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Has the Age of Mass Protest Actually Achieved Anything? Has the Age of Mass Protest Actually Achieved Anything?
(14 days 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.
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.”