Had enough of never-ending disruptive political protests? You are not alone. But besides being annoying, there is a subversive purpose to the disruption and disorder, and we would be wise to take notice.
A perceptive 1960s far-left (SDS) radical once observed about his protest movement, “The issue is never the issue; the issue is always the revolution.” The asserted issue is pretextual, but the pretext’s protest power is leveraged to serve a greater goal.
That Alinsky-esque guideline, however, needs one key refinement: It is true of left-wing protest only. When the right assembles, the issue protested usually is the issue.
That is a useful lens through which to examine mobocracy movements in the U.S., Israel, and much of the Western world. Mob disruption is a reliable component of leftist protest. It should not be mistaken for mere over-exuberance; it is the point of the protest. Its intent is to strategically destabilize.
Right-wing protests generally appeal for preservation or restoration of specific eroded rights. They thus are direct and straightforward, even quaintly so.
Consider a sample of right-wing (or at least non-leftist) protests. The Tea Party protests, for instance, emerged not to destroy any system, but to call on President Obama and Congress to adhere to America’s founding principles of limited government, fiscal responsibility, and constitutionalism. Israeli protests opposing disengagement from Gaza or ceding the Golan Heights were designed not to topple a government, but to stop recklessly risky policies. Canada’s 2022 Freedom Convoy involved cross-border truckers, who spent their workdays alone in the cabs of their trucks, protesting mandatory COVID vaccinations and other COVID mandates. They were, per their anthem, standing guard to keep Canada glorious and free from intrusive government overreach. No revolution, no mobs, no destruction — they likely left the streets cleaner than they found them.
Leftism, however, is a Marxist religion, and disruptive protest its sacrament. The left sees its mission in big terms. It focuses on supposed “systemic” issues of alleged injustice and purported power imbalances, such as perceived racism, the white patriarchy, colonialism, inequity, or income inequality. (Or Judaism/Zionism, but that requires its own column.) No mere policy tweak can solve such issues.
The left-wing impulse is thus revolutionary; leftists drive toward dividing and dismantling existing power structures, then imposing their ideas of equity and “justice” through redistribution of wealth and power — not infrequently to themselves. (When they are in power, disruptive protests magically disappear.) Disruption is a necessary and strategic part of their protest: They aim to attack, undermine and even topple the existing order and authority, no matter how popular, just or democratically chosen they may be. Hence the roadblocks, strikes, vandalism, physical intimidation, occupation of public spaces, and defacing symbols of authority, from statues to courthouses. Violence works. Chaos is justified and upheaval necessary when doing the all-important holy work of upending existing power structures.
The poisonous language employed by the protesting left adds to the subversion and corrodes societal cohesion. E Pluribus Unum? When every police officer is a racist, every ICE agent Gestapo, every conservative a fascist, every right-wing leader a dictator, every Zionist a genocidal colonialist — and everyone who objects canceled — common ground disappears. Not a lot of Unum can survive that.
It is useful to compare the protests movements in Israel and the U.S. Israel, since the re-ascension of P.M. Netanyahu’s right-wing coalition nearly three years ago, has endured an unending wave of protests from the left. They are well funded, coordinated, aggressive, and destabilizing, featuring crippling strikes and shutdowns of airports and major highways. For a year, they protested supposedly against the threat to “democracy” posed by an American-styled judicial reform, but essentially against government under Netanyahu. Protest leaders even destabilized the military, inciting thousands of IDF officers (including pilots) to refuse call-ups for reserve duty until the protesters got their way.
The shock of October 7, 2023 generated a short protest reprieve (though it is still taboo to ask to what degree those refusals impeded military readiness), but even with the country at war ever since, the same activists reignited the protests under new banners, now purportedly to end the Gaza war and negotiate the release of remaining hostages at any cost — and, as always, to end Netanyahu’s elected leadership. The permanent ambush harassing Netanyahu and his aides and their families at their homes recently escalated to setting fire to cars, trash bins, and tires, forcing the emergency evacuation of residential buildings. This isn’t politics; it is a power play. And not a democratic one.
