This article is from the source 'nytimes' and was first published or seen on . The next check for changes will be

You can find the current article at its original source at https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/22/opinion/does-protest-work-bevins.html

The article has changed 9 times. There is an RSS feed of changes available.

Version 3 Version 4
Has the Age of Mass Protest Actually Achieved Anything? Has the Age of Mass Protest Actually Achieved Anything?
(about 7 hours later)
You hear the superlatives now with disorienting regularity: the largest protests in American history, in European history, in Latin American history; the largest since Black Lives Matter, since the Women’s March; the biggest since Occupy and the Tea Party, since the Arab Spring or the Pink Tide or the global rallies against the Iraq war in 2003.You hear the superlatives now with disorienting regularity: the largest protests in American history, in European history, in Latin American history; the largest since Black Lives Matter, since the Women’s March; the biggest since Occupy and the Tea Party, since the Arab Spring or the Pink Tide or the global rallies against the Iraq war in 2003.
Over the past month, after Hamas stormed into Israel and slaughtered 1,200 people and the Israel Defense Forces began brutally bombing Gaza in response, the world’s streets have filled again. The protests — some in support of Israel, more in support of the Palestinians — have looked to many of those participating with gusto and many of those watching from afar in horror like a generational inflection point. In Germany, the government criminalized the phrase “from the river to the sea,” and elsewhere new fronts in the speech wars have seemed to open up almost daily — on lampposts, in Harvard Square, on Instagram.Over the past month, after Hamas stormed into Israel and slaughtered 1,200 people and the Israel Defense Forces began brutally bombing Gaza in response, the world’s streets have filled again. The protests — some in support of Israel, more in support of the Palestinians — have looked to many of those participating with gusto and many of those watching from afar in horror like a generational inflection point. In Germany, the government criminalized the phrase “from the river to the sea,” and elsewhere new fronts in the speech wars have seemed to open up almost daily — on lampposts, in Harvard Square, on Instagram.
Above all, there have been crowds — enormous ones. On Nov. 4, there were perhaps 300,000 marching in Washington in support of Palestinians. Ten days later, it was tens of thousands in support of Israel. On Nov. 11, in London, it was 300,000 for the Palestinian cause, and the home secretary, Suella Braverman, was fired for calling on the police to handle the protesters more harshly. In Paris, the very next day, 180,000 marched contre l’antisémitisme, including Marine Le Pen, the face of reactionary France, though not President Emmanuel Macron, who has lately been calling for a cease-fire. Weekend to weekend, country to country, what has startled is the turnout, which is growing.Above all, there have been crowds — enormous ones. On Nov. 4, there were perhaps 300,000 marching in Washington in support of Palestinians. Ten days later, it was tens of thousands in support of Israel. On Nov. 11, in London, it was 300,000 for the Palestinian cause, and the home secretary, Suella Braverman, was fired for calling on the police to handle the protesters more harshly. In Paris, the very next day, 180,000 marched contre l’antisémitisme, including Marine Le Pen, the face of reactionary France, though not President Emmanuel Macron, who has lately been calling for a cease-fire. Weekend to weekend, country to country, what has startled is the turnout, which is growing.
As unprecedented as the protests might seem, they were also immediately familiar. We were already living through a kind of golden age of public protest, the journalist Vincent Bevins writes in his remarkable new history, “If We Burn: The Mass Protest Decade and the Missing Revolution.” More people participated in protests between 2010 and 2020 than at any previous point in human history. And yet, he writes, nothing much ever seems to improve.As unprecedented as the protests might seem, they were also immediately familiar. We were already living through a kind of golden age of public protest, the journalist Vincent Bevins writes in his remarkable new history, “If We Burn: The Mass Protest Decade and the Missing Revolution.” More people participated in protests between 2010 and 2020 than at any previous point in human history. And yet, he writes, nothing much ever seems to improve.
For a full decade, mobilized by social media and inflamed by the inequities of globalization, the world was on fire with mass protest: Occupy Wall Street and the Tea Party, Tahrir Square and the Arab Spring, Gezi Park in Turkey, Brazil and Chile and Ukraine and Hong Kong. At the time it was almost irresistible to overlook the differences among these movements and see instead an astonishing unforeseen rupture in the global order — one that just kept ripping, a modern-day 1848 of parallel global uprising. Yet writing about the decade in retrospect, Bevins argues that what is most remarkable is how it ended: with nearly every country back where it started or worse, as reactionary forces and backlash unbent what once looked like an inevitable arc of history.For a full decade, mobilized by social media and inflamed by the inequities of globalization, the world was on fire with mass protest: Occupy Wall Street and the Tea Party, Tahrir Square and the Arab Spring, Gezi Park in Turkey, Brazil and Chile and Ukraine and Hong Kong. At the time it was almost irresistible to overlook the differences among these movements and see instead an astonishing unforeseen rupture in the global order — one that just kept ripping, a modern-day 1848 of parallel global uprising. Yet writing about the decade in retrospect, Bevins argues that what is most remarkable is how it ended: with nearly every country back where it started or worse, as reactionary forces and backlash unbent what once looked like an inevitable arc of history.
