I think you're giving your opponents too much credit. There are definitely some who would use extreme slogans only to fall back on moderate positions, but for the most part, I think the typical person using slogans like "Abolish the police" either (A) really meant it and only fell back on a moderate position to try to look better, or (B) did not care about substantive positions to begin with, with the more likely option being B.
Re: Malcolm X, he was definitely too critical of the golden era of the Civil Rights Movement. "Stop singing, start swinging," dismissing the Civil Rights Act of 1964 on the grounds that you shouldn't have to coerce people into "loving" you, etc.
Plus, as Bayard Rustin said in his post-assassination tribute, X didn't really know much economics.
But he was also an amazing leader who was developing in an interesting direction, away from the no-win politics of the Nation of Islam and towards something more like egalitarianism. And to your point in the piece, when Malcolm X reflects on his experiences at the NOI, he does NOT sound like a modern critic of respectability politics. There's a lot of emphasis on cleaning up, wearing suits, not committing crimes, etc. -- it's super jarring to juxtapose that with 2010s movement rhetoric.
You should have at least mentioned some of the more recent research that contradicts Shor's 2020 post. Like this 2019 paper published in the top political science journal written by researchers at Harvard, NYU, and UC Merced which found the 1992 LA riot "caused a marked liberal shift in policy support at the polls."
I would note that the 1992 LA riot study was purely observational, it just looked at changes in voting patterns between 1990 and 1992. Wasow (2020) mentioned in OP was quasi-experimental so I give it more weight.
To my knowledge, Wasow (2020) is the only quasi-experimental study looking at real-world violent protests. There are also some other observational studies like the LA riot study, and some lab experiments where e.g. they show people fake news articles of violent or nonviolent protests and ask them if they support the protesters' cause. See Orazani et al. (2021) (https://mdickens.me/materials/Protest%20Meta-Analysis.pdf) for a meta-analysis of lab experiments, which found that peaceful protests increased support (d = 0.25) and violent protests marginally decreased support (d = –0.03).
The Enos et al. paper was partly quasi-experimental too. They did a difference-in-differences analysis, comparing changes in support for public schools vs. changes in support for universities. And they measured support by looking at votes for ballot propositions.
(To make this work, the authors have to assume that public schools "are associated with African Americans," whereas universities aren't.)
Protestors lighting shit on fire is stupid, but Trump illegally federalized the National Guard and deployed US Marines to the protests. The next Democrat President must be crazy, meaning indefinitely detaining every Republican responsible for the CECOT flights at Guantanamo Bay, revoking the visas of any workers at conservative institutions, impounding any funds going to conservative universities, targetting conservative law firms and the ones that caved by offering pro bono services to Trump via Executive Order, deploying military platoons to "guard" the homes of anybody involved in illegally deploying the National Guard or US military for domestic policing. Without reciprocating these norm violations, Republicans will only be more emboldened because they know Democrats won't hold them accountable. And this is assuming e.g. Trump doesn't call in the army to prevent people from voting "illegally" in the midterms or in 2028, which would just end our democracy.
a lot of left-liberal norms basically make sense if you’re moderating an internet forums. for example, “don’t tone police”, “censorship is good and necessary”, “it’s not my job to educate you”. as a moderation strategy, all of these actually improve intra-left internet discussions in an environment where bad faith right wing trolls occasionally show up. it’s just a disaster to carry these unexamined into an entire real world political movement.
Your political posts are often vague. You don't actually identify the groups in any systematic fashion, which makes your criticism hard to evaluate.
If you go to the "No Kings" partners page (https://www.nokings.org/partners), you'll find a bunch of "leftist/liberal" organizations, including the ACLU, Bernie Sanders organization, climate organizations, labor unions and so forth. If that is not the "activist left" what exactly is the "activist left" you're complaining about? Insane people on Twitter?
The "anti-ICE movement" is nascent and inchoate. There's less organization, so of course it is more undisciplined.
I find it revealing that you don't identify any of the groups involved or any of their demands, if at all. So there's no attempt to analyze the ideology of either protests.
The main thing you're complaining about is not ideology per se, but rather the level of organization.
