It’s deja vu all over again.
Large, left-wing, American[1] protests fueled by student outrage follow a familiar—and typically self-defeating—pattern. It happened with the anti-Vietnam War protests, Iraq War resistance, Occupy Wall Street, Black Lives Matter, now Gaza. (I simplify some, but not much.)
An outrage brings students and young adults out onto the streets to protest.
Most Americans don’t know, or care, or pay attention, but the protestors at first do get organized, find allies, and gain some public sympathy.
The powers that be do not concede and so the protestors increasingly take actions that disrupt bystanders’ lives—blocking roads, taking over buildings, walking out of classrooms, interrupting normal commerce and government operations, and so on. The message is, We’ll shut it all down until we get what we want.
The authorities escalate their efforts to control the protests. Disorder mounts. Bad actors—activists for other causes, semi-professional and violent agitators (pro and con—e.g., Antifa, Oath Keepers), and plain criminals—join the fray.
Now the wider American public starts to pay attention, getting annoyed and exasperated. Whatever the cause, the chaos must end, law and order must be restored, and the chaos-makers must be punished. Average Americans turn toward the right, the usual upholder of order. The right wins more elections and promotes policies that the protestors were objecting to. Who shut whom down?
No surprise then that in today’s (May 3, 2024) news, we read that on many campuses, most of the arrested protestors were not affiliates of the college and, more important, that American adults who say that colleges’ responses to the “pro-Palestinian campus protests” have been “not harsh enough” outnumber 2 to 1 those who say they have been “too harsh,” 33% to 16% (with 20% saying “about right”), and that Republicans from Trump down are now campaigning on this crisis—that is, on the protest crisis, not the Gaza crisis.
What’s the Alternative?
If I were supportive of the Gaza protesters (full disclosure: I am not), I’d point them to protests that seemed to succeed, such as components of the broader 1950-60s Civil Rights movement—voting rights, for example, were vastly expanded. Also, the early days of the George Floyd protests drew a wide spectrum of support. The 2017 Women’s March (remember “pussyhats”?) led directly to campaigning that produced Republican losses in the 2018 election, thereby limiting the damage Trump could do.
What these (and successful right-wing movements, such as the long pro-life campaign) typically did was use public demonstrations to enlist sympathy from onlookers—even at bodily harm in the Civil Right case—combined with the pragmatic politics: lobbying office-holders combined with registering and turning out voters to scare or change the office-holders.
(A friend, David Levine, pointed out during Occupy that its slogan “We are the 99%” should have been followed up by each Occupy activist registering 99 voters. It wasn’t.)
This concern about the election consequences of the Gaza protests is hardly original. Many in the center-left media—even Nicholas Kristoff today—have warned about a pro-Trump backlash. This may be an establishment view, but that makes it no less true.
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I’ve discussed these points in greater detail and with social science citations with regard to Occupy, here, here, and here; Black Lives Matter (Ferguson to Floyd), here and here and here; and the “no justice, no peace” strategy, here.
UPDATE, May 12, 2024
An article in The Atlantic by Jerusalem Demsas covers the topic of what street demonstrations gain, or mainly do not gain, in much greater detail and with many academic citations. The George Flood demonstrations seem anomalous in actually moving public opinion in the desired direction, but even that effect seemed to dissipate over a few months and also to polarize Americans (see here).
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[1] My impression is that the story may be different elsewhere.