Moving Beyond Trump to a Brave New World

Some Young People Think No Kings Is Old News, NYTimes, April 24, 2026.

On April 14 Thomas B. Edsall published an op-ed entitled, Why Aren’t the Kids Out Protesting Against Trump?. It provoked a number of interesting responses. Here is one of them:

To the Editor:

Re “Why Aren’t the Kids Out Protesting Against Trump?,” by Thomas B. Edsall (Opinion guest essay, nytimes.com, April 14):

As a Gen Z participant in No Kings who has been dismayed to find myself quite alone, demographically speaking, at each protest, I have thought long and hard about how this came to be. I believe that Mr. Edsall’s essay accurately underscores many of the contributing factors. Here are two more to consider.

First, the protests evoke an America that my generation feels we don’t know. The No Kings movement centers largely on the idea of restoration — of democratic principles, political normalcy and American decency. Gen Z, having come of age in the Trump era of political discord and the erosion of democracy, has hardly known any of these things.

Second, precisely because the No Kings protests evoke the past, they fail to appeal to our appetite for change. Young people by nature desire to reform, rectify, reshape. We want to tear down the existing structures we deem unjust and build better ones in their place. To stand against apartheid, sexual harassment or police brutality is to dismantle the present and construct the future.

While the notion of restoration is a noble one, it simply does not motivate people my age in the same way the promise of radical change does. It implies a return to the status quo, and for a generation that considers the status quo one of great injustice, it is fundamentally unpalatable.

Juliana Birkenkamp Boulder, Colo.

I understand that response. A year ago I, when the depredations of the second Trump administration were becoming obvious, I published an article in 3 Quarks Daily, Why I am a Patriot: Vietnam, the Draft, Mennonites, and Project Apollo. That title alone makes Ms. Birkenkamp's point. Here are my opening paragraphs:

Sometime in the past two weeks I found myself feeling patriotic in a way I don’t remember ever having felt before. I accounted for this feeling by invoking that old adage, “you don’t recognize what you have until you lose it.” The current federal administration has stolen my country from me. The America to which I pledged allegiance every morning in primary and secondary school, that America is being pillaged, plundered, and sold off for parts to greedy megalomaniacs and oligarchs.

Now that the nation is being destroyed, I realize that I’ve been bound to America my entire adult life. If I hadn’t felt those bonds before – except perhaps for a moment in the mid-1980s when I played “The Star Spangled Banner” for 25,000 bikers at Americade in Lake George, me alone on my trumpet, without the rest of the band – that’s because I’d taken the idea of America for granted. To invoke another cliché, just as the fish is oblivious to the water in which it swims, so I was not consciously aware of the freedom and dignity, of the liberty and justice for all, which made our national life possible.

I understand her second point as well, and share it. I don't want to return to the world of my youth. That's gone, forever. I want to move forward. Just how we are to do that, that is not at all clear to me. The best I can manage at the moment is to imagine where we might be over a century in the future. Here's a glimpse of what might be: Kisangani 2150: Homo Ludens Rising, A Working Paper. Here is the abstract from that paper:

The advancement of AI offers us the choice between contrasting paradigms for organizing human life: Homo Economicus (where work is the defining activity) and Homo Ludens (where play is the defining activity). Drawing on Johan Huizinga's work and Kim Stanley Robinson's speculative fiction, I propose that humanity faces a critical juncture as AI increasingly dominates economic production. The document develops a theoretical framework for a "Fourth Arena" of existence-beyond matter, life, and human culture-that emerges through human-AI interaction. Through speculative narrative (first section) and philosophical dialogue with Claude 3.7 (second and third sections), I argue that play, rather than economic utility, will become the defining characteristic of human value and meaning in an automated future. As AI systems assume utilitarian functions, humanity's capacity for non-instrumental play becomes increasingly central to our identity and contribution. The manuscript represents preliminary work toward a larger project titled The Fourth Arena: Homo Ludens Rising, which envisions play as the essential bridge into a post-economic society where human flourishing transcends productivity-based value systems.

A Lesson from the 60s: “For What It’s Worth”

The current political situation in the USA and the possibilities for radical change [Collapse? Part 1]

Trump’s presidency has been a disaster so far, and there’s no reason to think that it will get any better. But it may get a whole lot worse.

The DOGE rampage through USAID has cost 100s of thousands of lives, many of them children, in countries where USAID had programs. The anti-university tantrum has, at least, weakened the research capacity of the top universities. Cuts at NIH and NSH have done the same. It may be impossible to restart many of those research programs if and when funding is restored – intermediate results will have been lost, researchers will have dispersed. And those are only the most obvious damages.

It’s clear that this would not have happened if Kamala Harris has been elected. Let me be clear, yes, I voted for her, but that was more a vote against Trump and a positive affirmation of her politics. Her politics are the same as Biden’s. It would have been more of the same.

Those assessments are near-term assessments, say, from now to the next presidential election in 2028. It’s not at all clear what will happen in the next decade much less then next quarter of a century or longer. And it would be silly to attempt such assessments of a merely hypothetical Harris victory. We just don’t know.

But I’m going in a different direction. How you evaluate the current situation depends on whether or not you think our current institutions are basically sound, but in need of some repair and maintenance, or whether you think that are fatally flawed. If you think the former, then, yes, Harris would have been better than Trump, much better. A Trump presidency followed by, say, eight years of Vance-and-the-techbros, that might well wreck the nation, turning it into a technologically advanced feudal state.

However, I think the current institutions are fatally flawed and are likely to unravel under pressure from AI, not to mention climate change. So, for me the questions are: 1) what kind of new institutions will we need, and 2) how do we get from here to there? I don’t have clear answers to either, but if that’s way we need to go, then Trump-induced chaos may have an upside.

For one thing, it gets (my kind of) people used to the idea that things are bad, really really unsustainably bad. So people may actually start thinking about alternatives. Moreover, the chaos, ugly and destructive as it is, also creates opportunities (I’m thinking of how that asteroid crashing into the Yucatan made opportunities for mammals 65 million years ago). ICE raids have provoked people to protest. And then we have the No Kings Day protests. Wikipedia:

The No Kings protests, also known internationally as the No Dictators or No Tyrants protests, were a series of demonstrations that took place on June 14, 2025 (labelled as No Kings Day by the participants), largely in the United States, against Donald Trump's policies and actions during his second presidency, including his purported fascist tendencies and associated democratic backsliding in the U.S.[3][4][5] The protests took place on the same day as the U.S. Army 250th Anniversary Parade and Trump's 79th birthday.

