Plain English with Derek Thompson - A Political Scientist on How Protests Can Change Minds or Backfire

Episode Date: April 26, 2024

In the last week, hundreds of protests across college campuses and American cities have taken place in response to the war in Gaza. Campus life has shut down at Columbia University in NYC. The news is strewn with images of police confrontations on campuses, from Texas to California. Hundreds of demonstrators across the country have been taken into police custody. And many people now anticipate that, without a major course correction in the war in Gaza, demonstrators will converge on the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, in a replay of the infamous 1968 anti-war protests and police riots that defined that national convention. Next week, we’re going to have a full episode on the war itself. Today, I want to talk about the nature of protest itself. Omar Wasow, a professor of political science at UC Berkeley, is the author of an influential paper about the history of 1960s protests. Today we talk about what made the 1960s protests different, how protests succeed, how protests backfire, and how his research applies to today. If you have questions, observations, or ideas for future episodes, email us at [e-mail]. Host: Derek Thompson Guest: Omar Wasow Producer: Devon Baroldi LINKS: "Agenda Seeding: How 1960s Black Protests Moved Elites, Public Opinion, and Voting" [link] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Nathan Hubbard, spring has sprung, the birds are chirping, and the pop girls are pop-girling. Oh, and you know what that means, Nora Prenziotti. Every single album is back. This spring is packed with new releases from some of the biggest pop stars in the world, including our girl Taylor Swift, and we'll be covering it all. We'll, of course, break down every angle on the tortured poets department, and we'll also cover new music from Beyonce, Duolipa, Maggie Rogers, Casey Musgraves, and Ariana Grande. It's Pop Girl Spring on every single album. New episodes starting March 28th. On Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. Today's episode is about protests in America.

In the last week, hundreds of protests across college campuses and American cities have taken place in response to the war in Gaza. Campus life has shut down at Columbia University in New York City. The news is strewn with images of police confrontations on campuses from Texas to California. Hundreds of demonstrators across the country have been taken in a police custody, And many people now anticipate that without a major course correction in the war in Gaza, demonstrators will this summer converge on the Democratic National Convention in Chicago in a replay of the infamous 1968 anti-war protests and police riots that defined that national convention.

Next week, we're going to have a full episode on the war itself, Gaza, Israel, and the regional conflict that is enveloping it. Today, I want to talk about narrowly the protests themselves. Some of the historical analogies with 1968 that we're seeing in the news are downright eerie. Writing in the Atlantic this week, the author George Packer wrote, quote, 56 years ago, this week, at the height of the Vietnam War, Columbia University students occupied half a dozen campus buildings and made two principal demands of the university.

Stop funding military research. and cancel plans to build a gym in a nearby black neighborhood. After a week of feudal negotiations, Columbia called in New York City Police to clear the occupation. The physical details of that crisis were much rougher than anything happening today. The students barricaded doors and ransacked President Grayson Kirk's office. The cops arrested more than 700 students and injured at least 100, while one of their own was permanently disabled by a student.

end quote. You can see here in this description why so many people are talking about 2024 as 1968 Redux. The protests, the police clearings, the confrontations between schools and students, the fact that it's all about a war, thousands of miles away, that is being indirectly or directly funded by American military.

Now, I've been following these protests, and of course, the war in Gaza itself from Washington, D.C. That distance has a clear disadvantage. I cannot tell you right now what's happening on the campus quad of Columbia University. But distance in this case also has an advantage. It allows me to reflect on how the protests are being covered in the media. In my general news daily diet, I follow conservatives, liberals, Jews, Muslims, and their coverage of the protests. The general coverage of the protest to the person has been astonishingly predictable. It's like I know who is going to focus their attention on the very worst, most anti-Semitic

tense signs with horrible language and say, this is the true character of the protest. And I know who's going to focus their attention on peaceful dancing, the case for ceasefire in Gaza, and say, this is the true nature and character of the protests. The media has enormous discretion when it comes to choosing what to focus on because a protest is never just one thing. It is always a thousand things happening at the same time. When we decide that a protest is all about one thing, that's typically us choosing to focus on what story to tell. This matters because protests truly are global media events whether or not they want to be. The number of students at Columbia University is several orders of magnitude smaller

than the number of people around the world that have now seen the Columbia University protests. The way that protests are mediated by news coverage ultimately goes a long way toward determining whether they succeed in setting the agenda or fail in changing the world. That is just one of the insights into protests from today's guest Omar Wasso,

a professor of political science at UC Berkeley, and the author of an influential paper on the history of 1960s protests. Today we talk about what made the 1960s protests different, how protests succeed, how protests backfire, and how his research applies to today. I'm Derek Thompson. This is plain English. Omar Wausso, welcome to the show.

