The Omar Wasow Re-Election Strategy

I don't watch or listen to news much these days.  (Even I have limits on how much garbage I can swallow in a day!)  So it was surprising to me to hear that the entire city of Portland, Oregon is "entirely ablaze all the time."  Thus says our orange-haired President of the United States, a man who I am sure has never told a lie in his life... Question to self: if Portland is entirely ablaze, why did I not see dozens of fire engines trying to put out the blaze as I went to the grocery store today?  Why was the store not on fire?  Why did I sleep so well last night?

Yet there have been fires - deliberately set by rioters - oops, I mean, "violent protesters" recently.  These "protesters" have also made appearances in several cities throughout the United States, as I am sure you are all aware.  Their modus operandi seems to be to cause as much provocative, polarizing property destruction (including tearing down statues and setting fires) and cause as much provocative, polarizing unrest as possible.  Some of them are no longer even pretending to be associated with Black Lives Matter or with the struggle against racism.  According to one source, the Antifa has made its reappearance among these "protestors".  Note that according to some sources, these who are causing property damage are White.  (Additional note: I have deleted the source I originally cited.  He has since turned out to be unreliable.)

Let me suggest that it's useless telling these people that they are actually helping the cause of Donald Trump as he seeks to demonize those who are opposed to him.  They already know that - which is why they are doing what they are doing.  Their tactics are reminiscent of the staged battles between the Antifa and various right-wing groups in Portland and elsewhere during the 2018 mid-term elections.  They are also reminiscent of vandalism perpetrated by Russian agents in Ukraine.

Why does Trump think that injecting violence into American society (and especially into the protests against racist oppression) will help him?  (For yes, there is overwhelming evidence that people aligned with Trump are behind the injection of violence into American politics in 2020!)  Let me suggest that even though Trump probably doesn't read anything much more complicated than coloring books, he has advisors who do know how to read.  And I'm sure that they have heard by now of a man named Omar Wasow.  Mr. Wasow is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Politics at Princeton.  He also did a study which is by now quite famous among students of strategic nonviolent resistance.  That study showed that the 1960's civil rights struggle achieved its most impressive gains when it was most strongly non-violent.  That study also showed that when protests began to become violent, the violence actually hurt the cause of the protestors and helped Richard Nixon to win the 1968 presidential election.

And that is Mr. Trump's only hope of a road to a legitimate election victory this November.  You see, even dictators can learn new tricks (or at least try to recycle old ones), as Will Dobson documented in his book titled, The Dictator's Learning Curve.  And for the last ten years or so, dictators around the world have been staying up all night studying how to thwart strategic nonviolent resistance.  By the way, I highly respect Dr. Wasow and his work.  It's a shame to see his work put to evil uses.  

But will Trump's gambit work?  Let me suggest that in 1968, there was not a coronavirus pandemic or its resulting economic fallout to deal with.  Let me also suggest that Slobodan Milosevic lost the election which deposed him even though he also resorted to dirty tricks.  And lastly, let me note that the Democrats flipped the U.S. House of Representatives in 2018.  Also, Dr. Wasow has two pieces of very good news.  First, the current data show that 93 percent of anti-racism protests this year have been peaceful and nondestructive, according to a recent Washington Post article.  Second, Trump's gambit does not appear to be working, according to additional recent articles in the Washington Post and on NPR.

Narcissism Vs. Democracy

I have a project which is due on Tuesday of next week, so today's post will be short.  But I want to note two things which follow from last week's post.  First, I want to repeat what I said about the role of structure in effective social movement organizations:

In order for a social movement organization to succeed in achieving any goal, therefore, it must have structure.  For the social movement organization to achieve democratic goals, the structure must be both explicit and formal, and it must be formally ratified by each of its members.  That structure must also include a formal, explicit, democratic method of decision-making.  The creation of such democratic structures is not a spontaneous process, but is deliberate, conscious, and goal-oriented.  Movement organizers who create such structures create movements that actually accomplish things.  "Movements" which don't are like an amoeba having a seizure.

To this paragraph I would add that the members of a democratically run social movement organization must be willing to be bound by the results of the democratic method of decision-making.   And this willingness to be bound by the results of democracy provides a key to the motivations behind those people in high places who have launched successful attacks against democracy both in the United States and elsewhere.

For those who have grown used to life as dominant power-holders and whose lives of privilege have produced an unhealthy narcissism tend to regard the emergence of a diverse population as an existential threat - especially if the members of that population have equal access via democracy to the power held by the dominant.  To guard against that threat, the dominant must damage or cripple democracy - through such things as the revocation of voter protections, the sabotaging of national postal services, the selective disenfranchisement of dark-skinned ethnic minorities, and other means.  This is why the American Right has been engaged since 2008 in what appears to be a project to tear the United States apart.  For even when the dominant remove the threat of the powerless by denying the powerless access to pre-established structures of democracy, this is no security to the dominant.  Instead, what is very likely is that the dominant will themselves self-destruct by means of in-fighting among the members of the elite, each of whom is saying to himself or herself that it is better to rule in Hell than to serve in Heaven.  These elite members will be unwilling to be bound by the results of anyone else's decision-making - even if the decisions are made by the other elites.

Second, in regard to the weakness of "leaderless" movements, here are two more articles to chew on:

• "Analysis: Do 'leaderless' revolts contain seeds of own failure?", Reuters
•  "What Successful Movements Have In Common," Harvard Business Review

Spontaneous? Or Successful?

