Conventions are normally hum-drum affairs, with all the charm of a Jerry Lewis telethon. The Democrats hope to extend the Kamala honeymoon by having a festive, well-publicized, and problem-free event. The recent big wave of anti-Israel-genocide protests and possible anti-immigration demonstrations are looming threats. If either happens on any scale, it’s all too easy to make comparisons to Chicago 1968.
That also means the incentives for the dominant Democratic-party friendly media to minimize any effective political action will be strong. That means good odds of under-reporting on any embarrassing scuffles or ambushing of officials or participants. It also means the protests will be held up to artificially high standards for result.
This post is intended to raise some questions as opposed to deliver answers. Activists in our readership and those familiar with theory and practice of protest and social change are encouraged to speak up.
Sadly, the group with the most expertise in using protests and other means of effecting change is the CIA. That would also suggest that they could readily devise the playbook as to how to undermine their usual moves. Have any readers come across scholarly or good journalistic work seeking to reverse engineer the CIA color revolution manual? Or does it involve too many hard to replicate measures, like finding promising young people and getting them indoctrinated educated in the US?
Many readers decry the idea of violent or even merely inconvenience-creating actions. Frederick Douglass disagrees:
Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will. Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have found out the exact measure of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them, and these will continue till they are resisted with either words or blows, or with both. The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress
How do we think about whether protests “work”? The officialdom and media have done a very good job of persuading the great unwashed public that organized resistance is ineffective. And in many senses that is correct because it takes so long to move the Overton Window and effect change. From a 2010 post:
It’s astonishing to see how Americans have been conditioned to think that political action and engagement is futile. I’m old enough to have witnessed the reverse, how activism in the 1960s produced significant advances in civil rights blacks and women, and eventually led the US to exit the Vietnam War.
I’m reminded of this sense of despair almost daily in the comments section. Whenever possible action steps come up, virtually without fail, quite a few will argue that there is no point in making an effort, that we as individuals are powerless.
I don’t buy that as a stance, particularly because trained passivity is a great, low cost way to hobble people who have been wronged. I mistakenly relegated an article by Johann Hari in the Independent on this topic to Links, and Richard Kline’s commentary on it made me realize it deserved its own post, so I am remedying that error now.
As Kline observed:
The nut of the matter is this: you lose, you lose, you lose, you lose, they give up. As someone who has protested, and studied the process, it’s plain that one spends most of one’s time begin defeated. That’s painful, humiliating, and intimidating. One can’t expect typically, as in a battle, to get a clean shot at a clear win. What you do with protest is just what Hari discusses, you change the context, and that change moves the goalposts on your opponent, grounds out the current in their machine. The nonviolent resistance in Hungary in the 1860s (yes, that’s in the 19th century) is an excellent example. Communist rule in Russia and its dependencies didn’t fail because protestors ‘won’ but because most simply withdrew their cooperation to the point it suffocated.
So let’s return to the headline issue. How do you benchmark particular protests or protest programs? Please do not point out the obvious, that this question seems to contradict the notion right above, that protest does not result in fast, easy, or even much visible wins, but slowly grinds away at the legitimacy and foundations of support for the behavior being targeted.
Yet one of the ways to tamp down demonstrations and other forms of opposition is to subject them to performance tests or expected results that movement members never had. For instance, it’s common to criticize Occupy Wall Street for not achieving anything, even though its members never promised that. The fact that it is still remembered even though the original occupation in New York City lasted all of two months until it was cleared as part of a 17-city paramilitary crackdown shows its very existence in representing the 99% v. the 1% (that was their meme and it has endured) shows it did have an impact, and was perceived as a threat. The press regularly insisted that Occupy serve up leaders and present demands, which it never did. Its cumbersome collective decision-making process was an impediment to action, but was arguably a good vehicle for what in the 1960s was called consciousness-raising.
Or consider Black Lives Matter. It was starting to get traction, witness even some Congresscritters taking up the poorly-formulated and therefore discrediting demand to defund the police. But by that point, it had already been infiltrated by Democrats, with actual or pliable potential leaders bought off with various paid opportunities. Lambert can fill in vastly more detail, but even yours truly noticed that the co-opting process started around when Black Lives Matter started organizing die-ins, which got high levels of white and Hispanic participation.
More recently, I’ve had readers and contacts depict the late spring wave of US campus protests as ineffective because they saved no Palestinian lives. But even though this is the ultimate aim (and sadly looks unlikely to be achieved absent an escalation of Axis of Resistance action, which as we all know risks all sorts of collateral consequences), they had specific demands, such as that school endowments divest holdings in Israel-related ventures (which frankly have to be miniscule) and supporting the BDS movement. Even though the tangible impact on these fronts seems marginal at best, as far as I can tell, an effect of the protests was to greatly increase the media’s willingness to use the word genocide. It also exposed the power of Zionist billionaires in stomping on the schools and threatening to ruin the careers of student protestors.
There is no reason to think these protests won’t continue when the school year resumes, and so the soft costs of backing Israel will continue to increase.
These examples underscore the difference in timescales, that for most reform campaigns, progress is so slow and hard to discern that it’s easy to dismiss them as unproductive. And that’s before getting to subversion or simply trying to crush them out of existence, as we saw with the recent wave of campus anti-Israel genocide uprisings.
So the expected anti-genocide and anti-immigration protests at the Democratic Convention are vanishingly unlikely to produce a strategic win, absent a horrible miscalculation by the police that turns participants into martyrs.
What type of tactical gains could they achieve? This is a partial list:
Increasing morale among their sympathizers, perhaps at the margin increase participation and other support
Get media attention. Donald Trump has shown that there is no such thing as bad press
Show that they have power, by virtue of numbers or cleverness of tactics undermining the Kamala party. This might be more consequential than it appears. The Democrats hope to keep the ‘gasm going through elections. Effective protests, even if way below Chicago ’68 levels of disruption, could undermine the party efforts to project a Kamala win as inevitable
The venues, United Center and McCormick Place, are already being cordoned off, so demonstrations at the site. beyond stragglers somehow getting close enough to make a fuss and being quickly removed, is na ga happen. .
So what about outside? Again this is not my area, but the recent protestor blockage of the 405, a major highway in Los Angeles, suggests that strangling transportation arteries is not hard and has high payoff, at least in terms of getting attention.
Chicago has a major point of vulnerability: the Kennedy Expressway, which goes from downtown Chicago to O’Hare airport. It is also a major commuter road. There is a good public train from the airport to downtown, but it is highly unlikely to have the capacity to replace the expressway if protestors were to stop traffic for any length of time. I’ve had cabs take the streets rather than the expressway at peak traffic times. Few knew how to do that, and the route is a bit convoluted. Of course, with GPS, knowledge is no barrier, but those side streets would presumably get choked pretty quickly too.
McCormick Place is isolated, meaning it is already a logistical hassle for convention participants to get there from their hotels. A convention is like a fashion show; one big point is to show foot soldiers a good time. So the use of McCormick Place undermines that at the margin. McCormick Place is also near a big highway, and former Chicagoans tell me they think it would not be hard to block that and chock traffic around that convention center.
Having said all that, ironically the test here is likely not old-school effective action, which depended on scale to show the protestors had mass or at least considerable numbers, but the ability to generate video vignettes that could and do go viral and succeed in amplifying protestor positions. But we’ll see soon enough if Team Dem has successfully pre-positioned its anti-agitator measures, or whether the demonstrators manage to dent the plan to have a glossy, friction-free event.