All of it is pointless. Winning the last election was entirely within the grasp of the Democratic Party. The big problem was/is the failure to offer a real democratic alternative. There were no serious primaries. Anti-democratic insiders substituted a weak candidate at the last minute. There wasn’t and isn’t a serious platform beyond “vibes.”
No wonder there are “vibes” festivals pretending to be protests. Obviously, protests cannot substitute for a compelling alternative.
Yeah. The festivals have become symbiotic with the conditions and powers they are ostensibly opposing. Just expressions of a vibe that are working off of expressions of a complimentary vibe.
Yes. As bad as Trump is, it's not bigger (or even more intense) protests that are needed. It's just convincing people to vote for an alternative, and I'm not sure if any type of "protest" is helpful.
But... so long as we are in the thrall of a two-party system, where will that alternative originate? Why can't the U.S. support or at least tolerate another 'party'? Too much money in the system maybe? Will SCOTUS rethink Citizens United?
It’s basic arithmetic—the two party system is what tends to happen in a first-past-the-post election (whoever gets the most votes wins, even if that’s not a majority). Even if there are multiple parties (as in most European countries) in the end there is a coalition formed which ends up being center-left or center-right. In the US, parties allow voters to choose their candidates (according to party registration, or even in some states whatever party’s primary they want to vote in). It may be that allowing voters to choose candidates is not such a hot idea (since it tends to be the most ideological fanatics that bother to show up for primaries, especially on the Republican side).
One alternative ranked-choice voting, or proportional representation, which allows for multiple party elections while assuring that the winner represents the choice of the majority of voters. The main disadvantage of these system is that a lot of people find them confusing.
I am a fan of the French system, where citizens can vote for whom they want in the first round, but vote strategically in the second. The party system that we have now is terrible. I live in Florida, where there was no Democratic primary. I would have registered as a Republican had not the last candidate in the Republican primary not dropped out at the registration deadline. As a result, I and many others had no choice at all. Again.
Ranked choice has an appeal for many, but I don’t know if it clears the problems identified by Condorcet and Ken Arrow. Granted, it is a long time since I studied any of it, so there are probably others who could enlighten me.
For what it’s worth, I detest the control of the electoral system by the two parties that I unwillingly subsidize with my tax dollars.
To a great extent, though, it may be the preferences of the American people that you detest. Part of the problem is having an old constitution written by men who were, by their own account, winging it. They designed it to be changeable, but only by supermajority agreement, and supermajority agreement on anything is basically impossible now.
I don’t think so. The parties aren’t in the Constitution. The courts overturned bad party practices in the past, particularly the all white primaries held by the Democratic Party in the South.
The parties are private organizations funded by the taxpayers, at least as far as the primary elections. It is the party leadership that decided against allowing the electorate to choose a candidate in the last election.
I don’t know how to change the behavior of private, rich, and powerful organizations.
You make an assumption about RCV that is not automatically true. I am in Portland, OR. RCV was used for the first time to elect a city council and all that was required was 25% of the vote to win. If you ran a good campaign and received more than 25%, your 'excess' votes were taken from you and run through the opaque RCV grinder to be given to the remaining candidates.
Legitimacy wavers mightily when one only needs 25% and the RCV mechanism used is too complex for anyone but a math PHD to understand.
Don’t you mean “*less* than 25%”? I think the ones who get more than 25% are the ones who receive the redistributed votes. Of course if you had enough candidates that everyone got less than 25%, it’s hard to see how that rule works—at some point you have to take the top vote getters, and eliminate the lowest vote-getters.
Of course, I have to admit I know nothing about Portland and it may be that they are just crazy enough to implement the system you describe….but then, that’s on Portlandia, not RCV. A lot of city council races are nonpartisan anyway, so the “two party system” isn’t an issue there.
The Democrats are the alternative I’m talking about. Certainly there are plenty of ways that I think they could be a better alternative (which you and I might agree about or might not), but compared to the current iteration of the Republican Party it should be more than possible to get a majority of Americans to vote Democrat.
I don’t think the Democratic Party as it is right now is capable of providing an alternative to the GOP. Their entire message thus far is “we’re not Trump” and that’s no longer enough
The Democratic party was never one thing, never one platform that everyone actually ran on (the stuff agreed to at conventions was generally forgotten as soon as the balloons dropped). The Democratic party was at its height of power when Will Roger’s famously announced, “I don’t belong to any organized political party—I’m a Democrat.”
This article gets the democratic question completely backward.
Illegal immigration is anti-democratic by definition. It means people are entering or staying in a country against laws passed by that country’s citizens. And this is not some small technical issue. Illegal immigration is massively unpopular, and everyone knows it.
So when elites tolerate it, excuse it, or block enforcement, they are not defending democracy. They are overruling the people.
