Friction, Refusal, Discipline, Alignment, Limitation
A Doctrine for Democratic Insistence
Yesterday we wrote a brief strategy guide. Today we’ll describe part of the doctrine behind it.
Against the Machinery
Authoritarian regimes do not fall by accident. They collapse when their machinery—legal, logistical, ideological—encounters something it cannot absorb, override, or repurpose. That “something” is not simply outrage. It is friction. It is refusal. It is discipline. It is alignment. And it is limitation.
Taken alone, these are principles. Taken together, they are a doctrine. They define a mode of resistance not dependent on heroism or martyrdom, but on architecture: distributed, adaptive, antifragile. This is Radical Federalism as practice.
I. Clausewitz’s Friction: Exploit the Medium
Carl von Clausewitz taught that war, unlike theory, is not clean. It is simple in concept, difficult in execution. Why? Because of friction—“the force that makes the apparently easy so difficult.”
Friction is not an obstacle to be eliminated; it is a condition to be weaponized. Authoritarian systems are bureaucratic machines. Their scale is their weakness. Their dependency on obedience, synchronization, and message discipline makes them vulnerable to disruption.
To resist, we do not need to overpower the regime. We need only to slow it—bog it down in paper, process, contradiction, and excess. Every FOIA filing, every subpoena, every jurisdictional challenge, every refusal to comply compounds the friction.
█ Where they demand speed, we offer slowness. Where they seek smoothness, we become coarse.
II. Arendt’s Refusal: No Legitimacy Without Consent
Hope, Hannah Arendt warned, is not a virtue but a trap. It waits. It dreams. It stalls. What Arendt championed instead was action rooted in natality—the miracle of beginning. Not the promise of eventual redemption, but the act of reclaiming authority now, publicly and plurally.
In dark times, the refusal to cooperate is not passive. It is creative. It asserts that power comes not from domination, but from participation. A school board that disobeys an illegal mandate, a judge who rejects a federal deputization order, a library that refuses a blacklist—these are not holdouts. They are sovereigns in miniature.
█ No regime can rule without recognition. Withdrawal of recognition—enacted, not pleaded for—is how regimes dissolve.
III. Sharp’s Discipline: Noncooperation as Warfare
Gene Sharp understood that regimes, even brutal ones, depend on obedience. Cut that, and they fall.
His theory is not about feelings. It is about structures. Sharp’s method treats strikes, boycotts, slowdowns, and legal overloads not as gestures, but as levers. Strategic civil resistance is not a moral protest; it is a systems attack.
Sharp’s doctrine teaches us to target the compliance nodes: the courthouse, the contractor, the local administrator. His 198 methods of nonviolent action are not suggestions. They are weapons—psychological, political, economic.
█ Like Clausewitz, Sharp urges simplicity. But unlike Clausewitz, his battlefield is everywhere people can say “no” with consequence.
IV. Bismarck’s Alignment: Compacts, Not Consensus
Otto von Bismarck was no liberal. But he understood alignment better than any democrat of his century.
Bismarck did not build alliances on values. He built them on need. He forged compacts—mutual defense pacts between powers who otherwise distrusted each other—to hold Austria, Russia, and Germany in balance.
Today, the lesson is this: Do not wait for ideological agreement. Build municipal defense pacts between school boards, libraries, city halls, and state agencies. Coordinate not because you agree on everything—but because your independence depends on each other.
█ Compacts maximize defense. They create redundancy. And when enough are networked, they form a sovereign mesh.
V. de Jouvenel’s Limitation: Design Against Power
Bertrand de Jouvenel warned that all concepts meant to restrain power—natural rights, constitutions, even democracy—are eventually subsumed by it. The state turns every restraint into a rubber stamp.
The only real limitation, he argues, is structural: a system designed not to accumulate power but to shed it, interrupt it, and terminate it.
A decentralized republic survives by dispersing authority, embedding refusal, and rejecting permanence. It does not fear secession from overreach; it builds for it. It does not centralize in crisis; it multiplies nodes.
█ The future must not be scalable. It must be divisible. Because when the center fails, only the edges can remain.
VI. From Theory to Praxis
In the coming months, democratic actors must adopt a shared doctrine rooted not in optimism but in readiness.
Let friction bog them down.
Let refusal revoke their legitimacy.
Let discipline dissolve their obedience structures.
Let alignment amplify defense.
Let limitation become design.
We cannot outgun authoritarianism. But we can outlast, outmaneuver, and out-distribute it.
The doctrine is here.
Now build the mesh.
Refuse in sequence.
Resist in layers.
Survive by alignment.
And when they come—make the machine jam.
█ Let us become ungovernable by design.