A Protest That Kinda Wasn’t
If the first two weeks of January are any indication, the United States is in for a helluva lot more protests and rallies. In fact, unless the current regime in the White House and their cronies turn over a small forest of new leaves real soon, the price of poster board futures is going to shoot sky high. From a journalistic standpoint, a whole new genre of criticism may be called for — that of the protest critic. In fact, I’ll inaugurate that innovation right now.
The January 11 stand-out to denounce the U.S. invasion of Venezuela in Pittsfield, Mass. rates at maybe two out of five picket signs. The event kicked off at 1:15 p.m. (Why on the quarter hour? Who does that?) on a raw Sunday afternoon that delivered winds increasingly cutting as the hour wore on. I arrived more than half an hour early, fearful that I might not find a nearby parking spot. I needn’t have worried. At 12:45 p.m., I was beginning to worry I’d gotten the date or location wrong.
Eventually, people began trickling into the park with their signs. All in all, it was a very low-energy affair. An introductory speech or two that touched only glancingly on the original inspiration for the stand-out. Some chants that failed to sweep the crowd up into righteous, raucous indignation in unison. And then, after an awkward scheduling disagreement caught on a hot mic, some musicians bleated a few senescent protest songs to which few people paid attention.
The two picket signs I am able to award the dissent event were due to an eloquent and fiery speech given by community organizer Fernando León, the creativity in some of the signage, and a small number of people I spoke with who clearly had been educating themselves outside of the tepid, toothless corporate reporting of MSNow and NPR.
Look, is there value to over two hundred souls showing up on their day off to take a stand? Absolutely. As cars drove around the circle, a steady honking racket reinforced that no shortage of Berkshire, or at least Pittsfield, residents share the outrage caused by this imperialist cancer that used to be our country. That sort of public support for the opposition is energizing.
This wasn’t exactly a bad protest — it was a safe protest.
I do kinda wish that I’d showed up with a backpack full of Venezuelan flags instead of recording equipment, though — I’d have made a killing, I didn’t see a single one.
Unfortunately, my criticism goes deeper than the cosmetic deficiencies I’ve listed so far. And it tracks with my concern that, no, these types of events are absolutely not going to be enough to pull this country back from the brink of full-blown fascism and the climate, social, and economic collapse on a swiftly approaching horizon. It’s taken me a few days to hammer out exactly what fuels the sense of dread I’ve been feeling since driving away from Pittsfield that afternoon. I’ve pinned it down now, with some timely help from a guest on my favorite podcast.
There’s a term political theorists use for this phenomenon: the compatible Left. It describes a layer of organizations and activists who oppose the most grotesque excesses of the Right while remaining fully compatible with the political and economic order that produces them. Their dissent is genuine, but it is also safe — designed to register protest without ever destabilizing the machinery of power.
Not only are standouts like this past weekend’s unlikely to have meaningful impact, they risk eviscerating any actual chance the nation has for enacting the systemic changes required to prevent our descent into totalitarianism because the goal such events serve is the preservation of the corporate state.
Were it not so, the demographics of the crowd would have looked much different. In walking around interviewing attendees, I immediately had difficulty locating young people to talk to. I peg the average age at 60 years old. I spoke to a number of octogenarians, God bless them, who recalled protesting in the ‘60s and ‘70s. Wouldn’t you think, given that theirs is the destiny on the chopping block, the millennials and Gen Z would be out there roaring in defiance of this rogue administration? So where were they? I don’t believe for a second that people under 30 in the Berkshires just aren’t paying attention to the news or that they can’t be bothered to throw on a coat and drive on down to the county seat.
Did the organizers do any outreach to youth? Beyond Facebook? Beyond the newsletters that go out to the middle-aged and older audiences that make up the organizations already? To harness the energies of the twenty– and thirty somethings who will be most impacted by the consequences of U.S. hegemony for decades to come, current capital-R Resistance leadership must identify and nurture younger leaders and push them into the spotlight at these events. Not to get too Logan’s Run here (look, I’m dating myself!), but any social change organization that can’t manage to attract an age-range that has historically been out in the streets needs to interrogate its relevance.