Thank you so much for having me. So today with protests spreading across the country of the war in Gaza and the rising likelihood of major protests at the Democratic National Convention this summer, I really wanted to talk to you about how this moment compares to similar protests in the 1960s. In 2020, you published a paper

on the effect of 1960s protests on elite opinions. Before we get into that paper and exactly what you found, I would love you to situate it within the larger literature in this space. What had been the prevailing wisdom? Did previous political scientists find that mass protests often succeed, or were they generally of the opinion that protesters are screaming into the void?

It's a great question. And there's a large body of work in political science and sociology that's looked at this. And there's a range of results. But in political science, the dominant position has been that elites really dominate political communication. So that there's work by, for example, two scholars, Gillen's and page that looked at a wide range of issues and just found that like mass influence on these different issues was almost non-existent and that basically these issues were there were people

like lobbyists who had some influence and there are other kind of elite actors say in the media who had influence but that the mass public had very little influence there's other work by scholars like maria stephen and erika chenowith that found And across nationally, nonviolent protests were successful about 50% of the time and violent protests that had some degree of violence about a quarter of the time. So there has been some evidence of success. But broadly in the U.S. context, the sense is elites dominate political communication and sort of these bottom up voices are often go unheard. I want to hold on a couple words that you said and remind myself and listeners, we're going to get back to them later in the show. political opinion, elite opinion is fundamentally a top-down phenomenon.

Protests are, by definition, a bottom-up phenomenon. There's no point in protesting something if all the elites already agree with you. There's some ways in which I think the world is becoming a little bit more upside-down, a little bit more bottom-up, and so I'm interested in your opinion about that. But I want to, I'm putting that in the refrigerator and keeping it for later. First, if you could, set the scene of the 1960s protests. what should we know about the protests, their political context? Maybe the right way to frame this is like,

what have we potentially forgotten about the protest environment of the 1960s that is so important to remember today, given the environment of protests right now? So very generally, I mean, not just in the 1960s, protest movements tend to be episodic. And so you have these sort of waves of activity and then it often fades rather quickly. And what we see in the 1960s, and it really even begins in the late 1950s, is this kind of building set-ins and people trying to integrate buses.

And that activity builds quite dramatically in the early 1960s. In terms of activity, you see events like the March on Washington, a quarter of a million people converging on D.C. And then there's this sort of remarkable period of legislation, right? 64 Civil Rights Act, 65 Voting Rights Act, and then it starts to fade rather quickly in that kind of episodic model and are consistent with that kind of episodic model. And then what we see in the kind of latter half of the 60s and early 70s is another wave, but where the protests often escalate to violence where there are, there's a protester initiative violence, not just violence by the state against protesters. Last question before we jump right into your paper, the civil rights protests at the late 1950s and 1970s. 60s, were there ways in which these protests were qualitatively different from previous eras of protest, whether it was for women's right to vote or labor strikes or Luddite-style

protests against the introduction of new technologies? Is there something that political scientists who study protests set aside the 50s and 60s civil rights protests away from these sort of previous generations of protests because they were just different. different in some way? So that's a really good question. And there are a number of things that we might point to in the 1960s. I mean, one thing that I kind of loop on a lot is that in 1950, something like 2% of people have a television.

And by 1960, more than 90% of people have a television in their home. And so there's this really radical transformation in the media environment in that era. And that lays the groundwork for a different kind of visual style of protest. And there's a great book, Pulitzer Prize winning book, on the history of reporting on the civil rights movement called The Race Beat. And what they show in that book is that essentially the civil rights, like when TV news first comes out in the 60s, like, people are like trying to figure out, like, what is this good for? They have 15 minutes a day and they don't know what to do with it. And essentially to use kind of a modern term, civil rights protests become the killer app of TV news. And it sort of justifies the existence of TV news.

And there's this whole wave of national reporting from outside of the South that starts to cover the civil rights movement that really creates a different kind of protest strategy, which is that you create sort of these very dramatic events that then help to get national and international news coverage that puts pressure on local actors. And that that I think is distinctive. It's not totally novel. There are people doing things in earlier periods that look like that. But it just, the media environment makes this much more available as a strategy. And this is an interesting on-ramp to your paper and your thesis, because what you're describing are protests as programming, protests as content. And surely, you know, the suffragettes must have seen aspects of their movement as programming and content, too. They were thinking about their protests living within an ecosystem of newspapers and news headlines. But here, because the introduction of the television, which at the time was just the god king of media penetration and media programming, it's just a different kind of thinking about protests as programming. Let's jump right into your paper. What's the big question you were trying to answer? So there are a couple of interrelated questions, but the main question is, coming back to what you had posed before, is at some level, do protests matter?

