Fighting for Power to Build Peace:

A Roadmap for Pacifist Politics in the 21^st Century

Jim Josefson,

Assistant Professor of Political Science

Bridgewater College

Why didn’t the Church of the Brethren stop the Bush administration from going to war in Iraq? It probably strikes us all as a silly question. After, all the historic peace churches together make up only a tiny proportion of the overall electorate in the United States. Certainly it is unreasonable to expect Brethren to have a significant impact on whether the United States goes to war. In the light of this fact, perhaps the goal of pacifists should be to be witnesses for peace, advocates for the Prince of Peace, rather than to actually stop wars. If this is the goal, however, I may be the wrong person to turn to for advice. If you want a witness, then you need an expert in public relations, someone who knows how to mold public opinion using the levers of mass media. I’ve been asked to speak as a political consultant, however, and I take that invitation to mean that you would like more than just to have people in the U.S. know that there is a small sect with the odd name “Dunkards” who think the Gospel of Jesus demands peace, that you would also like to exercise political power so that you can actually make peace.

Thus, my advice is going to be about how the Church of the Brethren can use its admittedly scarce resources to claim a share of political power in the United States. To do that I’m going to describe the three main sources of political power in the United States, the obstacles to using them, and give some advice about how pacifists could use these levers of power to work for peace.

Political Opportunities in American Politics

One of the biggest problems for Brethren peacemaking is the overall political values and political orientation of the Church. Following its traditional culture as outside the mainstream, Brethren seem quite reluctant to take advantage of the levers of power available to it. Or perhaps better, the Brethren’s desire to stay outside the mainstream has resulted in them using points of access to the political system that are too mainstream, ones that don’t enter too boldly into the darker corridors of power. For instance, one of the main focuses of Brethren political activity has been to educate the Brethren constituency about political issues through “Christian Citizenship Seminars” and church publications. The idea here is to inform church members so that they can vote, contact political leaders, and write letters to local newspapers in support of political positions taken by the Church of the Brethren.[1] Now, I don’t mean to demean such activities, as they are important acts of citizenship and they do have some effect. But the overall effect is smaller than it could be because voting and engaging in public debate are perhaps some of the least efficacious political actions a group can take, especially one as small as the Brethren. The group is simply too small to make more than a witness with these forms of participation. Such a strategy rests on a kind of individualism that actually reduces the political power of citizens.

So what are the more powerful forms of political action? I will divide the field of political action into three areas: electoral politics (involved with electing public officials), inside politics (sometimes called inside the beltway politics- referring to the interstate that surrounds Washington D.C.), and movement politics (concerned with forming organizations that enter politics through such unconventional means as protesting).

Electoral Politics

Let’s turn to electoral politics first. The basic feature of American government is that it is uniquely designed simultaneously to keep power closer to the people by dispersing it to states, local governments, and congressional districts and at the same time make it extremely difficult for the people to exercise power. In order to really win an election an interest must capture a plurality of votes in a majority of the hundreds of distinct electoral districts. Thus only certain sorts of interests, those who claim millions of adherents spread over a wide number of the electoral districts, can effectively use elections as a means to exercise power. The National Rifle Association has such capabilities; whereas even some interests that have millions of adherents, for instance unions, are dispersed and/ or concentrated in such a way that their political power is deadened rather than amplified by our electoral system of American federalism. These effects are only reinforced by the two-party system in American politics, which makes the parties represent broad swaths of interests, many of which may be so distasteful to the Brethren that party politics may be unappealing. Contrast this with the German political system, where a relatively small peace party like the Greens can claim the Foreign Minister job and major role in government, because their electoral system gives them power proportional to their nationwide vote. If Brethren were 5% of the vote in Germany, they’d get Around 5% of the seats in parliament and perhaps a share in a governing coalition. If Brethren were 5% of the American electorate, they’d likely get no power unless their numbers are concentrated to give them a majority in a few districts. As a result, any peace movement in America, let alone one led by the Church of the Brethren, will have a very difficult time using elections to win political power.

So what about gaining the backing of individual elected representatives? This is a worthwhile endeavor even though you need to have quite a few Congressmen and Congresswomen on your side to make a difference. The question is how do you get politicians to be committed to a peace platform? Well, the levers of power in individual elections are votes, money, and volunteers. Let’s take these in turn.

