Robin:

Hello, Agnes!

Agnes:

Hey, Robin!

Robin:

What's on your mind today?

Agnes:

I thought we could talk about protest. What is protest? And I mean, I'm particularly interested in the ways in which universities naturally become sites of protest. Why is that? And sort of what is the ethos of protest? So one thing I read today that I thought was interesting was someone saying protest is essentially disruptive. This is someone who is on the side of, you know, protesters on my campus. So that this was not being put forward as a criticism of the protest, that it's essentially disruptive. And so that was a question I had for myself. Why would it be disrupted?

Robin:

So a traditional literature in economics or those areas, close areas, focuses on it as a signaling story. That is, if you think of different kinds of political communication, If you just send a letter to the editor or vote in some poll, it doesn't have as high a cost. And so a story is that protest is a way to show you're willing to take on a higher cost. You spend more time out in the street or travel to a place that would be awkward or yell a lot or something like that. And that does make some sense, but I think you're pointing out that, and many people have, that mere cost isn't enough to explain the particular forms of protest. They also apparently want to impose costs on other people, which you might think is not very social. I mean, if you want to tell me your point of view, I might be willing to listen, but if you're going to go out of their way and bother me and cause me trouble, then I might not be so inclined to listen to your position.

Agnes:

Right, so there's something adversarial about protest that in some way the protesters expect that at least a large fraction of their audience doesn't want to accept their message and doesn't want to hear their message maybe. And that's part of, that's sort of built into the act of protest. And now maybe it's just, there's this element of, there's the status quo and the protesters are trying to, you know, bring about a new status quo or something like that. And so that involves calling assumptions or norms of behavior or whatever into question.

Robin:

Now, when you have a particular law you don't like and you go out and you break that law, I get how that would especially call attention to that law and perhaps people's willingness to enforce it in those cases. So I get why people might break laws in a disruptive way when they are challenging those particular laws. But a lot of these protests are breaking laws and causing disruptions, but the disruptions they're causing aren't challenging the particular law against that disruption. And I can't help but notice that... basically people often invoke the idea of revolutions as a background concept. And then it makes me seem like they're trying to hint that if enough of them, you know, got behind this and were mad enough, they might cause something like a revolution. And we wouldn't like that, would we? So it's kind of an extortion sort of threat hinting at revolution. And I think there's some element to that, although most protests are so far from revolution, it's really hard to believe that we actually take that seriously as somehow a threat of that. But maybe we do.

Agnes:

I mean, I think that that may be right, but if so, I think it's pretty far from the minds of protesters. So my sense is just to put some features of protest on the table. Protesters tend to be idealistic. That is, they espouse idealism in one form or another. You know, maybe the simplest form just being, there tends to be a kind of inference from something bad or unjust is happening to, like, we can do something about it. That's an idealistic form of inference. But then they often, it's idealistic in that, like at least with, you know, the current protest, say on my campus, there's, it's advocacy on behalf of people who are very far away. So it's, there's a sense of like a good or a just world and that even people who are very far away from you matter. The demands of protesters are often impracticable. That goes along with the idealism. I mean, I was just reading about French protests where the demands were things like the end of capitalism and the restructuring of society. But things like the versus for my campus thing, like getting rid of the university police and stopping all construction on the south side, these really big demands that are not very practical.

Robin:

Everything you've listed so far does gesture at revolution. Yeah.

Agnes:

So let me let me list a few more things. So I think that there is a sense in which the protesters are not very inclined to negotiate. They do things that would generate hostility between themselves and the administration like they'll you know, insult the president of the university using graffiti or something, but that's the person they have to negotiate with, right? So they're not putting themselves in a good negotiating position, which suggests that they're not inclined to negotiate. That supports your revolution theory. So they sort of feel free to generate hostility and a kind of adversarial stance. But then here's the next bit. I mean, There's also purchase as a form of political activity in which you're fundamentally trying to get someone else to do something, right? So the idea is there's someone out there and you want to affect their behavior. And so you're going to do a bunch of stuff and then that's going to cause them to behave in some way, which is different from if you were yourself going to do that. Okay. So I think that the sort of puzzle that this raises for me is that it's a weird combination of sort of leisureliness and unleisureliness. That is, it's a kind of leisurely form of politics, a form of politics that is unconstrained. by a lot of what are usually the constraints of politics when you have to like affect changes on your own to the world around you, usually to solve problems that you actually have. And where you would be very cognizant of what the limits are for the possibilities of achieving those forms of change. And that that leisureliness might be connected to its appearing on campuses. which are, I think, spaces that are in some ways dedicated to leisure. By leisure here, I want to say I don't mean rest. Oh, I mean neither work nor rest, but a third thing. So anyway, these are like, and I guess I think that the idea of revolution is supposed to loom in the background. Maybe that's right. But I think that's where it's supposed to stay, is looming in the background. There's something quite practical and work-like about a revolution. I think the thought here is really supposed to be that the end result would be somebody else doing something, which is not quite like a revolution.

