@emma no. but we should act with care.
@scott it could be that too, for sure!
there are interesting things. both parties like to talk about Jan 6, but in very different ways, kind of the inverse of stereotypes. (you'd think it'd be lefties valorizing imprisoned activists as heroes and martyrs, while righties talk up law and order.)
identities really matter in these things. Rs define threat in terms of who, a "good guy" (white, conservative) with a gun makes you safer. Kyle Rittenhouse does the circuit.
@scott i think Democrats are trying to go for a "there are white nationalist lunatics you should fear" take and Republicans with their traditional "there are poor immigrant minority criminals you should fear" but now also adding "radical left movements".
@scott there is a kind of bipartisanship of fear these days.
but i still think the traditional relationship between being afraid on the streets, over crime or political streetfighting, and yearning for authoritarian control holds. (i always could be wrong!)
@scott i guess i'd want more evidence than one interpretation of survey data to be persuaded of that. early on post George Floyd polling sympathetic to protests struck me remarkably resilient, despite the disorder. the video was pretty horrible, shocking. maybe there was still that effect by November? 1/
@scott but the behavior of political campaigns suggests to me pretty strongly a different story, at least more recently. it's Republican politicians who want to talk about the "riots" of 2020. maybe that's just dogmatism on the part of campaigns and they actually misunderstand how the public perceives those events? but i wouldn't bank on it. /fin
@divya "always" is *always* overstated. social affairs are complicated. but very very often! disorder on the streets is not the same as street protest. die-ins can be awesome. but street action has to be careful, disciplined, should appeal not just disrupt, unless the cause is already super popular.
melees, brawls, circumstances that lead less engaged outsiders come to fear play into the core fascist trope, there are enemies among us who will hurt you, we will provide order and protect you. 1/
@divya i've written a piece that people sometimes read as making the opposite case. i don't disown it. but i intend a view a bit more nuanced. as from our Civil Rights Movement discussion, i do think sometimes some degree of fear things fall may fall apart serves a role in motivating positive reform. but i think it very dangerous as prescription, because it's hard to titrate and very often yields backlash, crackdown, or apartheid solutions. https://www.interfluidity.com/v2/5911.html /fin
@divya Is Kissinger not a war criminal? “He wants a massive bombing campaign in Cambodia. … It’s an order, it’s to be done. Anything that flies, on anything that moves. You got that?” Bombing of Laos and Cambodia, and obviously Vietnam, had begun under LBJ. But boy, at least in Cambodia, did the new guys ramp it up. 214 tons under LBJ out of 2,756,941 tons. Do you think LBJ would have done the same? Do you think the protests had something to do his not contesting or winning the 1968 election?
Yes! Exactly! Ashes! Die ins! They blocked the Queens-Midtown tunnel once, the clearest example I could find of generalized disruption. But they mostly targeted specific institutions — FDA, the White House, NYSE, in clever, performative ways. No one feels their safety is at risk at a die-in. (I guess there may have been people paranoid enough to think they could get AIDS from ashes?) Their actions were powerful! But by performance more than just sand in the gears.
@divya I haven't read Schulman's history, but I think there's no dispute the outside track played a crucial role. (I think the inside track did too.) But Act Up protest was mostly (not always) pretty targeted at powerful institutions. Act Up was not a disruptive or frightening force for bystanders going about their lives. Act Up largely substituted brilliant performance for generalized disruption as a way of attracting media attention. Outsiders could sympathize without having been messed with.
@divya There was a lot going on, sure. And there was violence. You can make a case that a generalized sense of threat played bad cop to the ostentatious virtue of MLK's nonviolent movement. Riots sometime lead to change. But they often lead to reaction. 1/
@divya You can tell lots of stories about the 60s. But I don't think you can fairly look at the world and conclude that violent chaos frequently births leftish or liberal or just orders. You can maybe claim CRM as a counterexample, if you want to emphasize the sense of threat. But then the political aftermath of the 60s was mostly reaction. Vietnam War protests just picked off LBJ, which did not redound to the benefit of people in Indochina. /fin
@Alon @asayeed @BenRossTransit I mean is the claim that the US ought to have become the military of the Arab Spring throughout the region, that we needed more and more follow through on the Libya model? Obama dithered, abandoned Assad but shirked from enforcing his "red line". But even if he had, that would be a far cry from prosecuting the revolution. Is that what the US ought to have done, before ISIS and the often very cynical alliances that resulted from countering it?