While I think people on the left do have an optics problem, especially around 2020, I think you make a good point in this specific instance of the anti-ICE riots. It’s not like there’s an organization of people demanding a reversal to the Mexican Cession that started the protests.
My hypothesis is that people are mainly driven, in this instance, by viral online reactions that defended the protests.
If this hypothesis is true, however, it would be bizarre that the median American voter judges the left by what internet celebrities and viral posts say, but they don’t think it’s alarming when the Republican nominee for president defends overriding the Constitution.
I’m curious if any other commenters think this is true and what can be done about it.
The problem is quite complicated. There will always be hotheads and ranters. If you spend all your time denouncing them, it plays into the hands of right-wing framing. If you don't spend all your time denouncing them, the right-wingers smear everyone with the same brush. It's impossible to denounce one's way out of this.
It seems intuitive that causes for which non-violence seems likely to work enough for people to try it, are more hopeful than ones for which campaigners feel compelled to employ violence. You need to adjust for this skew and ask yourself about the initial plausibility of victory.
The discussions around tone policing are frustrating because, as with a number of other associated concepts (like privilege) they're carrying over ideas that have real value in the right context to efforts at advocacy where they can potentially be counterproductive. If in a meeting planning a protest, someone personally affected by the issue expresses a view in an extreme/hostile/emotional manner, it may be reasonable to call out criticisms of them as tone policing if that's what they are. This doesn't mean that there's an obligation to take the angriest and most extreme ideas expressed at the meeting as the motto of the protest regardless of their impact on the goals.
I think the greatest slogan of all time is "I like Ike." Impossible to misinterpret how the speaker felt about Eisenhower. People on the left need an equivalent slogan.
Unless there's some other name for it already, I'm going to refer to a fallacy that's a bit of a cross between the weak man variant of the straw man fallacy and the motte-and-bailey fallacy, as the "dull man fallacy".
It involves holding up some poorly considered take as if it were authoritative or representative of considered stances for a concept, and attacking that in an attempt to discredit the concept as a whole. Often unintentionally and unknowingly. The dull man's take is something that is actually expressed by people (often a vocal minority but sometimes the general public) but not maintained by reasonable people who are suitably informed and intelligent.
Here the dull man position is along the lines of: "any request that people tone down their impassioned rhetoric is tone policing, and tone policing is bad".
While a sensible version would be: "tone policing is when you try to dismiss people's positions by criticizing their emotional tone instead of their arguments, which is fallacious and/or disingenuous".
In this case the notion being attacked is so far removed from the traditional understanding of the term (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tone_policing) that the article is talking about something else entirely, leading to some very strange blanket statements about how the term is used.
“The only reason people hate it is because they care more about signaling to their leftist friends than achieving their political aims. “. I think you diagnosis is right, which is fundamentally why your plea will fall on deaf ears. It is the rest of us that must stand up to these narcissists.
I agree with this post, buuuuuuuut it’s complicated slightly by the Radical Flank Effect. The research org Social Change Lab has done a bunch of interesting research into what does and doesn’t work in social movements — TL;DR, sometimes doing things most people think is crazy and bad helps the cause. But it’s not like the Waymo burners are making a research-informed strategic decision. If their tactics are net positive (which I doubt) it’s by accident. I think we can all agree that social movement organisers should be more pragmatic and evidence-based than they are in almost all cases
I agree with your overall message, but not with your application of the principle to the No Kings protests. At the start of your post, I thought you were going to criticize No Kings. That protest was accusing the current administration of defying the Supreme Court, dissapearing people, and deporting Americans, all of which is just as ridiculous as ACAB. Seeing those kinds of lies yet again as the headlines of a liberal protest notably increased the level of disgust I feel at the Democratic party.
Many movements do succeed from violent revolutions, though. What do you think explains that? Maybe because they succeeded by force, but many of these movements were frequently popular (Nazism, Communism, American Revolution)
I think you're giving your opponents too much credit. There are definitely some who would use extreme slogans only to fall back on moderate positions, but for the most part, I think the typical person using slogans like "Abolish the police" either (A) really meant it and only fell back on a moderate position to try to look better, or (B) did not care about substantive positions to begin with, with the more likely option being B.
