| While there was a very lively discussion of the Quick Hit on Kos--including a much-need reference to his own diaries on the subject at DKos--for me the most salient point here is simply that Kos tends to take a very short-sighted view of the value and nature of protests, a view that's nearly ubiquitous among the very sorts of political insiders who he claims to be working against.
The plain fact is that protests have many political consequences far beyond their immediate impacts, many of which go under the broad rubric of "movement-building". And without movement-building very little in the way of significant long-term political change ever becomes possible. Of course, movement-building is much more than just a string of protests, and a narrow-minded infatuation with individual protests is just as fatal to movement-building as a pathological hatred of them is. As in most things, the truth is a bit complicated--more like home-made soup than a cup of coco.
In short, the notion that there is sharp distinction between political protest and "normal" political activity, such as lobbying, fundraising, phone-banking, etc., is itself a very myopic view--though not the only one. Of course one can and should distinguish between degrees of effectiveness, and Kos himself goes through the motions of doing this in one of his posts. But his brusque and impatient manner is a dead giveaway to how narrow and constricted his views are with respect to the role and value of protests.
He's a clip from "Why yesterday's protests were stupid":
I've never made a secret for my distaste of most street protests, and of groups like Code Pink that think they are accomplishing anything with their street theater. But when I set out to write Taking on the System, my book on effective organizing in the 21st century, I had to dig deep to figure out why I didn't like them, and how to differentiate the usual ineffective ANSWER-organized protests with those that actually had a positive effect (e.g. the Jena Six and pro-immigration protests of a few years ago).
I finally determined that for a protest to be effective it needed to:
- be novel and/or unexpected
- have a sympathetic, singular, and media-friendly message
- provide great visuals
- tap into a hot-button and timely issue.
The usual leftist protests fail most of these, falling into the worst, cartoonish stereotypes. They feature a mishmash of causes and issues, with no unifying theme. Is the protest about the Iraq War? Or Palestine? Or American imperialism? Or freeing Mumia? Or legalizing marijuana? Or blah blah blah blah? Who the heck knows? Who the heck cares?
....
There's nothing novel, new, or interesting about these protests, making them easy to ignore. We've seen them a million times, the visuals are easily mockable, with the dreads and the stupid puppets and whatnot. And not only are they patently ridiculous, but we saw just how ineffective they were during the Bush years. No one gave a damn about them, not the media, not powers-that-be (in either party), and certainly not the public.
It wasn't the protest movement that moved the Democratic Party left on Iraq, it was Joe Lieberman's loss in his Democratic primary in 2006. Prior to that, Rahm Emanuel, as head of the DCCC, was telling Democratic candidates to steer clear of the war. After that primary, the Dems fully embraced ending the war in their campaigns and won huge that fall. In other words, the anti-war cause was best served via electoral politics. After Lieberman's loss, not even the media could ignore the saliency and validity of the anti-war position. "Patriotism" could no longer be used to silence anti-war voices, we had helped mainstream them.
Several points jumped out at me from this:
(1) Citing Code Pink as typical of what he doesn't like immediately triggered the "feminist problem" flag. If you don't know about Kos's feminist problem, it's too long and complex to go into here. I just say this for the sake of reportorial honesty. That's what my first thought was when I saw that. Why is it important to note? Because
(2) The very four things he says make for an effective protest are things that Code Pink is generally known for. It's one of the reasons why they started off as a tiny little group in the midst of the sort of large, muddle-messaged protests Kos criticizes, and grew rapidly to become a readily-identified, well-known group whose specific messge jumped out from the background noise of everything else going on.
(3) Kos's arguement is, basically, that leftist protests are ineffective because they are "amatureish". But he offers no real argument or evidence for this. It seems far more likely that they're ineffective because they lack institutional support. As such, the only way they can possibly be effective is via generating more widespread forms of social action or change in values and perception over a longer time-frame. In short, Kos is talking as if political effectiveness were a matter of presentational effectiveness--always a big concern for electoral campaigns--when there's no real reason to take this level of explanation as fundamental for issue organizing or long-term movement-building. Rather, one would expect presentational effectiveness to reflect deeper levels of organizational effectiveness, which in turn require a much more sophisticated sort of analysis than Kos provides. Books like Pivens & Clowards' Poor People's Movements: Why They Succeed, How They Fail are relevant here.
