Well played, indeed.

by Jason Arvak

League members Scott Payne and Mark Thomspon have recently engaged in a debate over the value of protests.  In one sense, I agree with each of them.  Like Mark, I am skeptical as to the value of protests to move the ball of social change in any meaningful sense.  Like Scott, however, I am mindful that protest movements can have benefits beyond the merely instrumental.

There is, however, somewhat of a disconnect between Scott and Mark in that they have left a persistent ambiguity regarding what they are talking about.  To put it punchy: who are protesters?  If we conclude that they are merely actors seeking particular changes, then Mark’s critique holds much more bite.  But if we are to conclude that they are merely expressing what sociologist Robert Bellah called an “American civil religion” that values participation in its own right and views apathy as the primary threat to the health of democracy, then Scott’s defense of protesters becomes much more persuasive.

I would argue that modern protest movements encapsulate both elements at the same time and, as a result, undermine their own effectiveness even at the same time that they enhance their ability to recruit new participants. [Read more →]

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. 

[Read more →]

Freddie and Mark have recently gone a couple of rounds over the effectiveness of the counter culture and its protest modality for expression of concern and frustration about any variety of issues. In many ways I think that both are simultaneously spot on in their analysis and way off-base.

Firstly, let me just say that I think it was wholly unfair of Freddie to extrapolate the very last line of Mark’s post in order to conveniently conjure up one of his favourite axes to grind. That’s precisely the kind of rhetorical voodoo for which  Freddie has regularly criticised his more dishonest nemeses, and rightly so.  As Mark has subsequently gone out of his way to point out, his criticism about the incoherence and subsequent lack ineffectiveness of protesting was leveled equally at participants from both the left and the right. I personally would have thought that his extremely funny “Pardon Scooter” line made that fact abundantly clear.

That said, I think Mark analyzes the function of protesting from a distressingly one-dimensional perspective that misses an entire component of its value. Ironically, such an analysis is of precisely the same kind for which Freddie called me out some time back at The Politics of Scrabble (sorry, no link – I really should have migrated the content before letting to site go dark), so I’m somewhat surprised that he failed to offer the analysis here, especially insofar as I think it’s compelling and has re-shifted my own perspective on the subject.

Much, much more after the jump. [Read more →]

Andrew Sullivan has been taking flak from movement conservatives (what else is new?) for calling the Tea Party protests nothing more than childish “temper tantrums.”  He has repeatedly pointed out the hypocrisy of these protests being launched only after a Democrat is in the White House, rather than at any time in the last 8 years’ orgy of spending.  He has further noted the complete lack of focus that these protests seem to have, noting that it’s tough to figure out what they’re protesting at all.

He is right, of course.  And at the same time, completely wrong.

As Stephen Gordon, fresh from the Bob Barr campaign, has been taking great pains to document, the people at the root – though for quite some time no longer the forefront – of the Tea Party protests have been as vocal as could be over the last 8 years’ orgy of spending, “preemptive” war, civil liberties abuses, etc., etc.  Gordon is – rightly -skeptical that the other groups joining in the demonstrations are only fair weather friends.  I suspect and expect that he will quickly find his skepticism validated as the protests increasingly become nothing more than a vehicle for movement conservatives to advance their whole agenda, including a whole host of things that were the reason people like Bob Barr and others turned their backs on Republicans in the first place. 

The trouble is that in order for a protest to have any success, it must become a movement.  And in order to become a movement, you have to attact people who may agree with the specific cause you are protesting, but have exactly zero interest in signing on to your other beliefs.  Worse, you cannot control the message they try to send in their own protest.  Sure, you can try to limit the people who actually get to hold a microphone at the protests, but good luck prohibiting someone from speaking who has agreed to donate substantial resources to the protest, and even more good luck preventing individual protesters from carrying signs that convey an irrelevant message that you or – more importantly – the average observer may find appalling.  Even if the average observer might not find that irrelevant message appalling, its existence makes it increasingly difficult for the average observer to figure out exactly what it is you’re protesting, and the result is that it just looks like you’re throwing a collective temper tantrum because your “side” lost an election, even if you never considered yourself part of that “side” in the first place.

And this is exactly what happened in the case of the Tea Parties.  The concept started out as a relatively small idea organized by a handful of libertarian activists.  Movement conservatives saw an opportunity to co-opt it – and they did. 

To them, the Tea Parties aren’t just an outlet for expressing frustration over the recent orgy of government spending, they are an opportunity to complain about gay marriage, affirmative action programs in government hiring policies, and just about everything else that movement conservatives oppose even more vehemently now that they’ve been beaten – badly – in consecutive national elections.  Never mind that the original point of the Tea Parties, so far as I can tell, was completely libertarian in nature and was to be as much a protest of the Republicans as it was of the Democrats.

Of course, if the Tea Parties had remained the sole province of a handful of libertarian activists, they never would have received the national attention they’re now able to receive, and thus would have had even less impact.  By accepting the involvement of the movement conservative multitudes, the originators have lost control of their message even as the message has access to an ever-larger platform.  The result?  An incoherent jumble of protests that is going to wind up resembling the same sort of incoherence that has characterized large-scale protests and demonstrations for decades.

Sadly, I’m going to guess that “Pardon Scooter!” signs are likely to be the Tea Party versions of “Free Mumia!”