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.

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.

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.

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.

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. . . .

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.

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.

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.