Down by the riverside: Do anti-war rallies and demonstrations do any good anymore?

There's been a good deal of talk since last Saturday's peace rally in DC: Are rallies and marches a good way for anti-war people--or progressives, or whoever--to spend their energy? Do they advance the cause, or divert resources and attention from where they should be directed?

One wonders if part of the punditocracy's objection to popular demonstrations is that (as Tom Lehrer might have put it), they're an expression of "the people," amateurs meddling in matters that should best be left to the experts of the opinion pages, the blogosphere, etc. I'll name no names at the moment. Just wondering aloud.

But one thing that's been clear to me as I look at the last week of coverage is that it wouldn't be that difficult to follow the reports closely without ever discovering that the anti- (and pro-) war rallies were about . . . well, you know, the "war."

The crowd-count angle

One question critics and friends alike raise is whether demonstrations like this can successfully focus media attention where it needs to be. David Corn thinks major DC demonstrations are becoming increasingly irrelevant, in large part because coverage often ends up as a pissing contest about crowd-size estimates.

Was it 100,000? Or 150,000? Or 227,000? Or 301,294 and three dogs?

That's one reason I'm a bit down on come-to-Washington demonstrations. Following the gathering, the debate often focuses on the body count. And organizers, I suspect, usually adopt the tactic of the military in exaggerating both the number and its meaning. So after the protesters leave town, what remains? A dispute more than a debate. Which is what happened following the anti-war rally that occurred this past Saturday.

FAIR offers a pretty good instance of the point Corn's making:

Hundreds of thousands of Americans around the country protested the Iraq War on the weekend of September 24-25, with the largest demonstration bringing between 100,000 and 300,000 to Washington, D.C. on Saturday.

But if you relied on television for your news, you'd hardly know the protests happened at all. According to the Nexis news database, the only mention on the network newscasts that Saturday came on the NBC Nightly News, where the massive march received all of 87 words. (ABC World News Tonight transcripts were not available for September 24, possibly due to pre-emption by college football.)

Cable coverage wasn't much better. CNN, for example, made only passing references to the weekend protests.

Astute gadfly James Wolcott makes a pretty smart point, that the structure of mass rallies generally makes bad TV, an important consideration in light of the fact that most Americans either know about the anti-war demonstrations from television or don't know about them at all. (Of course, as one veteran American observer suggests, the solution there might be fairly simple.)

(Oregon angle: The Oregonian's public editor found himself defending the paper against readers' charges of bias in its coverage of both Portland and DC's Iraq war demonstrations last week. His fifteen paragraphs in today's paper discuss such issues as the accuracy of crowd estimates, the factors driving decisions about article size and placement, and the need to give coverage to Hurricane Rita--and in the end say absolutely nothing about the issues driving the rallies, the place where one might reasonably expect discussions of "editorial bias" to begin. It's not entirely clear from the article, but it seems likely that his response was lean on issues, heavy on insider-baseball, in large part because he was responding to readers' letters that were themselves tending strongly in that direction.)

It's that lack of focus on the war itself that bothers The American Prospect's Matt Yglesias:

Fundamentally, [attacking or defending the anti-war movement rather than the war itself] is not the conversation we want to be having. The anti-war movement's merits stem entirely from the lack of merit possessed by the war itself. That -- the war -- is the thing we need to be talking about.

We also need to be building bridges with allies who are going to want to have nothing to do with a generic lefty shindig.

So here's where I think this is headed: If they're not so good at turning themselves into Must See TV, is there any point to rallies like that?

Yes. Two points, in fact. Yglesias has named the first.

Rallies as coalition building

One of the problems with the DC rally was lack of focus. (Hint to the anti-war left: When Jon Stewart goes after you in his lead story, it may be time to rethink things.) It's true, the fringe groups like ANSWER organized the DC event, and captured some of the lazy coverage, at least initially; but as The News Blog points out, that wasn't the whole story.