@Alon @asayeed @BenRossTransit naturalization of Palestinians where they live is a universal position among Jewish Israelis. except, of course, for the Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank. it is regarding those populations that differences emerge.
@Alon @asayeed @BenRossTransit It's hard to distinguish between what is cynical and what is structural with respect to Iran's behavior. You may be right that, under some future hypothetical settlement, their inclination would become Westphalian. or perhaps they are pan-Islamist, and would have a Tehran based new metropole for that. (obviously, very longstanding intra-Islam sectarian distinctions complicate that.) for now, they are profoundly an anti-Westphalian force.
@Alon @asayeed @BenRossTransit Western Islamophobia, Wester ethnic identities, lots of Western strands are anti-Westphalian. the state system lives or dies only because states manage and monitor evershifting allegiances and constantly emerging currents to maintain national identities "artificially" coterminous with state boundaries as primary.
@asayeed @BenRossTransit @Alon (if that's the case, was it any opportunity at all? did Arab publics not do enough? i mean the US, idiotically for a status quo power, abandoned perfectly stable and in the first case very warm relationships with Mubarak and Assad on the theory of a liberatory Arab Spring. Tunisia pulled it off for a while. who has an opportunity to do more? did the US need to turn on Bahrain & Saudi, and then something good might have emerged? what was the opportunity was lost?)
@asayeed @Alon @BenRossTransit "state" is the center of the controversy. Erogan's Turkey is not as liberal (or pliant) as the US might like, but it is an ordered state. to the degree it causes troubles elsewhere, they relate to where its state consolidation is weakest, ie risks of Kurdish national self-determination. i think the US is slowly realizing the form of postcolonial moralism that means every self-perceived ethnicity gets its own state is unaffordable, despite affection towards Kurds.
@asayeed @Alon @BenRossTransit states can fail and reform themselves all they want from a US perspective. the advantage of democracy is that revolution is routinized, but institutions to support that may be hard to get or keep. what the US (+ Israel) can't tolerate are the anti-Westphalian currents. Iran's "axis of resistance" is a catastrophe from the perspective of state-system legibility + management. we can't know what form Sunni pan-Islamism might take, but we'll try to impose constraints.
@asayeed @BenRossTransit i agree with @Alon that for Israel, conversion of "Palestinians" into a Westphalian state (or their naturalization into existing such states) is the only way forward. the Israeli right wants to insist upon the parenthetical by any ugly means necessary. the US and Israeli left-ish prefer the former.
@asayeed @BenRossTransit @Alon But the broader problem is to find ways of reconciling a legible global system made of states with defined borders with the aspirations and identities of the people of that region. recognizing that it is not an easy fit is not a case for abandoning the project. the risks, from the perspective of a status quo power, are far too great.
@asayeed @BenRossTransit @Alon (from the perspective of revisionist powers like China, Russia, and Iran, there's are sorcerer's apprentice problems. on the one hand, playing up the contradictions between ME aspirations & westphalian states troubles the hegemon. on the other hand, China largely does not dissent from the westphalian norm, and faces risks from assertive pan-Islamism unconstrained by them. they want to alliances and perhaps some borders, but cautiously. Russia may be less cautious.)
@asayeed @Alon @BenRossTransit @shadihamid i think the US is likely to go for a Taiwan/Korea solution—support illiberal autocracy until it mb someday becomes secure enough to relax into liberalism. that may not succeed, but if you think ugly illiberalism is an unfortunate historical necessity, is it necessarily worse? is it a bad idea to try, given the risks to global (including obviously US/Western) stability of more freeform Islamicized illiberalism?
@asayeed @Alon @BenRossTransit @shadihamid (obviously it could turn out that the longer an inevitable is delayed, the worse a rebound will be, as you say. kind of an austrian business cycle theory of liberal recessions. but, as in austrian economics, what is inevitable is contestable, and succumbing to perhaps avoidable awfulness on the say-so of tenuously evidenced theory carries its own risks.)
@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.