This story caught my eye this week:
And specifically, this part of that story caught my eye:
Okay, well: They were charged. They might be innocent. Let’s not conflate a charge with a conviction. After all, a robust commitment to due process is a fundamental principle of a liberal society.
Of course, there is this photo:
I’ll admit: It doesn’t look good for that guy. But let’s not rush to judgement; after all, maybe the horse started it.
Ordinarily, an Australian punching a police horse wouldn’t phase me; it’s a statistical certainly that at any given moment, a drunk Aussie somewhere on Earth is cold-cocking an animal. But several recent stories (including that one) have left me with the same thought: Direct political action is overrated. We romanticize it, and we give it more political weight than we should. People who protest or attend meetings often claim the mantle of speaking for “the people” even when the people aren’t on board. We sometimes let small groups distort our perception of what “the people” want, even though there are better ways of measuring the popular will. Here’s my thinking…
Example 1: NIMBYs1
Why is it so hard to build anything in a major city? Ezra Klein asked that question in a recent podcast with Vox reporter Jerusalem Demsas. Anyone who lives in a city has wondered about this. Basically every major American city has a housing shortage, which is why many of us spent our 20s with enough roommates to populate a rugby team, sleeping in a “bedroom” that was actually a converted dumbwaiter. Every city also has a major public works project that’s an instant punchline; in DC it’s the Purple Line, in New York it’s the Second Avenue Subway, which is still incomplete despite being such an old idea that it was mentioned on Mad Men. In California, the L.A.-to-San Francisco high speed rail line has been scaled back to Bakersfield-to-Merced, which means that tens of billions of dollars are being spent to connect an almond farm to a tumbleweed.
So: Why? A big part of the answer is “citizen voice”.2 Citizen voice is the catch-all term for processes that let people voice objections that can delay major projects. The basic concept is sound; people need a way to express concerns before a project happens. If a project will, for example, have an adverse impact on an animal, the government should have to prove either that the impact is minimal or that the animal is especially delicious.
But the system is being abused. Environmental Impact Statements -- which are one tool in the anti-growth toolkit -- were once routinely ten pages long. They now regularly exceed 1,000 pages and take an average of 4.5 years to complete. They’ve been used to delay environmentally-friendly projects like solar farms and wind turbines. Homeowners show up at zoning meetings and express concerns about “neighborhood character”, which are sometimes actual, legitimate concerns about a neighborhood’s livability and are sometimes actual, legitimate 1950s-style racism.
The people who show up at meetings are often seen as “the people". They’re typically facing off against the government or a faceless developer, which is an enviable spot in terms of winning a public relations battle. Think about it: Is there a single ‘80s movie that takes the developer’s side? To my knowledge, there’s no movie that ends with the audience thinking “Hooray! The developer can bulldoze the orphanage to make way for a much-needed rail project! Thank God that plucky band of misfits wasn’t able to win $10,000 in that dance contest!” Whoever’s trying to stop the project has the inside track to being seen as the voice of the public interest.
But who are they, really? They’re usually homeowners, and usually older; we can deduce that they’re probably disproportionately wealthy. They may or may not represent the people they claim to represent; an upzoning proposal in a heavily-Hispanic part of Brooklyn was killed amidst “concerns about gentrification” raised by an activist group that appeared to be mostly white. In her talk with Ezra Klein, Jerusalem Demsas argues that, just as business interests often have undue influence over policy at the federal level, homeowners pull a lot of water at the local level:
DEMSAS: “I think that there’s this broader correct diagnosis that progressives have done, that there is massive regulatory capture by billionaires, by big business, by oil companies, to stop environmental legislation from passing. But there’s very little reckoning of the fact that there are large swaths of the community that makes up progressives that have also engaged in regulatory capture.”
So: “The people” aren’t necessarily “most people”. They might just be the people who had the time, resources, and motivation to get their knickers in a twist over a particular issue.
Example 2: “Populist” movements
“Populism” has many definitions, but most describe a movement that pits “the people” against “the elite”. Star Wars is basically a populist narrative. At least, the early ones are; the middle ones are some deep weeds stuff about a trade federation, and the later ones are capitalist because they only exist to make money.
It’s hard to say what, exactly, makes a movement populist. Trump is often described as a populist even though his main accomplishment was a corporate tax cut, which is like being described as a virgin despite a 20-year career in hardcore porn. If populists truly represent the people, then they should be close to unbeatable in a democracy. But they lose all the time. Trump not only lost: He and his supporters tried to overturn the popular will. Populists still push the “people versus the powerful” narrative even when a majority of people loudly tell them to get lost.
Another recent, high-profile populist movement is the yellow vest movement in France. It was never totally clear what the movement stood for; they definitely didn’t like high gas prices, and they thought Macron was aloof (he should have gotten a beer with Mitch McConnell!). At one point, they latched on to a lefty-ish list of 42 mostly-unachievable demands, such as “that the causes of forced migration are treated”, to which I say: Yeah, come on, France! Get off your keesters and solve every problem in North Africa and the Middle East already! Before long, the movement became an incoherent mix of right and left. It has since splintered, failed to establish itself as an electoral force, and elements of the movement are now part of the anti-Covid vaccination protests in France.
