Backlash - Hyperbolic demonstrations that

Backlash - Hyperbolic demonstrations that attack the US while lionizing brutal dictators may have actually increased support for the war.

The Vietnam War. Oh, and the one that's going to start in a few weeks, too.

It's been an article of faith on the far left in America that demonstrations are a key to winning "the people over". Yet as Eric Alterman says, the record doesn't bear that out - then, or now:

...part of the problem is this awful organization, A.N.S.W.E.R., which has taken over the organizing of them.

It is a little-known fact — I discovered it while researching my senior honors thesis in 1981-82 — that the anti-Vietnam demonstrations may have actually increased support for the war. Nobody was more unpopular with the country than the demonstrators. Even people who opposed the war, according to Gallup data, disapproved of the demonstrators by vast proportions. (The alternate argument — equally unprovable — is that the movement helped end the war because it scared the Nixon administration into suing for peace for reasons of domestic tranquility. But this is belied by the collapse of the movement following the end of the draft.)

Had that particular conceit been true, McGovern would have been president.

Some demonstrations are effective because they show Americans that people just like them care passionately about a cause and are willing to show up in person to support it. This was certainly true of Martin Luther King’s demonstrations and I think it’s also true of Equal Rights Amendment and abortion rights demonstrations, and it seemed true of the nuclear freeze demonstrations I attended in the 1980s.

I suspect that Alterman is injecting his own beliefs into his piece. He was right about King - but had the ERA and abortion and freeze demonstrations been genuine expressions of the general public's will, the ERA would have passed, support for abortion would have risen and Ronald Reagan would have served one term. All of these movements were controlled by radicals of one stripe or another - unlike ANSWER, they were radicals of whom Alterman approved.

But Alterman continues:

But radical rhetoric denouncing America and everything it stands for — which is what I heard from the A.N.S.W.E.R.-chosen speakers in D.C. over the weekend — does more harm than good. They harden the other side’s resolve and turn away “normal” non-political people from a cause they might otherwise support.

Again, Alterman is superimposing himself into other peoples' consciences, and asking a "Chicken/Egg" question: If the "Anti-war" movement weren't run by Stalinists like ANSWER, would the factory workers and pizza deliverers and COBOL coders and office temps of America support the war any less than they do? Would their fundamental common sense lead them to fear Hussein's potential nukes and nerve gas any less than they do?

Would the memory of 9/11 motivate us any differently than it does, if the "anti-war" leaders were any less stridently absurd?

Posted by Mitch at January 21, 2003 06:20 AM