Organizers estimated that more than five million people participated in more than 2,100 cities and towns, including the flagship event in Philadelphia.[6][7][8] More protests took place in the U.S. territories of Guam, the Northern Mariana Islands, Puerto Rico and the United States Virgin Islands, and in 20 foreign countries, including Canada, Japan, Mexico, and in Europe. In countries with constitutional monarchies such as Canada and the United Kingdom, the alternate "Dictators" or "Tyrants" titles were favored over "Kings" to avoid confusion with anti-monarchic movements; Hawaii did the same to avoid confusion with a King Kamehameha Day parade held on the same day.

Protests themselves do not bring about change. But they get people moving, and perhaps even thinking. They’re something that we can build on.

It’s with that in mind that I had a conversation with Claude in the middle of the night. I started by asking it about the formation of the current regime of nation states: Was it born out of political violence? I ended up talking about local events in Hoboken, where I currently live. My prompts are highlighted in blue. Everything else is Claude’s.

* * * * *

Nation-State

We live in a world where perhaps the single most important political structure, the one that dominates the world, is the nation-state. It’s my impression that conceptually the nation-state is an 18^th century 19^th century idea and that most current nation states originated after that time. For example, the USA was born out of revolution in the last quarter of the 18^th century; the same for France. Britain has been more or less continuous for centuries, but there’s been wars and revolutions. More recently, the 20^th century, nation states have originated in Asia, Latin America, and Africa, through colonialism, often through a revolt. That is to say, the current regime of nation-states is the result of one kind or another of politically motivated violence. Is this more or less so?

Your observation is largely accurate and touches on a fundamental aspect of how the modern international system emerged. The nation-state as we understand it today is indeed primarily an 18th-19th century concept, and violence has played a central role in its development worldwide.

The conceptual development: The modern nation-state combines two ideas that weren't necessarily linked before: the nation (a people sharing culture, language, history) and the state (a sovereign political entity). This fusion was powerfully expressed during the French Revolution and spread through 19th-century romantic nationalism.

Violence in nation-state formation: Your assessment is correct - most contemporary nation-states emerged through some form of politically motivated violence:

·       Revolutionary violence: American Revolution (1776), French Revolution (1789), various European revolutions of 1848

·       Wars of unification: German and Italian unifications through multiple wars

·       Independence wars: Latin American independence movements (1810s-1820s)

·       Anti-colonial struggles: The vast majority of Asian and African states gained independence through armed resistance or the credible threat of it

·       Civil wars: American Civil War consolidated the federal state; many others resolved questions of territorial integrity

Some nuances: While violence was predominant, there were variations:

·       Some transitions involved negotiated independence (though often with implicit threats)

·       Some states evolved more gradually from existing political structures

·       The intensity and duration of violence varied considerably

The deeper pattern: What you're identifying connects to a broader truth: the current international system of sovereign nation-states largely emerged from the breakdown of previous orders (empires, city-states, feudal systems) through violent ruptures. Even "peaceful" transitions often occurred against a backdrop of demonstrated or threatened violence elsewhere.

This has profound implications for how we understand legitimacy, sovereignty, and international law today.

Future & revolution

OK. Now I’m thinking about the future. As I am a citizen of the USA that’s where my concern is centered. I’m thinking that the democratic state is currently fragile. I’m worried about whether or not it can continue. I note that AI is developing rapidly and is going to be widely deployed over the coming decades. It’s hard to see the implications, but I can’t help but think that current institutions are going to be stressed. Let’s assume for the sake of argument that major structural change will probably be necessary. How’s that going to happen? Revolutionary political violence doesn’t seem very plausible to me, the central state (i.e. the federal government) has too much power.

What’s going to happen? I know that there are various secession movements in a number of states; I’m thinking particularly of Vermont, which has a long-standing secession movement. So far these movements haven’t gotten anywhere. But perhaps things will change in the future. On the face of it, I can vaguely imagine secession happening without revolutionary violence.

You're grappling with a fascinating and genuinely uncertain question. The combination of AI disruption and existing institutional fragility could indeed create pressures for structural change that our current political framework might struggle to accommodate.

Why revolutionary violence seems implausible: You're right about federal power - not just military, but surveillance capabilities, economic control, and the sheer complexity of modern infrastructure make 18th-century-style revolution practically impossible. Plus, the geographic and demographic distribution of political divisions doesn't map neatly onto clear territorial boundaries.

AI as a structural disruptor: AI could stress institutions in ways we haven't fully anticipated:

·       Economic displacement creating new forms of inequality and dependence

·       Surveillance capabilities that could either strengthen or delegitimize state power

·       Automation potentially reducing the state's need for broad-based consent

·       New forms of information manipulation affecting democratic deliberation

·       Questions about human agency in an AI-dominated system

Alternative pathways for major change:

1.     "Constitutional Convention" route: Article V allows for constitutional conventions called by state legislatures. This could theoretically enable fundamental restructuring without violence.

2.     Gradual devolution: Federal power could gradually devolve to states through legislative and judicial processes, effectively creating a much more confederate system.

3.     "Velvet divorce" secession: Like Czechoslovakia's peaceful split, though the legal/constitutional hurdles in the US are much higher.

4.     Crisis-driven fragmentation: A major crisis (economic collapse, climate disasters, AI-driven social disruption) could create conditions where central authority simply becomes ineffective and local/regional authorities fill the vacuum.

5.     Technological sovereignty: Regions or states might develop parallel technological and economic systems that gradually reduce dependence on federal structures.

The Vermont example: Vermont's secession movement is interesting because it's rooted in scale arguments - that democratic participation becomes impossible in units too large and distant. AI might actually strengthen such arguments if it further centralizes power and reduces human agency.

What specific pressures from AI development do you see as most likely to stress current institutions?

