What Protesting Is Really About

A definitive guide to prepare you ahead of the next tedious round of discourse.

Thomas Hengge/Anadolu via Getty Images

Over the weekend, tons of people went to one of the No Kings rallies taking place across the country. And that means one thing: another round of tedious protest discourse.

You get this kind of thing every time there’s a big set of demonstrations, or even a small set. The protests are meaningless! They’re going to change everything! They’re too liberal and safe! They’re too anarchic and scary! It’s what Trump wants! It’s what he doesn’t want!

I hate this conversation. It is boring and repetitive and pointless. So I decided to write my definitive, one-time-only thoughts about what protesting is really about, and how you should respond to it.

I should start by saying: Honestly, I don’t really love protesting a lot of the time! My biggest fear is audience participation, something protesting demands quite a bit of. I have been to more rallies than I can count where the point is to ensure that every single interest group and friend of a friend of a friend gets to say “we were there and we spoke,” rather than to rev up the crowd or be captivating in any way.

But I’ve also been to protests that were thrilling and energizing and joyful, and that made me feel something like hope. And I’ve been going to protests ever since I was very little and didn’t have a choice in the matter. So I feel qualified to share these thoughts. And then may we never have this conversation again.

OK. Here we go.

The best protest is the one you want to go to

I didn’t go to a No Kings march for two reasons: I was busy, and I tend to give marches where the American flag is waved unironically a miss. Not my jam.

But that’s me. The No Kings stuff wasn’t meant for me. It was meant for the liberals and normies out there who are angry about the state of this country (as they should be) and wanted a chance to be mad about it in public surrounded by other liberals and normies. And good for them, really. It takes all sorts to make a world, and they’re broadly on the right side of the question “do you like what Donald Trump is doing right now,” so let them have their march. Being among them would probably have made me cringe myself into the ground, but that’s why I didn’t go.

And that is everyone’s right. Don’t want to join one kind of protest? Guess what: you don’t have to! Wanna do a totally different protest? Wanna do direct action? Wanna be in the black bloc? Wanna go rogue and take over the highway? Wanna deface a cop car? Wanna stage performance art in the lobby of an ICE building? Wanna not do any of those things and instead try to help in some other way? Go with god.

The point is that if something gets you engaged, snaps you out of your solitude and fear, and puts you in the company of like-minded people who also want to fight back in some way, it’s a net positive. The best protest is the one that you want to go to. It’s the one that makes you say, “I have to be there. I have to do something.” The rest is kind of just details.

Of course protests are not enough!

There’s always a lot of chatter about whether protests “work” or not. Does marching in the streets really change anything? Hasn’t the state long since figured out how to ignore this kind of dissent? Why waste time on something that’s not effective?

And I get it. You want to do something that leads to results. You don’t want to feel like lint on someone’s shirt that they can just flick away and go along with their day. I’m all for trying to figure out the most high-impact way of making change in this terrible world. Dissent should be treated as seriously as any other field. People should think about it with rigor and purpose. And it’s absolutely true that protest alone is not enough. Have you seen the stuff we’re up against? Marches, by themselves, aren’t going to make them suddenly decide to do what we want them to do.

But I sometimes feel like people consider that last point to be new information—as if there’s some movement out there that thinks all you have to do is protest a bunch and then everything changes. No movement worth its salt has ever thought that! And no movement worth its salt right now thinks that either. Protest is just the most visible manifestation of a whole bunch of other work—the hard graft of organizing and bridge-building and political education and campaigning and disrupting the system. Are there movements not worth their salt that push the idea that all you have to do is protest? No, because those aren’t movements. They’re just groups of people. This isn’t revelatory stuff—so we shouldn’t treat it like it is.

Nobody knows what to do

A lot of the protest discourse carries with it a whiff of certainty that kind of boggles my mind. People are reaaaal sure that this kind of protest is the right kind, or that that kind of protest will never work.

Uh, look around. Have you noticed the state of things? We are in crazy, awful times. We’re going through the kind of epochal rupture that the world hasn’t seen in centuries. Things are falling apart everywhere. We’re under unprecedented levels of surveillance and repression. Nobody knows what the fuck to do right now. People are just trying to figure things out, and that means attempting a lot of different stuff.

You have to give people the space to make those attempts. If someone approaches you in this moment and says, “I’m confident that I have the singular activist answer to our problems,” turn and walk the other way.

Which leads me to…

Keep your eyes on your own paper

We are not in a position to start limiting the scope and variety of responses to the hell we’re living in. Unless you’re directly involved in organizing a protest, approaching one like you’re Siskel and Ebert—“Two thumbs down, not enough stuff on fire,” or “Two thumbs down, too much stuff on fire”—is weird and useless. Let people cook!

And don’t be a dweeby narc. There have always been different kinds of protests with different levels of militancy and risk attached to them. Any successful movement will engage in activity up and down that scale.

So do the one you want to do and let people do the one they want to do. Nobody who is not an undercover agent of some kind is going to be trying to make you escalate past your comfort level. So just chill and keep your eyes on your own paper.

Protests are about us, not them

The assumption that protests are literally the only form of activism that people are engaged in also leads to what I think is a fundamental category error.

A lot of people look at a big march and say, “What’s the point? This isn’t going to make any difference. The law won’t change. The bad things won’t stop happening.” Which, true! A march by itself ain’t much.

But to me, protests have never been about “we do x and then y happens.” It’s not about getting them to change—not by itself, anyway. In a fundamental sense, it’s not about them at all.

It’s about us. It’s about knowing we’re not alone. It’s about knowing that, far from being isolated freaks who have crazy thoughts about how the world should be, we’re part of a vast ocean of people who see things the same way we do. It’s about creating a space for people to rage and revel and be with each other in a little bubble of catharsis. It’s about strength in numbers—the courage that comes from doing something together.

I don’t particularly like causing a scene in public. Hell, I don’t even like it when a restaurant knows my usual order. That’s how much I don’t want to stick out in a crowd. But if I’m surrounded by nice people, hooting and hollering and making a good ruckus, even a little mouse like me can get into it (to an extent—I’m still me). That’s what you’re protesting for—to have that moment where you all look around and you say, “We’re all here!”

Protest without organizing is theater. But organizing without protest is just one long meeting, and meetings are boring as hell. You need that moment where you show up in public and let the world know that the issue or person or event you’re protesting about cannot be ignored without some kind of fight. You need to draw curious people in. You need to have fun. You need to be with each other. You need hope.

That’s what it’s about: us, not them.

OK? OK.