Protests, Movements, and Communities

So in the continuing debate between myself and Mark about the value of protesting and the intricacies of protest culture, Mark has basically conceded my point that judging protests on the basis of affecting change and cohesiveness of message alone is to misunderstand at least one element of protesting insofar as they are community building events. However, Mark notes that the near invariability of mixed messaging involved in protesting may well generate as much apathy as it seeks to mitigate.

Mark asks,

But what if taking to the streets winds up increasing, rather than decreasing, apathy in society as a whole even as it creates a sense of a passionate united community amongst the faithful? What if, indeed, it winds up destroying a nascent movement united on a single issue? I think this is exactly what happens when more and more non-germane elements are introduced into a protest.

Sure, again if the purpose of the protest in question is to unite people on one single issue and give birth to a “nascent movement” Mark’s point would be very well taken, but that’s not what I’m referring to when I talk about the community building potentials of grassroots protesting from either the left or the right.

Listen, before I dig in to what I take to be the meat of this issue, let me get a couple of things out of the way. Firstly, it is my estimation that anyone who is going to be turned off by a plurality of messaging at a protest to the extent that they come to question the very value of mass public demonstration, then odds are they weren’t generally going to be very much involved in the first place — much less susceptible to any gravitational pull of community building that may go on in these events.

I know that Mark points out that some folks who may have bee inclined to protest could very well be dislodged from that inclination by an incoherent message and that that dislodging has an effect of the numbers of a protest, thereby hampering its success (right?), which I’ll concede. But, again, I think that we’re looking at the success of protesting strictly in terms of its ability to affect change in an immediate sense.

Going to a protest just isn’t in the cards for everyone and no protest can ever possibly cater to the diversity of opinions of potential attendees. So the fact that you lose some people along the way isn’t just acceptable “collateral damage”, it is in many regards an inevitability. Those people who you lose were never likely going to be affected in any serious kind of way by the sense of community that can be generated at such events, so they don’t really enter into the community building equation from the get go. Let’s face it, grassroots protests are in no way a panacea to apathy, they are one potential method of remediation. And insofar as protests are one method of many in the fight against civic disengagement, it is equally fair to acknowledge that they will have limited applicability in that fight.

Which segues nicely into my second point (still not the big point), which is to say that protests shouldn’t be seen as any kind of end all be all to affecting change. It is certainly the case that most intelligent protest organizers avoid seeing them as such. Just as protests are one potential tool in the fight against apathy, they are also merely one tool in the social dissident’s (again, be they left or right) strategy to affect on a particular issue or set of issues.

I bring this up in regards to the Stephen Gordon quote that Mark provides,

The successful Tea Party in Alabama was the rallying point which turned into a major defeat of the largest tax hike (proposed by a Republican, no less) in our state’s history. Some organizers tried to hold similar events in later years. However, the rallying cries became more about issues like abortion and especially immigration. Not surprisingly, the movement fell apart. (Emphasis Mark’s)

The logic here seems to be: you hold a protest, lots of people come, government officials see that you’re serious about an issue, they enact the changes you demand. This is to completely misunderstand all of the other work that goes into affecting change on a social and/or governmental level, of which organizing and holding a protest is just one element. Indeed, little to nothing would happen if there weren’t significant government relations campaigns that occurred along side effective protesting, as well as engagement and education campaigns that also provided alternative avenues for citizens/stakeholders from a variety of backgrounds to become involved in the issue.

The protest, such as it is, is merely one very loud, very public, and admittedly, very messy demonstration of that constellation of effort. It is only one effort precisely because it is very difficult to manage and control down to the last detail, and so if every hope rode on its success, those hopes would be very much misplaced indeed. Any protest organizer who tells you that if he/she just holds enough big protests on a particular issue that they will be able to realize the change they’re seeking, doesn’t really understand the art of protesting, I would argue.

However, the big issue in my mind is how we conceive of the community that I have suggested some thoughtful protests have the potential to build (I think commenter Michael Drew is correct to point out that not all protests are created equal, as it were). To my mind, E.D. nails it in the comments of Mark’s post when he says,

More broadly, perhaps what you’re identifying as the problems with protests is the larger problem with movements in general…?

Quite right, I would say. It certainly seems to me that there is pernicious tendency to conflate what we means when we say “community”, especially within the context of protesting, and what we mean when we say “movement”. However, I don’t think that the two are at all the same thing and distinguishing them will go a long ways towards identifying what I might be seeing as the potential in protesting that I think Mark is not.

The modern conception around most any politically or socially motivated actions is that one is addressing an issue and attempting to cultivate a, to use Mark’s words from earlier, “nascent movement” in order to try to affect some kind of change on that issue (or set of issues as the case may be). This also happens to be the primary drive of most of the political parties currently in operation and goes at least some of the way to articulating why those parties spend most of their time struggling to capture an elusive crowd of voters who seem like a fish that cannot be caught — at least in any permanent sense. Movements, by and large, demand homogeneity and conformity, they demand that all of the members of the movement agree on a host of issues as part of the agreement on membership. For ample evidence of how this is the case just take a look at the “what is and is not a conservative”battles that have been occurring over the past months; as E.D. has pointed out, the evidence is rife.

