Thoreau's Civil Disobedience & Punk

Clearly, an anti-establishment and authority-defiant approach is fundamental to both Thoreau and the punk aesthetic, and it is perhaps the most obvious connection between the two. In a scholarly book length follow up to his punk manifesto, Greg Graffin expanded on the punk ideal with Anarchy Evolution: Faith, Science, and Bad Religion in a World Without God. In that work, Graffin explains punk’s challenge to the tyranny of institutional authority warning that “If people unquestionably give in to the massive force exercised by the oppressive institution that is the government, they will enable the people in power.” This criticism clearly mirrors Thoreau’s assertion in Resistance to Civil Government about the relatively few bending the government to their will with the Mexican War. 

Prior to Graffin’s book Anarchy Evolution, Bad Religion’s song You are the Government had decreed “when people bend, the moral fabric dies,” and that concern is the essence of Thoreau’s abolitionist stance and the development of his most significant and enduring political work in the art of “Civil Disobedience.” Thoreau’s original thinking on government and the integrity of the individual who dissents began as his counterargument to William Paly’s “Duty of Submission to Civil Government” from The Principals of Moral and Political Philosophy. While scholars and historians widely acknowledge the lineage of Thoreau’s ideas running through the anti-colonialist revolution led by Mohandas Gandhi and the American civil rights protests led by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., the defiant beliefs can easily extend through the 1970s and 80s with the rise of punk. 

Granted, no one is aligning the historical struggles for abolition, independence, and civil rights with the kids raging in mosh pits during the early 80s. That doesn’t, however, discount the connection of the punk ethos linking back to the ideas of Thoreau. For, when Graffin “warns against blindly accepting the government directives and blindly conforming to their ideals,” he is clearly channeling the transcendentalist concepts of self-reliance and civil disobedience. Graffin, Bad Religion, and the punks of the Lower East Side would certainly “accept the motto that government is best that governs least” and might even agree that “when men are prepared for it, that is the type of government they shall have.”