Hot takes: Protests, authoritarianism, inflation & organizing
Today’s Platypus features several pieces we found useful and provocative. We will be publishing infrequently over the next couple of months, as a book deadline looms, and we’re suspending paid subscriptions through the end of the year. Thank you to all of our loyal readers!
A story in the New York Times, “Even as Iranians Rise Up, Protests Worldwide Are Failing at Record Rates,” reports on political scientist Erica Chenoweth’s finding in a recent paper that “Nonviolent campaigns are seeing their lowest success rates in more than a century.” But Chenoweth’s tweet thread published after the Times piece clarifies some important points:
First, the claims in the piece about the decline in protest effectiveness is based on data with a specific set of scope conditions. These data look specifically at campaigns trying to oust incumbent national leaders or achieve territorial independence.
They therefore *do not* include movements or campaigns that seek other types of goals, like policy reforms, economic, social, racial, or environmental justice, or other such goals - the types of protest movements that are the most prominent worldwide today.
In fact, one study suggests a steadier degree of "achievement" of protest goals over time, painting a sightly more optimistic picture than the data referenced in the article. . . .
Third, even using these very strict, discrete criteria, there is no evidence to suggest that armed struggles are succeeding more often than unarmed struggles. In fact, both forms of struggle have declined precipitously in their success rates.
Fourth, the latter reality points to a key point that was not raised in the Times article: the fact that popular movements today face much more sophisticated, emboldened, and unconstrained regimes than they did even ten years ago.
The new global autocratic alliance has emerged because of the sense of shared threat such regimes possess, in part due to the paranoid & false belief that mass movements within their borders are always engineered by the West to destabilize them.
Autocrats like Putin, Xi, Lukashenko, and Raisi know that if a movement succeeds in ousting any of their allies (particularly neighboring allies), they too may become vulnerable to newly emboldened opposition groups who will take the cue to rise up.
As a result, there has been significant cooperation over the past 15 yrs among autocratic regimes & leaders who share info, tech, advice and/or personnel against mass movements. They use a common toolkit that some people call "smart repression."
Regardless, going back to the Times piece, I would not interpret the decline of protest effectiveness as evidence of the permanent demise of people power as a technique. Autocrats have adapted a new playbook precisely because they *know* that mass protests threaten their power. . . .
Tldr: despite the grim trends in the recent data reported in the Times, (1) many other protest movements are winning on lots of issues; (2) mass movements for democracy are here to stay as a major source of change, even if they have uneven, complex, & messy results.
One other important finding from this research is that protest size may not be the most important factor in toppling authoritarian regimes – winning over defections from the ruling coalition is more important.
There’s also this helpful piece by Reza Aslan, “The Iranian People’s 100-Year Struggle for Freedom,” situating the inspiring uprising in Iran in a longer historical arc and pointing to the importance of internationalism in the fight against autocracy.
What began as spontaneous protests over the brutal murder of a young Iranian Kurdish woman named Mahsa Amini by Iran’s dreaded morality police has now escalated into a massive nationwide revolution against the Islamic Republic. Iran, of course, has had three major revolutions over the course of the last century—in 1979, 1953, and 1906. But it is the first of those revolutions, the Constitutional Revolution of 1906, that provides the best historical analogy, not only for how the current uprising may succeed in its ultimate goal of bringing down the regime, but also what the rest of the world could do to help in that cause. . . .
Almost overnight, the city of Tabriz became a rallying cry in every country fighting for freedom from oppression. Vladimir Lenin, living in exile in Europe, sent an urgent appeal to his fellow Bolsheviks to travel to Persia and join the struggle against the shah. Support came from Russia, Georgia, and Turkey. Armenians, Arabs, and Azeris took up the cause as their own. Two Persian Jews served as commanders in the rag-tag constitutional army. Christians and Muslims, Zoroastrians, and Baha’i fought alongside one another. Women joined the revolutionary ranks by the hundreds. They threw off their veils, put on pants and vests, cropped their hair short, picked up rifles, and fought shoulder to shoulder with the men. The revolutionaries came from different countries, spoke different languages, worshipped different gods. But none of that mattered. They were all united in the fight against tyranny. . .
