Why Is There No Anti-War Movement? |
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Why Is There No Anti-War Movement?
Exploring what might help us move to start building one.
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 anti-war 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.
Americans Feel Powerless
A key reason 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’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. To overcome this feeling of resignation, we need more inspiring examples of successful struggles. Minnesota’s successful mass resistance against 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 millions of consumers to leave companies like OpenAI that are enabling Trump’s war machine. Proving in practice that we have power in smaller battles can inspire millions to join the fight against this administration’s worst horrors at home and abroad.
People Are Hoping the War Ends Quickly
Like so many others, I wake up every morning hoping to see a headline suggesting that the always-mercurial Trump has decided to call a quick victory in Iran, like he did in Venezuela. At least, in that case, further atrocities against civilians would be halted.
Given the administration’s lack of interest in trying to manufacture consent for this war and the obvious political risks of rising gas prices, it’s been hard to believe that Trump would so willingly risk his presidency—to say nothing of the lives of Iranians and US service members—on a long armed intervention with no clear endgame. Nevertheless, the war continues to deepen.
The fact that Trump moved so quickly and with so little regard for public opinion has left many of us in a state of shock. Whereas George W. Bush spent a year trying to convince us to invade Iraq—sparking a deliberative process into which mass protests could intervene—Trump’s speed and dismissal of public opinion has created little space for Americans to break out of spectator mode. This helps explain the paradox of why an exceptionally unpopular war has so far been met with exceptionally little mass protest. But insofar as the war continues, expect increasing numbers to start taking collective action.
And even if Trump does call victory in the next few days or weeks, this is unlikely to put a stop to his imperial ambitions. We’ll still need to ramp up our anti-war agitation to stop the administration’s push for regime change in Cuba, its continued funding of Israel, its belligerence towards China—and to make the 2028 presidential election, in part, a referendum on runaway military spending, US imperial wars, and US support for the genocidal Israeli state.
Trump Is Doing So Many Horrible Things
In contrast to George W. Bush—whose imperialist exploits were his singular focus—it is easy to get overwhelmed by Trump’s across-the-board attacks and difficult to quickly respond to every new outrage. Our side’s organized forces have been stretched thin. Personally, I’ve been spending about 10........