Demonstration Disillusionment

To be honest, I found yesterday's anti-war demonstration rather depressing.

There was no real or credible leadership there. Hundreds of thousands assemble on the National Mall to express themselves on the most important issue of the day, and who do they get to headline the rally? Sean Penn, Susan Sarandon, Jane Fonda, Tim Robbins. Mere celebrities. Sure, there were a couple of members of Congress on the dais earlier in the day - John Conyers, Maxine Waters, Dennis Kucinich. But there was no one capable of translating the enormous public disaproval of the war or the energy of the thousands present into something that might have any impact on US politics whatsoever.

The lack of leadership is not just a matter of who was there on the dais. It is also a matter of who leads the various contingents within the march, an organizational backbone. Left demonstrations always have a substantial presence of the fringe groups that exist (I think) for no other purpose than to show up at rallies: the Socialist Workers, the "9/11-Was-an-inside-job" conspiracy types, etc. They're there with their flyers, banners, pamphlets, signs, chants. But what is so apparent is the relative lack of similar organizations to represent the thousands of mainstream folks who were there. The mainstream presence is so much less visible in the crowd than those exhibitionist fruitcakes.

Where were the churches, the labor unions, the local Democratic clubs, Americans for Democratic Action? Members of all these groups were obviously there in huge numbers, but they weren't well-organized or led. There were a few banners, a handful of actual organized mainstream groups, of course. But so little leadership, so little organizational structure, so few institutions represented.

In the end, this is the reason why demonstrations, no matter how impressively large, don't matter. But it is also the reason why the left as a whole is so irrelevant in shaping mainstream discourse and politics in the US. It's why Congress remains so pitifully afraid of confronting a president with 30% approval ratings. It's why the Sunday shows almost never book anyone who opposed the Iraq war from the start. The American left is just a big mob of individuals unhappy with their government. Its lack of leadership and organizational structure make it so, so much less than the sum of its parts.