Mexico has a political party named "The Institutional Revolution Party", known as PRI. While it serves as an indication of how far politicians around the world will go to lift the rhetoric of reform while simulaneously betraying that they have no indication of putting the words into action. Honestly, a "revolution", by definition, is opposed to the institutions of government (which define the "establishment" against which the revolution wails). Nothing like making the name of your party an oxymoron.
A few years ago, Thomas Frank wrote an essay entitled Why Johnny Can't Dissent. The thesis of his work is that the anti-establishment is, in fact, an establishment of its own. As our culture has come around to worshipping itself and "strong feelings" have come to replace facts as a basis of public debate, protest has become an end unto itself. It provides credibility of being "against the man" among no one except the other members of that small fringe that are also "against the man". To everyone else, it is noise to be tune out, or, better yet, ignored completely.
I think that is why Bruce Weinstein's latest column, while being right on point after point, just doesn't seem to quite apply to the protests in Denver this week. It's because they aren't really "protests" as much as they are "demonstrations" - of personal commitment without the political force to turn them into viable movements.
Cindy Sheehan and Ron Kovic can talk about corporate sponsorship all they want, but when Kovic moves on to say that he can be "put in a cage" for speaking against the Democratic Party (or the Republican Party, for that matter) he's confusing the issue and moving into the area of spin dominated by the people he seeks to unseat. In effect, they are moving towards the same sort of institutional problems against which they supposedly are speaking.
The First Amendment protects such speech. Any and all of us are free to tell whatever lies we want to tell. But that is not the same protection given to seek redress of grievances from the government or to assemble peacefully. While those are protected by the First Amendment also, they should not be confused.
Any demonstration that sets out to disrupt an event does not qualify as a "peaceful assembly". It isnt' necessarily violent in a physical sense, but the purpose is to deprive other people of their rights of peaceful assembly and free speech. That immediately moves the demostration outside of the protections intended by the Constitution.
And that brings up the point that there is no such a thing as an unlimited freedom. All liberties are bounded by laws that describe the manner in which they can be freely exercised. We are able to keep and bear arms, but not inside a bar or a school or a courtroom. We are free to speak freely, but not to issue death threats against federal judges and the President. We are free to assemble for peaceful purposes, but there is more to "peaceful" than just not being physically violent.
It should be pointed out that the party conventions are not public events, nor are they governmental functions. Most of the attendees at the conventions are not even elected officials. They are delegates chosen within the party power structure. Sheehan and Kovic would be better advised to run for their state committee so they could sit at the grown-up table inside the convention and be heard. There is no right to disrupt private, or semi-private, events. Doing so isn't exercising Constitutional rights - it is hooliganism.
The people at the convention won't hear the voices of "protest", but not because of the Denver police. It's because no one at the convention wants to hear them. And that is the fault of the insitutionalized protesters themselves. By seeking ideological purity - withdrawal from Iraq "within 18 months" is morally inferior to "immediate withdrawal" - they create an internal rigidity in their group that silences dissent much more effectively than anything against which they are protesting. They are building a form of institutional protest that, like Nixon's appointed "Devil's Advocate", soon gets dismissed as background noise.
The problem with this contingent - and there is a matched bookend on the right end of the political spectrum - is that they are so used to opposing "the system" that they can no longer tell when they win, or even when they have a friend that would like to help them. But agreeing to work with anyone in the system is "selling out" and that automatically gets them thrown out of the "movement". Success, in this system, is an indication that one no longer believes in the ideas for which they fight. This means that failure is the de facto goal.
And that is why their voices, for all of the earnestness and for the grains of truth their rhetoric may contain, will never be heard. Institutionalized protest isn't protest at all. It's just a migrane bumbling around in the background.