Academia: The Ends of Protest?

Friday's Child Is Still Looking For Change

Zeynep Tufekci argued this week that the usefulness of mass protest as a tactic against the powerful is more or less exhausted in American life, and particularly on university campuses. I more or less agree, and for many of the same reasons, in particular that changes in media infrastructures have robbed protest of a lot of its effectiveness. Tufekci also wisely refuses to tell young people what to do instead. I am not going to quite show the same wisdom in this essay, but I hope to only point to some of the considerations that people thinking about protest should take on board.

I also want to observe in passing that many of the underlying logics of protest do retain their value for the far right in the United States, something that should discomfort liberals and progressives more than it does.

Here’s how I run things down to arrive at similar conclusions to Tufekci.

There have been a number of different reasons to use mass protests on campuses and elsewhere in American public life since the 1930s.

First, protest was a simple way to make visible the numbers of people who felt a particular way about a major issue or question where previously the powerful might have ignored them or pretended they were a small and fragmented group of malcontents. When the nuclear freeze movement turned out more than a million people in American cities in 1982, or when the March on Washington filled the National Mall in 1963, they not only forced the powerful to recognize the sentiments behind those movements, they invited people in the marches and people witnessing the crowds to feel connected to advocacy that they might have previously thought to be a private conviction, isolated from others.

Second, protest was about drawing the attention of mass media and using that attention to disseminate the messages and ideas of a movement or group to wider publics, with the hope of recruiting more support or inspiring other groups and movements to incorporate those ideas into their own advocacy.

Third, protests were often meant to address the powerful directly either to make them feel ashamed at the harm they had done or were doing or to call upon a sense of noblesse oblige, to pluck at a sense of elite responsibility—sometimes by pointing out through protest that a target institution or individual was doing far less than their peers or being far more harmful. The goal in these cases was to produce embarrassment or humiliation in the target, or to provoke a reaction that made the target look even worse.

Fourth, protests were an implicit threat, a demonstration of numbers and organizational capacity meant to communicate that those numbers and that organization could potentially turn into something more violent, more dangerous, more uncontrollable, that the time to negotiate or make concessions was now, before the window of opportunity closed.

Finally, protest was disruption, no longer a promise of future consequences but the consequences themselves, a controlled effort to impede the everyday operations of a targeted organization, government or group; to deny them expected revenues or customers; to close roads or buildings through mass action, and so on—to inflict enough pain, albeit it non-violently, that the targeted organization or government decides to meet some or all demands of the protesters.

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So why are all those uses of protest now approaching ineffectiveness, particularly at universities? The first answer is not the aggressive moves being made by universities and public institutions to suppress protest through changes to laws and rules. If anything, those reactions are the last lifeline of protest, a demonstration that it can still get under the skin of the people in charge.

First, as far as visibility and attention go, the problem is that at this point almost every group and movement can generate the spectacle of visibility. The scale of modern American life is such that groups with surpassingly small memberships are still able to put enough bodies into a confined urban space to create a sense of being large. Really large groups and movements, on the other hand, can’t create that visibility without also creating disruption simply because of scale—you pour 500,000 people onto the streets of the 15 largest American cities, you’ve effectively shut them down. That’s no longer a protest in the usual sense, it’s a general strike, and it’s a different kind of action as a result. Getting attention is now a less useful game where mainstream media attention doesn’t matter for much and social media attention lasts a microsecond and expires. Or, as Tufekci points out, opponents of protests have become adroit at isolating the most risible or extreme elements of protests and staging a counter-spectacle that draws the wrong kind of attention.

Here is where the far right still benefit from public rallies and marches that have the energy of protest, even if many of them are in fact aligned with the powerful rather than against them. The spectacle of protest works to make them visible—they draw media attention far more readily than progressives or liberals marching because they are understood by the media to be a problem, a transgression—which is then something the far right can catalyze further into a complaint about the media, in a sort of double-win for them.

