I’ve been thinking about the arrogant and dismissive superiority with which leftists tend to look at extremest right protests. There is this notion that groups that picket with “God Hates Fags” sign will eventually die out, not only because of an assumption about the linear progress of progress, but also because of the presumed uselessness of those protests in these days.
We assume that protests are simply a practical political tool, and the political impractically will die a natural death. This is true in some ways, after all we don’t see anti-segregation protests these days. But this assumes that rightist political protests are nothing more than emotional, if realistic minded, reactions to change.
But there is an symbolic and ritualistic aspect to protests as well that we can not ignore. Protests are about both aspiration and affirmation. The most visible aspects of protests is the aspirational side. There is a political goal to be achieved, whether it is to voice a political stance or demand change. Protests seek to transform public opinion. Ideally the participants of the ritual of protest, protesters or witnesses, undergo a transformation. Anything short of it is failure.
So what about those protests which are seen as too extreme to be transformative? Protests, as a form of ritual, effective or not, also function as a practice of embodying what one believes to be true. It doesn’t matter that no one starts to hate the queer community, because protests act as a ritual through which people can reassure each other of the reality of their values. These protests are reproductive, and the fact that they continue in the face of political failure should not be something we mock as silly and inconsequential.