By what virtue does that movement deserve the mantle of representing the people? After an initial flurry of support, their poll numbers quickly went underwater. It seems clear to me that we don’t label movements “populist” because they represent the popular will; we call them “populist” because they traffic in the “people versus the powerful” narrative.
Example 3: The “Defund the Police” people
We’re starting to get a measure of the tremendous gulf between the opinions of activists who called for defunding the police and the opinions of most Black people. A poll this week found that three quarters of Detroit residents reject the “defund the police” slogan and favor more cops on the street by a nine-to-one margin. This comes on the heels of several polls telling us telling us that a majority of Black people want more (though also better) police.
Let’s reflect on what happened here. A group of activists called for something. The activists were “associated with” the Black Lives Matter movement, and I’m using scare quotes and the fuzziest term I can think of -- “associated with” -- because none of us can really say where BLM begins or ends. At any rate, activists called for something, and then many people, including many white people, just assumed the activists represented what Black people wanted without actually collecting any data. This is a MAJOR fuckup. Well-intentioned white people, many of whom talk a big game about “listening to Black voices” and being an “ally”, threw their support behind an agenda that appears to be the opposite of what most Black people want. The only silver lining is that defunding the police ultimately didn’t happen; in the end, some cities shifted money representing less than one percent of total police spending to other programs.
We were way, way too quick to assume activists represented the popular will. Black Lives Matter had broad support -- Mitt Romney was saying it, for God’s sake -- but defunding the police was always a fringe idea. Activists with extreme views were able to attach their message to a much-broader movement that mostly didn’t share those views.
Our willingness to conflate the views of activists with the views of the people might be a holdover from an earlier era. For most of human history -- basically all of it until about ten minutes ago -- political power was tightly controlled. People took to the streets because it was the only way to have their voices heard. And, generally speaking, they weren’t there to wave signs and sing Woody Guthrie songs; they were there to chop off heads until the ruling elites started to think “hey…maybe it is time for reform!”
In a democracy, things are different. Elections basically reflect the people’s will (and better electoral processes would take the “basically” out of that sentence). No Ipsos poll or 538 model can capture public opinion as well a good ol’-fashioned, lever-pullin’, “I voted”-sticker-distributing election. There’s clearly a role for direction action in a democracy; protests and other forms of activism help hold elected officials accountable. But when an issue pits a group of activists against a democratically-elected government, in many cases the government will have the better claim to be the representatives of “the people”.
This upends the “people versus the powerful” narrative. In some cases, “the people” are the powerful, and protesters represent a minority opinion or special interest. Which is not to say that the protesters are wrong, just that they may be in the minority.
Anti-vaccinations protesters clearly imagine themselves to be freedom fighters pushing back against an oppressive government -- they think they’re Luke in the Star Wars narrative. But they’re wrong. In this case, the government represents the popular will, and they represent selfish ignorance. They have a right to express their opinion, and we have a right to roll our eyes at them. We don’t have to view the guy in the tank top sucker-punching a police horse as the authentic voice of the people just because he was part of a protest.
“NIMBY” stands for “not in my backyard” -- it’s a pejorative term for people who oppose construction projects. Now, obviously I don’t think that every proposed development project is good and anyone who opposes any project is wrong, but I am arguing that, in general, we listen to anti-development interests far too often.
At least the horse could take a punch. The one in 'Blazing Saddles' went down like a sack of potatoes.
The gentrification issue is really interesting to me, and obviously far more complicated than can be summed up with an "ugh, white people!" We live in a small, inexpensive house that was supposed to be our starter home (two months before the market crash way back when!) and now we've been here fourteen years with no plans to leave.
Our neighborhood is diverse, working-class, and is semi-rural (we're in the county just outside the city limits of a sprawling Southern city). Within the past five years, what was once a barren field filled with bracken has been developed into a new neighborhood (also extremely diverse) with homes that are 2-2.5 times more expensive than ours. Our neighborhoods are connected by a through street.
Since that neighborhood was built and filled, our home values have gone waaaay up. I'll give some numbers (though as a city dweller you might cry). We bought our house in the fall of 2007 for $112,000. It's now valued at about $170,000 based on comps in our neighborhood (but our house might actually go for more, because of improvements and upgrades we've made over the years).
I know this isn't gentrification in the traditional sense of a neighborhood being taken over and reimagined. But it's at least gentrificatoin-adjacent, in that more wealthy people have moved in next door (again, an extremely racially diverse set of wealthy people) and now our home values are so much higher, people who used to be able to actually buy a home may not be able to anymore.
I don't think anyone in our smaller-house, poorer neighborhood feels bad about this. Our investment in our homes is paying off.
Could what has happened naturally here be recreated on purpose? A neighborhood is built/revitalized and for the next 20-25 years it's purposefully rent/mortgage controlled (for instance, only people making under a certain income qualify to buy homes there) as a way of helping working-class people build wealth?