Whether or not you believe, as David Frum does, that President Trump’s order federalizing California National Guard troops and sending them to Los Angeles is the first stage in a multi-step effort to justify the seizure of control of local government, including ultimately local elections, the President’s actions are a negative example of an important point.
Despite the migration of so much of our lives (our social interactions, our relationships, and our information sources) to the online world, our public actions, including protests in physical public space, still matter — and they matter a lot.
What the academic John R. Parkinson asserted a decade ago in Democracy and Public Space: The Physical Sites of Democratic Performance remains true today:
As political activists have understood for years, it is not the issue per se that gets coverage, it is the dramatization of the issue, and that requires physical action, creating pictures and a story, in physical space … [and] that demonstrating the sheer scale of popular anger still matters — even in a world where the public sphere has burst out of the coffee house, beyond the central plaza, and onto the airwaves.
While some may argue that the so-called digital town squares of Facebook, X, YouTube, Instagram, or TikTok have taken the place of brick and mortar central plazas, in his book, Speech Out of Doors, the legal scholar Timothy Zick submits the unique characteristics that are associated with the “experience of assembling with others and speaking in material places” that include “proximity, symbolism, emotion, and solidarity [that] are difficult, if not impossible, to replicate in existing virtual places.”
Beyond simply providing a stage for political action, exercising our rights of free speech and public assembly in our public spaces — whether the steps of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, on the Benjamin Franklin Parkway, in Dilworth Park, or even on Market Street — promotes public citizenship and democracy by creating the space for people of diverse backgrounds to gather, interact with one another, make their voices heard on issues of shared concern, and be visible to and confront government officials and decision makers.
As history has repeatedly demonstrated, the empty bluster of tyrants and autocrats can be made absurd and ineffective by the peaceful, unified resistance of the people — provided we all stand together.
And it’s not just a matter of numbers. Our Constitutional right to freedom of assembly is more than mere permission to gather, it’s also a form of political expression itself, with the formation of a group, the composition of its membership, and who leads it also sending important messages.
These critical democratic functions of in-person public assembly were on full display in the mass protests across the world a decade ago, including the 2011 Arab Spring protests in Tahrir Square in Cairo, Occupy Wall Street in Zuccotti Park in New York City the same year, and the anti-government protest camp in Independence Square in Kyiv in 2013. In the wake of these protests, the Turkish sociologist Nilüfer Göle has asserted the emergence of a new form of politics: “public space democracy.”
Göle suggests that protesters were “reclaim[ing] the stage (confiscated by digital power, state surveillance, and private ownership) for personal and collective renewal …” And in the context of growing authoritarianism and anti-democratic trends world-wide, Göle asserts that “public agency and assembly” can empower citizens into “acting together and enacting in public [to] reset democratic agendas …”
If we are unhappy with the policies and decisions of our leaders, if we are dissatisfied with the political culture of our country, we need to exercise our Constitutionally guaranteed right to gather together in our public spaces, our streets, our parks, and our town squares.
In her most hopeful assertion, Göle goes as far to suggest that the recent decline in democracy can be arrested if “the emancipatory power of public space can be rediscovered personally and collectively.”
What Göle is reminding us is that if we are unhappy with the policies and decisions of our leaders, if we are dissatisfied with the political culture of our country, we need to exercise our Constitutionally guaranteed right to gather together in our public spaces, our streets, our parks, and our town squares to engage in a new public debate about the direction of our nation, our cities, and our communities.
President Trump’s recent actions may have been intended to incite and inflame public protest to the point of violence to rationalize a military crackdown and an exertion of expanded power and control. But a response of large-scale and massive peaceful protests in communities and cities across the country — including the No Kings protests planned in Philadelphia and other communities in our region (and the country) — could simultaneously deny the desired provocation while powerfully signaling the popular discontent of the nation.
As history has repeatedly demonstrated, the empty bluster of tyrants and autocrats can be made absurd and ineffective by the peaceful, unified resistance of the people — provided we all stand together.
Shawn McCaney is the Executive Director of the William Penn Foundation, which funds Democracy & Civic Initiatives and Public Space projects.
The Citizen welcomes guest commentary from community members who represent that it is their own work and their own opinion based on true facts that they know firsthand.
MORE GUEST COMMENTARY THIS WEEK
