Conventions are typically mediocre events with the appeal of a Jerry Lewis TV drama. Democrats hope to extend Kamala’s honeymoon by staging a celebratory, well-publicized, and uncontroversial event. The recent wave of anti-Israel genocide protests and the possibility of anti-immigrant demonstrations are looming threats. If either of these occur on any scale, it’s all too easy to draw comparisons to Chicago in 1968.
It also means that the Democratic-leaning mainstream media will have a strong incentive to keep effective political activism to a minimum — meaning embarrassing brawls or ambushes on officials or protesters are unlikely to go unreported — and that an artificially high standard will be imposed on the outcomes of protests.
This post is intended to raise some questions, not provide any answers. If you are an activist or someone knowledgeable in the theory and practice of protest and social change, we encourage you to speak up.
Sadly, the CIA is the best at using protests and other means to create change, which means they can quickly devise strategies to undermine their normal movements. Have you come across any scholarly or good journalistic work that tries to reverse engineer the CIA’s color revolution manual? Or are there just too many methods that are difficult to replicate, such as finding promising young people and persuading them? Indoctrinated Were you educated in the US?
Many readers denounce the idea of violent or simply inconvenient behavior. Frederick Douglass disagrees.
Power concedes nothing without demand; it never has, and it never will. It determines the exact degree of injustice and injustice imposed upon people by what they silently submit to; and it continues until it is resisted by words or blows, or both. The limits of a tyrant are determined by the patience of those he oppresses.
How are we to think about whether protests are “effective”? Bureaucracies and the media have done a good job of convincing the public that organized resistance is ineffective, and in many ways they are right, because it takes a very long time to move the Overton Window and create change. From a post in 2010:
It’s amazing how Americans have been conditioned to think that political activism and engagement is futile, and I’m old enough to have seen the opposite: the activism of the 1960s that led to major advances in the civil rights movements for blacks and women and ultimately led to the US withdrawing from the Vietnam War.
I am reminded of this sense of hopelessness almost daily in the comments sections: Whenever a viable action step is suggested, there is almost always a significant number of people who claim that there is no point in trying, that we, as individuals, are powerless.
I disagree with that attitude, especially since disciplined passivity is a great, low-cost way to sabotage those who have been wronged. I accidentally downgraded Johan Hari’s article on this topic in The Independent to a links’ item, but Richard Klein’s comments made me realise it deserved its own post, so I am now correcting that error.
Klein said:
The bottom line is that they lose, lose, lose, lose, and then they give up. As someone who has protested and studied the process, it is clear to me that one naturally starts off losing most of the time. It is painful, humiliating, and intimidating. You can’t usually expect to have a clear-cut victory, like in a fight. What protests do is exactly what Hari argues: change the situation. That change moves the other party’s goalposts and stops the flow of their organization. The nonviolent resistance in Hungary in the 1860s (yes, the 19th century) is a good example. The communist regimes in Russia and its client states failed not because protesters “won,” but because most people withdrew their cooperation and it suffocated.
So let’s return to the headline question: how do you benchmark a particular protest or protest program? This question seems to contradict the notion expressed above that protests do not produce quick, easy, or even visible victories, but rather slowly chip away at the legitimacy and support base of their targets’ actions, but let’s not point out the obvious.
But one way to quash demonstrations and other protests is to subject movement members to performance tests and expected results that they never achieved. For example, Occupy Wall Street is often criticized for achieving nothing, but its members never promised anything. The fact that the first occupation in New York City is still remembered, even though it lasted only two months before being removed as part of a paramilitary crackdown in 17 cities, shows that its very existence as a representation of the 99% versus the 1% (that was their meme, and it survives) was certainly influential and perceived as a threat. The press frequently claimed that Occupy should have put forward leaders and presented demands, but they never did. Its cumbersome collective decision-making process was an obstacle to action, but it was arguably a good vehicle for what was called consciousness-raising in the 1960s.
Or consider Black Lives Matter. The movement was beginning to gain momentum and we saw some lawmakers take up the poorly phrased and discredited demand of defunding the police. But by that point, the Democratic Party had already been infiltrated, and actual leaders and compliant leadership candidates had been bought off with various paid opportunities. Lambert could explain in more detail, but even I can see this process of co-optation beginning around the time Black Lives Matter started organizing die-ins, which found high participation rates among whites and Hispanics.
More recently, readers and stakeholders have commented that the protests at US universities in late spring were ineffective because they failed to save Palestinian lives. But despite this being their ultimate objective (and sadly, it is unlikely to be achieved without escalating Axis of Resistance actions, which, as we all know, risk all sorts of collateral consequences), they made specific demands, such as that the school endowments divest their shares in Israel-related ventures (which, frankly, should be negligible) and support the BDS movement. While the concrete impact on these fronts seems minor at best, as far as I can tell, the impact of the protests has been a significant increase in the media’s willingness to use the word genocide. It has also revealed the power of Zionist billionaires to threaten to overrun schools and ruin the careers of student protesters.
There is no reason to think that these protests will not continue when the school term resumes, and therefore the soft costs of supporting Israel will continue to increase.
These examples highlight the difference in time scales: most reform movements move so slowly and are so hard to gauge that they are easily dismissed as unproductive — and that is before we resort to sabotage or simply try to crush them into extinction, as we have seen with the recent wave of anti-Israel genocidal uprisings on universities.
The anti-genocide, anti-immigrant protests expected at the Democratic National Convention are therefore highly unlikely to produce a strategic victory, unless a terrible police miscalculation turns its participants into martyrs.
What tactical gains could they achieve? Here’s a partial list:
Boost morale among their supporters, perhaps slightly increasing participation or other support
Get media attention. Donald Trump has shown that there is no such thing as bad press.
They show they have the power to weaken the Party of Kamala through numbers and subtle tactics. This may have more consequences than it seems: Democrats want to maintain momentum through the election. Effective protests, even if far below the levels of chaos in Chicago, could undermine the party’s efforts to promote the inevitability of a Kamala victory.
The venue is United Center and McCormick Placewhich is already sealed off, making any demonstrations at the site unlikely, other than latecomers somehow getting close enough to cause a ruckus and being quickly removed.
What about outdoors? Again, this is not my specialty, but the recent blockade of the 405 by protesters in Los Angeles shows that choking a traffic artery isn’t hard and can have big rewards, at least in terms of attracting attention.
Chicago has a major weakness: the Kennedy Expressway, which runs from downtown Chicago to O’Hare Airport. This road is also a major commuter route. There is a convenient public rail line from the airport to downtown, but if protesters stop traffic for an extended period of time, it is highly unlikely that there is capacity to replace the highway. I have encountered taxis that drive on the streets instead of the highway during busy times. Very few people know how to do it, and the route is a bit complicated. Of course, if you have a GPS, knowledge is not an obstacle, but these side streets will probably be congested soon too.
McCormick Place is isolated, and it’s already a hassle for conventioneers to get there from their hotels. Conventions are like fashion shows, and the main goal is for people to have a good time, so using McCormick Place slightly defeats that purpose. McCormick Place is also close to a major freeway, and former Chicago residents told me it wouldn’t be difficult to close the freeway and create traffic jams around the convention center.
Ironically, though, the test here is likely not so much old-fashioned, effective action that relies on size to show that the protesters are numerous, or at least significant, but rather their ability to produce video footage that is likely to go viral and succeed in amplifying the protesters’ case. But it will soon be known whether the Democratic team has successfully prepared an anti-instigator strategy, or whether the protesters have managed to undermine their plans to stage a glitzy, frictionless event.