(4) The claim that anti-war protests were ineffective, but that Ned Lamont's failed Senate campaign was effective seems totally unsupported. By what measure is supposed to be validated, particularly given that we're still in Iraq? And expanding into Afghanistan? Even if one accepted Kos's totally unsupported (not to mention false) assumption that Lamont's campaign and the anti-war protests had nothing to do with one another, it's hard to figure out how one would even formalize the basis for making--much less proving--such a claim.
I could go on, but I think my underlying point should be more or less clear: what Kos is giving us amounts to little more than exactly what he confesses: this is a rationalization of his gut feelings. Nothing more. Nothing less.
Kos is a proven expert at online community-building--more than that, he's a genius at it. But that doesn't magically make him an expert anything else. Some other things he's good at, others not so much. Some things he doesn't even really try. And understanding social movements is one of those things that seems to pretty obviously fall into this last category. So don't expect him to be any sort of leader in it, either. It would be freakin' great is he were, of course. But it's just not the case. He does not provide leadership, because he's not even interested in doing so. He does provide leaderliness, because other folks seem to expect it from him. But his "failure" here is more a failure of other people's expectations.
Things are much different with Barack Obama. True, the failure of other people's expectations plays a role here as well. But Obama has gone far out of his way to sell himself as a "transformational leader" offering "change you can believe in" and thus his failure to deliver is something he's directly responsible for in a way that's really quite different from Kos.
John's dairy at A Tiny Revolution makes this blindingly obvious:
What A President With Genuine Courage Looks Like
By: John Caruso
Evo Morales just finished a 5-day hunger strike in support of a package of electoral reforms:
Bolivian President Evo Morales ended a five-day hunger strike today after Congress approved a new electoral law that will boost the voting power of his core constituency.
Morales had canceled a diplomatic visit to Cuba to maintain a vigil inside the presidential palace, where for almost a week he consumed only water and coca leaves, the raw ingredient in cocaine and a folk remedy used in Bolivia to suppress hunger. He slept on a bare mattress on the palace floor, surrounded by fasting union leaders who form part of his coalition party.
"The Bolivian people will never forget this revolutionary process," Morales, 49, said today in the presidential palace, moments after concluding the strike. In remarks on state television, Morales said he hoped the fast would strengthen Bolivians' support for "profound economic, social and cultural changes."
(This was nothing new for Morales, who once fasted for 18 days when he was a union leader to protest coca eradication.)
The superficial similarities between Morales and Obama only serve to highlight the critical differences: Bolivia's president is a former union leader who draws directly on his experience to fight for his principles, whereas our erstwhile community-organizer president trades on his past to gain votes while actively betraying the principles he formerly espoused. To put it another way, Morales uses his power to further the goals of the popular movement that made him president, while Obama co-opts the power of the popular movement that made him president to undercut its goals.
Just for a moment, imagine what it would be like to have a president who actually possessed (positive) core, non-negotiable convictions, and for whom going on a hunger strike was well within the range of sacrifices they were willing to make to fight for those convictions....
It is comparatively easy to imagine Kos being other than he is. But to fully confront the magnitude of Obama's falling short of what he could be, that is something so painful that it could well be paralyzing if we were to fully let it in.
Imagine--he could go on a hunger strike, just like Evo Morales, to fight for universal healthcare, or EFCA or a people's bailout. Instead, he's either staunchly opposed, or else seemingly indifferent to all of them.
That gap between the possible (the transformational political figure we were promised during the campaign) and the real (I'm not a transformational political leader, but I play one on tv) is simply staggering, and far, far too painful to concentrate on for any length of time. Much easier to rail against Kos. Much harder to figure out what else to do.
But that's our job.
It's just like the charlatan said: we are the leaders we're been waiting for. |
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