In 1953, the Iranian people once again rose up and expelled the shah from the country, only to have the CIA place him right back on the throne. In 1979, another popular uprising ended up replacing the shah’s tyranny with the tyranny of the Islamic Republic.
The Washington Post published an excellent investigation “Tactics of repression: How Iran is trying to stop Mahsa Amini protests.” TLDR: it’s a mix of old-school brutality and “smart repression” moves like shutting down internet platforms.
Sammy Feldbulm’s recent article for The Baffler, “Pinochet’s Long Shadow,” explores the meaning of the defeat of Chile’s progressive Constitution at the ballot box, concluding with this analysis:
Cifuentes, of the Libertarian Left party, described an overstated but commonly cited disconnect between the “Octubrista” faction of the left—those who place their faith in street movements—and the “Noviembrista” faction—those who act institutionally to achieve their aims, their label referring to the initial agreement to hold a constitutional plebiscite. The two groups will need one another in the days to come. A new constitutional convention likely approaches. Even as the left works through the sting of this initial failure, Boric remains the president, a powerfully situated champion for constitutional change. A triumphant elite will claim the results demonstrate the country does not want to transform the disparities in Chilean social life that brought about the new constitution, and will aim to bury the estallido beneath its rejection. Those in the street, however, remember exactly why they are there.
A piece in The Forge by Daniel Judt, “Building Worker Power,” reflects on the work of UNITE HERE and makes a powerful case for bringing the best of organizing methods into electoral politics rather than continuing to rely on transactional and shallower approaches.
This approach to elections inverts the old rallying cry of the labor left, which is to bring political democracy into an autocratic workplace. That mantra, though well-intentioned, has proved doubly damaging. It has enabled capital to veil workplace dictatorships in the thinnest of “democracies,” elections where workers choose “between” a union and an employer. And it has quietly reinforced the idea that our political electoral system is genuinely democratic. Local 11’s approach flips the analogy, bringing the thick democratic practices of union membership — sustained political relationships that build solidarity and common ground — into our hollowed-out political sphere. It was this principle, shaped by decades of hard-fought victories in Los Angeles and hardened in the crucible of a pandemic-riven Arizona summer, that prompted the founding of Worker Power, which trains union members and community allies to build electoral campaigns with worker organizing at their core.
The Campaign School, which I helped to run, was designed to teach and hone the Worker Power model. We recruited students who had experience with Local 11’s political campaigns: our own members, but also members of sister UNITE HERE Locals (1 in Chicago, 19 in San Jose) as well as community activists who had participated in Local 11’s political or worker-organizing campaigns. We chose to bookend the school with two versions of the union’s two-day, intensive training on the mechanics of a house visit, lightly modified for an electoral context but with the core organizing principles untouched. The trainings are resource-intensive: one union organizer for every two member-students, practicing over and over the fundamentals — listening for a person’s material struggles, their fears, their hopes; agitating them on their own terms while also sharing with them a part of yourself; pushing them from a place of urgency but also care. Seeing these skills presented in the context of electoral politics is bracing. It becomes clear how difficult it is to practice real democracy in America — real in the sense of speaking openly and intimately with our fellow citizens about what kind of society we want to live in together. But it becomes equally evident that the only way we will get there is by building the sort of relationships that can gradually unravel the strictures of capitalist individualism. Political mobilization of the shallow, standard variety will never achieve this.
In The Nation, Elias Rodriques reviews Thulani Davis’s inspiring new book, The Emancipation Circuit, which documents how enslaved people organized to win their freedom and then build new societies in the aftermath of the Civil War.
