An update on protesting in America:

Read this article, and see if you don't agree with my previous post.

Of Protesting

In a recent post, I said that "we need people in the streets." What do I mean by that? Is setting up formal protests on the Mall really going to change things? I'm afraid not; not unless we've got someone like Dr. King up in front of Lincoln. Cindy Sheehan ain't gonna cut it.

I don't know if you remember, but there were massive protests in both New York and DC before the Iraq invasion. Even though 77 Senators supported the war, there was a substantial chunk of the country that opposed it from the beginning. And it is a mistake to say that college students were indifferent. We made up the core group of protesters. And the protests were very well organized. Ever heard of moveon.org? Remember how they first got started: organizing pre-Iraq-war protests.

But what effect did these protests have on policy? Nada. Why? Here is my theory: Protests are not really protests when they are allowed.

I was in Kyoto recently, and I met a man from Tehran. We were chatting and walking, and we ran into a big anti-war protest. A lively, shouting group from all demographics was protesting against proposed changes to Japan's constitution that would allow for a military build-up. Shouting and dancing, brandishing rainbow flags and Che posters, the protesters stood in stark contrast to the austere Kyoto neighborhood. But the really striking thing was not the protest itself but the number of police deployed to monitor it. On all sides, the protesters were barricaded in by troops in riot gear. There was no trouble; it was a model of peaceful political action. I'm sure that the permit to protest was properly filed--the forms were filled out--and the police were only there "for the protection of the protesters."

I've seen a similar thing in Seoul. I've run into two protests since I've been here: a striking union and a very, very small protest against the Burmese junta in front of its embassy. In both cases, the police outnumbered the protesters. (In the case of the strike, this required no small amount of manpower.) But I have to wonder: can something really be a protest, if the protesters are outnumbered by the police?

The police presence sends a very evident message: you are allowed to protest. If we wanted, we could stop you. We are indulging you, indulging your eccentricities. In sum: you are meaningless.

This was the same message I got in New York in February 2003. Although the protesters greatly outnumbered the police, the protest itself was contained. It was barricaded in, forced to follow a route. There were minor scuffles between police and protesters; most of these were provoked by the protesters in an attempt to feel something--to feel like we were actually bucking the law.

If Vietnam-era protest veterans want to complain about the college students today, they should realize this: In the '60s--not only in America but all over the world--governments realized what protest can do to a democracy. To prevent such things from happening again, certain rules were put in place. The idea of protest was legalized, sterilized. In the U.S., a right guaranteed by the Constitution now has to be authorized by a local government. "Public safety" has to be taken into account. And now that authorization is required, if a protest is not properly authorized, then it is lawful for the police to stomp it out, violently. Look at what happened at G8 conferences in the '90s. And now these conferences are held in inaccessible, heavily fortified locations.

The authorization of protests killed protesting. When protests are allowed they are no longer protests.

My friend from Tehran saw the Kyoto protest with different eyes. For him, to protest is an ideal, a remarkable democratic institution that, he believes, could change his country. But I wonder if he's right. If Tehran allowed protests, and surrounded them with troops, do you think they would have any effect? Probably, they would just single out the radicals for, if not imprisonment, then at least public ridicule. If anything, the authorization of impotent protests could kill off--in seas of red-tape banality--a real anti-government movement.

So what did I mean, "people in the streets"? We had people in the streets before the war, and now I'm saying that that doesn't work. If you agree with me that we've got to do something to change our government's policy--especially about torture--then what is to be done? What should we have done, before Iraq, before Guantanamo? Should we stage illegal protests all around the country? If we did, we would be stomped out with tear gas and night sticks. Because of a subtle shift in the notion of the right to assembly, the law would be against us. If the law is against us, most likely the public would be as well.

Or, should we lobby to change the law. Something about that seems absurd to me: lobbying the government in order to allow us to protest without a permit. Still, if a bill appeared that guaranteed the right to protest without the need for government consent, I would support it. (But wait, haven't we got such a law already...?)

Or should we, like the French, fight fire with fire? The recent suburban-Paris riots actually get attention, actually affect government policy, for better or worse. Perhaps this is what protest today must be: flaming cars, baseball bats and hunting rifles. The French always seem to set the standard for protests. And there's something beautifully inarticulate about simple violence. There's no need for policy suggestions; violent rioting sends the simple, far-from-subtle message that the government is doing it wrong. No need to specify what it is doing wrong, or how to fix it.

I'm not actually prepared to do this, of course. There must be another way. But whatever we do, we cannot allow the hallowed status of our government-guaranteed freedoms to hide the fact that basic democratic procedures--protesting, and, perhaps even voting--are ineffective.