Fareed Zakaria on Grassroots Democracy
From his 10/16/22 CNN GPS program:
And now for the last look. The protests raging in Iran have been deeply inspiring, sparked by women demonstrating against the repression of a brutal regime, that has made control over women and their bodies a central tenant of its rule. And as the "New York Times" notes, the protests have now spread to include oil workers who have taken to the streets shouting slogans like "death to the dictator."
This is powerful stuff. But are the regime's days numbered? In a fascinating piece in "The New York Times," Max Fisher notes two puzzling trends. All over the world we are seeing an astonishing rise in protests. But this rise in frequency does not appear to correlate to a rise in efficacy. In fact, quite the opposite.
Mass protests are now more likely to fail than at any point in the past century. This finding comes from a group of Harvard scholars who maintain a data set of protests that have either sought to change a regime or to gain territorial independence between 1900 and 2021. That data shows that the number of such nonviolent protests have grown dramatically in the past 20 years.
Many of these demonstrations were remarkable. The Arab Spring, for example, or the recent protest against Belarus' brutal dictator Alexander Lukashenko. But it doesn't follow that these demonstrations were all successful.
The Harvard statistics show that of those protests initiated in the 1990s, 64 percent succeeded. Of the protests initiated between 2010 and 2019, just 42 percent succeeded. And of the protests that began in 2020 and '21, just eight percent succeeded in their aims, though that data is, of course, partial.
What is behind this striking drop? Perhaps the most illuminating place to look is the rise of social media. It's easier than ever to watch an explosion of anger. Just go online. But as Fisher writes, while it's become easier to organize discontent on social media, the traditional activist organizing that has historically led to change has weakened everywhere.
The truth is, as he notes, that street protests are just one piece of a multi-prong strategy required to affect change. The others involve forging alliances with other groups with overlapping aims and meeting and pressuring political elites.
The scholar Samuel Huntington pointed out that the key to democratic change was to induce cracks within the ruling elite. Achieving regime change or significant democratic reform needs more than just likes on Facebook or even bodies on the street. It needs effective organization and sustained strategizing.
Historically, major successful protest movements came with an almost military level of organization and hierarchy. Take one surprising example, the civil rights movement of the 1950s and '60s. As Malcolm Gladwell explained in 2010, that inspiring movement was not some spontaneous call for justice but rather "a challenge to the establishment mounted with precision and discipline."
Central to its success was the Black church, which Gladwell notes had a very hierarchical structure. It organize standing committees and other groups that ultimately reported to a central authority, the minister. Hierarchy, not decentralized democracy, Gladwell wrote, is what is required to effect systemic change.
Look at the Montgomery bus boycott of the 1950s. When Rosa Parks was arrested after she famously refused to go to the back of the bus, civil rights organizations and Black churches publicized a boycott to be held on December 5, 1955. About 40,000 people in Montgomery refused to take the bus that day. This protest lasted for over a year.
A young charismatic pastor named Martin Luther King, Jr. emerged as its leader. To encourage sustained participation, the boycott's organizers had local Black churches work on keeping up morale.
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Organizers also arranged a free carpool service. Black cab drivers were compelled to charge Black passengers just 10 cents for a ride, the local bus fare. Eventually the Montgomery bus boycott led to the Supreme Court's 1956 decision that bus segregation was illegal.
In a broader sense, the passage of the Voting Rights Act never would have happened without the years of back room meetings between Martin Luther King, Jr. and Lyndon B. Johnson. The data from Harvard is concerning not least because it marks a new reality as one of the scholars who maintains the database writes in a recent journal article, nonviolent protests now no longer has a statistically significant advantage over armed insurrection in terms of achieving systemic change in a country.
Now let me be clear, that does not tell us much about Iran. Individual countries can always be exceptions to a trend. But the trend is a troubling one.