Donald Trump, Henry David Thoreau and Civil Disobedience

Watching Donald Trump’s disjointed, narcissistic ramble at the United Nations, I kept thinking: “Why don’t the delegates walk out?” After all, he insulted many of their countries. “You’re destroying your countries. Your countries are going to hell,” he shouted. Walking out on speakers at the U.N. during the annual General Assembly meeting has precedents: U.S. diplomats walked out on Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s speeches from 2009 to 2012. And this year, after Trump’s muddled 57-minute performance, more than 100 diplomats from over 50 countries walked out when Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu went to the podium. Why didn’t any delegate walk out on Trump? And outside the U.N., where is civil disobedience in the United States today?

The 19th-century American Transcendentalist Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862) is considered the father of civil disobedience. His 1849 essay On Resistance to Civil Government – later retitled Civil Disobedience – has inspired generations to challenge unjust government policies. Thoreau refused to pay the state poll tax to protest the Mexican-American War and slavery. More than a century later, folk singer and activist Joan Baez followed his example, refusing to pay a portion of her federal income tax. She justified her refusal, saying: “This country has gone mad. But I will not go mad with it. I will not pay for organized murder. I will not pay for the war in Vietnam.” Other non-taxpaying protesters against the Vietnam War included Nobel Prize winners George Wald and Salvador Luria.

Refusing to pay taxes in protest of government policy is an example of civil disobedience. Following Thoreau’s model, the disobeying person accepts that citizens have an obligation to pay taxes and respects the general authority of government. The refusal to pay taxes targets specific policies, not the state itself. Thoreau, Baez, Wald, and Luria were not revolutionaries seeking to overthrow the government.

In that sense, civil disobedience is an act of conscience rather than a political rebellion. Thoreau opposed the government only insofar as it carried out specific policies he could not accept. He was not an anarchist. As he famously wrote: “That government is best which governs least.” He believed in some government.

As for other possible acts of dissent, Thoreau never renounced his citizenship nor did he call for the overthrow of the United States government. “If a thousand men were not to pay their tax bills this year, which would not be a violent and bloody measure… This is, in fact, the definition of a peaceable revolution…” he wrote, in words that later inspired Mahatma Gandhi in the nonviolent struggle for India’s independence from British rule, as well as Martin Luther King Jr.’s peaceful advocacy for racial equality in the United States.

The delegates’ walkout at the United Nations in protest of Netanyahu and Israel took place within a proper institutional framework, under the established rules of the U.N. General Assembly. The protesting delegates accepted Netanyahu’s right to speak;  they simply chose not to listen because of Israel’s policies. In essence, the walkout was merely a violation of diplomatic protocol.

There was no major disruption during the General Assembly meeting in New York because of the walkout. Had there been a question about Netanyahu’s legitimacy as Israel’s representative or about Israel’s legitimacy as a member state, that would have been different. (The International Criminal Court’s warrants against Netanyahu did not prevent his visit since the United States is not a party to the Court and prime ministers have diplomatic immunity at the U.N.)

The Netanyahu walkout fits within the spirit of civil disobedience; it was symbolic, peaceful, and within institutional rules. Similarly, Thoreau accepted the consequences of his refusal to pay taxes by going to jail without protest. For him, imprisonment was not a shame but an honorable outcome of resisting injustice. As he wrote in Civil Disobedience: “Under a government which imprisons any unjustly, the true place for a just man is also a prison. The proper place today, the only place which Massachusetts has provided for her freer and less despondent spirits, is in her prisons…”

Civil disobedience cannot be separated from civility. Neither Joan Baez, George Wald, nor Salvador Luria gave up their American citizenship, as many dual nationals living overseas have done. They all respected the United States’ legal and political system. After leaving Walden Pond, for example, Thoreau returned to Concord, where he worked in his family’s pencil-making business and became a surveyor – a rather bourgeois life despite how many memorialize him.

The question of opposing Trump through traditional civil disobedience is harder to unpack. There is no question that fear exists within the United States, as was undoubtedly the case with the delegates in New York who opposed Trump’s policies but feared recriminations if they walked out. There are so many Trumpian actions that merit specific protest. Thoreau opposed the Mexican War and slavery. Baez, Wald, and Luria protested the Vietnam War. Where does one even begin with Trump? Undermining the balance of power between the three branches of government? Personal corruption? Threatening traditional alliances while weakening the U.S.’s global image? Overriding the rule of law domestically and internationally? Challenging freedom of speech? 

Being civil in the face of overwhelming incivility is not easy. Is Thoreau-style civil disobedience against Trump possible today? What should be protested, and how? What would be the consequences? Trump defies the very civility that gives civil disobedience its moral force. His crude behavior undermines whatever civility underpins civil disobedience. 

The following legendary anecdote about opposition, Thoreau, and civil disobedience is intriguing. In 1848, Thoreau spent one night in jail for failing to pay his taxes. When his friend, the poet and fellow Transcendentalist Ralph Waldo Emerson, came to bail him out, Emerson asked: “Henry, what are you doing in there?” Thoreau quickly replied with a blunt question: “Ralph, what are you doing out there?”

As long as Trump remains in power in the White House, we are all, somehow, “out there.”

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