Street protests ain't what they used to be

The New York Time's Max Fisher has summarized some recent scholarly research on the effectiveness of mass protest all over the world in the last decade -- and for an inveterate believer in taking to the streets, the results are not encouraging.

... Mass protests like the ones in Iran, whose participants have cited economic hardships, political repression and corruption, were once considered such a powerful force that even the strongest autocrat might not survive their rise. But their odds of success have plummeted worldwide, research finds. 

Such movements are today more likely to fail than they were at any other point since at least the 1930s, according to a data set managed by Harvard University researchers. 

... This sharp and relatively recent shift may mark the end of a decades-long era when so-called people power represented a major force for democracy’s spread. 

... Throughout most of the 20th century, mass protests grew both more common and more likely to succeed, in many cases helping to topple autocrats or bring about greater democracy. 

By the early 2000s, two in three protest movements demanding systemic change ultimately succeeded, according to the Harvard data. In retrospect, it was a high-water mark. 

Around that decade’s midpoint, the trend began to reverse. ... “Nonviolent campaigns are seeing their lowest success rates in more than a century,” Erica Chenoweth, a political scientist who oversees the protest-tracking project, wrote in a recent paper

Researchers find that, in sharply divided societies like ours, those divisions can offer leverage points that bolster repressive authorities.

Polarized societies, in moments of turmoil, become likelier to split over mass protests. This can bolster even despised governments, helping them to cast protesters as representing a narrow interest group rather than the citizenry as a whole.

I suppose that's what the MAGA people think is happening to them when they are prosecuted for violently invading the U.S. Capitol.

No study of any contemporary phenomenon would be complete without throwing some shade -- rightly or wrongly -- at our social media lives.

In earlier eras, activists might spend months or years building the organizational structures and real-world ties necessary to launch a mass protest. This also made movements durable, instilling discipline and chains of command. 

Social media allows would-be protesters to skip those steps, spurring one another to action with as little as a viral post. The result is rallies that put thousands or millions of bodies in the street overnight — but that often fizzle just as quickly. 

Without that traditional activist infrastructure, social media protests are less equipped to endure government repression. Leaderless, they more easily fracture and struggle to coordinate strategically.

This seems to me accurate -- but incomplete. These viral incitements only catch fire when the social preparation exists. It still takes absorbing a certain consciousness to get people off the sofas and that is seldom the work of an instant. Even the filmed murder of George Floyd could not have ignited mass protests without half a decade of consciousness raising by Black Lives Matter activists. It all seems sudden and unpredictable to much of the comfortable mainstream -- until it seems obvious and unstoppable.

This study of protests does remark on one strength of street actions which past researchers might easily have overlooked.

... Because women in any country come from all walks of life, their participation can transcend social or demographic divides associated with polarization. Observers also tend to see movements as more legitimate when women are visibly involved, research finds. ...

In the Atlantic, political analyst Ronald Brownstein, writing about the midterm races in the highly polarized state of Georgia, may have got wind of a social development which could partially explain the eclipse of street protests. Mass protests have always found the bodies willing to put themselves at risk among young people. What if a generation of young people is actively experimenting with a different path to make itself heard?

More young adults may vote in 2022 simply because so many of them registered and voted in 2018 and 2020. One reason for that is structural: “There are more young people on the voter rolls because of the [2018 and 2020] elections, which is a huge boost, because it means they are more likely to be contacted by parties and organizations,” and those contacts increase the likelihood of people voting, Abby Kiesa, Circle’s deputy director, told me. 

The other key reason is attitudinal: Higher youth turnout may mean that not only is voting becoming a habit for those who have already done it; it is also becoming more expected among the 18-year-olds who age into the electorate every two years (more than 8 million of them since 2020, Circle projects). At the AME event, for instance, Kendeius Mitchell, a disability-claims manager, told me that youth engagement in Georgia is feeding on itself. 

“Just having it around so much in the conversation now is making people take accountability,” he said. 

John Della Volpe, the director of polling at the Harvard Kennedy School Institute of Politics, sees the same trend in the institute’s national surveys. “Voting … could be becoming a part of this new generation and how they think,” he told me.

Have we really spawned a generation that thinks social progress comes through voting? That would be novel to a boomer like me. There are some signs of it. Brownstein is an acute observer.

Though I have no doubt that the women and men of this age cohort, if blocked, will take to the streets like their parents and grandparents. These things are cyclical but youth will make its own future.