A Little Less Conversation
The Democratic Party needs to let the people lead the resistance against Trump.
If there is a moment of peak pop culture cringe surrounding the social justice movements of the late 2010s, the crown would have to go to Pepsi’s 2017 commercial “Live For Now.” The commercial centers around a mass of telegenically diverse millennials gathering in protest, carrying signs with vaguely progressive messages like “Love” and “Join the Conversation.” As a line of police officers face down the protestors, the tension is broken by model Kendall Jenner approaching one of the cops and handing him a Pepsi. The commercial was widely panned and promptly yanked from the airwaves after Pepsi received backlash for blatantly trivializing and monetizing Black Lives Matter and other social justice movements that were gaining momentum during Trump’s first presidency.
While Pepsi’s “Live For Now” campaign has been relegated to the Advertising Hall of Shame, Democratic lawmakers and liberal pundits have reacted to the ongoing demonstrations in Downtown Los Angeles as though those protesting ICE’s crackdown on immigrant communities were all carrying signs reading, “Join the Conversation.” Endorsements of peaceful protest against Trump’s immigration policies were quickly qualified by unsolicited advice on messaging, optics, and decorum: quit torching Waymo driverless taxis, knock off the profane graffiti, maybe swap those Mexican flags with American ones.
It’s a peculiar habit of today’s Democrats to interpret every act of resistance against authoritarianism as a statement in some broader national dialogue, a conversation that every important Democrat is compelled to join and moderate to assure optimal results in the next electoral cycle. A similar sense of ownership over right-wing protest does not appear to be a Republican thing. I don’t remember conservative pundits advising participants in Charlottesville’s 2017 “Unite the Right” rally to maybe ditch the torches for glow sticks to give the event a more friendly rave vibe rather than the hellish glow of a Klan Rally. On January 6th, 2021, I recall Republican Senator Josh Hawley giving the angry mob a triumphant fist pump rather than reminding them that violence is never the answer and that law enforcement personnel should be respected. There is something unique within the Democratic Party’s ideological DNA that compels its members to compulsively gesture solidarity with protest movements while simultaneously critiquing the tone and tactics of its participants.
The Democrats’ sense of ownership over mass demonstrations is maybe not all that surprising, given that the Party’s current power structure was forged in the New Left student protest movements of the 1960s. The New Left would emerge as the dominant force in the aftermath of the disastrous 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago that pitted college-educated anti-war baby boomers against an Old Left dominated by labor unions and big city bosses who ruled over white ethnic neighborhoods like personal fiefdoms. Through the closing decades of the 20th century, the Democrats drifted more toward neoliberal centrism on economic issues but still regarded themselves as the responsible outlet for the restive energies of protestors calling for social justice and the inclusion of historically oppressed minorities. Democrats regarded the young, idealistic activist as the larval stage of party members who could one day metamorphose into pragmatic, moderate statesmen like Bill Clinton and Barack Obama. Youth activists were enlisted as ground troops for getting out the vote, yet in exchange for recognition by the party, any liberal movement would need to listen to the advice of elder statesmen eager to temper any overzealousness that might alienate the Democrats from the much-coveted swing voter. If activists were taking their message to the streets, the Democratic Party felt that they had the right and the imperative to join the conversation to ensure youthful enthusiasm did not torch the party’s political capital like a wounded Waymo.
The stand-offs in the streets of LA over the past week should make us question the wisdom of Democrats’ compulsion to “Join the Conversation” every time there is resistance to the authoritarian overreach of Republicans. Unlike the upcoming “No Kings” demonstrations, which are being funded and promoted by “Good Billionaire” heiress Christy Walton, the LA protests were not premeditated, hierarchical operations planned with a calculated attempt to shift the opinion of the electorate. From what we know, the Angelenos who first rose up in resistance to ICE were acting from a much more personal, primal impulse to protect friends and family from being disappeared by an administration that often takes sadistic glee in terrorizing immigrant communities and flouting the rule of law. Of course, other elements have joined the LA protests to advance their own agendas, but those who initiated this resistance were probably not looking to start a national conversation; they were fighting against the very real possibility that those they loved might never be seen again. The raw human emotion at the root of these protests is trivialized by reducing it to a dialogue that any member of the liberal commentariat or the DNC is entitled to guide with unsolicited advice on messaging discipline.
