On our minds: The rise of mass movements. |
Protests Don't Work the Way You Think They Do |
 | | The police response to a vigil for Sarah Everard in London on Saturday has drawn widespread criticism.Mary Turner for The New York Times |
|
I joke sometimes that my job is just to answer the question "what the hell is going on?" over and over again. |
The specifics of that question change, of course. Sometimes it's about what the hell is going on with the rise of populism, or Donald Trump. Sometimes it's about how social media is changing our world in confusing and dangerous ways. But over the last year, that question has often been about mass protest movements: where they come from, how they gain power, and how they change the societies around them — or fail to. |
And I am starting to think that the way we think about protests, and the mass movements behind them, is all wrong. |
The popular view is that protests are centered on a particular group's particular grievance. But when I go to cover those movements, that's not what I find. |
Chile's uprising in 2019, for instance, was sparked when the government announced an increase in mass transit prices. But when I went there and spoke to the people involved, I heard a very different story: that ever since the days of Augusto Pinochet's military dictatorship, the government had embraced a far-right economic policy that had left many people in precarious circumstances. Ordinary people joined the protest because they saw it as a way to finally shed the legacy of dictatorship, not because they were deeply invested in how much they would have to pay for bus fares. |
In fact, the grievance that nominally sparks a protest is not what sustains it or gives it political power, Daniel Q. Gillion, a University of Pennsylvania political scientist who studies protests, said in an interview. Rather, protest movements are successful when they can activate a sector of society by tapping into deeper ideological beliefs. |
In the American context, when members of the general public see a Black Lives Matter protest, they don't think "'these are Black protesters arguing about Black issues,'" he said. Rather, those movements gain power when people connect them to a broader ideology — in the case of Black Lives Matter, liberal egalitarianism. |
"What they're saying to themselves is 'this is those liberals up again, trying to put forth their concerns,'" he said. "Those who embrace that liberal ideology are now motivated. They're mobilized to engage with the issue and to engage with politics." |
That ideological connection can also allow disparate protests to link together into a more powerful movement over time, even if they take place in different places and seem to concern different issues, he said, because they are built on similar claims that the government has failed to live up to the obligations that worldview sees as important. |
In Chile, for instance, years of smaller protests, nominally concerning a variety of different issues, built momentum around the idea that the government was failing ordinary people because of an outdated allegiance to dictatorship-era ideas. And even though police departments in the United States are locally controlled, Black Lives Matter became a national (and then international) movement because it tapped into a deeper ideological concern about racial equality that transcended the details of any individual case. MeToo, likewise, connected with ideological beliefs about gender equality that went beyond any particular workplace or abuser. |
But it is often the police response to protests that helps turn them into movements, said Omar Wasow, a Princeton political scientist who studied the political consequences of protests during the civil rights movement in the 1960s. "In polarized societies, these are not just individual events, they're really a contest between two social orders," Dr. Wasow said. "One is for kind of maintaining the current status quo, maintaining the social hierarchy. And the other that's a more egalitarian movement, that's trying to kind of transform some of the social hierarchy." |
When there is a mass mobilization against the current social order, the police are, almost by definition, on the front lines of defending the established hierarchy. And so when they use violence against protesters, they undermine not only people's opinion of the police themselves, but of the hierarchy they are defending. |
"If the police are perceived to be the aggressors and those are the kinds of images before the media — a classic example was John Lewis being beaten on the Edmund Pettis bridge," he said, "those kinds of images do a lot of work to essentially tell the entire story in small form." |
Civil rights leaders also decided to march in Birmingham in part because they expected to be met with a brutal crackdown in front of photographers and television journalists, Dr. Wasow said. |
Dr. Wasow said that he saw a more recent example of that effect in Britain, when the police cracked down on a peaceful vigil in London in the wake of the murder of Sarah Everard. Before the event, there was already widespread anger at the police for telling women to stay inside following Ms. Everard's disappearance. But photographs of the police trampling flowers and arresting women at a memorial vigil seemed to confirm to the wider public that the police did not value women's participation in public life — and might themselves be a threat to women's safety. |
"The kinds of video that came out of the U.K. where it's people mourning a killing, and then this wildly disproportionate police response, tells a story in a way more powerfully than almost anything else protesters could do," Dr. Wasow said. |
What We're Reading & Watching |
|
No comments:
Post a Comment