What everyone needs to know about nonviolent protest:

• must be provocative. If nobody cares, nobody will respond. Gandhi didn't do boring things. He took what (after rigorous self examination) he determined was rightfully his, such as salt from the beaches of his own country, and interrupted the British economy, and provoked a violent response against himself.
• must be certain not to justify the violent reactions they receive. It cannot succeed without rigorous self-examination to make sure you, the protester, are not committing injustice.
• "hurts, like all fighting hurts. You will not deal blows, but you will receive them." (from the movie Gandhi -- one of my favorite movie scenes of all time)
• demands respect by demonstrating respectability. The courage to get hit and keep coming back while offering no retaliation is one of the few things that can really make a man go, "Huh. How about that."
• does not depend on the what the "enemy" does in order to be successful. It depends on the commitment to nonviolence.

What happens next

Demands

• Demands need to be specific and have limits. That is, they can't be "Improve x forever." There needs to be a way to decide together at a future time whether they have concretely been met. (And if not, start protesting again.)
• Demands cannot percolate into a whole set of new ones as soon as you have the upper hand. It's unjust to demand "a minimum wage of $15 an hour" while protesting, and then when the government is cornered by embarrassment and just wants this to stop, to demand "a minimum wage of $20 an hour and free tomatoes for everyone."
• Demands must be just. Note that unjust demands will not work, by principle -- it would be unjust, coercive, violent to use the spirit of nonviolence to try to extract a concession that would be damaging, humiliating, or otherwise destructive to the state or to other groups of people. The mechanism that nonviolent protest relies on for its effectiveness -- the moral high ground -- would not be able to bear the contradiction of pursuing unjust demands.

• First, being for something gives everyone involved (and society at large) a specific target to aim at. It presents a vision and puts it in public consciousness. This helps to coordinate action and make that shared, specific vision real. By contrast, being against something leaves open the decision of what to do instead -- the government could well pull a Captain Barbosa and say "I promised I'd let you go, it was you who failed to specify when or where."
• Second, being for something automatically implies that the absence of that thing is a mistake. In other words, "for-ness" has within it what "against-ness" was trying to achieve: Don't do x. If you're for "Make and enforce a new police accountability law that accomplishes x, y, and z," then not doing that, or arguing against that, will look like a failure just as much as if you'd said "Don't do p," and they went ahead and did p.

How Bernie is succeeding in these principles:

• He is being "pro-good" instead of "anti-bad." He is not trying to win us over with fear of an opponent (Republicans, Trump, ISIS, etc.), but talking about serving our actual interests.
• He is running a clean campaign, not insulting or attacking Clinton despite inordinate reasons to justifiably do so. This makes makes attacks against him tend to backfire.
• He is "walking the talk" by not taking campaign contributions from Wall St. or big-moneyed interests.
• He is encouraging his supporters to follow his example and also not to engage in smearing and negative campaign tactics.
• He is listening extremely well to his opponents and to Republicans. At town halls he frequently says to questioners from the audience, "I may be wrong, you may disagree" -- which no matter what you believe, is philosophically true. Despite what science may tell us, there are myriad reasons, all human and all innocent (even if not "rational"), that someone may disagree and still have an earnest heart in their inquiry.

What we can do for Bernie:

An idea for the convention

On December 9, 2014 I attended a protest in Oakland. When the riot gear came out with full weaponry in hand and emotionless facial expressions on display, the atmosphere was tense. I saw it as the perfect place to challenge myself to practice empathy. Here they are, ready to beat me at the command of their superior, and if I can open myself to empathize, maybe I can shift the energy. I raised my voice as loud as I could without screaming and started addressing all of the police at once:

“You are not my enemy. Violence is my enemy. I have faith in you. I know there is a human behind that uniform. I won’t give up on you. I know you are not all bad. I know on some level you probably don’t want to be here right now. I know it may pain you to get orders to hit or arrest us. I know there is good inside of you. I know there is another way. You are not my enemy. Violence is my enemy.”

Inside of me emotion was swelling and tears came as I felt that the police were softening up. Some of them acknowledged me with head nods or by waving their hands. The ‘us vs. them’ vibe seemed broken at least for a moment. I noticed the lack of hate within me, and instead the genuine concern for their humanity behind the cold exterior they were displaying. My partner Mica Stumpf described the scene, “There was a real energy shift when you started empathizing with them. The police seemed to relax a bit and feel some relief, maybe because they finally had a good interaction with a protestor. The other protestors seemed to be a bit shocked and intrigued by what you were doing as well. At the very least you planted some seeds.”

• They have a flawed candidate, that is polling badly against Trump.
• When they look out at 10s of thousands of protesters, they are convicted by the sight of people they are suppose to be serving.
• They cling to the power they have, knowing it is given to them through the corruption of big money
• The moral stance of their position is self-evident - morally they are in the wrong. They know what they have done to steal this election, they will know what they are trying to do inside the convention to steal the nomination. And they know it is wrong.