Want to know why we’re sending thirty thousand additional troops to Afghanistan? Puzzled how health care reform vaporized before your eyes? Just can’t figure out why we’re still torturing people at Guantanamo and letting banks terrorize consumers with obscene interest rate hikes and foreclosures? Well, it’s all very simple. Nobody got arrested.
That’s it. There’s your answer. Nobody got arrested. At least, not nearly enough people got arrested.
While young liberals and progressives were sitting in coffee shops tweeting, emailing and updating their Facebook status, embracing the tools of the “new activism,” tea baggers were disrupting town hall meetings and staging credible rallies and marches on the halls of power. While the left embraced the delusion that new media technologies have changed the rules of political and social activism, mossback conservatives and libertarians were effectively applying the same techniques of political protest that have worked and worked and worked since the dawn of history.
I am constantly hearing my younger friends tell me how much more efficient it is to organize people through email, tweeting and Facebooking. Through these wonderful new technologies, they tell me, activists can respond rapidly to events in the news, spreading the word to millions within just a few hours. What’s more, they say, online petition campaigns can be created, publicized and implemented within a couple of days, as opposed to the weeks such efforts require through traditional means.
All of that is unquestionably true. What is questionable, though, is the effectiveness of all this electronic activism. Sure, it’s quick and easy, but like most quick and easy things it turns out not to be worth very much.
Don’t believe me? Then ask yourself a simple question. Who seems to be winning?
All summer long millions of people forwarded chain emails urging support for health care reform with a public option. At least seventeen online organizations formed petition campaigns and delivered over two million electronically submitted signatures to Congress demanding such reform. The President was on our side, public sentiment was on our side, and the online dissemination of information in support of our position was widespread. Then came August.
Not relying on online petitions, tweets or status updates, Tea Party activists descended upon town hall meetings in large numbers. They were loud. They were rude. The took over the meetings. They showed their asses. They won.
When health care reform proponents called for rallies, almost no one showed up. I know. I went to several. I carried my banners and waved my placards together with a few dozen middle aged and older citizens, wondering what happened to all the younger people. At the largest of those rallies I could count the number of young people in attendance on my fingers. Young people weren’t there. They were at Starbucks signing online petitions.
When Dick Armey, Glenn Beck and Fox News called for rallies, the rednecks showed up. Grandma. Grandpa, Uncle Henry, Momma and all the kids. Susies went with Johnnys on Tea Party blind dates. They came in droves to local rallies all over the country and to the big shindigs in Washington, D.C. They came in convoys of pickups with gun racks, flack jackets and big hair, and even bigger signs. They were angry, demanding and in no mood to reason.
Okay, it’s an ugly picture. It was an ugly thing. I don’t recommend that we copy them, but I do call to your attention one important fact—they won!
They meant to stop health care reform, and they succeeded. They meant to perpetuate the war in Afghanistan, and they succeeded. They meant to keep you and me under the thumb of thug bankers, and they succeeded. They meant to keep gay marriage illegal, and they succeeded.
Tea Party people may be an ignorant and mindless bunch, but the capitalists at Freedom Works and Fox News are not. They know exactly what they are doing. They are organizing political activism that works. We aren’t.
So, what is it about old fashioned, in-the-street activism that makes it work so well? Well, first, it makes those in power, the decision makers, nervous. There’s no way to cover up a million man demonstration, no way to pretend it didn’t happen. Television cameras capture the images and transmit them into every living room in America. They are beamed across the globe. Newspapers publish the images and columnists opine, and the internet is abuzz with news, commentary and opinion.
A million man march, or a half million man march, or even fifty thousand people raising cane in the street is real news. A disruptive demonstration is an actual event, as opposed to a virtual protest. It produces images of human beings engaged in real human activity, images that produce emotional reactions among those who view them. People see the images and emotions are stirred.
The louder, noisier, more insistent and rude street demonstrations become, the more attention they get. Sit-ins work too. Large numbers of people obstructing foot traffic in public buildings cause inconvenience and get attention. It’s a guarantee to make the six o’clock news.
Posters with bold political and social messages plastered on the sides of buildings, stuck on power poles throughout the city, placed in the windows of sympathetic shopkeepers and pinned on every campus bulletin board both promote events and lend urgency to an issue. Who can forget the striking imagery and corresponding impact of anti-war posters in the Sixties? Only those who are too young to remember them.
Do such public disruptions and explosions of graphic propaganda persuade people to support a cause? Do they win hearts and minds and result in real change? What do you think?
The freedom marches of the 1960s produced the Civil Rights Act. The anti-war protests of the ‘60s and ‘70s resulted in an end to the Vietnam War. A bunch of enthusiastic tea baggers acting up at town hall meetings and marching on the capitol killed health care reform. Real, in-the-street activism works.