Mass illegal immigration makes it even worse, because it changes the future electorate, the culture, and the long-term power of citizens who never agreed to that transformation.
Enforcing the border through legal means is democratic. Preventing people from controlling their own national future is not.
That is the real authoritarian move: elites and their violent supporters nullifying the people’s will, then calling the people authoritarian for objecting.
The administration is going after legal migrants as well but the bigger point is that the bugbear of “illegal migrants are coming for you” is a trick that’s been used by the powerful to distract us from real issues since time immemorial. Don’t fall for it
Elites are not hurt by illegal immigration. They benefit from it: cheap labor, consumer spending, future voters, NGO clients, and moral status.
The trick is telling citizens that wanting democratically enacted immigration laws enforced is somehow authoritarian. And my point was about illegal immigration, not legal migrants.
The elites win when they trick citizens into thinking that their problems come from immigrants — and not from the elites themselves. This ruse allows the elites to continue robbing you, don’t let them keep getting away with it
Elites benefit from illegal immigration — cheap labor, consumer spending, NGO clients, moral status, and political power — while ordinary citizens bear the costs: lower bargaining power, pressure on housing and services, weakened social trust, and loss of control over their own borders.
The trick is telling citizens that wanting democratically enacted immigration laws enforced means they have been manipulated.
You’re treating “elites” as one unified bloc. They are not.
Many elite institutions benefit from illegal immigration. And the scale still matters: millions came in while only a fraction were removed. Limited enforcement after mass entry doesn’t prove elites oppose illegal immigration — it proves enforcement is the exception.
Thank you for bursting our bubble. Minneapolis shows it can happen. But so far it’s the exception that proves the rule. My question for you is, are protests like “No Kings” harmless even if ineffective? Or do they siphon off energy and commitment that needs to go elsewhere? Do they make participants and sympathizers think they’re doing something meaningful when they aren’t?
I think it depends on a multitude of factors. Festival protests can be nexus points for organising, learning, meeting people etc. Definitely better go to those than stay home if you want to build connections with like-minded activists, and connecting with each other is very important even if it’s only the first step
You are right as long as you say it in that order. For sure all emotional support groups do not count as protests. But I think at this point, all protests are emotional support groups.
I got some bitter reactions in the comments of The New York Times when I tried (as a fellow commenter) to make this point about affect versus effect and the greater point that street protests are perennially overrated as means of bringing about political change. Have I got the data to back up that statement? Well, I've got other people's data. Please see, for example, the following two articles.
I very much want to see Donald Trump and his crowd undone, but I can't pretend that it will be accomplished by our gathering in the park or giving each other high fives in The New York Times.
The Times has also contributed, in the form of a column by David Brooks, to an understanding of the planning, coordination, and variety of actions that are really necessary for effective resistance. Here it is:
Sure, I'm pissed off reading this but also awakened - or "woke" as my in-laws used to say. The point is well-made and backed up. What I would search for in all of this is whether Amos, Adam and Guy all make valid points that just need to be woven together: we do need emotional support and to show the world that millions of us care about our liberal democracy and we need boots on the ground of hard-core organizers (see Blanchard's volumes on the Civil Rights Movement - non-violent except when a bloody assault required a convoy to a distant hospital who would accept Blacks and the convoy rolled out bristling with gun barrels poking out of every car window.) And we need leadership to go for the jugular and delete unready candidates and party cadre. Full disclosure: I participated in all the major protests.
Protests are another way we surround ourselves with people who believe the same things that we do. Before we can have nonviolent and rational confrontations with people who disagree, we have to be for something and not just against someone. Not to belabor the obvious, but shouldn't we want to stop the rot in our constitutional democratic republic? We can start by explaining to people who seemingly agree with us what a constitutional democratic republic is.
I read that the average age of the No Kings protesters was 67, so these are old people.
Democracy requires a certain amount of passivity, accepting electoral defeat, a peaceful protest followed by debates with elites being dragged in and having to say something.
These are people soaked in democratic culture and their behaviour reflects this.
Fighting for democracy contains a contradiction. To fight means aggression and ultimately violence and this situation does not produce the type of people ready to accept democracy with all its compromises.
When you have peaceful protests against repressive regimes the people taking part accept that they may face injury, torture or death. They must be propelled by the sheer unendurable misery of everyday life. The US has one of the highest GDP per capita in the world and life is pretty good, a long way from being impelled into dangerous protest.
All of it is pointless. Winning the last election was entirely within the grasp of the Democratic Party. The big problem was/is the failure to offer a real democratic alternative. There were no serious primaries. Anti-democratic insiders substituted a weak candidate at the last minute. There wasn’t and isn’t a serious platform beyond “vibes.”
No wonder there are “vibes” festivals pretending to be protests. Obviously, protests cannot substitute for a compelling alternative.
