The Protest or the Vote?

I’ve heard from some young, passionate protestors who disparage voting. They care deeply about racism, and they’re excited about demonstrating for Black Lives Matter, but they lose interest when you talk about the coming election. Joe Biden fails to excite them; they don’t think he’s radical enough.

I think they’re badly misunderstanding how change actually happens. Almost invariably it combines attention-grabbing protest that leads to political change and new laws. It’s true that politics alone produces, at most, incremental change—and more often, a mere rearranging of the status quo. But protest without politics simply fizzles—see Occupy Wall Street. We have to have both—protest and politics. When protest seizes attention, dramatizing problems so that they are easily understood, it creates opportunities for savvy politicians to jump in and write new laws.

Case in point: slavery. American abolitionism was a protest movement. A tiny and very unpopular minority, white and black, deliberately provoked opposition by traveling to small towns and challenging their opponents to a debate. They got beat up and shouted down, but they stirred up people to think about the morality of slavery. At the same time they were sending literature into the South—it was too dangerous to go in person. Their papers and books were invariably confiscated and burned, and anybody found transporting those papers was severely punished—but this too was a kind of protest, making the obvious point that the slaveholding South could not stand to hear the truth.

Through twenty years of protest, popular sentiment in the North changed to opposing slavery. Then and only then did the politicians get productively involved, culminating in the election of Abraham Lincoln. Lincoln wasn’t popular with abolitionists—he wasn’t nearly radical enough—but he brought an end to slavery.

Another case: civil rights. The civil rights movement emphasized dramatic protest, culminating in Birmingham and Selma. With unbelievable courage and panache, protestors caught the attention of northerners and changed their beliefs about the morality of segregation. Only then did the Kennedys—cynical politicians to the max—begin to act, cautiously. Lyndon Johnson, a Southerner not known for his strong moral compass, passed civil rights legislation that recognized the citizenship of blacks for the first time. Protest led to politics, which enabled change.

The protests arising from George Floyd’s murder have changed attitudes. However, nothing is really different until new rules and regulations are passed: revised standards for police tactics, transparent review of police actions by independent bodies; streamlined processes for removing police officers who abuse their authority, and so on. None of these changes will be brought about by changed attitudes. They must be mandated by politicians who pass laws; and that means electing politicians who are responsive to the goals of the protestors.