A bunch of people tweeting and signing online petitions over coffee at Starbuck’s does not attract television cameras. CNN just doesn’t cover it. Neither do the local newsrooms or newspapers. The activity produces no images. No passions are stirred, no pressures brought to bear. In such a clean and sterile environment nothing can grow.
Real change doesn’t come easy. It doesn’t come cheap. It never did. People have to make a lot of noise, and accept the risk of getting hurt. People have to defy authority, and be prepared to go to jail. People have to believe in something strongly enough to leave the comfort of their homes. Activism is not an activity for the timid or the lazy. It is not a spectator sport.
Have I done my part? There was a time when I did, but admittedly it’s been a while. I haven’t forgotten how. I cannot walk as fast as once I could, but I can still walk. I cannot yell as loudly as I could in my youth, but I can still yell. I can still draw and put ink on paper, and our poster press, I vow, will find new life in 2010.
New life. That’s what we need if we’re to realize any genuine, meaningful social or political change. New life. We’re not going to find it on Facebook or Twitter. We can find it in the old, the tried and the true
{ 10 comments… read them below or add one }
A lot of people want to support a political or social cause but don’t have the time to attend meetings or rallies. Online activities such as joining Facebook causes and signing online petitions are valid outlets for their political expression.
Mary Ann, I share your passion and frustration, as well as your belief in the power of nonviolent conflict. But I also see other reasons for, and even some merit in, the younger generation’s reluctance to turn out for protests.
1. Mass protests appear less effective than in the past. Remember that the largest protests in history, not only in the U.S. but throughout the world, confronted the Bush regime’s decision to invade Iraq. They achieved exactly nothing.
2. Governments and elites have learned to resist the pressure generated by conventional mass protests. As you point out, they’ve also learned to manipulate mass protest techniques through “astroturf” strategies, of which the Tea Party movement is one of the most successful examples. These changes in the political landscape cannot be ignored. So just as protesters in the Sixties modified the tactics of labor demonstrators from the 1930s and ’40s (and they in turn modified what was done in the teens and twenties, and so on back to 1776 and earlier), the present generation has to improvise new methods while taking what’s best from their heritage of protest and movement building.
The biggest handicap is not laziness or fascination with the Internet. It’s fear — first of all, of our government, and second, of other Americans.
Partly because of decades of conservative harping on failures of government, we have trouble imagining how putting pressure on government could lead to a solution that’s worth the risk of being subjected to surveillance. (Even in the ’80s I constantly heard the objection that going to a demo would bring trouble with the FBI. It’s a folk belief, and is hard to overcome with mere argument, esp. in the era of Homeland Security.)
Another reason we’re less willing to join masses of our fellow citizens is that most of us are convinced that fellow citizens are a big part of the problem. You know the kind of rhetoric we’re all used to: the country is divided, red state/blue state, why don’t they just secede, we’re going to have a war in this country. I’m often surprised to hear these remarks coming from people who ought to know better. In the Sixties, bitter division was a reaction to protest; in the 2000s it’s a “pre-existing condition.” So noisy protest can serve mainly to widen the gulf between groups of people our government does not want to see forming alliances.
Besides, marching in the streets with megaphones is not always subversive. In Birmingham it’s become a commemorative civic ritual, as provocative as a church picnic. Times have changed.
So what would shake things up in 2010 the way that marches and sit-ins and teach-ins and be-ins did in the Sixties?
I’m convinced that the most subversive thing we can do in the 21st century is to talk politics and form common interests with people we’re not supposed to associate with: coffee shop regulars with Wal-mart shoppers; feminists with right-to-lifers; suburban evangelicals with urban pentecostals; gays with Muslims; lesbians with home-schoolers. Our mass media, which follows us everywhere, constantly tell us that these talks would be impossible, and only a fool would try it. So let’s try it. Stake out the common ground, and claim it together. It means we can’t get hung up on political creeds, or buzz phrases, and must do a lot of listening to people we are trained to despise.
The point is to pick shared goals, identify our opponents, and then overcome them alongside people who, even though they believe some things we think are obnoxious, we still think of as neighbors and fellow citizens.
Progressives tend to assume that this kind of work would be beyond the capacity of people on the religious or cultural right. But my experience leads me to think that, with obvious exceptions, they may be more up for it than we are.
Building coalitions across the left-right or blue-red divide may seem hopeless on its face, but the fact is, we’ve done this kind of work before. The people who pretend to run this show are constantly afraid that we’ll manage to do it again.
