"This is not to deny the emotional force
of the protests. Anyone who has ever attended a rock concert or a
football game knows how much fun it is to be part of a roaring crowd.
The experience is far more intense when you are standing in a crowd that
might change history. Since the eighteenth century, philosophers have
tried to describe the hallucinatory power of a mass movement. When
Michael Walzer interviewed American civil rights activists they all told
him the same thing about protests: 'It was like a fever. Everyone
wanted to go.' It is precisely because he understands the euphoric power
of crowds—and especially because he understands how they can embolden
people cowed by an unjust state—that Vladimir Putin, the Russian
president, is so determined to prevent Ukraine’s revolution from
spreading.
Yet a successful street
revolution, like any revolution, is never guaranteed to leave anything
positive in its aftermath—or anything at all. In the West, we often now
associate protests with progress, or at least we assume that big
crowds—the March on Washington, Paris in 1968—are the benign face of
social change. But street revolutions are not always progressive,
positive, or even important. Some replace a corrupt tyranny with
violence and a political vacuum, which is what happened in Libya.
Ukraine’s own Orange Revolution of 2004–2005 produced a new group of
leaders who turned out to be just as incompetent as their predecessors.
Crowds can be bullying, they can become violent, and they can give rise
to extremists: Think Tehran 1979, or indeed Petrograd 1917.
The
crowd may not even represent the majority. Because a street revolution
makes good copy, and because it provides great photographs, we often
mistakenly confuse “people power” with democracy itself. In fact, the
creation of democratic institutions—courts, legal systems, bills of
rights—is a long and tedious process that often doesn’t interest foreign
journalists at all. Tunisia’s ratification of a new constitution
earlier this year represented the most significant achievement of the
Arab Spring to date, but the agonizing negotiations that led up to that
moment were hard for outsiders to understand—and not remotely telegenic."
People Power works and it helps people. But yeah, it might be overrated.
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