Urgent Lessons for the Next Generation of Protesters
Urgent Lessons for the Next Generation of Protesters
What we can learn from the many failures and few successes of recent protests around the world, with Vincent Bevins
In If We Burn: The Mass Protest Decade and the Missing Revolution, journalist Vincent Bevins chronicles recent uprisings around the world—and why so many of them went awry. In his book, and in conversation, we trace some of the lessons that the next generation of protesters in the US can draw from their peers’ efforts around the world. Vincent also details why the best time to get involved in changing the world is now.
A condensed transcript edited for clarity is below. You can also listen to the audio of our conversation, which includes further exploration of protests in Brazil and Chile, a silly but sobering hypothetical about what would’ve happened had the Women’s March overthrown Donald Trump, and more:
Ben: Vincent, thank you so much for being here.
VB: Thank you for having me.
Ben: Your book chronicles how the world experienced more mass protests in the 2010s than at any other point in human history—in places like Tunisia, Egypt, Turkey, Brazil, and Chile. And yet, many of the demonstrations led to the opposite of what they asked for. Today I’d like to explore where movements went wrong, what they got right, and the lessons you draw for the next generation of protesters in the States.
To frame our conversation, let’s begin with what seems to me like your central argument: progress isn’t inevitable. You better have a good plan.
VB: I can’t emphasize this point enough: if you want things to get better, you have to make them better. That sounds stupidly obvious, but I think that especially in the English-speaking world, and particularly in the United States, there has long been this deep, unexamined assumption that the world was just always heading in the right direction.
Political philosophers trace this linear idea of progress to conceptions of time and history built into the Abrahamic religions, especially Christianity. You can see why it made sense for about 250 years if you were a white American in the U.S.: things did just keep getting better, at least from the perspective of a particular class that ran the government and experienced the benefits of its power.
But if you take a much larger, more representative, and international look at human history, the notion of inevitable progress falls apart very quickly. The 2010s certainly showed that things will not get better if you fail to concretely plan for the construction of a better world.
Ben: It seems like leaderless resistance, specifically a common form of organizing called “horizontalism,” lay at the heart of many movements’ initial successes—and ultimate failures. Can you explain how?
VB: Sure. Horizontalism is a way of configuring social movements. Originally developed in Argentina, it spread around the world. For example, it was the guiding philosophy of the protest group in Brazil, called the Movimento Passe Livre—The Free Fare Movement—or MPL, a left/anarchist group.
For the MPL, horizontalism meant that there would be no leaders whatsoever and that every decision should be made through absolute consensus. There’d be no division of labor—everyone would do everything. They’d rotate spokespeople so there was no way any one person could be said to be above the group.
The MPL’s long-term goal was to make all public transportation in Brazil free, and in June 2013 they organized protests against a bus-fare hike in São Paulo (where I’m based), here just outside my window. The protests got much, much larger than they'd expected, growing into the largest protest movement in Brazilian history. In over one hundred cities across the country, two million people took to the streets.
The MPL successfully killed the fare hike, but then there was a big question mark: what happens next? One of their members told me they planned for every single element of the protest up until the day after they succeeded. They believed somehow that causing a mass uprising would just lead to something good. But without a clear plan to capitalize on the moment they created, the MPL ended up being overwhelmed by fast-changing circumstances. Soon, the left was violently expelled from the streets by new arrivals, right-wing protesters in the yellow-and-green football gear that we would now recognize as the uniform of Bolsonaristas [supporters of the extreme-right politician Jair Bolsonaro], who quickly changed the meaning of the protests.
Ben: This gets to another point you make: protesters need to be prepared to define what they’re doing, especially in the media, otherwise someone else will come in and define the protests for you.
I thought it was telling that the term “Arab Spring” was coined by an American political scientist in Foreign Policy magazine, who conveniently ignored that it was actually winter in North Africa.
VB: Nor does spring have the same revolutionary connotations there as it does in the States.
