What Sen. Booker’s Speech Teaches Us About Effective Resistance Strategy
“I rise tonight with the intention of disrupting the normal business of the United States Senate for as long as I am physically able… These are not normal times in our nation. And they should not be treated as such in the United States Senate. The threats to the American people and American democracy are grave and urgent and we all must do more to stand against them.”
This is how Senator Cory Booker (D-NJ) began a speech which ultimately lasted more than 25 hours. At a time when our democracy faces an unprecedented crisis, Sen. Booker’s speech constituted a call to action in the name of unity and civil rights, justice and solidarity. It broke the filibuster record set by Sen. Strom Thurmond (R-SC), a man so racist that he spoke for a whole day and night to try and block the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1957 and “keep people like me out of the Senate,” as Booker pointedly told Rachel Maddow.
A filibuster seeks to obstruct the democratic act of deliberation around a specific piece of legislation. Sen. Booker’s speech was a resistance action. It called attention to the sober fact that all of our democratic procedures, norms, and institutions are imperiled. And it enacted and supported several key resistance strategies and principles.
This is a long game, and we must be resilient, seeing each individual action as part of a larger collective process.
The speech was an endurance test. Sen. Booker took no bathroom or rest breaks. He modeled in miniature the resilience shown by U.S. civil rights protesters on the streets and during the long years of struggle. And he reminded us that we will need to be tenacious and not easily discouraged in our efforts to turn back this assault on our rights and freedoms and restore the rule of law and democratic governance to America. “Moments like this require us to be more creative or more imaginative, or just more persistent and dogged and determined,” Booker said, his strength flagging as he entered the final few hours.
Lead with values and harness the power of emotions to bring others into the cause.
I was not surprised that it was Sen. Booker who stood up against the moral collapse we are witnessing. “This is not right or left. It is right or wrong. This is not a partisan moment. It is a moral moment,” he said. “Where do you stand?”
Sen. Booker has often been ahead of the curve by appealing to Americans to take a stand and draw on the wisdom and practice of the civil rights era as they do that. During the first Trump administration, when he decided to run for president in the 2020 election, Sen. Booker made values-driven politics, love, and empathy part of his platform. In a 2018 Atlantic interview, he evoked Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s belief that ‘hate can’t drive out hate; only love can do that.’ Not only do I believe it is an important ideal, I also believe it is the right strategy, the right political strategy.”
While Sen. Booker did not invoke love on this occasion, many journalists and commentators noted his displays of emotion, as though this was something unusual to see in a member of Congress.
Here is my essay about the power of love and positive emotions as effective resistance strategy.
Sen. Booker used the Senate chamber to make his speech and invoked his right to not yield the floor until he was ready. In doing so, he followed another core principle of anti-authoritarian action:
Use the tools and spaces you have now –all of them—because there is no guarantee that they will be available in the future. Be prepared to use those tools and spaces in new ways that might take you out of your comfort zone.
His fellow Democratic members of Congress have many instruments of protest available to them: voting NO on Republican-sponsored legislation, demanding quorum calls, denying confirmations, and much more. Yet many have acted timidly, avoiding such actions, some of them perhaps trying to honor a bipartisanship that has sadly all but disappeared as the Republican party has become an authoritarian entity.
And ten Democrats were decidedly not using the spaces and tools at their disposal to fight autocracy when they signed on to the Republican motion to censure Rep. Al Green (D-TX) for protesting during President Donald Trump’s first address to a joint session of Congress. By censoring Rep. Green, these Democrats also ignored another key resistance guideline:
Always present a united front to oppose an authoritarian aggressor. Solidarity is everything.
Booker’s extraordinary action brought forth a show of affection and respect from his colleagues in the chamber –Sen. Chris Murphy (D-CT) stayed with him throughout, and others frequently asked him questions to allow him a bit of vocal rest. That, too, was important for Americans to see. As Bloomberg columnist Nia-Malika Henderson observed, Sen. Booker was sending a strong message to his Senate colleagues as well as the Democratic base, both through his physical performance and through the content of his speech.
