Protest and Politics

Some of you know me because you voted against me. Some of you know me because you voted for me. And just before I talk about the question of protest, I would say that my own experience is not just those two campaigns, but I’ve been involved in politics, local politics, for a long time. And I’ve also been very fascinated with protest and power, and been to many Tea Party events, as well as spent time at Occupy Wall Street on the legal team. And we can talk about some of the really interesting lessons that came out of that as well.
But thinking about this question about protest and politics, I want to introduce a somewhat cheap dichotomy; and those Thoreau scholars can beat me up later: There’s basically two — I think at least two — major strands from which civil disobedience and protest come in this country. And one strand I would identify with Thoreau, and the other with Martin Luther King, who of course also learned directly and indirectly from Thoreau. Thoreau’s essay, “On Civil Disobedience,” and King’s essay, “Letter from the Birmingham Jail,” being these two very different models.
And the thing that is so striking about King’s letter — First of all, the important thing about King’s letter is that he does not start with protest, but starts actually in the four-step process that he almost talks about as a time-tested process for protest. He starts with, first we collect the facts. Then we negotiate. Then we self-purify, and by self-purify he means prepare for the inevitable attacks. And then we take direct action. And negotiation is a central part of his story in “Letter from the Birmingham Jail,” in fact what he talks about in “Letter from the Birmingham Jail,” and then taking this very radical action. One of the things he talks about in “Letter from the Birmingham Jail” is the importance of dialogue as opposed to monologue. In King’s letter, he speaks from a place of profound morality, profound love, and the desire to create tension which then creates the possibility for power.
Thoreau was protesting slavery. And Thoreau’s civil disobedience is very much about himself and his discomfort with the fact of government and the fact of law itself. It’s a long letter, so I’m not going to go through all of it; but it’s mostly about how can he live with himself given what his government is doing. He asks himself, well, why don’t I engage in what Micah would want him to engage in, the laws, the electoral system. And he says — and this is the only part I’m going to quote: “As far as the ways the state has provided me for remedying the evil, I know of no such ways. They take too much time, and a man’s life will be gone.” Then he elaborates on this, saying, I don’t really want to be involved in this.
And so I see the sort of fundamental difference here is that one form and tradition of protest is profoundly political, in that is creating tension, it is collective, its goal is change; and the other form — and I say this with great admiration for Thoreau — the other form has more to do with himself and who he is and whether or not he can live with himself.
And in the past several decades I believe a lot of protest, and by no means all, but a lot of protest in this country has taken up a kind of lazy reading of King and then the spirit of Thoreau to make protest be about the self, what I can live with. And you hear this all the time. Just listen to your radio station, the story of somebody who’s newly involved in Indivisible. The story is, I could not live with it. I could not sit with it myself. It’s about people’s own need to resolve the tension between what the government is doing and what they are doing, which is very different from starting with a purpose — not with the self.
So one of the things that this does — there’s a lot of things this does — is that the Thoreau strain that fits also very well with the modern kind of consumer politics. And I’m sure many of you have been in a room — how many of you are involved in the Indivisible or a local group? — where people will say to you, You’ve gotta find the thing you’re passionate about and work on it, right? It sounds so good! Well that sounds great. It’s just like picking my favorite ice cream, right? But the truth is, the idea of starting with what you are most passionate about — I’m not saying there’s something wrong with that if it happens to align with the good; but as opposed to asking, where do you see the wrong? and what long-term strategic way you can engage in that — those are totally different kinds of questions. And there’s sort of consumer activism, consumer language that has infected a lot of protest, so it’s about ourselves, or about our expression, or about our own sense of passion or meaning, and not actually about taking on very serious people with incredible amounts of power — incredible amounts of power, both military and monetary power, charismatic power — and trying to actually change the way they behave so that people can live better. Those are real real differences.
The cheap answer to the question, having given sort of this cheap dichotomy, is that protest can be political, but not all protest is political; and that protest is political when it recognizes that it is not about the self, it is not about self-actualization, but about achieving some very real change in the material well-being and structures of society.
One of the great weaknesses of the consumer self-oriented way of thinking about protest is that it’s not too hard to get you off track if you have that kind of approach. So in politics we have a phrase that we call murder-suicide. I worked on Howard Dean’s presidential campaign in 2003, and Dick Gephardt performed a murder suicide. He attacked Howard Dean so strongly, because he was coming up on him, that both Gephardt and Dean fell to the bottom of the polls, and this guy Edwards, and John Kerry floated above them.