And so is there any, given a kind of counterpoint that says, again, elites dominate political communication, do we see any evidence of these protest movement being able to punch through even briefly, right? And then kind of related to that, do different kinds of protest tactics matter? And on the first question, I find a lot of evidence looking at everything from public opinion to newspaper coverage to what people in Congress. Congress are saying to voting, that like a protest today is showing up, the headline, the front-page headline in newspaper tomorrow. It is showing up and people in Congress talking about it. So, protests are punching through and influencing kind of like the, you know, what we might call today, you know, the discourse. And then I also find the tactics matter and that what's happening on the ground is shaping different kinds of coverage and the different kinds of coverage in turn

produces different kinds of essentially sympathy or hostility to the cause. And so just to drill into that, right, that what I find is when protesters are nonviolent, and in particular when there's nonviolent protest met with sort of brutal state repression, that generates these very sympathetic images in the media, and that kind of grows the coalition in favor of civil rights. And when there is protester-initiated violence, that tends to get coverage in the mainstream press, which is to say at that time, the white press as riots and sort of disorder, and that tends to grow the coalition in favor of law and order politicians and policies. I want to really understand

the pipeline you're describing. And there's a graph or figure in the paper that basically represents your conclusion is something like this. A group wants to change public opinion, number one. So they stage a protest. That protest can be violent or nonviolent. The character that protests, is so important because it determines the media frame. So if riots break out in New York City, that's a very different media framing device, then protesters demand peace and the police just beat them up. That framing device increases the salience of the topic, disorder on the one hand or peace on the other. That shapes elite discourse, shaping public opinion, and ultimately shaping voting. Is that sort of domino effect that I just described too simple? What else should people know about

the theory you're laying out here. That's not too simple. That captures it really well. I appreciate your summarizing my work better than I did. And I think maybe the only thing I would add is that there's, you know, when this paper was going through the review process, some people were skeptical, like our protests really influencing mass opinion too. And, you know, the reason we might be skeptical is almost nobody directly observes a protest, right? And so I was just assuming, well, no, no, no, I mean, people are hearing about it in the news, and that's shaping their attitudes. And I had to go back and collected a quarter of a million headlines from front page headlines

and showed that there really is, you can. A protest today predicts this front page headline tomorrow, and the front page headline tomorrow is correlated with shifts in public opinion. And so it's both happening at the elite level and at the mass level, and that that plausibly is how protests are influencing things like voting behavior monthly. I'm always a little bit jittery about diving headlong into methodology, but I want to do that for this next question. So one of the most interesting parts of the paper is you have several graphs that look at changes in public opinion when it comes to the question, what is America's, quote, most important problem? So in 1964, you can very clearly see civil rights spike and become this number one issue for Americans, the election year when Lyndon B. Johnson absolutely demolished Barry Gold,

water. Foreign affairs was a narrow second. By 1968, the share of people saying civil rights was the nation's top issue had fallen by 50 percent. You've already alluded to that. And crime, public safety, issues that fall under this bucket of social control, they surge, right? Law and order. In fact, 1968 was the rare election where the economy, which is almost always in the top two, was actually number four. It was way at the bottom. I want to know how you connected all the dots here. How did you connect protest character, violence or nonviolence, to issue salience and voting at the county level? How did you connect the fact that you have way over here, protest violence, and way over here, Americans saying, this is our number one problem. Just draw that out from you a little bit.

That's a really thoughtful question. And I'm going to even step back before getting into the methodology and set up a puzzle that you allude to, which is, like, a part of what was interesting is, like, where did law and order come from as a policy? I mean, this is in some ways the animating question for me. I was a kid whose parents had been active in the civil rights movement and then grew up in the law and order 80s. And I wondered, how did we go from the civil rights era to the law and order era? And so it was kind of looking in this period where you see that pivot in the 60s and 70s.

And I think what was striking to me is like, just to one more bit of the puzzle, Goldwater, as you alluded to, he runs on Law & Order and he loses in this blowout. And then two years later, Ronald Reagan runs for Governor of California, also on Law & Order, and wins. And he sort of thought of as a long-shot candidate. And so, you know, those are not apples to apples comparisons, but it's like, how did law and order go from a losing issue in 64 to a winning issue in 66 is another way of thinking about, like, this kind of transition over time.

