Wake Me Up When <strike>September</strike> 1968 Ends (Special Protest Edition)

Run Everywhere: Chris Bowers points to the current state of House recruitment. There are currently 412 active campaigns, and only 4 seats without a Democratic candidate. That means Dems need to find candidates for only 7 of the remaining 19 races in order to break the Republican's record of 419 candidates in 1994.

I don't predict a landslide, but there could be enough seats changing hands to take back the House this year.

I am not the biggest fan of protesting. It always strikes me as an ineffective form of political action; why am I going to change my mind because a few—and let's be honest, after the initial anti-war rallies in 2003, most protests weren't very large—people disagree with my position very passionately? Flyers, going door to door, and pushing the issue with friends and family always struck me as a better way to force political change.

I'm also quite sure that my dislike of protesting stems from my dislike 1960s revisionism. Lets remember, the Civil Rights Act and Voting Rights Act didn't turn into law until eleven years had passed since Brown v Board of Education, and they came at the cost of significant riots, to say nothing of outright domestic terrorism by segregationist forces. We forget this, but MLK was a rabble-rouser, and was not taken seriously by the civil rights "establishment" for quite some time. Sure, there was progress, but even then it was painfully slow, and it came very close to tearing the country in half. On the Vietnam War front, Eugene McCarthy's primary against LBJ almost certainly helped put Richard Nixon in office. Protests continued to escalate for another six years without ending the war. Nixon intentionally sought large crowds of protestors in 1972 to tar the anti-war position as a bunch of dirty hippies, helping him slag the McGovern campaign into oblivion. I once pointed out to a friend that between Iraq and gay rights, we were starting to re-live the sixties, and how unhappy I was about those developments. She looked at me like I was crazy. Wouldn't you like to see social change and progress? Sure, but not if it means that I have to start hating my neighbor just because he doesn't care as much, and certainly not if it means living in a country where riots are the norm.

The recent immigration-related rallies feel different. Nathan Newman and Publius explain why; these protests are huge, and the protesters come from outside the ethnic and ideological clique that drove the Civil Rights & Vietnam protests. The non-Cuban Latino immigrant population hasn't ever been seriously mobilized in this country, and now they have a reason to become politically active. So unlike your run of the mill giant-puppet crusade against nuclear power, the IMF, or logging old-growth forest, these rallies represent an historic political shift.

Drinking Liberally, this Tuesday and every Tuesday, at the Montlake Ale House, 2307 24th ave E, 8pm to closing time.

Wake Me Up When September 1968 Ends (Special Protest Edition)