David Brooks, of all people, is calling for a mass uprising

I kid you freakin' not! That's the title of his column in the NYTimes from yesterday (Apr. 17): What’s Happening Is Not Normal. America Needs an Uprising That Is Not Normal. After running through a litany of the depredations the Trumpist Hegemony has inflicted on the nation and the world, and after noting that "each sector Trump has assaulted has responded independently," he goes on to say:

Slowly, many of us are realizing that we need to band together. But even these efforts are insular and fragmented. Several members of the Big Ten conference are working on forming an alliance to defend academic freedom. Good. But that would be 18 schools out of roughly 4,000 degree-granting American colleges and universities.

So far, the only real hint of something larger — a mass countermovement — has been the rallies led by Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. But this too is an ineffective way to respond to Trump; those partisan rallies make this fight seem like a normal contest between Democrats and Republicans.

What is happening now is not normal politics. We’re seeing an assault on the fundamental institutions of our civic life, things we should all swear loyalty to — Democrat, independent or Republican.

It’s time for a comprehensive national civic uprising. It’s time for Americans in universities, law, business, nonprofits and the scientific community, and civil servants and beyond to form one coordinated mass movement. Trump is about power. The only way he’s going to be stopped is if he’s confronted by some movement that possesses rival power.

Peoples throughout history have done exactly this when confronted by an authoritarian assault. In their book, “Why Civil Resistance Works,” Erica Chenoweth and Maria J. Stephan looked at hundreds of nonviolent uprisings. These movements used many different tools at their disposal — lawsuits, mass rallies, strikes, work slowdowns, boycotts and other forms of noncooperation and resistance.

A bit later:

In his book “Upheaval,” Jared Diamond looked at countries that endured crises and recovered. He points out that the nations that recover don’t catastrophize — they don’t say everything is screwed up and we need to burn it all down. They take a careful inventory of what is working well and what is working poorly. Leaders assume responsibility for their own share of society’s problems.

This struck me as essential advice for Americans today. We live in a country with catastrophically low levels of institutional trust. University presidents, big law firms, media organizations and corporate executives face a wall of skepticism and cynicism. If they are going to participate in a mass civic uprising against Trump, they have to show the rest of the country that they understand the establishment sins that gave rise to Trump in the first place. They have to show that they are democratically seeking to reform their institutions. This is not just defending the establishment; it’s moving somewhere new.

Then, his penultimate paragraph:

In other words, a civic uprising has to have a short-term vision and a long-term vision. Short term: Stop Trump. Foil his efforts. Pile on the lawsuits. Turn some of his followers against him. The second is a long-term vision of a fairer society that is not just hard on Trump, but hard on the causes of Trumpism — one that offers a positive vision. Whether it’s the universities, the immigration system or the global economy, we can’t go back to the status quo that prevailed when Trump first rode down the escalator.

Jamming for Peace [Iraq in 2003]

I wrote this on March 24, 2003, two days after the event it describes, a protest march in Manhattan. We were protesting invasion of Iraq. In view of the current state of war in the Middle East I thought it worth bumping to the top of the queue.

It was Saturday, March 22, 2003, the day of the big peace demonstration. I got off the PATH train in mid-town Manhattan at about 12:30. Five minutes later I was in Harold Square, home of Macy's, checking out the demo. I’d agreed to hook up with Charlie Keil between 1 and 1:30, so I had a few minutes to get a feel for the flow.

People filled Broadway from side-to-side for block after block. Here and there I heard drums and bells and a horn player or two, but no organized music. Shortly after the Sparticists passed (they’re still around?) I noticed a trombonist standing on the sidewalk. Just as I was about to invite him to come with Charlie and me he headed out into the crowd. I let him go his way as I went mine.

I arrived at 36th and 6th – our meeting point a block away from the demo route – at about 1. Charlie arrived about five minutes later, with two German house guests. We were to meet with other musicians and then join the demo, providing some street music for the occasion. None of the other musicians had arrived by 1:45, so we waded into the crowd searching for the drummers we could hear so well – one of our musicians arrived about ten minutes later and managed to find us in the demo. We made our way to the drummers and starting riffing along with them, Charlie on cornet and me on trumpet. I could see one guy playing bass drum, another on snare, a djembe player or two, and various people playing bells, a small cooking pot, plastic paint cans. Then I heard some wild horn playing off to the left. I looked and saw the one-armed cornetist I’d seen playing in Union Square in the days after 9/11. Charlie and I made our way toward him and joined up. Then I noticed two trumpeters and a trombonist a few yards behind us.

So there we were, a half dozen horns, perhaps a dozen percussion, all within a 20-yard radius. We’d come to the demo in ones, twos and threes, managed to home-in on one another’s sounds, and stayed in floating proximity for the two or three mile walk down Broadway to Washington Square. Sometimes we were closer, within a 5 or 6-yard radius, and sometimes we sprawled over 50 yards. The music was like that too, sometimes close, sometimes sprawled.

 

When the march slowed to a stop, one of the djembe players would urge the percussionists to form a circle. The horn players executed punctuating riffs as one person after another moved into the circle’s center to dance their steps. These young women clearly had taken African dance classes. When the demo started to move, the dancers dispersed into the crowd, the circle dissolved, and we starting moving forward.

Sometimes the music made magic. The drummers would lock on a rhythm, then a horn player – we took turns doing this – would set a riff, with the four or five others joining in on harmony parts or unison with the lead. At the same time the crowd would chant “peace now” between the riffs while raising their hands in the air, in synch. All of a sudden – it only took two or three seconds for this to happen – a thirty-yard swath of people became one. Horn players traded off on solos, the others kept the riffs flowing, percussionists were locked, and the crowd embraced us all. You walked with spring and purpose. Even as the crowd chanted “peace” I was feeling “Onward Christian Soldiers” and “Battle Hymn of the Republic” in my mind and in my step.

The tribe was rising.

Things got jammed up as we got to Waverly Place – the street that runs just north of Washington Square, the demo’s end. One of the cornet players looked off to the side. I followed his gaze and saw the trombonist I’d passed when I’d first reconnoitered the demo in Harold Square. His horn was pointed to the sky, slide pumping away, as he worked his way toward us. He settled into “All You Need Is Love” and the other horns joined him in sweet, crude, rough harmony. I was hearing John Lenon in my mind’s ear, along with the sardonic horn riffs answering the treacly refrain.

