Out of Action

August 28, 2017 11:55 AM

Still, what has protest done for us lately? Smartphones and social media are supposed to have made organizing easier, and activists today speak more about numbers and reach than about lasting results. Is protest a productive use of our political attention? Or is it just a bit of social theatre we perform to make ourselves feel virtuous, useful, and in the right? For The New Yorker Nathan Heller writes 4800 words on the history of contemporary U.S. political protesting.

History provides an especially sharp rejoinder to those who doubt the sustained power of protest: the civil-rights movement. From the mid-fifties to the mid-sixties, activists successfully worked to roll back school segregation, public-transit segregation, interstate-bus segregation, restaurant segregation, poll taxes, employment discrimination, and more. It happened, piece by piece, under politically entrenched and physically threatening conditions. Its efficacy was virtually unmatched in our national past. The civil-rights movement preceded the protest meteor of the late sixties, but, for a new generation eager for change, it showed what was possible by taking to the streets.

posted by cgc373 (13 comments total)

Anybody interested in social activism in the digital age should read Twitter and Tear Gas by Zeynep Tufekci. Creative Commons licensed if you are cash strapped.
posted by COD at 12:11 PM on August 28, 2017 [4 favorites]

This article drove me bonkers. How do you write an article about protest and ignore all of the protests you didn't attend? (ie the conservative ones) And how do you not talk about protest in the framework of actual violent action?

Plenty of interesting questions raised but I was pretty disappointed by the analysis.

Also, 'neoliberalism' is a vague term? What a brilliant insight.
posted by ropeladder at 12:32 PM on August 28, 2017 [6 favorites]

Protests in Charlotteville against the nazis put enough pressure on them that dozens of other planned nazi meetings were called off

Similarly this weekend, nazi scum was once again chased away thanks to the power of mass protest.

Further away from the present day and American parochialism, there were of course the protests in the Middle East that ended dictatorships in Algeria, Tunesia and Egypt (if not permanently), mass protests in Serbia at the turn of the century chasing away Milosevich, which NATO bombings couldn't do and of course the massive wave of protests all over Eastern Europe ending communist dictatorships there.
posted by MartinWisse at 1:20 PM on August 28, 2017 [17 favorites]

I could really live without seeing another liberal white boy feeling powerless in the present moment decide to regain some sense of agency by telling the rest of the left, especially women and minorities, how they're Doing It Wrong.

His criticism of BLM is particularly galling. You're right, dude. They didn't Solve Racism in the three years since 2014.
posted by praemunire at 1:34 PM on August 28, 2017 [56 favorites]

That's a lot of words to say "I'm comfortable without having to do anything and seeing other people work makes me uncomfortable."

(A better critique would be that protests are but one prop in the political theatre and should also be met with strikes and shutdowns, but no platforms Nazis and making them afraid to be in public is a very effective way of shutting them down)
posted by The Whelk at 2:02 PM on August 28, 2017 [24 favorites]

Contrary to Betteridge's Law of Headlines, the answer to "Is there any point in protesting?" seems to be "yes". The piece itself is a meandering analysis of three different books, with the most attention paid to Zeynep Tufekci's Twitter and Tear Gas. Heller questions the efficacy of modern, loosely structured protests ("adhocracy", to use Tufekci's term) in contrast to the successful movements and protests of the past, primarily the American Civil Rights movement. He argues that much of this movement's success was a result of careful, strategic, deliberate planning and execution, which is lacking in crowd-sourced protesting. He defines 'success' in this case as policy/law change. He does go on to note, near the end, that there are other measures of success, such as raising awareness and decreasing alienation. He readily allows modern protests do accomplish this, using the Women's March in early 2017 as a primary example.
posted by smokysunday at 2:15 PM on August 28, 2017 [7 favorites]

US Aug '63: What are your feelings about this proposed mass Civil Rights rally to be held in Washington D.C. on August 28, 1963?
posted by Joseph Gurl at 3:14 PM on August 28, 2017 [10 favorites]

In one survey, half of Occupy Wall Street allies turned out to be fully employed: even that putatively radical economic movement was largely middle class.

I have no clue what any part of this sentence is supposed to convey.
posted by atoxyl at 3:45 PM on August 28, 2017 [5 favorites]

I have no clue what any part of this sentence is supposed to convey.

You mean, beyond the fact that the author is apparently genuinely unaware that one can be fully or more than fully employed and still be poor?
posted by praemunire at 5:58 PM on August 28, 2017 [8 favorites]

one can be fully or more than fully employed and still be poor?

Or be middle class and still in favor of redistribution?
posted by Dip Flash at 6:49 PM on August 28, 2017 [11 favorites]

Boston.
posted by Peach at 7:43 PM on August 28, 2017 [4 favorites]

You mean, beyond the fact that the author is apparently genuinely unaware that one can be fully or more than fully employed and still be poor?
Or be middle class and still in favor of redistribution?

Or what the most famous slogan from Occupy is and what it implies, regarding the middle class?

Or that the conventional slur against Occupy is that it was a bunch of upper middle class college kids who didn't have to work, perhaps mixed with a few dropouts who didn't want to? I mean, if he wants to take potshots he's not even keeping that story straight.
posted by atoxyl at 11:01 PM on August 28, 2017 [4 favorites]

That middle class is only there to convey disdain, as the middle class is the ultimate in fakeness, poserdom and hypocrisy, something something kale, not like us salt of the earth working class people and billionaires. It's another little trick rightwingers nicked from intraleft disputes.
posted by MartinWisse at 1:17 PM on August 29, 2017 [2 favorites]