Ben: Right. It’s kind of like watching the music video for “Hot Girl Summer” by Megan Thee Stallion and describing it as “a quaint autumnal celebration.”
VB: Ha, you tell me.
Again, in the case of Brazil, the mass media here was and is owned by oligarchs. Their reporters interpreted the protests through a more center-right perspective—as mass media often does—which ended up changing the meaning of the protests, which brought different people to the streets.
That dynamic appeared around the world. The lesson is clear: when you don’t have clear spokespeople to define protests, it often falls to journalists like me to ascribe meaning to what’s going on, which we have no business doing.
Ben: Let’s talk about Chile for a moment. By your analysis, Chilean protesters had the most success relative to other movements, and their success was related to representation. How is that the case?
VB: Zooming out for a second, I don’t think it’s contentious to say that since the neoliberal era began in the 1980s, representation has been in crisis. The political class very clearly does not represent the voting public in the way that they're supposed to. Politicians worldwide are more responsive to corporate interests than they are to regular people. Understandably then, most recent protest movements rejected representation, refusing to engage with politicians.
Historically though, it turns out the choice is not between bad representation and no representation. The choice is between the best representation you can get and representation imposed by somebody else. In 2019, Chile emerged as a success story (relatively speaking) because Chileans—reluctantly—embraced that representation.
In October 2019, students in Santiago launched an “anti-neoliberal” revolt. The story is complicated and ties into decades of US-supported dictatorship that the country suffered through, but to keep it short, the students’ protest quickly turned into a “national urban awakening.” Over a million people took to the streets in the largest protest in Chilean history.
And luckily, former student protest leaders were already in Congress, including Gabriel Boric. Many leftists viewed Boric’s initial entry into politics in 2013 as a betrayal, but in 2019 at least protesters had some people in office who more or less understood what was happening in the streets. Boric and others chose to resolve the crisis by offering a path to write a new constitution. Arguably, this was actually a top-down imposition of meaning onto the streets, but this resolution managed to get a significant portion of people to say, well, maybe that's not the total revamp of society that we wanted, but okay, a new constitution would be a pretty good outcome. Ultimately, Boric became president, and other major figures from the 2011 generation took executive power, though the dream of a new constitution still lies out of reach.
Ben: As I was reading this part of the book, I thought to myself, is Vincent saying, well, at least we're lucky enough that we have someone like AOC in Congress to interpret what's going on in the streets? Or is he saying, it's not great that so many old Democrats are holding onto power, but they’re the best that we’ve got?
VB: Ha, I want to emphasize that the lessons I draw are based on interviews, not my own personal preferences. I think you have to conclude that some kind of representation—even the imperfect, corrupted democracy that we have in the U.S.—is better than a lot of alternatives.
In so many of the countries I covered, protesters created revolutionary moments, which created power vacuums, which created opportunities for someone else to step in: whether it be a new, more repressive dictator in Egypt (Abdel Fattah El-Sisi), or the government in Beijing simply accelerating a process of the full integration of Hong Kong, or the proto-Bolsonarista movement riding the wave of the MPL protests.
So unless you have a better system ready to go, international examples show that you don’t just want to throw out the system you have. A lot of my interviewees who were at first completely ideologically opposed to representation advised future protesters not to be afraid of it; and to do the hard work of trying to build the best type of representation possible. In a complex society, representation will be necessary whether you like it or not.
Ben: At the same time, the protesters you interview also advise being prepared to change the world at any moment.
VB: Exactly. One of the lessons that comes up over and over again is that no one really knows when history is going to strike and when an uprising is going to happen. In those unexpected moments, it’s usually already-existing organizations that are best equipped to act and build a better future, something that so many people clearly want.
So the time to get involved in an organization doing good work is always now. And, I’ll add, failure is okay—you have a long time to build the future. If it takes you three to eight to twelve years to turn an initial failure into a long-term victory, that counts. Keep going.
Ben: A good note to end on. Thanks for sharing your insights, Vincent. It’s been a pleasure.
VB: Thanks so much, Ben.