It wasn’t long after Donald Trump had appeared on election night to thank his supporters for delivering him an extraordinary victory when the first reports emerged of protests on the West Coast. Videos showed students at UC Berkeley and elsewhere marching through their campuses, chanting expletives about Trump.
The next day, as Hillary Clinton conceded defeat, more organised marches began in New York, Los Angeles and Chicago. #NotMyPresident was the rallying cry and the hashtag. Trump Tower, the site of unthreatening mini-protests throughout the campaign, was now targeted by much bigger demos. The NYPD soon shut off the entire block.
American progressives are now working out how they are going to resist Trump’s presidency for the next four years. And protest can work, as a group of Polish women demonstrated recently. The sight of people on the streets is unnerving, and governments don’t like it. Get enough people together and national leaders start having to comment on it. Do it for a few days and the protest leaders themselves will be on TV, delivering their case into millions of living rooms - or on to tens of millions of Facebook timelines.
You have to ask, though, where was the pre-election protest movement? I wrote on Coffee House in late July that I was struck by how few protesters made it to the Republican Convention in Cleveland, and how many showed up to protest at the Democratic one. The crowds in Cleveland for the RNC basically consisted of myself and a few other journalists - including the Spectator’s Freddy Gray - sweating more than Richard Nixon under the Ohio sun and waiting for the show to begin. But it never did.
The most effective protest happened on the final day, when Trump was accepting the nomination of his party, while conjuring up dark images of national crisis. A few hours earlier an activist from the well-known Code Pink group told me one of her colleagues was in the process of getting into the Quicken Loans Arena to interrupt Trump’s speech. As the speech began she texted me to say, 'She’s in'. And she was; for a few seconds, TV audiences noticed a disturbance in the hall, and saw her banner reading 'Build bridges, not walls'. Imagine if 100 people had done the same, or a thousand. Imagine if the convention had felt like a Woodstock of protesters from all over America.
The incredible lack of protest sent out the opposite message: this candidate is normal. His nomination is normal. Nothing to see here. For a year, liberals across America warned their similarly-disposed Twitter followers about the 'normalisation' of Donald Trump. But no one could be bothered to get out and prevent it at its seminal moment. Two weeks later, protesters flooded Philadelphia like it was a pilgrimage site to protest against the first female major party nominee.
Progressive America is entitled to a new wave of dissent - they almost owe it to themselves. Liberals are shocked by Trump’s election because they didn’t see it coming, just as the British Left utterly failed to detect the disaffection in its heartlands that tipped the referendum in favour of Brexit. Those were terrible failures of judgement and empathy which no amount of protest can redeem.
Joshi Herrmann is editor-in-chief of The Tab