I saw vanishingly few people of color at this event. I’d ask you to mentally copy/paste all of my points about the lack of young people. The necessary recruitment efforts that would have changed the racial and ethnic makeup at the stand-out should have been chugging along during Trump’s first term. Unfortunately, no serious effort to alter the color bars was performed. I don’t believe that the Whiteness is necessarily intentional, but I also don’t believe that it is accidental. It’s a question of where organizational leadership is willing to direct their resources and intentions. Let’s face it, a mutual lack of trust and comfort exists between the dominant White population in the Berkshires and everybody else. You can’t just send out an invite and expect people of color to just show up. You need to foster relationships with communities of color and their own organizations based on a willingness not to impart White wisdom, but to listen to the concerns and lived experience of people for whom ox tails, arroz con pollo, and falafel aren’t just specialty exotic treats indulged in on a Saturday night out.
The last underrepresented group is harder to pin down — the working class. Exactly who is working class is amorphous, I get it. A public school teacher might fall squarely in the definition. So might an associate artistic director of a theatre company who is sorely underpaid with crappy benefits. But that’s not quite who I’m talking about. I’m talking about welders and waitresses. Nursing assistants and landscapers. I did not ask the attendees I approached what they did for a living, which I would do at a future event. Some folks did give off a work-by-the-sweat-of their-brow vibe, I will attest, but the majority of the people I interviewed were clearly highly educated, and radiated distinctly Professional Managerial Class energy.
Again, what were the outreach efforts? Realizing that the proletariat has been captured by MAGA brainwashing, I still believe greater representation of the bottom rungs of the economic ladder could have been possible. Did any of the organizers reach out to workers’ groups such as the Western Mass Area Labor Federation? Perhaps such efforts were made, but I didn’t see any labor buttons or signs, and no one from labor was at the mic from what I saw. Fostering a relationship with unions seems like a natural method of bulking up the numbers at any rally. And I’d point out that reaching out and pulling in people of color would have increased the representation of the working class.
So, what’s the explanation for the presence of such a largely homogenous crowd? I can only point to the organizations actually sponsored the stand-out: The Berkshires Democratic Brigades, Indivisible Pittsfield, and Greylock Together. These groups are committed to getting rid of Trump — surely a good thing. Unfortunately, they are also committed to the Vote Blue No Matter Who mentality that gave us four lackluster years of Biden, the genocide in Gaza, and the beginning of soaring inflation in the interim between Trump’s two terms. In its efforts to appeal to the edges of the Republican base, the Democratic Party, with its “third way” strategy, has shifted to the right with every election since 1992. They have pushed the Overton Window so far that they are nearly indistinguishable from conservatives of the 1980s. No longer relying on traditional supporters, the game they play is all about process and crying helplessness and chasing support from billionaires not yet in the GOP court.
I find it appalling that the local Democratic Party and its affiliated organizations are capitalizing on the shock, grief, and anger of their members and followers to advance their agenda of “things will be better if you just vote us back in power.” We’ve seen the evidence to the contrary. We know that torture morphed into drone striking under Obama and heard him say that we should look forward rather than focus on the war crimes of the Bush administration. We saw the financial criminals responsible for the Crash of ’08 get off scott free. We have Biden on video telling a room full of the masters of the universe that “nothing would fundamentally change” during his administration in their ability to get everything they every wanted out of regulatory agencies and the courts.
For a decade, Democrats in Congress have rubber stamped gargantuan funding increases for the military, ICE, and law enforcement in general. Democrats’ most-voiced complaint about the violation of Venezuelan sovereignty and the abduction of its president and first lady was that Trump didn’t go to Congress to ask permission. The undeniable reality is that, despite accurately assessing Trump to be a vile creature who is an embarrassment to our country (and species), the Democratic machine doesn’t want to ally itself with workers or people of color or the youth, because that would insinuate an obligation actually to tend to the misery faced by half the population of the U.S.
