How to do protests

Love this from Drum:

Kevin Engel, a student protester at Dartmouth, explains why they won’t give up:

“We’re not going to stop,” he said. “Palestine will be free within our lifetimes. The students are taking up the burden of doing that work because no one else really is.”

Engel is 19 years old and he’s just one guy, but I still can’t get over the hubris and ignorance on display here. I mean, “no one else really is”? Seriously? The fate of Palestine has been a burning worldwide issue for nearly a century. It’s prompted multiple wars, half a dozen terrorist groups, UN resolutions by the bushel, endless peace talks, the only nuclear program in the Middle East, tens of thousands of rockets launched into Israel, and so many newspaper headlines as to be uncountable. But Engel thinks that living in a tent while attending an Ivy League university is “doing the work”?

Umm, indeed.  But what’s even better is this top comment:

In a democracy, the best way to effect change in policy is through the political process. Protests can effect change in public opinion, and if so, then policymakers may listen. If you want big change, it’ll take decades (at best).

A few thoughts about winning public support:

1. Take the high moral ground.

2. Don’t engage in any violence.

3. Don’t engage in hate speech such as antisemitic slogans.

4. If you break the law (e.g., break into buildings), understand you may have to pay the consequences (e.g., arrest or suspension).

5. Understand that disruption of normal activities (classes, graduations, etc.) usually leads to negative public opinion.

6. Do you best not to be mockable. (E.g., if you take over a building at Columbia, don’t demand the university send in meals because you already bought a meal ticket. The whole world knows that the cafeteria is just a short walk away. You just look silly.)

7. Understand that if you attend an elite university, you are an elite (or at least an elite-in-training). The public does not have sympathy for elites as a general rule. You need to earn public support by your actions, not assume it.

8. Understand that controversy attracts bad actors. Don’t let your cause be hijacked by those who set back your cause. They will try.

9. Back to #1, taking the high moral ground means drawing clear distinctions between righteous action and immoral action. For example, you do not hurt the cause of the Palestinian people by condemning Hamas for the attack of October 7. But if you fail to condemn terrorism, or make excuses for it, then you are setting back the cause of Palestinians by muddying the clear line between what is right and what is wrong. The public you would like to side with your cause will be tepid or negative.

10. Protests have a long history and many have helped advance the common good. But others have been ineffective, or worse, slowing down or preventing progress. Think about the outcome you want and the best way to achieve it.

11. Politics will determine how the situation in Gaza is settled. Protests in Tel Aviv will probably be more on the mind of the Israeli government than protests in the US. Ultimately, the election in November will determine longer term US policy. If you think “genocide joe” is the problem, you need to think again. Things can be worse. Much worse. (Assuming what’s best for the Palestinian people is what you truly want.)

On the superior mental health of conservatives

This was really good from Thomas Edsall.  And I just sent the gift link to my teenage son, so I figured I might as well share it here, too, “The Happiness Gap Between Left and Right Isn’t Closing”

Why is it that a substantial body of social science research finds that conservatives are happier than liberals?

A partial answer: Those on the right are less likely to be angered or upset by social and economic inequities, believing that the system rewards those who work hard, that hierarchies are part of the natural order of things and that market outcomes are fundamentally fair.

Those on the left stand in opposition to each of these assessments of the social order, prompting frustration and discontent with the world around them.

The happiness gap has been with us for at least 50 years, and most research seeking to explain it has focused on conservatives. More recently, however, psychologists and other social scientists have begun to dig deeper into the underpinnings of liberal discontent — not only unhappiness but also depression and other measures of dissatisfaction.

One of the findings emerging from this research is that the decline in happiness and in a sense of agency is concentrated among those on the left who stress matters of identity, social justice and the oppression of marginalized groups.

How about that– research to suggest that identity politics are literally bad for your mental health!

I asked Judge and other scholars a question: Have liberal pessimists fostered an outlook that spawns unhappiness as its adherents believe they face seemingly insurmountable structural barriers?

 

Judge replied by email:

I do share the perspective that a focus on status, hierarchies and institutions that reinforce privilege contributes to an external locus of control. And the reason is fairly straightforward. We can only change these things through collective and, often, policy initiatives — which tend to be complex, slow, often conflictual and outside our individual control.