Leaving us wanting more, that’s how it ended.

Protest [Liberty State Park 12.2.17]

The Future

The Mayor

The Governor

Protest isn't enough [social media facilitates protest without grass-roots building]

Zeynep Tufekci, I Was Wrong About Why Protests Work, NYTimes, July 21, 2022.

Post 2000 or so, large protests seem to

emerge from nowhere and grow quickly, using the powers of digital technology. Social media amplification allowed movements to bring important but largely ignored issues to the forefront of the public discussion — as, for example, Occupy did for inequality — but it was also crucial for handling the logistics of a big protest: getting the word out, coordinating and pushing back against official narratives and even the disdain and dismissal that often came from traditional media.

As I studied many of these movements, I noticed more common patterns. The quickly sprung large movements often floundered for direction once the inevitable pushback came. They didn’t have the tools to navigate the treacherous next phase of politics, because they hadn’t needed to build them to get there.

In the past, a truly big march was the culmination of long-term organizing, an exclamation mark at the end of a sentence, indicating prior planning and strength. Large numbers of people had gotten together and worked for a long time, coordinating, preparing — and getting to know one another and making decisions. So they didn’t just manage to hold a protest; lacking easier ways to organize, they ended up having to build organizational capacity, which then helped navigate what came after.

But since the early 2000s, a big protest has started to feel more like a sentence that begins with a question mark. Newspapers still remark on their size — and many of them are very large — but I’m less impressed now by mere size: The global Occupy demonstrations, the Arab Spring protests and the Women’s March in 2017 all could lay claim to being larger than any previous protest. Maybe they would go on to build more sustained power, but maybe not.

So I concluded that although today’s big protests look the same as those in the past, the different mechanisms that produce them — in particular, the internet and lately, especially, social media — help determine whether governments or other authorities will see them as a genuine threat or just something that can be dismissed like a focus group.

There's more at the link.

When the Federales do not know the law, how can they legitimately police? [the Portland story]

Andrew Crespo, Unpacking DHS’s Troubling Explanation of the Portland Van Video, Lawfare, July 25, 2020:

Over the past few days, millions of people have seen a now-viral video in which two federal agents dressed in full combat gear removed an apparently peaceful protester from the streets of Portland, Ore., and carried him away in an unmarked van.

7️⃣7️⃣6️⃣ Portland, OR: federal troops doing a casual roadside abduction, wordlessly seizing someone and putting them into an unmarked van before driving off

15 July 2020

[@matcha_chai]
pic.twitter.com/byQHLY4D6U

— T. Greg Doucette (@greg_doucette) July 15, 2020

Stories have emerged of other people being taken or pursued by federal agents in a similar fashion. Meanwhile, troubling videos show federal agents in Portland beating a peacefully resolute U.S. Navy veteran and, on a separate occasion, shooting a man in the face with a nonlethal munition, which broke his skull.

As criticism of these events rolled in—including from virtually every relevant state and local official in Oregon—the Department of Homeland Security scheduled a press conference earlier this week to try to reclaim the narrative. If the point of that press conference was to reassure an anxious nation that this unfamiliar and recently constituted federal police force is following the law, it likely achieved the opposite effect.

In particular, there is a two-minute segment of the press conference that is both revealing and highly disturbing. It shows that one of the top commanders of this new paramilitary federal police force—Kris Cline, Deputy Director of the Federal Protective Service—apparently does not know what the word “arrest” means. To say as much might seem like harping on semantics or, worse, like picking on Cline for speaking inartfully. But it is absolutely critical to unpack and examine Cline’s words—because the word arrest is one of the most important words in the constitutional law of policing.

Simply put, for an arrest to be constitutional it must be supported by probable cause. This means that the arresting officer must be able to point to specific facts that would cause a reasonable officer to believe that the person being arrested has committed a specific crime. If, on the other hand, the police have not arrested someone but have instead conducted only a brief investigatory stop, they need substantially less proof that the target of their attention is engaged in criminal activity. And if the police initiate instead what is often termed a consensual contact—as would occur if, say, a uniformed officer walked up to you and said, “hey, I want to ask you some questions”—well, in that case the Fourth Amendment simply does not apply, which means the officer does not need to have any reason to approach you.

Prof. Timothy Snyder of Yale: It’s very troubling. To say that the man was not arrested is simply lying. This is what authoritarian propaganda sounds like. A man has been arrested and you find some other way to describe it, for example, as a ‘simple engagement,’ which is false but it sounds like a technical term. So you stop and think about it. That’s how authoritarian propaganda works.

Arrests, stops and contacts carve up the universe of police-civilian interactions in the United States. So, when I say that Deputy Director Cline does not appear to know what the word “arrest” means, what I am really saying is that he does not know where the basic and essential legal lines are that mark the bounds of his agency’s lawful authority. That is a problem.

Crespo then goes go point out in some detail why Kline was wrong in his reasoning.

There is an odd, disorienting quality to Cline’s two-minute statement. I have no reason to question Cline’s integrity or motives. But on its face, his statement feels like a kind of criminal procedure version of gaslighting. With an earnest, “just the facts” style, Cline is clearly trying to convince the public that what happened in Portland is not a big deal.

The agents were “peaceful,” he said. “There was no tackle to the ground.” This was just “a simple engagement.” It is unfortunate, Cline tells us, that this all “got kinda spun out of control with the rhetoric about what happened,” as if the people questioning the legality of the arrest are the ones blowing this all out of proportion. After all, Cline reminds us, “it was not a custodial arrest.”

Except it was.

Johnny Don't Study War No More

Time to break out the anti-war/peace music.

The New York Path to Peace has another video out, based on a traditional tune, When Johnny Comes Marching Home. Arranged by Steve Swell, it features Roswell Rudd on solo trombone. The photographs are from the Library of Congress and depict the battlefield at Gettysburg. A good many of these photographs were prepared in stereo-pairs, implying that they were intended for home viewing. Given the often grisly subject matter in these photos, that, I believe, makes them “war porn.”

