Eric Alterman comments on the demonstrations:
DEMONSTRATION DOWNSIDE
I caught about 15 minutes of the weekend’s anti-war demonstration in Washington,D.C. on a C-SPAN rebroadcast while waiting for the Stones to come on Saturday night. I couldn’t stand much more.
In the first place, everybody looked so cold, I felt their pain. In the second, most of the speakers sounded like jerks. Part of the problem is endemic to demonstrations. I never accept invitations to speak at them, no matter how good the cause, because I can’t bring myself to make blanket pronouncements I know to be vast oversimplifications at best, falsehoods at worst.
But part of the problem is this awful organization, A.N.S.W.E.R., which has taken over the organizing of them.
It is a little-known fact — I discovered it while researching my senior honors thesis in 1981-82 — that the anti-Vietnam demonstrations may have actually increased support for the war. Nobody was more unpopular with the country than the demonstrators. Even people who opposed the war, according to Gallup data, disapproved of the demonstrators by vast proportions. (The alternate argument — equally unprovable — is that the movement helped end the war because it scared the Nixon administration into suing for peace for reasons of domestic tranquility. But this is belied by the collapse of the movement following the end of the draft.)
Some demonstrations are effective because they show Americans that people just like them care passionately about a cause and are willing to show up in person to support it. This was certainly true of Martin Luther King’s demonstrations and I think it’s also true of Equal Rights Amendment and abortion rights demonstrations, and it seemed true of the nuclear freeze demonstrations I attended in the 1980s.
But radical rhetoric denouncing America and everything it stands for — which is what I heard from the A.N.S.W.E.R.-chosen speakers in D.C. over the weekend — does more harm than good. They harden the other side’s resolve and turn away “normal” non-political people from a cause they might otherwise support. Ramsey Clark may have been a good attorney general way back when, and might have made a good senator, but he took a wrong turn somewhere and his political analysis is now about on par with that of Alexander Cockburn or Andrew Sullivan. I hope most of the people in that freezing crowd disagreed with it, but there’s no way to know.
In other words, by allowing A.N.S.W.E.R. to take over the peace movement, protesters are focusing America on their worst features, and almost daring them to side with Bush and company. It’s a tough quandary because the left needs bodies and these Stalinist types are the best demonstration organizers — just as they were in the sixties. And the Left has never solved it.
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