Yeah. The festivals have become symbiotic with the conditions and powers they are ostensibly opposing. Just expressions of a vibe that are working off of expressions of a complimentary vibe.
Yes. As bad as Trump is, it's not bigger (or even more intense) protests that are needed. It's just convincing people to vote for an alternative, and I'm not sure if any type of "protest" is helpful.
But... so long as we are in the thrall of a two-party system, where will that alternative originate? Why can't the U.S. support or at least tolerate another 'party'? Too much money in the system maybe? Will SCOTUS rethink Citizens United?
It’s basic arithmetic—the two party system is what tends to happen in a first-past-the-post election (whoever gets the most votes wins, even if that’s not a majority). Even if there are multiple parties (as in most European countries) in the end there is a coalition formed which ends up being center-left or center-right. In the US, parties allow voters to choose their candidates (according to party registration, or even in some states whatever party’s primary they want to vote in). It may be that allowing voters to choose candidates is not such a hot idea (since it tends to be the most ideological fanatics that bother to show up for primaries, especially on the Republican side).
One alternative ranked-choice voting, or proportional representation, which allows for multiple party elections while assuring that the winner represents the choice of the majority of voters. The main disadvantage of these system is that a lot of people find them confusing.
Hi Susan,
I am a fan of the French system, where citizens can vote for whom they want in the first round, but vote strategically in the second. The party system that we have now is terrible. I live in Florida, where there was no Democratic primary. I would have registered as a Republican had not the last candidate in the Republican primary not dropped out at the registration deadline. As a result, I and many others had no choice at all. Again.
Ranked choice has an appeal for many, but I don’t know if it clears the problems identified by Condorcet and Ken Arrow. Granted, it is a long time since I studied any of it, so there are probably others who could enlighten me.
For what it’s worth, I detest the control of the electoral system by the two parties that I unwillingly subsidize with my tax dollars.
To a great extent, though, it may be the preferences of the American people that you detest. Part of the problem is having an old constitution written by men who were, by their own account, winging it. They designed it to be changeable, but only by supermajority agreement, and supermajority agreement on anything is basically impossible now.
I don’t think so. The parties aren’t in the Constitution. The courts overturned bad party practices in the past, particularly the all white primaries held by the Democratic Party in the South.
The parties are private organizations funded by the taxpayers, at least as far as the primary elections. It is the party leadership that decided against allowing the electorate to choose a candidate in the last election.
I don’t know how to change the behavior of private, rich, and powerful organizations.
You make an assumption about RCV that is not automatically true. I am in Portland, OR. RCV was used for the first time to elect a city council and all that was required was 25% of the vote to win. If you ran a good campaign and received more than 25%, your 'excess' votes were taken from you and run through the opaque RCV grinder to be given to the remaining candidates.
Legitimacy wavers mightily when one only needs 25% and the RCV mechanism used is too complex for anyone but a math PHD to understand.
Don’t you mean “*less* than 25%”? I think the ones who get more than 25% are the ones who receive the redistributed votes. Of course if you had enough candidates that everyone got less than 25%, it’s hard to see how that rule works—at some point you have to take the top vote getters, and eliminate the lowest vote-getters.
Of course, I have to admit I know nothing about Portland and it may be that they are just crazy enough to implement the system you describe….but then, that’s on Portlandia, not RCV. A lot of city council races are nonpartisan anyway, so the “two party system” isn’t an issue there.
The Democrats are the alternative I’m talking about. Certainly there are plenty of ways that I think they could be a better alternative (which you and I might agree about or might not), but compared to the current iteration of the Republican Party it should be more than possible to get a majority of Americans to vote Democrat.
I don’t think the Democratic Party as it is right now is capable of providing an alternative to the GOP. Their entire message thus far is “we’re not Trump” and that’s no longer enough
It will mostly be enough this year. In 2028 it certainly won't be but that's what a Presidential primary is for.
The Democratic party was never one thing, never one platform that everyone actually ran on (the stuff agreed to at conventions was generally forgotten as soon as the balloons dropped). The Democratic party was at its height of power when Will Roger’s famously announced, “I don’t belong to any organized political party—I’m a Democrat.”
This article gets the democratic question completely backward.
Illegal immigration is anti-democratic by definition. It means people are entering or staying in a country against laws passed by that country’s citizens. And this is not some small technical issue. Illegal immigration is massively unpopular, and everyone knows it.
So when elites tolerate it, excuse it, or block enforcement, they are not defending democracy. They are overruling the people.
Mass illegal immigration makes it even worse, because it changes the future electorate, the culture, and the long-term power of citizens who never agreed to that transformation.
Enforcing the border through legal means is democratic. Preventing people from controlling their own national future is not.