Votes

Given that the Church of the Brethren has few votes in any one electoral district how can their votes make a difference? First, their votes will make a difference if Brethren vote as a block on the peace issue and candidates need to know that that block of votes is there. This is a relatively easy matter, since candidates are anxious to receive speaking invitations or an invitation to distribute literature with Brethren groups or congregations. All you need to do is initiate a relationship.[2] And all this can be done without jeopardizing the Church’s tax-exempt status if it is done correctly. Churches pursuing an anti-abortion positions and Black churches do it all the time.[3]

Second, Brethren votes will make a difference if they focus their efforts on competitive races, ones in which only a small number of votes will determine the winner. Politicians are most responsive to small constituent groups when their margin of victory is small or they are vulnerable to defeat. Unfortunately, close elections are becoming a rarity in America today. State political parties have become very effective at gerrymandering, drawing the lines of electoral districts so that their party has majorities in most of the districts while packing as many of their opponents partisans in the remaining ones. The result is tremendously anti-democratic as politicians have little need to listen to their constituents if they routinely run unopposed or receive over 70% of the vote.[4]

Money

Competitive elections should also be the focus of Brethren efforts to use the next lever of electoral power: money. Contemporary elections run on money, since the key to elections is funding the expensive radio and television commercials that are the main tool that candidates use to move voters. The money people give to candidates doesn’t usually buy votes on legislation, but it does buy special access to politicians so that you can convince them of your views. Now, how do you give money? There are two kinds of contributions: individual contributions and Political Action Committee contributions. Individual contributions are limited to a maximum of $2000 per candidate per elections, which means you can give $4000 to a candidate for both the primary and general elections. Now, how many Brethren members have $4000 to give to candidates? You can give in smaller amounts, but the impact is then lessened, contributors get face time with politicians in direct proportion to their contributions. One way to get around this is bundling. You may not have many rich Brethren willing to write $4000 checks, but can you find 1000 Brethren willing to write $100 checks? If you do, all you need to do is collect the individual checks and present them together to the candidate as a bundle of “peace money”. This may sound dirty, but it is legal, and this is how politics works. Some companies direct employees to contribute in this way and then reimburse them under the table. That’s illegal, but it happens all the time.

The second kind of contribution involves the formation of Political Action Committees, institutions formed by Congress to regulate the way business, professional, and union interests give money to politicians. There are political action committees to represent just about any conceivable interest. There are pork PACS, oil PACS, doctor PACS, gun PACS, military industrial complex PACS, why not a peace PAC? They can give $10,000 per candidate per election.[5]

Volunteers

The third lever of electoral power is volunteers. Candidates are very anxious to have volunteers to do campaign work, from knocking on doors and calling voters to the polls to stuffing envelopes and putting up campaign signs. Such volunteers are paid back with special access to the politician. This can be a very inexpensive and very effective way to access power. For key members of a campaign team, working on a campaign can also result in an invitation to work on a congressional staff in Washington, where you can access another key lever of political power: inside politics.

Inside Politics

Inside politics refers to the politics surrounding the writing and passing of legislation and overseeing how the bureaucracy implements the law. The Church of the Brethren has an office that engages in inside politics: The Brethren Washington Office. The Washington Office currently has one paid staff member plus 3 volunteers from BVS (2 legislative associates and one peace educator). From my interview with a current staff member, and reading about the historical record of the Washington Office, I have the sense that the Office does a good job considering the pitiful lack of resources with which it has to work. Political scientists refer to the work of inside politics as “issue networking”.[6] What this means is that coalitions of bureaucrats, politicians, staff members, and interest groups form around every conceivable issue and piece of legislation. Networks tend to overlap since all actors tend to work with ideological or partisan allies, but networks are constantly forming and reforming in fluid fashion. Some of the issue networks that the Washington Office is currently involved with include the Latin America Working Group, the Domestic Human Needs working group, the National Council of Churches, and the Churches for Middle East Peace.[7] These networks allow Brethren to share resources, information, and actions with other groups in a way that magnifies the Church’s efforts. However, the efforts of the Office are severely limited by a lack of resources. One paid staff member and a constantly revolving door of dedicated but inexperienced assistants is not going to make a substantial mark on the corridors of power. They simply need more money and more staff. The key to influence in Washington is having a staff with experience and contacts in the centers of Washington power. Brethren simply lack this. So what to do? With resources, hiring more qualified staff would be easy. There is no dearth of people looking for work in Washington. And Brethren should be contributing money to working groups, and establishing its own Pacifist Working Group. With more resources, the Washington Office could also coordinate electoral efforts.

