Elijah John wrote:"Lawful tactics". Wouldn't it be a better world if protest consisted of appeals to reason and attempts at
persuasion instead of intimidation? Campaigning and
voting??
In an ideal world everyone would be impeccably civil and reasonable... like Switzerland... who only managed to give the vote to women in 1971.
In the real world there is personal interest, class interest, racial prejudice, dogma, propaganda, and all sorts of biases both conscious and unconscious, and then there is an unequal distribution of wealth and power. By itself reason is insufficient to overcome all those inequalities.
It is an old saying that power does not hand over power without a demand, and that demand needs to be backed up with either physical strength, social unity or economic leverage and often a combination of all three. Reason and the moral high ground is the fourth leg to this chair and they can't hold the chair up on their own.
At the heart of the problem is
normal sets the standard for what counts as reasonable. Dissenters are at best deemed naive, probably seen as a bit loopy, and if they threatened to upturn things then they are targeted as dangerous and labelled dissident. An understandable response if social norms are internalised and held firm through a lack of consciousness. By definition dissent starts at the margins of debate and has to overcome steep resistance - because dissent is asking for something not normally seen as
reasonable. This is how slavery, apartheid, class structures, religious caste systems, gender differences and so forth, are all defended. If something is normalised the
normal tend to think they are the reasonable ones and the dissenter is the fool or a trot.
The question of intimidation v persuasion is moot and how we answer it gives a clue to where our sympathies lie.
There is a new movie Peterloo about the 1819 Peterloo massacre. The circumstance of Peterloo seem apt. Following decades of land enclosure restricting access to common land, the 1815 war and then a period of famines and high unemployment the social mood was exasperated by introduction of Corn Laws designed to protect land owners by raising the price of corn. The poor also lacked political franchise. Economic and political oppression was palpable. The massacre occurred in the context of the hegemonic political powers both not in the mood to back down and fearing rebellion. The army stormed a crowd of 80,000 gathered at Peterloo. The immediate repercussion was a crackdown and arrests. It is true the protest themselves seem to have little effect on the speed of reform. However there was a change in consciousness. The massacre ushered in a period of parliamentary change and a change of consensus. The protests fed into a change in the accepted logic of the debate. And as we look back now it is obvious reform was needed and our capacity to understand the injustice is informed by the massacre. The 15 that died and the hundreds injured at Peterloo teach a lesson about the nature of power. Not just about the powerful but also about those that serve power. It took a soldier to give the actual order on the ground to charge and it took more soldiers to obey the orders. Though in reality the majority of those soldiers had more in common with those they charged than those they obeyed. And now it a powerful movie that may offer lessons for our own times, thought there would not be a movie or a lesson if there had not been 80,000 people protesting at Peterloo.
When I hear criticism of protests and protestors I wonder how history over the long term will judge their cause and how reactionary the critics will look later. Like men (and woman) in the early 20th century aghast at the antics of the suffragettes. History and our shared sense of injustice sides with the suffragettes (well at least my sense of justice does
) And it is difficult to see how the raising of consciousness small or large is achieved without the friction of protest and at times open revolt.
The golden rule is not difficult to understand. If we were all reasonable it would eight heavy on us all. Even at the height of slavery there were still plenty of people to argue slavery was wrong. Their logic was not at fault. The golden rule made their logic obvious. And yet the problem was bringing people to the reasonable answer who didn't want to go there. Likewise there is not a version of history that says in
1948 white south Africans saw the logic of treating black South Africans as equals.
"Lawful tactics" is also a moot idea.
Martin Luther King Jr. wrote:One has not only a legal but a moral responsibility to obey just laws. Conversely, one has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws.
A greater man than me had it about right I'd say.
So bringing this all back to the issues in America today. I think the answer as to how to engage in political debate and political differences comes down to just how bad are things getting and how bad could they get.
Booing people out of restaurants, targeting kids is pretty dreadful. Maybe people have forgotten how to protest. Maybe they are a nasty rabble.
On the counter side to this I know Republicans like Rick Wilson, Charlie Sykes and David Frum have a lot to say about the abuse including death threats handed out to them by Trump supporters. There seems to be deep tensions in America at the moment which is being felt all ways.