And what I, and so when you see that, it sort of suggests, well, you know, something, there are variety of theories we could have. So the kind of classic elite story, going back to the beginning of our conversation, is, well, this is driven by campaigns. This is driven by the candidates. But of course, Goldwater was running on Law & Order in 64 and it didn't work, right? So why was Nixon able to, you know, sort of win with that? And if you look at the public opinion data, it's, it's, law and order is not, it's actually declining as we go into the election. And so that suggests that it's not, at least superficially driven by the campaigns. And there must be some other factor. And what I, then did it as kind of zoom in a little. And if you look at protest activity, not just annually, which is what some research had done in the past, but you look at it really day by day, what you see is this remarkable pattern where concern about civil rights is like to the, you know, let's just call it the month, spiking and rising and falling with protest activity. And concerned about social control is rising and falling with violent protest activity.

and just one last, and this is not getting to your point about the county, but when I was first looking at these, like, lots where I was like, here's public opinion spiking and falling, here's protest activity rising and falling. My initial thought was, oh, public opinion is moving around a lot because public opinion is noisy. It's just like, and then I started looking at it more closely, and it's like, oh, no, no, it's going up in the summer and down in the winter and up in the summer and down in the winter. And you have to have a story that it's like, why is it seasonal? And it's seasonal and plausibly because, it's being driven by activity on the ground, not just noise. And so once I started to see that structure, it became clear to me that, no, no, no, like this is a bottom up story. This is a bottom up effect. And that led to this additional set of analyses that were, okay, now can I make a kind of of a large systematic county level analysis that connects a local protest to changes in voting

behavior. How strong was the effect of this? protest, violent protest programming on the final election results? Like, is it possible in your view, and according to your model, that protests in the spring and summer of 1968 and media coverage of those protests, which, according to your view, raised the salience of violence in law and order? Is it possible that they swung the election to Richard Nixon? Yeah, so that became one of the core questions. So let me come back to part of what you just asked in the prior question in this one, right? So it's like, how can we test protests on voting?

And what I do just quickly is take, we have voting data in the 1964, 68, and 72 elections. I have a bunch of, you know, data about each county demographics, you know, economic, and basically look at, and then I have geocoded all of the protest activity. And so I then say, well, if your county was, quote, treated by a protest, was it within a certain distance and time and kind of like, like was it a big enough protest, then we say the county was treated or not. And what I find is the counties that were, quote, treated by a protest, if the protest was nonviolent, vote slightly more liberally. That is say, they vote for the Democratic Party, which in that period is really the pro-civil rights party. And so importantly, this is not in my mind fundamentally about the parties,

but kind of who's aligned with the civil rights coalition or who's opposed to it. And then, so it's about, It's about two percentage point increase in Democratic vote share if a county was exposed to nonviolent protest. If the county was exposed to violent protest, what I find is, and it depends a little on the model, but call it about one and a half to seven percent decrease in Democratic vote share. And the method I use for that is a, it's called like a panel regression. And that's a pretty good way of accounting for a lot of potential confounders, but it's still a correlation at heart.

And so to try and make a causal claim, I do this one additional analysis where if we had godlike powers, we would potentially like randomly assign some places get a protest, some places don't. We obviously can't do that. We can't rerun history. What we can do is approximate something like a experiment.

And so I use a method developed by some economists where I take rainfall in April of 1968. That's when Martin Luther King is brutally assassinated, and there are 137, sorry, 127 protests that escalate to violence following his assassination. And if we think of rainfall as almost like a, you know, a coin toss, a kind of random assignment mechanism. Some counties have rain. Some counties don't. We don't think that's related to voting in November. And so I use rainfall to predict whether protests happen or not. That, again, is this kind of random assignment mechanism. And then

use that sort of natural experiment to estimate a causal effect of violent protest on voting in November. And there I find significant effects of the violent protest on a decrease in Democratic vote share. And importantly, I also, I only find that effect in the week following King's assassination. So in the days before King's assassination, in the latter half of April of 68, there's no effect. And so that suggests you have to have a story about why pilot. protest is influential voting in November only in the week following King's assassination and not before or after. The most obvious reason that, you know, I argue is that this is a causal effect of protest and that that's the most parsimonious explanation. What overall then is the formula

for a successful protest according to the results of your paper? And we are going to discuss later the degree to which your analysis of the 1960s can apply to a protest movement in 2024, but just based on the results of your paper, what are the active ingredients of a successful protest? Another really perceptive question. So I would say, first, let me just flag that there are a variety of different kinds of protests. So some kinds of protests are like in the 1960s, maybe people boycotted a movie theater that was segregated.