More importantly, the American right has a coherent politics that is connected to the mobilization of people across causes and communities. This is where accusations of “astroturfing” led American centrists and progressives so badly astray: for decades, the assumption was that the apparent move to the right was just a set of elite manipulators and a passive, deceived populace who had no agency of their own in that process. The opposite has turned out to be true, I think, and therefore being visible in terms of public spectacle that has the energy of protest is highly generative for the far right in terms of mobilizing and empowering their supporters, of making them feel connected and socially present to one another.

Whereas for liberals and progressives, the visibility and attention-getting aspects of protest have become less about a politics of connection and more about petition, about particular constituencies and causes asking for recognition and concession from the powerful. It’s not how people find affinity and belonging, and the institutions and party leaders don’t make politics through connection to communities, affinities or lived situations. Visibility and attention are just the mandatory dance that courtiers perform before the king.

Similarly, shaming only works as long as the targets of protest still feel shame—or have an outsized sense of public responsibility and accountability. I think this is increasingly not the case with most American institutions, companies and government at all levels. It’s still possible to shame individuals enough to provoke a response, but the response is usually just to pay a reputation manager and to step out of the spotlight for a while.

Increased enforcement, whether in the form of private regulations or legal retaliation in the wider public sphere, has had an effect on protest as a threat of some less controlled futureward action. But also the lessons of riots and mob action have sunk in over the last quarter of the 20th Century and the first quarter of the 21st. They aren’t just frightening to the powerful, they’re often destructive forces in the lives of the powerless. So making an implicit threat of possible action that everyone knows you don’t actually want to do doesn’t work any longer. It’s dangerous in more ways than one and it also feels like a bluff that the powerful are willing to call.

So let’s focus on disruption. Protest is linked to disruption through mass action, the tactical deployment of bodies spatially in order to impede movement, or through privileged access to critical infrastructure. In both cases, it carries legal consequences that may inhibit the willingness of protesters to act, but then again, pushing the powerful to visit those consequences on protesters may itself represent a serious disruption, whether that’s flooding the jails with more bodies than they can hold, pushing law enforcement to the material limits of their ability to contain disruption, or forcing an organization to lose so many employees or students through legal retaliation that its financial operations and work processes are crippled.

Nevertheless, organizations have become quite skillful at containing disruptive protests before they can deploy the people available to them. I would have said that they also had learned how to just wait out protest’s disruptions by transferring essential operations and keeping their distance but last spring suggested that universities in particular have forgotten that effective counter-move. I expect that moves in a punitive direction will have some kind of suppressive (and self-damaging) effects even as they may stimulate more intense responses from protesters.

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It is at the point of thinking about protest as disruption that some new thinking is called for that is first philosophical and second practical.

Protest as disruption is part of the long lineage of civil disobedience, about individuals and movements looking to show that they refuse to go along with what they consider to be immoral actions, and in many cases hoping to demonstrate that their refusal will badly interrupt business as usual. At least implicitly, that refusal in democratic societies is tied to a recognition that the people refusing are a political minority, e.g., that they must disobey because they lack the electoral strength to change the immoral system. Or, if they are in fact in a majority, they are operating within a democratic system that has powerful anti-democratic elements that suppress their ability to impose their will on the government, or to have government act on their behalf against immoral institutions.

The problem in more recent years in American life has been that the institutions that most urgently seem to be immoral are also almost entirely protected from any constraint, governmental or otherwise. They operate at such vast scales with such enormous resources that they are fortresses against citizen action. Moreover, “they” at times or in various ways includes governmental bodies that are only technically obliged to bow to democratic opinion.

At this point, I feel obliged to repeat something I’ve written many times since the early 2000s, which is that disruptive protest at universities is often a proxy for protest against those other highly protected institutions, that universities have been identified (correctly, at least up until now) as “soft targets” who were compelled to allow themselves to be the targets of protests that were really aimed elsewhere. That is substantially true of the Gaza protests as it was of protests for fossil fuel divestment or divestment from South Africa. The propositional idea underneath these protests is that the university is a site of activism that creates a more general visibility (especially if it’s an elite university that is highly attended to by the national news media) and that compelling the university through disruptive protests to declare its affinity for the cause of the protesters is thus presumed to be a way of creating pressure on the proxy target.

