Reflections on the Protests in France (and…)
A significant, new type of political movement has cropped up recently, as manifest in many protest movements around the world, most recently, the George Floyd protests. These protests have very little precedent historically and display a recent shift in the motive and character of political unrest. There has, however, been very little discussion of this shift; most explanations tend to rely on politics and polemics, which don’t help us understand them at all. This article will attempt to remedy the lack of nonpartisan scholarship on the differing character traits of this new kind of protest.
Historically, even during anarchic times like the Arab Spring, protests have had a central figure or group. There was an individual (or individuals) who led the people in demanding something from the government. This central figure asked for specific policy changes. Sometimes these demands were unreasonable, for instance in the 1968 Parisian revolts when protesters asked for the creation of a new Communist society, but the demands were always somewhat specific. The people who followed that political leadership were always subordinate to them and joined because as a group they themselves believed in the leadership’s policies. These protesters could easily make themselves into a political movement or political movements (as in the French Revolution) because they were essentially political. A leader led a group to administrate themselves in a certain manner, and then it either got what it wanted from the government or formed a political party and went into opposition. This would then result over the long run in them compromising and shifting to moderation, slowly fading into obscurity, or getting what they wanted. The idea of protests having centralized leadership was rarely even questioned: the very idea of a decentralized protest was considered preposterous. How else would you know where to meet for the protest? On what basis would you be protesting?
In the past three years, three protests have occurred that have completely challenged most preconceptions about the nature of political protests: the Gilets Jaunes in France, the Hong Kong protests, and these new protests over the death of George Floyd. All three of these protests work in an almost completely distinct fashion from traditional protest movements in three fundamental ways. First, there are no particular policies that these movements ask for. Second, they are usually ignited by a non-political event that they aren’t actually about. And, third, there is no leader. All three of these attributes are caused by the other two. Initially, an event occurs, something that can be reported about from an apolitical perspective. Usually, this is a crime (the Murder of Poon Hiu-Wing, the killing of George Floyd), although sometimes it’s a story about a popular video (Gilets Jaunes). This event then allows reporters and people in general to view the situation immediately from a human-interest perspective rather than a political perspective. The mediate response is, due to the outpouring of support for the victim (whether that be the maker of the video or the person hurt in it), the anger that the event caused creates protests against the perpetrator. These protests start out necessarily as apolitical. However, these protests inevitably become political as more people join the protesting. The protests’ highly sympathetic cause, combined with a lack of specific policies, allows people to believe that their own views represent the views of the greater group protesting. The lack of leaders is due to the fact that the protests start as spontaneous and apolitical. The lack of leaders also aids the lack of a platform, since if there were a leader, the leader’s views would then be imposed upon the protest. In these most recent protests, however, people get involved not because they want to see a certain policy written or because they like a particular person but because they feel like their beliefs can be put into practice if they join the protest. The protesters can project their own beliefs onto the protest because the protest doesn’t have any express goals other than, at most, a sentiment or direction. It is only a complaint against something, not an argument for anything. There is no actual protest, but many protesters.
Okay, what does that sentence mean? Basically, in politics, we have a very entity-based system. There is a Republican Party and a Democratic Party, there are unions and think tanks, and there are political action groups around those two parties. Both inside and outside of our governing institutions, there is constantly one person above another person telling them what the entity to which they are affiliated believes. Within government, this is what a whip is, a person whose job it is to literally tell people how they’re supposed to vote. Outside of government, this is enforced less openly, but it’s still there. One cannot “be” political; instead, one has to “affiliate” with the real political people, which are the non-person institutions. Even the people in charge of these institutions aren’t really in charge of them: for instance, what can the chairman of the RNC really do? To put it simply: within a political institution, there is always someone above you, and if there is no one above you, there are a few (the Speaker of the House can’t pass something without her fellow congresspeople voting for it). Today’s protests, though, don’t work like that. There is no party line anyone has to follow and no rules anyone can’t break. People join the protest, each with their own intention and beliefs about what the protest stands for, and then simply express that they share a single point of agreement about one thing, whether that be gas taxes, a homicidal Chinese mainlander, or a homicidal cop. They do not come to discuss, like an ancient agora, for each protester already believes that everyone else in the crowd agrees with them. Nobody is affiliating themselves with anyone else’s politics, but everyone thinks everyone else is affiliating with their politics. Hence, “There is no protest, but many protesters.”
These protests are uniquely successful at rallying many people to a cause and then radicalizing them. In Gilets Jaune, a protest about gas taxes became a protest about wages and then a protest about Macron and then finally about “neoliberalism” in general. The protests in Hong Kong started by raging against a particular Chinese policy, then against Chinese encroachment onto Hong Kong’s internal leadership, then the pro-Chinese government, then the way the democracy was rigged to favor Chinese government candidates, and then, finally, after the Chinese attacked the protesters, just against China in general. In both of these cases, a minor issue slowly evolved to encompass all the major issues of the day. This evolution occurs because, of course, not everyone who joins the protest cares all that much about the original cause except as an example. Almost always, more people who join these protests are against the system at large than any individual part of it. And when they begin to see any amount of success, they think that means there is hope, that there could be yet more victories, and that if with more protest, their opinions can be fully realized in society. Even people who start out wanting modest reform can often reach the conclusion throughout the protest, that perhaps the government will do more than just address their initial complaint. And so, millions will go out and protest a cause they would not otherwise care about. Supporters of green political movements will join protests complaining about green policies, Hong Kongese business owners will join protests complaining about cheap Mainland Chinese labor, and middle class protestors will join protests complaining that the system must be fundamentally shifted to their disadvantage, with none of them really realizing this, of course.
