The Party's Over

Conor Friedersdorf and I share an aversion to protests, on the grounds that they rarely work.  But he adds:  "If you're going to have a big protest -- or even a mid-sized family reunion -- you can't help it that some loonies are gonna show up. This is part of why I am averse to big protests, but it's also why no one should judge the average protester by the looniest signs that surrounded them."

To me, this is why protests are a bad idea.  You will always be judged by your looniest adherents, in part because badly hand-lettered signs with ho-hum slogans at a PTA level of anger are just not very photogenic.  Unless you can police your movement as effectively as, say, the Civil Rights marchers did, you will likely end up giving your political enemies ammunition.  And of course, the Civil Rights movement was more easily able to present a united front because people who acted anything but saintly in their Sunday best were very likely to be beaten by the actual police.

That said, I confess I am surprised--though I probably shouldn't be--to see a respected anti-war libertarian site, whose proprietor got quite testy when people lumped him in with the ANSWER goons and the puppeteers, embracing the notion that the worst signs you can photograph from an event represent the collective point-of-view of everyone who attended the protest.  One knows this will happen, which is why, as I say, protests are generally a bad idea.  But one doesn't expect this sort of gross generalization from every quarter.

On a side note, I find the question of how many people attended quite interesting.  I don't see how you can make these photos jibe with the low-tens-of-thousands estimates left-wing blogs are pushing.  I also don't know how anyone ever thought millions were possible, when the inauguration involved months of planning and millions of dollars to pack people onto the mall like sardines.  But what I really don't understand is how a New York Times headline writer got to "thousands", which is the size of the crowd at a decent high school football game.  Crowd estimates are an uncertain science, and the police have stopped doing them precisely because everyone gets so emotionally involved in distorting them.  But this is perhaps the most dramatic example of this I've seen.