Rob,
Just my two cents relative to your comments:
I cannot agree that mass protests are less effective today than in the past. The marches and demonstrations of the Civil Rights Movement and anti-war movement during the Vietnam era were persistent. They were repeated and sustained over a rather long period of time. In contrast, the Iraq war produced a couple of mass marches and only sporadic small demonstrations around the country. The marches and demonstrations were not persistent over any meaningful period of time.
Even though the Tea Party movement is not yet quite a year old, it has sustained a series of demonstrations and public protests which have already produced fruit, simply because they are persistent. The movement has already staged over 60 town hall meeting protests, many dozens of local tea party rallies drawing crowds ranging from a few hundred to a few thousand, at least a dozen regional events drawing sizable crowds, and three national events drawing 50,000 to 150,000 people. Have these efforts been significant in shaping public opinion and influencing Congress? Judge for yourself.
I think the reason that public protests work is, as Mary Ann has said, because they produce images of people engaged in very human activities, and these images have an emotional effect upon those who see them. Emotion, not reason, drives the opinions and resulting actions of most people. Joining a Facebook cause produces no compelling imagery.
Surely, fear is a factor which deters some people from participating in public demonstrations. I guess it always was. During the Civil Rights movement there was a very real possibility of having one’s skull cracked by police while participating in a nonviolent march. People were actually killed by national guardsmen during anti-war protests. There has always been the possibility of sustaining some physical injury when participating in political protest, but people committed to a principle are willing to accept those risks rather than be silenced.
During the ’80s you heard rumors that participating in a demonstration might subject one to FBI scrutiny? This you disbelieved? I assure you that participation in public demonstrations during the ’60s and ’70s carried with it a risk of increased attention from J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI. It was not a joke. But, that was a part of it. People were willing to take that risk in order to make their voices heard.
I am sure many factors contribute to the wide preference for online activism over public demonstrations. Laziness and a lack of genuine commitment to principles are, I fear, among them.
Great blog as usual, Perkerson Park writers! After reading the blog and everyone’s comments, I actually agree with everything each of you stated. All opinions ring true.
I would like to offer one more reason why younger people and even older people do not get involved in a real, active way – I think it’s because they truly do not believe it will make a difference. I think there are many kids out there that really DO care but feel so overwhelmed by what they see in the media they feel there is nothing they could contribute that would possibly make a difference. These kids weren’t even born during the Vietnam era and have no frame of reference of the old protest marches. Those are just stories that they’d heard in history class, maybe if they have a decent history teacher.
For those of us who are middle-aged or seniors and sit back and do nothing – we are so jaded and defeated that again, we think what’s the real point? We’ll still be in a war with no meaning, banks will still control all the money and the homeless and uninsured will continue to be without a roof or proper medical care. It’s bred a lack of empathy, hope and eventually a lack of compassion.
My good friend, Bernie Ellis says this, “We are the ones we’ve been waiting for.” I totally agree….the problem is we just don’t know where the heck to start.
I share your passion! Pretty frequently I will see a group of vets protesting the war out in front of the CNN building and I am reminded “of the days”. I celebrate the right to be able to protest by standing on a street corner, waving signs and chanting about your cause. I agree…something is very much lost when you sign an online petition or send a fax!
First, Mary Ann, thank you for pointing out what so few seem to recognize or understand. We people get so enamored of all this new hi-tech stuff & just go ga-ga over its latest form. First came e-mail and cell-phones, then the whole WWW on Windows, then MySpace, then texting, now Twitter. . . . But that’s the problem, in part. Folks are so ga-ga over the latest hi-tech invention being disseminated, that they don’t have time for the issues of life. Real life. REAL life, as in what you can see, hear, touch, taste and smell. As in three-dimensional life. Perhaps one might say that the hi-tech “groupies” have deteriorated into two-dimensional living?
Okay, I know that this comes from yours truly as I sit here typing a comment for a blog. Yeah, it’s hi-tech and I do hi-tech. But I don’t do Twitter, nor MySpace nor i-podding, etc. And NEVER texting, which is way too time-consuming! If the Founding Fathers had texted, they’d never have gotten around to having a revolution in the thirteen originals.
And I really do want to downsize my hi-tech activity. I believe downsizing is necessary, because I strongly suspect it. This may sound crazy to some, but I get a stronger and stronger impression that the “mark of the beast” in the Book of Revelation (Apocalypse) may be IN this hi-tech web we 21st Century humans are weaving.
Therefore, I call on everybody who reads this to consider for your own good & the good of all you love and all for which you stand, whether you’re liberal or conservative, young or old, or whatever, to consider the value and worth of backing off from so much hi-tech stuff. At the very least all this obsession with doing hi-tech is distracting from REAL life and from REAL life issues.