And so you can have a local targeted protest that doesn't need a lot of media coverage if you can bring pressure to bear on like a local company. And so the most famous example of that would have been like the Birmingham bus boycott, right? That can succeed as a local boycott. The kind of protest that, and then there are other kinds of things like hunger strikes and, you know, there are variety of other methods. But the most common event that I see in the 1960s that I think continues to be a very common, you know, strategy is to generate, you're using protests to essentially focus the public attention on an issue. And so protests are, in a way, a kind of,

public relations. There are a kind of storytelling where you're trying to get an issue on the public agenda. And that requires then, in some ways, thinking like the media and what kind of story is going to be told through the media. There's a great line. This is not from the 1960s, but in the film How to Survive a Plague, which is about Act Up, there's a former media executive who's advising people before a demonstration. And she says, don't talk to the media. talk through the media. And that's, to my mind, the kind of the core insight that people in the 1960s really took to heart, which is they were trying to talk through the media to a national and international

audience. And that if you're using this kind of like media, if you're trying to do this storytelling strategy, it's about then trying to kind of construct narratives that have the potential to make, you know, kind of get coverage and get sympathetic coverage. In 2020, I know that your work was largely held up by some people to make the point that violent protests, the sort that create news chiron's about law and order, the sort that create images of burned out storefronts are likely to swing public opinion, local public opinion, against the protests. I know that there is some research and some academics who said, we just disagree. We actually think that violent protests have historically worked in a case. variety of ways. And there is, in fact, a thesis called the insurgency thesis proposed by Cloward and Piven in 1971, which says that mass unrest often, this is their argument, induces the state to buy off the movement. So, for example, political violence by African-Americans

led to greater spending on aid to families with dependent children. How do you feel about the insurgency thesis? So I think it's important to parse out a couple of things there. So there is evidence cross-nationally, for example, in the Arab Spring as well, where like movements, do we do see evidence of investments by elites in things like social policy that try to buy calm, right? And so it's not, I think there is evidence from the American past as well as sort of other cross-national evidence that a certain amount of disorder can lead to investments in kind of like welfare policy of a variety of forms. we also see evidence that it leads to investments in greater repression. And so those are not mutually exclusive. The other thing that I think is important about how to think about the insurgency hypothesis is sort of the elite versus mass dimension.

And so you might get some kind of concessions from elites, but also at the same time mobilize the mass public against you, particularly if you're a group like people with AIDS under Act Up or African Americans in the 1960s, you're kind of a despised minority by a significant chunk of the population. And so I think the insurgency hypothesis has, again, some good evidence behind it. And at the same time, there's this, it doesn't really look at the mass public effects and it doesn't really consider the, like, greater investments in repression. And then the last thing is a lot of the evidence from the insurgency hypothesis is in that

kind of pre-television era. And so if you have like a strike at a, you know, a plant in the 1930s, like that might help to induce concessions. But if you're getting a lot of cover, if you've imagined TV cameras in that era, it might change the dynamics in terms of, oh, like, you know, a kind of violent resistance may in fact mobilize the public against you. And I think that's, that's less, that's happening less when there's less, you know, the TV is less present in, in this kind of pre- 1950s era. We're walking up to the 2020s now. I would love you to apply this standard and this worldview to the last decade of protests,

the protests going on right now. But first, I think it's appropriate to ask whether the model that we've described is applicable at all. Your model implies, I think, and just tell me if you think any aspect of this question is unfair, Your model implies that reality informs media framing, right? That the media frame is downstream of what happens on the ground in the protest. I think that might have been appropriate in 1964 when there were three television networks where media itself was actually very top-down.

Like Walter Cronkite was not one of us. He was Uncle Walter on Mount Olympus. The city newspapers were incredibly powerful as local advertising monopolies. And they were monopolies. No one competed with them. There wasn't like a little newsletter that competed with the Washington Post. There were no podcast. There was no internet.

Today we have more abundant media. We have more ideological media. We have more bottom-up media. Whereas I think I could argue that unlike 1964 and 1968 in 2024, in 2024, publisher ideology sets the agenda and reality is often filtered through that agenda rather than the agenda being predominantly set by what happens in the world. Is that too cynical? Does it challenge the applicability of your model for evaluating protest movements and protest effectiveness in the 2020s?

I don't think it's too cynical, but I also don't think it's quite as different as it might appear. So, like, in the 1960s, there is a black press, a southern white press, and a national white press. And they each come to these issues quite differently. And so the black press is obviously quite sympathetic to the cause of civil rights, and is covering it well before the national white press gets involved. But the Southern press is quite ideological, is quite, you know, their coverage is almost all. This is outside agitators and people breaking the law.

