A Problem With Protests

Over at The Monkey Cage Joshua Tucker put up a great post on how to make political science research more accessible. While the video is certainly fun to watch, and quite a change from your typical scholarly article, I found that the substance of the video also makes a great point. The video depicts a scenario where a country's people mobilize to overthrow an unpopular despot and after a lot of hard work and sacrifice they succeed in ousting him. Unfortunately rather than ushering in a golden age, the new leader commits many of the same errors as his predecessor. A situation not unlike what we've seen in Egypt over the past few years with Mubarak's replacement also trying to do things like limit freedom of expression and consolidate political power. This "one step forward, two steps back" scenario has the potential over time to lead to people becoming less interested in political involvement as they see the ultimate results of their actions being replacing one crook with another. Far from creating a new form of democracy, we just get political stagnation instead.

I'd argue that we've seen this a lot in the past 20 years of progressive protests. One example I came across on the internet a while ago was about evolving views on The Million Man March. During the 90's and 00's we had period outbursts of political activity in the black community that often seemed to come out of nowhere and seemed to have the potential to cause a lot of change in our societies political and economic dynamics around race, indeed some of their contemporary chroniclers called them "a new civil rights movement." Back in 2001 Ta-henisi Coates wrote a long profile of Louis Farrakhan that highlighted his own experience with the Million Man March when he was a college student at Howard Univeristy in 1995:

During the months before the Million Man March, the anticipation at my university could have sent a small satellite into orbit. Nation of Islam speakers came to campus spreading the good word, and Howard's student association declared its support. The night before the march, Howard students convened a rally that was roundly attended by men and women. The next day I connected with a few friends and three of my brothers and walked down to the Mall to witness the greatest post-civil rights gathering of black America to date. 

Because black folks put a lot of stock in unity, the picture of hundreds of thousands of black men peacefully assembled was moving. We perceive ourselves as a perpetually fractured ethnic group and envy Asians, Jews, and white America. But on Oct. 16, 1995, no group looked more single-minded than black men. Public figures who in the past had had a rocky relationship with Farrakhan addressed the crowd--most notably Malcolm X's widow, Betty Shabazz. Lawyers, ex-convicts, fathers, parolees, and students all swarmed the Mall. We took particular pleasure in defying all the stereotypes by not coming to the Mall and wrecking shop. For black men, it was like being a turkey all your life and getting a chance to fly for a day.

It was also Farrakhan's opportunity to fly. For years he had been shunned by the establishment, black and white. He'd been rejected as a hate-filled anti-Semite and been slammed even by the nationalists for his suspected role in the death of Malcolm X. But Farrakhan would leave the march as the undisputed President of Afro-America. Even Jesse Jackson had been forced to play second fiddle to him, and the rest of the black moderates who had tried to steer clear of Farrakhan's Million Man train were instead tied to the tracks.

Now this event was very important to a lot of people, but it's hard to see what actual political change it caused, something that Coates saw as a key role of both Farrakhan and the march. By 2001 Coates had to concede that. "Now, though, the threat of unleashing Farrakhan and his Moonie-esque minions isn't likely to leave many on Capitol Hill shaking in their boots." 

I'd argue this is just another example of the limited power of protests. So of course the protests in Tahir Square mattered and of course even smaller protests in America matter in the sense that they mattered enough to a lot of people that those individuals did the hard work of organizing and attending them. However, these protests are no substitute for the daily grind of politics.
 

Party Factions and Protests

Ta-Nehisi Coates has a nice piece looking back on the 10 year anniversary of the Iraq War.  However, I think he gets a major lesson about the war wrong when he lionizes the original anti-war protestors a decade ago:

In fact it meant a lot. It meant that you got to firmly and loudly say, "No. Not in my name." It meant being on the side of those who warned against the seductive properties of power, and opposing those who would bask in it. It also meant pragmatism...And finally it meant the election of the country's first black president whose ascent began at an anti-war rally in Chicago.  I say all this to say that if I regret anything it is my pose of powerlessness -- my lack of faith in American democracy, my belief that the war didn't deserve my hard thinking or hard acting, my cynicism. I am not a radical. But more than anything the Iraq War taught me the folly of mocking radicalism. It seemed, back then, that every "sensible" and "serious" person you knew -- left or right -- was for the war. And they were all wrong. Never forget that they were all wrong. And never forget that the radicals with their drum circles and their wild hair were right.