Robin:

So I think we can, like right from the start, say that, you know, one set of effects of the protesters will just be on themselves. Another set of protesters will just be direct effects, will be directly on, say, the administration they are talking to and about. And a third set of effects will be on some audience who they're trying to call to attention to it. It does seem like that third one is more important than the first two. That is, the first two are in the service of the third one. That is, if the university administration is going to respond, it's going to be because of that audience, not because directly what the protesters did. The university is mainly concerned about that audience and how they'll respond, not so concerned more directly about what the protesters might do, except through how the audience might react to it. And so both of them are playing to this audience then, and the protesters get to take the initiative with the audience. And then we might ask, well, what's the message that the protesters are trying to get to the audience? And why do they think this message will induce this audience to pressure the administration to do something in their favor? because that has actually happened in the past. We might admit, like we could say that the protests in the 60s not only got some policies happening, but probably got, say, Nixon to pull out of China before he otherwise might. So concrete policy outcomes did result. And we might ask, well, how did that happen exactly? Is it that the public opinion moved against Vietnam because of the protesters, or were the audiences more concerned about what the protesters might do if we didn't get out of Vietnam? It was more of an extortion threat, or what exactly were people thinking would happen if they did or didn't placate the protesters?

Agnes:

Yeah. I mean, I guess I think... Maybe a thing I feel I've missed in my list of properties of protest, well, the thing I said at first, that they're idealistic, that they really care about the issue that they're protesting about. It's really important to them. It's sort of more important to them than anything else. And I think that what they want to do in the audience Is infect that audience with that same Karen so they think there's something terrible happening and they're sort of They wanna be responding to that and doing something about it, but in ways that are not necessarily gonna be immediately constrained by the question, what can I do? What can I do to end this bad thing from happening? So it's a kind of idealistic response to the injustice. And so it's like, fully allowing the wrongness of the injustice to kind of saturate your emotional response to it outside of other sorts of concern. And then, yes, I think that's what they want for the audience as well. And then the question is, is that the disruption? Like, is the disruption kind of getting the audience to feel the way you do when they don't already, and thus they would experience it as a disruption, or is it more than that?

Robin:

So it sounds, again, you know, the first place that the political science literature starts with is costly signals. So the idea would be, well, some people care to some degree, but the audience doesn't really know who cares how much. And then you do some very costly things, and you point out how much it's aligned with this thing you care about, that people might come to actually believe that you care about it a lot. And that could be on the... You could do people sit in a tree for a long time or light themselves on fire or cut themselves or... I mean, there's things people have done in history that are just imposing direct costs on themselves to show how much they care about something. But the interesting thing here is there is some of that, but there's also imposing costs on other people. trying to invoke revolution in some sense, identify laws, to induce confrontation with police. Those are not just ways of having costs. Those are ways of indicating the kind of feelings they have and the kind of attitude they have about this moral outrage they have. And it seems to be basically saying, we're so morally outraged, we're willing to break laws. we're willing to go the revolution direction because we're so outraged. And that's a key message trying to get across. And they'd like you to share that with them. But it's not just, I care a lot about this, which cutting yourself might do or cutting off your hair. You know, there's lots of things people have done to hurt themselves to show how much they care about something. And these people are hurting themselves to some degree, risking their jobs, being out in uncomfortable weather, things like that. But There's this other element of the fight, they're trying to show that they're fighting, they wanna pick an authority to fight, and it needs to be an authority, not just anybody who objects to their position. So there is some sense in which they're highlighting, we would be willing to fight authorities for this.

Agnes:

Right, so that gets at the element of hostility, and this is like a battle between good and evil.

Robin:

where the evil is represented by local authorities, like university authorities, who they've been fine with all the years before that. I mean, they didn't have that many complaints about university authorities as students. All of a sudden, university authority is only evil because of some indirect connection to some world event.

Agnes:

Right, so there's some way in which the university becomes a proxy for whatever the bad thing is that's being fought, because the university is the authority.

Robin:

Right. That's the key thing. It says that it's that idea that evil in the world is caused by authorities and authorities are all kind of one thing together. And they're going to fight authority as a general thing because this problem elsewhere in the world is caused by authority.

Agnes:

OK, but so what is the what is what is being opposed to authority have to do with protests? That is. Is all protests essentially anti-authoritarian?

Robin:

I wouldn't think so, but I guess maybe a big class of them are. So, you know, maybe there is just a sense of which a whole bunch of these groups are framing the problems of the world as caused by capitalism or, you know, US dominance or things like that. That is, there could be a sense of which they have chosen a particular framing of the problems of the world where it is in fact, in their minds, some large coalition of authorities were behind the problem.

Agnes:

I mean, capitalism is actually a bit hard to square with that, because there's not anyone in charge of the economy. It's not a thing, right?

Robin:

I guess there are very rich people, but- Well, they often think that powerful governments and the rich and the media are in cahoots in not just a simple competitive market way, but they are coordinating to oppress I mean, certainly Israel today, you might say Israel isn't just some country over there doing things, it's in cahoots with powerful Jews in the US and the US government supporting them and powerful capitalist firms profiting from the war and et cetera, right?

Agnes:

Right. We maybe maybe the activity of protests. So like take when your kids are protesting something. Right. So you've told them no dessert for you because you didn't finish your dinner. Happens sometimes in my household and they get very annoyed by it and they in some way protest that. I guess the point there is they wouldn't employ the technique of protest, like storming off to their room or getting angry at you about it or whatever, they wouldn't employ those techniques as opposed to other ones if they thought that it was available to them to just directly get dessert, right? So they think it's up to you whether they get the dessert. Which is largely true when it's your kids. And so maybe protest is already selecting for a field of powerlessness. That is a feeling like we're not the ones in charge, there's another group of people and at some basic level we're asking them for something. But there's a funny situation, which is that we think they're not going to give it to us. So we're asking them for something they don't want to give us. So we somehow have to make them give it to us. But still, we're angry that we even have to ask. We're angry that we're in the position that we're in. The way kids could get angry that, you know, you're in charge of whether or not they get dessert.

