What The Hell America!

Before we start: Great conversation yesterday on protests. I’m grateful to everyone who participated. And I’m sure this will be ongoing. But I do have one additional response to some thoughts I saw expressed elsewhere.

There is a strain of thinking which maintains that all of these protests are beyond reproach. I’ve seen people say, for instance, that it’s perfectly fine for protesters to be waving Mexican flags. That this is their God-given right, etc.

A lot of the uncritical support of the protests is based on moral judgments about what should be true.

It should be fine for people to wave Mexican flags. But I don’t think should is a very useful frame right now. I’m much more interested in will.

Will the rest of America—rightly or wrongly—become more sympathetic to the people opposing Trump after seeing Mexican flags?

We can expand the frame of will for the entire scene—the people in the streets, the torching of cars, the throwing of bricks. Protests are a tool for leveraging public opinion. It does not really matter what the public should think. It matters what it will think.

For whatever it’s worth, I’d argue that we should view these protests through a utilitarian and not a moral lens. Maybe the best evaluation I’ve seen about the nature of protest is from Peter Coyote (yes, that Peter Coyote):

A protest is an invitation to a better world. It’s a ceremony. No one accepts a ceremonial invitation when they’re being screamed at. More important you have to know who the real audience of the protest is. The audience is NEVER the police, the politicians, the Board of supervisors, the Congress, etc. The audience is always the American people, who are trying to decide who they can trust; who will not embarrass them.

Coyote goes on to make a number of practical suggestions which strike me as sensible—but require organization and leadership:

Number 1 let women organize the event. They’re more collaborative. They’re more inclusive, and they don’t generally bring the undertones of violence men do. 2 appoint monitors, give them yellow vests and whistles. At the first sign of violence, they blow the whistles and the real protesters sit down. Let the police take out their aggression on the anarchists and the provocateurs trying to discredit the movement. Number 3 dress like you’re going to church. It’s hard to be painted as a hoodlum when you’re dressed in clean presentable clothes. They don’t have to be fancy they just signal the respect for the occasion that you want to transmit to the audience. Number 4, make your protest silent. Demonstrate your discipline to the American people. Let signs do the talking. Number 5 go home at night. In the dark, you can’t tell the cops from the killers. Come back at Dawn fresh and rested.

We will see what this weekend’s decentralized protests look like.

One last thought: At the moment the various anti-Trump protests are logistically, thematically, and organizationally decentralized. This is helpful in some ways and unhelpful in others. At some point the movement could benefit from having a leader.

Okay. So let’s talk about something else: Dirty Jersey and the problem with Bulwark Democrats.

If you haven’t listened to Sarah’s Focus Group on Democrats and the New Jersey governor’s race, you absolutely should. Today.

It’s the best episode of the show, maybe ever.

I know that you don’t care about the Democratic primary in this race. But I want to talk about it in some detail because it gets at one of the Dems’ big strategic mistakes: They sometimes promise things they can’t possibly deliver. Which is a recipe for disillusionment and apathy from their voters.

Let me explain.

I am one of Mikie Sherrill’s constituents. If you grew a Bulwark Democrat in a lab, it would look like her. She had a cool job in the military. She’s an upper-middle-class professional. She’s so moderate that you could mistake her for a McCain-era Republican. By all accounts she has been a hard worker and a diligent policy person in Congress. She’s great. Seriously.

She also seems to be leading the Democratic field, though not by much. She has polled in the 30s after it had been widely assumed that her race would be a coronation.

On The Focus Group the N.J. Dems Sarah spoke with were lukewarm about Sherrill. They liked her fine but didn’t love her. This mirrors the sense I have on the ground in Manhattan.

Sherrill’s campaign focuses on exactly three things:

• Housing costs

• Electability

• Being a helicopter pilot

Most of the Democrats running talk about housing costs as their primary issue. I understand that. New Jersey is a high-cost state and voters rank the cost of housing as their top issue.

But I want to be very clear about this: No governor can make New Jersey real estate cheaper. It’s impossible.

Why?