Big tent

Matt Yglesias on modern political protests:

At root the issue is that large contemporary protests have become these carnival-like escapades. It is accepted -- and, indeed, encouraged -- for as many people as possible to show up, whether or not they agree with the United For Peace and Justice platform, know what the UFPJ platform is, or even know what UFPJ is. As a result, it's hard to know what protest attendance signifies.

Matt says this like it's a bad thing. That's a framing error. The RNC protests are a triumph by a diverse coalition united in their opposition to the Bush administration.

United for Peace and Justice chose the tagline The World Says No to the Bush Agenda. UPJ was the largest and best organized of many groups protesting this weekend.

Pundits have been doing a lot of back-of-the-envelope demographics on the protests. The exact ratio of street theatrics to earnest sloganeering and stolid citizenry is irrelevant.

There is a common denominator: all of the protesters are fervently anti-Bush. At first I bristled at that description, but, upon reflection, it's fair and accurate. It doesn't really matter whether the half million people united for peace and justice shared a single conception of peace and justice, let alone that advocated by the leaders of United For Peace and Justice. All these votes count the same. There's plenty to dislike about this administration.

The Republicans figured out how to get small-c conservatives fall in with evangelicals and big business. The Democratic base has a lot more in common than opposite number. If nothing else, the RNC demonstrations should show the Democrats that must cultivate analogous alliances.

Comments

[david]

I was at one of the protests in Chicago against the war (this was just before the war started, when everyone knew it was inevitable) and noticed a man handing out anti-semitic pamphlets arguing that the war is bad because Saddam is good because he is against the Jewish bankers. He was chanting along with everyone else. The "big tent" you're talking about is truly big.

I think many (most) of the people who show up to these events, show up because the events are fun and entertaining. For these people, showing up means about as much as would showing up to any other fun and entertaining event. Consider: Lots of people go to a carnival when it comes to town. You would not increase or decrease attendance very much (though I imagine you would change it in one or the other direction slightly) if you changed the name of the carnival from "Carnival" to "Anti-Bush Protest." By changing the name, you would not suddenly change everybody's purpose in being there; their purpose would be the same: to have fun. Likewise, even if a million people really did show up to the Billionaires for Bush event, it would not mean much more than that lots of people like dressing up like billionaires.

I'm not clear on what the purpose of a protest is. Is it just to get a lot of people together and say: "Look! All of these people are in favor of/against X"? In that case a protest is no better than a poll. I suppose that is part of the purpose, but maybe the rest of the purpose is actually to convert people who see the protest - to bring them around to an anti-Bush point of view. In that case, the disparity of views represented at a given protest might be seen as a good thing: If one sub-group's slogans don't convince people, maybe another sub-group's slogans will. But the thing is, there is not much more in terms of actual content at a protest THAN slogans and chants and four-paragraph pamphlets. Being convinced by such things is like being convinced by a bumper sticker or a song. I do not deny that people CAN be convinced by chants, songs, slogans and bumper stickers; but there seems to me something a little unethical about convincing them in this way. When they are so "convinced," they do not really understand the reasons why your view is correct or best. They are just sucked in by a catchy refrain.

[Lindsay Beyerstein]

I'm going to post about the moral dimensions of protest later on. Right now, I'll just say a few things about the strategic importance of public protests.

Demonstrations are very much like polls. If someone cares enough about a cause to show up at a protest, chances are that they also care enough to vote accordingly.

I might add that protests aren't very entertaining unless you are sympathetic to the cause. Otherwise it's a lot of marching and shouting and being seen with people you don't agree with.

There are a lot of misconceptions about the role of public protest. One function of protests is to demonstrate that a particular view is a going concern. We can't sit back and rely on the media to give our views equal time.

Sadly, most people won't even consider a position unless they have some evidence that it's a "serious" view. By serious I simply mean "held by a non-trivial number of others." The fact that half a million people were willing to protest against Bush is an interesting data point, even to the most wishy washy of swing voters.

The latest round of demonstrations is sound media strategy. By massing their forces on the eve of the RNC, liberal protesters were able to insert themselves into the news cycle and displace uninterrupted stream of puff pieces that would otherwise have surrounded the opening of the convention. We gave the media something to chew on, we stayed in the public eye. Otherwise, progressives would have been invisible during this critical time.

Demonstrations aren't really meant to convince skeptics. These demonstrations were more about energizing the faithful and raising our profile in the eyes of the Democratic establishment. A successful week of demonstrations will energize the activists for the tough electoral slog ahead. If the demonstrations had fizzled it would have been terrible for grassroots morale, which would have made it harder to recruit people to do all the vital but boring logistical stuff that will decide this election.