And so there is a different way of framing in the Southern press, the civil rights movement. And then the national press is interested, but there's like one big protest in Hattiesburg, Mississippi, and a reporter is covering it and says to a local civil rights leader, you know, this is all well and good, but if there's no blood and guts, there's no story. And so there was like a bias, which I think still exists in a lot of ways in the media today, for spectacle or, you know, visual.

And, you know, people talk a lot about left-right bias and that often misses. No, no, there's like, there's a bias for drama, and that can work against a peaceful protest. and of course there were other kinds of biases where it's just like there was a real challenge for this civil rights movement to get covered in a way that felt like it represented the full humanity of these black activists in the larger white press so there so some of those dynamics of us of a kind of ideological and fragmented media were there in the past but fundamentally I think you're right there's this kind of explosion of new outlets and and and and this almost glidescopic representation of reality in the current media that does make it

harder for any one story to kind of become the consensus reality in the public mind. And that absolutely is a challenge. Your research was talked about a lot in the summer of 2020 with the Black Lives Matter protest, the George Floyd protests. It's being talked about a lot right now. In 2020, I know a lot of liberals worried that the George Floyd protests, I'm talking about more centrist liberals, I suppose, worried that the George Floyd protests would backfire against Democrats and swing the 2020 election.

I mean, I think I believe it was a San Harris podcast that I most clearly remember where, if I recall correctly, he ominously predicted that the Black Lives Matter protests happening that summer were going to swing the election to Trump in November. Obviously, Joe Biden won that election. Do you think the George Floyd protests largely support or challenge the thesis that you put out in 2020? The evidence, I think, broadly is consistent with my story in the 1960s,

and let me give some substance to that. So, first off, by one analysis of a group that documents protests all over the world, something like, I'm forgetting whether it's 94 or 96, but let's just call it 95% of the protests were nonviolent, were peaceful protests in the George Floyd era. And so in that sense, there are a few events, the Minneapolis police station going up in flames and other things that got a lot of attention. But if there was local coverage in your paper about a protest,

almost certainly it was a relatively, you know, benign, peaceful protest. And so in that sense, the story is broadly consistent with the evidence I find of a kind of liberalizing effect of local peaceful protests, despite the fact that a lot of the attention was for that small percentage where there was violence, and in some cases, really quite dramatic violence. I think some of the things that are also broadly consistent and that are not directly articulated in my story, but I think are consistent, which is that that video, right, so this teenager, Darnella Frazier has the presence of mine to kind of bear witness with her cell phone camera to the murder of George Floyd.

And that video really punches through in the public consciousness in a way that very few things had. Of course, it's this moment where it's COVID times. And so there's a little bit more room for a story to capture the public's attention. But I think that while it's a different thing that's like here's social media and cell phones that are kind of documenting, it has an echo of, it has an echo of, it. something like the Edmund Pettus Bridge beating of Congressman, suddenly blanking John Lewis, or other kinds of images.

You know, the classic, you know, a boy, a young man being, having his pants ripped off by a dog. Like those kinds of images are, you know, sort of seared into the public consciousness. And that, I think, is an echo of like this way in which, kind of suffering can be turned into power through the media. And so there's a sympathetic public that's driven by particular kinds of images and stories that gets circulated, again, differently in the social media era than the three-network era, but echoes.

Zaynep Tufekshi at the New York Times and previously of the Atlantic wrote a book called Twitter and tear gas that said, you have to judge, we have to judge, pre-and-posts internet movements differently. Internet age protests are both faster to scale and faster to dissipate, like maybe Occupy Wall Street, whereas older protest movements required much more care, were much more difficult to build. The 1963 March in Washington took months to plan, but ironically, or perhaps fittingly, all that effort necessary to build thick institutions contributed to their longer-term success. How do you think, feel about the theory that modern protest in the age of the smartphone is simultaneously easier

to stage, but harder to make social change out of? Yeah, I think Zainab is spot on there, and that it's, you know, we can think about just in a very simple model of the world, right? It's like any gathering has this logistics problem, which is like, when are we meeting? Where are we meeting? and in a pre-internet era, like, solving that coordination problem is non-trivial. And so with something like the Birmingham bus boycott, right, like, people had to, you know, hand out flyers and, like, organize at this local level in a very significant way. And that meant that there was this kind of leadership infrastructure and, you know, people who could negotiate with the powers that be.

And what Zainab documents quite nicely is how, like, there are these, The internet lowers the cost of coordination dramatically. One person with a big Twitter following can sort of say meet at this intersection at this time and boom, there's a protest. But then you get this weird scenario where it's like, okay, somebody wants to negotiate with the protest movement like, you know, Occupy Wall Street or whatever it is. And there's no one, there's no clear leader because there hasn't been a kind of process of organizing beforehand to create that infrastructure. And so it's both a strength and a weakness that it's become so much easier to organize a movement. In some ways, it's a movement without the organizing. And that I think is exactly right that there's a hard trade-off.

