It’s an incentive problem. If even one party defects in a society of pacifists, the pacifists have no real method of recourse besides refusing to interact with the defector, and how many people are going to do that if the defector starts killing people to enforce compliance?

Some subscribe to a soft pacifism where non-destructive violent resistance like disarming the defector or disabling the defector using less-lethal technologies like a tazer would be fine. Pure pacifists who don’t believe in any kind of physical resistance whatsoever are almost exclusively religious practitioners who don’t ascribe a high degree of value to life in this world because they believe non-resistance will bear spiritual fruit in the next world.

It's because people in positions of power can safely ignore nonviolence. They can't ignore the other option. Nonviolence on it's own is not productive.

Yeah, the thorough argument is that people in power don't want people to rise up and challenge their authority.

It's absolutely not realistic. Every right we have was fought for and people died trying to get it. This is especially true in America where a fifth of the population was enslaved at inception. Nothing has never been given to us it had to be taken from abusers of power and there have always been abusers of power in this country.

I mean Trump is no different than Washington. Washington routinely ignored laws, he tried to have his lackeys go get his "property" from free states while never willing to go to court (a provision of the fugitive slave act).

John Adam's called Shays's Resistance terrorists because they had the audacity to close down courts to stop foreclosures of farms (fun fact, that was the first time since the revolution where Americans fired artillery at other Americans (and it was a paid mercenary army by Boston merchants killing over credit)).

You can go down the list, it's always been there but luckily there were always people fighting against it trying to better society against those that simply dragged us down.

A commonly cited example is during the Battle of Seattle the cops wanted to beat the shit out of a nonviolent sit in and the black bloc protected them through a combination of strength and diversion. The non violent people are there for the optics and the violent people are there assuring that any move made on the nonviolent protesters will be rewarded swiftly.

The important part is that the violence mostly doesn't start until someone tries to hurt those who are there peacefully. Good was there peacefully so retaliation is becoming a possibility.