Protests and Liberalism

By Justin Rogers-Cooper

In order to understand what happened during the G-20 Pittsburgh protests last month, one must frame the clashes between police and protesters through the lens of martial law. This martial law framework lies outside the typical liberal political lens, which necessarily sees public demonstration as ineffective and the police response as excessive. For the liberal, both are written off as marginal breaks with the normal social sphere. For the liberal, neither the protests nor the police reveal themselves as symbolic of larger social conflicts, but rather as side-shows where the extremes clash. The Pittsburgh Protests don't concern his paycheck.

Let us take the proverbial window-smashing protester. The liberal will criticize protests that break glass windows in order to justify the police response in the context of protecting personal and corporate property, as if smashing windows were intended literally and not symbolically. By definition, the liberal can’t support anything but the meekest forms of dissent. This attracts people to liberalism, and to the Democratic Party. It’s safe and it pays off, though taxes go to the wars and to environmental regulation. The liberal bargains by shaking his head at the former, and clutching at the latter to help him fall asleep at night. For the conservative, the reverse is true.

This is where liberalism quietly rests with its conservative neighbor: they are both secretly allied with the police, and perhaps even the police state, because the liberal way of life depends upon the current economic system as much as his conservative frenemy. They are united in their belief that capitalism is inevitable and therefore can only be reformed through bureaucratic oversight and good faith. Like the conservative, the liberal basically believes that human beings can’t cooperate in order to produce life on our current scales of production.

For the liberal, this degree of infrastructure, commodity exchange, capital flows, traffic regulation, employment market, violent crime, private philanthropy, and technological innovation can only exist through a political system that tolerates force on either end. On the top, he subsidizes authoritarian corporate institutions that understand themselves as legal human beings. On the bottom, he ignores the “stop and frisk” police tactics in black urban neighborhoods, which are based on the constitutionally suspect “broken windows” theory. This theory is essentially a police tactic that legitimizes random police searches in the name of preventive crime. This tactic is itself a localized precedent for martial law, and is only the latest in a long trajectory of constitutional abuses against African-Americans. But the liberal tolerates broken windows because, as the name implies, it keeps his windows uncracked. It works.

The liberal today frets because he can't remember an alternative. What’s disappeared from the so-called western world since 1989 is any form of alternative messianic belief in another end to western history, though to say it was there since the 1970s might be a stretch, too. Messianic movements still exist among the religious because they are arguably more organized and more coherent than political parties. At least their followers are passionate in daily cycles, rather than in election cycles. Not long ago there were secular religious movements here in the United States; there was black nationalism, feminism, and democratic socialism. Poets like Allen Ginsberg and Ed Sanders wrote odes that directly pointed to political problems. The Black Power movement and the Black Arts Movement funneled forms of expression that exploded a decade later into hip-hop and rap.

Movements have vanished because people no longer passionately believe in collective identities. The liberal is passionate about mostly and only himself. He styles himself in the vague codes of rebellion and laughs at The Daily Show - no offense to John Stewart intended here, really. He cares about shoes more than the fact that martial law occurred last month. There was no constitution. That's crazy, man.

There is barely an alternative left for him to chase as fashion. Forget flannel: the commercialization of counter-culture is an old story, but perhaps what’s unprecedented about the current era is the stunning lack of counter-culture left to colonize. Socialism can't catch on as a libertarian and conservative attack word because liberals have forgotten what it means. They're deaf to ideas outside the umbrella of capitalism, and thus can't really produce a coherent alternative counter-culture. Whatever "going green" means, it's liberal: so far no green spokesman besides those in The 11th Hour have proposed anything except smart consumption: hybrids, energy independence, recycling, organic food, whatever. Clothing and car ads have to continually channel earlier figures and music. Bono once argued about debt to the IMF. Pearl Jam once challenged Ticketmaster. Now they have a distribution deal with Target.

The end of the Vietnam War must have exhausted a generation of protesters. Since then, neither white middle-class college students nor the black working class has been able to organize anything near the power of the national movements at work in the 1960s. In ways that are totally unlike their parents, they’re on drugs and drinking: not to free their minds, but to numb them. They post videos on Youtube and write blogs in the hopes that they get an agent or a book deal. Deep down, the liberal mostly wants to reproduce himself and get paid for it.

While it’s worth debating the reasons why this happened, it appears evident that in the wake of ‘movement withdrawal’ the neo-liberal era created a new form of voting liberal: complacent, patient, and, until last year, relatively profligate in his use of credit. The G-20 protests can’t stir him because he fears the protesters as much as the police. He will rally against the war, but not against the system that lent him money for college. Where the liberal and conservative disagree most is in tone. The liberal believes that the working class needs its charity, and that the ruling class sometimes needs it, too. This is why the Obama administration continued to bailout the corporations and attempt health care reform. The liberal can’t decide what he believes, since he most of all believes in his being happy. The neo-liberal era made him happy. He worries for the future.

By contrast, the passionate protester sometimes smashes objects because she desires a break with the past; she smashes property in order to protest an economic system that leaves half of the population without it. The protester dares to believe in another order of things. Whether efficacious or not, the protester believes she must address an urgent conflict with a loud voice. The protester believes that the human voice possesses some singular power that can amplify that urgency in real time, in real space. The protester believes in the logic of the strike: that if bodies in the streets can stop a flow, then their message becomes invested with power. This power is a way to center attention on messages that exist outside the stratosphere of corporate advertising and media. This is in part why digital modes of liberal engagement – like forwarding petitions – are simultaneously attractive and ineffective. On the one hand, they're easy. They flow. On the other hand, the petition doesn’t threaten anything because it doesn’t stop anything. The protest and the strike dare to stop things.

At its most basic level, the right to assembly is a cheap way to effect real power because one can force someone’s attention, if they’ll only look. One cannot effectively send an online petition for things “to stop” at the G-20 Summit. The meetings will go on anyway, sure, and without any opposing points of view in the room. The protester believes she can be heard if only she can get near the spaces where power resides – in this case, Pittsburgh. Protesters have always believed this. It’s a way to ‘get in the room’ with powerful people who would never otherwise meet with you.

This is what the liberal resents about protesting, and what confuses him. He hates the interruption to his routine only slightly more then the interruption to his paradigm. He hates being late for work. He fears his windows getting smashed. He’s concerned about the noise. He feels superior to the protester because he believes himself to be more rational. It is the emotions of the protester he finds so annoying. He finds her passion melodramatic. He believes that compromise and conversation through electoral participation work, or should work, or will work, if only the system functioned. He refuses to believe that the dysfunctional system is working the way it's designed: that is, chaotically, with regular, profitable catastrophes.

Perhaps what he fears most is the sacrifice now involved in protest: to give up one’s body to the police, to dare to assemble, to be “taken away” to jail, to be “charged,” to be infected with the sludge of crime. The liberal doesn’t see himself as a criminal under any circumstances, even if the law that criminalizes protest is unjust. The liberal refuses to sacrifice his body for the cause.

And herein lies the contradiction of liberalism and protest: the liberal can’t justify civil disobedience if it means becoming a criminal. The liberal believes there must be a better way. Or perhaps he most of all fears losing the charms of his everyday life, or fears the humiliation of appearing in court, or fears what his parents will say. The liberal fears what this will do to his self-esteem, to his narrative of success, to his vague sense that he is “good” and those arrested are “bad.”

And so the liberal tolerates all, including martial law, including the militarization of the Homeland, and will tolerate it all until he loses everything, and only then will he protest -- and only then because his sacrifice will be necessary.