Another week has passed, which means the street theater geeks have found another foreign flag to parade through the streets of American cities. After the Trump administration authorized a strike on Iranian nuclear facilities, demonstrators waved the Iranian flag. Less than two weeks prior, rioters waved Mexican flags in Los Angeles while burning vehicles under the auspices of protesting against the enforcement of immigration laws.
The outrage du jour changes, but street theater is the M.O. of the anti-Trump resistance. Sometimes the cause is hatred of law enforcement, from local police departments to ICE. Sometimes it involves foreign disputes in the protesters’ home countries, from Palestine to Iran. Two weeks ago, Democrats staged a nationwide day of protest to voice their displeasure with Trump.
Protest theater has also become a favorite pastime of elected Democrats desperate for relevance. Earlier this month, Rep. LaMonica McIver, D-N.J., was charged with “forcibly impeding” federal officers at an ICE detention facility. The day after McIver was indicted, Sen. Alex Padilla, D-Calif., tried to get in on the attention by rushing up to the podium at a press conference given by Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem (security restrained him, a development he immediately tried to fundraise off of).
At the height of the riots in L.A., The New York Times published an op-ed expressing support for the riots, blaming Stephen Miller for them, and claiming that “Protest Is Underrated.” The author, David Wallace-Wells, concluded that there are “enduring lessons from political science about what works” and that “those lessons are not exactly … that some amount of violent protest is always counterproductive.” (Buried behind a double negative and three quantitative adverbs, it kind of sounds like he’s extolling the virtue of violent protest, but I digress.)
I don’t know if Wallace-Wells or his editor came up with his headline, but it’s exactly backward. Protest, while not meaningless, is grossly overrated as a useful means of effecting change in a representative republic like the United States.
The right to protest is an important one, though it’s notable that the word “protest” does not appear in the First Amendment, which ensures the right “of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.”
Protest has historically been a powerful tool employed by citizens to register dissent when their government has left them no other recourse. But in a country like America, where we have the freedom to actually participate in self-governing, waving signs in the street is a pretty impotent alternative. The protesters themselves might claim the Trump administration is a fascist, authoritarian dictatorship, but they and their friends just voted for a literal communist in New York City, so do with those accusations what you will.
Most of the “protests” taking place today demand something from the government, whether the demand is to stop enforcing immigration law or to give out more taxpayer-funded freebies. The operating assumption is that the preeminent solution is action from the government, and if the government won’t take the appropriate action on its own, it must be pressured to do so by civil unrest.
Sometimes the people fanning the flames sincerely believe the government can and should solve what they perceive as urgent problems; other times protest is simply a way for privileged liberals to cosplay as freedom fighters and earn back-pats for sticking it to the man. Either way, it’s a lazy cop-out from people who have never done the work of self-governing.
Don’t get me wrong, I don’t want those people running my local school board or civic organizations. But it’s a bad thing for society when people seek to solve their problems by making demands on the government instead of doing something about it themselves. It takes a lot more work to effect real change by investing in your community than it does to order a wrinkled polyester flag on Amazon and carry it around.
The people making actual progress toward a better republic are the ones living and working in their communities, raising families, attending church, starting volunteer organizations, and building relationships. They understand that they and their neighbors are far better equipped to solve social ills than government bureaucrats.
Even when there is merit in petitioning lawmakers for a particular policy objective, those petitions are best accompanied by shoe-leather community work. Pro-lifers may have marched in D.C. to raise awareness for reversing Roe v. Wade, but they did far more through conservative legal organizations and local pregnancy resource clinics.
When French aristocrat Alexis de Tocqueville visited America in the 1830s, he observed a phenomenon in which Americans would solve problems by forming associations among themselves instead of demanding solutions from the government.
If an object blocked traffic on the highway, he observed, “neighbors immediately establish themselves in a deliberating body; from this improvised assembly will issue an executive power that will remedy the ill.” Citizens would have the problem solved “before the idea of an authority preexisting that of those interested has presented itself to anyone’s imagination.”
Americans only appealed to the power of “social authority,” he found, when they had exhausted all other resources. And their associations weren’t limited to political goals; they also gathered to advance causes Tocqueville classified as industrial, intellectual, and moral. These associations, in his mind, were the fruit of the First Amendment’s freedom of assembly.
The local, practical solution of joining with your neighbors to solve problems is less glamorous and more demanding than writing expletives on a piece of posterboard with a Sharpie. In a word, it’s underrated. But it has a far better track record of success. Plus, it has a wonderful side effect: if you invest physically, relationally, financially, and/or spiritually in your community, you’ll find you have a real stake in how your ideas play out in the real world. It might even turn you into a conservative.