Among the many essays and opinion pieces that have been written for major media publications during the last few months, quite a few have quite understandably focused on the mass protests that have occurred in the wake of several high-profile police and vigilante murders of unarmed African-Americans in this country.  These echo articles written within the last two years about the strength of "leaderless protests" worldwide.  Check out the short list below:

• "The George Floyd Protests Show Leaderless Movements Are The Future of Politics," Slate Magazine
• "Today’s Activism: Spontaneous, Leaderless, but Not Without Aim," New York Times
• "The Common Element Uniting Worldwide Protests," The Atlantic
• "Leaderless rebellion: how social media enables global protests," Financial Times

Note that the Slate article heralded such protests as "the future of politics."  If such protests are seen by the powerless as "the future of politics," then let me just suggest at the outset that the powerful and the dominant have nothing at all to fear from the powerless.

As long-time readers of my blog know, I have been touting the power and potential of strategic nonviolent resistance for the last three-and-a-half years.  But I find lately that I need to add a cautionary note to my praise of strategic nonviolent resistance.  For those who want to engage in resistance nowadays seem to be guilty over and over again of the same two basic mistakes repeated ad nauseam.  The first mistake is to assume that strategic nonviolent resistance consists solely of protest marches and rallies.  The second mistake is what I want to tackle in today's post.

Let me take you first to a TED talk given by Zeynep Tufekci, titled, "How The Internet Has Made Social Change Easy to Organize, Hard to Win."  Ms. Tufekci is a sociologist and associate professor at the University of North Carolina, so she's no lightweight.  In her TED talk, she examines the wealth of "leaderless," spontaneous protest "movements" which erupted throughout the world from the 1990's to the mid 2010's.  She noted that these "movements" (of which the Occupy "movement" was a prime example) scaled up very quickly from one or two people to many mass gatherings of tens of thousands of people.  However, they achieved no long-lasting gains.  I think it safe to say that the Occupy "movement," for example, did not accomplish a bloody thing.  Why is this?

Zeynep suggests that "movements" which are easily and hastily thrown together by means of a few mouse clicks are largely composed of people who have not learned to work together and to make decisions together as a collective unit.  Therefore, they are unable to form a coherent strategy or to adjust their tactics to overcome strategic challenges that arise in their struggle.  Thus they have no staying power.  In another place (I can't remember where just now), I believe Ms. Tufekci likens modern, easily thrown-together "movements" to a car that can accelerate quickly to high speed, yet has no steering wheel.  She compares the protest rallies of these modern movements with the March on Washington in which Martin Luther King gave his famous "I have a Dream" speech.  The 1963 march was not just a march, but it was a signal to dominant power-holders of the capacity of a large number of people to act collectively in a coherent, long-term, strategic manner.  It served as such a signal precisely because back before the Internet, organizing things like a march, a strike, or a boycott required people to work together for a long time and to figure out how to work together long-term without falling apart.  It required people to create formal processes for deciding on goals, for analyzing power, and for mapping and implementing strategy.  These were not spontaneous processes.  Today's protests seem at times to me to be more like a bunch of kids throwing a spontaneous open-air tantrum!

So let's talk about learning to work together and make decisions together as a collective unit.  And let's begin with a question, namely this: how are decisions made in a group of people who want to achieve something?  Or in other words, can there ever really be such a thing as a "leaderless" movement?  To answer that question, we must turn to another sharp woman, feminist scholar Jo Freeman.  Ms. Freeman wrote an essay titled, "The Tyranny of Structurelessness."  Her essay, which was written in 1970, shows that leaderless, structureless groups have long appealed to those who are trying to escape from systems of domination and oppression.  However, Ms. Freeman shows that such leaderless, structureless groups quickly become neither leaderless nor structureless.  What happens instead is that in place of formal, universally acknowledged means of making decisions, an informal network of decision-making always springs up.  And this informal structure is always created by those members of the group who are the most dominant - either in personality or in wealth of pre-existing resources.  These dominant members become the group's "elites."  Once that happens, bam!  You're right back in a structure over which you have no control unless you're one of the "elites."

In order for a social movement organization to succeed in achieving any goal, therefore, it must have structure.  For the social movement organization to achieve democratic goals, the structure must be both explicit and formal, and it must be formally ratified by each of its members.  That structure must also include a formal, explicit, democratic method of decision-making.  The creation of such democratic structures is not a spontaneous process, but is deliberate, conscious, and goal-oriented.  Movement organizers who create such structures create movements that actually accomplish things.  "Movements" which don't are like an amoeba having a seizure.

And this is why I don't hold out much hope of lasting change from many of the protests now taking place, not only against oppressive White supremacy, but against many other evils.  Nor will I have hope until the organizers of such resistance actions begin to grow up, to get over their Millennial sense of entitlement to their opinions, to stop trying to re-create Woodstock, and to start reading some books.  Because their "movements" are "leaderless" and "structureless", they can be very easily co-opted and hijacked (for instance, by agents provocateurs who cause violence at protests), and their message can be derailed by their enemies - enemies who have both leaders and formal structures and who therefore succeed.  We have already seen this happen.

Let me leave you with a quote from Srdja Popovic, former leader of the OTPOR! movement which successfully overthrew Slobodan Milosevic.  Srdja said, "There are only two kinds of political movements in history: they're either spontaneous or successful." Chew on that.