Violence drowns out explanations

From the peaceful Mayday protest in DC

If the success of a protest movement depends on winning converts to the cause—fellow citizens who will either join it or vote with it—then recent opinion polls should give an indication of how the movement is doing so far.

In early June, YouGov polled about 3,000 American adults before and after the June 14 No Kings rally. The results were encouraging. Before June 14, 33 percent said they strongly approve of the protests; after, that number climbed to 38 percent, with another 9 percent approving “somewhat,” and somewhere between 16 and 25 percent of others who could be won over. 

In my last post I suggested that a better theme could win over those fence-sitters. Since then, the Senate passed a federal budget that would throw millions off health insurance while giving lucrative tax breaks mostly to the wealthy.

It’s also crucial that the movement remain peaceful and that it distances itself from any violence that occurs in connection with protests. By a margin of 42 to 35, respondents told YouGov they believed participants in recent Los Angeles protests against Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) were mostly violent.

And note how closely those results track with opinions on public approval of the protest (45-36 percent disapproval).

These results are consistent with extensive studies of 20th century protest movements around the globe, which found that nonviolent campaigns were twice as effective as violent ones.

But also, when individuals associated in the public mind with an otherwise peaceful movement commit violent acts in conjunction with or close proximity to protests, it tends to undermine popular support.

No one understood this better than Martin Luther King Jr.

By 1962, his movement had been succeeding in winning popular support, largely because of the contrast playing out on the nightly news between peaceful protesters and violent segregationists who opposed them, especially Southern cops with their dogs and fire hoses. In Albany, Georgia, the movement encountered a different dynamic.

Unlike segregationists in other cities, Albany police chief Laurie Pritchett restrained his men from retaliating violently and against protesters. When gangs of local blacks—characterized by King biographer Taylor Branch as “juke-joint” hoodlums who were not “movement people,” began throwing bricks and bottles at police outside a meeting of organized protesters at Shiloh Baptist Church, Pritchett pushed through the crowd and into the Church, walked up to the podium, and spoke to the crowd.

“We respect your policy,” he said but added: “I ask your cooperation in keeping Albany peaceful. This business of throwing rocks is not good.”

Of course the movement people inside the church agreed—but what power did they have against the hoodlums outside?

King was in jail at this time. Later during the campaign, when organized protesters marched to the jail with the goal of being arrested to show the contrast between their peaceful demands for basic rights and unreasonable Southern resistance, “angry Negro bystanders” started hurling beer bottles, rocks and bricks at the arresting officers.

During the riot Pritchett quipped to reporters: “Did you see them non-violent rocks?” Press reports included a photograph of a cop holding a rock that knocked out two of his teeth. The New York Times published a “lauditory profile of Chief Pritchet,” Branch wrote. It seemed that a Southern cop, "not King, was the “master of nonviolence that night.”

But now, King was out of jail. When one of his associates suggested he should rationalize the violence  as an understandable response to segregation in his comments to reporters, King refused. The violence, King reasoned, would drowned out any such explanations, Branch wrote.

Meanwhile, King declared a day of penance and went on a “peacemaker’s tour of Albany’s Negro dives” to explain the nonviolent strategy to its patrons and how their violent reactions had undermined the movement. “We don’t need guns and ammunition, just the power of souls,” King told them.

King was modeling his behavior on Mahatma Gandhi, who fasted whenever his followers resorted to violence.

It’s important to note the connection between the tactics of the Civil Rights Movement and the fortunes of the Political Party more inclined to support its goals and thus associated with it in the public mind. 

Princeton Politics Professor Omar Wasow studied press coverage of the 1960s Civil Rights Movement and found that “when the [protest] tactics were primarily nonviolent, the counties proximate to nonviolent activism tended to vote more liberally.” But when violence broke out in connection with protests, those counties voted more conservatively. Violent protests in reaction to King’s assassination may have helped to elect Richard Nixon in 1968. “In the counties with violence, the Democratic vote fell by at least 2 percent, which was enough to help Richard Nixon win the 1968 presidential election,” Wasow said.

This year, a May 25 YouGov Poll had the Democratic Party’s popular approval under water by a whopping 20 percent (58-38% unfavorable). Having been blamed for lawlessness at the border, and rising crime in cities, the Democrats can’t afford to be associated with more of the same.

Of course the current anti-Trump movement has no one well-respected and credible leader like King to make the case to purveyors of violence.

Violent eruptions on the sidelines of peaceful protests—like those at the recent Los Angeles anti-ICE riots or during the George Floyd protests of 2020—are probably inevitable.

But it’s imperative that leaders of the movement and the Democratic Party unequivocally, clearly, unambiguously, and in unison condemn the violence rather than try to justify it as many did in 2020, ignoring King’s maxim that violence drowns out explanations.

For example, Nicole Hannah Jones, a prominent figure in the “race reckoning” of 2020 and mastermind behind the New York Times 1619 project, argued that property destruction isn’t violence if no one is hurt—this at a time when police stations were burning on the nightly news, once famously behind a CNN reporter describing “mostly peaceful protests.”

Ta Nehisi Coates, perhaps the most prominent African American advocate of the 2010s, proclaimed that "The people who are called on to be nonviolent are the people with the ability to do the least amount of damage; whereas, we don't call upon those who have the most power and actually can do the most damage."

The Nation published an article with the headline: “In Defense of Destroying Property: We cannot conflate the destruction of plateglass with the violence that is being protested.”

Any nuance behind comments like these are sure to be drowned out by images of burning police stations and Waymos, as the polls on the LA protests show.

Also in their June polling, YouGov asked people about their lingering perceptions of the George Floyd protests and found that 46 percent thought they were “mostly violent,” and only 33 percent remembered them as “mostly peaceful.”

You would think the party and the leaders of organizations behind the protests like Indivisible would learn from past mistakes, but I’m not hopeful.

When the Democratic pollster (and self-described socialist) David Shor posted Wasow’s article after violence broke out during BLM protests in 2020, he was attacked relentlessly on Twitter by fellow liberals and then fired from his job at Civis Analytics, a consultancy founded by one of President Obama’s campaign analysts.

At least one Democratic member of Congress is repeating the mistakes of 2020 and instead of unequivocally distancing the cause from violence as King did, asserting “nobody was shot, nobody was killed” and “there was no violence,” at a time when Waymos were burning in the background. 

Note

On the Albany protest and King's response to violence see Taylor Branch, Parting the Waters: American in the King Years, 604-621.