Donald Trump’s war on Iran is very unpopular. As pollster G. Elliot Morris notes, it is the most unpopular a US war has ever been when it started. And “with just 38 percent of Americans in favor, support for bombing Iran is lower than retrospective support for the war in Iraq was in 2014.”
Why then has there been so little collective protest against the US-Israel offensive? Answering this question is not easy. What follows are seven hypotheses rather than definitive conclusions. But exploring why we’re lacking an antiwar movement today can help us move to actually start building one. And for the sake of Iranians, the Middle East, and working people in the United States, we’d better do so as soon as possible.
1) Americans Feel Powerless
A key reason why so many young people in the 1960s threw themselves into the fight against US military involvement in Vietnam was that the civil rights movement had recently demonstrated the power of mass action. As Students for a Democratic Society (SDS)’s founding manifesto in 1962 put it, “The Southern struggle against racial bigotry . . . compelled most of us from silence to activism.” Looking back, one participant recalled that such examples of success “gave the feeling that you could actually make a difference, that you needed to take a stand.”
Now the biggest obstacle we face in our country is a pervasive sense of powerlessness. SDS leader Bernardine Dohrn was right to underscore the difference between that era and our current moment: “The issue holding us back today, to me, is the idea that what you do won’t make a difference.”
To overcome this feeling of resignation, we need more inspiring examples of successful struggles. Minnesota’s successful mass resistance against Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), for example, has begun to energize activism nationwide. The challenge now is to find and scale up winnable bottom-up campaigns, like getting our schools to break with ICE or getting…
Auteur: Eric Blanc