Members of The New York Path to Peace, August 29, 2008

Music by The New York Path to Peace

Editing and Assembly by Xanadu Jive (Bill Benzon aka STC4blues)

Roswell Rudd, Solo Trombone

Steve Swell, Arranger

Music

The New York Path to Peace:

Victor Jaroslaw: Drums, Sekere

Steve Swell: Trombone

Sam Kulik: Trombone

Roswell Rudd: Trombone

Matt Moran: Bass Drum & Cymbal

Greg Glassman: Trumpet

Everyone: Chants

Enrique Fernandez: Alto Sax

Don Slatoff: Tenor Sax, Bass Clarinet

Dan Peck: Tuba

Chris Stromquist: Snare Drum

Charlie Keil: Valve Trombone, Percussion

Bob Hovey: Trombone

Bill Benzon: Trumpet

Allen Farmelo: Percussion

Produced by Allen Farmelo & Charlie Keil

Recorded by Allen Farmelo at Mavericks Studio, NYC

Mixed & Mastered by Allen Farmelo at The Farm, Brooklyn

Assistant Engineer: Jessica Thomson

Music © 2009 12/8 PR

www.128path.org

Photographs

Civil War photographs from the American Memory collection of the Library of Congress.

The (mis)use of social media as a means of social control

Aviram, Hadar, Progressive Punitivism: Notes on the Use of Punitive Social Control to Advance Social Justice Ends (June 14, 2019). Buffalo Law Review, Forthcoming; UC Hastings Research Paper No. 364. Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=3404276 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3404276.

Abstract: This essay examines the emergence of an academic and popular discourse that advocates turning the cannons of the punitive machine against the powerful. I identify this discourse as “progressive punitivism”: a logic that wields the classic weapons of punitive law — shaming, stigmatization, harsh punishment, and denial of rehabilitation — in the service of promoting social equality. This logic has permeated much of the political conversation on the progressive left in the United States, and while it has gained some hold in academic discourse, particularly in the legal field, its core lies in the leftist social media arena, where it has enjoyed considerable popular appeal in the last few years. Progressive ire before, and especially after, the election of Donald Trump to the presidency, has flared around issues such as police accountability for use of excessive force, especially against people of color; the proliferation of sexual harassment, assault, and abuse, by the powerful, with too little accountability; and the too-lenient legal response to expressions of racism, xenophobia, corporate/political malfeasance, and other forms of discrimination, social hatred and exclusion.

Progressive punitivism operates within the criminal justice system, in the context of a call to hold people perceived as belonging to powerful groups accountable for their actions. However, it also operates throughout the realm of social media and public opinion, often compensating for the perceived lack of formal consequences against the powerful with intense bursts of informal social control, such as online shaming and excoriation. These two realms — formal and informal social control — frequently cross paths in progressive punitivism in complex ways, often yielding informal, democratized punitive power to those perceived as powerless within the formal apparatus.

In this paper I attempt to sketch the main features, origins, and consequences, of the progressive punitive perspective. I start with an overview of the main characteristics of progressive punitivism: turning the existing punitive machine on the powerful, focusing on identity and group politics as an epistemological resource for identifying perpetrators, the concept of “ratcheting up” punishment, the preoccupation with victim voices, and the idea of punishment as a catalyst for social change. I then review the three key areas in which ideas of progressive punitivism have gained visible popularity in recent times: police abuse of force, sexual assault (carceral feminism and the #metoo movement) and hate crimes. I also engage in a brief discussion of the interplay between the call for formal consequences for lawbreaking and the engagement in intense punitive expressions of informal social control, particularly via shaming campaigns on social media. I then expand the theoretical framework by interrogating the intellectual and cultural sources of progressive punitivism, examining radical and critical criminology, second-wave feminism, and Communist China as a surprising intellectual parallel. I conclude that the most plausible source of progressive punitivism is conservative punitivism; Americans of all political stripes, I explain, have been steeped for decades in a framework that sees criminal justice as the quintessential solution for moral problems and victims of crime as the premier moral interlocutors. American criminal justice in the late 20th and early 21st centuries has had a deep impact on the national psyche, and progressive punitivism is, upon reflection, an application of this mentality, rather than a deviation or revolutionary reinterpretation of it. The essay ends with a discussion of the discontents of progressive punitivism and the dangers of cottoning to it as a viable strategy for social justice reform.

Protests can be joyous!

Lebanon is not stopping!

Making protests into incredible, fun events is looking like a winning strategy.

pic.twitter.com/42ASFXTikT

— Joshua Potash 🆘 (@JoshuaPotash) October 31, 2019

See my posts:

• Jamming for Peace
• Peace Now! - First Mix
• Johnny Don't Study War No More
• Come Together, Right NOW! Music on the March
• The Japanese Take Manhattan, Protest Nukes

From "Jamming for Peace", way back on March 22, 2003, before the invasion of Iraq:

So there we were, a half dozen horns, perhaps a dozen percussion, all within a 20-yard radius. We’d come to the demo in ones, twos and threes, managed to home-in on one another’s sounds, and stayed in floating proximity for the two or three mile walk down Broadway to Washington Square. Sometimes we were closer, within a 5 or 6-yard radius, and sometimes we sprawled over 50 yards. The music was like that too, sometimes close, sometimes sprawled.

When the march slowed to a stop, one of the djembe players would urge the percussionists to form a circle. The horn players executed punctuating riffs as one person after another moved into the circle’s center to dance their steps. These young women clearly had taken African dance classes. When the demo started to move, the dancers dispersed into the crowd, the circle dissolved, and we starting moving forward.

Sometimes the music made magic. The drummers would lock on a rhythm, then a horn player – we took turns doing this – would set a riff, with the four or five others joining in on harmony parts or unison with the lead. At the same time the crowd would chant “peace now” between the riffs while raising their hands in the air, in synch. All of a sudden – it only took two or three seconds for this to happen – a thirty-yard swath of people became one. Horn players traded off on solos, the others kept the riffs flowing, percussionists were locked, and the crowd embraced us all. You walked with spring and purpose. Even as the crowd chanted “peace” I was feeling “Onward Christian Soldiers” and “Battle Hymn of the Republic” in my mind and in my step.

The tribe was rising.

Rising expectations...protests...progress?

By the numbers, things in Chile look good. so why the protests?

