Why yesterday's protests were stupid

Friends,

Please do not shoot me the messenger.  I think it is important to hear what a very prominent liberal is thinking.  Of course, he doesn’t understand the meaning of witness.  And he offers no proof of the success of the Jena Six protest or the pro-immigration marches.  In my opinion, they were worthy one-day protests, but in actually accomplishing long-term change I do not see it.

And to promote electoral politics as the way to achieve anti-war concerns is really suspicious.  Nevertheless, we in-the-street protesters should always be willing to accept constructive criticism.  Kagiso, Max

Why yesterday's protests were stupid

by kos

Thu Apr 16, 2009 at 04:44:04 PM PDT

Atrios:

All fun aside, there's obviously nothing wrong with the right attempting to engage in protest politics. The problem is that it was never clear what they were protesting. So far Obama has cut taxes for most of the population and... well, that's it. The protests of "The Left" have long been mocked for lacking message discipline. That criticism has often been fair. The difference is that our side's protests generally have a single point ("don't do this stupid fucking war in Iraq") which gets hijacked by a bunch of other causes when the speakers hit the stage. But the teabaggers... honestly, I still have no idea what it was about. I mean, I know it was about tribal allegiance against Barack Mumia Saddam Obama III. But it wasn't actually about anything else.

Now's as good a time as any to take a break from mocking the teabaggers in favor of a more serious look at what they accomplished yesterday.

I've never made a secret for my distaste of most street protests, and of groups like Code Pink that think they are accomplishing anything with their street theater. But when I set out to write Taking on the System, my book on effective organizing in the 21st century, I had to dig deep to figure out why I didn't like them, and how to differentiate the usual ineffective ANSWER-organized protests with those that actually had a positive effect (e.g. the Jena Six and pro-immigration protests of a few years ago).

I finally determined that for a protest to be effective it needed to:

1.      be novel and/or unexpected

2.      have a sympathetic, singular, and media-friendly message

3.      provide great visuals

4.      tap into a hot-button and timely issue.

The usual leftist protests fail most of these, falling into the worst, cartoonish stereotypes. They feature a mishmash of causes and issues, with no unifying theme. Is the protest about the Iraq War? Or Palestine? Or American imperialism? Or freeing Mumia? Or legalizing marijuana? Or blah blah blah blah? Who the heck knows? Who the heck cares? This is a classic clip from the Daily Show after one such protest:

Stewart: On Saturday, a 100,000 strong peace march descended on Washington seeking to crystallize America's dissatisfaction with the war into one single idea.
Clip of young male speaker: Peace!
Stewart: Okay.
Clip of male speaker: Justice!
Stewart: (pause) Fine.
Clip of male speaker: Environmental protection!
Stewart: (pause, confused look on face)
Clip of male speaker: No racism!
Stewart: (dumb-founded, and then says in Valley Girl-like voice) Dude! I didn't hike from Oberlin for this.

There's nothing novel, new, or interesting about these protests, making them easy to ignore. We've seen them a million times, the visuals are easily mockable, with the dreads and the stupid puppets and whatnot. And not only are they patently ridiculous, but we saw just how ineffective they were during the Bush years. No one gave a damn about them, not the media, not powers-that-be (in either party), and certainly not the public.

It wasn't the protest movement that moved the Democratic Party left on Iraq, it was Joe Lieberman's loss in his Democratic primary in 2006. Prior to that, Rahm Emanuel, as head of the DCCC, was telling Democratic candidates to steer clear of the war. After that primary, the Dems fully embraced ending the war in their campaigns and won huge that fall. In other words, the anti-war cause was best served via electoral politics. After Lieberman's loss, not even the media could ignore the saliency and validity of the anti-war position. "Patriotism" could no longer be used to silence anti-war voices, we had helped mainstream them.

So now conservatives are out in the cold, far from the levers of power. They are feeling marginalized, ignored, powerless. We know the feeling. It wasn't long ago that we were there. But instead of adopting the tactics that best served liberals on our way back to power, conservatives seemed to have learned the exact wrong lesson, adopting our most ineffective ones.