But if there are no more resources to be had I would suggest a more sneaky strategy. What the Church needs is some moles, people who can be encouraged to enter the political world as staff in bureaucracies and especially in Congress. There they can make the contacts and learn how to use the levers of power that the Brethren currently lack. Such moles may already exist, and effort only needs to be made to find them. Perhaps scholarships could be established at Brethren colleges to encourage committed pacifists to enter the world of politics. Individuals sadly make little difference in politics, but individuals close to centers of power in the bureaucracy, Congress, the White House, and important think tanks and universities do. You should have some moles in these institutions. Witness what a tiny group of committed neo-conservative hawks have recently done to bring us the second Gulf War.

Movement Politics

The last kind of politics is movement politics, which involves building a pacifist social movement. Movement politics involves first and foremost building organizations that support and foster identities which will mobilize members to engage in political action. The pacifist tradition in the Church of the Brethren should make this easy. The central social movement of the 20^th century, the Civil Rights Movement was fundamentally a movement supported and fostered within churches.[8] But I have the sense from being on the Bridgewater College campus that there is a distinct lack of enthusiasm among younger Brethren to participate in an anti-war movement. Brethren need to reevaluate the old arguments and come up with new justifications for pacifism that can rededicate existing pacifists and mobilize a new generation of peacemakers.

In coming up with such arguments, leaders should remember that successful movements are able to build a relatively simple message that taps into existing beliefs, values, and common sense.[9] This is difficult because the efficacy of war as an instrument of foreign policy is part of common sense. Thus pacifists need to mobilize around ideas and issue that best allow them to both build on and challenge this common sense.[10] One way would be to mobilize people based on commons sense notions of Christianity as the doctrine of love. Signs and bumper stickers I’ve seen asking “What Would Jesus Bomb?” strike me as emblematic of the kind of messages Brethren need to find to mobilize the young and new adherents.

Other issues are more difficult. The second Gulf War may well be quick with light civilian and military casualties. Why is such a war wrong nonetheless? To challenge this common sense view, Brethren should point to the hidden costs of such allegedly low cost wars as the first Gulf War (civilian and military casualties, veteran maladies such as post traumatic stress disorder and Gulf War syndrome) and question the efficacy of war and U.S. hegemony as instruments to achieve security. Certainly the rise of al Qaeda in the wake of the first Gulf War has demonstrated that American strength can have the paradoxical effect of increasing our insecurity as nations and groups strike out in response to the insecurity they feel due to US power.

This line of thinking suggests arguments that the historic peace churches are well positioned to make given their long history of work in international development. US security may be enhanced more by American involvement in political and economic development than by flexing its military might. Improvements in health, education, standards of living, and political and civil rights are not just the issues of dewy eyed idealists, rather they are also issues that should be seen as central to national security. [11] Work by pacifists in these areas should be recognized as efforts to achieve security through peace. Indeed, the role of the historic peace churches in building civil society around the globe could give pacifists the legitimacy to access the levers of power in other countries that they may never achieve here in the US.

The key to any successful movement, however, isn’t really numbers, resources, or beliefs (although these things are certainly important) but tactics, things to do or action for members to engage in. A movement needs to figure out things for its members to do that will 1) be something that they are willing and able to do and which reinforces the group’s identity and dedication to the cause 2) affect public opinion and/ or the views of political leaders and 3) do so without mobilizing opponents.[12] This is a tall order. Movements are successful, however, the more creative they are in developing and trying new tactics that meet these three goals. The most successful tactics will often be brand new because they capture the interest of both group members and the attention of the media and political leaders they are directed at.