Now, what we've seen, there's a recent paper by a couple of economists that looked at about a dozen movements in the last, I feel like it's about a decade period. And they find that across these movements, almost none of them move public opinion or voting. The one that did was Black Lives Matter. And so it might be that at a certain scale, and to be clear, the Black Lives Matter protests, there was something like 10,000 in the U.S. and 10,000 abroad. I mean, it was just like among the biggest movements in American history. So it might be that, yes, it's chaotic, but at a certain level of scale, it still can make a difference

in terms of shifting opinion and voting behavior. I want to be clear, I think it's exactly right. I think whether you support Black Lives Matter, don't support Black Lives Matter, it's very, very difficult to argue that it didn't change many, many different institutions and the way that race was discussed by those institutions both externally and maybe even most importantly internally. Like it changed the way I think we talk about race, historical racism, diversity in so many ways.

Not going to do a whole segment on all of that, but I think it's absolutely clear to me that those protests were influential in changing elite discourse. Turning to today's news, trying to keep all of this in mind. The historical success of nonviolent protests, the mixed record of violent protests, which can receive both carrots and sticks from the government, here's a policy to help you, but also from setting the National Guard, violent protests can secure short-term wins, even as they mobilize public opinion against them. I suppose so could non-violent protests.

There's been changes to media since the 1960s. It's from the Kronkite era to the TikTok era, keeping all this in mind, what are you paying attention to with the Gaza protests? It's a little bit like you know how to look at these movements in a way that most people aren't probably looking at their news, watching the news, reading newspapers. What are you paying attention to as you follow this story? So, I mean, it's the nice way you're framing that question is it's sort of how to read a protest. There's a book actually with that title, so I don't want to take credit for that phrase,

but that's, I think, a nice way of setting it up. And I am looking for a few things. So one is, to what degree, you know, like, what are the headlines? What are the images, right? I mean, if we, most of the public isn't paying attention to these things. And so you want to imagine, for the casual news consumer, what's the cursory impression they're getting, right? Like, what's the, again, what's just the kind of snapshot? What's the soundbite? You also, I mean, in the era of social media, we might think about, like, how, what are the, what are the clips that are going viral on, you know, TikTok? And so there, the kind of, you know, there's footage, I think it was out of USC this morning when I opened my phone of, like, police and protesters in, you know, just sort of,

Like for a college campus, it seemed quite violent. And that doesn't in and of itself create a frame, but it does, for me, say, okay, this is like, this is clearly escalating in terms of its seriousness and it's likely to get more attention then. Again, the media likes conflict, likes drama. And if there are more images where there's sort of a clear good guy and bad guy, that's, I mean, in some ways, the way I'm reading these is almost like they're small morality tales. And the question is, is there a clear kind of like moral high ground held by one group and, and, you know, kind of bad guy, villain status held by another?

That's, I think, how it's often interpreted. And then I think more substantively, there's a question that is like, you know, where is, I mean, if you're the protesters, you want to, you want the public. I think the heart of it is to pay attention to things like famine in Gaza, right? And so I think there's a challenge to a degree, which is if the protests become about university administrators versus protesters, it in some ways is not quite focusing the lens on a crisis of the conflict between Israel and Hamas or, you know, hostages or whatever other issues you might want, it becomes much more of a domestic kind of culture war issue as opposed to,

hey, there's an international crisis issue. So I think that's one challenge for the protest movement. And at the same time, I think the degree to which we're seeing authority figures engaging in what seemed like fairly heavy-handed tactics, ironically, has a real short-term cost to the protesters, right, people getting expelled from school, you know, suspended. But that, I think, has the potential to build a more sympathetic story in the public eye of like, heavy-handed tactics put the administrations in the kind of, they become the bully and the protesters become the kind of underdog. I take your suggestion as pay attention to what you're paying attention to.