When I was at Occupy Wall Street I saw Bloomberg engage in a murder-suicide. Bloomberg wiped out Occupy in a totally irresponsible way, trashing people’s property. Bloomberg didn’t look good, but the effect was he changed the structure and the way that Occupy Wall Street was working from a debate about taking on the banks to taking on police practices in New York City. And part of the reason that was possible for him to do is that people in that moment said, what the police are doing is wrong. I can’t live with myself. I must protest this. I have to engage, instead of staying on the — and not all people — staying on the fundamental protest, which is the protest against concentrated financial power — or at least as I saw it. There was a radical shift.
And right now I believe we are in the middle of a major national murder-suicide with Trump, who repeatedly, repeatedly engages in a way that is so offensive and so profoundly disturbing that we feel like we must respond; otherwise we cannot live with ourselves. And in fact it’s not just that. It’s like I must, I must Tweet. I am not a good person, I am not a good person, I am not a good citizen if I have not Tweeted out my outrage about Trump’s response to the NFL. And you feel it, even in your little circle of friends. Like oh my gosh, I haven’t gone on Twitter today. What if I want to say something about the whales?
But it’s even worse now. We actually demand of our leaders that they themselves do the same thing. We demand that they go off-track. We demand that they respond to outrages; because if they are not responding to outrage, they are not in some ways expressing who they are, as opposed to actually rebuilding society and rebuilding another model besides the Trump model. And I very much fear that if all we do is build a series of blocks against the incredibly cruel and careless and incompetent and bigoted president that we now have, if all we do is protect against that, at the same time we are actually not rebuilding a politics that we can live by, we’ll have another kind of Trump character coming in.
So a few last things, and then we can talk. I want to have more of a conversation.
So I want to acknowledge — I feel like I’m Bill McKibben, saying, “It’s even worse than you think.“ And I think Micah might say the same thing. But the depth of the problem we face is not something that can be fixed by doing — as much as I have strong feelings about protest and the way that we can do protest far more strategically with the goal of winning as opposed to expressing. But the societal problems are deeper than just a slightly better activism or better protest. We actually have — and the president referred to some of these — but we have a society that is so profoundly disconnected that politics is very hard to do, politics in the sense of engaging and building power.
Sixty years ago in this country 20 percent of Americans from any class were presidents of their local volunteer association — presidents. In fact, one of the sayings was, We have a nation of presidents. Why do we need a president? If you go to the gravestones, cross-class, cross-race, you will see mention of Mom, daughter, member of this local volunteer association. It was so deep, people were so profoundly involved in a kind of politics — whether it’s the Elks’ Club, or the Moose Club — involved in politics that one out of five people had taken on a leadership role in organizing people on a regular basis. So I know a handful of you raised your hands saying you’re involved in Indivisible or other local groups. They’re can be annoying, right? People are strange, and there’s real battles to be won, won and fought, and you lose them, and there are strategy sessions, and you disagree. If one in five people in this country are engaging at that level, not in some kind of pure way, but in the annoying part of local politics, that’s a way I can imagine our country getting transformed; but that’s going to take a lot more than mere thinking about this as the Resistance. It’s actually going to take long-term work.
So because I am an organizer I do have to give you a hard time first. How many of you live in Dutchess County? How many of you have done any work for the 2018 Congressional race? How many of you worked on the 2017 county legislature race? Okay! I got some hands! Right now in this county there are county legislator races in a county that voted overwhelmingly for Hillary Clinton. Sorry, take away the overwhelmingly. Barely for Hillary Clinton, and the county legislature has almost three-quarters Republicans on it. The county executive is Republican. If we think about how we’re — not as expression — but how we’re creating, you’re going to be involved in your county legislature race, and that means really changing the way that we think. This isn’t about expression; this is about long-term, highly local, sometimes annoying, very social work. And to Roger’s point, that means going door to door, or meeting with people and confronting them, and meeting somebody says, I think you should have a voter ID for every person who’s voting, and engaging with that person, not turning them away.
So when I was thinking about this question about what is political and what is not political, what is not political is when the goal of allegedly political action is the self; and what is political is when there’s a willingness to engage, there’s a willingness to create tension, there’s a willingness to live in that tension; and the goal is actually change, not merely feeling like the soul is consistent with one’s ideals. Thank you.
Zephyr Teachout is one of America’s leading anticorruption scholars and activ- ists. She is an associate law professor at Fordham Law School and a senior fellow at the Hannah Arendt Center at Bard College. She received her BA from Yale, and a JD and MA in political science from Duke University. She has published two books: the edited volume Mousepads, Shoeleather, and Hope(Routledge, 2008), about internet organizing; and the award-winning Corruption in America: From Benjamin Franklin’s Snuff Box to Citizens United (Harvard University Press, 2014). Her articles and essays have been cited in courts around the country, including the Supreme Court, and she has written for the New York Times, Washington Post, Boston Globe, American Prospect, Democracy: A Journal of Ideas, the Nation, Politico, Daily Beast, and other news outlets.
