Did The 26th Amendment Fail, tRYING TO Answer The Question, Part 2

 

The Left’s Protests Over The Last Decade

Has Done Nothing To Stop The Forces of Conservatism.

Why Are They So Sure It Will Make A Difference Now?

 

In 1954 after Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat it began a concentrated effort by the African-American community in the city of Montgomery to combine social justice and disruption with economic muscle. Over the course of more than a year Martin Luther King and the NAACP organized to apply social pressure with economic pressure to advance the cause of Civil rights.

It bears repeating this involved African-Americans with few economic options or recourses in a city in a state that in 1948 had voted for Strom Thurmond for President. And it only ended on December 20, 1956 when the federal ruling of Browder v Gayle took effect -  a decision by the Supreme Court that declared the laws that segregated buses in Alabama were unconstitutional. In effect Rosa Parks may have protested segregation in the Alabama buses but the Supreme Court had to affirm it was illegal.

For the next decade the Civil Rights movement achieved the incredible success it had in legislation, executive orders and judicial reform because the Movement was willing to use its activism to force Washington to act. It was a long and difficult struggle and no one doubts the sacrifice and lives lost because of it. But the reason the movement was successful was a combination of social activism, economic sacrifice and political muscle.

While the Voting Rights Acts was before Congress the anti-war movement was beginning to form. In both the makeup of its participants and its methods, it could not have been more of a polar opposite of the one that was taking place in the South. The majority of the protesters were college students, many of whom were economically affluent and had more privileges that their counterparts in the Civil Rights movement. Their protest was about not sacrificing – in this case, wanting to serve in Vietnam. They argued that the war was immoral (as if there has ever been such a thing as a moral war) and that the government was lying about it (true but it was something they only learned about years after the fact). And aside from their one movement to try and primary LBJ in 1968, they had no social or political muscle – many could not even vote for Eugene McCarthy.

And to call their demonstrations, occupations of college campuses and marching organized in the way the Civil Rights movement was is a bad joke. Their plans seemed fundamentally to march in the streets, scream and the authorities and try to shame the U.S. government – never mind South Vietnam – into ending the war solely so they didn’t have to fight in it. As a movement, it was ridiculous.

It did bring about change, of course – Richard Nixon became President in 1968, in large part due to the backlash of white working class voters which began their drift to the Republican Party to this day.

For the rest of the 20^th century the lion’s share of activism almost all seems to have followed the model of the anti-war movement. It’s rare that activists choose to adapt a method that has failed, then keep using it over and over and keeping expecting it to work but that by and large is what the left has done. Some movements did manage to combine political and economic muscle along with social change – Cesar Chavez’s victory in organized labor, the protests at Stonewall, Harvey Milk and the movement he managed for equality in San Francisco – but overall the model for protest took on the model of loud demonstrations and rage at the power structure, essentially insisting angrily for recognition at the top of their lungs.

 No one seems to have considered what happened after that, and to an extent that was understandable among so many of the marginalized groups wanted to be acknowledged by the white power structure. But none of them seem to have learned the lessons of the civil rights movement, that unless your outrage and marching for justice is matched by economic or political power, those who have economic and political power have no real reason to listen to you. You can speak truth to power all you want. Power is under no obligation to listen unless you make it worth their while.

There’s an argument that almost all the social progress that has been made in the last half century for so many marginalized groups has been made despite activism, not because of it. As the Republican party has increasingly become more made up of white, rural Americans there is little political gain to try and woo members of identity groups. Indeed considering how much of their base is in the deep south and the religious right it’s in their best interest not to listen unless theirs a political upside. Considering that the left has spent the last fifty years vilifying both them and their voters (not without justifiable cause) they have no reason to give these marginalized groups anything and they haven’t.

Yet the left by and large has still been unwilling to embrace the Democratic party as their only option. They will fully acknowledge that the Republicans are their mortal enemy and wants to destroy them but the logical next step – embrace the Democrats and build a margin – has never been part of their model of activism. Indeed they frequently choose to punish the Democrats – as they did in Nader’s run in 2000 – for not being sufficiently left enough for their taste. They spent much of the 2000s marching against the War in Iraq and the Bush-Cheney administration, but not only did they never seem to acknowledge they had a role in it, they still didn’t think the Democrats were the answer.

