Protests and Democracy

A lot has happened since our last conversation in late May, when we were primarily concerned with the consequences of the Covid-19 lockdowns. George Floyd’s gruesome death at the hands of Minneapolis police triggered massive, nationwide demonstrations against police brutality, institutional racism, and even against capitalism and the liberal foundations of our government. For the last month, many thousands of people have taken to the streets to express their anger at the status quo.

While public protests have a long and maybe even glorious history in the US, these protests diverge from that tradition in a number of ways. To start, they are ridiculously popular, with protests in every state and seemingly every city in the country. But as a widespread and grassroots movement, the protests are also relatively leaderless and spontaneous, compared to more tightly organized popular movements of the past, such as the 1963 March on Washington, or even the 2017 Women’s March. As a result, the protests bring together a huge coalition of people with a diversity of interests: some are concerned specifically with police reform, some want to abolish or replace police, and others want an entirely new society and government. There’s even disagreement among people who share policy preferences: some police reformers may believe that police must become “anti-racist,” while others may believe that policing can be effectively reformed without addressing racism; some who want to defund the police may be motivated primarily by anti-racist concerns, while some other defunders may be primarily motivated by a pre-existing commitment to socialism. Given this complexity, it may be too early to fully comprehend the substance of the protests, and it may be years before we really know what the protests accomplished.

But it’s not too early to ask some specific questions. Putting aside the grievances that motivate the protests, therefore, we’re interested in what it means to protest in the streets in 2020. When mostly left-leaning people are protesting in large cities governed by Democrats whom they presumably helped elect, what is going on with our politics?

Samarth: I think that’s a very reasonable question and something that maybe points to bigger breakdowns in our political process and the satisfaction of voters around the country. To me, when people take to the streets, especially in the midst of a pandemic, it’s a sign of deep-held frustrations. And dissatisfaction in the outcomes that their leaders have been able to accomplish. I also think protestors want to push their leaders to go further than they might have otherwise. If I were a governor or mayor and I saw, for multiple weeks, hundreds of thousands of my constituents taking to the streets in support of specific political goals, I’d take that pretty seriously as a failure of my leadership. But, Jay, do you think protests represent something else?

Jay: I actually think you’re mostly right about both of those factors — deeply frustrated people are trying to demonstrate their frustration, and the protests are moving political leaders to attempt to address racial and policing issues, probably pretty effectively. But that still raises questions. First, why are protestors frustrated with the leaders they presumably supported? Second, is pressuring public officials through street protests a legitimate form of pressure in a democracy?

Samarth: Let’s answer those one at a time. To me, you can support a candidate or a public official and be dissatisfied with their performance. But you’re right, that a protest is a pretty high bar to cross to register that dissatisfaction. Maybe it’s indicative of another breakdown in our political process. Maybe voters feel so disconnected from their representatives that they feel they have no other recourse, especially when a problem is deemed an emergency, than to take to the streets. I do think, in this context, being locked up at home, pent up anxiety about a pandemic that shows few signs of letting up, huge unemployment, the ease of collective action via technology like social media, and a host of other factors resulted in the protest.

Jay: I couldn’t blame anyone for feeling frustrated. I guess I’m more confused about how that frustration is oriented. For example, Democrats control every level of government in Minnesota and Minneapolis, and they have for decades. Yet Democrats also seem to be leading the protests, and are sympathetic to them. Why aren’t people frustrated specifically with Democrats?

Samarth: This dynamic seems related to the 2-party world we live in. “Democrats” are a huge tent. There are big swaths of young people, people of color, and otherwise politically liberal constituents who feel unrepresented by establishment, center-left, Democrats. People like Joe Biden and Nancy Pelosi on the national stage, but also versions of those leaders more locally. Protests on the street could be a version of these voters pushing these establishment Democrats to cater to their policy needs. Although who all participated in the protest is still a question journalists and academics are grappling with. Perhaps in a different world, these people would break off and form a different political home for themselves. I don’t think any of them are eager to seek refuge among Republicans, certainly.

