Protest politics. Relatively little time just now to post—or, frankly, emotional energy, after the last week—so I'm poaching a bit here, since this is something of a hot-under-the-collar topic for me. Patrick at yelladog asked an eminently sensible set of questions (in a tone of civility I'd never have been able to manage) over at AMERICAblog the other day wondering why, exactly, John Aravosis felt the need to dis-recommend the big Sept. 24th protest march based on the likelihood that ANSWER and what Aravosis calls "the kitchen-sink coalition" would be involved in it. "I for one will have nothing to do with a protest that is devoted to that kind of wingnut crap," said John, "wignut crap" in his lingo meaning concern for such things as "ending U.S. colonialism ... in Haiti, Palestine, Cuba and beyond."

Foolish, wingnutty me, thinking that a critique of U.S. imperialism might be rather crucial to protest of an imperialist war of U.S. aggression. [Aravosis, not so incidentally, thinks it's "nuts" for Haiti to be on the list of protest-worthy items. To quote him at slightly more length, from the same comment thread referenced above: "Haiti? We fucking saved Haiti." A fine example of Aravosis' deeply informed and violently progressive response to questions of imperialism. So full is the man's self-confidence (or self-infatuation—judge yourself from his excerpted remarks) that he appears not to recognize when he's talking out his ass. Anyone wishing chapter and verse on just how completely and disastrously "we" have managed to "save" Haiti could do worse than starting with eRobin's copious and exhaustively well-linked series of posts on the subject. I'd suggest Aravosis, in particular, might want to just shut the fuck up about Haiti till he's tried to learn himself one or two things.]

Patrick, for his trouble, got some flamage on the thread and not much else. So he posted at yelladog, which is where I joined the discussion. I mentioned the prevalence of the "dirty hippie" stereotype among the knee-jerk anti-protest liberals, and Patrick asked, "Why are these people letting the Right's perceptions of them determine whether or not they go and protest?" And since my reply said just what I wanted it to say, I record it here for the ages:

The simple answer, of course, is that they really don't want to protest, and disdain for protesters is as good an excuse as any not to get off your ass.

For Ezra Klein or Matt Y. et al., I think it's at least in part a careerist thing. Policy operatives just aren't going to be credible, in the view of the right people, if they're exhorting the masses to get out there and stand shoulder-to-shoulder and do unseemly things like yelling. And politics is no place for the masses anyway. There's a significant degree of classism in it.

Larger point, though: it's not that the anti-protest libs are avoiding doing something they'd otherwise do because they somehow fear the opprobrium of the Right. It's because the perceptions of the Right, wrt protest, are their perceptions too. They've internalized a stereotyped anti-liberal discourse so powerfully disseminated throughout our culture, in the wake of the '60s, that it's managed to naturalize those stereotypes even in people of otherwise good political will. I remember something like this from my own experience doing union work as a grad student, among grad students: it was an enormous hurdle (one I had first to leap over for myself) to get people on the cusp of academic careers to shed themselves of their entirely unreflective disdain for the idea of working-class associations—which you had to do before they'd even consider the possibility of joining up. The desire not to be one of those janitors or secretaries was of the same order as the desire not to be one of those gross hippie weirdos, and like any ingrained bigotry it's a very powerful one.

And I want to underscore that last point, because there's a degree of painful personal introspection in it. I was involved early on, when TAs at Yale formed a loose association called (it was the late '80s) TA Solidarity: and then I sat completely on the sidelines for a year or more, when the organization began to push in the direction of unionization (and alliance with Yale's recognized—though barely tolerated—unions of maintenance and clerical/technical employees). Big Marxist that I was, I was in the grip of a disdain I scarcely understood for colleagues I thought of as sentimental lefties, playing at what I thought of (again, without interrogating it) as an impractical, outmoded politics. [When of course it was really TA Solidarity that had been sentimental and impractical, based as it was on a politics of nothing more than moral suasion, on maintaining the self-defeating figment of collegiality between student pre-professionals and the university administration.] Fortunately I had friends who hammered me into waking up—who shamed me, in particular, into bussing along down to Virginia with them for a really moving and eye-opening march in support of striking service workers at Colonial Williamsburg—but it wasn't easy. I wasn't easy—and I had every theoretical reason in the world to have been. So I think I know what I'm talking about here.

posted by michael  12:00:09 PM  
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