The drama may have been at the Washington Monument on Saturday afternoon -- but the progress was taking place at the other end of the National Mall.
While the usual protesters with the usual assortment of messages that ran the gamut from the vaguely coherent to the unbecomingly spiteful took over the lawn just south of the monument; while they pretended to understand what suit-clad Ralph Nader was saying to them from the stage of the Sylvan Theater and watched skits on globalism performed by fellow activists ("The market is neutral in these matters!" screamed a man in a cape as he ran off stage); while they endured the taunts of a handful of conservative counterprotesters ("Fry Mumia" read one poster) and retorted with the odd rejoinder or wanking motion; while they held up signs saying "Congress: Another Israeli-Occupied Territory" and "No Blood for Oil"; while they went through the motions of protest and anger and outrage for reporters and cameras and, most of all, for each other; while they did all this, a handful of college undergraduates -- the same age as many of the protesters -- were at the far eastern end of the Mall, patiently talking about the nature of power.
Not political power -- but solar power. The students, from 14 different colleges, were competing in a contest sponsored by the Department of Energy to build houses that could be powered completely by the sun. Their houses -- more or less functional and extremely impressive -- were sitting on the Mall and open to tourists, who came in droves, creating long lines out of each solar-powered home's front door.
So there were two groups of young people on the Mall on Saturday, each acting out its own version of revolution. To the west were people yelling about the environment; to the east were people designing the technologies that will someday make the environment safer. They are the same age as each other, and Saturday they put on display very different visions of what the next generation of liberalism will look like. Will it find new, innovative causes to champion? Or will it prefer to rely on the prefix "anti" to describe itself -- as in "anti-war," "anti-Israel," "anti-IMF," "anti-World Bank," and "anti-corporate"? Will it find a unique political voice? Or will it strive for nothing more than ersatz imitations of what its parent generation did 30 years ago? Will it seek solutions? Or will it merely be angry?
To me, the contrast provided by the solar scientists magnified the emptiness of this weekend's protests -- but they would have looked plenty empty anyway. To be sure, protest is a valuable part of democratic life. But these protests had a pathetic quality at their core that was hard to miss if you were there. It's as if in the absence of a single rallying cry or coherent message, the young left has decided that a generic rage at the world will do just fine. I'm 23 years old, and every time I have gone to cover one of these rallies, I have left with the same thought running through my head: This cannot be the best my generation is capable of. And this is not liberalism -- it's spite.
Everyone reacts differently to such protests, of course -- and among people my age, there is broad disagreement as to what the next generation of liberalism should look like. It was in the spirit of furthering that debate that TAP Online dispatched four Prospect regulars, all in their 20s and roughly the same age as most of the protesters, to hit the streets of Washington, D.C. this weekend and write about whom they met and what they saw. Their impressions of the protesters were, in the end, mostly negative. For Prospect writing fellow Drake Bennett, the events -- whether an anti-Gap striptease or the Saturday afternoon march itself -- proceeded according to a well-rehearsed script that is growing progressively more tired and forced with each repetition. For the Prospect's other writing fellow, Alex Gourevitch, the politics behind the rallies are focused too much on victimhood -- and too little on real change. Former Prospect writing fellow Natasha Hunter was more ambivalent in her take on the weekend. For her, the protests were more a collection of the eccentric and the bizarrely well-intentioned than anything else. Also worth checking out -- and also thoughtfully critical of the anti-IMF movement -- are Nick Penniman's recent Prospect cover story on antiglobalism forces and Tapped's take on the protests from last Friday.
For my part, I was all too happy to escape the rallies and head east to the solar houses. The students there were engineers representing schools such as Auburn University and Carnegie Mellon University and Texas A&M University. I doubt many are captivated by politics, and I'll bet fewer still consider themselves liberal. But in pioneering the future of the solar-powered home, they accomplished far more for the cause of environmentalism this weekend than their protesting peers a dozen blocks west. Yelling is fine in politics; yelling is good. But at some point there has to be more than yelling -- there has to be doing. That, in a nutshell, is why I found the rallies so depressing. It's also why I found the solar homes -- and the people who built them -- so hopeful.
Early Saturday afternoon, as the unusually strong September sun bore down on solar homes and protesters alike, Ralph Nader took the stage at Sylvan Theater and implored the assembled activists to bring democracy to the rest of the world. But the truth is that Nader doesn't have a clue how to do that -- he only knows (or thinks he knows) how not to do it: Not by invading Iraq; not by supporting Israel; not through capitalism; not through the IMF; not through the World Bank. It's as if he and the other protesters have been living in a single dark room, feeding on one another's anger while gradually replacing analysis with indignation -- and substituting mass resentment for independent thought. It's time someone threw open the windows and let in some sun.
