Settle for Nothing
Pete
Guest, Medium, June 5, 2018
After
millions marched in 2003 to protest the US-led invasion of Iraq, the ensuing
conflict dealt a forceful blow to the empowerment of the anti-war movement. It
was also the start of a worrying trend for governments to ignore the will of
their people.
One day
after Donald Trump took his oath of office, millions took to the streets of
more than 400 US towns and cities to protest. The ‘Women’s March,’ which began
as a demonstration to rage against Trump’s overt misogyny and anti-abortion
stance, evolved rapidly into a protest against the very fact of his presidency.
Trump’s first two weeks were always going to be a divisive theatre, but few
expected the new administration to follow through on its campaign pledges to
build a wall and shut its borders to the citizens of seven Muslim countries.
Once,
such howls of protest from the street would have led to reversals of policy,
but today there is no sense that the outcry has resonated at all in the White
House. With perhaps the most divisive president in modern American history now
in office, protest movements new and old are gearing up for four years of
running battles with the administration. But what can they really achieve if
Trump and his government aren’t listening?
Protest is
supposed to be a pressure valve for democratic society, and a way for the
people on the street to shape their politics outside of the electoral cycle. At
some point, in the democracies of the West, that mechanism has broken down.
Donald
Trump is more than just an anti-institutional candidate; his rise was a
many-headed hydra of unrestrained prejudice, blue-collar desperation, and an
American identity in crisis, all aided by the systematic undermining of the
basic rules of engagement in Western politics. But the anger against the
institutions of state that Trump tapped into as he rattled towards the White
House transcends political tribes, and it is rising — in part as a consequence of those same
institutions’ failure to listen to the drumbeat from the streets.
Jeffrey
Murer, lecturer on collective violence at St Andrews University and an expert
in protest, said that the turning point could have come more than a decade ago,
in 2003, when massive protests across Europe against the US-led invasion of
Iraq were ignored by politicians, who pressed ahead anyway.
“You see
literally millions of people marching across Europe and North America against
what was then the impending invasion of Iraq. And there was nothing doing. In
particular, in Britain, it was a profound moment, where it was the Labour Party
not listening to people on the street,” Murer says.
But in
the febrile years since the financial crisis, that feeling of distance has
metastasised into impotence, driving protest movements to try to enter the
political mainstream. In the US, Occupy Wall Street took on the banks that many
believed had caused the downturn, but had escaped without censure. In the UK, students
turned out en masse to argue against the imposition of tuition fees. In Greece,
Athens’ Syntagma Square was turned into a near-permanent battleground over
brutal cuts to social services during the country’s debt crisis, and what they
saw as the government’s desire to appease investors and international
institutions.
“I think
there was the idea that people in the street were asking for public health, for
utilities, for transportation, for heat, for electricity, and the priority
still was private banks,” Murer says.
That was
mirrored across Europe, and in the US, where the anger on the streets failed to
translate into meaningful reform. Faced with this failure, several protest
groups morphed into mainstream political — or anti-political — movements that are contesting elections or forcing
their way into the democratic process. In Italy, the Five Star
Movement,
led by the comedian Beppe Grillo, has moved from the street to the ballot box;
in Spain, the anti-austerity group, Podemos, snowballed from a group of radical
academics to become a genuine political force.
In the
US, the message and language of the Occupy movement echoed in the campaign that
turned the independent, radical senator Bernie Sanders into a credible challenger
for the Democratic Party’s nomination for president.
There was
considerable overlap between the UK’s anti-tuition fee marchers and those who
surged into the Labour Party to back the anti-establishment Jeremy Corbyn for
leader. But when Corbyn ‘relaunched’ himself for 2017, his language — at least on Twitter — started to mirror not Sanders, but
Trump, repeating over and over again that “the system” was “rigged”.
“Sometimes
protest movements that step into the formal electoral system do indeed find it
is rigged against them.”
In Hong
Kong, in September 2014, proposed changes to the electoral system brought
protesters, many of them students, onto the streets. They camped out in the
business district, channeling the US’ Occupy Wall Street to form Occupy
Central. As the standoff — and ultimately, clashes — with the police escalated, the umbrellas that many
carried became a symbol of the movement.
Those
protests were eventually dispersed, but they simmered all through 2015 and into
2016, occasionally boiling over into more confrontations. As the second
anniversary of the protests approached, though, many of those who had been at
the vanguard of the movement had to admit defeat. Beijing’s grip continued to
tighten, the Party-appointed chief executive, CY Leung, offered no concessions.
In the
words of one protester, who later became a candidate for a new political party
contesting Hong Kong’s September Legislative Council elections: “Occupy failed.
It achieved nothing.”
Even the
protesters that won seats found they were restricted in their ability to
exercise any kind of power; several have been challenged by the government and
face disqualification. Their foray into democracy seems to have done little but
widen the gap between the protests and the state.
Worldwide,
people are finding that gap insurmountable, creating an odd dynamic between
formal democratic mechanisms and protest, made stranger by the fact that many
young people are apparently losing faith in democracy and in democratic
institutions. Recent research by two political scientists — Yascha Mounk from Harvard, and Roberto Stefan Foa
from the University of Melbourne — found that globally, younger
people are less convinced by the importance of democracy than their parents’
generation; they were also more accepting of authoritarian measures, such as
military control of governments.
Fewer
than 30% of Americans born since 1980 say that living in a democracy is
‘essential’; more than 20% born since 1970 say that the country’s democratic
system is ‘bad’ or ‘very bad’. Mounk and Foa observed the same patterns — a phenomenon that they call ‘democratic
deconsolidation’ — in the UK, the Netherlands,
Sweden, Australia, and New Zealand.
 |
| Source: World Values Survey, USA, 2011. Percentage stating that “having a strong leader who does not have to bother with parliament and elections” was “Fairly Good” or “Very Good”. |
As Murer
said, it is hard to separate this loss of faith in democracy and democratic
institutions from the sense that government no longer listens, and that
protest’s power has dwindled.
“For the
most part, at least in my own research, I’ve found that a lot of young people
have very little regard for institutions in general,” says Murer. “They think
that those institutions don’t work, or are corrupt. In thinking so, they look
for alternate means of expression. Sometimes that’s through direct action,
sometimes that’s through protest or demonstrations. The idea that, to use the
term that Donald Trump keeps using, that the system is rigged, I think for a
lot of young people that feels like a great reality.
“We are
headed into uncharted territory of very new challenges for democratic
institutions, where we will really see how resilient they may be. Is there a
way for the voice of average people to stand up against the very entrenched
corporate interests that have now permeated Western politics… Or do we see
direct action groups themselves replace a kind of politics?”
