A Constructive Program

On building the future we want together

For anyone who’s troubled by the abuse of power and neglect of our most basic values at the highest levels of public office in America today, the unified demonstration of opposition on April 5^th was a sign of hope. It wasn’t just a day. It continues. Tens of thousands of people rallied with Bernie Sanders and AOC, not only in California, but also in Utah, Idaho, and Montana. An organized opposition in Utah? Yes. More coordinated demonstrations are planned for this coming weekend, and they will continue to grow.

We are not crazy, and we are not alone.

Coordinated actions of millions of people in thousands of different places are not easy to pull off, but they are important. They signal to everyday Americans and to observers around the world what we know from the data: public opposition to the current administration’s extremism is double what it was following Trump’s inauguration in 2017, according to the Crowd Counting Consortium at Harvard University.

There is no mandate to dismantle government as we know it, defunding social programs to give tax breaks to the richest Americans. In fact, there is an overwhelming opposition to this extreme and immoral agenda.

For most Americans, this opposition is rooted in our fundamental values. Our commitment to care for elders through Social Security is more basic than which party we trust most on any given issue. Our conviction that people who work day-in and day-out in the richest nation in the history of the world shouldn’t be destitute, sleeping in their cars, is a moral conviction. Something inside of us says, “That’s not right,” and it resonates with our deepest religious and Constitutional traditions. When we join others to speak out, we’re being true to our truest selves.

But standing up and saying, “No” when political leaders abuse power is only one side of social change—what Gandhi called the “obstructive program.” If enough people are willing to refuse to cooperate with immoral policy, it cannot happen. We obstruct it through our resistance. The great discovery of nonviolent movements in the 20^th century is that this resistance can be both militant and nonviolent. If a government derives its authority from the consent of the governed, then people can choose to withdraw our consent from immoral actions. We can refuse to cooperate with evil.

Because the state has the power to exercise violence to exert its sovereignty, authoritarians will always try to silence dissent by any means necessary. “First they ignore you,” Gandhi famously observed, “then they laugh at you. Then they fight you. Then you win.” We win, Gandhi insisted, when we trust the power of truth-force to overcome the worst that they can do to us.

Nonviolent resistance is what it means to trust the power of truth-force in the obstructive program of resisting autocracy.

But what does it mean to trust the power of truth-force for a constructive program? In short, what can we do now to start building the world we want, where political leaders represent the real needs of people and pursue policy that benefits all of us?

A constructive program is essential to any moral movement. It’s not simply about answering the question, “what are we for?” It’s also about learning to practice the beloved community we want to be. A constructive program helps us to grow and develop even as it shows those around us that a better way is possible.

For Gandhi, the constructive program started at home, on the ashram, where he conducted “experiments in truth” to discover how he could live in harmony with truth-force.

For Jesus, whose Sermon on the Mount Gandhi read every day, the constructive program was accessible to anyone he met in the villages where he preached, inviting folks to trust God’s economy by divesting from Rome’s aspirations for wealth and fame and investing in cooperative economics, forgiving one another’s debts as they were forgiven.

This week, Christians like me celebrate Holy Week. It’s when we remember Jesus’ poor people’s march on Jerusalem (Palm Sunday) and decision to turn over the money-changers’ tables in the temple courts. These direct actions were the obstructive program that put Jesus in the crosshairs of the governing authorities two millennia ago. He was not executed for offering an alternative interpretation of Scripture. He became a marked man when he led a protest march.

Jesus’ obstructive program got him killed.

But the obstructive program remembered by Christians during Holy Week is unimaginable apart from the constructive program that sparked a movement of people who believed that the “kingdom of God”—another political reality—was possible. By proclaiming embrace across lines of division, Jesus invited people to practice a radically inclusive community. By challenging people to let their “yes be yes and no be no,” Jesus built a community of truth-tellers. By teaching people to take what little they had, break it, and bless it, Jesus taught marginalized people to trust an economy of abundance.

It was the constructive program that gave people confidence to interrupt the violence of the status quo with an obstructive program.

The same is true of American history. Good Friday this year falls on April 18^th, the 250^th anniversary of Paul Revere’s ride to alert to citizens of Lexington and Concord that King George’s troops were coming to assert the crown’s authority at gun point. Revere rode on the signal of two lanterns hung in the bell tower of Boston’s Old North Church (which is why congregations across the US will ring bells for freedom this Friday.) The citizens’ response to Revere’s call was the obstructive action that began the American Revolution.

But it’s worth pausing to ask what constructive program prepared everyday people in those towns to refuse to submit to the British troops.

• Through the newspapers and pamphlets of printshops across the colonies, they had documented the abuses of King George for years.

• In towns halls and assemblies in church houses, they had been practicing democracy, sending representatives to gatherings where citizens considered their shared future together.

• In direct actions like the Boston Tea Party, some groups had begun to demonstrate a capacity to obstruct King George’s abuse of power.

Even a sketch of this history reveals the pattern we need to remember: a constructive program, built around efforts to tell the truth and become the kind of community we want to be with our neighbors, helps us build courage and capacity for an obstructive program.

• Through telling the truth on media like Substack, we can document what’s really happening and shape a shared narrative.

• By gathering together in our communities and listening to one another, we can re-establish the basic bonds of democracy.

• By taking collective action with focused, moral message, we demonstrate our capacity to resist abuses of the power we’ve entrusted to elected leaders.

Whenever we stand and say, “No” to tyranny, we are already saying “Yes” to the work of building together the country we’ve never yet been.

In the long struggle to reconstruct American democracy, people have poured out their lives to make the imperfect structures of our union more equitable and just. We haven’t yet reached the Mountaintop that Dr. King promised we would get to, and it can feel terribly defeating to watch the carelessness with which the work of so many generations is being attacked on a daily basis. But the minority of extremists who’ve done so much to protect their own wealth would not be spending this much money and effort to attack and divide us if they did not understand our strength.

Because we are knit together in thousands of ways by a constructive program, we have the power to stand. And whenever we stand, we should celebrate the ties that already bind us—and take a moment to get to know the people beside us, listen to their hopes, and talk about how we’re going to remake America again.