Podcast and print and protests oh, my

New projects!

Hello! It’s been a few weeks since I sent out a newsletter because I’ve been working hard on a couple of new projects I’m really excited for. 

NEW PODCAST: I’m launching a new podcast at The Atlantic called Good on Paper. It’s a policy show that will interview a new expert each week on big ideas shaping the political narratives that eventually become policy. The goal of the podcast is to unravel narratives that have often gotten ahead of their skis (and occasionally affirm narratives that do a good job of describing the world).

I’m really excited to get back to podcasting in addition to my own writing, and I’d love it if you subscribed and shared with your friends. Here is the link to the Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and Overcast pages (it’s available wherever you listen to podcasts!) 

If you have feedback on things you’d like to see/topics you’d like me to address/things you don’t like, please feel free to email me at jdemsas@theatlantic.com. I may not get back to everyone but I will read all the emails on this particularly in the early months as we continue shaping the show. 

NEW BOOK: I’m also releasing a book of essays this fall! It’s a compilation of some of my best pieces at the Atlantic with a brand new introduction that contextualizes my thinking as part of a larger critique of “local democracy.” You can pre-order the book here. It comes out this fall and I’m thinking of coming around to some college campuses to talk about it. If you’d like to reach out to me about that, email me!

Now on to our irregularly scheduled programming…

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I wrote an article last week about what I see as a protest doom-loop. 

Social movements have gotten really good at getting attention, but they’re increasingly ineffective. 

Harvard political scientist Erica Chenoweth has studied the impact of violent and nonviolent campaigns against states (They define violent resistance as including not just “bombings, shootings [and] kidnappings” but also “physical sabotage such as the destruction of infrastructure, and other types of physical harm of people and property.”) Since 2010, Chenoweth wrote in a 2020 essay in the Journal of Democracy, fewer than a third of nonviolent campaigns, and just 8 percent of violent ones, have been successful—down from about two-thirds of nonviolent insurgencies and one-quarter of violent ones in the 1990s.

My theory is this is about the media environment. There are two impacts I’m tracing w/r/t social media + social movements.

1. Anyone can get attention as part of a social movement and speak for that movement as a result. 

2. Getting a bunch of people to turn out for a protest no longer requires hard relational organizing to get people to turn out and do what’s – in the grand scheme of things – a pretty costly political action. (more costly than voting or calling your representative at least)

So activists have become fantastic “hackers” of our attention economy. The speed with which tactics like blocking highways or encampments on college campuses spread is remarkable and even with small numbers of people, the media flocks to cover these tactics. 

But in many ways it’s the attention economy that’s hacked social movements. Very few people have participated in protests w/r/t Gaza, but many positions like ceasefire, humanitarian aid to Palestinians and low levels of support for providing military aid to Israel are widespread. Yet, how is today’s anti-war movement characterized? By its fringes. 

Now before I go too far, I have to say I find so much criticism of protests to be… bizarre. So much of it pretends that social movements can eradicate disorder. This is a common theme for me but I hate how fixated people are on a picturesque, Tocquevillian vision of democracy—an imaginary world where interest groups always argue respectfully and compromise amiably. This vision isn’t aspirational; it’s actually oppressive. Real-life democracy is a marketplace of ideas and emotions and arguments bouncing off one another, scrabbling for purchase in the hearts of voters, the minds of the cultural elite, and the press clippings skimmed by harried politicians.

But I do think that social movements have become less controllable by leadership within their flanks and are instead led by their most extreme flank, betraying the vast majority of their supporters (or would-be supporters) by allowing themselves to be characterized by extreme tactics or rhetoric. Activists today recognize this problem. For instance, the boycott target I’ve heard the most about is Starbucks but not only is this missing from the official BDS list, the BDS website explicitly has an FAQ asking about the boycott lists with “tens of products” rather than the tightly curated list they present. The answer to the FAQ?: 

The global nature of today’s economy means that there are thousands of companies that have links to Israel and are complicit to various degrees in Israel’s violations of international law. However, for our movement to have real impact we need our consumer boycotts to be easy to explain, have wide appeal and the potential for success. That’s why globally, while we call for divestment from all companies implicated in Israel's human rights violations, we focus our boycott campaigns on a select few strategic targets. We also encourage the principle of context sensitivity, whereby activists in any given context decide what best to target and how, in line with BDS guidelines. There is a lot of information online claiming that some large companies give money to Israel, some of which turns out to be false. BDS has built a reputation for strictly adhering to established facts and producing the most accurate information.

I’ve seen activists imploring people to focus their boycott efforts on social media, pointing to this rhetoric on TikTok and Instagram – all to little avail, tons of people view this as one of the top ways to prove you’re helping Gaza. 

Part of what gives me hope for the ability for norms around more effective/less polarizing tactics to take hold is that despite social media’s radicalizing effects, social movements have increasingly trended towards nonviolence.

This trend is surely in part that people have become convinced of the normative case for non-violent protest. But I think it’s in large part because social movements have internalized the strategic superiority of nonviolence.

Chenoweth et al describe this strategic superiority as coming in many forms: 

1. More people will ascribe to your movement’s goals/be sympathetic to you if you don’t use violent tactics. No matter how unfair you find this, this is plainly true. 

2. Potential sympathizers within the regime are more likely to come around to your side if you are nonviolent. If you can be characterized as “just as bad” as your opponents, that makes it more difficult to sow discontent within a regime. 

But once more people are sympathetic to your cause that increases your chance of being effective. Even in non-democratic contexts, governments want to keep the population pacified. 

In any case, by far the most important thing is ending the suffering going on in Gaza as quickly as possible. I think that dissent in the West is likely having an impact on US policy but I worry that the core message that killing tens of thousands of civilians is bad is being lost because of a tendency towards radicalization that’s allowing the conversation to shift in unhelpful ways. We shouldn’t be naive about this, protests will always attract criticism and absurd caricaturization, but movements that want to be successful shouldn’t help it along. 

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A couple of things I’ve been reading:

• Books:

  • Finally got around to reading a bunch of Joan Didion. It’s funny to read her now, her worries about disorder in cities and among young people 50 years ago sound so familiar to the modern reader… anyways I def recommend Slouching Towards Bethlehem. 

  • The Politics of Exclusion by Michael N. Danielson – it’s fun to read a book written decades ago that predicts all the problems about housing and exclusion that I’m writing about today. Of course by fun I mean more a mix of deeply depressing and weirdly unifying.

• Favorite Atlantic article of the past week – this one already changed my behavior.

• Favorite non-Atlantic article of the past week 

• It’s cheating to pick Rachel Aviv since she’s the GOAT so here’s the link to her newest which you should read.