@Alon (i think it’d be funny if they painted FTFY, now that they’ve been called on the left-to-right thing.)
@divya ACT UP caused very narrow and targeted disorder on the streets, and famously paired it with an inside strategy. i’m not saying all protest is bad. i’m saying effective protest is orderly, intentionally and clearly contained, carefully controlled because when it devolves into anything that resembles street violence you lose. the 1980s were a propitious time for these protests, bc there was a right wing govt but no fascist outside movement contesting. 1/
@divya the civil rights movement has to be scored a win for outside protest, but it was a close run thing, under unusual circumstances, in which people were so committed they not only began nonviolent but remained so under baton and fist. even so, it likely would not have succeeded if the disorder had not been confined to a fraction of the country the rest was embarrassed about, and extraordinary efforts by LBJ. i think we’ve overlearned from a very close-run N=1. 2/
@divya 60s protest in general cannot be scored a success, except that it was its middle aged protagonists who got to do most of the scoring when we learned about it in school. we traded LBJ for Nixon, and have been in decline ever since. Democrats retook power in 1992 only by catastrophically rebranding themselves and betraying our values, a spiral Biden is the first (ironically) to meaningfully recover from. /fin
@tb (i don’t think @phillmv intended to glibly dismiss undergrads here. i think they were putting themself in the shoes of a more enlightened administration, who, regardless of the message or content of the protests, might have taken a “kids will be kids” attitude rather than treating them as serious and dangerous and overreacting.)
“huge numbers are drawn to these protests more by solidarity with fellow students than by support for a ‘free Palestine.’” @tb https://tldr.nettime.org/@tb/112366486090607587
// a really important point. and faculty too, i think.
as soon as flags are involved, you know it is going to be stupid.
@BenRossTransit how anti-Bibi?
@BenRossTransit i don’t think most actual participants are clear on having that agenda, though i suspect their participation and the escalations now surrounding the protest movement are likely polarizing them that way.
@KimSJ have the physical protests done a lot of good, beyond getting polarizing press whose net effect might go either way? “something must be done, this is something” is not a great way forward.
persuasion, political pressure (like the recent, very brilliant “uncommitted” campaign) are first tools.
if you are trying to increase your numbers, you have to present yourself sympathetically. if you have numbers, you can exercise influence passively, by eg not showing up, striking. 1/
@KimSJ if you are trying to skip the numbers part, get your way without recruiting widespread agreement, well unfortunately too many mainly rich people succeed at that but it’s no great failure that it’s hard. no matter how strongly you believe in a cause, action without persuasion or democratic accountability is not legitimate. /fin
another paradoxical effect of the current protests is to have restored the vitality of liberal zionism in america. speaking strictly anecdotally, from my own community, people who two weeks ago were facing an identity crisis over israeli actions they recognized as indefensible are today comfortably crouched behind accusations of antisemitism and terrorist supporters to blame for it all.
we’re about to defeat LBJ all over again. how did that work out for us the last time?
@phillmv @tb it was the best possible response for fascist accelerationists in the US and the most genocidal elements of the Israeli polity.
they say never let a crisis go to waste, but for a burgeoning fascist movement, the catchphrase is never waste an opportunity to create a crisis.
the socialist left imagines it owns crisis, because contradictions of capitalism theory predicts it. but there’s an underpants gnome btw predicting correctly and benefiting from.
@MisuseCase @williampietri they might have been right, they might have been wrong. we think it worked out in retrospect, but that was very contingent (on rather extraordinary work by LBJ and God knows what else). 1/
@MisuseCase @williampietri 60s era protest broadly left us with Nixon making “peace with honor”. between 1968 to 1992 we get one four-year interlude of weak and unpopular less right-wing government, American social democracy is largely undone, then Democrats believe they must become “new” — economically neoliberal and “tough on crime” — to contest elections in America. 2/
@MisuseCase @williampietri yet people with leftish stripes broadly look back upon the era nostalgically, and lionize those movements — which did in LBJ, our most social democratic president — as somehow successful, as example social movements to be emulated. 3/
@MisuseCase @williampietri it is a bit insane. /fin
@williampietri MLK had the advantage that his audience was spectators, publics of a north that actively disidentified with Jim Crow fascism and were willing to blame southern leadership rather than protesters for disorder. had the relevant public been only the people of the US south, it would have been a much riskier strategy. and MLK paid exceptional care in public to the manner of protest and discipline within its ranks, hard, esp in the presence of provocateurs, hard to keep up.
@djc if there’s extraordinary opposition to an existing right-wing state, maybe. but when control of the state is simultaneously contested by popular fascist and “left” movements, the streets are fascists’ best terrain.
people on the left tend to imagine that taking the streets is their ultimate backstop, but that’s like thinking ocean water the ultimate backstop for thirst.
@BrianRAlexander yes. of course they do, and are.
@danjac@masto.ai yes. there are real constraints on what forms of political action can be effective in the context of a fascist movement.