Let me give you an example. Early on in the struggle against Apartheid in South Africa, students responded to police violence by spontaneously going on strike from school and throwing rocks. They didn’t plan this. It just happened. But it was a tactic that gave members of the movement something to do, that they could rather easily do with little organization or resources. In fact it was fun! It also caught the attention of TV cameras and the authorities and pressured them for change. But at the same time, the tactic of throwing rocks wasn’t too challenging. If they had used guns, the South African military would have just mowed them down with machine guns, but they couldn’t respond to only rock-throwing with overwhelming violence.[13] The tactic worked the same way for Palestinian youth in the first Intifadah. The problem is that old tactics can lose their ability to mobilize people and attract attention. Thus movements eventually need to produce new tactics, which, as is the case with suicide bombing in the current Intifafa, may be unsuccessful because they mobilize opposition.

Finding new tactics, I’m afraid, is something desperately needed for the anti-war movement. For instance, I sense that the protest march has lost some of its efficacy, as it has become just too normal (and thereby unthreatening) a feature of the political landscape. As such it simply fails criteria #2 above, it doesn’t challenge the status quo sufficiently to attract the attention of media or politicians. This is especially the case for small groups like pacifists. Thus, one tactic that should be studied by pacifists as a model for what can be done by a small group is the efforts of ACT-UP, a small group of mostly gay and lesbian citizens pushing for more public resources for AIDS prevention and treatment. ACT-UP combined small inventive protest events such as blocking bridges and occupying offices to embarrass public officials with very effective mainstream political activities such as lobbying in order to win a seat at the political table. By threatening protest sanctions in order to claim political access, ACT-UP effectively built on the skills and identities of their members (drag queens are well suited to embarrass politicians, while many members had professional skills in public relations, science and law), commanded attention through creative protest events, and demonstrated great skill in deflecting opposition. They are a notable example of what can be achieved by a small group with inspired tactics.[14]

So your movement needs to find new tactics that mobilize members, pressure leaders, and don’t mobilize opposition. Any ideas? Let me suggest one. Pacifists could mobilize now to help the families of troops and the families in Iraq simultaneously. Millions of Americans are looking for someway to show support for America and our soldiers without showing support for the war. Raising money and awareness about the needs of soldiers’ families and Iraqi civilians gives war skeptics and their families something to focus on, to do in their kitchens as part of their everyday lives, to work for peace during a time in which many do not want to protest. Also by highlighting the costs of war, perhaps especially the costs to veterans, and drawing the connections between American suffering and Iraqi suffering will bring these costs home to the public and our leaders. During Gulf War I, a group called the Military Family Support Network was founded to do something similar. Finally, who would mobilize to oppose such efforts? There are many more tactics that could be developed. This one is imperfect, but it is illustrative of what you need to do.

Conclusions

Let me say in conclusion that this is a depressing story I have told. In order to get political power, groups like the Brethren need to manipulate a political system that political scientists call “interest group liberalism”. To do so means to accept, even reinforce, a system that systematically puts you and the vast majority of our citizens at a political disadvantage. Interest group liberalism has redistributed political power in this country away from the citizens and to the special interest groups that have the resources to fund the candidates, think tanks, lobbyists, and organizations that I have described as holding the power in American politics. The only way to win in this political game is thus to leverage power you don’t really have in a way that is antithetical to many of the values that animate pacifism to begin with: a dedication to a life ordered by reasoned debate among free and equal citizens. The reason why Brethren have not stopped the war is the same reason no one could have stopped it: we simply lack the political institutions that are responsive to the public will. We have been led to war by a president that did not receive a plurality of the vote. We have a Congress, elected by a pitifully small portion of the qualified electorate in an electoral system based on fundraising and advertising rather than reasoned debate, which gave up its constitutional responsibility to debate and declare war to this unelected president. Our citizens who now support this war simply lack the capacities for citizenship to critically evaluate the wisdom of this war. Indeed, the press told them, for instance, that the connections between Iraq and al Qaeda were at best exaggerated and the evidence of Iraqi nuclear weapons manufactured, but this made no dent in the public consciousness. If you feel disempowered and depressed, take comfort in the fact that you are not crazy. You actually are disempowered.

So let me make a final suggestion that peacemaking requires more than political action on behalf of peace. The success of peacemaking will be dependent on our polity’s ability to create more democratic institutions that will actually listen to the peacemakers. Unfortunately, to affect these changes will require working with the system I have described using the tactics I have described. There is no other way. This is a difficult road, but it is the path of peace.