Aside: That might also go a long way toward explaining why the "pro-war counter-demonstration" in DC fizzled (something like 400 participants, compared to 100,000-300,000 for the anti-war demonstration): When you're not so much pro-war as anti-anti-war, you've got a message problem.

But for the anti-war demonstration, the "focus" complaint was only a symptom of the larger problem: Demonstrations need to reflect clout. L.A. Weekly's Marc Cooper solidly nails the problem here, and points to a major defect in last week's DC rally.

The peace movement can achieve its goals only by building a political coalition broad enough, forceful enough and credible enough to provoke a policy sea change.

A huge proportion, if not the majority, of the Democratic Party has to be onboard. Unfortunate but true. The war could be "nationalized" in the November 2006 election if the movement were broadened sufficiently. An upset in the midterms could force the Bush administration to change course or could lead to a Democratic victory and a change in war policy in ’08.

Yet not a single top Democratic official publicly came out to last weekend’s protests. Not just the Kerry and Clinton types were AWOL, but also outspoken critics of the war like Howard Dean, Russ Feingold and Ted Kennedy.

One of the reasons that the peace movement’s organizational logistics remain tightly locked in the hands of shrill fringe groups like ANSWER is, precisely, because they fill a gaping void left by more-moderate forces.

So this part of the problem is not so much about the fringe groups associated with the rally as about the absence of congressional faces at the front of the anti-war movement. They're always a lagging indicator in times like this; most of them--having spent five years getting pounded remorselessly by the Bush/Rove political machine--are not going to step into the lead until they feel confident the American mainstream is already safely out in front of them.

That gets us to the second point of demonstrations.

Rallies as expression for "the rest of us"

Here, the focus should probably return from the "mother ship" rally in DC to the many vigils held in conjunction, all over America including here in Portland.

Observers of middle eastern politics talk about the gap between the political elites and popular opinion by referring to "the Arab street." Juan Cole asks about the "American street:"

Critics of the [DC anti-war] event derided it as a carnival, but what popular movement in history has not been Rabelaisian? Crowds and their performers clown and mug, ridicule the sacred and celebrate the deity all at once. Carnivals of protest create their own bubble of consciousness, in which the unspeakable can finally be shouted, the powerful parodied, and the status quo turned upside down.

Here's a point that many Professional Pundits and Beltway Insiders should paste in their hats: Most Americans aren't Professional Pundits and Beltway Insiders.

For most Americans, political participation comes somewhere after making the mortgage payment and looking after the family. They relate to the media not as "content providers," but as consumers--which means that the media aren't a vehicle for them to network and shape opinions, but rather an experience that often leaves them feeling more helpless and alienated than they were before.

So when a rally comes along that lets them shake a little Rabelaisian booty, they may well take it for what it's worth. And the carnal/carnival aspect of rallies, marches, vigils, boycots, sit-ins, etc. allows people to put their individual bodies out there among other bodies--an ancient strength of public demonstrations that never needed television or blogs to exert itself. David Swanson writes:

While a majority of Americans currently oppose the war, only a tiny minority know that. Most people who oppose the war believe falsely that they hold a minority opinion. A march helps people learn that a mainstream opinion is mainstream.

I know I can vouch for that in my own experience. I've been running this blog for almost a year, and it's certainly been a therapeutic change from yelling at my TV screen, and it's put me in touch with a small group of interesting people I'd never have met otherwise. But behind it is, yes, the suspicion that on much of what I write about I am a minority opinion. (That's not completely bad; the day I think all my opinions are completely mainstream, blogging--and a lot of other things--will become a lot less fun.)

But still, as something that gives me some sense of being part of a community, a year's worth of blogging can't hold a candle, so to speak, in comparison to participation in the first Portland anti-war rally in January 2003. I still vividly remember the amazing feeling--"hey, maybe I'm not crazy after all!"--as I looked at something like 20,000 people filling the downtown streets around me.

So build the coalitions, and keep the rallies coming. (And keep coming to the rallies.)