Tellingly, Israel’s anti-Netanyahu attorney general refused to allow police to enforce order or to arrest lawbreaking protesters, declaring, “There can be no effective protest without disturbing the public order.” (Think about that.) Speakers and interviewees from the protest movement — including anti-Netanyahu former prime ministers — proclaim that for Israel, “the enemy” is not Hamas, not Hezb’allah, not Iran, “but Netanyahu!” Protesters even fired marine flares (burning at 2,800 degrees F) at the prime minister’s home. It matters little whether the protest is ostensibly about hostages, judicial reform, or objections to the “Crime Minister.” Intimidation and disruption of the governing order are the tactic of choice and risk no more than token punishment.
U.S. protests — particularly those condemning Israel’s supposed Gaza “genocide” while cheering for the Jewish State’s extermination — are similarly notable for their thuggery, disruption, and occupation of buildings and campuses and intimidation of opponents. Dittos for the “Occupy” groups, Extinction Rebellion, Black Lives Matter, and whichever other “social justice” cause cloaks a Marxist core. Administrations are either on board with the neo-brownshirts or too cowed to enforce order.
Antifa torches courthouses across the country and attacks police. Black Lives Matter ludicrously calls to “defund the police” and launches nationwide “anti-racism” mayhem, property destruction, looting, shooting, and statue-toppling. Activists threaten and intimidate Trump administration officials and conservative Supreme Court justices. They shoot at law enforcement and conservative politicians and pundits. These are hardly the behaviors of reformers; they are the tactics of revolutionaries attacking that which undergirds public order. And so long as there are few consequences for these actions, these revolutionary tactics will only become more extreme. Woe to any dissenters.
“Law and order” are the pillars upholding well functioning societies; lawlessness and disorder are tools to weaken those supports. Disrupting, sowing chaos, and threatening further breakdowns serve as leftist extortion to force political concessions unachievable through ordinary democratic processes. Without coercive disruption, the left’s agenda would be left solely to the judgment of ordinary voters, justifiably skeptical of broader leftist ambitions.
Free societies protect honorable dissent as a fundamental right, but leftist protests are dishonorable to the degree they are coercively disruptive and deceptively presented. Using coercion and disruption to make political gains abuses and short-circuits the very democratic process which grants the freedom to protest.
The left finds deception necessary. Not every protester or sympathizer has radical intentions, so the protests are presented as moral imperatives — justice, equity, democracy — precisely to be more popularly attractive. When marketed individually as trendy causes — stopping claimed genocide, assaults on the Judiciary, police brutality, environmental catastrophe, fascism — organized opposition is reflexive and garners popular support. But the lofty-sounding slogans on the placards are deceptive. They are benign-sounding placeholders for the unstated, broader leftist project and underlying narrative: that American and/or Israeli government is fundamentally broken, and that nothing short of radical reordering will bring the required changes.
After all, as Sun Tzu wrote in The Art of War, “all warfare is based on deception.” And disruptive and destabilizing leftist protest is a weapon of political-cultural warfare.
Don’t expect any help understanding protest dynamics from our profoundly uncurious mainstream media and oh, so serious pundits. Left-leaning themselves, they present the protests superficially, solemnly nodding in agreement with those protesting the proclaimed injustice du jour. Rather than confront uncomfortable questions raised by protestor aggression and violence, they blur the fundamental difference between “peaceful protest” and “mostly peaceful protest.” Wittingly or dimwittingly, they serve as the demonstrators’ megaphone, parroting their talking points and deflecting any suspicion that the protests may have broader goals.
Disruption is the very purpose of leftist protest. It aims to challenge authority and knock the existing order off-balance. That SDS radical understood: Beneath the surface, the real issues are revolution and power.
Keep those real motives in mind the next time a leftist demonstration subverts public order.
Abe Katsman is an American attorney and political commentator living in Israel. He serves as Counsel to Republicans Overseas Israel.
Image via Flickr, CC BY-SA 2.0 (cropped).