Progressives’ Plan B: Violent Protest or Principled Opposition?

By Ian Tuttle

Tuesday, January 03, 2017

The dawn of a new year, and of a new administration, has progressives rediscovering their Dickens. Jelani Cobb, scrying the signs of the coming year (or four) for the latest issue of the New Yorker, might as well have written: “It is the best of times, it is the worst of times.”

It is the latter, says Cobb in her story, “The Return of Civil Disobedience,” because progressive fortunes look grim:

In 2016, the Republicans won the White House, maintained control of both chambers of Congress, and secured the ability to create a conservative Supreme Court majority that could last a generation or more. Donald Trump, a man with minimal restraint, has been awarded maximal power.

Drawing on a recent comment by Joe Biden, in which he compared 2016 to 1968 — the annus horribilis that saw the assassinations of Robert F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr., nationwide riots, and violence at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago — Cobb comments that at least Richard Nixon was forced to contend with a Democratic Congress.

But — dark clouds, silver linings, and the rest — it’s not all bad news. The looming specter of the Trump era “has recalled another phenomenon of the nineteen-sixties: the conviction that ‘democracy is in the streets.’” Pointing to the widespread protests in response to Trump’s election, and to the much-anticipated “Women’s March on Washington” scheduled for the day after his inauguration, Cobb predicts:

The Congress is unlikely to check the new president, but democracy may thrive in the states, the courts, the next elections, and, lest the lessons of the sixties be forgotten, the streets.

But not all protest is the same, and just because people are in the streets does not mean “democracy” is thriving. Surely that is one of the lessons of the Sixties.

That transformative decade was hardly the first in U.S. history to see marches on Washington, or elsewhere, but it was arguably the first to see protest become, in the popular mind, the handmaiden of revolution, and riot a legitimate form of social protest. That was what became clear in 1968. The violence at the DNC started as “protests” by the “Youth International Party,” the “Yippies” whose first demand was “an immediate end to the war in Vietnam.” But the Yippies were not interested in gentle reform: “We shall not defeat Amerika [sic] by organizing a political party,” Yippie leader Abbie Hoffman declared in his 1969 book Woodstock Nation. “We shall do it by building a new nation — a nation as rugged as the marijuana leaf.” Also heavily involved in the mayhem in Chicago were members of Students for a Democratic Society, many of whom by 1968 were tiring of civil disobedience; the next spring, a faction of SDS members would officially form the Weather Underground, an outright domestic-terrorism outfit. A resolution penned in 1968 by Weather Underground co-founder John Jacobs, encouraged by events in Chicago, was titled: “The Elections Don’t Mean Shit — Vote Where the Power Is — Our Power Is in the Street.”

Add to the above much of the activity of the Black Panther Party, on the rise in the late 1960s, and it’s clear that much of the “protest” that made the period so tumultuous had nothing to do with restoring Cobb’s cherished “norms of democracy.” Its aim was to overthrow the whole system, relying on an ever-finer line between “protest” and violence.

Of course, there was an earlier form of protest in the 1960s, demonstrated at Selma and on the national Mall, that was distinct from the above. Consider the words of Martin Luther King Jr. In his “I Have a Dream” speech, delivered at the March on Washington in August 1963, King talked of a “promissory note” guaranteeing the freedom and justice on which America had defaulted. “But we refuse to believe that the bank of justice is bankrupt,” King said. “We refuse to believe that there are insufficient funds in the great vaults of opportunity of this nation.”

King did not reject his country’s ideals as lies. Instead, he argued that the country had fallen short of enacting them but that it was possible, with faith and steadfast effort, to make these ideals a reality for every American. In this, he was working within a tradition defined by Abraham Lincoln and the suffragettes and others who sought to more fully realize the promises of America’s Founding. His work was rooted equally in the peace-loving summons of the Christian faith.

About a coming surfeit of protests Cobb is surely correct. But which “lesson” of the Sixties will anti-Trump protesters adopt? Do they see themselves upholding a country that is flawed but fundamentally decent? Or are they radicals eager to upend fragile, hard-won accomplishments in service to grand new visions?

The Sixties presented multiple models of how to take politics to the streets. One of those models created a freer, more equal America. One led to the long, violent Days of Rage. If they’re determined to revive the Sixties, progressive protesters should at least choose the former.