And I was trying to do that bit of reflection as you were talking. And something I always struggle with in stories like this is how to think about. the enormous amount of attention that we pay to elite schools. I mean, we have so much footage and so many images of the Columbia quad. I mean, how many images of that library, how many images of that quad? And we also now have images of USC. Where I guess I'd like you to take this is actually, is this new? Did we always pay this much attention to what was happening on the campuses of the 15 most selective schools in the country, or is there a way in which our fascination with the young elite

is a new development, a new twist on the way that we, quote, read a protest? Yeah. I don't know the history of media coverage of education, but it certainly feels like a – I agree that there seems to be an excess attention to this relatively small number of elite schools, given that the vast, you know, most Americans don't graduate from college and then within those who do, you know, the overwhelming majority are not going to these schools. And so that reflects one other kind of bias in the media, which is an elite bias. And that is, I think, again, something that that's worth

constantly flagging in our kind of media criticism. It's like, well, what's happening at University of Michigan or what's happening at a big state schools around the country? And certainly there are going to be protests there, but it would be useful to have a broader lens. And, you know, at a big state school here at Berkeley, and there is a protest out there and it's gotten some attention. But I agree with you that Colombia is, you know, part of it is also,

it's not even just an elite bias. It's a New York bias. It's like there are a lot of media. New York, and it's like really easy to get up to, you know, upper Manhattan. And so, so yeah, I think that's a real issue. And, you know, just to kind of go back for a second in the historical lens, I mean, there were moments like Kent State where there were students shot by the national, been killed by the National Guard in an otherwise like unremarkable peaceful protest.

And that kind of, you know, so there was, I think more. I mean, that obviously brought national attention to a non-Ivey school. But I think there's definitely room for a broader lens. And also for that matter, the people engaging in the protests are one subset of students. And it would be interesting to hear from a broader range of students about their opinions and attitudes as well. I might be steel manning the case that I actually disagree with. But if protest is programming, and protest is programming to shift elite opinion through the media, and you think, well, where's the media?

Well, it's disproportionately concentrated in Manhattan. Where are the elite? Well, there are people who are disproportionately graduated from the Ivy League. There is a way in which, if there was a kind of national institute for protest movements that was dispatching people to protest in different places, they might come to the conclusion that there's no better place to stage a protest than Columbia University because it is the most elite

university on the island that disproportionately creates elite media. If the final game here is to make elites change their mind, well, that's ground zero. I still think we probably pay too much attention to Colombia, but from the protesters standpoint, it actually, there is a logic

to staging a protest where New York media is already looking. Maybe let's put it that way. Very last question for you is about this summer. A lot of people, I think, are already wondering whether 2024 is going to be a redux of 1968, where the protests, the Democratic National Convention. And more specifically, to your point, the media images of the protests at the Democratic National Convention were seen to sway public opinion. what's one thing we should know about 1968? Like maybe either a myth that needs to be busted

about what actually happened in 1968 or something for Americans to remember about 1968 as so many people are now thinking about this year being history repeating itself. Really important question. For those who may not remember the 1968 Democratic Convention, it is famous for having had a anti-war protest. that was had what was described at the time as a police riot, this really kind of wild crackdown on protesters that was seen as a catastrophe for the Democratic Party.

And so I think there is a genuine concern among a significant chunk of the Democratic elite that like are we going to read. And importantly, it was in Chicago where the this year's Democratic convention is happening again. And so there's a real concern that there may be this kind of repeat of the past. And we have seen across Biden's events over the last few months, consistent disruptions of his speeches and gatherings by anti-war protesters. And so there's reason to think that Chicago 2024 is going to have some echoes of Chicago 1968. That said, I think it's exceedingly unlikely that you have the same level of,

you know again quote unquote police riot um there's just going to be so much more attend i think the police and the democratic party will be much more um attuned to you know again kind of what what narrative are they constructing are they constructing that that almost certainly means that there will be fairly um heavy-handed control tactics but that's like protesters will be you know in a you know some kind of containment area a mile away and um And that's not great for free speech, but it is the kind of thing that the party will have anticipated and the city will have anticipated, I'm guessing. So I would expect that there are efforts by, you know, assuming the war. I mean, the other important detail here is that we're still months away from November, and it's entirely possible that the Israel-Hamas war has wound down considerably, and it's just not as salient an issue.

but if it is salient, there will be protests and there will be real efforts to kind of put this issue on the agenda. Final thing I would say, though, is when I look at public opinion data from that era, and in particular, I look at, did people switch from the Democratic coalition to the Republican coalition? Did they go from supporting LBJ to Nixon? I don't find any effect of the 68 invention on switching. And so some of these events get attention, but it's fleeting, and it doesn't really move the needle on things like voting behavior.

So it's not to say that they're unimportant, but it may be that it's really, it's got to be going back to our discussion of the George Floyd protests. It's got to be a lot. The cumulative effect has to be, there has to be a big dose of protest for it to really punch through. And one event, even if it's catastrophic in some way or another, it may not be enough. Omar Waso, thank you so much. Thank you for having me. Really appreciate the opportunity. Thank you for listening.

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