“No Ways Tired”

We have witnessed a resurgence of mass demonstrations and other public forms of political protest in the Trump era, but are protests becoming less effective and delegitimated—counterproductive, even—precisely because of their frequency, as Richard Ford maintains in “Protest Fatigue”? Granted, more and more of us may be, in the immortal words of Fannie Lou Hamer, “sick and tired of being sick and tired” and, at marches against ever more virulent manifestations of sexism and racism, signs like “I Can’t Believe I Still Have to Protest This Shit” evince a certain weariness and frustration among the dissenting masses. But, in this chapter, I argue that more, not less, protesting—by more people, in more places, on more occasions—is what we need now, since it can have a galvanizing, reinvigorating effect and be no less legitimate than past protests such as demonstrations for women’s suffrage and the March on Washington. Especially in the digital age, mass protests, far from sapping our energy and yielding diminishing returns, have the potential to tap and replenish the ever-renewable resources of hope and solidarity.

Protest Fatigue

Political protests and mass demonstrations have in the past been effective tools for social change. Ideal protests of the past emphasized issues that transcended normal politics and those that suggested the failure of the normal political process. They suggested that their protest was the result of an unusual threat and of extraordinary circumstances. But protest today has become commonplace and ineffective through overuse. This overuse has led to inconvenience, disruption, dilution of sympathy, and the undermining of liberal institutions. Furthermore, protests today are often self-gratifying exercises that are done for recreation, to relive nostalgia, and commonly "preach to the choir." For these reasons, contemporary political protest has lost widespread legitimacy. Suggestions are given for how they can regain this legitimacy.

Are Protests Good or Bad for Democracy?

Theorists disagree with one another about whether protests have beneficial or nefarious effects on democracy. I argue that protests can act as a corrective to several flaws in electoral democracy as a mechanism of representation and accountability. Protests can open participation to non-citizens and semi-citizens. They can introduce greater equality of citizen influence on governments. And they can help circumvent problems of voter myopia and of the multidimensionality of issues in elections. These beneficial effects are balanced against some threats to democratic practices of protests which critics correctly identify: their weakness as forums for deliberation, their potential to thwart legislation and actions of representative institutions, and their potential to oust elected governments. It’s unimaginable that a free society would ban protests; but organizers should consider ways of improving the deliberative quality of demonstrations and refrain from interrupting what may be delicate electoral equilibria.

On the Strike and Democratic Protest

Many people recognize that strikes have important instrumental or indirect democratic benefits, especially ones resulting from their effect on economic and political inequality. Meanwhile, some theorists have made robust arguments recently for the republican value of strikes, showing how strikers’ cessation of labor resists two forms of domination linked to employment. In this chapter, I push beyond both these arguments to show that strikes are in themselves democratically valuable forms of collective action—and that they are illustrative, even exemplary, of important things we should remember about all forms of democratic protest. The democratic case for the strike, I contend, rests on recognizing the strike as more than just cessation or refusal—as a positive statement about the effort, skill, and agency of workers, and as a multifaceted collective action of a particular egalitarian kind. Strikes consist of workers striving to act together, on equal terms, building horizontal relations with each other, to resist economic domination and to achieve some rough sort of collective management of the terms of labor. And reflection on strikes and labor organizing reminds us of the significance of recognizing democratic protest as skillful and difficult political work.

No Justice, No Peace

This chapter defends a confrontational view of protest that puts civil and uncivil protest in a continuum and argues for the contextual legitimacy of uncivil protest. The chapter argues both against conservative views for which protests are legitimate only if previously authorized and in full conformity with law and order, and against liberal views that allow for civil disobedience but, either for principled or for strategic reasons, allow only for protests that remain civil. I argue that contexts of oppression warrant the use of incivility and mild forms of violence for protesting injustice. Elucidating the history of protests in sports, the activism of Act Up, and the counter-protests of Black Lives Matter, I argue that nonviolent movements of resistance can legitimately use incivility and mild forms of violence while still being committed to the mitigation of violence in the long run.

Uncivil Disobedience

There is a common tendency to categorize as civil disobedience acts of resistance that one approves of, even when the acts in question violate common marks of civility. This chapter proposes a different strategy, namely, to think about uncivil disobedience—to wit, principled lawbreaking that is covert, evasive, violent, or offensive. The first section explains the problems with the two main approaches to civil disobedience and sketches a basic conceptual account of uncivil disobedience. The rest of the chapter seeks to justify at least some forms of uncivil disobedience even in supposedly legitimate, liberal democratic states like ours. The second section argues that uncivil disobedience can do much of what civil disobedience does, while the third section argues that uncivil disobedience can do and say valuable things that civil disobedience cannot do or say. In particular, it identifies the potential value of incivility for subordinated members in democratic societies allegedly committed to mutual reciprocity.

Introduction

This chapter introduces the volume and its key themes of protest and dissent. It explains the tripartite structure and summarizes the main arguments of each chapter, drawing connections across the various chapters.

Defining Nonviolence as a Matter of Law and Politics

Recent years have seen the reinvigoration of disruptive political protest — from the Occupy Movement, to Black Lives Matter, to the Women’s Marches. These sorts of disruptive outdoor assemblies, including many of their tactics, have been central to American politics since the Founding, and have long been protected by the First Amendment. Nevertheless, legislatures around the country have been introducing and passing bills that render a wide swath of protest tactics unlawful precisely because they have been effective in drawing attention to claims and issues that typically fall off the legislative radar. More important, these legislative efforts are part of a broader erosion of fundamental democratic norms—from partisan redistricting to rewriting legislative procedures and traditions for judicial nominations—as well as the emerging pattern of attacking the free press and the loyalty of dissenters. Now more than ever, therefore, whatever our personal normative views on either the tactics of contemporary protesters or the parameters of current constitutional doctrine, it is our duty as a scholarly community to reaffirm that recent acts of protest and dissent operate well within the bounds of our American tradition of outdoor assembly and its constitutional protections.

Competing Theories of Nonviolent Politics

The contemporary literature on nonviolent politics relies upon a sharp distinction between strategic and principled nonviolence. Gandhi and King are associated with the latter, defined as a strict moral commitment to nonviolence that both scholars and activists view as unnecessary for the successful practice of nonviolent politics. I argue the distinction between strategic and principled nonviolence is misleading. It misunderstands the most distinctive feature of classical nonviolent politics, namely, how Gandhi and King tethered ethical practice—practices of self-discipline or suffering—to political strategy. This chapter reconstructs an alternative account of nonviolent action—nonviolence as disciplined action—and argues that it is also strategic in orientation but premised upon a different theory of politics and political action. Disciplined action is underpinned by a skeptical ontology of action which highlights the affective dynamics of action. I contrast this to the prevailing model of nonviolence as collective power, which focuses on techniques of mass mobilization and the generation of social power. I distinguish the conceptual logic of these competing theories of nonviolent politics and the differing forms of protest and dissent they recommend.

The Radical Possibilities of Protest

This chapter raises four questions about the capacity of Candice Delmas’s uncivil disobedience framework to understand more radical possibilities of protest. First, protest is important not simply for its capacity to communicate with the broader public, but for its constitutive and expressive function. Second, individual acts of protest cannot be divorced from the larger organizing and social movements in which they operate. Third, a civil disobedience framework may not be compatible with movements that seek structural political, economic, and social transformation. Fourth, elevating a particular form of lawbreaking over others may pose challenges for understanding contemporary movements that seek to denaturalize criminalization altogether.