There must be 50 ways: Participating in democracy #22: Inside game and outside game

Historian Mary Frances Berry is an activist scholar, a pracademic who vacillates between her role as an educator of students in the classroom and educator of the public and powers that be via her activism. She describes the dynamic between the inside game--legal, normal political involvement at any level--and the outside game--direct action with a willingness to confront and even be attacked or arrested or both. 

In a way, her strategy is one developed over millennia by militaries--flank the enemy so he can be brought down from a variety of directions. Doing this using nonviolent methods is a smart and adaptive way to participate in democracy. 

Identifying which practices are strategically advantageous and which are harmful to any effort to participate in democracy is a key component of not simply participating but of doing so in a way that promotes democracy is key. 

For example, violence tends to work against democracy. Nonviolence tends to work to strengthen, preserve, or even create democracy. This leads to one obvious conclusion, that of all the ways to participate in democracy, they will fall on the nonviolent side of action. 

However, there are few hard and fast rules after that basic understanding. In a way, if we tweak what Malcolm X advised we can more helpfully categorize the path to democracy: "By any nonviolent means at our disposal." 

There are those ideologues who reject any aspect of the inside game as being part of the structural violence of any governmental system. That's purist and understandable, just hopelessly impractical. The realpolitik of the inside game/outside game strategy is important and effective. Splitting philosophical hairs around what is violent at multiple orders of remove is not always helpful. 

This is especially the case when the advantages of the synergy between the inside game and outside game is considered. 

If your arrest for a nonviolent direct action brings you into court and you have assembled a legal team that affords you a reasonable chance for victory, that brings the outside game directly into the literal court of the inside game. A victory in the legal defense of your nonviolent direct action can impact other arenas in both the inside game and outside game, eventually (or sometimes quite quickly) leading to the actual policy change you seek. 

Think Rosa Parks. She played the outside game, sat down, got arrested, and the outside game ramped up into a bus boycott, also suddenly shoving a new young minister into the national spotlight, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. That outside game precipitated some upheavals in the inside game as the public began to increasingly sympathize with the African Americans who were playing the outside game, causing public opinion to change the political positions of elected officials. The dialectical relationship between inside game and outside game can be momentous. It is participating in democracy at a profound level.