Very important insights. I made a short list of the key findings for those who don't end up watching the whole thing (but please do if you can because this is really just my personal take): - non-violent movements are more likely to succeed than violent movements - all the movements which motivated at least 3,5% of the people to get involved, succeeded - The more women were involved in front-line roles, the higher the likelihood of success. If the movement succeeds this tends to have a positive long-term effect on women’s rights. But, if the movement fails, the regime tends to restrict women’s rights. - Defections from forces and sectors that support the regime tend to be pivotal moments in these conflicts that favour the movements. - Both armed and unarmed maximalist movements are declining in effectiveness. This may be due to the number of such movements that proliferated in the 1990s. It’s also due to digital techniques encouraging people to prioritise short term mobilisation over long term movement building. - Concentrated actions (demos) are dramatic but easier to suppress than dispersed ones (strikes). Movements become too predictable if they only do one of these.
Just a follow up thought after sleeping on the talk and what I said in last night's column. This was a historical study with a new methodology across many types of movements in many different cultures. A couple of the most successful - Indian Independence and South African democracy based on racial equality gave us examples of revolts which had very broad bases of support in the way no movement currently in the US enjoys. And both were mixed with some violence: India at the end of the struggle, and in S.Africa, by Mandela's account, reluctantly taken up in limited bombings as a last resort, not the full blown methods used in Algeria. And think about the US, where the non-violent civil rights movement is perhaps the paradigm successful example; it faltered in broad support at the time MLK started to emphasize the economic over the procedural voting rights and accommodation rights...his martyrdom gave it a last legislative boost...but the popular protests...as over housing in Chicago, were on the downswing...what's my point? Mass movements need ideas and powerful moral causes; there is a whole range of tactics as covered above that non-violent movements can employ, and the left in the US, including the environmental and black lives matter and naturally, the women's movement (naturally because it is pacifism's natural home) and immigrant causes...would be fools to confront the armed Right (and the level of arms has been growing in the wake of the Black Lives Movement demonstrations and rioting)...as I have written as early as 2013, in the wake of the Repub. Right's stance in Congress and against Obama, based upon both its tactics and ideas...our nation is drifting towards a civil war, the exact nature of which will be new...please note in stating this, I don't advocate for one, hardly... My point is the lecture stressed less the ideas that form the moral and political core of "Movements," and focuses rather more on the tactics employed; could they not apply to the Right as well; And another way to look at the outcome of the Presidential election of 2020 is this: the nation is still clearly split down the middle, despite the winning margins; the Dems barely won the senate and lost ground in the house, and they do not have a geographical mandate in state houses across most of the country. And the gaps remain enormous inside their party, the largest being between the Centrists, the corporate wing and the Sanders/Warren left; that was patched over in the cause of stopping Trump, but in the policy struggles coming up it will re-emerge. The broadest intellectual and moral consensus on the left side of the spectrum is to stop Global Warming/Climate Chaos, but without joining itself to the longer history of the egalitarian economic left - as the drafters of the Green New Deal Resolution anticipated - it would have very difficult going. What was shocking was the objection of the old labor "left" which opposed the attack on the carbon economy, as they have universal health care...just to be fair about the history of that egalitarian left, and also an increasing obstacle to that economic side is the professional achievements of women as lawyers, doctors teachers and business people in general...and the conservatism of the black middle class which so heartily disliked Sanders...all in all, for there to be a successful left opposition to the Republican Right and its Right Populism...I think we will need a Left Green Populism (the old Green New Deal idea) which incorporates environmental justice. And take note of this finding by a RAND think tank study in September of 2020, which I don't believe ever surfaced in the campaign. Between 1975-2018, there has taken place the greatest transfer of wealth in human history, some $50 Trillion Dollars from the bottom 80% or so to the top 1% due to the reversal of tax policies and regulatory policies which affected the financial sector and anti-trust and executive pay...essentially the reversal of course from the first New Deal to the Neoliberalism of the Reagan-Clinton economic consensus, which has yet to be overturned, as shown by the narrow victory of Biden over Trump's version. Here, judge for yourself: time.com/5888024/50-trillion-income-inequality-america/ If the findings of this RAND study are correct, and I believe they've got the gist of the matter, then that enormous brute fact is one of the most powerful baselines underpinning the "fracturing" of America which was both cause and effect of the unravelling of the New Deal coalition, the last time the working class was roughly progressive in view.
One last observation: mass protest movements, with all the tactics available to them, and we must admit that the Republican Right will use them as well, although the tradition has been on the left, work best and are not a substitute for an powerful political movement, seeking to win office in all 50 states in the US, as well as local offices, and to do that it, a mass movement on the left, it will need a inclusive and comprehensive ideology which today does not exist amidst the fragments of many movements, I count 5-6 within the Dem Party, and the schizophrenic structure built of the Sanders-Warren left and the corporate/conservative wing of the party. I live in the very red state part of MD, and the Dem. party here is not capable of competing, it has no paid staff, no infrastructure and no "missionaries." Nor have I seen any attempt to correct that. By the way, the Trump populist Right carries the majority of Maryland counties, echoing the geographical distribution in the broader USA.
