The Return of the Grassroots Right

By Nate Hochman

Tuesday, October 26, 2021

 

In America’s popular imagination, street protests — raised fists and colorful signs, marches and megaphone-led chants — are a distinctly left-wing phenomenon. From union strikes to Saul Alinsky–style “direct actions,” mass movements seem to carry far more romantic appeal for the Left than for the Right. Progressivism has traditionally understood itself as the politics of picket lines and sit-ins; conservatism tends to find its political center of gravity at Rotary Clubs, church meetings, and dinner tables in sleepy bedroom communities.

 

This presents an issue for conservatives. Protests — so long as they remain nonviolent — can be enormously effective. Even as support for the Black Lives Matter movement has fallen sharply from its peak in June 2020, last summer’s demonstrations precipitated a sea change in American institutions that went well above and beyond the hundreds of millions of dollars that flooded in to support left-wing causes in the months following George Floyd’s death. The political salience of such movements is not limited to the Left: The Tea Party drove up the GOP’s vote count in the 2010 midterms and pushed Republican incumbents rightward on policy. In fact, there is some evidence that conservative protest movements may even be better at driving up votes than their progressive counterparts.

 

But that’s only if conservatives decide to protest in the first place. There is a long tradition of right-wing protest movements, from the 1970s citizen tax revolts to Phyllis Schlafly’s campaign against the ERA to decades of pro-life demonstrations across the country. (The annual March for Life brings hundreds of thousands of protesters to Washington, D.C., every year.) But conservative constituencies, often clustered in rural and exurban areas, are typically composed of parents, middle-class Christians, and noncollege-educated small-business owners — a far cry from the “younger, male, educated, politically interested and trade-unionized” individuals that political-science research shows are “more likely to engage in protest activities.” Even as protests from across the political spectrum surged in 2020, the number and size of left-wing demonstrations far outnumbered their right-wing counterparts: Princeton’s Bridging Divides Initiative estimates that slightly more than 2,350 total protests associated with right-wing causes occurred in 2020, whereas Black Lives Matter alone topped out at more than 10,330.

 

Part of the discrepancy between the frequency of left-wing and right-wing protest movements has to do with the fact that young people — who tend to be more progressive — have more time on their hands than members of older, more conservative demographics. More fundamentally, the conservative disposition is inherently averse to the kind of agitation that is the bread and butter of progressive activism. It is difficult to imagine a staid, patrician Republican congressman pulling a stunt like Cori Bush’s recent attention-grabbing pressure campaign on the steps of the U.S. Capitol, which saw the Missouri progressive spending three nights in a sleeping bag to whip up support for an eviction moratorium.

 

The problem is, Bush’s tactics worked: While the Biden administration’s constitutionally dubious halt on evictions was struck down by the Supreme Court in less than a month, the White House’s acquiescence to the moratorium was widely attributed to the first-term congresswoman’s forcing its hand.

 

A resurgence in right-wing protests has the potential to accomplish something similar for conservative ends. The mass walkouts and strikes against vaccine mandates and the widespread parent-led movements against critical race theory (CRT) are part and parcel of a broader surge in conservative demonstrations over the course of the past six months. Although it’s too soon to measure the effects of the recent anti-vaccine-mandate protests, one need only look to the slate of anti-CRT laws in states across the country to see the political potential of a more confrontational and insistent approach to grassroots conservative politics. Beyond mobilizing disengaged voters and shifting public attitudes on an issue, protesters can push once-marginal causes to the forefront of the national discussion, pressure sluggish and reluctant institutional authorities to take action on an issue, and bring a collective sense of organizing identity and political purpose to previously disparate individuals and groups.

 

Conservatives are not used to thinking in these terms. Rather than seeking to change or influence institutions from the outside, the Right has traditionally been aligned with institutional insiders seeking to protect long-standing arrangements from would-be progressive reforms. But as we increasingly find ourselves on the outside of American institutions — from the education system to Big Business — it is time for conservatives to get comfortable with grassroots activism against the status quo. While it is important to avoid the excesses of the Left, its successes are hard to ignore; witness how left-wing activism conquered academia in the 1960s. The Right can study this history profitably.

 

Fortunately, there is more than enough energy in the conservative base for this project. Last summer’s riots and confrontations with Black Lives Matter and Antifa, the ongoing debates over critical race theory and transgenderism in public schools, and the Biden administration’s surprisingly aggressive progressivism have all led to a broader sense of urgency about the state of the country in red America.

 

Conservative elites and the right-wing grass roots historically have had an uneasy relationship. The energy of the latter can attract rough-around-the-edges voters who at times say or believe kooky or conspiratorial things. But properly channeled, the passion of these individuals — most of whom are decent, generous, fiercely patriotic men and women committed to fighting for America — can be powerful. Republican leaders should not ignore or dismiss them; they should try to harness their ardor toward productive and mutually beneficial ends.