On the other hand, if I view “life’s chances” (Virginia Woolf’s term) to be mostly dependent on my own agency, this reflects an internal focus, which will often depend on enacting initiatives largely within my control.

Judge elaborated on his argument:

If our predominant focus in how we view the world is social inequities, status hierarchies, societal unfairness conferred by privilege, then everyone would agree that these things are not easy to fix, which means, in a sense, we must accept some unhappy premises: Life isn’t fair; outcomes are outside my control, often at the hands of bad, powerful actors; social change depends on collective action that may be conflictual; an individual may have limited power to control their own destiny, etc.

These are not happy thoughts because they cause me to view the world as inherently unfair, oppressive, conflictual, etc. It may or may not be right, but I would argue that these are in fact viewpoints of how we view the world, and our place in it, that would undermine our happiness.

Last year, George Yancey, a professor of sociology at Baylor University, published “Identity Politics, Political Ideology, and Well-Being: Is Identity Politics Good for Our Well-Being?”

Yancey argued that recent events “suggest that identity politics may correlate to a decrease in well-being, particularly among young progressives, and offer an explanation tied to internal elements within political progressiveness.”

By focusing on “political progressives, rather than political conservatives,” Yancey wrote, “a nuanced approach to understanding the relationship between political ideology and well-being begins to emerge.”

Identity politics, he continued, focuses “on external institutional forces that one cannot immediately alleviate.” It results in what scholars call the externalization of one’s locus of control, or viewing the inequities of society as a result of powerful if not insurmountable outside forces, including structural racism, patriarchy and capitalism, as opposed to believing that individuals can overcome such obstacles through hard work and collective effort.

As a result, Yancey wrote, “identity politics may be an important mechanism by which progressive political ideology can lead to lower levels of well-being.”

And, it’s Edsall, so it’s long with pretty more good stuff to check out, if you are so inclined.  And, quite relatedly, I just came across this post at Clearer Thinking which hits on similar themes:

1. Life satisfaction

Evidence suggests that progressives are less likely than conservatives to report being satisfied with their lives and more likely to be anxious and depressed. In our own research in the U.S., these correlations with progressivism were moderate in size (r=0.28 for anxiety, r=-0.26 for life satisfaction). 

 

In 2007 (during the Republican presidency of George W. Bush), Gallup found that just 8% of Republicans said their mental health is poor or only fair, whereas 15% of Democrats and 17% of independents said the same thing.

 

 

 

Source: Gallup poll

 

However, this trend does not appear to change when the political parties in power do: this study used data from 2022 (during the Democratic presidency of Joe Biden) and found that, even controlling for factors such as age and church attendance, there was still a difference between the self-reported mental health scores of conservatives and progressives.

 

 

Source: Tufts study, using 2022 Cooperative Election Study data

Of course, these are just correlations, and they don’t tell us why these differences exist. One hypothesis that researchers have suggested is that this difference may stem from the fact that being progressive involves being unsatisfied with the status quo (seeking progress), which could naturally lead to a lack of satisfaction.

Further supporting this explanation, researchers have argued that conservatism can be characterized as being what’s known as a “system-justifying ideology“, which offers arguments in support of the status quo. One of the most prominent conservative thinkers of the late 20th century, William F. Buckley Jr., articulated his type of conservatism (and the conservatism of his publication, The National Review) as one that “stands athwart history, yelling Stop”. This suggests a view that the status quo is largely satisfactory (and should be conserved) and might go some way to explaining higher rates of life satisfaction among conservatives…

4. Fundamental Beliefs

Research on fundamental beliefs about the world (“Primals”) has found conservatives are more likely to see the world as hierarchical (taking the view that people, places, and things all have a value and rank). Perhaps relatedly, research typically finds that conservatives tend to be higher in what researchers call “authoritarianism“, which is understood and measured in terms of submission to established authority, conventionalism, and aggression towards sanctioned targets.

 

 

 

Here is a diagram showing how some of these “Primals” were found in research to link to social and economic conservatism:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Numbers show correlations, and line color relates to correlation strength. All p values are <0.001 except three: the two numbers with asterisks are p<0.01, and the dotted line was not statistically significant.

Pretty interesting stuff!!  I shall quite happily stick with my liberalism focused on better health care for all, a better social safety net for all, and better material outcomes all around, which will definitely disproportionately benefit people of historically marginalized groups, while not overly-focusing on the identity of those groups.