Dismantle your civilization or we will continue to party and hit on each other!

Josh Keating of FP Passport has a theory about why modern large-scale protests - the anti-globalization protests, the anti-Iraq War protests - haven't been as successful as their predecssors:

[Successful past protest movements like] Gandhi's march to the sea and Martin Luther King Jr.'s march on Washington...mobilized huge groups in support of a defineable and acheivable goal rather than opposing an amorphous concept like "capitalism."...Rather than organizing around a specific political goal...[modern] marches tend to devolve into general lefty free-for-alls encompassing everything from Palestine to free trade the environment to capital punishment.

Matt Yglesias disagrees:

I don’t really think [Keating is] right. Both Gandhi and King led movements that were committed to vaguely defined and quite sweeping visions of social change that, among other things, included opposition to capitalism and all forms of war. Their goals look well-defined in retrospect because they achieved a great deal so, in retrospect, MLK’s leadership resulted in the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act and Gandhi’s leadership led to independence for India. But all mass-movements are prone to ill-defined goals. The difference is that the methods of King and Gandhi were quite different from sporadic sign-waving and noise-making, and also quite different from sporadic destruction of property. Both men led sustained campaigns of non-violent resistance.

Yglesias is claiming that today's protesters don't use the additional threat of civil disobedience. Keating is claiming that today's protesters fail to back up their threats with appropriate negotiating tactics. And I don't see why Yglesias' argument contradicts or negates Keating's.

Despite their lack of explicitly stated demands, the movements of Gandhi and King were obviously capable of being bought off by the existing power structure. Even if Gandhi disapproved of plenty of British policies and aspects of British culture, it was obvious that Britain could put an end to the problem by granting India independence. Same with King and civil rights. Or with anti-Vietnam protesters.

But what in the world would buy off today's anti-globalization protesters (or "anti-capitalism" as they now call themselves)? The end of global capitalism? Is that what these people are demanding? I'd call that a non-starter.

Making impossible demands is good for looking tough, but bad for getting what you want. A somewhat more gruesome example of this is the failure of the Palestinians to get a state; their starting point for negotiations with Israel has always been the dissolution of Israel (whether by death, as Hamas demands, or by the "right of return" demanded by Fatah). Would you negotiate with someone who says "Shoot yourself, then we'll talk"? I wouldn't.

At my college (Stanford), there as a core community of students who called themselves the "protest community" - and this name was very accurate. Every month they would stage a major protest. I joined them to march for a living wage for Stanford contract employees, and made a speech at a rally. We won that fight. But then next month it was something else; "open space", maybe, or more ethnic theme-dorms (neither of which are things I particularly agreed with, incidentally). As the President of the University went out on the Main Quad for yet another sit-down with the protesters, I realized that nothing the University did would ever get the protesters to stop protesting. Ever. Protesting was their social scene, their community. It was not something difficult that they were doing because they had been driven to do it, as Gandhi or King or the anti-Vietnam protesters were.

Eventually, a "protest community" will come to be seen as exactly what it is: a group of raucous party kids with more interest in getting a date than changing society. From the party kids' point of view, that's fine; society has already become exactly what they want it to be. But from the point of view of the people in power, all protests start to look like jokes...until some issue comes along that's big enough to get normal people out of the house and into the street.

An issue like Iraq. Josh Keating (and Matt Yglesias) may think the anti-Iraq protests didn't work, but I say look at the results. Vietnam dead: 55,000 in 15 years. Iraq dead: Less than 5,000 in 7 years. And yet we knew we were getting out of Iraq as early as 2006. That couldn't have happened without a major shift in national opinion against the war, which I would argue was enhanced and hastened by the size and diversity of the protests against the war. And anti-Iraq War sentiment, let's not forget, is the main reason we now have Democrats in control of the Legislative Branch.

So I think Yglesias is wrong - even without mass civil disobedience, protesting still works. But the protesters have to convince the world they're serious; and that's something that you can't do if your protest is just a weekly street party.