Scott (and, by implication, Freddie) has put together a challenging retort to my arguments that most large-scale political protests are inevitably undermined by the unpreventable introduction of irrelevant issues into the protest and are thus exercises in futility.   At the risk of beating a dead horse, Scott’s riposte really deserves a full response.  Scott essentially concedes my basic point that the introduction of irrelevancies makes the protests incoherent to the general population.  BUT, he says, there is another part of protesting that maybe is served by carrying an Anti-Illegal Immigration sign to a government spending protest:

…[I]n some cases the lack of clarity in protest messaging could be indicative of a group of people who are grappling with the articulation of a future that is novel, bold, and sincerely innovative. One doesn’t always necessarily have a fully-formed image of the different state of affairs that one thinks ought to be the case and the act of trying to articulate that vision, building it as you go, is an important and worthwhile endeavour. That our political discourse only takes seriously, to ape on Freddie for a moment, those articulations that are perfectly put together and nicely packaged is part of its problem. Such requirements stifle real creativity and debate, more often than not.

Scott further argues that, at its root, protesting is about discouraging apathy, and whether the protesters stay on message misses that point:

There is something to be said for average citizens having the motivation and wherewithal to take to the streets to comment on what they perceive to be the wrong direction in which their country is generally headed.

There is, no doubt, quite a bit of truth in these statements.  Certainly, there is something healthy about a group of people willing to take to the streets to express their collective outrage.

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.

In the case of the Tea Parties, to quote myself, “I’m very much anti-spending orgy - passionately so, actually – but I’m not terribly interested in being so publicly if it means that I also have to be a Birther who opposes gay marriage, supports a strict closed-borders policy, and thinks that the Republicans are in some way less bad than the Democrats.”  For me, the introduction of all those non-germane elements has very distinctly and personally decreased my interest in opposing massive spending* because it inextricably links an opposition to government spending to all those other beliefs, which I actively do not want to see advanced. 

Similarly, Stephen Gordon (who I’ve quoted far too often this week) writes of what happened when more and more non-germane elements were introduced into the 2003 Alabama state Tea Parties:

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.

(My emphasis).

Nor is this a problem that is exclusively the province of protests on the political Right.  Liberal legal scholar Michael Dorf wrote in February of this same phenomenon:

…[T]he muddle one sees among activists on the American left is not principally a result of a large organized effort. Rather, it reflects a kind of parochialism that assumes that people who share some of your concerns share all of them….  As a vegan, a progressive, and a civil libertarian, I often encounter people who share my generally liberal/left views on some issues and therefore assume that I must also share their views on everything. This assumption is off-base even for people who share basic values and the same socio-economic-educational background, so of course it’s wildly off-base across larger divides.

So in a sense, yes, introducing all of these ideological assumptions is relevant to creating a community as Scott suggests, at least in the sense that “parochialism” is interchangeable with community.  The trouble is that by making these assumptions, which are implicit when one carries a Free Mumia sign to an anti-war protest or a pro-life sign to an anti-tax protest, one effectively defines people who don’t care about Mumia or who are pro-choice out of the community.  Obviously, the more someone is defined out of a community, the less willing they are going to be to remain part of that community. 

The result – and here I’m not talking just about protesters but about the assumptions implicit in unified ideologies more generally – is an increasingly apathetic population, or an increasingly “silent majority.”  These are people who may be against the Iraq War, or against domestic wiretapping, or increased government spending, and may even be people who have been willing to protest against these things, but whose willingness to express themselves has waned upon coming to the realization that doing so requires implicitly agreeing to all these other beliefs that you either don’t care about or simply don’t agree with the “official” community position. 

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I was reminded yesterday why it is that I never fell in for the popular Ron Paul, younger generation hype by watching his CPAC address. Overall it was a good speech, full of thought provoking suggestions and interesting analysis. I suppose the other reason that I didn’t fall in for Paul is that I often times don’t agree with his take on things. It seems to me that Paul provides an interesting flavour on foreign affairs, both military and economic, but that at core he is one of those folks who wants to run away into the past and I just don’t find that option to be very compelling. There are, of course, other elements of Ron Paul’s analysis that don’t mesh well with me, but by and large I can respect where he’s coming from. Which is why it always makes me roll my eyes when Paul gets to this part of his speech,

“We now have moved a major step in the direction of socialism,” Rep. Ron Paul (Tex.) said Friday, adding: “We are close to a fascist system where the government has control of our lives and our economy.”

Boom, just like that you’ve lost me. And frankly, you’ve probably lost a goodly portion of any audience who aren’t automatically primed to hoot, cheer, and applaud at any and every portion of your speech. Call this the reverse Godwin’s Law of political speech writing, but the more consistently a politician refers to either side of the political spectrum advancing their agenda as the steady march of American society towards a fascist state, the closer that politician’s likelihood of building a broad base of support that could conceivably govern as diverse polity as America approaches zero. In other words, saying that this development or that development in American politics means that America is on the brink of becoming a fascist society is an excellent way of ensuring you don’t ever get taken as seriously as you need to in order to have a major impact on said society.

Granted, Ron Paul has his supporters, so I’m not trying to argue that he’s a nothing when it comes to American politics. For goodness sake, he’s a US Congressman and was one of the most talked about Republican candidates for president in 2008. But the Ron Paul movement never seemed to materialize in anything truly significant and some of the people who should have at least been inclined to support, if not vote for, a libertarian leaning Republican like Paul whose analysis I trust, people like Will Wilkinson and Daniel Larison couldn’t bring themselves to do it. Why is that? [Read more →]