The word protest means to dispute, to disapprove, to remonstrate—valuable and important checks on government power guaranteed to citizens. However, since tech and social media have dominated public space and communications protest has become swamped by this new environment and by the provocations of our current administration. Political protest now competes with social media, blogs, advertisements, opinions and every variety of gossip (including the news) as simply one more point of view, often with no more lasting impact than a flash mob. This dilution has robbed the theater of protest of substantial power, and in the struggle to be distinguished from background noise, protest has morphed into more crude and shrill events, more acts of emotional release, than than a blades to separate truth from lies.
Every political demonstration implies an invitation to live in a more equitable, just, and compassionate world. Such invitations cannot be extended while screaming. Without criticizing the intentions of the players, I want to suggest that most protests that come across the media screens currently are bad theater. They have been formalized into ritual and lost their archaic power. They remind me of plays that failed to generate the emotions it intended.
We political actors have missed discerning how changes of context have altered our messages and skewed how they are received by the general public, rendering them ineffective. Unless we change our strategies and sharpen our skills we will continue to lose on every important front. In the alternatives we offer we must model in our own behavior the world we wish to create.
My friends and I were in our early 20’s when we observed an inequitable system that was not dissimilar to what is happening now. We believed that we could design and construct an alternative society —a counter-culture— in what we believed was the impending ruin of the old. We trusted that our world would be more just and appealing than the one we were leaving and that it would entice others to join us.
As proud as I am of the lasting contributions of the counter-culture— the Women’s Movement, Organic food, the Environmental movement, increased attention to Civil Rights, alternate spiritual and medical practices and concern for diversity, I’m forced to conclude that our insistence on clinging to our own styles and morés condemned us to marginality in the same way that I believe our current focus on identity politics— defining oneself primarily as a Liberal, Progressive, Gay, Transgender, Black, Latino, Woman or Victim, is defeating our political effectiveness by unintentionally recreating a modern counter-culture which, like the former, will marginalize our best efforts.
There’s a Buddhist adage, which observes, “A clay Buddha can’t cross water. An iron Buddha can’t cross a furnace. A wood Buddha can’t cross fire.” It means that no fixed position will ever be appropriate in every circumstances. Fixed definitions will always fail us, and we have to be ready and internally fluid enough to respond to objective events. In the Sixties, my counter-culture peers and I believed firmly in the rightness of the counterculture mission and pursued it with the total committment but, in hindsight our over-focused dedication ignored the fact that there were many Americans who were not being bandaged where they were wounded. Most wanted and deserved a better break from their government as we did, but even so, were not willing to make common-cause with people, who, they believed, practiced every excess and indulgence, often spurning their conventions and beliefs. They did not want their children exposed to our narcotized and polyamorous pursuits, or around people who spit on servicemen returning from combat. To underscore their resistance to us they elected Richard Nixon President and moved the country decisively to the right.
John Ehrlichman, Nixon’s Advisor on Domestic Affairs admitted publicly that the Nixon administration capitalized on these social divisions by falsely identifying Hippies with LSD and Blacks with Heroin, using those identifications to estrange them from public sympathies. If we take credit for our ‘wins,’ my generation must also take its share of responsibility for these losses too; for pushing too insensitively and heedlessly, and for failing to understand and respect the values of our our audience which is always the American people. The trick is to create the condition we describe, to ensure that our public utterances and behavior are consistent with the world we are invoking and the audience we are trying to invite. We are always playing for a National audience not a table of old white men.
Remember the Civil Rights demonstrations of the 1950s and 60s, when African-Americans exposed systemic white racism to the larger population. They did so with extraordinary dignity, courage, and discipline while being set upon by vicious dogs, slammed into walls by fire hoses, and beaten by vicious mobs. The difference between the values of the two sides was so stark that observers were forced to choose. The African-Americans never screamed. If they raised their voices, it was to sing. They were well dressed, polite, and prepared to suffer beatings or death to win their rights. They never broke that discipline. They controlled the theater of the event and they won great gains.
Remembering their example leads me directly to recent events. After the Kavanaugh hearings, Senator Lindsay Graham, stood up in the Senate and asked America “Who do you want running the country? The grownups or the kids?” The camera then cut to the outraged women screaming at Jeff Flake cowering in an elevator. These women are my sisters and I understand their rage completely. However, I cringed watching them, because I knew how their behavior would be assessed by the Midwesterners I went to school with, or the farmers I’d grown up with in Pennsylvania—men and women who generally respect courtesy and decorum, who rarely feel entitled enough to be rude or to scream and yell. I wanted to caution them, “You are indulging your personal outrage. Do you want to be right, or effective ?