Chile's life expectancy has risen steadily, overtaking that of neighboring Argentina. Chileans, on average, now live longer than Americans do. pic.twitter.com/Yc85oCB2Zy

— Noah Smith 🐇 (@Noahpinion) October 28, 2019

De Tocqueville: actual progress fails to meet rising expectations resulting in unrest and even revolution.

— Bill Benzon (@bbenzon) October 28, 2019

Tyler Cowen at Marginal Revolution:

That is the topic of my latest Bloomberg column, here is one excerpt:

Second, a protest against poor conditions is not the same as a protest against inequality. Many Chilean complaints revolve around the pension system, health care, water rights, public transportation, schools and corruption. Are Chileans upset that their transport options aren’t better? That’s a complaint in absolute terms. Or are they upset that they are riding the subway while many of the wealthy have private cars with drivers? That’s a relative complaint.

The answer will depend on the protester, and in virtually all protests around the world there will be those with both motives. But some North American commentators try to equate these two grudges and subsume them all under the heading of inequality. That just won’t wash.

And don’t forget this:

In the case of Chile, it has the highest real wages in Latin America, income inequality has mostly been falling, and life expectancy is above average for the region. By Latin American standards Chile has a low rate of crime and a high degree of public order. Chile has had open and honest elections, and peaceful transfers of power, since 1990.

So high expectations may be more relevant than either “inequality” or “neo-liberalism” per se, at least for many of the protestors.

Ah, high expectations, classic: Things improve, leading people to expect further improvements, but, alas, those expectations outpace the actual improvements, leading to greater discontent. I believe that it is de Tocqueville who introduced that mode of explanation into social science, back in the mid 19th century. I read about it in The Old Regime and the Revolution in my intro to sociology class as an undergraduate.

And, to the extent that at least some protests are fueled by this mismatch between expectations and accomplishment, we might see protests as an indicator of PROGRESS.

Protests have been on the rise since the 1950s, but success rate has been doing down since the mid-2000s

Max Fisher and Amanda Taub, The Interpreter, NYTimes, Oct. 26 2019:

The world is changing in ways that make people likelier to seek sweeping political change by taking to the streets. [But] Protests are also becoming much, much likelier to fail.
Only 20 years ago, 70 percent of protests demanding systemic political change got it — a figure that had been growing steadily since the 1950s.

In the mid-2000s, that trend suddenly reversed. Worldwide, protesters’ success rate has since plummeted to only 30 percent, according to a study by Erica Chenoweth, a Harvard University political scientist who called the decline “staggering.” [...]

To understand that shift, here are four major changes behind our new normal of mass global protest and what it reveals about the world.

(1) Democracy is stalling out

Democracy’s once-steady growth around the world has stalled, and is maybe beginning to reverse.

For the first time since World War II, the number of countries moving toward authoritarianism is exceeding the number moving toward democracy, according to a recent study by Anna Lürhmann and Staffan Lindberg of the University of Gothenburg in Sweden. [...]  Bottom-up pressures that usually manifest as public demand or at least desire for democracy, such as rising middle classes, are still building, as they have throughout the modern era.

But now that people aren’t getting democracy, it’s as if a release valve has been closed. That built-up pressure is getting released as explosions of mass outrage. And because within-system avenues for change, like voting in elections or lobbying elected officials, are seen as less and less reliable, people seek change from outside the system, with mass protests. [...]

Those middle-ground countries, where citizens have enough freedom to expect and demand change but not to get it, may be the most susceptible to repeated popular revolt.

Such countries can become “stuck in a low-level equilibrium trap” between unrest and reform, Seva Gunitsky, a University of Toronto political scientist, wrote in a recent paper. [...]

(2) Social media makes protests likelier to start, likelier to balloon in size and likelier to fail

[...] She [Erica Chenoweth] cited, as a comparison, the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee, or SNCC, a student civil rights group that played a major role in the civil rights movement.
In that pre-social media era, activists had to spend years mobilizing through community outreach and organization-building. Activists met near daily to drill, strategize and hash out disagreements. But those tasks made the movement more durable, ensuring it was built on real-world grass-roots networks. And it meant that the movement had the internal organization both to persevere when things got hard and to translate street victories into carefully planned political outcomes.

Social media allows movements to skip many of those steps, putting more bodies on the streets more quickly, but without the underlying structure to help get results. [...]

At the same time, governments have learned to co-opt social media, using it to disseminate propaganda, rally its sympathizers or simply spread confusion. [...]

(3) Social polarization is way up

There is a truth about protest movements that often gets missed.

We often think of mass protests as representing “the people.” It’s how participants describe them. And it gives their protests a degree of democratic legitimacy.

But the truth, in almost all cases, is that they are primarily driven by a particular social class or set of social classes. [...] any movement, especially at first, is usually animated by a social class collectively demanding changes that will serve that class or, maybe just as often, demanding to reverse changes that have hurt them. (When enough social classes join in, particularly poorer strata that are historically less likely to protest, you have a revolution.) [...]

Social polarization is increasing worldwide. People are more polarized along racial, class and partisan lines. As a result, they are likelier to cling to their sense of group identity and to see their group as under siege — compelling them to collectively rise up. [...]

The result is often a sense of conflict between “the people” and “the system” — a recipe for populist backlashes in countries where people still trust institutions enough to bring change through elections, and anti-system uprisings seemingly everywhere else.

(4) Authoritarian learning

The world’s strongmen, would-be strongmen and outright dictators appear to have noticed the rise in civil unrest, and especially protesters’ success at forcing change.

Nonviolent protests became, to the world’s authoritarians, a threat just as dangerous as any foreign army, if not more so.

In the mid-2000s, they began to fight back with what Ms. Chenoweth called, in a 2017 paper, “joint efforts to develop, systematize, and report on techniques and best practices for containing such threats.” [...]  And, Ms. Chenoweth said, governments learned to watch one another for lessons on tools and tactics, and even to openly share them.

There is a term for this direct and indirect lesson-sharing: authoritarian learning.

These cat-and-mouse strategies for frustrating and redirecting popular dissent without crushing it outright are a major reason that protests’ success rate has plummeted.

But such strategies also don’t really defeat dissent outright — so they may be helping to ensure future cycles of protests, maintaining the high global rate.

H/t Tyler Cowen.

See earlier post, INEQUALITY!! sparks rising tide of protests world-wide.

