What Comes After the Protests - The New Yorker

Do Americans still believe in mass protest? Or do we just not know of any other possible mechanism, outside voting, for achieving social change? When we take to the streets—which we still do, in great numbers—do we expect something to come of it, or are we out there simply because our understanding of American history tells us that this is what we are supposed to do next?

The killing of Renee Nicole Good, a thirty-seven-year-old mother and American citizen, at the hands of an ICE agent, this past Wednesday, took place less than a mile away from where George Floyd was murdered, in Minneapolis, in May, 2020. That proximity is merely a staggering, tragic coincidence; still, it serves as a reminder that state violence is never merely local, especially if it is captured on camera and spread across the internet. Americans anywhere have little protection against police officers kneeling on our necks or masked federal agents storming our neighborhoods; every time we see it, many of us realize that we could be next.

Good’s and Floyd’s killings were separated also by roughly five and a half years, a span that has cast a strange, spectral feel over the news, as if some important and potentially world-changing rage has returned to haunt us, though we can’t quite make out its contours. Could people take to the streets again, like they did in 2020? Do we remember the tear-gassing, the fires, the movement of crowds under street lights? Why does it seem as though those events took place a lifetime ago? Do we even live in the same country that we did then?

As with the murder of George Floyd, the killing of Renee Good occurred after a period of elevated street protest in America, much of it, this time, about ICE and the Trump Administration specifically. And just as the video of Floyd’s murder provided a clear and unmistakable illustration of what the years of Black Lives Matter protests which had preceded it were addressing, the footage of a masked agent firing into a car driven by a mother has confirmed all the mounting fears about what happens when unchecked, extralegal, and largely untrained military forces are set loose in an American city. Someone was always going to get killed on video.

At this point, less than a week after Good’s killing, one can discern the beginning stages of the mass mobilization we saw in 2020, with marches springing up in cities across the country. But, to date, we have not seen an outpouring of spontaneous street action on the scale that we saw back then. There are many possible reasons that Minnesota, in particular, has remained relatively quiet. First, there’s the weather: street demonstrations in America wax and wane with the seasons; summer is usually the period of highest activity, especially in places with brutal winters. People might also be frightened after watching Good get shot in the face and then hearing the Vice-President effectively give ICE agents permission to do what they please. And, perhaps most important, the 2020 protests took place during the height of the pandemic, and they fed off the restlessness of an entire country that had been locked inside and wanted to go out and feel something.

But many Minnesotans might also no longer be sure if protests today will lead to change. If this is the case, their hesitancy is likely shared by many of their fellow-Americans who, in the past year, have dutifully shown up to large-scale marches around the country, such as “No Kings” day, but who do not appear to expect anything more from these mass gatherings than an opportunity to vent and to feel camaraderie and kinship.

The truth is that, thanks to the two-party system, relative economic comfort, and basic stability, many of us in America do not have much in the way of political imagination. Nostalgia certainly plays a role in our limited view—we are always re-creating the marches we learned about in history class—but it’s increasingly clear that the internet and social media also have a diluting effect on dissent, creating the illusion of strength through volume while somehow watering down everything in the process. We can tweet, go protest, and vote. That’s about it.

During the past fifteen or so years, we have seen a handful of revolutions-that-weren’t, from the Arab Spring to the summer of George Floyd to the Umbrella Movement in Hong Kong. Today, we are watching yet another insurrectionary moment in the streets of Iran. The ceding of nearly all communication to the internet might be generating a pattern of online flareups followed by enormous, stirring street protests. What remains unclear, as chronicled by Vincent Bevins in his excellent book “If We Burn: The Mass Protest Decade and the Missing Revolution,” is what happens after the streets empty and people go back to their phones. Bevins, who published the book in 2023, argued that what we have seen so far, at least, is that the protests fail to achieve much in terms of material or political goals and are followed by periods of intense backlash and repression.

Before Good was killed in Minneapolis, I was already thinking about Bevins’s book, as the sabres rattled after the capture of the Venezuelan President, Nicolás Maduro. The Trump Administration, through some cockeyed revision of the Monroe Doctrine, seems eager to stake a claim to the entire Western Hemisphere. After Maduro’s capture, the Trump War Room account on X posted a cartoon of the President straddling North and South America with a big stick reading “Donroe Doctrine” in his hand. A litany of possible military targets emerged throughout the week, communicated via leaks, press conferences, and statements from the Secretary of State, Marco Rubio, and from Donald Trump himself. Greenland, Colombia, and Cuba have all been named as places that should be on high alert for some measure of American military expedition. (Mexico’s President, Claudia Sheinbaum, said this week that, after speaking with Trump, the U.S. would not be invading her country.) A year ago, the invasion of Greenland felt like a joke, or, at worst, a sign of Trump’s deteriorating grip on reality. Today, it seems inevitable that America will seize Greenland from Denmark and will then turn its eye back to Central and South America. Congress appears utterly incapable of restraining the Administration’s adventurism, and condemnation from foreign leaders seems only to add new names to the list of America’s enemies.

