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(This is kind of disappointing. Zeynep was a co-moderator of the mailing
list that preceded Marxmail. In this op-ed she implicitly backs the idea
that the protest should evolve into a Democratic Party version of the
tea party.)
NY Times Op-Ed, Jan. 27 2017
Does a Protest’s Size Matter?
by Zeynep Tufekci
The Women’s March on Saturday, which took place in cities and towns all
across the United States (and around the world), may well have been the
largest protest in American history. There were an estimated 3.5 million
participants.
This has to mean something, right?
After studying protests over the last two decades, I have to deliver
some bad news: In the digital age, the size of a protest is no longer a
reliable indicator of a movement’s strength. Comparisons to the number
of people in previous marches are especially misleading.
A protest does not have power just because many people get together in
one place. Rather, a protest has power insofar as it signals the
underlying capacity of the forces it represents.
Consider an analogy from the natural world: A gazelle will sometimes
jump high in the air while grazing, apparently to no end — but it is
actually signaling strength. “If I can jump this high,” it communicates
to would-be predators, “I can also run very fast. Don’t bother with the
chase.”
Protesters are saying, in effect, “If we can pull this off, imagine what
else we can do.”
But it is much easier to pull off a large protest than it used to be. In
the past, a big demonstration required months, if not years, of
preparation. The planning for the March on Washington in August 1963,
for example, started nine months earlier, in December 1962. The march
drew a quarter of a million people, but it represented much more effort,
commitment and preparation than would a protest of similar size today.
Without Facebook, without Twitter, without email, without cellphones,
without crowdfunding, the ability to organize such a march was a fair
proxy for the strength and sophistication of the civil rights movement.
The Women’s March, on the other hand, started with a few Facebook posts
and came together in a relatively short amount of time. The organizers
no doubt did a lot of work, and the size and the energy of the gathering
reflected a remarkable depth of dissent. However, as with all protests
today, the march required fewer resources and less time spent on
coordination than a comparable protest once did.
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This is one reason that recent large protests have had less effect on
policy than many were led to expect. I participated in the antiwar
protests of February 2003 — at that point, likely the largest global
protest in history, with events in more than 600 cities. I assumed the
United States and its allies could not ignore a protest of that size.
But President George W. Bush, dismissing the protesters as a “focus
group,” indeed proceeded to ignore us, and the Iraq war began soon
after. Mr. Bush was right in one way: The protesters failed to transform
into an electoral force capable of defeating him in the 2004 election.
In 2011, I attended the global Occupy protests, which were held in about
1,000 cities in more than 80 countries — again, likely the biggest
global protest ever, at that point. Thanks in part to digital
technology, those protests, too, had been organized in just a few weeks.
I was optimistic that I would soon see political and economic changes in
response to this large-scale expression of resistance to economic
inequality. I was wrong, then, too.
Two enormous protests, two disappointing results. Similar sequences of
events have played out in other parts of the world.
This doesn’t mean that protests no longer matter — they do. Nowadays,
however, protests should be seen not as the culmination of an organizing
effort, but as a first, potential step. A large protest today is less
like the March on Washington in 1963 and more like Rosa Parks’s refusal
to move to the back of the bus. What used to be an endpoint is now an
initial spark.
More than ever before, the significance of a protest depends on what
happens afterward.
Consider the Tea Party protests of 2009, which also brought out hundreds
of thousands of people in cities throughout the United States, and which
also were organized with the help of digital communication. Like any
other protest, including the Women’s March, these were symbolic
expressions of support, and they also functioned as events where
like-minded individuals could find one another. But the Tea Party
protesters then got to work on a ferociously focused agenda: identifying
and supporting primary candidates to challenge Republicans who did not
agree with their demands, keeping close tabs on legislation and
pressuring politicians who deviated from a Tea Party platform.
Last Saturday, as I participated in the Women’s March in North Carolina,
I marveled at the large turnout and the passion of those who marched.
But if those protesters are not exchanging contact information and
setting up local strategy meetings, their large numbers are unlikely to
translate into the kind of effectiveness the Tea Party supporters had
after their protests in 2009.
The Tea Party, of course, is not the only model for moving forward. But
there is no magic power to marching in the streets that, on its own,
leads to any other kind of result.
The march I attended in North Carolina ended with everyone singing along
to a song called “Let’s Get to Work.” For today’s protests, more than
ever, that’s the right message.
Zeynep Tufekci, an assistant professor at the School of Information and
Library Science at the University of North Carolina, is the author of
the forthcoming “Twitter and Tear Gas: The Power and Fragility of
Networked Protest.”
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