REAL life is where it really is, not the virtual life of the hi-tech world. Mary Ann, you call Tea Party people “an ignorant and mindless bunch”. However, I casually and serendipitously stopped by a T.P. rally at Legislative Plaza not long ago, during a transfer between MTA buses, and noticed that those folk KNOW their American Revolutionary history along with our founding documents. Not to mention they are smart en’uf to ACT, to DO things physically and visually and verbally. To carry out what they believe in in the REAL world. And NOT to get wrapped up in obsession with doing virtual activity in a virtual world. “Virtual”? What the younger, supposedly liberal crowd faces is a virtual stand-still.
Meanwhile, the so-called T.P. crowd, with whom I agree on a few points and disagree on others, is out in the streets and in the halls of government taking ACTION – real action! And as you and Prentice point out, Mary Ann, it’s having its effect. REAL effect!
I think I’ll get off this keyboard and go find a barricade to help man or a picket sign to carry somewhere. . . .
Hey, Prentice, there are a couple of things we completely agree on. One is that online petitions and the like are useless. Another is that sustained protest can be very effective.
I did believe it likely that protest would draw the attention of the FBI, and used to joke about sending a Freedom of Information request for my file. But what I’ve never been able to take very seriously is the idea that being watched by the FBI was likely to lead directly to bodily harm, or was worth worrying about. It certainly puts a person in good company. Certainly not worth giving up free speech rights over. But as I was suggesting, we have become a fearful people. Maybe we always have been, with a few braver ones to stick up for the rest. So now we’re informed in countless more or less subtle ways that “the rest” are not really worth sticking up for.
That’s the thing that bothers me most about our politics. I was describing (above) a kind of organizing that I don’t see happening anywhere, and haven’t been able to rally people to do around here. Maybe I’m just a crank.
But I don’t see how you can build a movement without first building trust. And if you build it where you’re not supposed to, so much the better.
Excellent. I have been screaming this story on Twitter all year.
It inspired me to write this:
http://shoqvalue.com/our-real-enemy-progressive-passivity
I am going to add it to my rants and primers page
http://shoqvalue.com/rants-and-primers
Oh, you don’t seem to be on Twitter? Most of the activist progressive community and media are now all on twitter. I don’t know of any leading activists who bother with Facebook anymore (but the right wing just loves it). Hurry over. We need your voices… badly.
It’s just hard to convince young people to get excited about health care–for the most part, they are not sick. The sandwich generation people in their 30s and 40s are stretched too thin between work and family to have energy for politics (average annual hours at work has climbed a lot since the 1960s). Unemployed people have the time but not the means to go to protests.
But all these people do have access to the internet. Even the most overworked parent can sign an online petition. That’s why we’ve tried to use that connective ability. What we have done has not worked, but that’s not a good enough reason to throw out electronic protesting completely. We have a large army ready to mobilize here.
In-your-face protesting worked because, among other things, it got everybody’s attention. Online petitions don’t get attention. So how can we use electronics to get the nation’s attention?
What we need is a short-term disruption of online services that everyone will notice. When Twitter went down for a few hours, it was reported on the news. What if millions of people all did something on the internet at once and created a usage surge so big that it briefly affected everyone who uses a computer?
I’m not enough of a techie to know how to do this. Can just sending a flood of emails during a half hour window do the job? That’s something the electronic army could manage.
Separately, I agree that the other side has been using divide and conquer to keep natural allies apart. My parents are lifelong libertarians and I’m a progressive, but our positions are not that far apart.
One of the other main reasons that the author does not mention is that there is no real liberal or progressive representation in state legislatures or government. Liberals and activists methodically and pathetically fool themselves every two year that this is not the case.
One of the reasons why the tea party people seemed so effective is that much of the conservative party and much of the democratic party wants to do exactly what the tea party was asking them to do – they just needed political cover, and more support to do it.
Lets face the truth, mass marches, rallies, etc in the modern world of 2010/11 do not work without a real, progressive political/electoral component to transform the “movement” into “the law.”
The Democratic Party is so dominated by conservative corporate special interests, and regressive social policy that they are incapable of doing this. Wake up, and smell the Tea, because if you keep fooling yourselves into voting for Democrats, and keep wondering why conservatives win, then you are simply not willing to put 2+2 together.
The Democrats have not been a progressive political forces since the mid 1960′s. They are merely content to manage the decline of the civil rights movement, and FDR’s New Deal.
Are you content to keep supporting their complicity to the conservative movement?
If you want real, progressive representation, the vote for real progressives – regardless of party. If you want more of the same, just keep voting straight-ticket Democrat.