Protest march to nowhere

Political parties always face hard decisions about who, within their ranks, should have the most influence — the wings or the middle. Today, one of these flashpoints can be found in the Democratic Party; it was the subject of a Washington Post article that a number of blogs have noted.

Democrats are getting an early glimpse of an intraparty rift that could complicate efforts to win back the White House: fiery liberals raising their voices on Web sites and in interest groups vs. elected officials trying to appeal to a much broader audience.

These activists — spearheaded by battle-ready bloggers and making their influence felt through relentless e-mail campaigns — have denounced what they regard as a flaccid Democratic response to the Supreme Court fight, President Bush’s upcoming State of the Union address and the Iraq war. In every case, they have portrayed party leaders as gutless sellouts.

Okay, I’m going to break the “short posts are best” rule here, because . . . because it’s my blog & I can break the rules if I wanna. And I feel like writing about this :-)

I think it’s fair to characterize the “activist” elements referenced above as comprising people who are fully persuaded that the country is in terrible shape, is on the wrong track, etc. etc. This is a power struggle, and the objective of the activists is to take control of the Democratic Party and use it as a tool for change — social change, changes in our foreign policy, changes in domestic policy.

The activists are suspicious of the party’s more centrist elements. They don’t believe the moderates’ claim that, to get/keep political power, it’s necessary to please the middle.

The activists also believe in the power of the protest march.

The protest march ideal is this: huge numbers of earnest and passionate people descend on a community and, through sheer numbers and force of spectacle, change that community’s political point of view. Since we’re talking national politics, the “community” is the entire US, making Washington the geographic focal point of choice for the quintessential physical protest. Leftist online communities can congregate anywhere, of course, thus the email campaigns etc. referenced in the WaPo excerpt.

Whether it’s physical or virtual, however, any time you take part in a protest, it’s easy to feel that ideal embodied around you. You’re in a crowd. You can feel the energy. Your convictions are mirrored everywhere you look. The sense of pulling together with other people — strangers — toward a common goal is palpable and thrilling.

But here’s the problem.

I’d be willing to bet my next paycheck that very, very few individual’s minds are ever changed by witnessing a protest march. That is, the percentage of people who are swayed by change imposed from without is miniscule — perhaps even negligible.

When you think about the political changes that did catch on in the 1960s — and which defined the template of today’s protest-march activism — it was inside-out change. Feminism, for instance, didn’t catch on because a bunch of men started organizing marches against bras. It caught on because it gave a vocabulary to women coming of age in the post WWII era; it let them organize and articulate an unease they felt with the social roles they’d inherited from their mothers and grandmothers.

Many leftists today feel frustrated by the American electorate. How could so many people vote for Bush? Support the invasion of Iraq? Support a ban on partial birth abortion? It must be ignorance, stupidity, or a perverse combination of the two.

But here’s the thing. You aren’t going to change anyone’s mind on any issue by imposing your views from without. Some right-leaning bloggers recognize this; their attitude is expressed by remarks like this one from Indcjournal:

“Clintonian Triangulation” gets two thumbs down from the Kos crowd; noted. Maybe y’all should just, you know, fight harder! I mean, on every issue. Think – maybe it’s just that you’re not quite left-wing enough for all those middle-class midwestern and southern voters …

Peoples’ minds aren’t changed by strangers. The opinions we hold are deeply personal. We aren’t wired to give them up because of a sharply-worded placard. If we are influenced by others, it’s by people with whom we identify. And unless we’re crazy — literally — we don’t typically permit others’ influence to change our opinions 180 degrees. Strangers might help shape beliefs we already hold. But they aren’t going to plant whole new beliefs in our heads.

Yes, people do experience radical changes in their beliefs, but that usually occurs through a personal experience of some kind. A woman has an abortion, finds herself regretting it, and switches from pro-Choice to pro-Life. Another woman, raised Catholic, has an abortion, experiences tremendous relief, and becomes pro-Choice.

Those are obviously simplistic, even cartoonish examples, but I think they are more realistic than the notion that somone’s going to change her views about abortion because somebody else shoved a pamphlet in her hand.

So this, in a nutshell (albeit a somewhat large nutshell) is the reason I agree with other prominent bloggers (including Instapundit) that the current activist wing of the Democratic Party is doomed to fail — either by burning itself out in futile efforts to take over the party, or by rendering the Democrats too marginalized to garner any power.

In the 1960s and 70s, a significant percentage of American youths found themselves spontaneously leftivizing. Radical leftist politics “fit” — it felt right — it was the zeitgeist — and yeah, it was a movement. But it’s a mistake to think that you can induce that sort of change by sheer force of activity or attitude. That’s not what happened then, and it’s not going to happen now.

Nor can you induce it by presenting people with “facts.” This is another leftist myth — that protest marches bear with them piles of facts, which are thereby deposited at peoples’ feet, and when people see them, their minds are changed. What actually happens is that people gravitate toward facts that support what they already believe, and dismiss as false or irrelevant facts that don’t support their current beliefs. As one example: what anti-war leftist would give any credence to the idea that Iraq had WMD, and that the reason they weren’t found is they were shipped to Syria? Ain’t gonna happen. To anti-war leftists, it “doesn’t pass the sniff test.”

What leftists have to understand is that their pet collection of facts is just as dismissible from the perspective of the right. Not only that, but the exchange of information is more sprawling and decentralized than ever, today. Consumers of facts have a lot of outlets to choose from — and it will take more than controlling the Democratic Party to fight that.

So what can liberal activists do?

By themselves — nothing.

For leftist beliefs to gain ascendency, the activists would have to find people in the center who hold leftish ideas and give them the movement’s leadership. They need to find the anti-war Nascar dads, the pro-choice devout Catholics, the hunters who supports gun control. These are the people who could reach their peers. Get them marching, and you’d get somewhere.

Unfortunately, even if such political oddities exist, the leftists don’t seem interested in them — because Nascar dads, devout Catholics, and hunters are as alien to leftists as leftists are to them.

Another possibility: a miracle could happen. I find it plausible, for instance, that the pro-life movement gained traction in middle America when ultrasounds became common. Seeing a movie of your unborn baby swimming around in your womb is precisely that sort of personal, emotionally-charged experience that can change a person’s belief. But note that this wasn’t a phenomenon engineered by pro-lifers.

One, final alternative is for leftists to grab power and use it to wield tools like propoganda, top-down imposition of laws, criminalization of right wing positions, etc. But do rank and file leftists really want to resort to that to change America’s course?

I hope not.

Technorati Tags: politics, Democratic Party