Re: Malcolm X, he was definitely too critical of the golden era of the Civil Rights Movement. "Stop singing, start swinging," dismissing the Civil Rights Act of 1964 on the grounds that you shouldn't have to coerce people into "loving" you, etc.
Plus, as Bayard Rustin said in his post-assassination tribute, X didn't really know much economics.
But he was also an amazing leader who was developing in an interesting direction, away from the no-win politics of the Nation of Islam and towards something more like egalitarianism. And to your point in the piece, when Malcolm X reflects on his experiences at the NOI, he does NOT sound like a modern critic of respectability politics. There's a lot of emphasis on cleaning up, wearing suits, not committing crimes, etc. -- it's super jarring to juxtapose that with 2010s movement rhetoric.
You should have at least mentioned some of the more recent research that contradicts Shor's 2020 post. Like this 2019 paper published in the top political science journal written by researchers at Harvard, NYU, and UC Merced which found the 1992 LA riot "caused a marked liberal shift in policy support at the polls."
https://www.cambridge.org/core/services/aop-cambridge-core/content/view/C9DD76149BBA4D6854B0B64BA37F0C6D/S0003055419000340a.pdf/can_violent_protest_change_local_policy_support_evidence_from_the_aftermath_of_the_1992_los_angeles_riot.pdf
Thanks, fixed!
I would note that the 1992 LA riot study was purely observational, it just looked at changes in voting patterns between 1990 and 1992. Wasow (2020) mentioned in OP was quasi-experimental so I give it more weight.
To my knowledge, Wasow (2020) is the only quasi-experimental study looking at real-world violent protests. There are also some other observational studies like the LA riot study, and some lab experiments where e.g. they show people fake news articles of violent or nonviolent protests and ask them if they support the protesters' cause. See Orazani et al. (2021) (https://mdickens.me/materials/Protest%20Meta-Analysis.pdf) for a meta-analysis of lab experiments, which found that peaceful protests increased support (d = 0.25) and violent protests marginally decreased support (d = –0.03).
The Enos et al. paper was partly quasi-experimental too. They did a difference-in-differences analysis, comparing changes in support for public schools vs. changes in support for universities. And they measured support by looking at votes for ballot propositions.
(To make this work, the authors have to assume that public schools "are associated with African Americans," whereas universities aren't.)
Protestors lighting shit on fire is stupid, but Trump illegally federalized the National Guard and deployed US Marines to the protests. The next Democrat President must be crazy, meaning indefinitely detaining every Republican responsible for the CECOT flights at Guantanamo Bay, revoking the visas of any workers at conservative institutions, impounding any funds going to conservative universities, targetting conservative law firms and the ones that caved by offering pro bono services to Trump via Executive Order, deploying military platoons to "guard" the homes of anybody involved in illegally deploying the National Guard or US military for domestic policing. Without reciprocating these norm violations, Republicans will only be more emboldened because they know Democrats won't hold them accountable. And this is assuming e.g. Trump doesn't call in the army to prevent people from voting "illegally" in the midterms or in 2028, which would just end our democracy.
a lot of left-liberal norms basically make sense if you’re moderating an internet forums. for example, “don’t tone police”, “censorship is good and necessary”, “it’s not my job to educate you”. as a moderation strategy, all of these actually improve intra-left internet discussions in an environment where bad faith right wing trolls occasionally show up. it’s just a disaster to carry these unexamined into an entire real world political movement.
Your political posts are often vague. You don't actually identify the groups in any systematic fashion, which makes your criticism hard to evaluate.
If you go to the "No Kings" partners page (https://www.nokings.org/partners), you'll find a bunch of "leftist/liberal" organizations, including the ACLU, Bernie Sanders organization, climate organizations, labor unions and so forth. If that is not the "activist left" what exactly is the "activist left" you're complaining about? Insane people on Twitter?
The "anti-ICE movement" is nascent and inchoate. There's less organization, so of course it is more undisciplined.
I find it revealing that you don't identify any of the groups involved or any of their demands, if at all. So there's no attempt to analyze the ideology of either protests.