The Emancipation Circuit offers a powerful reimagining of the networks that helped to secure Black freedom during the Civil War and Reconstruction: It is a history about enslaved people’s efforts to free themselves and about their local struggles to give substance to their legal emancipation, as well as a mapping of the geography that enabled their achievements and the circuits that spread their political goals like pollen in the wind. Davis chronicles the myriad kinds of organizing and institution-building that freed people undertook, emphasizing that creating a “mobilized public” for these grassroots efforts on several fronts enabled freed people to make serious progress even in the face of great repression. Though many of these advances were eventually rolled back, and several of their greatest ambitions went unrealized, the ideas that freed people developed during Reconstruction—the eight-hour workday, an end to workplace violence, universal suffrage, and more—laid the foundation for later transformations of American society.
In his latest Jacobin article, “Red the Fed,” Samir Sonti dissects what the current debate about inflation and monetary policy means for everyday people.
If the Federal Reserve’s monetary policy cannot get at the root of the problem, and certainly not without causing significant hardship, then why are they doing what they’re doing? On the one hand, it’s because some particularly hawkish central bank officials really believe that workers have too much bargaining power and need to be taken down a notch. On the other, it’s because they believe they need to be seen as having acted aggressively in order to moderate the expectation of future inflation, which is more dangerous, in their view, than actually existing price increases. Put these together, and you have a consensus on the Board of Governors for rate hikes.
But zooming out from these immediate calculations, the biggest reason for their tightening is that a central bank commitment to combating inflation through increases in the short-term interest rate — what Benjamin Braun and Leah Downey have called the “holy trinity” of inflation control, independence, and interest rate — is a core tenet of modern macroeconomic governance. Breaking with that model would mean accepting the reality that management of inflation, or any other economic issue, is fundamentally about political choices and social priorities. And that would force us to reconsider the role of the Federal Reserve entirely. . .
Given the supply shocks we’ve seen in recent years, it seems possible, if not likely, that inflation will be with us for the foreseeable future. Navigating these treacherous waters in a just way will require greater public control over investment and selective measures to contain price increases. None of this is possible if the Federal Reserve remains free to enforce ruling-class authority without any checks on its power.
The Platypus revisited a seminal 1998 article by Gary Delgado about the field of community organizing, “The Last Stop Sign.” It stands the test of time and is relevant in this political moment.
In truth, organizing people for power raises the question: Power for whom and to do what? . . .
In order to really address the changing political environment, even the more authentic community organizations will have to change. We must not be afraid to use analytical and ideological tools to develop political vision. By political vision, I mean a vision that takes us past the strategies of a campaign, a power analysis of key players, or the tactics of a good accountability session. In order to be a critical element in future change efforts, we must work with our constituents to develop our vision of a future society. In a global society, our vision cannot simply be a warmed-over “lowest-common-denominator” notion of Jeffersonian Democracy coupled with an appetite for power, without defining power for what and for whom.
How do we arrive at a vision that takes into account and combines our own political beliefs, values, aspirations and experiences with those of our constituents? Very slowly. But we will only arrive if we allocate the resources, create the organizational space, and make a commitment to read, study, and discuss wedge issues and political vision as part of the culture of our organizations. In finding ways to build our vision, we don’t have to agree on everything. However, if we have any hope of affecting larger societal issues and continuing to be relevant to our own constituents, we have to create space for discussing and developing a collective vision. Remember, the grassroots movement of the right does not begin, or end, with stop signs.
When many of us began organizing, we believed that the organizations we built would form the base for a movement. Somewhere along the line, many of us got stuck in our own brand of organizing. Instead of believing that all of our organizations might have a shot at building a movement, we began to believe that our network was the movement and that everybody else should join, die, or get out of the way.
Given our current political situation, we may just want to rethink that position. . .
