Protest Porn
The pleasure-seeking behind today’s righteous causes
A few days after the November 2016 elections, I sat down to write out my feelings, which consisted mainly of fear and loathing. The president-elect, I intoned, was a dangerous lunatic, one likely to recall the ghosts of Fuehrers past. His election meant the death of America, of democracy itself, and maybe even scores of Americans. “Assume the worst is imminent,” I advised. Celebrities I’d admired my entire life praised the piece on Twitter. NPR came calling. Seven years later, my cri de coeur remains one of Tablet’s most widely read articles.As a piece of writing, it was moving, forceful, and … entirely wrong.
You can find much to dislike about Trump—his policies, his personality, and an assortment of other failings—and, over the next four years, I did just that, often and with gusto. But my piece remains an embarrassment, more hysterical ululation than an attempt at the kind of useful or correct analysis that readers deserve. Reading it today, I realize that, for a brief moment there, I lost my goddamned mind.
So, what happened? It’s important for all of us, but particularly for those of us who make a living asking others for their trust, to give an honest accounting of our mistakes, so here’s a very brief one of mine. Trump’s ascendance was a time of uncertainty, and I felt scared. The language of moral absolutes offered some solace; so did the company of so many others who treated me to encomia like “morally courageous” or “a fierce and clear-eyed defender of democracy,” and with whom I relished text threads in which we shared articles and tweets and posts that enabled us to soak together in a pool of ever-expanding righteous fury.
The resistance offered purpose and community, and something else too: It offered the pleasure of letting yourself get caught up in something. The Women’s March, BLM, Russiagate—they all seemed to offer, in the moment, the irresistible possibility of coming-together-ness to promote or defend justice. And in every single one of these cases, the core leadership or premise which we held as solid was later proven wrong, or worse.
And now, the same fever is taking over Israel. Last month, I walked around Tel Aviv as hundreds of thousands of Israelis began to take to the streets, again for a righteous purpose: They’re opposed, they said, to the government’s proposed judicial reform, which they worry will weaken the checks and balances needed for democracy to survive. Sounds great! Until and unless, that is, you welcome in reality—at which point you have to reckon with the fact that even some of the protest’s leaders admit that the reform was drafted in response to the very real problem of judicial overreach; that some of the reform’s most maligned clauses are already in effect as legal precedents passed long before Bibi Netanyahu came to power; that, to date, no opposition leader had drafted anything resembling a viable and serious alternative; that all opposition leaders have thus far rejected the government’s offers to meet and negotiate a compromise; and that the most stirring battle cry you hear in these mass protests—Israel needs a constitution now!—has been calmly and seriously debated by scholars for, oh, 75 years with neither political pressures nor any viable resolution.
None of this is to say that the folks on the march—my mother, by the way, among them—aren’t earnest, or patriotic, or truly concerned citizens. And none of this is to say that they haven’t legitimate claims; I’m a staunch supporter of the reforms, and even I would love to discuss the possibility of adding a few meaningful safeguards to the bills currently on the table. It’s to say, instead, that whatever else is going on in Israel, it’s not an emergency that just burst forth out of nowhere, suddenly flinging the country to the precipice of disaster unless action is immediately taken.
As I tried to understand this better, I zoomed out and saw something unexpected: more protests. Actually, many more. This week alone, there are emotional marches in Australia (gay rights), New Zealand (climate change), Buenos Aires (farmers), France (against the plan to raise the retirement age). Oh, and one more: “Across England and Wales, a handful of schools have been hit by protests against rules such as banning trips to the toilet during lessons or regulations against rolled up skirts,” The Guardian reported this week. “Schools admit they are extremely worried about the copycat protests that have erupted in the last two weeks, typically sparked by videos shared on TikTok with many thousands of views. But what has shocked many leaders most is the number of parents on social media applauding pupils taking part … by openly questioning the fairness of school rules and the authority of teachers.”
Something is definitely wrong here, but it’s not the Israeli judiciary, or pension plans, or teachers infringing on the human rights of students by restricting toilet use during lessons. If you take a sober look at these gatherings, you’ll see that they’re all about the same thing—which is not what any of them individually claim to be about. Instead, they’re being driven by a global drought in basic human connection, leading to too many people seeking a hit of pure purpose and belonging, and a fully automated network to activate it all.
How did we get here? A very crude but somewhat useful explanation goes something like this: Human beings have hearts and minds and souls, which is why, unlike, say, sparrows or sharks or mules, they must be convinced that their lives have some higher purpose. Without this conviction, our brains, masterful probability machines that they are, go crazy by asking themselves too many questions they simply cannot answer and registering too many phenomena they simply cannot explain. For most of the species’ run, the solution to the challenge above was simple: Trust in God, or gods, or spirits, or whatever you’d like to imagine is the unseen heavenly force that animates the world. This worked reasonably well for millennia, give or take a crusade or two, but when the excesses of the organizing principle we call religion got too pricey, we ushered in the Enlightenment to curb faith’s worst impulses.