These protests also have a rare ability to shield themselves against criticism. Normally, if a protest gets out of hand, the leaders are blamed for having let that happen. But whom do you blame in a leaderless protest? All of the protesters? Should every single one of them have tried to stop the few who committed crimes? Nobody really believes this. Indeed, resorting to crime (which historically has destroyed many a protest movement) merely increases the strength of these protests, as it suggests that the government is demonizing every single individual participant, usually an underlying reason they are protesting in the first place. (An obvious example of this is how China passing a national security law that basically treats the Hong Kongese protesters as being all criminals, has bolstered the movement and transformed the protests into a widely popular movement.) In addition, there is no argument to disagree with and no leader to discredit. Most of these movements are based on claims of fact that are usually correct (such as our recent George Floyd protests), and if they aren’t, are still usually a common belief among 80% of the population (as in the beginning of Gilets Jaunes based on the clearly draconian and regressive French gas tax).
But, sadly, “I come to bury Caesar, not to praise him.” I say this because I believe these protests are self-destructive by nature. They are fundamentally based on nobody finding out what any individual protester actually believes, because if anyone does, protesters might begin to either feel alienated from the other protesters and uncomfortable being part of the group or feel otherwise ashamed with being associated with their fellow protestors. The failure of the Gilets Jaunes movement is a perfect example. At its height, millions of people protested on the streets of Paris, and a poll by Elabe showed that a hypothetical “Yellow Vest Party” would receive 13% of the vote in the upcoming European Parliament elections. This was in January 2019, when it seemed like the Yellow Vests were the most important political movement in recent French history. But just a month after consistently polling above 10%, the Gilets Jaunes party found themselves polling at only 3%. Two things explain this sudden shift in popularity: the failed attempt to create leaders and the sudden appearance of bigotry.
The first – the attempt to organize around a leadership – is the less interesting factor, but it is still important. The attempt to create a political party around the Gilets Jaunes movement was a failure. Who would lead it? What would they lead? What would they believe? None of these questions could be answered. So the movement segmented into its most vocal, and thus most radical, groups. On one side was the most popular figure of the protests, Jean-Francois Barnaba, who created a political party and then, realizing he wouldn’t be elected, allied with a right-wing populist party that also couldn’t manage to elect anyone. Several other political parties were formed, some allied with green parties, some with no one at all. Some Gilets Jaunes ran with the Communist Party, and others with the conspiracist Popular Republican Union. None were elected. When they revealed their views, no one wanted to be affiliated with them. While these protests are not subject to the same constraints as political movements, they also do not have the ability to morph into them.
Thus, it makes sense that the protests are generally unable to successfully transform themselves into successful political parties, but this doesn’t explain why the protests themselves also lost their luster. The reason for this was a different kind of identity being thrust onto the Gilets Jaunes. This protest included many people with many different opinions. Some of those opinions were not the sort that are accepted in polite society. However, at first, no one really saw this. No one looked at each protester and asked them what they were personally thinking or protesting for. That became clear when Alain Finkielkraut, a French philosopher and public intellectual, walked by a group of these protesters. In spite of having publicly stated that he sympathized with the Gilets Jaunes, dozens of these protesters started harassing him, shouting things ranging from anti-Semitic insults (“Fuck off, you dirty piece of shit Zionist”) to death threats (“France belongs to us…You’re going to die!”). This sudden shift in rhetoric towards the type of thing one might see at a Klan meeting was picked up in the media. Overnight, the protests started to be seen as anti-Semitic rallies of far-right crazies. Unlike the violence example, these people were just as right about what the protest was about, ideologically speaking, as anyone else. While the vapidity of recent protests shields them from ideological criticism, it also makes them glass cannons that are always at risk of being destroyed by their own members.
That’s the one hand – the lack of a central policy viewpoint around which the protesters unite means that the protests themselves are vulnerable to being identified with the myriad policy viewpoints of their members, many of which may be quite unpopular. The other hand, though, occurs when the protests are violently repressed, as they were in Hong Kong. In that case, it doesn’t matter what the protesters think, because no matter what, they won’t be able to say it if they’re being attacked by police officers. If the protests have an enemy that defines itself as the protests’ enemy at every juncture, the protest never has to be about anything except opposing the repression of protests. And if that happens, then these protests will continue to be extremely effective and will be able to attract a lot of manpower they wouldn’t otherwise get. If the Mainland Chinese had simply left the Hong Kongese protesters to say what they thought, the protests wouldn’t have been nearly as popular. Many of the original protesters are little more than racists romanticized by the West, people who think not just that Mainland China is bad but that Mainland Chinese are bad people by nature (as in Youngspiration, whose flagship policy is deporting Mainlander immigrants from Hong Kong). But the Chinese government didn’t allow the protesters to define themselves; the CCP responded, and the CCP responded poorly. A year later, the Chinese government is still dealing with the consequences of having turned everyone in Hong Kong against them and in favor of the protesters.
America still has a choice. It can choose whether to wait for the protesters to implode (and they will implode – there are so many ethnic games in play here – they’re protesting a killing committed in a city with a Jewish mayor, and on top of that, this is occurring amidst an uptick in bigotry and hate crimes against Asian-Americans; some fraction of the people in those protests has to be bigoted against at least one of those groups) or whether to make an enemy of itself and fight a war with an ever-increasing population of protestors. Either destroy the protests by doing nothing, or nurture and grow them by doing something.
You will likely hear the opposite on the news.