Sen. Booker denounced the Trump administration’s actions in every sector and the destruction wrought by Elon Musk’s DOGE shock troops, but he did so in ways that made the awful outcomes of those actions and policies clear. Throughout, he shared testimonials from people who have already been adversely affected by the wrenching changes, whether farmers or educators and students or foreign nationals trying to enter the U.S. who ended up in ICE detention sites.
Focus on the human and other outcomes of the adversary’s bad policies. Stories remain with people in ways that policy analysis does not.
Sen. Booker here followed best practices of anti-authoritarian messaging: rather than discuss policies in detail –something wonky Democrats have favored—lean into storytelling and humanize the issues, narrating the concrete consequences for individuals of bad policy and linking your proposals for reform to better outcomes.
Tell your own stories. Don’t be a prisoner of the adversary’s narrative frames.
Moreover, Sen. Booker’s speech did not just call out President Trump and Musk for their attempts to wreck our democracy and bring hardship to Americans. It also drew attention away from those aggressors –who are so very skilled at capturing the spotlight, and possess powerful instruments to do so—and put eyes on the telling of another story: a story of another nation that does not consent to having lives and livelihoods turned upside down by billionaires allied with autocrats.
Telling your own story is how you break free of the prison of authoritarian overwhelm and the narrative frames they have constructed through disinformation. Sen. Booker was onto this in 2018. As he told Franklin Foer of the Atlantic: “[I]f we become a party that is about what we’re against, I don’t think that’s a winning strategy. I think if we give all of our energy—psychic, mental—toward Donald Trump, it makes him powerful….If you make Donald Trump your central focus, then it’s going to be much harder to get to a sense of common purpose.”
Give Hope to Others
Sen. Booker also looked forward and saw this dark moment as full of potential, saying that new leaders could emerge from this “pivotal moment.” “I’m not talking about Senators. I’m talking about citizens.” Seeing a member of the political elite acknowledging the power of the people with humility was moving. He supported the idea that “we are the leaders we have been looking for,” to quote the title of a book by Eddie S. Glaude, Jr. It’s no wonder that the New York Times noted in a headline that Sen. Booker’s speech, along with a victory in the Wisconsin State Supreme Court election, had given a “big psychological boost” to Democrats as a whole.
One Resistance Action Inspires Others: On to the April 5 Hands Off! Day of Protest
“And so we all have a responsibility, I believe to do something different to cause, as John Lewis said, good trouble, and that includes me,” Sen. Booker said on the Senate floor, evoking the late Rep. John Lewis, a protagonist of the civil rights movement and force for justice. “He said for us to go out and cause some good trouble, necessary trouble, to redeem the soul of our nation. I want you to redeem the dream…. Let’s be bolder in America with a vision that inspires with hope.”
Hundreds of millions of people watched Booker’s speech. It had 350 million likes on TikTok, was followed live by 110,000 people on YouTube, and led to 28,000 people leaving messages on Sen. Booker’s office voicemail. Likely timed to prepare people for the April 5 Hands Off! day of protest, which will unfold in over 900 places across the country, it created new energy and momentum. The Hands Off! protests will be another example of using the tools and spaces we have when we still have them: protesters will be exercising their rights to free speech and assembly.
As Democratic lawyer Marc Elias writes, each of us has our own town square, and we can use it to speak out and contribute to the creation of a different political reality. Authoritarians want us to feel hopeless and helpless. It’s up to us to show them that we will not submit quietly and that we believe in struggle and collective action. Like Sen. Booker, each one of us can do something, using the spaces and means we have, to meet this moment with the same resilient and resolute spirit he showed on the Senate floor.
It is to be remembered that Senator Booker spoke … he did not threaten.
Yes, we can learn so much from both Fifties/Sixties civil rights protests AND Sixties Vietnam War protests. Non-violence is still the way.