by Kevin N
Sometime in my early twenties — way, way back in the early 2010s — for reasons I’m still not entirely sure about, I suddenly stopped being a nihilist apolitical punk who couldn’t be bothered with activism because he had more important things to drink. I was first radicalized around the issue of campaign finance reform, and got involved with a national organization called Wolf-PAC. I spent a few years lobbying Ohio’s state representatives regarding campaign finance laws — they were invariably bemused each time I walked into their offices with long hair and a patchy leather jacket. In spite of my ratty appearance, I did manage to personally convince a Republican State Representative to change his stance on campaign finance laws after a series of meetings at the Mentor Public Library, although he still wouldn’t sponsor our Wolf-PAC resolution for fear of political backlash. I learned a lot about political advocacy through that experience, but that’s another story.
At some point, I got an email from a group dedicated to campaign finance reform that called itself Democracy Spring. They were organizing a protest in DC, with the intention of having as many people as possible perform an act of civil disobedience by willingly getting arrested for protesting without a permit on the steps of the Capitol Building.
I was absolutely thrilled at the idea. I had romanticized 1960s images of crowds of protestors in my head, and they had convinced me that this was the sort of direct action that would affect real change (that was, indeed, the depth of my analysis). So I threw everything I had into the organization. After months of working with the Democracy Spring organizers in DC, I was able to organize a small contingent of Clevelanders to travel to DC by train and participate in the protest. All in all, there were some 1,300 people who were arrested on the first day of the protests, the largest number of arrests at the Capitol since the Vietnam Protests. More would be arrested in the week that followed.
I spent a week in DC protesting, and it was one of the most exciting weeks of my life. I marched, chanted, and commiserated with like-minded activists. I have a picture somewhere of me getting my hands zip-tied behind my back, but I have no idea where. Rosario Dawson and Cenk Uygur got arrested with us. One of my favorite political commentators at the time, Lawrence Lessig, spoke at the rally. Bernie Sanders gave us a shout out on social media. Cory Booker and John Lewis came out to speak with us and encouraged us to continue. Elizabeth Warren admonished the rest of the Senators for ignoring us during a speech she made on the Senate floor. I even made my first semi-viral Twitter post. It truly felt like the beginning of something important — I left DC feeling downright euphoric.
But that was it. Nothing changed.
Aside from CNN showing a single 30 second clip of the protest, no mainstream news media covered us. Someone at Vice wrote a piece on us, but nobody ever really took them seriously anyway. After it ended, nobody in the government ever referenced the protest again. I’m quite certain most of you reading this have never heard of the protest in the first place. It was like we had plowed the ocean.
After I got home, I was undeniably elated by the experience, but in the back of my mind I was still somewhat conflicted. It seemed like we hadn’t actually accomplished anything, despite all that effort.
Luckily, I learned from the organizers that there would be a coordinated follow-up effort: the country would be divided into smaller regions, and local organizers would recruit supporters (there was no formal membership process) by staging smaller protests at local political events. Then after two years of building support, we would return to the Capitol and stage a repeat of the original protest, but larger.
This was promising! Again, I threw everything into the effort. I drove to Columbus once a month to meet with Ohio’s organizers, and got another small contingent of Clevelanders to go to protests in an effort to build support for our nonpartisan campaign finance reform movement.
Then Trump got elected.
The Spring Dries Up
Suddenly, all of the emails from Democracy Spring stopped talking about campaign finance reform and were just focused on “resisting” Trump. Okay, that’s fine. But how? Are we still meeting in Columbus to coordinate efforts? No, those regional meetings around the country stopped pretty abruptly. Are we trying to organize another big protest in DC? No, the communications were just filled with vague calls to “Resist!” and unoriginal, unremarkable statements about the gravity and urgency of the political threat posed by Trump. Lacking any formal structures, the organizational movement in Ohio and around the country dissipated faster than it came together.
But emails from Democracy Spring’s leadership (the only remaining form of communication they sent out) kept coming. I wasn’t clear on what they were doing now, but I continued to read them since they had been such a big part of my life for nearly half a decade. On Trump’s inauguration day, I went to DC to protest — although, admittedly, I ended up disgusted and depressed by the whole spectacle and spent the day in the Holocaust Museum instead.
I touched base with some of the Democracy Spring organizers who were in DC as well. They said they had something big planned for the inauguration, and I was confused as to why there hadn’t been a more concerted effort to recruit people. Regardless, I hadn’t planned to get arrested again, so I declined to participate.
