For your consideration: When is a protest more than just a protest? [View all]

[EarlG]

Full disclosure: I was born in 1974 so my awakening to the wider world of politics probably began somewhere around 1990. The protests of the 1960s and 70s are something that I can only understand through history books, because I was not there to experience them in person.

When I participated in large protest actions during the 2000s -- the selection of 2000, multiple marches against the Iraq War, the March for Women's Lives, etc. -- they felt very much like protests. We made our presence felt, and we made our voices heard. Hundreds of thousands of people participated in those marches, they shut down the streets in DC (legally), and they were almost entirely peaceful. Of course in a crowd that size, you're always going to get a handful of people who act out and get hauled off by the cops, but my memories of those events were that the VAST majority of the crowd was entirely peaceful.

One of the anti-war marches that I participated in was routed along Pennsylvania Avenue between 15th and 17th streets, directly in front of the White House. We didn't think Bush was there at the time, but we sure as hell yelled like he could hear us. There was of course a police presence, but as long as we kept moving, there were no problems.

During this time, I seem to recall groups like Code Pink and others setting up small encampments near the White House, for a more permanent protest presence, but they were largely ineffective. With hundreds of thousands of people marching peacefully in the streets, these small enclaves felt like what they were -- extremist elements of a much larger movement. The deal, generally, was that you arrived at the protest location, engaged in a peaceful mass action, and then went home afterwards.

Fast forward to 2011, and Occupy Wall Street. I did not participate in this, but it's the first time that I can personally recall a major protest as not just a protest but an "occupation" -- the purpose was not merely to march around the Wall Street area, but to set up a permanent camp there. It obviously drew a lot of media attention -- especially because the protesters were generally left wing and the president at the time was a Democrat. After that, "Occupy" became quite the buzzword. People were "occupying" everything (we even still have an "Occupy Underground" here at DU).

Since then, over time, it seems that organized protest marches have gradually fallen out of favor, and have been replaced by more attention-grabbing "occupations," and, unfortunately, violent actions and vandalism.

This does make some sense in the age of social media. Nowadays, the ONLY thing that matters is getting eyeballs and attention -- and there's something to be said for this. Twenty years ago we had hundreds of thousands of people coming together and marching to draw attention to our opposition to the Iraq War. Nowadays all you need is one small-to-medium sized protest, a decent cameraphone, and an influencer account on Twitter or Instagram, and you can reach millions of people. (And with this dynamic, some quality shots of people breaking windows or fighting with cops can really boost your reach.)

So here's the question: When does a protest become something more than just a protest? The following are all technically acts of protest, with most peaceful at the top and least peaceful at the bottom:

• Permitted marching, large peaceful gatherings, speeches -- for example, MLK's March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom.


• Peaceful civil disobedience -- for example, unpermitted sit-ins, where you acknowledge that you are breaking the law by blocking traffic or occupying a particular space illegally, but you also do not resist arrest, on the understanding that publicly taking the punishment is part of the protest.


• Occupations -- where you take possession of a public space in the style of a sit-in, but you stake a claim to that area, call it your own, and resist arrest if authorities attempt to remove you.


• Violent protests which may begin with peaceful intentions, but which devolve into mass acts of vandalism and/or combat with police, either due to the intentions of many of the protesters, or due to violent oppression of the protest by police.


• Large scale out-of-control acts of mass violence -- for example, the LA riots of 1992.

It seems to me that the true art of political protesting, for maximum effectiveness, is to find the perfect nexus between maximum possible public exposure, but also maximum possible public sympathy.

Nobody will care if you go for a march with three friends around your local town. But at the other end of the scale, you very much risk driving people away from your cause if you, say, go for a march with ten thousand people around DC and then attack cops and assault the Capitol Building.

Ultimately, you want as many people as possible to hear about your cause, and you want as many people as possible to sympathize with your cause. I think a possible error that protesters on all sides are making in the social media era is that they believe they only need to appeal to people who already sympathize with them. (This explains why so many January 6 insurrections are surprised that they've ended up in prison.)

It's honestly unclear to me how things are going for the current student protests in this regard...