From Protests Past, Lessons in What Works

http://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/31/opinion/from-protests-past-lessons-in-what-works.html

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Nearly everyone outside the White House agrees that the Women’s March on Washington on Jan. 21 drew far larger crowds than the inauguration the day before. People marched in more than 600 locations around the world, on every continent, even Antarctica. Even the most conservative estimate — 3.3 million marchers in the United States — would make it the largest protest in the nation’s history.

Two weeks after the election, I examined lessons from successful protest movements. (It’s a good time to restate that the Constitution enshrines the right to peaceful protest.) Sam Daley-Harris, a longtime organizer of citizen movements, calls the current fervor for activism against President Trump and his policies “extraordinarily unusual.” The Women’s Marches were an astonishing start.

The many airport demonstrations against the barring of citizens of seven largely Muslim countries from entering the United States show that people are determined to speak out against specific Trump decisions. So let’s look at what past movements have to say to the question, What now?

Diversify your tactics

There’s a lot more to nonviolent struggle than marching. A list of 198 methods of nonviolent action has been drawn up by Gene Sharp, an academic who is a master strategist of nonviolent struggle. And Nonviolent Struggle: 50 Crucial Points is a fun-to-read primer that has more ideas.

Marches are useful for the anti-Trump movement because numbers are one of its advantages. But marches have their shortcomings. “Marches and parades are, in effect, symbolic gestures,” said Retired Colonel Robert Helvey, a scholar and teacher of strategic nonviolence. They can recruit and inspire. But they are infrequent, special events. And they are too sweeping to achieve the series of specific locally won victories the movement needs. And for the anti-Trump demonstrations, they have been mostly in the wrong places. (More about this later.)

Plan

I mentioned this point in the November Fixes column because it’s so important. Anyone good at planning — and protest needs to be planned, as carefully as a war — knows to start with the goal and work backward. What specific change is being sought? What steps are needed to get there? No military leader would stage a spontaneous assault. Nor should any nonviolent leader. The bus boycotts and sit-ins in the American South, the Egyptian protests in Tahrir Square — those were the visible tips of an iceberg, hiding months or years of training and planning.

Pull out the pillars

All leaders rely on the loyalty of important groups in society. The job of a protest movement is to pull out the leader’s essential pillars of support — turn his most influential supporters into opponents.

Who are President Trump’s pillars? He needs members of Congress to pass his legislation. One good goal for the opposition is to make them think: “Trump is a very unpopular guy, and this policy has a lot of opposition. I, too, will be unpopular if I go along with him. Maybe I’ll even face a primary challenge.”

Who has the power to do that? Representatives care about pressure from their constituents.

Focus

The Women’s March movement is now suggesting one action to take each week. The first one is “pour your heart out on any issue that you care about” on a postcard, post a photo of it on social media and send it via snail mail to your member of Congress.

Despite its good intentions, this is not an effective tactic.

A better example can be found in a nationwide “What now?” phone call staged the last two Sundays by MoveOn.org and other liberal groups. The first one had more than 20,000 listeners — a recording of the call is here. In that call, founders of a new organization, Indivisible, offered tactical advice. They are Democratic former congressional staff members who learned from the Tea Party’s successful opposition to much of the Obama agenda.

Their lessons: Talk only about the issues before Congress right now. And while pouring your heart out may feel good, it’s your political pressure that matters, not your policy analysis.

Get off-line and show up

“Online work is only useful for organizing off-line work,” said a veteran organizer, Sam Daley-Harris, who leads the Center for Citizen Empowerment and Transformation.

“The closer you can get to your member of Congress, the better,” said Angel Padilla, a founder of Indivisible. In the MoveOn call, organizers asked people to visit the district offices of their representative and senators every Tuesday. “An office visit is better than a call. A call is better than a letter,” Padilla said. What if your representative is already on board? Visit anyway. People like to be thanked. And tell her to do more.

Create an inclusive brand

Large crowds in big cities, as impressive as they are, are not persuasive in Trump country. Members of Congress care about what their districts think, not what the country thinks. And much of Trump’s support was a protest against elite urban liberals. This means finding a theme that can work in red states.

John Jackson, a strategist who has helped to develop many campaigns for human rights or workers rights, cites this strategy as a turning point for the American campaign for gay marriage. “It was mobilizing its own communities and speaking to its own communities,” he said. “Then it began mobilizing family, friends and colleagues of gay people. It seems obvious now, but hadn’t been tried before.”

Another example was the 2,000 veterans of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars who went to Standing Rock to join protests against the Dakota oil pipeline. Unexpected allies confound the other side.