Robin:

So to test this theory about bad capitalism, U.S. government thing, if we looked for right-coded protests of people who don't have a problem with the U.S., say, dominance of the world or capitalism, it might help us disentangle things. First thing that came to mind was the January 6th protest, which can very much be seen and has been seen in revolutionary terms. They were definitely hinting at revolution, and people have accused them of actually trying to do a revolution. So can we think of other right-coded protests?

Agnes:

But I guess I don't see that this is a right-left issue. I think the right-coded protests are also protesting against authority.

Robin:

Well, that's what I was hoping. Then we could verify the authority symbol. Right people might protest when the left is in power.

Agnes:

Yeah, yeah, exactly, right.

Robin:

It's always- Like mask mandates, say. Maybe the right would do a protest about mask mandates when the left was imposing them.

Agnes:

Right, right. I mean, I think the question of who's your villain is going to be different, and who do you think of as being in power is going to be different between the right and the left. But, right, okay, so you just wanted to check that it's in fact true that

Robin:

Well, so for example, at one time the right was concerned about images of children or sex or something by Disney, and so they might go protest outside the Disney offices, but they wouldn't necessarily protest the government or something, right? But they're finding this authority to protest who's related to the problem.

Agnes:

Right. Or like anti-abortion protesters.

Robin:

Right.

Agnes:

And yeah, they'll protest the government. I mean, they will protest at abortion clinics, but also government. And. I mean. Yeah, I guess it does seem to me that.

Robin:

So protesting at an abortion clinic isn't so much protesting authorities as sort of calling attention to the thing you think is a problem by standing next to it and complaining or a union protesting. I mean, a union, you know, basically on strike not only goes out and stops working, they stand around the plant and prevent others from coming in and cause a lot of noise, et cetera. So they're trying to call attention to their complaint. and also complain against the authority of the management.

Agnes:

Yeah, good. So attention is a crucial element of protest, it seems to me. Right. And that's getting at the audience, right? So there's the protesters, there's the administration, and then there's the audience. And some of the element of disruption has got to be the sort of grabbing of attention, that is, doing something that in some way forces you to pay attention to them. In general, it's hard to get a lot of people to pay attention to you, and a way to do that is to be disruptive.

Robin:

And it just seems to me clear, but you can challenge me if you want, that a core way to get attention in protests is to get close to or induce violence of some sort, some direct physical harm. You burn down a building, you smash a fence, you get people to hit you with... Police to hit you with clubs, you stand next to people and yell them in a way that might make them afraid you'd hit them. I mean, people are... That's what makes the news, it seems to me, that cameras and the news love these images of people who seem to be close to violence or in some ways are suffering and induced violence.

Agnes:

Yes, but I actually think just like the first method is just literally being loud. So like chanting, hard to turn your, you don't have little flaps to close our ears, right?

Robin:

Right. But you don't have to bring the TV cameras next to people yelling loud if you don't want to. The question is, why would anybody want to watch them yelling loud?

Agnes:

Right, so I guess there are different audiences, right? And there are, like, the people who just live nearby, who are nearby, are gonna have to pay attention if there's loud chanting. But, right, so there's a question, what's going to get the TV cameras to film something? I think passionate expressions of emotion Right. People like to look at those and maybe that's already intimation of violence.

Robin:

There's just blocking traffic. I mean, in San Francisco, they block bridges or things like that. Just preventing other people from doing the usual things will get attention.

Agnes:

Right, so I guess I think if the category is disruption, the disruption of ordinary life, and violence is maybe the most extreme form of disruption, but I think that there's an attempt to you know, stay at the other end of the disruption spectrum, the part where you stop traffic, maybe, or you stop people from getting into a building, so that there's this idea that a certain amount of disruption is permissible, and then it's hard to draw the line how much disruption is permissible, but, you know, once you get to violence, you're gonna get to the impermissible end.

Robin:

So there's the cost that the protesters themselves suffer, and then there's the cost they impose on other people, and then there's maybe the cost they impose on the authorities that they are trying to directly oppose, like occupying their office or something. That's just different than disrupting traffic or something. You're trying specifically to disrupt people you are challenging, so that would be sort of more on brand. But it seems like people don't just want to impose costs on others. They would like the authorities to impose costs on them. They don't want to just impose self-costs on themselves themselves or costs on the audience themselves. They would like to induce the authorities to impose costs on them as ideally violent, because that's the most dramatic news. is where they are the sufferers of the violence induced, you know, that's caused by these authorities they dislike. And that's the way to make them seem, you know, the victims of this moral outrage. And then they stand for these other people far away in the world who are also being, you know, hurt by they say, and that's the connection that's the most symbolic for them, is those people far away are world of suffering and they are right now suffering at the hands of the same authorities who are causing violence to both.

Agnes:

Right. So maybe, yeah, I mean, maybe that's, maybe that's right. Like, certainly that seems sometimes to be true. I think that

Robin:

But it's rare, we'd have to, this story has to come up against the fact that this doesn't happen that often, but.

Agnes:

Like, I think that the. you know, the self-understanding of the protesters on my campus is not that they were trying to induce or taunt the violent activities of the police. And I don't just mean what they say. I mean, they don't think of it that way. Like, so there's this question

Robin:

But they did. If you set up a camp and you insist on keeping it there until the police drag your camp away, you know that that's going to happen. I mean, you are directly setting up that later event.

