Protest USA

As Dan Froomkin at the Washington Post writes, this was the week that Bush decided to change the subject. Faced with dismal poll numbers and the endless violence in Iraq, he took to the airwaves to discuss immigration and shore up Republican support for his reform initiative. While clearly a political ploy, the Bush offensive does take place against the backdrop of a remarkable effort at popular mobilizing. Over the past month, millions of immigrants and their supporters have taken to the streets to call for amnesty and social equality and to protest Republican legislation that would felonize status as an illegal.

In a show of political strength that surprised politicians and Washington insiders, immigrant groups organized demonstrations in 102 cities on April 10, with over half a million people taking to the streets in Dallas and Los Angeles. Such mobilizing was followed by further protests on May 1, which included strikes and boycotts that substantially impacted many southwestern businesses. Republican strategists, who have been courting the Hispanic vote for the last decade, took notice. Wary of turning off potential voters with nativist policies, Grover Norquist reportedly commented that, unlike with its 19th century treatment of Catholic immigrants, the GOP should not send Latinos the message that they're unwelcome and then lose their vote for a hundred years.

Yet, perhaps the most interesting thing about the immigration protests was that in terms of sheer numbers it did not significantly outdraw those that took place over the Iraq war. On February 15, 2003, over 3 million people worldwide participated in anti-war demostrations, with protests occurring in 225 American cities. Since the invasion, dozens of large-scale demonstrations have been organized, including one last September in Washington which drew anywhere from 150,000 to 300,000 people. But, by contrast with the immigration rallies, Iraq organizing has had a minimal impact on Administration behavior or elite foreign policy discussions. If anything, popular mobilizing around the war has been notable for how disconnected it remains from actual sites of political power. No matter how many people take to the streets, government rolls on practically unaffected.

At one level, this speaks to how contemporary politics in U.S. tends to neutralize public assertiveness and to insulate political elites from those they ostensibly represent. However, a quick comparison of the protests around immigration rights and around the war highlights something else. What makes immigration mobilizing so potentially powerful is that the individuals involved share basic interests. They are united by a common goal of claiming their rights as equals in America and of improving their economic standing. Such ties mean that those organized are part of a relatively unified collective, seeking to impose group aspirations on politics. Moreover, participants cut across the stale partisan divide between Republican and Democrat, and include voters not safely captured by either party.

In other words, what we've witnessed over the last month is the nascent emergence of something more like a political movement, which understands itself as acting collectively to assert common objectives. This is precisely why May Day strikes and boycotts were once considered so dangerous. The power of immigrant, -- especially Hispanic -- workers to shut down business by truly enacting a "day without a Mexican" suggests real collective power. Those protesting represent a larger community that, when necessary, can be called upon to behave coherently and to great effect.

As for the anti-war protests, while ethnically and economically diverse, participants are essentially constituents of the Democratic party or independents, and can safely be ignored by GOP leaders. Moreover, their very diversity underscores the inability to articulate shared interests. Unlike with immigrant mobilizing, such activism does not express concrete experiences of economic hardship or political exclusion nor does it articulate any common viewpoint besides a general antipathy for Bush. Of course, part of this problem is due to the nature of foreign policy and to the real complexity of conditions in Iraq. Yet, it also speaks to the fact that protesting the war is by and large an act of individual conscience rather than of collectively asserting shared aspirations.

In a sense, the protest call "not in my name" speaks volumes about what happens when no group interests unite those mobilized in politics. The value of such a call is that it withdraws consent from political elites -- a potentially powerful move in any society. Yet, the very problem with the Iraq war protests is that Bush and others are utterly indifferent to whether protestors consent to the policies or not. As a result, the phrase simply dissolves into an act of private absolution and a way for citizens to divest responsibility for political choices made. By contrast, embedded in immigrant activism is an assertion of political responsibility. Such protestors make clear demands on politics on behalf of an identifiable group, and thus implicitly hold out that group as accountable for both those demands and their consequences.

Comparing these two protest experience underscores that one can't explain why popular power has become so neutralized in the U.S. without looking at the internal characteristics of those efforts at mobilization. It's not simply that political institutions seek to insulate their own authority and to limit avenues for popular invention. It's also that the very idea of shared interest as the basis for politics seems to have disappeared. Perhaps the greatest benefit of immigrant activism is that it reminds us of the need to root mobilization in concrete experiences. In other words, for protest to be successful it must be part of a movement, one that articulates the grievances of unified groups and that provides an account of social possibility. Without such a basis in interest and tangible reform, regardless of the size protests simply become another outlet for private conscience.