Later that day, I got this email:
The email went on to detail the efforts of “six brave democracy defenders” — a far cry from the 1,700 who joined them just two years prior — and they claimed it as a massive victory. In the weeks and months that followed, similar emails with subject lines like “Trump Disrupted!” and “Two Democracy Spring Leaders Arrested at Sit-In!” followed, each containing photos of the same handful of participants engaged in various innocuous acts of “resistance” — and typically accompanied by a request for donations. The emails eventually stopped.
The Democracy Spring organization (if you can call it that), once able to mobilize thousands of people across the country, had dissolved into a vanity project for its leadership clique. All it took was a single political crisis (Trump’s election, in this case), and the structureless network of dedicated activists from across the country fell apart into a harmless, toothless display of performative “Resist!”-ance.
I was devastated. I felt like I had totally wasted those years of my efforts with Democracy Spring. I dropped out of activism altogether and probably (definitely) started drinking too much. I got into activist journalism instead, and made a few locally-focused documentaries about homelessness that won some awards at some film festivals around Ohio. But I stopped engaging in direct political activism, for the most part, aside from attending one-off protests or local community-building events.
I’d occasionally talk with the organizers of these events, and when I asked them what their long-term strategy was, they would invariably offer vague, starry-eyed platitudes about “building the movement” and “Resist!”-ing without offering anything concrete. It was always too reminiscent of the empty rhetoric I heard from Democracy Spring’s leadership for me to buy into their passion again.
Luckily, I had also been a convert of Bernie Sanders in 2014, and canvassed for him in 2015. Exclusively thanks to him, I spent the following years reading and unlearning all of the misconceptions that I didn’t know I had held about the word “socialism” (on my own, since I still mostly liked to hang out with nihilist apolitical punks who all thought I was annoying for being “political” and reading). It took a long time! Anti-socialist propaganda dies hard. I’m still unlearning stuff. At some point in 2023, I saw a post made by an old college friend (shout-out Julie) about a DSA event and decided that I’d better attend if I were going to be calling myself a socialist. It was my socialist “put up or shut up” moment, if you will.
Democracy In Action
In Cleveland’s DSA chapter, I found tons of committed members working together in an organization that was structured in its composition, serious and thoughtful about its rhetoric, deliberate about its strategy and tactics, intentional about political education, and focused on efforts that did not just consist of protests and petty acts of civil disobedience. But most importantly, it was democratic, directly accountable to its membership, and committed to building its members into leaders — instead of having them orbit around an insular group of self-proclaimed leaders who lead through force of personality alone.
The chapter’s model of organizing, as opposed to just mobilizing and advocacy, was nothing short of inspiring. According to what a given situation demanded, the organization’s goals were both long-term and short-term, widescoped and narrow, national and local, and with a calculated strategy to achieve all of them — with the right kind of deliberate and thorough organizing, of course. Most importantly, the chapter had a priority structure that allowed its membership to pivot and focus their limited capacity on issues as needed, so the organization wouldn’t crumble if the national political situation demanded a change of course.
In short, DSA was everything that Democracy Spring wasn’t.
I want to clarify that I don’t expect or even want you to be disillusioned by protesting. It was a real bummer of a process to go through, and I’m happy for folks who don’t feel the same way I do. I’m also not trying to use my personal experience as a demand for deference — although if you’re someone who is shallow enough to grant political weight to this sort of activist credentialism, feel free to defer to me if you want to 😉 — nor am I trying to say “I know better than you, so you should think like I do.” My intentions are solely to give an example that illustrates the clear limitations of protest-based activism. The trend I laid out in my personal story about one protest movement is observable in varying degrees across all protest movements.
Protesting is an acceptable way to “fight back” precisely because the ruling class thinks protesting is ineffective. And without a deep commitment to organizing, it is. The word “demonstration” is suggestive of the performative nature of protests — which there is a time and place for! But protests are by no means the most important tool in our toolkit. Without clear follow-up, without a commitment to building ourselves and each other into leaders, without a plan to build working-class power — in other words, without organizing — protests achieve little beyond making the attendees feel good about themselves. And to amplify the social standing of the self-proclaimed “leaders” in liberal activist circles, of course.
(By the way, the French word for “protest” is “manifestation,” which is more befitting of their culture of resistance; the average French protest would be called a “riot” if it took place in this country. But that’s a separate discussion.)
