The fear of an Organized Left

‍ This is an excerpt from Paul Waldman’s Substack, The Cross Section. You can read the full post here.

If you’ve paid any attention to the federal invasion of Minnesota and the extraordinary response mounted by the state’s residents in response, you’ve heard administration officials and conservative pundits explain why the protests are so dangerous. The people taking part are “violent monsters” as Kristi Noem said, they’re radical, they hate our brave law enforcement officers, they’re paid by someone or other, and perhaps most concerning of all, they’re organized.

I could cite a hundred examples, but … here’s former sports reporter and current GOP Senate candidate in Minnesota Michelle Tafoya, who is asked to respond to a clip of Noem saying the protests are “well-funded and well-organized,” to which Tafoya says “I’m sure there were organic protesters as well, and that’s fine,” but the real problem is the professional agents of chaos with their expensive equipment and violent intentions.

What would an “organic” protester be in this case? Presumably it’s someone who is not funded or organized, who just on their own decided one day to wave a sign or shout a slogan (but not too loudly), then went home satisfied that their duty as a citizen was complete.

“You’re doing it wrong” is what conservatives have always said about protests from the left, whether it was the civil rights movement or the feminist movement or the environmental movement or the gay rights movement. The claim is usually that the actions are too unruly, and if they were more polite then we might deign to hear your concerns, but since you’re being so rude you must be dismissed out of hand.

The problem, conservatives now say, is precisely that what’s happening in the streets is too organized to be legitimate. If you libs were just wandering around aimlessly, that would be fine. But because you’re planning, strategizing and coordinating, that means it’s somehow not a genuine expression of public sentiment. It’s not real democratic participation; it’s something sinister. …

To many conservatives, this is inherently suspicious. How, they ask, could this possibly be real? Someone has to be paying them! But as a number of people have pointed out, women in particular are called upon to plan and execute complex activities involving many people on a volunteer basis all the time …