The main thing you're complaining about is not ideology per se, but rather the level of organization.
While I think people on the left do have an optics problem, especially around 2020, I think you make a good point in this specific instance of the anti-ICE riots. It’s not like there’s an organization of people demanding a reversal to the Mexican Cession that started the protests.
My hypothesis is that people are mainly driven, in this instance, by viral online reactions that defended the protests.
If this hypothesis is true, however, it would be bizarre that the median American voter judges the left by what internet celebrities and viral posts say, but they don’t think it’s alarming when the Republican nominee for president defends overriding the Constitution.
I’m curious if any other commenters think this is true and what can be done about it.
FYI, it's worth reading contemporary views of MLK Jr.
https://www.cbr.com/martin-luther-king-jr-cartoons-depictions-1960s-media/
The problem is quite complicated. There will always be hotheads and ranters. If you spend all your time denouncing them, it plays into the hands of right-wing framing. If you don't spend all your time denouncing them, the right-wingers smear everyone with the same brush. It's impossible to denounce one's way out of this.
It seems intuitive that causes for which non-violence seems likely to work enough for people to try it, are more hopeful than ones for which campaigners feel compelled to employ violence. You need to adjust for this skew and ask yourself about the initial plausibility of victory.
The discussions around tone policing are frustrating because, as with a number of other associated concepts (like privilege) they're carrying over ideas that have real value in the right context to efforts at advocacy where they can potentially be counterproductive. If in a meeting planning a protest, someone personally affected by the issue expresses a view in an extreme/hostile/emotional manner, it may be reasonable to call out criticisms of them as tone policing if that's what they are. This doesn't mean that there's an obligation to take the angriest and most extreme ideas expressed at the meeting as the motto of the protest regardless of their impact on the goals.
I think the greatest slogan of all time is "I like Ike." Impossible to misinterpret how the speaker felt about Eisenhower. People on the left need an equivalent slogan.
Unless there's some other name for it already, I'm going to refer to a fallacy that's a bit of a cross between the weak man variant of the straw man fallacy and the motte-and-bailey fallacy, as the "dull man fallacy".
It involves holding up some poorly considered take as if it were authoritative or representative of considered stances for a concept, and attacking that in an attempt to discredit the concept as a whole. Often unintentionally and unknowingly. The dull man's take is something that is actually expressed by people (often a vocal minority but sometimes the general public) but not maintained by reasonable people who are suitably informed and intelligent.
Here the dull man position is along the lines of: "any request that people tone down their impassioned rhetoric is tone policing, and tone policing is bad".
While a sensible version would be: "tone policing is when you try to dismiss people's positions by criticizing their emotional tone instead of their arguments, which is fallacious and/or disingenuous".
In this case the notion being attacked is so far removed from the traditional understanding of the term (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tone_policing) that the article is talking about something else entirely, leading to some very strange blanket statements about how the term is used.
“The only reason people hate it is because they care more about signaling to their leftist friends than achieving their political aims. “. I think you diagnosis is right, which is fundamentally why your plea will fall on deaf ears. It is the rest of us that must stand up to these narcissists.
I agree with this post, buuuuuuuut it’s complicated slightly by the Radical Flank Effect. The research org Social Change Lab has done a bunch of interesting research into what does and doesn’t work in social movements — TL;DR, sometimes doing things most people think is crazy and bad helps the cause. But it’s not like the Waymo burners are making a research-informed strategic decision. If their tactics are net positive (which I doubt) it’s by accident. I think we can all agree that social movement organisers should be more pragmatic and evidence-based than they are in almost all cases
I agree with your overall message, but not with your application of the principle to the No Kings protests. At the start of your post, I thought you were going to criticize No Kings. That protest was accusing the current administration of defying the Supreme Court, dissapearing people, and deporting Americans, all of which is just as ridiculous as ACAB. Seeing those kinds of lies yet again as the headlines of a liberal protest notably increased the level of disgust I feel at the Democratic party.
Many movements do succeed from violent revolutions, though. What do you think explains that? Maybe because they succeeded by force, but many of these movements were frequently popular (Nazism, Communism, American Revolution)