Agnes:

Well, so this gets to the idealism issue, which I think is, in a way, the really interesting part of protests. Like, people who can make demands that are as impracticable as the ones that many protesters make, I think they're just very capable of setting up the camp and viewing it all idealistically. So I'm really interested in that idealistic mindset because I think that so part of where you know I'm coming at this from is like I feel I don't feel very sure about the free speech defense of protest. That is I think free speech entails some right to protest but I'm not sure how far that right goes given that it's going to interfere with other intellectual activity, say, on campus. But it seems to me that there's something else about protest on campus and why we might think we ought to protect it besides free speech, which is that the fundamental spirit or attitude from which protest springs is a kind of idealism that we're actually trying to foster. And again, we're not going to support every manifestation of it. But actually, I think it's pretty important that we not always interpret it in the most cynical ways possible, right? As like, oh, they're just trying to provoke, you know, violent reactions that they can portray themselves as victims. So that's not totally wrong, but I think, like, it's important that that's really not how they see it. And they see what they're doing is very meaningful. Like, it's very, you know, people report these as some of the like my, you know, I'm just reading reports like my life began when, you know, we set up the barricades. This is from the 60s, not now. So these are, it somehow seems to me to be a very fundamental and profound expression of idealism. One that's a bit alien to me personally, so it's a little hard for me to wrap my head around it, but it may well be that very fundamental and profound expressions of idealism are going to involve engaging in behaviors where, in some sense, the predictable responses to those behaviors are not gonna be predicted by.

Robin:

I mean, I think you're definitely right that there is an element of idealism here and even of the sacred, because, I mean, one of the most dramatic facts about, say, the last 50 years or 70 years is that there was this burst of protests in the 60s, which at the time hurt the left. politically and you've got getting Nixon elected or things like that. But then over the subsequent decades, people have worked somewhat successfully to tell dramatic hero stories of protesters of the 60s, including civil rights protests and anti-war protests, and have made those some of the most iconic hero stories that we have in the last half century. And many people tie their identity even today to their role with respect to those things 50 years ago. It's sort of the truth measure of whether you really committed to these causes, whether you were committed way back then and did the right things. So there's definitely a huge amount of symbolism and and sort of idealism credentials for these things, not just as expressions of idealism, but later on they become almost the purest test of whether you're really committed to these causes is whether you were doing these things.

Agnes:

So I've been reading about it and like the leaders of those movements didn't go on to become people that we've like heard of. Right.

Robin:

But the leaders we do have want to point out their connections to these origins.

Agnes:

Right, but the other thing is you would think that if protests had been so glorified, then there'd be like lots of it. And in fact, I mean, recently there has been, but actually there was just this long period, you know, from like, yeah, like during my time as a Bicycle Team Member, this has not been, or as a student, you know, there's not been much by way of protests. So for something that is so glorious and well-respected, it hasn't actually been happening very much. There was like an era of it, and then even though we glorify that era, we're not engaging in it, which is a bit odd. It's almost like, so in Berkeley, I don't know if you know this, on the Berkeley campus, there's a cafe, it opened while I was there as a grad student, called the Free Speech Movement Cafe. And it's got these like pictures of Mario Savio, and you know, all these things that the administration at the time was incensed about, they're now proudly, they've made a cafe as a monument to this.

Robin:

There was also the divestment protests from the 80s, I guess, which was not just the 60s.

Agnes:

But that's still slightly before my time, yes. I started school in the 90s, so. Right, so still, it's not as though we've kind of had a continuous American tradition.

Robin:

Although it occurs to me like there is this striking analogy with the horrors of war and the idealism stories that we get from war. I mean, many of our grandest idealism stories are also of soldiers in war, even though war is horrible and we'd like to prevent it. And so, you know, there is this question, how much, how much we should accept these connections between where our idealistic stories happen and the events that happen near and whether we want to encourage those or not.

Agnes:

Right, I mean, I guess I think there's just a lot of stories of people who say, yeah, I thought war was great, but then I went to war and it was horrible. Like lots and lots of those stories, that's the dominant story.

Robin:

Right.

Agnes:

And you don't hear that from protesters.

Robin:

But you hear it about the people around the protesters, the people they were, you know, who had to suffer the disruption that they caused.

Agnes:

That may be, but the point is that the idealism I think doesn't really get reversed in the way that it does with war. Like the people who are against it are against it from the start. And I guess we have, there is this sense of like, maybe there's like a consensus of some kind that like protests like tends to be on the, people tend to be on the right side, the protesters tend to be on the right side of history. I hear that phrase a lot.

Robin:

Right. So there's like a- And that's a presumption often with revolution People tend to want to celebrate known revolutions, although I think the historical record isn't so kind to revolutions being overall good. But yes, that's part of why I think why protesters want to evoke the concept of revolution is because of that perception of that they are on average good.

Agnes:

Right. But so maybe it's supposed to be somehow a nonviolent revolution, a nonviolent war. Except they're hinting at violence and often... Yeah, but maybe hinting at violence is part of how you do the nonviolent war. And the fact that you're hinting at it may be something you don't have to notice if you're in a very idealistic frame of mind. So maybe there's this dream of this other way. So there's going through the status quo and making small improvements or whatever, and everybody dreams of revolution on some level. What if we could just make it all way better really fast? Problem is that tends to go super bad and involve tons of violence and then end up worse than we started. But then there's this idea, but what if we could do that, but without any of the really bad parts? That is just by, in some sense, the fact that people have an idea of it's being much better. Like, I can imagine this much better world. Why isn't my, why isn't that enough?