While he is right that the protestors may have been right about some things (they were wrong about others) he completely misses the story of how the war actually ended.  It's pretty clear that neither the Iraqi Government or some other third party could have ejected us from Iraq and that because the war was financed by deficit spending and fought by an all volunteer military that an ongoing presence in Iraq was completely possible.  Indeed John McCain campaigned on a promise of US troops in Iraq through 2013 at least.  Furthermore, the Presidency of George W. Bush shows us that a determined political party, the GOP, could keep an unpopular war going for years.  In short, public protests and public opinion neither stopped the war nor shortened it, making their effectiveness pretty doubtful.

So why did the war end?  Well the answer is that a determined faction inside the Democratic Party made opposition to the Bush's Iraq policies a mandatory position for elected Democrats to stay in good standing in their party.  This in term meant that the election of a Democrat in 2008 ensured the end of the presence of American Armed Forces in Iraq.  As I recall, in the lead up to the war there were three main faction inside the Democratic Party, Hawks like Joe Lieberman who supported war, Doves like Paul Wellstone who opposed it and people who punted like then House Minority Leader Dick Gephardt who refused to vote categorically against a war but didn't seem to care too much one way or the other and deferred this matter of foreign affairs to the Presidency.  Between 2003 and 2004 it was the Deaniacs that advanced the anti-war cause by making opposition to the war a viable position for a Democratic presidential nominee, even though Dean lost for othereasons.  After that it was the anti-Lieberman people who turned support for the war into a political liability rather than a political strength (remember who voting for the authorization for use of force in 2002 was seen as the "smart" political move?)  So that by the time the race for the 2008 nomination was on, all the major candidates for the Democratic nomination were for some withdrawal strategy.  We might remember that Obama was anti-war as opposed to Clinton but in reality their positions on how to move forward were very similar, even if their record from 2002 was not.  In short, what ended the war was a faction of a political party working inside that party to make their views, end the war, the position of their party through the daily grind of politics and elections.  That's about as unradical as you can get.      

The Tyranny of Protests

Minneapolis Mayor R.T. Rybak recently announced that he won't be seeking a fourth term in office.  After I read the news I headed over to the troll capital of Minneapolis politics (the Minneapolis Issues Forum) to see how people reacted and was of course greeted with the typical trolling you'd expect by people who have never liked R.T.  One "thread," of one post, struck a chord in me when a fellow named Dean E. Carlson announced the upcoming press conference and said "If you hurry, you can go down there are heckle him."  So that's it, after 12 years of non-stop rage and anger at a very popular mayor his political opponents are reduced to posting on message boards inviting people to go to a press conference and yell.  That is all the greens and anti-Rybak leftists have left in them, going to a press conference and yelling at strangers they disagree with.  I came to a realization today while driving to target to buy some consumer goods at knock down prices: far from becoming a revolutionary way of enacting social change for progressives, the tradition of public protest has become a terrible trap that limits progressives ability to achieve their political goals.

Political protests in this country go back to the Boston Massacre and beyond.  Indeed you can trace the idea of complaining to public officials as being both a sacred right and a political tool to enact change back in our political lineage all the way to the Middle Ages and the Magna Carta.  But here's the rub, public protests have never been a substitute for politics of a more traditional sort.  They have always been simply a political tool in an organizer's toolbox that can be used to do things.  Things like get your cause publicity or build public pressure against decision makers.  At the same time, they have limitations and drawbacks.  Mass protests can drain organization's or movement's resources as they take a lot of planning and organizing to pull off.  It took hundreds of thousands of sandwiches to feel the attendees of the famous March on Washington (it probably cost a lot to rent the sound system).  Imagine what else it cost and took.  Protests can also be very difficult to control, just as a big march can show your movement has power a small march shows you to be weak, irrelevant or the worse of all political afflictions: ridiculous.  In addition, as you see over and over again anyone can attach themselves to a protest and if they behave badly they make your whole movement look bad.  Even if they had nothing to do with you.

