The first thing to know is that it was all basically willed into being — not by “paid protesters” or the Mexican government or socialists or union leaders, but by Stephen Miller, the architect of President Trump’s xenophobic immigration plan and his deputy chief of staff. In a May meeting at ICE headquarters, Miller reportedly demanded that field agents forget about targeting only those undocumented immigrants with criminal records and instead stage purposefully cruel, attention-getting sweeps in places like the parking lot of a Home Depot. That is precisely where, last Friday, those raids began.
The second thing to know is that the unrest was really quite limited: a roughly five-block stretch downtown, in a city of nearly four million people spread over almost 500 square miles; several driverless Waymo robot taxis, lined up on one street and set ablaze. There was some more serious violence, too: some journalists were shot with rubber bullets and other less-lethal munitions, a few cop cars were pelted with rocks, and at least one was set on fire, but no serious law-enforcement injuries were reported. But this was not 1965, with widespread arson and 34 deaths, or 1992, with disorder spreading through whole neighborhoods and more than 60 people killed.
None of that means that what began last Friday in Los Angeles — a series of spectacular ICE raids, a direct-action response to block them, large-scale peaceful protests punctuated in places by bursts of familiar violence — is insignificant. To the contrary: Hundreds of migrants and protesters have been arrested over the last week, with many of the raids conducted by ICE officers in the now-familiar uniform of masked anonymity. The National Guard was mobilized over the objection of California’s governor, Gavin Newsom, and without the support of the Los Angeles Police Department’s leadership, with hundreds of Marines on active duty mobilized to join them in a rare deployment of military personnel to a site of domestic unrest.
On Tuesday, Trump disparaged Los Angeles as a “trash heap” in an incendiary speech that was met with horrifying applause from assembled loyalists in the Army, and on Thursday, Senator Alex Padilla was hauled out of a local news conference being held by the secretary of homeland security, Kristi Noem. When the senator was wrestled to the floor, the secretary had just declared “we are not going away,” but would instead stay in L.A. to “liberate the city” from “socialists” and its democratically elected local government.
The political scientists I spoke to throughout the week used phrases like “competitive authoritarianism,” “acute democratic backsliding” and “autocratic power grab.”
But the political theater of the last week also seemed strangely distorted, as though we were watching it transpire through the wrong end of a telescope. If the decade of protest that encircled the world from Tahrir Square to Hong Kong in the 2010s was a result of social media, which made it much easier to amass enormous rallies on the streets without much real organization or commitment among those joining the march, we seem to have entered a new phase, in which the relationship between real-world protest and the debate stage of our phones has been somewhat inverted.
Social media is still useful in drawing crowds pretty spontaneously into the streets. But it is now also functioning as its own theater, where the real world serves as fodder for endless argumentation, exasperation, outrage, and hand-wringing. “The agenda gets set through virality,” says the Berkeley political scientist Jake Grumbach. As does responsibility, he says — which, “in an era of social media, it’s incredibly hard to manage.”
“I am struck, in some ways, by the scriptedness of it all,” says another Berkeley political scientist, Omar Wasow, who studies activism and backlash. “Protests are an act of storytelling, at their most powerful when they draw on mythology in our culture, and what happens on the ground matters in shifting politics,” he goes on. “But there’s also a template now: outrage and calls for law and order on the right, and a kind of rallying behind the righteousness of the cause on the left. There is media coverage that just hyper-fixates on there’s a fire!” And, of course, a know-it-all impulse to proclaim, too, when we first see such images, that their effect on public opinion is obvious.
Grumbach calls this “pundit brain” — the impulse to immediately digest political news primarily through debates over strategy. Was it good to burn a Waymo, effective to block a highway, productive to wave a Mexican flag, all in the name of raising salience? Or would it all backfire, giving Trump and Miller exactly what they wanted, as so many pundits immediately warned.
Within just a few days, attention had turned away from those images and the A.I. slop each inspired, and toward the Trump administration’s eager escalation. But public opinion was scattered enough that it was pretty foolish to presume any coherent strategic lesson from it. One poll says Americans largely support Trump’s deployment of the National Guard; another says the opposite. One poll says immigration is Trump’s best issue; another has support turning sharply downward in recent days.
And, of course, over time opinion is volatile, too, and getting more so in an age of thermostatic whiplash. Just five years ago, for the first time in the Gallup survey’s history, more Americans were telling pollsters that they wanted higher rates of immigration rather than less, and not long before that those who believed immigrants were on net contributing positively to the country outnumbered those who thought they were a burden — 62 percent to 28 percent.