The 21^st century has seen a rise of leftist activist movements, from the protests against the War On Terror to the WTO protests to Occupy Wall Street to the Defund the Police movements in the mid-2010s. All of them have been high on moral outrage and loud dissent. None have led to any part of these movements having political benefits for those involved.

It has, however, endlessly benefit the right wing and the conservative movement. Indeed, over the last half-century they have been willing to do what the left hasn’t been willing to do: make alliances with corporations, spend money on far right wing candidates, work to remove boundaries to make sure their message is spread across every form of media, winning over the Presidency and building majorities in every level of the government. This took economic muscle, organization and political engagement at every level. The far right is infinitely better at political organization than the left has been.

If the various causes of the left were able to unite into one big movement, they at the very least be able to form a political force to face the right or at least, make the Democrats listen to them. But the various groups of identity politics remain fundamentally unwilling to unite. This is nothing new in our history: the right for women’s suffrage was delayed by at least a decade after the Civil War when the women’s movement broke with many of their African-American allies over whether they should get the right to vote first. For the next twenty years there were many separate fights within the larger movement that delayed progress for the rest of the 19^th century.

Yet even with a clear enemy who represents the worst of what they stand for, the various factions of the left have been by and large unwilling to work together, even during the first Trump administration. Yes there was a lot of organized protests almost on a daily basis but I defy anyone to tell me what any of those protests did beside express their frustration and get attention on TV and social media. The main reason so much of Trump’s agenda faltered had little to do with organized resistance and more to do with his own incompetence.

Even in the lead-up to the 2024 election, there seemed little willingness to acknowledge on the part of the left the consequences if he returned to power in their biggest protest movement. Ironically so much of the student protests against Gaza over 2024 mirrored in organization and execution the model of the anti-Vietnam protests in 1968, only it had even less political weight. Because America was not actively involved in events there, the students had even less political clout and less organization. Some organizations even acknowledged that the only thing that could bring a cease fire was the action of the Israeli government and that the government was hoping for a Trump victory in November. Yet none of them seemed to consider that this activism and disruption might be a factor in certain people voting for Trump in November.

And it’s hard for any logical person to understand how the Israeli government or Hamas was going to be influenced to make political decisions based on students protesting on college campuses in America or even why the Biden administration should do so or how they could. Only economic or political pressure could force them to the table and these students had none. Nor is in their any indication that they understand that, given an op-ed in The Nation on the eve of the election by its interns arguing the only way to bring about this change was not through voting but by demonstrating and raising awareness. This demonstrated a complete lack of awareness of foreign policy, diplomacy or even economic policy.

There seems to be an acknowledgment, at least according to a recent article in Time, that so much of the movements over that period failed for this very reason. What arguments do local or state governments have to defund the police if all the demonstrators are willing to do is march and create viral moments on line? Government can just wait until the marchers stop, give the bare minimum of offers and then go back to business as usual. Unless protestors can put political or economic pressure combined with social justice, they are marching and screaming for the cameras without any having to make any other sacrifices.

The one attempt at this kind of movement has been the attempts at Cancel Culture. Regardless of my concerns about the free speech aspects it doesn’t even pass the laugh test as a method of protest, much less a boycott.

It has always been hard to guess the goal of it. Even if one were to make a concentrated effort to stop buying the work of J.K. Rowling or Dave Chapelle, so what? They still exist and they will still be able to get work and have a platform regardless whether the youthful or those inclined choose to protest them. And the opposition, in particular, will use these actions to show the left’s only foolishness for their only political base. For them, it’s a gift the left is more than willing to keep on giving.

As a boycott, it’s a fait accompli as well: the people they target are already fabulously wealthy and famous and it won’t stop them getting from any richer. Even if Netflix were to take down every Dave Chapelle special, he still got paid for it, and the same is true for any project Rowling is associated with.  It’s a similar kind of navel gazing; if we don’t see it or pay for it, it doesn’t exist and it doesn’t count.