The public, according to polls, does not support the President’s expansionism. Only a third of respondents in a recent poll approved of the operation to capture Maduro; around nine in ten said that the Venezuelan people, not the United States, should control who governs them. On a broader level, Trump and Rubio’s imperialist aims cut against the priorities of the vast majority of their constituents: only twenty-seven per cent of respondents polled in September wanted the U.S. to take a “more active role” to “solve the world’s problems.” Readers of this column know that I’m skeptical of opinion polling—except when results are more or less uniform and conform to a coherent picture of the electorate. In this case, a country that endured seemingly unending wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and that has watched the wars in Ukraine and Gaza extract incalculable humanitarian and financial tolls might be wary of military interventionism.

ICE is not popular, either. A few hours before Good was killed, YouGov released a poll showing that only thirty-nine per cent of Americans approved of how the agency was doing its job. Regardless of what you think about the laws concerning justifiable force—which, in any case, have been muddied by ICE’s wanton disregard for due process and for normal law-enforcement procedures—there was no reason for an agent to fire multiple times into a car that was travelling at a modest speed and seemed to be trying to move out of the agents’ way. The attempt by Kristi Noem, the head of the Department of Homeland Security, to smear Good as a “domestic terrorist” has only fuelled public indignation. Lies will not convince Americans who watched an ordinary person get executed by a panicked federal agent in a mask. Even those who believe that Good should not have been impeding law enforcement are unlikely to support what Noem seemed to be doing, which was celebrating the death of a supposed terrorist.

Foreign policy might remain abstract for most of the public, but, as more Americans come in contact with ICE agents in their cities and towns, I believe that there will be an even sharper negative swing against a President who already is within range of becoming the most unpopular in history. One of the more stirring news segments I watched about Minnesota featured a young man who had watched ICE agents pull Good’s body out of her car. He looked traumatized while talking to a reporter, and said, “I’m pretty right-leaning, but this is not how we’re supposed to do things in America.”

So what can any of us do about this? We seem to have stumbled into an uneasy paradox: millions of people are willing to participate in widespread protests, but few appear to believe that they will lead to much change. Do such people join a community group that tries to alert their neighbors when ICE is coming? Perhaps engage in a bit of civil disobedience? Or do we merely protest in the same way that we always do, with an understanding, perhaps, that this might be exactly what the Trump Administration wants—to provoke a riot in the same city that sparked off the summer of George Floyd?

I do not believe that the majority of Americans think Renee Good deserved to be shot in the face. Even fewer want American bombs dropping all over the globe, leaving a mess that will cost billions of taxpayer dollars to fix while oil executives get invited to meetings at the White House to split up the spoils. We are not that depraved yet. But this is the first time in recent memory in which the will of the majority feels both irrelevant and totally impotent. There are three years left of this Administration. Do we really believe that a blue wave in the midterms and Democratic majorities in the House and Senate can stop ICE from invading American cities? If Trump doesn’t ask permission from Congress now, why would he ask when it is filled with what he calls enemies of the state?

What we are seeing in this moment of crisis, then, is a collision between the deep disaffection that many liberal voters felt after the 2024 election and the desperate need to do something. It would be a mistake to conflate this feeling of constriction with hopelessness, or even passivity. As Trump deploys more agents to American cities, more brutal scenes will emerge, and more people will take to the streets—even if they fear rioting, repression by ICE agents, and yet another failed, ephemeral revolution. A large-scale conflagration feels almost unavoidable and could change the course of the country’s history. There is no clever political parlor trick or stirring message that can change whatever it is that’s coming, for the simple reason that Americans, by tradition and disposition, do not respond well to thousands of federal masked agents running around their neighborhoods. Will resistance find a new form in this moment? Maybe, but I’m not sure that it would matter. The past decade may have shown the limits of the American liberal political imagination, but we have to work with what we know, and hope that it goes better this time. What other choice do we have?♦

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