Gandhi once said, “The line of demarcation between democracy and monocracy is often thin but rigid and stronger than unbreakable steel.” He didn’t unfortunately mean, I believe, that that line could not be crossed, because we have seen it crossed many times and are seeing the same misfortune in our own country right now.

But it goes both ways. In their landmark study Why Civil Resistance Works, Erica Chenoweth and Maria J. Stephan carefully document over 200 cases of insurrection against monocracy in about the last 100 years, looking to compare those that were nonviolent (or at least non-violent, meaning where outright, physical violence was eschewed) with those that were not nonviolent even in this minimalist definition. The former were spectacularly more successful, roughly by a factor of two, in about one third the time. More amazing still (if you’re not familiar with the principles of nonviolence), they led to greater democratic freedoms even when they “failed”( i.e., the obnoxious regime was not dislodged).

We want to stop the slide toward autocratic rule, here and anywhere. As many nonviolence theorists believe, including your present writer, that can only be done by an ambitious drive toward much greater democracy than we knew before. It is not a remedial but a revolutionary approach that’s called for now. And democracy (here I’m not sure many theorists would follow me, but here goes:) can only be enlarged and secured by bringing out the vision it’s based on, which is of a free, noble, empowered, and ultimately sacred image of the human being.