The response to calls for universal health care, for example, would not be met with “how are you going to pay for it?” despite approval ratings for the idea soaring to upwards of 80 percent within the party rank and file in the last decade. A vast majority of liberals do want nice things, and they’re even okay if the unwashed masses get access, but not if that access could potentially threaten their own comfort or socioeconomic status.
I’ll let Professor Gabriel Rockhill of Villanova sum it up. He was a guest on the most recent episode of Bad Faith podcast with Briahna Joy Gray. The episode is a bonus episode for supporters, and I’ve asked her to “unlock” the program, due to its crazy deep dive into how the “compatible Left” is suppressing the efforts of an actual Left movement to emerge. He explains:
…many in the middle layer who are on the left, and this brings us back to some of your references, like to the work of Adolph Reed Jr., who I think is an incredible and important figure, is that some of that middle layer will pose as leftist while actually just wanting to maintain their status as superior to the broader working class. And that’s the segment of the middle class that is open to, and has been to, at least some extent, bought off by the capitalist ruling class.
And what they want to do is appear as leftists without actually being dedicated to a serious system change. You know, there are these compatible leftists who want the symbolic credibility of appearing on the left, while materially and economically, they want to still be above the working class. They’re actually fearful of being driven down into the working class.
So that middle layer is historically, it’s very unstable, right? It can be perfectly aligned on the ruling class and work for the American Enterprise Institute or other such organizations. It can also pose as leftist without actually wanting a system change because it might mean a change in their, the quality of their own life.
And I think that’s where we are in a place like the Berkshires, where public dissent is visibly in stark contrast to what you see in places like New York, Chicago, or Los Angeles. The argument can be made that all three of those cities are radically more diverse than the Berkshires, but I think that misses the point. People of color, the poor, the young show up at rockin’ protest actions because they feel like they belong, like they have ownership. They don’t have to be invited because they’re already incorporated within the broader cohort of opposition. And these places are, no doubt, exceptional in that regard. The threat to any substantive change in the trajectory of political reform is the national milquetoast reaction to any and all of recent domestic and international atrocities, the dangerous lack of pushback from the Democratic Party.
Pick your catastrophe: climate change, expanding violent conflict across the globe (financed and armed by the U.S. in so many cases), the unchecked rise of fascism here at home. Where the hell is any kind of robust response from Democratic leadership? If one believes that 2026 is rife with emergencies that are civilizational and existential in nature, shouldn’t we adopt a five-alarm fire posture as a people? Deciding that the goal is just to try to vote out a set of Republican grifters in favor of a Democratic set of grifters is only going to waste what precious time we have to reverse course on any number of fronts.
I’ve already written pretty extensively about the situation in Venezuela, so I’m not going to rehash my thoughts here. I will bring it back, though, to the muted rally in Pittsfield. People were absolutely correct in showing up on a Winter’s day to make their voices heard. The United States invading one of our neighbors, saying that we’re going to “run the country,” and take their oil should be interpreted, not as a sign that a pig sits in the Oval Office who does bad things (which he is, and which he does), but that this action is a blaring siren and strobe light alerting the people of the entire planet that we have reached the end game.
In his most recent piece, “The Machinery of Terror,” Pulitzer Prize-winner journalist, Christopher Hedges, warns:
The Trump administration is consolidating the familiar machinery of terror of all authoritarian states. We must resist now. If we wait, it will be too late…
Authoritarian states are constructed incrementally. No dictatorship advertises its plan to extinguish civil liberties. It pays lip service to liberty and justice as it dismantles the institutions and laws that make liberty and justice possible. Opponents of the regime, including those within the establishment, make sporadic attempts to resist. They throw up temporary roadblocks, but they are soon purged.
We are not simply going to vote our way out of this, either in the mid-term elections this year (if they are allowed to proceed) or in 2028. And we are doomed if we do not rapidly expand the base of opposition to fascism to embrace people with whom we have only tenuous fraternity. The largely White, affluent, well-educated liberal class in places like the Berkshires will be crushed as surely as the working poly-ethnic poor if we don’t “Get it Together Now,” to quote a senescent anthem of another era of darkness.
