What would protest be without a thousand Hot Takes on how the protesters are doing it wrong and will never make a difference? Oh, right, it would be a right-wing protest. But when progressives mobilize, pundits of every stripe line up to tell them they’re doing it wrong—which is how, weeks after what may have been the largest single day of protest in American history, former George W. Bush speechwriter David Frum is offering up a heaping platter of condescension.
Frum is not wrong about everything, as when he writes that “Protests can energize people and overawe governments. But it is the steady and often tedious work of organization that sustains democracy—and can change the world.” He’s saying something that’s been said countless times, yes, but he’s not wrong.
But mostly, Frum’s advice boils down to the belief that he and people just like him are the only audience that matters and that your protest should be aimed squarely at appealing to him. It’s the type of advice you get on protesting from someone who looks back at pictures of the civil rights movement—Martin Luther King Jr. preaching in a suit, well-dressed students being assaulted as they sit quietly at lunch counters—and believes he would have been on the side of the protesters, even as he is the political heir to their opponents.
His advice? Ban Angela Davis from your rallies, but put anti-abortion activists on stage. Limit your goals to the driest possible legislative ones and ban any social media-friendly creativity from your events:
“Pass a law requiring the Treasury to release the President’s tax returns.” “An independent commission to investigate Russian meddling in the US election.” “Divest from the companies.” These are limited asks with broad appeal.
On the other hand, if you build a movement that lists those specific and limited goals along a vast and endlessly unfolding roster of others from “preserve Dodd Frank” to “save the oceans”—if you indulge the puckish anti-politics of “not usually a sign guy, but geez”—you will collapse into factionalism and futility.
But “above all: be motivated by hope, not outrage.” Be motivated by hope as you carry pre-made signs with boring slogans aimed at a limited agenda targeting only Trump’s corruption and not the wildly unpopular Republican agenda he’ll sign.
Erase saving the oceans from your dreams, but be motivated by hope. And do this because a guy who’s hanging his argument on the fact that a false Trump statement against protest has “become dogma in Trumpworld, including even to many Trump-skeptical conservatives” says so. Because a George W. Bush speechwriter who has been cast out by the right for occasionally tut-tutting them in the same way he’s now condescending to progressives doesn’t get that many “Trump-skeptical conservatives” voted for Trump even though they knew him to be dangerous and dangerously unqualified, and that the Republican establishment has shown it will back him no matter what.
David Frum is a good writer, and he ably recycles a few points of common wisdom on protest and organizing. But you could drive a truck through the holes in his argument—if the truck’s tires could get enough of a grip on the oily ooze of his condescension to allow forward movement.