What explains the pattern? For Bevins, it is primarily a question of political strategy and structure, how contemporary protest has exchanged purpose for scale and how little trust these recent movements have placed in those traditional forms of radical hierarchy that he calls, in a purposeful provocation, “Leninism.”What explains the pattern? For Bevins, it is primarily a question of political strategy and structure, how contemporary protest has exchanged purpose for scale and how little trust these recent movements have placed in those traditional forms of radical hierarchy that he calls, in a purposeful provocation, “Leninism.”
Movements need followers, he writes, but they also need leaders. When they choose instead to fetishize shapelessness or what they often call, these days, horizontality, the prospects for real change shrink pretty quickly, and the genuinely revolutionary energy of the streets is left somewhat up for grabs. In some cases, it simply dissipates — mass protest as release valve. In others, it is repurposed by more strategic actors with clearer objectives, often political agents friendlier to the establishment and working to enclose the protest energy in a big centrist tent. In still others, the initial protests present the provocation around which outraged others can mobilize a reactionary backlash.
In Brazil, over the last decade, it was all of the above: Anarchist agitators decided to back away from the raucous energy of the street after they helped unleash it, then watched as the middle class and media reinterpreted the protests as generic calls for reform, leading to corruption investigations that eventually toppled the social-democratic party in power, landed its onetime leader Lula in prison and helped usher in the rabid right-wing government of Jair Bolsonaro.
The pattern holds not just across the poorer parts of the world, where Bevins focuses, but also in more affluent and outwardly stable parts of Europe and North America as well. Here, recent protests have been characterized by the same two distinctive features: their enormous scale and their mercurial shapelessness. Drafting off social media, you can get millions in the streets and awe-inspiring aerial photography but also risk delivering something more like a symbolic mark on history than a concrete policy legacy. Tick through a list of those movements, for instance, and they may also call to mind narratives of failure and, in some cases, backlash: Occupy, the Women’s March, Black Lives Matter.
But with protest it is always tricky to rush to judgment or reduce the question of legacy too neatly to matters of victory or defeat. Although the rhetoric of these mass events may have seemed radical to apathetic Americans, these were not revolutionary movements but calls for reform, offering what were ultimately meliorist arguments and drawing on the power of shame and moral suasion and the intimidation of sheer scale: When you see millions of people in the streets, it’s hard to believe that the rabble energy of those crowds could ever be bottled up again, at least not without some concessions.
The strategy might seem naïve or even antiquated, given the sclerotic reputation of establishment power and the way it can make efforts to disrupt a seemingly indifferent status quo look more like confirmations of its indifference (or like performative expressions of pure frustration). And in a place as negatively polarized as the contemporary United States, where the political allegiances of most people are shaped more by antipathy for the other side than commitment to their own, large-scale demonstrations may also appear to run the risk of rallying more against the cause than behind it.
But while none of these movements can be described as an unequivocal triumph, they also did not really fail. Take Occupy. A decade on, the unruly movement is often described as a kind of cartoon of left-wing disarray, but its victories, though partial, are many: concern over income inequality and economic justice becoming a far more central part of the liberal agenda; the rise of Bernie Sanders and the rest of the populist left; the arrival of a new set of economic paradigms and perspectives that helped ensure that federal aid during the Covid-19 pandemic was both more generous and more effective than the bungled, underwhelming interventions after the financial crisis of 2008.
Or, for instance, the climate strikes. This fall marks the five-year anniversary of Greta Thunberg’s global fame, Extinction Rebellion’s first mass protest in London and the Sunrise Movement’s infamous confrontation with Nancy Pelosi. What has changed? The story is larger than climate protest, but whereas once climate activists could casually call out the total indifference of the world’s powerful, today they live in a world rushing to decarbonize — if not rapidly enough. Thunberg is now being disowned by some climate strikers for her stance on Gaza; the leadership of Extinction Rebellion has splintered off in several directions; and Sunrise now seems like a much weaker force in American politics, particularly after the passage of the Inflation Reduction Act, with its truly aggressive climate provisions. But we have that bill at least in part because of their agitation and the sense of obligation it produced.
The mass climate protests that began in 2018 also offered an illustrative contrast with the ones just before, which focused on stopping the building of pipelines through targeted actions with very concrete demands. Demands like those are productive, of course; they give focus to the cause and, even when they fail, tend to help identify those responsible for refusing them. But focus can be a throttle, and though protests aren’t all revolutionary, they also aren’t all about notching narrow policy victories. They shape the world seismically, too — including by making way for agitation to come.