Robin:

So our world is full of people doing positive things that they want to frame as idealistic and helping the world be better. People make art projects, people have discussion groups, they do Unitarian churches, they make gardens, they have parades. There's all these things people do in an idealistic spirit with an idealistic cause. in the name of our best ideals and coming together and getting stuff done. And there's a sense of which it just doesn't grab people as much as going next to and hinting at violence, even if you don't cross the line. Maybe this is a sad fact that all those other things just don't feel as compelling as protest.

Agnes:

I think that it's not because they're hinting at violence. It's because protest is specifically an idealistic response to injustice. So most of those garden fairs and whatever are not

Robin:

And it's a response to injustice that involves directly challenging authority, right?

Agnes:

Well, the question is, I mean, maybe we could start with this. It's an idealistic response to injustice. And then maybe we could derive the other features from that. That is, what is the idealistic response to injustice? Suppose that's all you knew.

Robin:

Well, I mean, but many Unitarian Church discussion groups are all about injustice. Their whole topic of discussion is injustice. So there are a lot of these are many movies made about injustice and celebrated as things calling attention to injustice. So injustice isn't only in protest. Many of these other things also.

Agnes:

So one thing one can do in response to injustice is call attention to it. That's a thing you can do. But calling attention to injustice seems to me to be not the full-blown idealistic response to injustice, because we want to get rid of the injustice.

Robin:

I would say protest moves toward fighting the injustice. I think people use that word in protest, but fighting means you have to actually engage an opponent. So you pick a villain, you engage them into some degree, and you actually have a little bit of a tough with them. There's some contact where sparks or dirt or something happens. Like it's not just calling them the villains, right? Because many of these other forms, calling attention to the Justins, you will point out the villain, name them, but still the protest goes farther than naming them. You're fighting them. And I think the fighting is reified in the actual conflict, the physical conflict. You're occupying their lawn. You're occupying their office, you're getting in their way.

Agnes:

Well, maybe that's fundamentally why protest has to be disruptive, is that it has to be a fight. It's an idealistic fight, and which is going to say it's going to shy away from a battle. So we could think of actual war, actual battle, and then we could think of two things that are sort of versions of it, like sports is a version of a battle. It's like a mock battle and stuff. Some sports, anyway, are a mock battle, like football looks to me like mock battle. And then protest is also a mock battle, but in a different way.

Robin:

And I think that... I mean, there's a third kind of battle, which is just, say, voting. So in a democracy, people often want to fight injustice by recruiting voters to vote in an election sort of on one side. And that, in some sense, is more directly causal. to kick out the bad guys connected with the injustice and put in better people. But somehow that's also not as satisfying as the protest because it's not as physical a fight.

Agnes:

Right. I don't think it's because it's not so physical, I think, or maybe, I mean, maybe this is itself can be explained by that, but I think it's just not as obviously a fight. Like, say, say you have a product that you're working on and your competitor has a product, right? and you wanna beat them, and you want your product to sell more than theirs, that might motivate you in a way that just selling as much of your product as you can isn't gonna motivate you. And you're especially gonna be motivated by framings of the situation that make the battle element show up really clearly. Like if there's like a list of things where it shows your things rising and their things falling or whatever.

Robin:

But all of that's true in an election. It's not, you have the opponent and you have the rivalry trying to get more votes than them.

Agnes:

I think that that's right, and that's why our attention is very much captured by elections, especially insofar as they can be visually framed as like, who's beating who? I think we do care about elections. We are moved by them. There's tons of news coverage of them, and we're moved by them as battles. And so the question is just what other kinds of spaces of battle can be introduced so as to kind of harness our, you know, how compelling we find battles to be.

Robin:

There's many movie scenes where in a room full of people, our hero will stand up and give a speech that is, you know, fighting somebody else in the room. And then typically that other person will just sit there and stand quietly listening to the speech and sheepishly accept the wisdom and glory of our hero. But that's kind of a fight. That is, it's set up as a fight in the sense that they are arguing.

Agnes:

Yeah, good. So I think the fact that protest involves speech is very important. Because I think that it sort of gestures at, once again, idealistically at this idea, maybe the best ideas can win because they're the best ideas. Now, it's gonna try to achieve that in a very distorted way, which is like often just rhetoric and bullying and whatever, right? Right. So certainly by just presenting the best arguments as clearly as possible. But still, I think that the protesters wouldn't want to win by means of physical force. They might want to incite physical force against the South. They would not want to win by means of physical force. They want, in some sense, the ideas to triumph. So there's this idea that there's a battlefield. And the very idea of the right side of history, it's sort of like, our ideas are going to win because they're going to prove right. And so there's this very idealistic thought that the right ideas just have to be the ones that... So that's another element of idealism.

Robin:

So I've been thinking a lot about culture lately. So, you know, basically one of the huge ways our culture changes is by people thinking they're in a fight to change culture and thinking that if their end wins the fight, that will be good for the world and that they are morally good people for pushing for that fight and then they often talk about needing to call attention to their fight and maybe needing to make people take sides. So maybe just calling attention to your point of view doesn't really make people take sides, but a fight does. Like in some ways, if there's a fight that's going to push neutral people to go one side or the other. in a way that otherwise it doesn't. So for example, the Israeli Hamas conflict has been a conflict for decades, but now that there's a fight, a lot more people feel like they need to take a side because they've seen a fight. And maybe that's just a way we react to fights is more feeling that you can't sit on the sidelines and be neutral anymore.