Again and again, when I see a political crisis emerge in this country, I watch the liberal activist groups in this city circle their wagons and start mobilizing for protests. I see the same people attending every time. And when the crisis passes, the mobilizing stops. There’s good work being done by these liberal activists, for sure. But every time a new issue emerges as the crisis du jour, the same pattern plays out: new coalitions with catchy names (but composed of the same people), emergency protests, vague calls to “Get organized! Join an org!”, and then — once public perceptions of “crisis” and “urgency” have faded — nothing. That sort of Sisyphean ambulance chasing is not organizing for change — it’s just performative “Resist!”-ance.
I often hear that we have a bad reputation among liberal activists in this city. Quite frankly, I don’t care. I’m not really all that impressed with those groups. That’s why I’m in DSA instead. Our DSA chapter is one of the largest, most coordinated, and most capable independent political organizations in the city, so let’s act like it. Liberal activist groups should be more worried about what we think of them. There’s nothing to be gained from deferring to liberal activists and giving undeserved weight to their criticisms of our chapter. We should absolutely work with them where our interests align, but at the end of the day, they need us more than we need them. After all, they wouldn’t be so desperate for us to endorse, support, and attend their events if that weren’t the case. Let them work for our approval instead.
I’m in DSA because I think it’s the organization best poised to stage a serious, coordinated, and multifronted resistance against capitalism and fascist reaction — not because it just happens to be “one progressive org out of many” that I happened to join. But if we treat this organization like it’s just one of many generally progressive orgs, it definitely will be.
Organizing, Not Just Mobilizing
I have nothing against attending protests. I attend and will continue to attend protests. People should attend protests; they’re cathartic, empowering, and publicly visible. But we have to recognize the strategic limits to endorsing and attending protests just for the sake of endorsing and attending protests. And if we do endorse a protest, we need to be deliberate about turnout.
The March 28th No Kings protest is coming up and there are questions over whether we should endorse it or not. Quite frankly, it doesn’t matter. Unless we’re doing something tangible at it like collecting signatures for our Gender Freedom Policy Petition, simply showing up, as good as that might feel, will accomplish as little as any other protest.
If we endorse a protest and only about 10 people show up, that misrepresents the actual power in this chapter and perceptibly brings our nearly 700 member org to the level of the myriad small, disorganized activist groups in the city. So, there is a potential cost associated with the optics of being present at these protests as well as the potential benefits to which folks are appealing; but those benefits only manifest if our turnout is strong.
Protesting alone isn’t going to stop Trump, Zionism, or ICE — it won’t stop any form of fascist reaction, for that matter. What will stop these things is organizing people into DSA and building it into a formidable political force that can leverage its power from below. As long as we’re not making a concerted effort at doing the latter, the former holds.
On a positive note of what can be possible at protests: at the last anti-ICE protest I attended, I connected a group of student activists at Case Western Reserve University (CWRU) with the state Young Democratic Socialists of America (YDSA) coordinator, and they’re currently organizing a new YDSA chapter on Case’s campus. This, in my opinion, is the sort of thing we should be aiming to do at protests.
Without organizing — and I mean organizing — mobilizing attendees for protests has an inherently limited impact. I think many comrades think “organizing” simply consists of getting people to show up at events, direct actions, canvasses, and training sessions; but that’s only mobilizing, not organizing. Without a deep commitment to developing one another into leaders both inside and outside the organization, we are not organizing.
Internal organizing is just as crucial a part of “the work” as our outward-focused efforts in the community. Without either, we stagnate.
To be clear, nothing should stop us from attending, endorsing, or supporting protests when they’re aligned with our values, but we need to be deliberate and calculated about what we’re doing when we go. Otherwise we’re just chasing the tail of the liberal activist movement — and I don’t know about you, but I joined DSA because I found that movement lacking.
We can attend these protests, demonstrate resistance to ICE and fascism, participate in direct actions/responses, and be serious about organizing people into DSA at these events — all at the same time. As one of our comrades likes to say, “We can walk and chew gum at the same time.” Another likes to say “We just have to do it.” Again, I fully agree — we just have to be deliberate and strategic about it. The urgency of the situation demands nothing less than a principled and coordinated organizational effort, not just blind faith that “Resist!”-ing at protests is enough to change anything on its own.
Solidarity, comrades.