1859, the New York City draft riots in 1863 and the Bonus Army march in 1932. Today, it seems likely a rebellion is needed to end Donald Trump’s tyranny.

Millions of Americans have joined in “No Kings” and “Good Trouble” protests in recent months. Erica Chenoweth, a political scientist at Harvard University, has found that when 3.5 percent of the population actively participate in protests it ensures serious political change.

A 2013 article in the UCLA Law Review notes that the American founders were enthusiastic proponents of a right to rebel against unjust tyranny. They drew many of their ideas from British philosopher John Locke who wrote that all individuals have natural rights which they surrender voluntarily as part of the social contract. The purpose of society, according to Locke, is to protect one’s property and other rights inherently valued by human beings. The people have a collective right, he argued, to revolt against the government should it violate the terms of the contract. Locke wrote:

“Whenever the Legislators endeavour to take away, and destroy the Property of the People, or to reduce them to Slavery under Arbitrary Power, they put themselves in a state of War with the People, who are thereupon absolved from any farther Obedience.” In some cases, Locke thought of revolution, not as a right, but as a duty to prevent tyranny.

The law review authors argue that the right to resist differs from civil disobedience. They add:

“Civil disobedience is nonviolent protest designed to affect particular public policies. In contrast, the right to resist evokes the language of violence. It has as its aims not merely the replacement of particular policies with more desirable ones but the wholesale restructuring of an entire regime. It thus requires a higher threshold of abuse before being invoked, but it also has more severe consequences for the target of protest.

“The right to resist, as opposed to a right of revolt, has as its goal a restoration of a constitutional order, not its complete displacement. It does not seek to replace the normative standard for guiding future behavior of rulers, but seeks simply to enforce it. The right to resist, in its purest form, is about centering the pieces on the chessboard of governance, not about fundamentally changing the game itself: It calls for a return to normal.”

Many U.S. state constitutions grant a right to their citizens to abolish the government. For example, the constitutions of New Hampshire, North Carolina, and Tennessee have the identical phrase “[t]he doctrine of nonresistance against arbitrary power, and oppression, is absurd, slavish, and destructive of the good and happiness of mankind.”

Some commentators expect Trump to invoke martial law or the Insurrection Act to prevent or overturn the 2026 midterm elections if they are likely to return control of Congress to the Democrats. That might be Trump’s Waterloo. Perhaps it will be enough to inspire collective action powerful enough to remove him from office.

Source:

“When to Overthrow your Government: The Right to Resist in the World’s Constitutions,” Tom Ginsburg, Daniel Lansberg-Rodriguez and Mila Versteeg, UCLA Law Review, June 30, 2013