People protesting South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol chant slogans as they attend a candlelight rally outside the National Assembly Building, in Seoul, South Korea, on December 4, 2024. (Daniel Ceng / Anadolu via Getty Images, published in The Nation, December 4, 2024).
“Get in good trouble, necessary trouble, and redeem the soul of America.”
John Lewis, March 1, 2020, speaking at the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama commemorating Bloody Sunday.
“If that means resistance and conflict we shall not flinch. We shall not be cowed. We are no longer afraid…
Martin Luther King Jr., Nobel Lecture (“The quest for peace and justice”), Oslo Norway, December 11, 1964
John Lewis called on all of us to create good trouble; to fight for democracy, rule of law, and human rights; to bring the world closer to the Beloved Community Martin Luther King, Jr. implored us to create.
As we approach 2025, bad trouble is all around us: in the U.S. and all over the world; worsened by disinformation, lies, hatred, religious nationalism, greed and inequality; backed up and intensified by systems and threats of ruthless violence.
Bad trouble calcifies, hardens, oppresses. Jim Crow lasted nearly 100 years, for example, and American slavery more than four centuries.
We can overcome bad trouble, but we cannot do so without generating good trouble on a massive scale, from the grassroots up. Dr. King and John Lewis showed this to us, and so did all of the SNCC students, the congregants in Black churches throughout the South, the young people who followed Bob Moses to Mississippi, the farmworkers and the sanitation workers, the millions who protested against the War in Vietnam, and all those engaged in movements for freedom and democracy across the world during the subsequent decades.
South Koreans understand the urgent need for good trouble, and act accordingly, when the critical moment comes. We must do the same.
Yesterday the Korean National Assembly voted to impeach Prime Minister Han Duck-soo who has been appointed acting president following the impeachment of President Yoon Suk Yeol on December 14. Yoon’s impeachment must be confirmed by the nation’s Constitutional Court, and Han had refused to fill three court vacancies, a refusal seen as an effort to support Yoon’s effort to overturn the unanimous impeachment vote of the National Assembly.
None of this would have happened without hundreds of thousands of regular citizens who rose up to oppose President Yoon’s attempt to impose martial law on the night of December 3-4 and in the days and nights that immediately followed.
The people of South Korea powerfully demonstrated the truth of Dr. King’s core strategic insight, following the teachings and example of Mahatma Gandhi: creative, disciplined mass nonviolence is the most effective method to successfully resist and overcome organized systems of violence.
Gandhi called this the power of satyagraha, holding fast to truth. King called it soul force, the strength of conscience, the power of love in action.
Here in the United States, Donald Trump and his MAGA allies will soon begin a four year regime of political chaos, financial corruption, and targeted repression, all of which will be infused with the implicit and explicit threat of violence from armed forces of the state (Army, national guard, ICE, and other agencies) and private sources such as those unleashed on January 6, 2021, including right wing militias, and individuals with guns.
How should concerned Americans respond? This question is being debated in the press, social media, and private conversations across the country.
Dr. King and John Lewis would tell us:
We must not be cowed. We must not be afraid.
We must be steadfast. We must act decisively, strategically, with courage.
We must stand with the marginalized. We must protect the poorest and most vulnerable among us. We must speak truth to power.
We must remain committed to nonviolence. We must fight to protect our democracy.
The South Koreans showed us how.
Ordinary citizens took to the streets to protect their democracy: students, activists, union members, human rights advocates, regular people of all ages from all walks of life. Without advanced warning, on a moment’s notice, they mobilized with extraordinary speed, extraordinary strategic focus and decisive, effective nonviolent action.
This is why we must rigorously follow the South Korean response to authoritarianism as the story continues to unfold. We must study exactly what hundreds of thousands of South Korea citizens did to successfully oppose a democratically elected leader who had attempted to use his power to arrest opposition politicians, journalists and civil society leaders, and impose martial law.
We must understand how they did it, so we can follow their path, adapted to our circumstances, if and when the time comes for us to do in Washington what they did in Seoul. In the meantime, we will need to do the hard work of preparation.
Are American citizens less committed to democracy than our South Koreans counterparts?
Tragically, the answer is almost certainly yes. This is not because the South Koreans are better people than we are. It is because the memory of dictatorship and brutal repression is still fresh, because the generation that fought for freedom and democracy is still alive, and because the power of mass nonviolent protest is well understood by millions who watched tyrants fall as a result.
Are the American people committed to democracy sufficiently to preserve it?
The answer to this question is not yet determined.
We do not have less power than the South Koreans. It is up to us to harness that power, rather than give it away along with our freedom.
This is the first posting of four in this series. The second posting explains how the South Koreans did it. The third explains why, when the time comes, we will need to follow a similar strategy and take comparable actions.
Radical differences in circumstances understandably evoke doubt that we can be as effective against Trump as the South Koreas were against Yoon and Han. The fourth posting reviews these differences and reflects on them.
The enormous challenge suggested by these differences will be extremely difficult to overcome. But it is important to remember that King and Lewis and millions of Americans acting in concert in cities throughout America overcame a even more difficult challenge, the apartheid system of Jim Crow that had segregated, disenfranchised and terrorized Black Americans for nearly a century. Regular citizens of all races and religions joined a mass movement to successfully defend the promise of democracy promised by the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution as modified by the 13th, 14th and 15th amendments.
When the time comes, we can and must do the same.
Jonathan D. Greenberg