But as commenter Mike points out in E.D.’s post about his own twisting and turning political evolution, there seems to be a breaking with those conventions that is gaining steam and making the prevalence and influence of movement wane on the whole. I know that it is certainly the case that said enforced conformity speaks to my own disease around the application of my own perspective(s) to a strictly defined ideology and my thinking is that I’m not alone (at least I seem to have Russell Arben Fox, E.D. Kain, and Mike floating along with me in this ill-defined boat).

Says Mike,

As I’ve mentioned here before, I think we are starting to see people move away from people-oriented political labels towards issue-oriented political labels. That way you can be a Lefty on immigration and conservative on abortion….or whatever.

As a self-styled progressive conservative in the Teddy Roosevelt/Disraeli model I like that most of the debate on labels seems to be happening in conservative circles. I think that exploring intellectual pedigrees is very important. Liberals tend to love the ‘big tent’ idea of a wide diversity of people but I remain convinced that coalition is fragile because they don’t address the very real disagreements between, for example, gay marriage proponents and black communities. Or between environmentalists (Greenpeace) and conservationists (union members who hunt). They don’t want to rock the boat by exploring the nuances of political ideology because that would expose their weaknesses.

Which is precisely why I chose to use the word community instead of movement. I’m not entirely convinced that movements will survive what I take to be a Mike’s accurate portrayal of a trend unfurling in our political and social discourse. Or, at least, I don’t see movements as occupying the same space and exerting the same influence that they have in the past in the face of that evolution in people’s political perspectives/perceptions. Communities, on the other hand, I think are ideally situated to rise into prominence within the context of this evolution and insofar as I conceive of protests as having the potential to help build such communities, I see them as having some kind of role — and thereby value — in our political evolution, writ large.

It strikes me that the incoherence or, as I would rather put it, diversity of message and perspective that one find in a protest much more closely resembles the structure and flavour of communities as we find them occurring within society. Stop to consider whether you agree with your neighbours or the other members of your community on every single item on which you might choose to speak. The answer is probably not. Now, does that disagreement mean that you or your neighbour are suddenly not a part of the community? Of course not. So communities, properly construed in my mind, are capable of housing that kind of disagreement while still appealing to a sense of identity that maintains the, for lack of a better phrasing, deeper bond between members of that community, as well as the basic social (and in our case I would suggest political) functionality of the community overall.

So when Mark suggests that some people might get turned off by the idea that by joining a protest means they have to agree with all of the articulated perspectives present within that protest, I would suggest that he, and the person being turned off, are looking at what that protest symbolizes as a movement, as opposed to a community. Of course, it is my responsibility — and the responsibility of anyone who might choose to agree with me — to articulate that mistake and convince people to shift their perspectives around what protests might potentially be capable of generating, in no small part because I think that seeing protests as symbolic of movements is that predominant perspective operating.

Let me take this notion one step further. Not only am I inclined to suggest that communities are inherently heterodox in terms of perspectives represented (while acknowledging that there is some context of homogeneity that functions to indicate the prevailing membership that defines a community), I would also say that said heterodoxy of perspectives functions to a community’s benefit. There is a strength that communities are able to realize in their diversity, with the deeper identification that binds the member of the community together still enabling a kind of kaleidoscoping of those perspective in a complimentary fashion. Without the context of community present, the divergent perspectives might very well see themselves as occupying a space of confrontation. But the context of community enables a broader context to prevail in their interaction and allows each to function in a live and let live manner and, I would suggest, to take turns in exerting greater and lesser influence when the time is appropriate. That broader context of community enables what I can only describe as a greater breathing space in which those multiplicity of perspectives are able to function. And like strains of harvest in nature, the diversity and dynamism of the present in the individual members works to the benefit of the whole.

Think I’m presenting an idealized version of communities? You might have a point there, but I don’t think that what I’m describing is entirely missing from the functioning of communities. What I’m basically trying to do here is pick up on some of those dynamics, clean them up, and present them within the context of political discourse such that we might learn from them in some kind of useful way. That I present a cleaner version of the messy process that plays out on the ground doesn’t necessarily detract from the broader points that I’m attempting to make.

The $25,000 question in my mind here is of what that deeper identification that allows for unity within diversity consists, and in that regard I admit to having very little to offer. I’m still turning it over in my head. I think that better understanding that notion of unity without doing violence to diversity is a key node in terms of the attempts that many grassroots activists, be they on the left or the right, need to wrap their heads around. A good start is to drop the preponderance around fashioning politically intentional groupings of individuals around movements and switch to a conception of those grouping as functioning as communities — communities that are inherently diverse.

The other question that occurs to me is how far out we might be able to stretch or expand the notion of community, and I do think that there comes a point at which we can no longer rightly call a group of people sufficiently widely defined a “community”. In this regard, I think the move that needs to take place is to start exploring in what ways we can begin to develop interstitial networks within a variety of communities so that we start to flesh out some kind of meaningful meta-structure that, again, enables some kind of relational unity without doing violence to the inherent, strengthening, necessary and unavoidable diversity of the world.

Doing so means doubling back in a very long arc to my ruminations around glocality, which Chris beautifully summarized as, “globalizing the local” and starts to flesh out in what I take to be some interesting ways what the hell I meant when I entreated conservatives to “go populist without going populist” — and note here that I don’t take that move to be exclusive to conservatives — but all of that is really a story for another day.

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Tags | Community, diversity, heterodoxy, identity, movements, protesting, unity