Jencunas: 2017 Will Look Like 1969

Tuesday, January 24, 2017

2017 is going to look a lot like 1969. Liberals have found their new Vietnam and it isn’t a war or an ideology, but a President. Helen of Troy had a face that launched a thousand ships, Donald J. Trump has one that’s inspired thousands of protest signs. Our new President’s time in office will be marked by frequent demonstrations as, for the first time since the 1970s, vast swaths of Americans feel like their government is actively opposed to their rights.

The protestors who packed the streets on Saturday in Washington D.C., Boston, and dozens of other cities should heed the words of former Congressman Barney Frank. A staunch liberal and one of the earliest legislators to publicly support gay rights, Frank argued, “People on the left are too prone to do things that are emotionally satisfying and not politically useful…I have a rule, and it’s true of Occupy, it’s true of the gay-rights movement: If you care deeply about a cause, and you are engaged in an activity on behalf of that cause that is great fun and makes you feel good and warm and enthusiastic, you’re probably not helping, because you’re out there with your friends and political work is much tougher and harder.”

Liberals who want to get results instead of just enjoying the feeling of catharsis that comes from surrounding yourself with like-minded people should study the successful tactics of conservative activist groups. These groups, most notably the NRA and Tea Party movement, succeed because they turn the momentum from big rallies into meaningful political action that scares politicians into following the groups’ agenda. Unlike a protest, that kind of political organizing isn’t fun. It requires spending weekends walking around a neighborhood, knocking on doors, and speaking to voters about an upcoming election. Most of them slam the door in your face. Few of them are persuaded. But, when done with dedication toward a clear, common purpose, that kind of organizing – not marching around with people who all agree – is how change occurs.

Protests on their own are far less effective than most people think, mainly because the only protests that get remembered are the ones that work. Schoolchildren learn about Martin Luther King, Malcom X, and civil rights protests because we have civil rights. Textbooks dedicate a sentence, at most, to the massive nuclear freeze protests of the 1980s because nuclear weapons remain commonplace. Likewise, the Nation of Islam’s Million Man March drew a huge crowd to Washington D.C in 1995. More than two decades later, Louis Farrakhan (the organizer of the march) remains well outside the political mainstream.

Usually, protest movements quickly become useless, self-congratulatory endeavors that get a lot of attention while accomplishing little substantive change. At best, they are starting points for meaningful activism. At worst, they become riots that discredit the causes they try and support.

Saturday’s protests were admirably peaceful. However, if the spate of property destruction and violence at Trump’s inauguration continues, distinctions between rioting and protesting will be blurred on both the left and the right over the next four years. Liberals will want to excuse any violence done in the name of opposing Trump’s agenda while Trump’s supporters will pretend all the administration’s critics are crazed, violent anarchists.

Liberals too often argue that rioting is the inevitable byproduct of ignoring a group’s concerns, often quoting Martin Luther King Jr.’s statement that “a riot is the language of the unheard.” If this were true, fans of losing sports teams would be among the most unheard, oppressed groups in the United States. Riots happen because some people, especially young men, enjoy breaking things and hurting people. Given any excuse – whether it’s a controversial police shooting or their local NHL team getting beat in the playoffs – those violence-prone men will indulge themselves at the expense of their community.

Contrary to the radical narrative that riots spur action as frightened people seek to address the concerns of the rioters, violence usually discredits the cause associated with it. After the Watts riots tore about Los Angeles in 1965, liberals hoped the violence would increase support for desegregation. As the L.A. Times editorialized, “[we need] open and frank communication with the people of Watts, not just its leaders but the people themselves, including the rioters ... to explore the kind of thinking, the kind of passions, the kind of despair and apathy, that led to an explosion of hatred that rocked a great city and shocked the entire world.”

Instead, average Americans were terrified by the rampaging mobs that shouted “Burn Baby Burn” and vowed to “get whitey.” Rather than trying to understand the rioters, they agreed with reactionary police chief William Parker, who blamed the riot on the civil rights movement’s philosophy that, “you don’t have to obey the law if you think it’s unjust.”

Change is hard even under the best of circumstances. When change becomes associated with violence it becomes almost impossible. The chaos makes it easy for wavering moderates to be sympathetic to the liberal cause.

Even if liberals can’t be persuaded that riots are counterproductive, they should understand that the poor, marginalized groups they claim to support are most likely to be harmed by these acts of violence. The people cheering the masked anarchist who punched neo-Nazi Richard Spenser should remember that if society’s norms against violence are eroded, it will be liberals who find themselves on the receiving end of vigilante’s fists. Anyone who thinks otherwise should remember New York City’s “hardhat riot” of 1970, where construction workers attacked anti-war protestors. The hardhats injured between 60 and 70 protestors, then marched to City Hall chanting “All the way, U.S.A.!”, taking detours to tear down a Red Cross Banner, try and destroy an Episcopal Church’s flag, and break windows at Pace University, a hotbed of anti-war student activism. At city hall, the hardhats sang “The Star-Spangled Banner” and assaulted one of the mayor’s aides. That same year, James Buckley was elected a Senator from New York, in part because of his support for the hardhats and their violence.

Leftists rely on law and order even as they mock it as a hobbyhorse of the bourgeois. Those who champion unpopular causes, causes that enrage their opponents, excuse violence at their own peril. If the next four years of Trump’s presidency continue to resemble the chaotic political climate of the late 1960s and early 1970s, liberals will be wise to learn from the mistakes of that era. If they don’t, Trump, like Nixon before him, will ride the cultural division to a second term. When Nixon won reelection, liberal film critic Pauline Kael said, “I live in a rather special world. I only know one person who voted for Nixon. Where they are I don’t know. They’re outside my ken.” Four years from now, the Women’s March attendees may share Kael’s sentiments.