The Physics of Resistance at Delaney Hall

We teach our children to admire precisely the kind of protest for which we now arrest people. The men we call the Founders shut down Parliament’s courts so they could not sit, forced its stamp distributors to resign their commissions under threat, tore apart the houses of its officials in the streets of Boston, and finally stood in the road at Lexington carrying not placards but flintlocks. Strip away the tricorn hats and what is left is a decade of obstruction, intimidation, and the destruction of property, all of it aimed at getting in the way of an authority the patriot resistance had decided was illegitimate. Call it the physics of resistance, the plain and unsentimental business of putting your body between abusive power and what it means to do. It is also, by any standard we apply today, the conduct that gets a person labeled an extremist and an agitator, and in a heated enough moment, a domestic terrorist.

The standard history files all of it under the birth of American liberty, a founding virtue, a building block of the national character. And there the reverence stops, because the conduct that made the country is the one thing the country was then organized to keep anyone from using again.

The men who had just won their independence understood the danger of their own example better than anyone, having lived it. What worried them was not a foreign enemy but the next set of Americans who might look at what the Revolution had done and conclude that the lesson was repeatable. A great deal of the energy that went into the Constitution was an answer to that worry. They built a central government strong enough to put down an insurrection before it could find its feet, and they wrote the means of suppression into the document itself, so that the force which had founded the country could never again be aimed at the men now running it. Many of those men had been extremists in their day, radicals by any measure, and they knew it. They had no real objection to extreme measures. Their objection was narrower and more honest than that, and it was this: they objected to extreme measures aimed at the order they had just built.

You can clock the speed of the reversal by Daniel Shays. In 1786 a few thousand farmers in western Massachusetts, many of them veterans of the army that had won the war and most of them being foreclosed into ruin, shut down the courts to stop the judgments against them. It was, almost to the gesture, what the patriot resistance had done a dozen years earlier. This time the men who had led the Revolution answered with cannon fire that killed four of the farmers at the Springfield arsenal, and with a privately financed army that ran down the rest, and then they tried the leaders for treason and sentenced them to hang. The rebels had done nothing the patriots had not, and the only thing that had changed in the years between was the order their defiance now threatened.

The same logic is operating in Newark this week. Inside Delaney Hall, a privately run federal detention center, the detainees say that some three hundred of them have been refusing food for a week over the conditions they are held in, conditions that, by their account, include worms in what they are fed. Outside the gates, their families and the people who have come to stand with them have been blocking the entrances, dragging the barricades down, and forming lines across the exits so the vehicles cannot leave. ICE has answered with pepper spray and batons. The protest that physically gets in the way is, predictably, the one that makes the place harder to run, which is the whole of the physics and the entire reason it is now being called something other than protest.

Here is where it stops being a story about Donald Trump, because the official now pinning that word on the protesters is the Democratic governor of New Jersey. Mikie Sherrill has spent the week on the detainees’ side of this, at least rhetorically. She has called for the facility to be closed, demanded that its conditions be fixed, asked to inspect it herself, and when she was refused at the door, sent the state Department of Health to try where she could not. By her own account she is fighting the administration that runs the place. And yet, the moment the protest outside became the kind that actually interferes, she reached for Trump’s own vocabulary. She described the disruptive demonstrators as national extremist groups, told the ones who had traveled in from elsewhere that they should go home, and reserved her thanks for the protesters who had, in her words, assembled peacefully, which is the polite name for the ones who change nothing.

Calling protesters extremists and outsiders is the safe move, and it has been the safe move in every one of these episodes. It is the loyalist move, the one that signals fidelity to the existing order, and it costs a politician nothing with the people in the middle. It may even help, because the middle is where the comfortable live, the people who already have their rights and can afford to be patient about everyone else’s, the ones who want above all to vote for the adult in the room, the figure who promises to put order ahead of liberty and to keep the temperature down. That instinct was available to the respectable Bostonian in 1765 who thought the Sons of Liberty had gone too far, and to the propertied men of 1787 who slept easier once Shays was put down, and to the Boston gentleman of 1850 who decided that returning a man to slavery was the tolerable price of union. The same instinct is available now.

Consider the zone itself. Sherrill’s answer to a protest she could no longer ignore was to announce a peaceful, protected protest zone, a fenced enclosure in which people would be permitted to object, and to clear everyone else out of the way with tear gas and mounted police in order to build it.

Set aside the irony of deploying force to establish a space for peaceful expression. The deeper trouble is the premise, because the whole notion of a designated zone for the exercise of a constitutional right is preposterous on its face. A right is not a zoning variance. You do not hold it only inside whatever chain-link pen the authorities find it convenient to erect fifty yards from the thing you came to oppose. The men who shut Parliament’s courts did not fight a war to be granted a lot on which to assemble. They fought so that the whole country would be ground a person could stand on and refuse, the pavement in front of a detention center emphatically included.

A freedom you may exercise only where you are told, and only so long as the exercise stays convenient, has already quietly become a permit, and a permit is something the people who issue it can withdraw.

Look at the geometry of the boundary and the purpose reads right off it. The person holding a sign at the fence is left alone, because a sign at the fence changes nothing and threatens no one. The person standing in the doorway is removed, because a body in the doorway is the one thing in the entire scene with the power to slow the operation down. Thoreau called that being a counter-friction to stop the machine. So the protest allowed to remain inside the fence is the one that accomplishes nothing, while the protest cleared away is the only one with the power to change the outcome, which is precisely why it has been renamed extremism.

By drawing that line, Sherrill’s troopers treat the people obstructing a detention center as the threat to be managed and leave the detention center itself, and everything happening inside it, alone. While they hold the perimeter, the strike goes on, the conditions the strikers are protesting go unexamined, and ICE, by the detainees’ account, keeps using pepper spray inside a locked unit. The troopers holding that cordon end up shielding the building from the only people with any interest in changing what happens inside it.

It is an old trick, this turning of the calendar, and it does not require a villain to work. Every patriot now carved into the national memory was an extremist in his moment, and the label came off only because he interfered and, in the end, won. Shays interfered and lost, and so he stays a rebel, his name fixed to a rebellion rather than a revolution.

The people at the gates of Delaney Hall are being sorted into that same category in real time, by a governor who says she wants the place shut down, before anyone can know which way their history will run. And the uncomfortable thing, the thing the people lowering the temperature would prefer no one said out loud, is that the protest we are taught to revere and the protest we are instructed to fear are the same act. The only variable that has ever told them apart is whose order was on the receiving end.