Naturally, this produced some unforeseen consequences, like new ideologies that replaced the belief in divine forces with a belief in social ones without losing any of the zeal or the messianic fervor. If you’re wondering how well this replacement worked, see under: Stalin, Josef. Finally, for two or three decades now, we’ve seen the rise of a new phenomenon, brought about by the ascendance of new media and new socioeconomic arrangements: These days, we’re all more or less alone, communicating via machines. More and more of us are unmarried. Fewer and fewer of us go to church, synagogue, or mosque. More and more of us don’t have kids. Fewer and fewer of us feel like we truly belong to anything—family, city, nation, you name it.
Where, then, might we find meaning? The obvious and immediate answer is in the institutions that govern society, which explains the rise of a class of people who insist that their academic degrees confer upon them the sort of expertise that mere mortals ought never to question, and also explains why these experts are so keen on dismissing dissent and so reluctant to admit it when they get something spectacularly wrong.
Humans, however, require not only meaning but also companionship, another privilege the old structures of religion and nation used to offer gratis before they were deemed too fraught to embrace. I spent a little time with the protesters in Tel Aviv last month, and what struck me most weren’t the speeches or the signs or the other declarations of purpose—those were often divergent and inchoate, bringing up a wide array of causes, from the occupation to women’s rights to freedom of religion—but the small sociology of a mass movement. The friends who now meet every Saturday night at 7 by their favorite ice cream shop and march together to the protest. The families that snap selfies at the march and post them to their WhatsApp group. The clusters of people you see everywhere, talking and smiling, relieved to be together. There’s something beautiful about observing this human closeness, and something heartbreaking, too, because it shouldn’t be this precious or this rare, and it shouldn’t take some hyperventilating and largely imagined danger to bring us together like this.
Where else, though, can we find this Sturm und Drang? We are all socially distancing, which remains, even now that the worst strictures of the COVID-19 regime have been proven to be yet another fact-free tremor, the perfect coinage for our age. We text those we had once called, Zoom with those we had once hugged, stream the films we had once rushed to watch in a room full of strangers. It’s all so awful and so lonely and so anathema to anything and everything human that it doesn’t take much of a premise to get us to put on our coats and take to the streets, reasons be damned.
This onanistic form of self-gratification—that marchers hop from cause to unrelated cause is important to note here—delivers the sort of pleasure many of us get from our other great purveyor of unencumbered gratification: pornography.
Making love to another human being is hard. It demands paying attention, showing empathy, negotiating desires, displaying vulnerability. Porn delivers climax without complication, and though you may feel dirty, empty, and gross moments after achieving satisfaction, you’re free to peruse it again whenever you’d like. If democracy is a sublimated exercise in lovemaking, a mass protest is political smut: quick, easy, euphoric, and absolutely sterile.
Or maybe not so sterile after all: Scratch the surface of virtually every mass march for democracy worldwide, and you’ll find foreign money and influence designed to turn the professional class against the government. Among the most prominent organizers of the current protests in Israel, for example, is Omdim Be’Yachad (Standing Together), a radical left NGO that receives a full third of its funding—according to Guidestar, an official tracker of Israeli nonprofit financing—from foreign sources, including the far-left German Rosa Luxemburg Foundation, which is named after the famed slain communist and which funded, among other things, a 2014 conference at Birzeit University which barred Israeli scholars from participating.
Another main organizer is the anodyne-named Association for Civil Rights, which receives two-thirds of its budget from foreign bodies, like the European Union and the Norwegian government. And as Lee Smith recently reported in Tablet, the Movement for Quality Government in Israel, yet another key organizer, is supported by the U.S. State Department. You’re free to dismiss all of the above as simply part of the complex matrix of swaying hearts and minds in Western democracies. Or you connect the dots and see that paying for protests overseas is a cost-efficient and effective way for wealthy countries to secure their interests and leverage their influence. Why, after all, lock horns with a democratically elected government with an agenda of its own when you can help the mighty opposition declare it illegitimate and enjoy triple the inroads at a fraction of the price?
Not that my mother and her fellow marchers see any of that, or care. They, too, give plenty of money to support their cause. And no matter how many balance sheets and reports you show them, they dismiss the fact of foreign funding as a vile conspiracy theory designed to discredit them as puppets. But two things can be true at the same time, and State Department funding doesn’t make the yearning the marchers feel any less real.
Again, I speak from experience. I, too, marched once, not too long ago. I, too, crackled with the heat of an unquestionable cause. I, too, felt relieved to be supported by so many other brothers and sisters in arms. What awaited on the other side of perception wasn’t nearly as comforting. More often than not, it took a lot of work to figure out the facts. One of the things that is most frustrating right now is seeing friends—friends who got it wrong with the Women’s March and later regretted it, got it wrong with Russiagate and later regretted it, got it wrong with BLM and later regretted it—fall right back into the same hole, once again making the same argument about how this time, this time the protest is about something truly right and righteous, and once again condescending to and berating everyone who questions their judgment as dangerous troglodytes who don’t care about the future of Justice™ and Democracy™. And just like with all of those other events, they will be shocked and outraged when their beloved protests make nothing but huge messes, sometimes hurting people and organizations and even ideas that they hold dear. It’s like dealing with a society full of heroin addicts.
Marching and shouting and making demands feel so good in the moment, but, in the long run, remaining calm and refusing to let your mind be infected by a contagion is healthier, personally and collectively, intellectually and emotionally alike. Desperate times call not for desperate measures but for adults who can still reason, even if that means reasoning alone.
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