And strictly from the argument of their own agenda, it is meaningless in the short or long run. Regardless of what you might think of the power and privilege these individuals have at the end of the day, removing them from the conversation will not fix anything. The only thing that protect the people targeted by their bigotry is legislation and elected officials willing to enact these laws.

It's so foolish to believe that targeting a single celebrity or any one person does anything to change the views of an institution or even get rid of bigotry. Roger Ailes is dead and gone nearly a decade and it has done nothing to sound the death knell of conservative media. Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell are long dead but the kind of religious right they advocate for is still very active as a political force. And trying to boycott Amazon (an attempt last month that actually led to revenues going up one percent during that week) will not stop Jeff Bezos from getting any poorer. These protests are done solely to express outrage and make the individuals involved feel like they are doing something when they’re doing nothing constructive at all. And because they feel like they’ve accomplished something they don’t think they have to do anything that would count as actual work.

Part of the reason the right has succeeded with much of its agenda is because it understands what it takes to get their agendas done and they’re willing to do it. The left, by contrast, has been basically marching and screaming and refusing to engage in the political and economic movements that bring real lasting change. For all the fervor that David Hogg and Greta Thunberg and AOC have before a crowd, their generation remains convinced in a foolish plan for their future.

1.   March and scream and raise a crowd for the local media.

2.   Do nothing else.

3.   Act shocked when Republicans win elections.

One would almost find this laughable were it not for the fact that so many in their generation think this is what activism and movement looks like and that the rise of the conservative movement in their lifetime is because no one listened to them. That the only people who they talked to were those who already agreed with them has never occurred to them; that people hear what they have to say and were so alarmed by it they vote Republican is something that they dismiss as being more or less: “Who cares what they think?” That at this point 92 percent of rural America and 65 percent of white-working class voters now think this way – according to various polls in the aftermath of last November – still doesn’t seem to trouble them.

I believe at my core all of the massive protest movements that have taken place in the last month are significant – but unless they lead to an actual policy movement and more important unification around the Democratic Party and everything they stand for  - they will ultimately come to nothing. Yes people are angry with Trump and his administration. They were just as angry at this point in 2017 and that changed nothing he did. Go ahead. March all you want. Make all the viral videos. Get all the footage on TV you can. It did nothing to influence the GOP or MAGA last time around. You know what they say about the definition of insanity.

The only way this works is that you have to put either political or economic power behind this. We’ve already seen that for all the left’s outrage as tech billionaires they have no desire to give up either their cell phones or social media and their demands for corporate change are basically we’ll show up certain places and demonstrate for a while. No one is going to get rid of capitalism any time soon, so unless you can come up with some modified demand you don’t have much to work with.

The other approach – the one they can take – is to work with the DNC and try to win back rural America and much of the white working class voter. There are signs this might already be happening – certainly the elections in Florida and Wisconsin last month demonstrate it – but they have to grow from it. Instead of fifty protests in fifty states, they could spend their time organizing for building up the DNC in each of those states and start bringing together candidates who can win in Republican districts and Republican states. With all due respect to Hogg, the Republicans are the ones causing the problems right now and infighting among the Democrats will not help progressive causes.

I remain unconvinced that we are in the final days of America as a society. I believe days are dark and they will be dark for a while. I also believe that America may be a long time recovering from what the administration is doing. But I refuse to believe that it is irrevocable.

I also remain unconvinced that the change that we need can come through protests or demonstrations by the left, based on the simple fact is hasn’t in fifty years and they give no sign of changing their methods now. I understand the desire to do something, even if it only seems like its going to fix things. But there’s a difference between that and actually doing something that can fix things. It’s the difference between activism and politics. The right has always been better at the latter than the left. If the left is serious about wanting to bring about change, then they have to do the work the right has been willing to do all this time. It’s not fun and it won’t go viral, but it’ll actually bring about change.