-
The Pointlessness of Protest Culture
Days after President Trump called a reporter “piggy,” a group of women boarded a bus in Ohio for a 36-hour “turn and burn” trip to Washington DC to fight for “regime change.” At least a half dozen protesters were dressed as Miss Piggy. They carried handmade “Impeach, Convict, Remove” signs, transgender pride flags, and others wore the red hooded cloaks and white bonnets made famous by The Handmaid’s Tale. A mother of three teenagers, one of them transgender, explained “Something has to change, and we have to start somewhere.”
I feel bad for her, and the others. They just don’t understand how naive they sound, wanting to believe some signs and a long bus ride might affect anything, never mind something as extreme as forced regime change in a democracy. They are not alone in their naivety; elsewhere, colorful ribbons in the red and green of the Mexican flag weaved into twin braids have emerged as a new symbol of “resistance” among Latinas.
Part of the perceived pointlessness of such protests comes from how institutionalized protest culture has become. In the Midwest labor demonstrations and coal mine strikes of the 19th century, protesters risked their lives to hold up signs while hired Wells Fargo thugs beat them. In New York and elsewhere, draft protests during the Civil War were put down by having the regular U.S. Army fire indiscriminately into the crowd. Anti-war protests during the Vietnam era often turned violent, most notably in Chicago 1968, with phalanxes of helmeted cops breaking up crowds with batons and tear gas. And there was the massacre at Kent State University in Ohio, where National Guardsmen used their service rifles to gun down four and wound nine unarmed college students in 1970. All those at any protest risked rough arrest.
For the women now seeking regime change, what once carried genuine risk turned into political pageantry. Cities now issue permits for marches, police escort crowds along predetermined routes, and the media broadcasts images of the wittiest signs and t-shirts. Everyone takes pictures and the whole typically dissolves into a carnival atmosphere. Bring your kids and the t-shirted dog.
Old protests were dangerous because they seriously threatened entrenched economic or governmental power. New protests are safe because they do not threaten power at all, because power does not take them seriously. Ask the Pink Pussy Hat marchers of 2017, whose efforts failed to stop Trump across multiple administrations. The question is if these actions (along with petitions, social media blasts, hashtags) never deliver outcomes, why do people continue to pour time and moral purpose into them? “This will probably end up in history books, if we have real history books,” said one of the Ohio protestors, dressed as a handmaiden. “I’m glad I was able to be a part of it instead of watching it on TV.”
They are united in a visceral hatred of Trump, and see him as a stand-in for everything they dislike or disagree with. It is not like they adore illegal immigrants, it is just that Trump is opposed to them. They protest seeking nothing short of “regime change” because calls for regime change are easier than the long, unglamorous work of civic participation. People feel they have done something, but the machinery they are pushing against barely notices. Sincerity alone is not a strategy. There is a brutal mismatch the protesters do not see between the scale of their efforts and the scale of actual power.
For example, when Marine One flew over the Ohio women as Trump returned to the White House, fists and middle fingers rose into the air. Though signing your name, holding a sign, or shouting in the street feels good, legislation, budgets, and institutions rarely move by feelings alone. The protest thus becomes not a strategy but group therapy. It is catharsis disguised as activism. The social reinforcement of gathering, even if it is just 36 women from Ohio, validates their own sense of moral vision, that they are part of something meaningful instead of residents in a decayed industrial wasteland.
Notice what the protesters are asking for: regime change here, “No Kings” before that, “End the Patriarchy,” amorphous issues like that. There is little anyone can do about those things, if they are even real. The pointlessness of the act of protest is built into the act itself. So when the next end-of-democracy event arrives, such as a Supreme Court ruling that goes against someone’s wishes, protest becomes a way of reconciling oneself to the absence of change and the reality of failure. Faced with no tools other than a vote statistically very few of them ever exercise, and that only available every few years, protests are a psychological palliative to nihilism. Like calling to make up new rules if a presidential election goes the wrong way, like the Electoral College should be done away with, or that the president should be chosen by the popular vote so Democratic Southern California will decide every election for Ohio women, it is all an alternative to doing truly nothing about the status quo.
