Image by Candice Seplow.

There is a clarifying power to nonviolence.

When Dr. Martin Luther King was jailed in Birmingham in 1963 for protesting racial segregation in that city, he declared that such protests were needed to create a “constructive nonviolent tension” that would lift individuals out of the “dark depths of prejudice and racism.” As he explained, “the purpose of the direct action was to create a situation so crisis-packed that it will inevitably open the door to negotiation.”

Today that clarifying power has been put to work in a new context, and, in many respects, to new effect: defining with great clarity the nature of the struggle now being fought out in the nation. This is not simply a conflict between Republicans and Democrats, or even between democracy and authoritarianism. At the most basic level, this is a clash between cultures of nonviolence and violence, with authoritarianism manifesting the most extreme version of a culture driven by the will to harm.

A good part of that clarifying energy has been seen in the thousands of largely peaceful protests that have taken place across the country, with millions of people demonstrating against ICE brutality, the firings and union-busting of federal........

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