another paradoxical effect of the current protests is to have restored the vitality of liberal zionism in america. speaking strictly anecdotally, from my own community, people who two weeks ago were facing an identity crisis over israeli actions they recognized as indefensible are today comfortably crouched behind accusations of antisemitism and terrorist supporters to blame for it all.
a reality that socialist or progressive protestors must take into account is that disorder on the streets always works to the political advantage of fascists, who credibly promise order at all costs even while they cynically ensure protest becomes disorderly.
it’s not fair, but it is reality. in the ecstasy of genuine righteousness one may not give a fuck, but then a morning after comes.
@williampietri MLK had the advantage that his audience was spectators, publics of a north that actively disidentified with Jim Crow fascism and were willing to blame southern leadership rather than protesters for disorder. had the relevant public been only the people of the US south, it would have been a much riskier strategy. and MLK paid exceptional care in public to the manner of protest and discipline within its ranks, hard, esp in the presence of provocateurs, hard to keep up.
@divya ACT UP caused very narrow and targeted disorder on the streets, and famously paired it with an inside strategy. i’m not saying all protest is bad. i’m saying effective protest is orderly, intentionally and clearly contained, carefully controlled because when it devolves into anything that resembles street violence you lose. the 1980s were a propitious time for these protests, bc there was a right wing govt but no fascist outside movement contesting. 1/
@divya the civil rights movement has to be scored a win for outside protest, but it was a close run thing, under unusual circumstances, in which people were so committed they not only began nonviolent but remained so under baton and fist. even so, it likely would not have succeeded if the disorder had not been confined to a fraction of the country the rest was embarrassed about, and extraordinary efforts by LBJ. i think we’ve overlearned from a very close-run N=1. 2/
@divya There was a lot going on, sure. And there was violence. You can make a case that a generalized sense of threat played bad cop to the ostentatious virtue of MLK's nonviolent movement. Riots sometime lead to change. But they often lead to reaction. 1/
@divya You can tell lots of stories about the 60s. But I don't think you can fairly look at the world and conclude that violent chaos frequently births leftish or liberal or just orders. You can maybe claim CRM as a counterexample, if you want to emphasize the sense of threat. But then the political aftermath of the 60s was mostly reaction. Vietnam War protests just picked off LBJ, which did not redound to the benefit of people in Indochina. /fin
@divya I haven't read Schulman's history, but I think there's no dispute the outside track played a crucial role. (I think the inside track did too.) But Act Up protest was mostly (not always) pretty targeted at powerful institutions. Act Up was not a disruptive or frightening force for bystanders going about their lives. Act Up largely substituted brilliant performance for generalized disruption as a way of attracting media attention. Outsiders could sympathize without having been messed with.
@tb i mean, i guess higher-ed was already a tinderbox, but columbia really has made a unique contribution this year setting the world on fire. had the school simply been indulgent, it’s not impossible this academic year could have come to a mostly uneventful close nationwide, just some very understandable protests in the ordinary course of things. a bit of groveling before ideologues that you try to back up with ill-considered action and blammo.
@phillmv@tb it was the best possible response for fascist accelerationists in the US and the most genocidal elements of the Israeli polity.
they say never let a crisis go to waste, but for a burgeoning fascist movement, the catchphrase is never waste an opportunity to create a crisis.
the socialist left imagines it owns crisis, because contradictions of capitalism theory predicts it. but there’s an underpants gnome btw predicting correctly and benefiting from.
i already think we’re paying too much attention to this stuff and too little to what’s actually going on in israel/palestine, but does anybody do any data journalism about campus protests, logging and tallying chants and activities at different locations?
the people who crush the university student protests will always be on the wrong side of history. it will become a settled matter twenty to thirty years later, when the former students are the ones writing the history.
if you want to make a case that antisemitism plays an unusual role in the US discourse surrounding Israel, your best point of reference is Yemen and US support of Saudi Arabia’s conflict there, which conflict (whomever you blame for it) did lead to mass famine and death, but not to mass protest on US campuses.
@asayeed@Alon@BenRossTransit@shadihamid i think the US is likely to go for a Taiwan/Korea solution—support illiberal autocracy until it mb someday becomes secure enough to relax into liberalism. that may not succeed, but if you think ugly illiberalism is an unfortunate historical necessity, is it necessarily worse? is it a bad idea to try, given the risks to global (including obviously US/Western) stability of more freeform Islamicized illiberalism?
@asayeed@Alon@BenRossTransit "state" is the center of the controversy. Erogan's Turkey is not as liberal (or pliant) as the US might like, but it is an ordered state. to the degree it causes troubles elsewhere, they relate to where its state consolidation is weakest, ie risks of Kurdish national self-determination. i think the US is slowly realizing the form of postcolonial moralism that means every self-perceived ethnicity gets its own state is unaffordable, despite affection towards Kurds.
@asayeed@Alon@BenRossTransit states can fail and reform themselves all they want from a US perspective. the advantage of democracy is that revolution is routinized, but institutions to support that may be hard to get or keep. what the US (+ Israel) can't tolerate are the anti-Westphalian currents. Iran's "axis of resistance" is a catastrophe from the perspective of state-system legibility + management. we can't know what form Sunni pan-Islamism might take, but we'll try to impose constraints.
@asayeed@BenRossTransit i agree with @Alon that for Israel, conversion of "Palestinians" into a Westphalian state (or their naturalization into existing such states) is the only way forward. the Israeli right wants to insist upon the parenthetical by any ugly means necessary. the US and Israeli left-ish prefer the former.
@asayeed@BenRossTransit@Alon But the broader problem is to find ways of reconciling a legible global system made of states with defined borders with the aspirations and identities of the people of that region. recognizing that it is not an easy fit is not a case for abandoning the project. the risks, from the perspective of a status quo power, are far too great.
@asayeed@BenRossTransit@Alon (from the perspective of revisionist powers like China, Russia, and Iran, there's are sorcerer's apprentice problems. on the one hand, playing up the contradictions between ME aspirations & westphalian states troubles the hegemon. on the other hand, China largely does not dissent from the westphalian norm, and faces risks from assertive pan-Islamism unconstrained by them. they want to alliances and perhaps some borders, but cautiously. Russia may be less cautious.)
@asayeed@BenRossTransit@Alon (if that's the case, was it any opportunity at all? did Arab publics not do enough? i mean the US, idiotically for a status quo power, abandoned perfectly stable and in the first case very warm relationships with Mubarak and Assad on the theory of a liberatory Arab Spring. Tunisia pulled it off for a while. who has an opportunity to do more? did the US need to turn on Bahrain & Saudi, and then something good might have emerged? what was the opportunity was lost?)