And having decided to do street protests, rather than learn from the people that have done effective street protests (like the pro-immigration forces), they decided to go the Code Pink/ANSWER route.

So looking at our list above:

1. be novel and/or unexpected

Other than anti-abortion protests, the Right doesn't really do protests. Their instinct is to laugh at the hippies out on the streets, not take to the streets themselves. So yeah, these were kind of new and unexpected. Give them a point.

2. have a sympathetic, singular, and media-friendly message

What was the message? Too much taxes? I didn't see many bank executives and Wall Street types out on the streets. And coming on the heels of the biggest tax cut in American history, almost entirely directed at the middle class, this message didn't have much salience. Furthermore, the theme of these protests "taxation without representation", was pretty silly considering that these people did have representation. It's just that they lost the elections, which sort of happens in a democracy. "Representation" doesn't mean you always get your way, it means that you have a vote. So it was an indefensible frame to base the protests around.

That's probably why the crowds didn't easily rally around it, deciding to freelance it instead. So there was talk about pork barrel spending! And bail outs! And wanting to stick a knife in Obama's eye (at 1:07)! And secession! And Obama's birth certificate! And Obama taking away their guns! And the American taxpayers are the Jews for Obama's ovens! And Obama is Hitler! And blah blah blah blah.

Conservatives were doing their best to impersonate the "free Mumia!" crowd.

Throw in the terrible name (you really don't want to be associated with sex acts), and it simply wasn't a great message day for these guys.

3. provide great visuals

Did the country really need another group of people getting together to chant crazy slogans and wave stupid signs? It's boring and trite when the ANSWER/Code Pink crowd does it, and it's boring and trite when dumbass conservatives do it. I mean, after all the time conservatives have spent mocking those dirty fucking hippies, they really thought it'd be a good idea to do the exact same thing?

The small number of protesters certainly proved counter-productive. If you claim a mass popular uprising, you can't have hundreds of people show up to events. Remember, conservatives claimed that 10 million anti-war protesters back in 2003 were fringe (Bush called them a "focus group"), what's that make 100-250,000 protesters nationwide? That's less than what some cities got during the anti-war and pro-immigration rallies. If we wanted to paint the protesters as part of some fringe (which we did, because they are), there was no better way to do so than to laugh at the pathetic turnout.

Throw in an exclusively white crowd protesting our nation's first black president (to the great delight of the Stormfront crowd), and really, the visuals were simply terrible. There's only so much that Fox News' tight crowd shots could do to pretend otherwise.

4. tap into a hot-button and timely issue

Tax Day is a good time to protest taxes, sure, but their problem is that taxes aren't currently a hot topic of national debate. As much as they may think otherwise, the nation is focused instead on economic matters, as the financial, jobs, and real estate crisis has decimated families and plunged us into the worst economy since the Great Depression. People like government stimulus spending. Many are benefiting from it. The only people who have any gripes about taxes are those making over $250,000 a year, and there isn't going to be any broad sympathy among the broader public for that crowd (hence the small crowds), especially in this environment.

So what did the teabaggers ultimately accomplish yesterday? They proved that even with the combined might of Fox News and Conservative Talk Radio (and their tens of millions of listeners), they couldn't mobilize a significant part of their base to take to the streets. They showed that their views, contrary to their beliefs, are simply not striking a chord with the broader public. They showed that they have learned the worst lessons from progressives (while we were learning the best lessons from their side). They gave their ideological opponents (like us) more visual proof of their fringiness (like Texas Gov. Rick Perry talking secession). And they did a great job motivating and entertaining our side as well (we had our best traffic day in a while yesterday).

So what now? The teabaggers are talking about a new round of protests on July 4th, which will likely feature rhetoric and signage, on our nation's most patriotic holiday, dominated by talk of secession and independence from ... the United States of America.

Go for it. For a floundering movement desperately seeking a leader (Sarah! Rush! Glenn!) and a cause, there's nothing better for us than seeing them stick with the ANSWER/Code Pink playbook.

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