That is the real authoritarian move: elites and their violent supporters nullifying the people’s will, then calling the people authoritarian for objecting.
The administration is going after legal migrants as well but the bigger point is that the bugbear of “illegal migrants are coming for you” is a trick that’s been used by the powerful to distract us from real issues since time immemorial. Don’t fall for it
Elites are not hurt by illegal immigration. They benefit from it: cheap labor, consumer spending, future voters, NGO clients, and moral status.
The trick is telling citizens that wanting democratically enacted immigration laws enforced is somehow authoritarian. And my point was about illegal immigration, not legal migrants.
The elites win when they trick citizens into thinking that their problems come from immigrants — and not from the elites themselves. This ruse allows the elites to continue robbing you, don’t let them keep getting away with it
I did not say all problems come from immigrants.
Elites benefit from illegal immigration — cheap labor, consumer spending, NGO clients, moral status, and political power — while ordinary citizens bear the costs: lower bargaining power, pressure on housing and services, weakened social trust, and loss of control over their own borders.
The trick is telling citizens that wanting democratically enacted immigration laws enforced means they have been manipulated.
If elites want higher immigration how come they are so brutal in curtailing immigration to the point that they’re killing citizens?
You’re treating “elites” as one unified bloc. They are not.
Many elite institutions benefit from illegal immigration. And the scale still matters: millions came in while only a fraction were removed. Limited enforcement after mass entry doesn’t prove elites oppose illegal immigration — it proves enforcement is the exception.
Thank you for bursting our bubble. Minneapolis shows it can happen. But so far it’s the exception that proves the rule. My question for you is, are protests like “No Kings” harmless even if ineffective? Or do they siphon off energy and commitment that needs to go elsewhere? Do they make participants and sympathizers think they’re doing something meaningful when they aren’t?
I think it depends on a multitude of factors. Festival protests can be nexus points for organising, learning, meeting people etc. Definitely better go to those than stay home if you want to build connections with like-minded activists, and connecting with each other is very important even if it’s only the first step
What if the real purpose of the gatherings is emotional support? Maybe pretending such protests are effective is just our way of coping.
That’s cool but emotional support groups aren’t protests
You are right as long as you say it in that order. For sure all emotional support groups do not count as protests. But I think at this point, all protests are emotional support groups.
Of course, my broader point is that emotional support needs to translate into something more tangible
It does. I'm just not sure we can get back to a place where feelings and vibes are not the end goal of political activity. Def buying the book though.
I got some bitter reactions in the comments of The New York Times when I tried (as a fellow commenter) to make this point about affect versus effect and the greater point that street protests are perennially overrated as means of bringing about political change. Have I got the data to back up that statement? Well, I've got other people's data. Please see, for example, the following two articles.
https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2014/04/why-street-protests-dont-work/360264/
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2024/05/protest-effectiveness-research/678292/
I very much want to see Donald Trump and his crowd undone, but I can't pretend that it will be accomplished by our gathering in the park or giving each other high fives in The New York Times.
The Times has also contributed, in the form of a column by David Brooks, to an understanding of the planning, coordination, and variety of actions that are really necessary for effective resistance. Here it is:
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/17/opinion/trump-harvard-law-firms.html
Sure, I'm pissed off reading this but also awakened - or "woke" as my in-laws used to say. The point is well-made and backed up. What I would search for in all of this is whether Amos, Adam and Guy all make valid points that just need to be woven together: we do need emotional support and to show the world that millions of us care about our liberal democracy and we need boots on the ground of hard-core organizers (see Blanchard's volumes on the Civil Rights Movement - non-violent except when a bloody assault required a convoy to a distant hospital who would accept Blacks and the convoy rolled out bristling with gun barrels poking out of every car window.) And we need leadership to go for the jugular and delete unready candidates and party cadre. Full disclosure: I participated in all the major protests.
Protests are another way we surround ourselves with people who believe the same things that we do. Before we can have nonviolent and rational confrontations with people who disagree, we have to be for something and not just against someone. Not to belabor the obvious, but shouldn't we want to stop the rot in our constitutional democratic republic? We can start by explaining to people who seemingly agree with us what a constitutional democratic republic is.
I read that the average age of the No Kings protesters was 67, so these are old people.
Democracy requires a certain amount of passivity, accepting electoral defeat, a peaceful protest followed by debates with elites being dragged in and having to say something.
These are people soaked in democratic culture and their behaviour reflects this.
Fighting for democracy contains a contradiction. To fight means aggression and ultimately violence and this situation does not produce the type of people ready to accept democracy with all its compromises.
When you have peaceful protests against repressive regimes the people taking part accept that they may face injury, torture or death. They must be propelled by the sheer unendurable misery of everyday life. The US has one of the highest GDP per capita in the world and life is pretty good, a long way from being impelled into dangerous protest.