The method of protest
Imagine yourself to be driving in some large city, on your way to work, to a first date, to a court hearing, a doctor’s appointment, or so on. Traffic comes to a halt, and you are able to see the blockage: a group of protesters who have chained themselves across the highway.
Or imagine visiting a museum, only to see someone throw paint on the artwork. Or attending a lecture at which protesters shout down the speaker.
What are your first, second, and succeeding thoughts about them and their cause?
Note that for the moment, I am being agnostic as to what that cause might be. My interest here is in the effectiveness of the act, not its degree of righteousness.
Protest can come in many forms, of course, from the writing of a strongly worded letter to the flying of an airplane into a building, from the single act to a sustained campaign, from a single person’s statement to a mass movement. As a matter of theater, anyone can do it. As a tool, only those not in power have any need for it. The powerful simply make a telephone call.
This is a matter made difficult to analyze by one’s sympathies or antipathies regarding the cause of the protest. The Houthis launching drones against shipping in the Red Sea, Colin Kaepernick taking a knee during the Pledge of Allegiance, and Trump supporters invading the Capitol Building all believed themselves to be justified, and each of those received the support of people who already supported them and the hatred of anyone who was a prior opponent. Many happy returns of the day upon each.
And therein is the problem. Is anyone in fact persuaded to come to a different point of view or a different stance by protest? The answer is yes, sometimes. And sometimes, protests achieve the antithesis of the protesters’ goals.
With that in mind, my purpose here is to suggest guidelines for how to perform a successful protest.
Consider as a paragon the blacks who sat at lunch counters in the civil rights protests of the 50s and 60s in the United States. They wore attire appropriate for offices of the period, and they simply sat, as any customer would. They did not cry, and they did not make speeches. Their objective was to be treated like anyone else there to exchange money for a meal.
Which is to say, they wanted one thing, and they were willing to fit into the context of getting it. They did not at that moment attempt to overthrow the entire system, though their limited purpose was a part of a larger movement that included voting for candidates and conducting legal cases through the courts.
What this is not an example of doing is a play on the emotions of anyone in power. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s “Letter from Birmingham Jail” appealed to his fellow members of the clergy, making arguments on the basis of values and doctrines that presumably he and the persons he addressed had in common. But both of these examples make no effort to make one group feel sorry for another. As I have suggested before in a comparison of the Ukrainians and Palestinians, the difference in how deserving a victimized people look to those of us who are comfortably not in the fight has a lot to do with presentation. I have seen many images of many types from the wars in both of their respective regions, but for Ukraine, the common portrait is of an armed soldier—perhaps kissing his wife goodbye, perhaps on the battlefield—whether he is alive for the moment or being remembered for his sacrifice. The typical picture from Palestine is a dead child.
This may sound unfeeling, but I do not mean it to be anything of the sort. My point is that protest must be tailored for the audience. We Americans like to fantasize about the freedom fighters of our past far more than we enjoy a wave of pity for the helpless.
Is this harsh? Of course it is. It is hardly unique to this country. Sympathy anywhere only gets a movement so far for so long. Tarek El-Tayeb Mohamed Bouazizi set fire to himself in protest of Tunisia’s autocratic regime, and yet the country is already sliding back into corruption and tyranny. How much Aaron Bushnell’s act will achieve here is yet to be seen, but Israel appears likely to achieve a large measure of their stated objectives long before enough of a reaction is generated among American voters against their actions. It is worth remembering that Thích Quảng Đức did the same thing in 1963, and the fighting—and repressive rule, regardless of political affiliation—in Vietnam continued.
For a protest to succeed, it must not only convince the many to side with the protesters, but it must also make the status quo intolerable for those in power. The fight for civil rights shoved the noses of white voters into the mess of America’s racism and embarrassed us on global television. Unlike sanctions on a country that drag on for decades with little to show for all the arguing, a labor strike shuts down a company’s production right now, a strike at the wealth of shareholders.
A protest ought thus to be adapted to the audience in a position to carry out the desired changes and to make those changes the only way out. It must go on until the changes are complete, and the threat of future protests must linger, again aimed at whoever the new powers may be.
Otherwise, protests are just more bad feeling, and we have plenty of that already.