oh, i don’t know about that. the content may vary, but on the left at least, i am reminded of something you said in your post re:bell curve:

That’s a seductive rhetoric for embattled liberals. You’re on the side of truth. You are being realistic. The conservatives like you. I’m all in favor of facing unpleasant truths, being a social scientist and all. But what’s so unpleasant about what seems to be the truth here?

…

I have read quite a few (casual, rather than empirical) references to the fact that it tooks years of quagmire to get to protests as big as the ones we’ve seen recently.

And as for narcissism… how pray tell is protesting the war in the streets any less narcisstic than sitting in one’s cozy home maligning protestors? If people do stand in the rain in Times Square chanting slogans for the purposes of polishing their egos, I can only admire that they choose this route rather than buying an expensive dress or something.

What if the “golden age” is actually an indication of an attitude shift manifested in the large-N protests. Why were the trends towards smaller numbers in the past? What were the issues of protest and to what degree could any individual have an indifferent opinion about them? The war is a polarizing issue; it is very difficult (believe me!) to be impartial or indifferent about the war. It could be that the larger number of participants in recent protests is do to a perception of polarity – antiwar proponents protest and prowar individuals do not -not to individuals set on social change or movement participation. Regardless of what the cause is, it is true that the protests are a measure of civil unrest and they present a body of potential collective action.

I did note in my essay on this subject that large, quiet, carefully staged public gatherings could be a positive good in building an antiwar movement.

The key issues are, “What is the main ‘performative’ tone of such a protest?” and “How is the march or gathering connected to a larger strategy of persuasion and mobilization?”

The first issue is what my dismissive comments were largely aimed at, and remained aimed at. Protest which defiantly stresses the distance between the protesters and non-protesters and anoints the protesters with an aura of moral superiority is bad protest. At 5,000 in a given protest event, it’s negligible in its effects on those in power, but it can easily alienate and drive off many who might otherwise sympathize. At 50,000, major direct action or revolutionary disorder becomes a threat to those in power, but at considerable cost in other terms to civil society—another kind of village destroyed in order to save it.

The second point, about a connection to a larger strategy, is a more complicated one. One reason I find data on numbers unpersuasive in this regard is that it doesn’t tell you alone what the nature, meaning and power of an event might be—in fact, I think it doesn’t tell you that much.

First, if I understand you right, Kieran, the dataset you’re talking about goes up only to the end of the 1980s. If there has been an institutionalization of mass protest—and thus its banalization—in the past 13 years—it won’t show up in this data set.

Second, you say, “Well, there’s only 40 large protests in this dataset”, from 1960 to the end of the 1980s (or was it only the period you ran the query on, from 1960-1975? Not sure). ONLY 40? ONLY? Even if it’s the larger set, in a 20-year period, we’re talking about 2 a year. 2 protests of that size in a year in NYC, SF or Washington DC. That’s a lot, actually.

To answer the question about the meaning of those large protests, one might do a more detailed breakdown of them. Take all the Vietnam and civil rights protests and lump them together, because they were profoundly connected to and expressive of a very deep social upheaval. Those worked by almost any measure you care to name, but think about what had to accompany them for that to happen. Most signally, we had a gigantic demographic bulge at the younger end of the population, a not-insignificant fact for a lot of reasons. Equally, those protests were connected to sustained broad-based political organizations (as well as narrow sectarian ones), and they were accompanied by other kinds of social disorder (urban riots, most notably).

So exempt those from the dataset, and what do you get? The Million Man March. The nuclear freeze protests. A couple of anniversary marches designed to commemorate the 1963 March on Washington. A major gay rights march in the 1980s. (There’s probably a few others, but these are what springs to mind.) Some of these weren’t strongly goal-based, like the anniversary marches. Some were, like the nuclear freeze protests and the Million Man March.

The nuclear freeze protests didn’t result in a nuclear freeze, but I do think they put serious pressure on the Reagan Administration, and so arguably produced some productive results—but fairly intangible ones.

The Million Man March got Louis Farrakhan a lot of publicity and energized his base of support, as well as provided other African-Americans not connected with Farrakhan an important opportunity to mobilize. But as a persuasive event, it didn’t do much at all in the larger public sphere.

Now contrast that with the way that social movements on the right, especially the religious right, have gone straight for the electoral jugular, often working at the local level—coupled with think tanks, judicial challenges and a smattering of direct action and marches. Yeah, I know, it takes money, but really the effectiveness of this strategy is not nearly so much a matter of money as it is a matter of clarity of political vision and a reasonably savvy command of what local publics want to hear.

Large protest marches right now, especially ones where the anti-WTO crowd from Seattle gets out to strut their stuff, do not belong in the peer group of Sixties era marches. Not yet, and maybe not ever, depending on how history unfolds. Their peer group is a motley group of large events, most of which have had little effectiveness at moving the political ball up the field. Compared to the strategy of the right, I’ll take the right’s strategy any day.

One reason I find data on numbers unpersuasive in this regard is that it doesn’t tell you alone what the nature, meaning and power of an event might be—in fact, I think it doesn’t tell you that much.

Spoken like a true historian! Good on ya. Of course the numbers I cited don’t tell you everything you want to know. But they do tell you how big the protests are relative to past protests. Given that there are so many people intent on denigrating the movement as simply so many spoiled brats, I think that’s useful to know.

