The #Metoo march is a great thing because the only real alternative is for people to ferment on social media. Being physically active outside in the fresh air with other people is always better than sitting hunched over a cell phone alone. Neither activity is even remotely political but the former is less likely to make one sick, so that’s good.
In the carnavalesque activities, the costumes and the slogans are always the best part. I saw a couple of good, creative posters on social media but most are embarrassingly earnest.
It’s great that people went and had a good time.
Clarissa's Blog 
Plus they got to show off those cute pink hats.
And they got to call Trump a lot of vulgar names, before he could even tweet back.
And (good for them!), they got the hosts on MSNBC and CNN to talk about something besides the Russians and Trump, and how the shutdown is all the Republicans’ fault.
And they got a few noble men like lesser brother Chris Cuomo (sibling of NY Governor Andrew Cuomo, both sons of the legendary almost-but-never-President Mario Cuomo), to bravely state how Trump “doesn’t respect women!”
And they got to talk in gushing terms about how, one year after their initial marches right after Trump’s election, their movement is growing ever more “savvy, inclusive, and strong.”
The mid-term elections on Tuesday, 6 November 2018 are eight-and-a-months away. We’ll see how much the marching and the speeches and the knitted hats translate into actual votes for women, or progressive candidates of any gender.
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Republicans are dropping like flies just sprayed with RAID, the latest in WI in a district that went to Trump in 2016. Keep whistling past the graveyard, Doc.
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This is great but how is it connected to my post?
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God, you don’t actually think Schachtner won because of the march, do you? That would be quite creepy.
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This post isn’t the first time you’ve used the word “earnest” derisively. What wrong with being earnest?
https://polldaddy.com/js/rating/rating.js
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It’s a euphemism for simple-minded. Sincerity without a drop of intelligence is actually quite scary.
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I think it is not true that marches are “not remotely political.” The civil rights marches of the 1960’s made a definite difference. I remember what it was like in the 1950’s. Things have changed significantly since then, though not enough by far. I remember being scolded, as a child, for drinking from a colored only water fountain in a department store.
Participating in a march with lots of other people gives one visible evidence that one is not alone in the belief that things need to change. Television shows, newspaper articles, and online commentary cannot do this. This offers a respite from the sense of desperate hopelessness and helplessness that leads to political indifference. The net result of such marches is that far more people will be motivated to vote and to help political candidates in whatever way they are able.
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“” The civil rights marches of the 1960’s made a definite difference”
Yes, but there’s two big differences between civil rights marchers and the pussy hatters.
1. the civil rights marchers had specific, clear goals and demands regarding specific unjust laws.
2. the stakes were higher as they faced real physical danger
Neither of these applies to the #metoo’ers who are essentially protesting the exploitation of would be actresses by unbearably self-righteous loud mouth voices for progressivism…
It’s not a political protest, it’s a low comedy burlesque of one, not a million miles from the smolensk ‘protestors’ I write about here:
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Yeah, I love it when conservatives extol the virtues of the civil rights marches to dismiss the marches and protests happening currently. Let us not forget that even at the peak of the civil rights movement, those marches were EXTREMELY unpopular. They were criticized for all sorts of reasons.
Let us not pretend for a moment that cliff, if he were present at that time, would ever have supported the civil rights movement. These cretins are exactly the kind of people who would’ve called MLK an outside agitator or a disgusting commie traitor or whatever.
David Bellamy is right, as usual.
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“Let us not pretend for a moment that cliff, if he were present at that time, would ever have supported the civil rights movement.”
I keep waiting for you to write something about me that is remotely accurate… and you keep disappointing me.
Or to be more optimistic, I keep expecting you to write a bunch of nonsense about me… and you never disappoint me.
Keep on keepin’ on, stringer, batting 000 point 0!
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The civil rights movement had leadership, concrete political demands and wasn’t in the least carnavalesque. It relied on a complex system of political organization. So this comparison is incorrect.
The pussy marches can be a lot more productively compared to the 15-M protests in Spain or the #occupy movements. As we all know, they led to nothing but an extreme neoliberal retrenchment and conservative victories in politics.
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“The pussy marches”
To run down a dead horse and hit it for a while…. Political protests are part of the nation state, the citizens protest and if they find enough support (civil rights, then womens rights, gay rights etc) then policy changes follow.
The post-nation-state (as it’s shaping up so far) is all about citizens not influencing policy in any significant way, so it’s all public spectacle that lets people blow off steam but which the government simply ignores because they have more important things to do like making more concessions to capital.
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The lawmakers are performing the spectacle of shutting down the government (that effectively already happened a while ago) and citizens respond by performing a spectacle of shutting down participatory politics. And everybody is happy as a clam.
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Clarissa, have you read Zeynep Tufekci’s “Twitter and tear gas”? She makes the point that a protest is not something that will bring change by itself, but a way for a movement to make visible its organizational capability; an organizational capability necessary for achieving political change, but no longer necessary for making a large protest happen, since social media enables easy large-scale mobilization and makes it possible, as long as the mobilization and the enthusiasm is there, to get specific tasks done on an ad-hoc volunteer basis
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These protests, indeed, don’t bring the kind of change their participants want. They bring the opposite kind of thing. Look at Spain. Years of mass mobilization, organization, protests. The result? The conservative austerity party sweeps one election after another. The Socialist party is destroyed. The new progressive Podemos goes deeply neoliberal the second it’s born.
Russia. Protests, organizing, etc. Putin’s approvals soar to 86%, his control on the country is tighter than it ever was before the protests.
The US. Occupy. Protests, organizing, etc. Republicans win all elections everywhere on all levels. The dismantling of the welfare state is almost complete. The best thing that progressive forces get is the deeply neoliberal Obama.
So yes, there’s political change in the wake of mass protests. Problem is, it’s a scary kind of change.
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“The net result of such marches is that far more people will be motivated to vote and to help political candidates in whatever way they are able.”: This seems to be true of the people I know who go to the marches – they’re politically active at the local, state, and national levels (working on campaigns, calling/writing/visiting their reps), serve on school boards, are active in unions, participate in civic organizations like the League of Women Voters, etc.
I’m not a marcher, myself, but I’d like to read more about the impact of marches, and why they don’t “count” as political when the people who participate consider them to be political. I’m especially interested to see analyses of what effects they have, good or bad – can anyone recommend articles/studies that talk about this?
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The only studies that exist are the very optimistic ones where the authors bend themselves out of shape to convince themselves that there will be some positive effect from the mass protest movements of the 21 century.
I can recommend Luis Moreno Caballud, Cultures of Anyone and Manuel Castells, Networks of Hope. It’s all a fantasy but it’s well-written, at least.
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And Zeynep Tufekci’s “Twitter and tear gas” for a much less starry-eyed view.
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Thanks!
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Man, these are gold. Literally the same language used today by the same people.
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Civil right movement, according to right wingers.
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Recommended song for the “Me Too” crowd:
FROGG by The Brothers Four.
I tell you, that Mollie Mouse really put that “horny toad” of a Frogg in his place.
She’s one hard-nosed no-nonsense lady, and can smell ulterior motives ten miles away.
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