Agnes:

Right, like you could imagine there's like a fight between two people, two individuals, and there's a big crowd around them, and slowly the crowd is getting pulled into the fight.

Robin:

Right.

Agnes:

Where people are, and eventually it's like everyone's on one side or the other, so what are you doing not being on one of the two sides?

Robin:

Right, whereas if they were just arguing, they're not fighting, maybe you wouldn't feel like you needed to take a side in their conflict, where it would be less of a push, Like if it was a mild conflict, if there's, you know, two sandwich shops next to each other competing, you might not think you need to take a side, but if they start yelling at each other outside the store, you might more, and then they start fighting. I mean, now, you know, the more we up the magnitude of the fight, the more you might feel you need to take a side.

Agnes:

I actually, I'm just thinking about this and I'm not sure why. Like, I mean, maybe one thought is if you don't take a side, it's going to be assumed that you're on a side and you'll be attacked by the people on their side anyway or something like that. I'm actually not sure why you have to take a side, even if the fight is spreading through almost everybody. Maybe somehow if you don't take a side, everyone's going to hate you. So in effect, the only way to have any allies at all is to be on one of the two sides.

Robin:

If there is a fight. But if there isn't a fight, people will complain that you didn't take a side. It's just a potential conflict. or it's a very small-scale conflict, but if it becomes a big one, then we expect everybody to take a side in a big conflict, I think.

Agnes:

Right. But often, in order to have a conversation, as happens in our conversations, it didn't happen in this one, but it's like you have to take a side, and in fact, it's not just that you have to take a side, you have to take a side against the one that the other person's taking, otherwise you're not going to have a conversation, right? Right. I just keep meeting with you all the time, we're not going to have a conversation. And so you might think conversation is even more constraining. That is a conversational argument. Ben, my ex-husband, will often just be like, I'll be making dinner or something. He's like, so where do you stand on free will? I'm supposed to take a side. Are you a mind-body dualist or not? Whichever side I take, he's going to take the opposite side. He's forcing me to take a side, in effect.

Robin:

In general, if there's a room full of 10 people and two people largely start to argue, yes, other people will be, you know, if you're going to speak up, you should speak up on one side or the other of this debate. You shouldn't just make an independent third comment. Right.

Agnes:

Right. So so the demand to take a side is it's quite it goes beyond fights to arguments of all kinds. That just seems like a very common thing.

Robin:

Or we see arguments as a week as a different kind of fight.

Agnes:

Sure, but it's sort of like, I guess, once there is a fight, it's like the terms of the encounter have been set. And it's like either you're here or you're here. You could stand outside it. You could just not participate. Then you're irrelevant and no one's gonna listen to you.

Robin:

Or maybe, in general, there's a vast space of possible positions, but once a fight forms, then you have to pick one of those two sides. You don't get to invent a third side, maybe is the rule. But if it was just a conversation among equals, you might be allowed to take a side. If somebody says A, somebody else says B, you might be allowed to just take C until there's a fight between A and B. Once it's a big enough fight, then you're not allowed to say C. You need to pick A or B. And so that's what the protesters are trying to do. They're trying to get you to pick a side. And they think there's a lot of neutral people out there if forced to pick a side would pick their side. But at the moment, they're mostly not wanting to pick a side and not thinking they need to.

Agnes:

And what. What is the motivation of the authority that's being protested in this way, like the administration? That is, what do they want? They just want this all to go away, I guess.

Robin:

Well, you know, basically, first, their authority, they don't want to lose their authority. So they want to seem to maintain their authority and maintain their position as an authority. you know, protecting wide interests, not letting small group of interests overrun all everybody else's interests. And, you know, with respect to, say, a larger group of parents at a university, they want to seem to be the same sort of neutral, fair-minded people, you know, weighing the different interests and keeping a neutral place where different people can discuss things together, etc. Right. And but then they're also going to mean if there are some people who don't like the protesters, which is what's happening now, they're going to exert pressure on the administration to do more. And, you know, and they are responsible for, say, like some recent protests that prevented graduation ceremonies from happening. You might think the university, you know, they thought they wanted to have a graduation ceremony. They thought that was a good thing to do. So you might think they would want to have those and try to do things to make them happen, because that's the sort of thing their students and parents, donors, et cetera, et cetera, want to have happen. And it bonds people together. Right.

Agnes:

So that just goes to the they want this to go away because it's a disruption.

Robin:

Right.

Agnes:

They don't want to have disruptions.

Robin:

But they certainly don't want to lean into sort of the identity of, yeah, we're the people who invested in the terrible people in the world that you are opposing. Right. I mean, I want to embrace that because that's what the protesters are trying to create, that identity. You're their authorities doing bad things. You're an authority. You're the same authority as them. You're supporting them. That's why you're bad. And they clearly don't want to just accept that. Typically, at least.

Agnes:

Right, so let's say the protesters are idealists in some way, and the administration is not going to be idealist in those same ways, but they also don't want to be cast in the role of the villain. They can't just kind of come over to the protesters and be like, OK, you know, you have a good vision of the world. Let's do your thing. Because they don't share the idealism. They don't simply think we can make the world a better place by making these eight changes. Right.

Robin:

Well, as you say, typically they choose very hard to satisfy demands. Right. Prevent the administration from giving in easily.

