Protest Nation

Signs and chants, cringe no more,

There have been a lot of jokes made and fun had over the decades with liberal and leftist protestors. Unsurprisingly, if you think about it for a few minutes, the best of those jokes almost exclusively come from what we might call fellow travelers. Nicola’s faddish causes in Mike Leigh’s Life Is Sweet, Tom Lehrer’s “Folk Song Army” (“though they may have won all the battles/We had all the good songs”), the ridiculous May-of-68 types in Eustache and Godard — they’re good gags because they’re based on close observation by, and even some affection from, like-minded people, unlike the dumb dirty-hippiez shit you get from rightwingers.

But they’re still gags, and the perspective is always that, however sympathetic one may be toward the sign-carriers. there is something not quite right about them. The basic tropes are naïvete or hypocrisy, but I perceive — and maybe it’s just me, though I doubt it — that they really come out of embarrassment. It’s not that the protestors are wrong, it’s that they’re too much. Their naivete makes us feel naïve by association, and their advocacy for the disprivileged reminds us of their (and our) privilege and makes us vaguely ashamed of it, in a way that blithely availing that privilege somehow never does.

So the malevolent reactionary caricatures of puffed-up brat students, crusty old hippies, multi-cause cranks, etc., even though we know they’re caricatures, may make us self-conscious, and awaken our inner centrist dipshit or horseshoe dipshit, who will tell us that whatever the road forward might be, standing in a public square and yelling THIS IS WHAT DEMOCRACY LOOKS LIKE ain’t it, and we should stay home and comfort ourselves with such main-character fantasies as fist-fighting riot cops or somehow achieving a high public profile and telling off the squares to the applause of John Q. Public.

I was never much of a sign-carrier myself. I joined the million-plus who marched in New York during the 2004 GOP Convention because how could I not but, as you’ll see from my reportage then, I still wasn’t totally comfortable with it. (I also reported on conservative reactions to the event, and these are worth revisiting because they’re insane, e.g. Adam Brodsky saying, “How fitting it would be if city natives held their own protests and spoke up for themselves, in support of an even tougher War on Terror…” Thus did wingnuts mischaracterize New Yorkers to their rubes back then; now they just tell them all New Yorkers were actually black antifa supersoldiers except Daniel Penny and Eric Adams.) (BTW you will not be surprised to hear Brodsky remains a piece of shit.)

Living in DC during the first Tubby administration changed things for me. For one thing there was fuck-all else to do there; for another, Trump’s election was a genuine emergency and people knew it from jump. Then we had COVID and George Floyd are ooooh boy things escalated. It strikes me now that once we got the fucker out, there was a general shrugging off of mass protest until the Gaza invasion — while there had been other things to protest in the interval, I think January 6 might have had something to do with the relative quiet; maybe, after months and years of protests that were characterized as an attack on democracy and civil order, the spectacle of an actual attack made good people nervous about retaking the field. (Or it may have been the now-familiar malfeasance of cops when the protest subject is unapproved by the authorities.)

Well, the first months of Tubby II have turned all that around right quick. The attendance at HandsOff/50501 protests across the country on Saturday seem to have at least matched those of the 2016 Women’s Marches — not just in the expected blue cities but also in places like Topeka and Salt Lake City.

I expect that new, fullest flower of Trump rampage, the ruinous tariffs, may have pulled a few extra people off the couch. I know many attendees were brought out to Baltimore’s event, which filled the green between City Hall and the War Memorial, by the literally berserk mass firings of federal employees, many of whom live around here. Of course this would stir those workers’ self-interest, but it also stirs the self-interest of those of us who have not been poisoned by propaganda into believing that government service has nothing to do with our roads, health, benefits payments, air quality, bank stability, etc., and that blessings greater that these will come to us out of wreckage if we just trust the plan.

In fact some of the loudest responses on Saturday came for a young woman who worked for the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Innovation (one of the many HHS agencies the dangerous lunatic Kennedy has slashed) and had been fired, but got her job back temporarily thanks to a stay issued in response a lawsuit by several state attorneys general; when she thanked “Maryland attorney general Anthony Brown and a Maryland-based US district judge” the crowd was glad to hear it. They were also glad to hear her tie her situation to everything else that’s going on: “Even in our hyper individualistic society, Americans do help each other. Americans are resilient, Americans are self-determined, and America is at its core for the people and by the people.”

One thing that struck me as I prowled the grounds was how many people were carrying hand-lettered signs (many quite entertaining, and I’m sure you’ve seen most of them on the internet) and wearing cause-related T-shirts; how many full-throatedly joined in on the chants and cheers and boos; how delighted those on the periphery were whenever cars going by honked and their drivers waved. These weren’t protest tourists.

It may be that years of hashtag-resistance have grown the numbers of Protest People. Maybe it’s harder than it once was to try the old lookit the stupid hippiez trick when the hippiez in question are your neighbors and colleagues. I also noticed that the crowd was cool with every flavor of speaker: Senator Van Hollen, a couple of Congressmen, the president of the city council, pushing the normie Democratic agenda — cool; radicals reading the riot act on billionaires, imperialism, and the carceral state — also cool.

A young woman from Indivisible got up and told us that, as a white person, she knew people like her hadn’t done enough to bridge the solidarity gap: “It’s time for white people to be the ally to the BIPOC community, as they’ve been begging us to be since before the civil rights movements. It’s time for us to get our hands dirty and use our privilege to rectify the wrongs that goes before us.” I wondered for a moment whether this would set off a cringe wave, but no, the crowd was with her, cheering her on:

While the previous 50/51 rallies have been about what we’re fighting against, this one is what we’re fighting for. And what we’re fighting for is our friends, families, and neighbors, the nameless, the voiceless, and the vulnerable, for trans rights, black futures, and disabled communities; for immigrants, documented and undocumented; and for all who’ve kidnapped by ICE, who are speaking out [against] the genocide of Palestine. We’re fighting for the Maryland father who was deported to El Salvador and has no way home. We’re fighting for those who are being held at the Fallon Building right behind us.

Her list went on a long while, not just with the “popularist” things like Social Security and a living wage, but also for an end to for-profit prisons and for “those oppressed near and far, for environmental protections, indigenous lands, and the Earth”; not just for the Department of Education, but also and specifically for CRT and DEI — because, I surmised, now they are equally targets and there is no percentage in sacrificing one to save the other. Finally:

We fight for the right to love whoever we want to love and to be authentically ourselves. Today and forever, we fight for due process, checks and balances, justice, equal rights, DEI, and the truth. For the pursuit of happiness, freedom, and a day where individual rights cannot be taken away by whoever is voted in charge. We are fighting for today, tomorrow, and the future. We are fighting for you, me, and everyone in between. We are fighting for a state, no, a country, nay, a world worth living in.

And then the THIS IS WHAT DEMOCRACY LOOKS LIKE chant, with everybody in. If this be cringe, make the most of it.