An anti-Trump campaign theme should be whatever the largest possible group can agree on. (Perhaps something like: Respect Is an American Value.) “Build a narrative that isn’t a ‘Liberal vs. Conservative’ narrative but a ‘Trump vs. America’ narrative,” Jackson said.

Promote hope, not fear

One movement that did this right was the anti-Pinochet movement in Chile. After 15 years of doing almost everything wrong, the opposition seized its moment in 1988, when the dictator held a plebiscite: A “yes” vote meant eight more years, a “no” vote meant free elections the next year.

Pinochet was masterful at using fear; his constant theme was “me or chaos.” The opposition countered with a dogged voter registration drive, and then a brilliant ad campaign: a rainbow-and-flowers montage showing attractive, smiling young people, set to a bouncy original pop song called “Happiness Is On Its Way” that I still can’t get out of my head nearly 30 years later.

That upbeat theme came out of extensive focus groups. “Progressives normally win battles when they are able to put future and hope in the center of the debate,” said Srdja Popovic, an organizer of Serbia’s anti-Milosevic campaign, who now trains democracy movements around the world.

He cited Brexit, Britan’s vote to leave the European Union. Fear of immigrants and European Union bureaucrats was the theme of the Leave campaign. The Remain campaign focused on how much Britain would lose if it left. With both sides using fear, Leave won.

Delegitimize, with facts

Another tactic is to create a “birther” movement, but one based on truth. The false allegation that Barack Obama was not American-born — peddled by Trump, among others — “really delegitimized Obama,” Jackson said. He suggested focusing on Trump’s (palpably true) lack of mandate as a way to both cut into his authority and bring out the kinds of behavior that allows him to delegitimize himself — for example, his bizarre lies about illegal voting and the size of his crowds.

Build on small, concrete actions

Popovic likes to compare a movement to certain sharks, which must keep moving forward to breathe. A successful movement is a series of small victories, at each point gaining people, skills, power and momentum. Popovic’s movement, Otpor, used this strategy, growing through successful street actions. Intrigued onlookers joined, and were trained and then sent out to do more street actions.

This was something the Occupy movement failed to do; it never tried to win anything winnable. “You need to choose a financial, corporate target and show them you have power,” Jackson said. Occupy could have aimed its protests at getting a bank to reverse foreclosures, for example. “If you never have any small victories you can amplify into bigger ones, people will drop off.”

The other value of working small and local is that it reaches people who aren’t motivated by grand causes like civil rights. Harvey Milk had two big issues in his brief tenure on San Francisco’s board of supervisors. One, of course, was gay rights. The other was cleaning up dog poop. Finding allies does not get more down to earth than that.

As an obvious example, the goal shouldn’t be “Keep the Environmental Protection Agency strong.” It should be “Protect our local water supply.” Protesters, rightly, aren’t saying, “Keep Obamacare.” They’re saying, “Protect my health care.” Their voices are of local people who are really sick and stand to lose their health insurance, and local institutions like churches that have their back.

Create a citizens’ lobby

In 1980, Daley-Harris founded Results, with the mission of recruiting, training and supporting ordinary people to lobby Congress to reduce hunger and poverty. (He went on to teach his methods to the Citizens Climate Lobby and other groups.)

Results secured a huge funding increase for vaccines and other anti-poverty programs. That in turn led to more investment from other countries. You may have heard that extreme poverty around the world has declined from 44 percent in 1990 to under 10 percent today. Results’ work is one reason.

Daley-Harris trains volunteers to be nonpartisan and nonconfrontational. Their approach to Democrats and Republicans alike is “We want you to be our hero.”

Create a Tea Party

A Tea Party that’s truthful, nonracist, respectful and nonviolent, that is.

Indivisible’s leaders aim for a Tea Party of the left. Like Daley-Harris, they believe that the most important action is persuading members of Congress and that people need training, support and a community to do it.

But instead of “Be our hero,” their message is “We’re taking names.” As the Tea Party did, this group is warning members of Congress that going along with Trump will bring on protests and primary opponents.

The Tea Party also ran get-out-the-vote operations, and recruited and trained candidates for local offices — all crucial today.

“Not a lot of people were represented by the Tea Party,” Jackson said. “They were very, very strategic — they campaigned locally and built local coalitions. They made it really difficult and very costly for members of Congress to do anything other than what they wanted them to do.”

Could that happen today? “Barack Obama had a clear and large mandate. He was popular and had a large majority in Congress,” Jackson said. “Now we have a president who is not popular even in his own party, who got 25 percent of those eligible to vote. This could be a massively bigger movement than the Tea Party. This could make the Tea Party look small.”