Agnes:

So I think that's a cynical reading, which is similar to the cynical reading of they're trying to instigate violence against themselves. And I'm not saying it's entirely incorrect. It may be correct about many people, but I am inclined to think that it's the better, a kind of deeper explanation is something like idealism. So that they're choosing very idealistic demands. Not because they think precisely those demands will be rejected, but because they're not choosing demands by first checking whether or not they're going to be accepted. They're just choosing what they think is good. Forget about what will be accepted or not.

Robin:

So why is infeasibility idealistic?

Agnes:

It isn't. What you would predict would be that some of the demands, many of the demands would be infeasible and maybe some of them would be feasible.

Robin:

It seems just sloppiness or poor thought, inconsiderate, predicts infeasible, but idealistic doesn't predict thoughtless or sloppy per se.

Agnes:

So if you imagine what it is to say to someone like, dream big, that's to say, you know, what if there were no constraints? So I think that they are not thinking so much with constraints in mind.

Robin:

But then if the administration simply pointed out the infeasibility, they would go, oh, then change their mind. But clearly, that's not how it happens.

Agnes:

Well, if they're committed to their idealism, then they're committed to not thinking in terms of those constraints. That is, if the idealism is the deepest thing, if it's the thing that's pushing them and motivating them, then my thought is that that may also be a thing that we want to protect. It would be a grounds for protecting protest. And that, like, in effect, it's very, very easy to come up with cynical interpretations of protest on the part of people who are not idealistic and thus who have all these constraints in mind and who have all these predictions in mind about behavior, but it may just not actually be so accurate just in terms of the mindset. I think protesters are inclined to employ a bad form of argument, which is they might do some bad thing, like occupying a university building or breaking something or whatever, and they'll be like, but that's a small thing in comparison to these people dying in this other part of the world. So that form of argument says a bad thing isn't bad because there's a worse thing. And that's a bad form of argument. The bad thing is still bad, even if there's a worse thing, you might think. But I don't think it's like, oh, they're cynically employing this bad form of argument that they realize to be a bad form of argument. It's that they're in a mindset where that doesn't seem like a bad form of argument to them.

Robin:

I think we're on an issue that we've touched on many times before. I might say that something in the history of this sort of behavior has induced certain patterns of it that have certain consequences and that those consequences have in the past selected for these behaviors. And that's why they're doing it. That's a way of explaining them. You might say, well, certain kinds of protests happen because they worked in the past. And so people copy things that work. That doesn't mean they have to know exactly why they work or have a cynical attitude toward it. But you know, it could still be that they're doing the things that work and that we can understand why they're doing things because once upon a time, those things worked. So, you know, they might at some point know that protester groups in the past that asked for small, reasonable demands weren't as famous, didn't get stories told about them as much and that they are copying the stories of the events that were the most famous and those are the ones that worked in a certain sense. And that can be an alternative to a cynical story. It's not attributing bad motives to them and saying they're acting consciously on those bad motives. It's saying that there's a structure here that will select for success in some cases and not for others. And that these people definitely have a history of celebrating past cases, which were the most successful in their minds and trying to model what they do on those.

Agnes:

But it's not true that in all of the past cases there were infeasible demands.

Robin:

I mean, like, I was just reading- But there might have been more infeasible on average.

Agnes:

I mean, I guess, I just think sometimes they were infeasible, sometimes they were feasible. And I don't know that the infeasible ones were the more successful protests. I mean, maybe that's true, but I don't know that that's true. I think, And in fact, I think these protesters are actually remarkably non-violent. They're staying further away from violence than at least what I read of a lot of the protests in the 60s. I haven't been reading about the ones in the 80s, so I just don't know what those were like. They might be willing to do some things that could cause violence against them, but they're not doing much by way of causing violence themselves. And I don't know how much they know about those. These people are young. They were definitely not around in the 60s. They may not even have heard much about the 60s or the 80s.

Robin:

I was listening to some NPR show about famous protests from the 30s. and how people in the 60s modeled many of their protests on those famous protests in the 30s, labor protests often, but involving free speech and freedom of labor advocacy.

Agnes:

Those would be like concrete demands, feasible demands, right? I mean, many of those demands were met.

Robin:

But often, large demands that they weren't willing to give. as opposed to small demands that they were. So typically when they made small demands, it happened and then it didn't become a famous case. So the most famous cases were the ones where they made demands that weren't given and then there was violence and then eventually they won and those are the cases they most celebrate.

Agnes:

Well, I mean, there's gonna be a selection, right, which is that there's gonna be all these times when people make small, feasible demands. They continue, like, people are making those demands. They're not avoiding those demands because those demands don't make you famous. They're making those demands, and they're getting some of those demands met. But every once in a while, they have bigger demands when they, you know, and then that's where the other side is not inclined to give them what they want. It may not be that they're selecting that in order to match these famous cases, but just that sometimes, like, because of the size of the demand, they're not getting what they want. And then maybe somebody in an idealistic frame of mind, which I'm saying is what's true of college students, that those people are going to lean in the direction of the sorts of demands that would call for a protest because they're not just going to immediately be met.

Robin:

So I'm especially interested here in understanding what it is that people will see as idealistic, and then maybe what it is that's seen as a credible sign of idealism. And what we're touching on here seems to deviate from the simple idea that idealism is just wanting to make a better world, and then making choices that, you know, recommending things and suggesting things that would in fact make a better world, as those things would tend to be feasible. And then you would tend to be ready to negotiate. Like you said, these people are typically making less feasible demands and they're less setting themselves to be able to negotiate with them. And then you're giving them in some sense, more credit for being idealistic because of these features. And therefore there's some way in which the way we see idealism and the way we credit it is different than the most straightforward way to be effective.