That thought in turn points the way to a thought that frequently goes under-examined, which is that protest as disruption doesn’t just seek to compel the powerful to do what they do not want to do, but it fairly often runs counter to the will of some relatively passive majority. E.g., turning to disruption is not necessarily a democratic pursuit and it does not necessarily take on democratic form. That doesn’t mean it’s wrong. A union has to win a majority to strike (and a majority has to uphold the negotiated outcome of a strike) but that is not a majority of all the people affected by the strike (managers, owners, community members, customers). And yet it is crucial to protect the right of a union to strike as part of collective bargaining because it is the only counter-balance to the overwhelming (and deeply undemocratic) power that owners and managers otherwise possess. Disruption is a check-and-balance against forms of power that otherwise have little to keep them from destroying the lives and aspirations of people in a free society. Sometimes you just cannot let power say “No, we can’t do that” and have that be the end of the matter, because what they’re saying no to is something that absolutely should be yes.

On campuses, not all disruptive protests have been aimed at proxy causes. Title IX-focused protests have a long, painful history within universities because they were from the very outset (before they even named Title IX as the statutory justification of their demands) focused on the university as an institution and on its own rules of conduct. Protests demanding greater diversity in admissions and hiring at universities were also centrally about the university and about decisions firmly under its control.

The problem with the proxy protests is that they often have been operating with a specific understanding of influence and political pressure that is weakly theorized and empirically dubious and that they are asking, whether through disruption or visibility, for concessions that universities either can’t or won’t give or for impact on decisions that they aren’t actually part of. If every president in every university facing Gaza protests today decided to give the protesters 100% of what they demand in terms of the institution’s publicly declared affinity with their cause, every one of those presidents would be fired by their trustees within 24 hours. If somehow the trustees embraced the same logic, the impact of the university’s affinity would be minimal in swaying the decision-making of the United States government—universities and their faculty expertise are easily severed from influence over policy-making and political action when their expert insights contradict some prior propositional logic that has the force of an unquestionable axiom within the circles of power.

It is true that the Israeli government plainly fears being made anathema in the civil society of Western nations, and they have spent considerable money and deployed many assets to try and prevent that outcome. But I think protesters underestimate how hard it is to achieve and maintain anathema simply by aligning universities and major cultural institutions and are letting the fears of a highly militarized and aggressive government determined to counter all imaginable opposition everywhere all at once guide their own strategy too much.

Here is where I feel obliged to leave off in the same fashion that Tufekci does in terms of really specific tactical advice to activists or would-be protesters about the alternatives. Let me point to some points they might think about:

1. If protest as disruption retains some usefulness in getting powerful interests and institutions to act differently, then what disrupts the operations of those interests and institutions in their present form in a way that is meaningful to them but also is hard or impossible for them to suppress through laws, codes and rules? To answer this question, you have to understand how the interests and institutions you are targeting actually operate on a daily basis, you have to consider their inputs and outputs, to audit their points of vulnerability, and to ask who you are in relationship to your target. Many contemporary activists turn to a repertoire of disruptions that worked in the past that won’t work now. Think again.

2. When are you demanding a change to the institution or interest that you’re targeting that is within its power to undertake? If you are, the flow chart between successful disruption and successful outcome is (or can be) short and the main limitation to your pursuit of your campaign is simply whether what you’re demanding is reasonable, just and plausible and whether you can sustain the disruption long enough for the people in charge to comply.

3. When are you demanding that the institution act as an ally in some other struggle or cause, the flow chart between undertaking protest and disruption and success is potentially long and convoluted. What is your concrete, practical, short-term understanding of how that alliance will produce a valuable outcome? Audit the organizational and ideological labor required to sustain a meaningful campaign of disruption versus the value of the outcome, and if X > Y, don’t start.