Jay: That makes sense — I get frustrated that the protestors make some radical demands but still seem very willing to vote for Joe Biden, a guy who, in my opinion, has expressed some deeply ugly racial opinions in his past and is a notorious architect of the 90s mass incarceration law. But it may just be that the Democratic Party has done a much better job maintaining cohesion in 2020 in the face of an intra-party split similar to what the Republican Party experienced in 2016. Somehow the Democrats are having their own Trump-like insurgency while keeping Jeb Bush at the top of the ticket. When I think about it like that, I’m reluctantly impressed by — and grateful for? — the way Democrats brought their radical wing into the party, rather than letting the radical wing become the party, as Republicans seem to have done.

Samarth: Your next question was about whether this is a legitimate way to pressure political leaders. In some ways, I agree, protests do show a more serious level of breakdown and transgression (if citizens of a country can be said to be transgressing against their own country?). Normally, we would work within the 2 or 4 year cycles we have to elect officials, propose and change policy agendas and incrementally improve society. But, from what I can gather, huge numbers of people are unsatisfied with that process. And we certainly are not in normal times.

In extraordinary times, collective action, largely peaceful, seems like a good way to jolt our leaders awake. Government, at all levels, has been marred, especially in the last 30 years, with inaction, inefficacy, an inability to rise to the challenges of the 21st century. Society all around has been decreasing in social trust. In lieu of an international opponent around which to rally a national identity, we’ve adopted partisan identities and taken postures of fighting across a left-right spectrum, largely.

So, “legitimacy”, I guess I have a hard time nailing down an answer for. But effectiveness, it seems, is definitely a point of success for these protests so far, from what little evidence we have.

Jay: And maybe “legitimacy” is too loaded a word to argue over for the protests. I’m really more concerned with how they are connected to a functioning democracy. If the democratic processes of our government aren’t satisfying, it normally requires new office holders who will implement satisfying policies. The protests imply that the normal democratic processes aren’t sufficient for this moment. But for what moment are they sufficient?

If taking to the streets is available to any aggrieved group of constituents, what incentive does anyone have to put their energy into “normal” electoral politics?

Samarth: Ah, okay, I see. I think I understand what you’re getting at. I might think that the protests that happened this month were effective, and even legitimate, but I wouldn’t want to live in an America that required taking to the streets every month to get the laws and society I want. We made compromises to live in a certain kind of country, with certain rules and ways of governing. If we had to directly enact our policy preferences every time a problem came up in society, we’d have no time to raise children or go to work or do any of the other things that we, presumably, would rather be spending our time on.

I’m still not concerned about collective action breaking down the compact of living in America. They happened for a few weeks and they’ve largely subsided. Most of the organizing is turning to more “legit” electoral activity, given that it’s an election year. And people are going back to business as usual (which is still that we’re living in a pandemic).

If we start to live in a world where this happens all the time, for months at a time, that would be worrying indeed.

Jay: And of course you’re right — the democracy of the streets hasn’t replaced our old norms yet. But I see the protests as the debut of a popular new attitude. Everyone in the street, regardless of the justice of their cause, rejected the compromise you mentioned — for these protesting debutantes, the stability provided by certain un-democratic aspects of our republic is no longer worth the cost. We may eventually return to more traditional modes of expressing (or suppressing) the popular will, but it’s hard to see why we would when so many people have already rejected the rationale for doing so.

Samarth: A related place where this kind of conversation has been happening in the last few years, in America and elsewhere, is in Political Science related to the concept of “democratic backsliding”. This is basically a concept that says democracies face all sorts of dangers, from compromised free elections, to institutions with checks-and-balances going out of whack, to aggrandized executives, and, related to this discussion, populism.

Since 2017, the US has shown up on a number of lists as being in danger of democractic backsliding. Maybe what we’re seeing on the street as populism, is actually part-and-parcel of a larger suite of democratic backsliding. Diminishing trust in free and fair elections, a feeling that an aggrandized executive branch is not being held in check by the legislative or judicial branch, increasing economic inequality and social discontent, are all, perhaps precursors to protest activity. And protests are just one of the latest signs of democracy losing its legitimacy.