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In recent years there has been a refrain of “when are people going to go out in the streets?” Protest has been treated as the decisive mode of politics, despite the fact that even before this year, there were huge protests (women’s march, climate march) that achieved nothing./1
This postmortem on the Minneapolis city council’s promise to dismantle the police, which I remember being held up as proof of the efficacy of street protest, is revealing. It shows why protest, far from decisive, is highly ambiguous as a political sign./2 https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/26/us/politics/minneapolis-defund-police.html?action=click&module=Top%20Stories&pgtype=Homepage
The basic assumption of protest discourse is that when elected officials see “the people” in the street, they will bow to their will, thus proving the ultimately democratic nature of the system. (Bernie, let’s recall, at some point claimed this was how he would get M4A passed.)/3
The idea is that protest somehow represents the General Will, more so than mediated representative forms of politics. But this instantly falls apart upon empirical examination: what makes the portion of the people who attend a protest more “the people” than those who don’t?/4
In the Minneapolis case, what we see is elected officials who admit they endorsed the demands of the protesters just to shut them up, dampen their momentum, and then wait for the media cycle to move on. They knew that the protesters were not an expression of the General Will./5
The basic delusion of how people talk about protest is that somehow it expresses the General Will more clearly than other modes of expression. In fact, the opposite is true: what it means politically, procedurally, practically is far more ambiguous than, say, voting./6
The ongoing Portland protests are an example: having lost any clear purpose, they have become entirely self-referential. Their purpose is now their own purposeless self-perpetuation. They are now protesting the existence of people who are not protesting./7 https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/21/us/black-lives-matter-protests-tactics.html
Which is to say, they are protesting their own incapacity to embody the General Will: they are protesting themselves. In this sense, these bizarre groups who are roaming neighborhoods protesting people’s failure to join them are the perfect, ideal form of protest in our time./8