To create the condition we describe one must ask “What is the world my actions imply?” A speaker is responsible to ensure that they are understood. Suppose every woman in the Senate Chamber had worn T-shirts in a common color and font, with a printed word— “Woman,” “Sister,” “Wife,” “Mother,” or “Daughter.” They would not have had to say a word and could have remained in the room as a chastising presence for the length of the hearings. Every time a camera fell on one of them, it would flash a reminder of the issue to the entire country.
Had the women in the elevator shaken Senator Flake’s hand while repeating, “Don’t be frightened. Don’t be frightened.” Had every critic of the Kavanaugh hearings, including men, been wearing similar T-shirts with Dr. Ford’s picture on it and bound their mouths with black bandannas, Senator Flake’s vote might well have been the same, but the event would have been perceived and interpreted differently by the greater audience and would have been more difficult for opponents to characterized it negatively.
Actions like these express themselves theatrically more than verbally, and that’s what makes them powerful. I am explicitly not urging women to just be polite, decorous and well-behaved, but even in dead silence and without signs (which would have been eerie) such dramatic expression would be more powerful and make their points with power. Theater is hard-hitting only when carefully crafted. Desperation needs to be transformed into skillful action and there are many ways to do this, but it’s important to remember that a protest is not “a message.”
If we believe in civil discourse, we need to model it. In a world where everyone is shouting, no one is listening. Engagement requires a strategic disciplining of personal outrage, forging anger into a weapon, and honing our strategies in order to win. It means understanding that we are participating in theater, and by understanding that we can communicate more powerfully.
The powerful will rarely respond to outrage or hurt feelings. None of our leaders budged at the massacre of innocents in Rwanda, or the gassing of civilians in Syria. Compared to those events, our wounds are mosquito bites. It’s time for us to understand the world we actually live in.
A warrior is someone who stands fast for what they believe. The question is how to do this skillfully. As a young man, my peers and I tried to do this. The women confronting Mr. Flake tried to do this, but as warriors we both needed to discipline our reactive impulses and employ our skills as coolly as General Mattes, who gave his murderous intentions away when he said, “be polite, be professional, but have a plan to kill everybody you meet."
While protestors yelled in the streets, President Trump nominated 55 people for district judgeships, circuit courts, and US attorney slots, many for lifetime appointments. The Senate will confirm them, salting the soil in which we hope to cultivate human values. Our only option is to win power and winning power is a long term, careful chess-game of numbers, narratives, and theater.
If we consider Progressive or Democratic politics as a vinyl record album, of course there will be tracks articulating and defending positions of diversity— race, gender, and sexual issues—but they should not be the album cover! When the Democratic party is identified in the public mind as primarily focused on sexual and racial issues, its primary focus has shifted from the most pressing (power-winning) majority concerns and recreated a modern counter-culture which will incur the same costs of marginalization as the first one.
Health Care, Infra-Structure—roads, airports, bridges, ports---— long-term projects to build a sound future could create millions of good jobs, and prepare the basis of wealth for our children and grandchildren. Repair of our Education system, raising student accomplishment from 14th among industrialized countries to first; Trade Adjustment Assistance (TAA)— money to retrain workers displaced by Globalism Currently, the US dedicates fewer resources to retraining displaced workers than any other developed country. Combatting Climate Change, which outside of Washington and the Coal and Petroleum Institute, is established science is particularly resonant as extreme weather, fires, floods, and billions of property damage are becoming annual events. These are all clear and simple policies. They are easy to explain. They don’t require social tolerance or generate personal unease. These are issues to win the broad, common-sensical middle of the country and the numbers to win power. If we win the numbers, we can defend our identity issues. In defeat, they are just fund-raising memes. What’s critical is that while we do this, we do not alienate our potential allies. How we discuss what we want is the theater of protest. We would do well to remember the Civil Rights warriors and apply their discipline to our contemporary efforts.
Our opponents steering the ship of state onto the reefs have amassed total control of the government because they followed JusticeLewis Powell’s White Paper strategy to counter Environmentalists and Consumer Advocates, in lock-step discipline since 1964. Google it. Read it. We need a matched level of discipline, and to transform our anger and disaffection into policies and narratives which will support the interests of the majority of our citizens and employ strategies which will not offend them. Most people don’t want to live in a perpetual rage. Let us demonstrate our alternative.
