When US President Donald Trump was elected the first time, German-American philosopher Hannah Arendt’s books flew off the shelves in the US. It was not all good news — J.D. Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy was also enjoying a surge in popularity and Trump was, of course, still about to be president. However, Arendt’s 1951 book, The Origins of Totalitarianism, was selling at 16 times its usual rate, which meant that by the time of the protests centered on Trump’s January 2017 inauguration, at least some of those people had read it.
Arendt’s view of popular demonstrations was complicated. She was not blind to the way authoritarian rulers use public protests as an excuse for a display of physical power, embodied in the police, which turns the state into an army against its people, altering that relationship. If it is no longer government by consent, it is rule by force, and they have the equipment.
Yet “how many people here still believe, that a protest has even historic importance?” she wrote of Germany in the 1930s, quoting French activist David Rousset. “This skepticism is the real masterpiece of the SS [Schutzstaffel]. Their great accomplishment. They have corrupted all human solidarity. Here the night has fallen on the future.”
Illustration: Yusha
It is an elegantly drawn lose-lose situation: If you lose the will to protest, you have been “morally murdered,” but if you do not, you play into the tyrant’s hands.
However, the 2017 Women’s March did not spark police violence. Not a single person was arrested across the 2 million protesters gathered in New York, Washington, Chicago, Los Angeles and Seattle. Commentators wondered whether this was due to the essentially peaceable nature of women and their allies, while academics drew comparisons with the hundreds of arrests made during the 2014 protests in Ferguson, Missouri, (which, of course, happened under then-US president Barack Obama).
“Tanks and rubber bullets versus pussy hats and high fives” was how academic Abby Harrington described the contrast, making the case convincingly that protesters were treated differently on essentially racist grounds. It would be wrong, and actually quite sexist, to say that the women were not considered worthy of violent suppression because they did not seem serious enough.
It would also be wrong to say that they made no impact — they were enormous, dispersed across 408 places in the US, rallying by some estimates more than 4 million Americans, and spawning protests in solidarity across seven continents, including one in Antarctica.
The demand was broad and consequently pretty loose: Protesters wanted “vibrant and diverse communities” recognized as “the strength of our country.” They wanted reproductive rights and tolerance and protection from violence, mutual respect, racial equality, gender equality, workers’ rights; it was a call for decency, to which the president felt no need to respond, almost by definition, since he is not decent.
The recent US protests were sparked on June 6 at about 9am, as border patrol agents massed outside a Home Depot in Paramount, California, a predominantly Latino city in Los Angeles County. California Assemblyman Jose Luis Solache Jr, happened to be driving past. He stopped and posted the scenes, which looked chillingly militaristic even days before the arrival of the deployment of the US National Guard.
Protesters started to arrive, not in huge numbers, but with a vast purpose — to prevent what looked like an immigration raid of people trying to do their jobs. It came on the back of the arrest of a senior union official in the Los Angeles Fashion District, and a father arrested in front of his eight-year-old son.
The message, when border guards sweep a workplace or a courtroom where people are doing regular immigration check-ins, is quite plain: This is not about deporting hardened criminals. The protesters’ demand was correlatively plain: Do not arrest our friends, neighbors or colleagues, when they pose no danger to anyone.
Since then, 700 marines have been deployed to the city, and the number of national guards doubled to 4,000. The situation recalls Arendt’s On Violence, in which she writes that power and violence are opposites — the state creates tinderbox situations when it has lost the expectation of public compliance.
So if the protests were symbolic, they would be playing into the government’s hands: an abstract resistance creating justification for concrete suppression. However, the protests are not symbolic — the alternative to protesting against a raid by border guards is to let the raid go ahead and lose those neighbors.
The Russian-American columnist and author Masha Gessen cites a distinction made in political science between faith, where you believe that justice will prevail, and hope, where you observe and participate.
“You can’t take action without hope, but you also can’t have hope without taking action,” Gessen wrote in the New York Times.
Everyone has a line over which they would be spurred to action — there is no one who would not lie down in front of the government van if their child were kidnapped and put inside it by masked men. So the real art of the autocratic state is not just to weaken protective institutions, but also to foster the conditions of fear and hopelessness ahead of a critical mass finding its hard limit. It is not yet clear whether the repression is a deliberate spectacle to create that fear, or whether, conversely, it is the accidental creation of conditions that demand action.
Zoe Williams is a Guardian columnist.
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