Incidentally, when Sarah et al begin really looking at the data, they’ll be doing a lot more than extracting counts of individual variables like I did. There’ll be all kinds of event-history analysis goodness. Data like this can tell you all kinds of stuff—including some of the things you mention in the next two bits I’m about to quote.

ONLY 40? ONLY? Even if it’s the larger set, in a 20-year period, we’re talking about 2 a year. 2 protests of that size in a year in NYC, SF or Washington DC. That’s a lot, actually.

Yeah, except they won’t be happening in neat 2-a-year chunks. They’ll be pretty clustered. And the overall number of protest events (>6,700) is still more relevant to whether you think 20 is a large number.

So exempt those from the dataset.

Woah! You cite a bunch of potentially explanatory variables. That doesn’t mean you throw away the data! Besides, several of your variables still apply today: lots of young people (off the top of my head, I think there are more teenagers alive in the U.S. today than at any point in history); sustained broad-based political organization (see anti-globalization movement), etc.

Yeah, I know, it takes money, but really the effectiveness of this strategy is not nearly so much a matter of money as it is a matter of clarity of political vision and a reasonably savvy command of what local publics want to hear.

Two points here: (1) It is about the money in a lot of ways, especially with the think-tanks and court action. (2) “What people want to hear”—- well, that’s a complex question. The globo/anti-war people would say they’re fighting an uphill battle for precisely this reason. As with civil rights, it’s hard to make your movement’s message palatable if people don’t want to hear about it.

Compared to the strategy of the right, I’ll take the right’s strategy any day.

Yeah, but the question is whether the right’s strategy works with the left’s message.

I think as far as the question of whether protest size tells you anything about contemporary antiwar protests, you really do have to throw out 1960-1975. That was a dramatically different time in so many respects that these are non-comparable numbers. It’s like comparing the AFL-CIO in 2003 with the IWW, or Nader’s Greens with Debs’ Socialist Party. Obviously, the comparison is not completely invalid—there are relationships and resemblances—but the historical conditions are so different that what the comparison tells you is somewhat limited.

One of the main reasons for that is the institutionalization and banalization of protest as a means of political action post-1975. If you simply count up the people at the March on Washington in 1963, it’s not even that large a march compared to some, but it made a huge difference because such a march was a novel event, a political earthquake. (Plus it was astonishingly well staged). By the time we get up to the Million Man March, it’s the progressive equivalent of Andy Rooney from one of those awful old films saying, “Hey, kids, let’s put on a show!” Protests changed American politics: we went from an era in which they were rare to an era where they were a regular part of the political toolkit, at all sizes.

Now I think that the recent protests in NYC and SF are vastly more meaningful than the Million Man March or even the nuclear freeze marches. They’re much more about an intense political point, and much more expressive of an underlying urgency. But if it’s just 50,000 in the streets, and nothing more, that’s good (keeping mind again that my main concern is that marchers avoid far-left freak shows as much as possible). If that’s all it is, though, so what? Bush can safely ignore 100,000 people on the streets of NYC and SF: he’s gonna lose New York and California in 2004 anyway. Now 50,000 people on the streets of Atlanta or Indianapolis or Nashville or Phoenix or Houston or Miami or Charleston, that’s another matter, especially if it appears to be a cross-section of probable voters. And that’s not just because of electoral politics, but because that would be a sign of the zeitgeist as a whole moving. A bunch of the usual suspects walking the streets—and there are 100,000 of us in SF and near NYC—is not a sign, by itself, of a zeitgeist in meaningful motion.

Er, I think you mean Mickey Rooney. I do agree that it would be pretty awful to have that guy from “60 Minutes” in a Busby Berkeley musical. :-)

Andy Rooney would be, “I hate tear gas, don’t you? And getting shoved back by a New York cop on a horse: don’t they have something better to do?”

I think something like this is plausible, but recall your earlier argument: you began it by being annoyed at all the puppets and traffic-blocking and small roving groups of protestors—i.e., all the novel movement tactics that protestors have developed precisely to try to combat what you call the “banalization” of marches. You called for a return to “large, quiet, carefully staged public gatherings”—the banal and boring stuff that everyone ignores—along with more right-wing style political work.

I think a lot of people look back at Civil Rights or Anti-Vietnam protests through a haze of feel good movies and stirring PBS documentaries and of course the positive consequences of those movements themselves. So they forget just how annoying and shocking those protests were. So I disagree that

A bunch of the usual suspects walking the streets—and there are 100,000 of us in SF and near NYC—is not a sign, by itself, of a zeitgeist in meaningful motion.

Because the data (which you want to throw away :) show that there aren’t a 100,000 usual suspects willing to show up for this season’s march.

E.g., maybe size doesn’t matter that much.

It’s certainly true that some of the tactics in the SF and Chicago protests are more unusual and less banal (though clearly emulate the Seattle anti-WTO protest in some respects) but that’s not a good difference, in my eyes. I’d rather they be banal—large quiet marches may not by themselves do a great deal of good, but they don’t do any harm, either. The direct action and CD tactics of some at the SF and Chicago protests, in contrast, are actively harmful to the antiwar cause, and largely justified by their practicioners as making the protesters themselves feel “energized” or “committed”. Which is what I have been calling narcissism, and I don’t see anything in the numbers that makes me think that label is unjustified.