Successful demonstrations by broad progressive coalitions also send a message to the Democrats about who their friends are. You might say we're buying a piece of John Kerry while shares are relatively inexpensive. The Democrats have been stampeding towards the center, often to their own detriment. A good street protest reminds them of the resources they may have been neglecting in democratic wing of the Democratic party.

[david]

Okay, so now it seems we have three candidates for the "purpose" of protesting:
(a) To show the media, the public, the opposition, etc. how many people are pro- or anti- X (anti-Bush in this case). This is the "Poll Purpose."
(b) To convince skeptics.
(c) To encourage, bolster, "energize" the people who attend the protest, as well as the people who share the sentiments of the protest but who are not in attendance and only see it on TV.

You seem to discard (b), at least in the case of the protests at issue here. You seem to think (a) and (c) are the main purposes of these protests.

Regarding (a), let me say this: Polls do a pretty good job of measuring people's preferences, but they do not do as good a job of measuring the intensity of their preferences. Polls can tell us, at any given time, for instance, about how many people are against the FMA, but polls cannot tell us just how much people would be willing to give up, or how hard they would be willing to work, in order to prevent the FMA. So it seems to me that if you want to say that protests have purpose (a), you have to argue not just that protests show how MANY people are pro- or anti-X (since polls already serve this purpose), but also show how MUCH people are willing to do, and to give up, in order to bring about or prevent X. That is protests must measure the INTENSITY of people's preferences, not just the preferences themselves; otherwise protests are (at best) redundant.

Now I think that some protests do in fact serve this purpose. The movie "Osama" begins with a bunch of female protesters in Afghanistan, pre-9/11, demanding the right to work. In participating in this protest, the women put themselves in great danger. They know they could be killed for it. Eventually the protest is predictably broken up quite violently by the Taliban. Thus the protest demonstrates what a poll cannot: Not just that many women want to be allowed to work, but also how much (some) women are willing to suffer in order further that aim.

But when protests are fun and relatively risk-free, as well as made almost glamorous by movies and television, I don't think they accomplish the same purpose. Nobody is really giving anything up by participating. In fact they are benefitting from it, because protesting is a fun and (as you put it) "energizing" activity. So the number of people who show up, shows that at least that many people are anti-Bush; but it does not show how strongly this many feel about their anti-Bushitude, because in going to the protest they have actually gained in terms of narrow personal well-being, not lost. This means, I think, that protests cannot measure intensity of preference. They can only measure the quantity of people who hold a certain view. And in fact they do a very bad job of even this, for obvious statistical reasons (protests are not composed of people selected from a random sample, etc.).

So now we have (c). Now I don't want to deny that protests can energize the faithful, make them feel stronger and more supported in their views, and so on. But if what I say is true, and protests are a fun and entertaining event - a form of recreation - then I am not sure how well protests can even do (c). I would be encouraged a great deal in my views if people were really risking something by expressing a sentiment which I share, but went ahead and expressed it anyway. This would mean to me that those who agree with me feel strongly about our views and won't buckle under pressure. But when protests are so obviously fun, I don't get the same level of encouragement. They are sending the message "I agree with you," but are not sending the message "I will help further our shared aims even if it costs me personally to do so." The latter message would be much more valuable than the former. But of course I do not want to deny that the former message has some value. It obviously does; whether it has any more value than the publication of a poll representing the same information remains to be seen.

Now there is a point related to (a) which you make. Protests can control the TIMING of information. As you say, a protest can draw people's attention to the opposition at a time when their attention would not otherwise be drawn. So it might be that even if protests are a sort of sub-standard poll, it might still be that protests are worthwhile because protests can strategically draw attention to the same information a poll would have conveyed.

I'm not saying protests serve no valid purpose whatsoever; I'm just saying that the fact that protests are so obviously fun makes them less purposeful and less valuable than they are in other political climates: The 60's Civil Rights protests in America, or the pre-9/11 Taliban-time in Afghanistan, etc.

Here's a related, kind of out-there point. Protests have become a coming-of-age thing, a rite-of-passage, in this culture. Kids nowadays feel like going to a protest is part of growing up; it's what you do just before, or just after, you get your first apartment or your first job. Now I know that not everybody who goes to protests is a teenager. I know that, as MY reported, many of them are parents who bring their own kids. But there is obviously something youthful about protests now. The fascination with protests in our culture is a part of the general fascination with youth we exhibit. So I think that if you are attending a protest, and you haven't shown up because you ARE young, you likely have shown up because you want to FEEL young. This is why people dress up, play games, act silly, beat on drums, etc. at protests. They hear the objections against these teenagerly acts: "We mustn't act like children; nobody will take us seriously." But these objections miss the point. It is part of being youthful not to be taken seriously; the protests are a deliberate stab at not being taken seriously and therefore at being YOUNG. We no longer go through rites of passage once and then become adults. We go through them over and over again as long as we are capable of doing so.