I'd argue, something changed during and after the 60's and since then public protesting has become to be seen by many progressives as a means unto itself.  With the questioning of power and authority in the 1960's protesting seemed to become a replacement for all politics.  The British film maker Adam Curtis found a great documentary made about the elections in Britain in 1966 where you see this new style of politics emerging.  But it was a funny and strange kind of politics, people were mad, and so they yelled at their political leaders, but they were increasingly mad in a strange disorganized fashion.  Curtis points out that:

In the film you can see both an old Britain and fragments of the new Britain that was emerging side by side in the audiences.  Empire Loyalists shout about the betrayal of Rhodesia and the loss of the last bits of the empire, while in the same audience - towards the end of the film - you can see early examples of British counter-culture. Long hair - but still beatnik, not hippie, fashion - with the slogan "Anarchy - don't vote, Anarchy don't vote". 

It's rather strange to look back at these sorts of events, shouldn't the beatniks and Empire Loyalists be yelling at each other not their MP's?  Joseph Strick, the man who made the film, introduces the film and takes the typical view of the 1960's (the same type of view that would make baby boomers Time's Man of the Year in 1966) where he sees it as an invigorating new form of democracy.  Looking back I can only see confusion.  In addition, looking at this film I am stuck by how the chaos in the audience doesn't weaken the politician at the podium, in this case Labour Party leader Harold Wilson, it only makes him look like the only reasonable person in the room.  Richard Nixon would use this kind of dynamic to get all the way to the White House two years from when this was filmed.

You can see the same dynamic at work in the whole short lived Occupy movement.  For a brief shining hour a lot of progressives saw the whole Occupy thing as a great liberal hope to change America, but it of course failed (not to rub it in but the Occupy MN website hasn't been updated since May).  It failed because the people that made it up consistently opposed any sort of political decision making.  They refused to make choices, refused to build organization and demanded everything operate by consensus.  Which means nothing got decided on, indeed for all the publicity it got I still don't know what they really wanted.  In short they imagined a sort of anti-politics, a politics that wouldn't have to deal with things like compromise, or collective decision making in a timely fashion.  But it's not possible to have an unpolitical politics at all.  In fact in Minneapolis the place of the "occupation" and the targets of their wrath seemed just plain strange to me.  They occupied Hennepin County Government Plaza which meant their main target was an organization that had no control over what they were mad about (Hennepin County doesn't control the political economy or monetary policies of the Unites States).  Matt Yglesias pointed out:

The Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis has, along with the Federal Reserve Banks of Dallas and Philadelphia, been one of the major centers of damaging hard money politics in the United States. These are the people loudly arguing against Ben Bernanke from the right, pushing for a slower economic recovery and a policy dynamic that’s even more favorable to creditors and more hostile to debtors and the unemployed. I don’t really know anything about the Hennepin County government, but it’s just not possible that they’re at the root of any major national or international problems.

Exactly.  Even the people that were being protesting couldn't have helped even if they wanted to, while the people who were causing the problems were spared public protest.  Such is the strange logic of protesting.   

A political strategy that focuses on heckling or protesting as ends in an of themselves, rather than means to an end, won't work.  To make matters worse, if you go down this path you will only exhaust yourself and your allies with little if not nothing to show for it.  Rather than being a way to transcend the boring and difficult work of having lots and lots of meetings, building a political structure or making decision that not everyone will love the protest has become a terrible trap that keeps progressives from enacting real social change and we progressives would do well to remember it.