The women protestors from Ohio have good reason to dislike the status quo, one enforced on them for the last several decades as the Heartland became the Rust Belt. One protestor, a 36-year-old from Georgia, said the president’s treatment of women was a big factor in drawing her to Washington for her first-ever protest. Yet she described herself as the wife of a disabled veteran and a mother of six who relies on SNAP. Another protester in the group was described as “currently unemployed after spending years on an assembly line building steering wheels for Ford vehicles. Her husband is a fully disabled Navy veteran dependent on benefits from Veterans Affairs. She said she is protesting for him and also for other women like her, for her LGBTQ+ family members, for immigrants in her community and for her 69-year-old mother, who relies on subsidized housing. A constant question that runs through her mind, she said, is, “When is it going to come for me?” Answer: it is already here.
Their socioeconomic precarity makes them vulnerable to political fear, while protest offers them some shred of meaning in a world where they feel little control. Their personal struggles only serve to highlight the unclosable distance between their needs and what symbolic activism can deliver. In the age of Trump, the real engine behind protest culture is not hope but fear. Some hope that their voices matter, sure, but with fear of discovering they do not at its heart. It was a 36 hour bus ride back to Ohio. Maybe they had time to think about some of these things on the way back, before the next protest.
Copyright © 2024. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
The Search for Heroes
These are your new heroes: people who invoke the grace of Dr. King to label riots as lawful protests, looting as reparations. To be fair, most of that labeling is not by the thugs themselves, but by the media who elevate them to hero status hoping once again this will bring Trump down. Citing the freedom fighters in the streets, former labor secretary Robert Reich proclaimed “Trump’s presidency is over.”
Not quite yet. So the MSM report on fires outside the White House with a wink; maybe they’ll burn the place down. The Trump family taking shelter in their bunker was met with articles calling the president a coward for not facing down the mob shouting “Get off my lawn!” The implied hope was there — if we can’t impeach him, maybe we can just have someone kill him. They will deny it, but the media encouraged violence. They hoped for it, they egged it on. “Destroying property which can be replaced is not violence,” NYT’s Nikole Hannah-Jones said. “I think any reasonable person would say we shouldn’t be destroying other people’s property. But these are not reasonable times.”
Meanwhile the media met the prospect of the military’s arrival on mixed ground. The big story was not the standard “order will be restored but my God at what price?!?” but that Trump had “declared war on the American people.” Though 58 percent of voters support the deployment of the military to respond to protests, with only 30 percent opposing, the web is awash in uninformed fear mongering over martial law, posse comitatus, the Insurrection Act, and whatever else a Wikipedia search churns up.
But underlying was a subtext: you know, maybe a military coup, maybe via martial law, would be OK. We’ve heard that actually for four years, with hopes expressed one of the ex-military men in the White House, maybe Mad Dog, John Kelly, or H.R. McMaster would hero up and assume control. If not directly, then maybe by running the country as the patriot behind the throne. Upon General Mattis’ departure, the The New York Times asked “Who will protect America now?” juxtaposing the warrior-monk with the Commander-in-Cheeto.
The search for Trump-smiting heroes has strayed far from anyone deserving the title even as the qualification for the job remained hilariously low. Felon Michael Avenatti was a contender, anal porn star Stormy Daniels, and felon Michael Cohen, too. Along the way James Comey, John Brennan, Michael Hayden, Christopher Steele, and James Clapper were all given some hero time, and of course the run by Robert Mueller as Savior-in-Chief. There was the anonymous whistleblower and a handful of State Department drones at the impeachment hearings whose names are so long forgotten they might as well have been anonymous. Even the virus was given the chance at hero status if it would have been horrible enough to end this presidency.
There were also the mini-heroes like Colin Kaepernick or the women’s soccer team, whose minor protests were turned into national moments by the MSM. They do keep trying for relevancy; pink haired soccer starlet Megan Rapinoe is threatening to run for some office, and joined other minor celebs in signing a petition to defund police forces. Kaepernick started a defense fund for protesters, quoting Malcolm X to warn “Concerning nonviolence, it is criminal to teach a man not to defend himself when he is the constant victim of brutal attacks.”