It’s time to face the fact that this intimacy between the Democrats and American protest movements is a mutually detrimental relationship. The sense of ownership Democrats feel over protests inevitably paints them as sympathetic to the demonstrators’ most destructive actions, despite relentlessly differentiating in interviews between good, peaceful protesting and bad rioting. The limits of lawful, peaceful protest in the face of the Trump administration’s lawless violence were put on shocking display Thursday with the forceful removal of California Senator Alex Padilla from Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem’s press conference. If Trump is willing to rough up a Senator to “liberate” Los Angeles from “socialists,” there is no telling what he will do to any of Padilla’s nameless constituents who challenge his authority in the streets. By instructing protestors to keep protesting but remain peaceful, sympathetic Democrats give Trump the cover of saying his political opponents are inciting insurrection while leaving protestors vulnerable to physical brutality at the hands of federalized forces under Trump’s command. More cautious Democrats who are obsessed with wooing independent voters should refrain from coaching protesters to do better and instead wash their hands of responsibility entirely, suggesting that these kind of reactions are inevitable in the face of Trump’s tyrannical policies while asking voters whether they think $134 million to round up hardworking day laborers and domestics is taxpayer money well spent. If anything, independent voters would likely have more sympathy for the LA protests if they felt participants were reacting out of the understandable fear of having their families torn apart rather than trying to push a national dialogue to help the Democrats take the midterms.
We only have to look at the track record of protest movements since the rise of the New Left to further confirm the intuition that those demonstrating in the streets of LA might be better off without overcoaching by Democratic lawmakers and liberal pundits. The Kent State massacre of 1970, a tragedy that many thought would finally confirm the righteousness of the anti-war cause, only played into Nixon’s narrative that a Silent Majority was exhausted by liberal protest movements stoked by Democrats. Relentless marches by feminists throughout the 1970s could not get the Equal Rights Amendment passed. The LA Riots of 1992 did little more than push both the Republicans and the Democrats to the right. The Battle of Seattle in 1999 could not stop the WTO from bringing China into the fold. The economic gap between the 1% and 99% has grown drastically wider since Occupy Wall Street packed up and left Zuccotti Park in 2011. March For Our Lives did not yield much other than quasi-celebrity status for school shooting survivor David Hogg, whose position as a DNC Vice Chair was scuttled after he suggested primarying ineffective Democrats, not a surprising stance after the failure to pass meaningful gun control promoted by the 2018 march he led. 2020’s Summer of Reckoning, after the murder of George Floyd, gave us the spectacle of white Congress members kneeling in Kente cloth and new standards of speech and decorum in professional spaces, but little racial progress outside the purely symbolic realm. It is hard to look back on the past 60 years of American history and not suspect that the New Left Democratic Party has been more of a shock absorber than a facilitator of social change.
If anything, the assumed leadership by the Democratic Party over protest movements has created the worst of both worlds: fodder for the Republican narrative that Democrats are a party of radical agitation, while Democrats simultaneously sap the spontaneous, grassroots energy of the movements they try to direct. We are at a crossroads where passively joining the conversation is no longer an option. Democrats must either join the movement as private citizens out in the streets or refrain from offering unsolicited advice to spontaneous and organic acts of defiance against Trump. Merely offering passive support and advice to protestors will be construed by Trump as seditious obstruction of justice anyway. If Trump is hellbent on escalating tensions toward civil war, then resistance to his authoritarian impulses is too important to be led by a Democratic Party that has abysmal approval ratings and a National Committee Chairman who whispers privately, “I’m not sure I want to do this anymore.” The more Democrats try to passively direct anti-Trump movements, the greater the chance that political violence will escalate across current partisan lines, putting both elected officials and demonstrators in greater danger. The suffering and loss caused by a Red vs. Blue conflict is almost too painful to fathom. This morning’s assassination of Minnesota State Representative Mellissa Hoffman and the attempted assassination of Minnesota State Senator John Hoffman, both Democrats, presents a chilling preview of potentially dark days ahead.
We may be approaching a point where the only way to avoid a violent struggle between millions of Republicans and millions of Democrats is to reorient these partisan energies toward a nonviolent struggle between 902 billionaires and the rest of the nation. The struggle against Trump needs to be part of a broader populist people’s struggle against the corporate and political elites who failed us, not the heightening of partisan tensions until the bullet is substituted for the ballot as a means to resolve conflicts between Democrats and Republicans. Until the Democratic Party is ready to make the leap from “No Kings” to “No Billionaires,” any attempt to lead resistance movements against Trump will only make this moment in history all the more perilous.