There are enduring lessons from political science about what works, but despite what we are often told, those lessons are not exactly that the public will never support disruptive action or even that some amount of violent protest is always counterproductive. These questions are the core focus of the research of Erica Chenoweth, a political scientist at Harvard, who finds that nonviolence is generally less politically risky, but also thinks questions about specific tactics are less important than the basic playbook for success: mass mobilization focused on cultivating noncooperation like boycotts and strikes among institutions and business elites, and designed above all to invite public defections from the other side.
In that sense, it is encouraging to see veterans and members of the military speaking out, and several Republican members of Congress appearing to criticize the president’s actions — and indeed to see the president himself somewhat backing down, suggesting that ICE should deploy more common sense in targeting farm and hotel workers, for instance. (Of course, we’ll see if that holds.)
But as Hahrie Han of Johns Hopkins pointed out to me, it’s always critical to build alliances between protesters and other leaders — as Senator Padilla seemed to be when he disrupted that D.H.S. news conference. But in the present environment that is becoming harder to do, given greater government surveillance and far more aggressive policing of dissent and political speech. (It’s no mistake, after all, that this administration’s first high-profile ICE detentions were not of violent criminals or even people in the country illegally but of activists here on green cards and student visas.)
This was one major shortcoming of the large-scale global protests of the 2010s, Vincent Bevins argued in his book “If We Burn: The Mass Protest Decade and the Missing Revolution,” when millions took to the streets across Cairo, Istanbul, Rio de Janeiro and Hong Kong, successively shocking the world with the sheer volume of widespread indignation — only to watch as the spontaneous-seeming protest energy quickly dissipated. In so many cases, something like the status quo, and often worse, returned.
By this standard, you might judge a whole generation of mass American protest to be a failure, too. The anti-globalization drive centered in Seattle in 1999, the antiwar protests in the run-up to the invasion of Iraq in 2003, and the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street movements in the aftermath of the financial crisis of 2008 — all sputtered out without notching obvious policy victories or reversing the patterns of history each hoped to thwart. But sometimes, the victories are simply more diffuse than we might expect — as, in truth, were the demands of protesters. Occupy Wall Street, for instance, didn’t lead to a huge wealth tax, but it did introduce income inequality as a new center of political gravity for the country. Over the same period, the country simultaneously grew considerably more isolationist and, in recent years, anti-free trade.
The legacy of more recent mass protests is complicated, too, partly because we so rush to adjudicate each episode immediately that we miss what protest is really meant to do, which is to bring change over time. Do you measure the balance of progress and backlash on Day 3, Month 3, Year 3, or even later? Do you look to public opinion, or policy, or who’s in the White House or the statehouse or the mayor’s office?
The climate protests, which surged in 2019, did ultimately result in concrete policy: the Inflation Reduction Act and the European Green Deal. But the first is now on the MAGA chopping block and the second has been put on the back burner, amid a broader cultural retreat from climate alarm. The Black Lives Matter protests of 2020 were enormously popular, meaningfully elevating national concern for racial justice and benefiting Democratic candidates that fall, though they are often remembered as progressive excess feeding of what looks like the country’s present reactionary turn. And activism against Israel’s war on Gaza, centered on college campuses, has ignited a war on elite higher education and is these days routinely derided as cartoonish political grandiosity from privileged 20-year-olds — but American sympathy for Israel has recently reached an all-time low. Exactly what is cause and what is effect, in each of these, is not so clear — it rarely is, in real time, and it isn’t always so clear in retrospect, either.
And then there is what you might call the most significant of all recent political unrest — the storming of the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. In the weeks and months that followed, Trump’s political standing seemed to collapse — including among electorally critical moderates and many prominent Republicans, who took the opportunity to publicly and unequivocally defect from and denounce the Trump coalition.
But that backlash didn’t exactly sink Trump’s political future, and while it’s hard to say for sure whether he might have won in 2024 without it, his coalition was ultimately hardened by the experience. This is one reason the country is where it is today, in a battle between humanitarian progressivism and an emboldened right-wing authoritarian faction. History is complicated.
Over the last week, that battle has unfolded in a kind of social-media diorama of Los Angeles. This weekend, it spreads across the country through nationwide “No Kings” marches. What follows may be what Wasow calls a “long hot summer” of violence and escalation, as the Trump administration has already hinted it is planning. Or it might yield to a merciful de-escalation, with the violence of protesters already somewhat circumscribed and the violence of the state already blunted by public outrage.
Whatever comes, let’s not pretend we know the ultimate meaning of each episode because we caught a glimpse of the Fox News chyron or saw someone denouncing protest tactics on X. Better to try and see those protests and federal crackdowns against them each for what they are — a renewed resistance and the eager use of force to snuff it out.
The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: [email protected].
Follow the New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Bluesky, WhatsApp and Threads.
The post Protest Is Underrated appeared first on New York Times.