Agnes:

Right, right. So I think the fight against injustice is seen as being very idealistic, maybe especially if you lose, like that is especially if you lose, if you experience very significant costs, like losing your life or something. So the fight against injustice is more idealized than the working in small ways to make the world a bit more just. There's this sense of taking it on directly.

Robin:

So as economists, we hear people advocating for changes to the economic system, and there are many changes you can advocate for that would be modest, feasible changes, and it seems like we can discuss those. And then there's always a group of people who want to advocate for really huge changes that seem quite infeasible and not very likely to be good, but they get great credit for their idealism, for fighting capitalism, they call it that, fighting the system by making, I would call crazy huge demands for changes that have just not been tested and that we don't necessarily have good reason to think would work, but there's a sense of which they would be very disruptive and they would be paying a very high cost to push for it and we're giving them idealism credit for that.

Agnes:

Yes, I think that's right. I think we do give people idealism credit for making those moves. I mean, maybe one of the most striking things about idealism is that it's very motivating. So like these producers are very motivated. And improving things a little bit, like in a small way, it's just not very motivating. Improving things a little bit for yourself maybe is, but for a world at large, a tiny improvement is not very motivating. It might even be motivating to the person who's doing it, but it's like an audience or whatever. And so, yeah, our attention is captured by these by the idealism of the fight against injustice, irrespective of whether that's in fact going to improve the world.

Robin:

There's all these ways in which are in our ordinary life habits. We do almost everything through lots of small steps. So clearly we accept the idea. I mean, if you want to get from A to B, you typically get there through a sequence of small steps from A to B. You don't try to make big jumps, you know, stand to do huge four foot jumps to see if you can get there. You know that if you, even if you get three of them, the fourth one, you'll fall down and hurt yourself. Right. We know. In a lot of contexts, you get things done by lots of small improvements, right? And so then that's the background context for wondering why we make these exceptions in these other contexts.

Agnes:

So in my household, like every once in a while, we'll say, one of the grownups will say, I want to celebrate something that like happened to one of the kids today or they did this or whatever. Like this happened actually just last night. One of my kids was rollerblading in a skate park and like totally wiped out. And like an older cool kid came up to him and said like, oh, that was an epic grind or something. And like the kid was like a teenager. So for him, you know, that was like a big deal for my son to have. I have the kid not say, are you okay? I have the kid praise him. So then this was celebrated to the people who hadn't heard of it. Now, my son has been role ready for a long time. He practices all the time. He's improving by incremental steps. But it's kind of important that there are these moments where we're like, now we're going to celebrate it. It's not every moment that we celebrate. We choose a moment to celebrate. That moment has to have some drama to it. Sure.

Robin:

Drama is gonna, you know, so I think... Right, but if the protester were asking for lots of little things and every 20th one they had a party about another 20 of them, that would be an analogy there, but they're not really interested in that, right?

Agnes:

Right, but this wasn't just one out of 20 of whatever. There was all this symbolic structure to this movement, right? Which is like, he's getting the approval of this older, more established skate park veteran. Sure. And that don't have that much directly to do with the fact that he spends a lot of time practicing wheeler. Sure. Um, so what, and you know, I don't know if he'd had to like fight a bad guy to do his scroll of blading, probably that would get even more applause, but that just doesn't happen that often. Um, so there's a question, what are going to be the circumstances that allow us to applaud? And

Robin:

So I think an important part of the context here is that once upon a time, most political action and organizing was very local in a town, in a workplace, et cetera, for relatively local outcomes and for practical outcomes that people wanted. Right? You might want sewers in the city, or you might want a school to be expanded. You might, you know, want better wages at a firm in the union negotiation. That's what most politics was for a long time. And then, you know, once in a while you might negotiate, you know, have international or larger issues that you would join in to support, but that was usually a sideline from the main activity of politics, which would be your personal local organizing. And in some sense, that sort of personal local organizing has gone away. And even, and it's even sort of the thing that's less a thing that college students would do. That is some college protesters would be asking, you know, to create a major or change the grading system or, you know, have better food at the dorms. But like the brand of college protests is more the, Oh, we're protesting these world events far away from here. And that's, in some sense, a key way politics has changed over the last century or two, is for people to focus on celebrating on these attempts to influence very distant events through actors who don't have much of a connection to them, and then maybe do influence sort of larger national or international opinion, but they are just noteworthy not doing that much locally. They're not helping a kitchen locally or a homeless shelter or, you know, whatever. Even in the sixties, a lot of people did those things.

Agnes:

Right, so I know you know that I did this event that was a kind of theater type event for community organizers, and I learned at this event there are plenty of community organizers. There are people who organize the homeless shelters, but also just who work locally with violence prevention. There's actually tons of people who do that.

Robin:

But maybe- It's hard for them to get national media coverage or local media coverage.

Agnes:

They don't get that much coverage and maybe there's not that much connection between those people and let's say college students or elites of various kind. But it's not I think it's not true that there is local political organizing and work at that level. I think there's lots of it.

Robin:

In fact it's just less of a focus of most voters. and most people, when people want to be idealistic, they mostly talk about national or international politics, and they don't actually do much local action.

Agnes:

Hmm.

Robin:

So they're.

Agnes:

See, stop, because we've gone over.

Robin:

OK, there. Yes, we have. So nice talking to you.