INEQUALITY!! sparks rising tide of protests world-wide [but the success rate is decreasing]

Declan Walsh and Max Fisher, From Chile to Lebanon, Protests Flare Over Wallet Issues, NYTimes, Oct 23, 2019.

LONDON — In Chile, the spark was an increase in subway fares. In Lebanon, it was a tax on WhatsApp calls. The government of Saudi Arabia moved against hookah pipes. In India, it was about onions.

Small pocketbook items became the focus of popular fury across the globe in recent weeks, as frustrated citizens filled the streets for unexpected protests that tapped into a wellspring of bubbling frustration at a class of political elites seen as irredeemably corrupt or hopelessly unjust or both. They followed mass demonstrations in Bolivia, Spain, Iraq and Russia and before that the Czech Republic, Algeria, Sudan and Kazakhstan in what has been a steady drumbeat of unrest over the past few months.

At first glance, many of the demonstrations were linked by little more than tactics. Weeks of unremitting civil disobedience in Hong Kong set the template for a confrontational approach driven by vastly different economic or political demands.

Yet in many of the restive countries, experts discern a pattern: a louder-than-usual howl against elites in countries where democracy is a source of disappointment, corruption is seen as brazen, and a tiny political class lives large while the younger generation struggles to get by.

“It’s young people who have had enough,” said Ali H. Soufan, chief executive of The Soufan Group, a security intelligence consultancy. “This new generation are not buying into what they see as the corrupt order of the political and economic elite in their own countries. They want a change.”

Few were as surprised as the leaders of those countries.

On Thursday, the President Sebastián Piñera of Chile boasted that his country was an oasis of stability in Latin America. “We are ready to do everything to not fall into populism, into demagoguery,” he said in an interview published in The Financial Times.

The next day, protesters attacked factories, torched subway stations and looted supermarkets in Chile’s worst upheaval in decades, eventually forcing Mr. Piñera to deploy troops to the streets. By Wednesday, at least 15 people were dead, and a clearly rattled Mr. Piñera had spoken of “war against a powerful and implacable enemy.”

As protests have been rising for decades, their rate of success has been falling:

Although the recent scattering of mass protests appears dramatic, scholars say it is a continuation of a rising trend. For decades, societies across the world have become far likelier to pursue sweeping political change by taking to the streets.

The rate of protest has accelerated sharply of late, as various factors have converged: a slowing global economy, dizzying gaps between rich and poor and a youth bulge that in many countries has produced a restive new generation fizzing with frustrated ambition. In addition, the expansion of democracy has stalled globally, leaving citizens with unresponsive governments frustrated and activists sure that street action is the only way to force change.

But as protest movements grow, their success rates are plunging. Only 20 years ago, 70 percent of protests demanding systemic political change achieved it — a figure that had been growing steadily since the 1950s, according to a study by Erica Chenoweth, a Harvard University political scientist.

In the mid-2000s, that trend reversed. Success rates now stand at 30 percent, the study said, a decline that Professor Chenoweth called staggering.

These two trends are closely linked. As protests become more frequent but likelier to flounder, they stretch on and on, becoming more contentious, more visible — and more apt to return to the streets when their demands go unmet. The result may be a world where popular uprisings lose their prominence, becoming simply part of the landscape.

“Something has really shifted,” Professor Chenoweth said in an interview.

“You could say these protests mirror what’s going on in the United States,” said Vali Nasr, a Middle East scholar who recently stepped down as dean of Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies in Washington. In countries where elections are decisive, like the United States and Britain, skepticism about the old political order has produced populist, nationalist and anti-immigrant results at the polls.

“In other countries, where people don’t have a voice, you have massive protests erupting,” he said.

But protests organized by mass media are not as effective as grass-roots protests:

If protests are quicker to stir and more widespread than in earlier decades, they are also more fragile. The painstaking mobilization that once was a feature of grass-roots movements was slow but durable. Protests that organize on social media can rise faster, but collapse just as quickly.

Authoritarian governments have also learned to co-opt social media, using it to disseminate propaganda, rally sympathizers or simply spread confusion, Professor Chenoweth said.

And even where there is a spasm of protest, it takes a lot more for it to snowball into a full opposition movement.

Over at Marginal Revolution, Tyler Cowen notes:

The trend is that price increases may continue to become less popular. And, crucially, the internet will help people organize against such changes.

Consider that an old-style labor-oriented protest can be organized through the workplace or plant itself, through on-the-ground techniques that long predate the internet. There is a common locale and set of social networks in place, including perhaps a union. Those who suffer from a price increase, in contrast, typically do not know each other or have common social ties. Just about everyone buys gasoline, either directly or indirectly. The internet, however, makes it possible to mobilize these people into protests with prices as the common theme.

In other words: Protests of workers seem to be becoming less important, and protests of consumers are becoming more important.

You may recall that one of the original demands of the “gilets jaunes” protests in France was for free parking in Disneyland Paris. If you think that sounds a little crazy, you haven’t yet internalized the nature of the new millennium.

In the future, efficiency-enhancing or austerity-induced changes in prices may be much harder to accomplish politically. The new trend is neither central planning nor market liberal reforms, but rather frozen prices, especially when those prices are set in the political realm.

The Japanese Take Manhattan, Protest Nukes

Another bump, just as a reminder: Give Peace a Chance!

As it's the season for peace I thought I'd bump this one to the top of the queue.

Yesterday (May 2010) I marched in my umpteenth protest march. This one was organized by United for Peace and Justice and took place in mid-town Manhattan, starting in Times Square and ending up near the United Nations building. As things would have it, this march turned out to be my first Japanese anti-nuke demonstration. It wasn't planned by the Japanese, nor was it planned to be Japanese, though Japanese organizations were intimately involved, e.g. the Japanese Trade Union Confederation (RENGO), and Mayors for Peace, an international organization started by the mayors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. I expected this demonstration be like every other protest march I've been in these past few years – though, not, for example, on the scale of the March 2003 anti-war protest, the one that didn’t prevent the invasion of Iraq under the pretext that it harbored nukes. That is, I expected to be marching with mostly North American descendants of European immigrants, but with the visible presence of the Japanese and Koreans, among others.