[O]ver the years I’ve become clearer about the importance of having “bridge people” in leadership positions. By bridge people I mean people of color, people with disabilities, some gay and lesbian people, and first-generation immigrants – those who, because they don’t exactly “fit” in this society, have been forced to carve out their own identities and their own unique perch from which they view the world. The ability of these people to see across and through similarity and difference – to see sideways – and to integrate the knowledge of many cultures can be a valuable asset to developing new multidimensional organizations.
Anyone working to build support for democracy will want to check out the Washington Post op-ed by Robb Willer and Jan Voelkel, “Here’s what persuades Americans to support democracy over party: Our new study tested 25 different approaches with both Republicans and Democrats.” They summarize the results of a
a massive experimental study called the “Strengthening Democracy Challenge.” Together with collaborators from Stanford University, MIT, Northwestern University and Columbia University, we used crowdsourcing to recruit more than 250 testable ideas for how to improve Americans’ democratic attitudes, designed by researchers, activists and practitioners from around the world. We received a wide range of submissions and selected 25 to evaluate in a tournament-style experiment. . .
One of the most effective approaches showed respondents vivid images of societal instability and violence after democratic collapse in several countries, including Venezuela and Zimbabwe, before culminating in footage of the Jan. 6, 2021, U.S. Capitol riot, with narration highlighting the potential for democratic failure in the United States. The success of this approach — which on average reduced support for undemocratic candidates by 4.5 points on a 100-point scale — suggests that Americans simply aren’t imagining what might happen to their own society if democracy were to fail.
Another top-performing approach built on the fact that Democratic and Republican voters greatly overestimate how much voters from the rival party support subverting democratic norms; partisans’ estimates of how much their rivals report supporting anti-democratic actions are more than twice as high as their rivals’ actual reported support for these actions. We found that this approach, which simply provided respondents with the accurate polling data, led to a 4.2 point reduction in support for undemocratic candidates.
These strategies influenced people’s commitments to democratic rules either by correcting their sense of how willing their rivals are to break the rules or by making them take seriously the threat of backsliding into social chaos. However, our results revealed another, less obvious strategy: reducing partisan animosity.
For example, one approach had respondents watch a recent viral U.K. video, produced by Heineken, showing conversations between people with different political orientations connecting with one another and finding mutual respect over pints of beer. Though the video focused on ideological differences in the United Kingdom, it strongly reduced American respondents’ animosity toward the other side more than any of the other approaches we tested. It also reduced partisans’ willingness to support candidates endorsing undemocratic moves — probably because by reducing animosity for rival partisans, it made respondents less determined to defeat the rival party no matter what.
These findings fit with other research on Americans’ voting. According to one analysis, American partisans’ voting is more influenced by their animosity for their rival partisans than by their liking for their fellow partisans, a tendency that has grown steadily since 1980. Our results show that partisan animosity also encourages people to tolerate unethical moves by their own party’s leaders — and thus can erode democracy.
Understanding why many voters are willing to consider voting for undemocratic candidates can help policymakers, activists and others to overcome these motivations — knowledge that may be useful for those who want to motivate Americans to defend fair play in the U.S. political system.
Amna Nawaz of the PBS NewsHour interviewed New York Times investigative reporters Walt Bogdanich and Michael Forsyth, whose new book, When McKinsey Comes to Town, pulls back the curtain the powerful and secretive management consulting firm.
WALT BOGDANICH: We want people to know how this company affects their lives, how it affects their children. How it affects them and how it affects their future and how it impacts one of the worst problems in America today, which is inequality, which is a problem that is really, um, eating at at the soul of this country. You know, the Billy Joel song goes,
MICHAEL FORSYTHE: You know we didn't start the fire and McKinzie didn't start the fire. But they fan the flames on so many issues that are so important to Americans today whether it's offshoring securitization of assets that led to the global financial crisis. Managed care system and increasing healthcare costs. The opioid epidemic tobacco If you understand Mackenzie and understand the story of McKinsey, you do understand a little bit more. The story of America in the recent 70 years or so.
The Economic Policy Institute has updated and GIF-ized one of the most important charts for understanding our economy.
