Title: How did Gandhi win? - Waging Nonviolence | Waging Nonviolence
Headings: How did Gandhi win?
How did Gandhi win?
Mark Engler
Paul Engler

Content: They do this by shifting public opinion around an issue and activating an ever-expanding base of supporters. At their most ambitious, these movements take things that might be considered politically unimaginable — women’s suffrage, civil rights, the end of a war, the fall of a dictatorial regime, marriage equality for same-sex couples — and turn them into political inevitabilities. Negotiations over specific policy proposals are important, but they come at the endgame of a movement, once public opinion has shifted and power-holders are scrambling to respond to disruptions that activist mobilizations have created. In the early stages, as movements gain steam, the key measure of a demand is not its instrumental practicality, but its capacity to resonate with the public and arouse broad-based sympathy for a cause. In other words, the symbolic trumps the instrumental. A variety of thinkers have commented on how mass movements, because they are pursuing this more indirect route to creating change, must be attentive to creating a narrative in which campaigns of resistance are consistently gaining momentum and presenting new challenges to those in power. In his 2001 book “Doing Democracy,” Bill Moyer, a veteran social movement trainer, stresses the importance of “sociodrama actions” which “clearly reveal to the public how the power-holders violate society’s widely held values [.]” Through well-planned shows of resistance — ranging from creative marches and pickets, to boycotts and other forms of non-cooperation, to more confrontational interventions such as sit-ins and occupations — movements engage in a process of “politics as theater” which, in Moyer’s words, “creates a public social crisis that transforms a social problem into a critical public issue.” The types of narrow proposals that are useful in behind-the-scenes political negotiations are generally not the kinds of demands that inspire effective sociodrama. Commenting on this theme, leading New Left organizer and anti-Vietnam War activist Tom Hayden argues that new movements do not arise based on narrow interests or on abstract ideology;