The hero-seeking media partnered them with every Democratic black candidate of any type or plain white woman who could check boxes (single mom, lesbian, HIV+, veteran, etc.) The high point of this low point was reached with AOC and her Squad, whose only real accomplishments have been relentless self-promotion and helping push Nancy Pelosi into an impeachment process that squandered the Blue Wave.
But rioters as the new heroes? That’s who is left? No one wants bad cops, and every day America suffers for its original sin of slavery and 200 year failure to find repentance. The only answer the country seems to have come up with is to allow rioters to run amuck every few years to let the pressure reset. Pick your favorite — the TV version following Rodney King, the blast from Ferguson, or something old school from the 1970s out of Watts or the Bronx.
In New York City we face an 8 pm everyone-off-the streets curfew, the first in 75 years (the COVID lockdown is also concurrently still in effect.) But the protests continue, with several hundred people last night closing down streets adjacent to my apartment building. Many stores in this part of America’s richest city had already been boarded up; the men putting up the plywood coming in from white working class neighborhoods in nearby Queens said to me they’re grateful for the work post-COVID, “but if I ever have to do this for my own neighborhood some mf is gonna suffer.”
The protesters themselves were about two-thirds white, uniformly in their mid-to-late twenties. People wearing Bernie t-shirts outnumbered those still practicing social distancing by about 6:1. Everyone who would tell me where they lived said Brooklyn but if you live here you would have already guessed that. The blacks in the group appeared to be joining spontaneously from the surrounding public housing blocks and not mingling. Their chants weren’t the organized ones of the white kids, mostly “f*ck the police” accompanied by gang signs or middle fingers, just rage cleansed of politics.
None of the black protesters would speak to me, but the white protesters wouldn’t stop. They knew media and my notebook drew them like shadows to a lamp. Asked what they wanted, everyone had their lines down — it was justice and peace — but no one really had an answer to how this demonstration would help create those things. What law could Congress pass to fix any of this? Raising awareness seemed to be the closest anyone could get.
Some apartments in the area have hired private security, those beefy guys you usually see checking IDs at night clubs. One hotel employee said his five-star place had former SEALS at the door. Two NYPD helicopters were overhead for almost two hours, top cover Baghdad-style, watching the rooftops. People living nearby are angry and afraid, and such people will defend themselves, and that will be a terrible, terrible thing. It seems leaders on all sides are setting us against each other and we are embracing that as a new way of life. When was your last pleasant but intense political discussion with friends?
It was hard to connect the odd collection of images and impressions from the street with a new theme among the righteous but uneducated on social media. They seem to think burning a Target is the modern equivalent of the American Revolution against the British. I listened to the Hamilton score twice now, and even read the Klassic Komics version of Federalist Papers, and can’t find anywhere the American side whined about the British being too rough. Instead, they understood a revolution meant risking their lives, their honor, and their sacred fortunes. Denied representation under an undemocratic system, they fought.
The Founders took to the streets with none of the protections of the Bill of Rights. It was only after they won those early heroes created a Bill of Rights. It came as a package deal, because the Founders wanted to create a society where peaceful change was written into the law and so another bloody revolution was something their children would not have to undertake.
That fundamental message was missed by the Democratic Party of Fairfax, Virginia. They tweeted (now deleted but the sentiment is widely shared) “Riots are an integral part of this country’s march towards progress.” No. Riots are not a vehicle for political change in a democracy. They are the antithesis of democratic change, change by force with no desire for compromise.
It was only a week ago people said protests against government (specifically COVID restrictions) were wrong and dangerous, we should listen to the authorities, and were glad the cops were out there enforcing social distancing and masking. The people I saw at yesterday’s protest looked a lot like the people hissing at me in Whole Foods for not wearing a mask. They likely believe the 1A protects their protests but not those of the rednecks at the statehouse. To them every offense is a lynching, every day the apocalypse, every Tweet another final blow to democracy, every misunderstanding another example of systematic racism if not sexism, every non-white non-male non-straight American another victim.
Once you understand how shallow and and tiresome and hypocritical such views are you will understand the 2016 election, and in about 150 very long days from now, the 2020 election. No heroes, or Russians for that matter, necessary.
Copyright © 2024. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
Buy Peter’s Books on Amazon!