But the North American Euros didn't show up, maybe because to do so would have been to repudiate the 8-year rolling disaster that was the Bush presidency. Or maybe they thought that we didn’t have to hold Obama’s feet to the fire on all this hope he’s been offering us. Whatever. The upshot is that Japanese out-numbered everyone else by three or four to one.

And they were insistent about Article 9 of their constitution, the constitution we gave them after WWII. Article 9 forbids the Japanese state from engaging in warfare. There was an exhibit about the article in the meeting area near the United Nations building and many Japanese were giving out decals and packages of facial tissue (a common promotional item in Japan) promoting Article 9. As you might have expected, there was also at least one Japanese in a Doraemon costume. Pop culture is pop culture, it’s everyone, and certainly at anti-nuke protests.

Article 9 Decal

I was there with The New York Path to Peace performing "Peace Now", a band of guerilla musicians dedicated to making music for good causes.

At one point a block’s worth of marchers were singing "Peace Now!" along with us. Of course we didn’t know it – we were told by one of the dozen or so people who hooked up with us along the way – because we were in the middle of the crowd playing our keesters off. The most gratifying moment, however, came when a Japanese group passed us (we were playing from the sidewalk at that point) singing “We Shall Overcome.”

We joined them. Of course.

That’s music.

* * * * *

See Jamming for Peace!
More Peace Posts

Protest marches aren't what they used to be: What does size mean?

Zeynep Tufekci in the NYTimes:

A protest does not have power just because many people get together in one place. Rather, a protest has power insofar as it signals the underlying capacity of the forces it represents.

Consider an analogy from the natural world: A gazelle will sometimes jump high in the air while grazing, apparently to no end — but it is actually signaling strength. “If I can jump this high,” it communicates to would-be predators, “I can also run very fast. Don’t bother with the chase.”

Protesters are saying, in effect, “If we can pull this off, imagine what else we can do.”

But it is much easier to pull off a large protest than it used to be. In the past, a big demonstration required months, if not years, of preparation. The planning for the March on Washington in August 1963, for example, started nine months earlier, in December 1962. The march drew a quarter of a million people, but it represented much more effort, commitment and preparation than would a protest of similar size today. Without Facebook, without Twitter, without email, without cellphones, without crowdfunding, the ability to organize such a march was a fair proxy for the strength and sophistication of the civil rights movement.

Tufekci goes on to point out that, sure, organizing the Women's march took a lot of work, "However, as with all protests today, the march required fewer resources and less time spent on coordination than a comparable protest once did." She goes on to mention the anti-war protests of February 2003, "at that point, likely the largest global protest in history", and the Occupy protests of 2011, "held in about 1,000 cities in more than 80 countries". Both of these protests, and others, have had relatively little practical impact.

This doesn’t mean that protests no longer matter — they do. Nowadays, however, protests should be seen not as the culmination of an organizing effort, but as a first, potential step. A large protest today is less like the March on Washington in 1963 and more like Rosa Parks’s refusal to move to the back of the bus. What used to be an endpoint is now an initial spark.

She then goes on to mention the Tea Party protests of 2009, noting:

But the Tea Party protesters then got to work on a ferociously focused agenda: identifying and supporting primary candidates to challenge Republicans who did not agree with their demands, keeping close tabs on legislation and pressuring politicians who deviated from a Tea Party platform.

Bryant Watch: Throw Him a Fish

Critiquing Levi Bryant is like shooting fish in a barrel, a very large barrel with an unbounded supply of fish. One could become addicted and so be lost to an endless, and ultimately fruitless, Sisyphean task. Still, I can't resist his most recent post, McKenzie Wark: How Do You Occupy an Abstraction? (4 Aug 2012).

While the whole post clocks in at well over 2000 words I've decided to limit my observations to the final sentence, more or less. Here it is: "I guess this post will get Homeland Security after me." In case you didn't believe it the first time, here it is again: "I guess this post will get Homeland Security after me."

What the Fuck!%&@!!#!

As you know the United States Department of Homeland Security was formed in response to the terrorist attacks of 9/11 and is charged "with the primary responsibilities of protecting the United States of America and U.S. Territories (including Protectorates) from and responding to terrorist attacks, man-made accidents, and natural disasters."

So Levi Bryant, Official Jester to the Court of Philosopher Queens–no sexist he, philosopher kings are so old school–is telling us that there is something in that post that merits the attention of the government agency charged with protecting the United States from terrorist attack. If Bryant has any serious intention to commit an act or acts of terrorism it would be self-destructively stupid to 1) post it on the internet in a public blog, and 2) to double-dog dare DHS to come get him. On the other hand, if he has no such intention, then his statement is pure self-pleasuring bluster, bombast, and bloviation.

You be the judge.

Intuition and the Real 2: On the March

I’ve got another case to add to those in my earlier post on intuition and the sense of reality. This case arose in a long, and often interesting, discussion of the recent evictions of Occupy Wall Street encampments. The discussion has been taking place at Crooked Timber and has involved, among other things, a fairly extensive conversation between one Adrian Kelleher, about whom I know nothing, and Rich Puchalsky, whom I know from The Valve and CT.

Kelleher has been making long, detailed comments saying, more or less, “you’re doing it wrong, you can’t possibly succeed.” Puchalsky, who’s been working with the Occupy group in his neighborhood somewhere in in not-Boston Massachusetts, has been saying, “you don’t at all understand the Occupy movement.” In particular, Kelleher made two long comments, 333 and, particularly 334, which is about how OWS is swimming against “the tide of history.” Puchalsky responds in 341.

Here’s my reply to Puchalsky:

Puchalsky: It’s possible for someone to have quite conventional political views and yet act quite differently within a social situation that is different.

BB: Bingo!

Puchalsky: When that failure happens, people in OWS will have friends that they can trust, people who they’ve worked with at a very elemental level.

BB: Bingo! Bingo!

BB: Let me invoke Marley's Theorem, named after my old buddy Jason Marley: "If you want to know what it's like to drive a car, you've got to sit in the driver's set and drive the car." Sitting in the passenger's seat watching the driver won't do it, nor will sitting in the back seat, and certainly not sitting at home in your den imagining what driving a car is like. You've got to be IN the car, making decisions about traffic, the road, and pedestrians. It's that elemental.