Question. What do you picture when I say the word protester? Do you see a weekend tourist with a latte in one hand and a political sign in the other chanting with the crowd as they meander peacefully along the state-permitted protest route?

Or does your imagination conjure a nimble and defiant character dressed in black, getting

in the face of the Magas, fighting cops, and causing tactically orchestrated mayhem and property

damage behind the anonymity of a masked face? A recent guest on our show, Benjamin S. Case,

is the author of a 22 academicacademic paper titled Contentious

Effervescence, which describes being swept away in the heightened state of euphoria,

empowerment, and group identification from the experience of participating in riots.

In his book, Street Rebellion, Case presents research interviews on the subjective experience of rioters

and concludes that their actions, I'm quoting here, can play a nourishing role for radical's will to resist.

He quotes one subject as saying,

While we are debating strategy, setting things on fire is an expression of sheer resistance that is as good an idea

as the next. Now, we're all left of center on this podcast, and so are most of our guests,

but on the spectrum of political action that runs from smashing shop windows, setting fire

to restaurants and cars,

and actively fighting counter-protesters and police,

to disciplined peaceful protest based on the principles of nonviolence,

I'm much more aligned with the latter.

Now, that's a preference,

and it's based on the kind of idealism that holds up the campaigns of Mahondas Gandhi,

Martin Luther King, and Nelson Mandela from my own home country as examples of what some theorists call people power. And this stance says that when enough people join a movement that protests

nonviolently against unjust laws and government actions, they will eventually prevail due, in part,

to holding a kind of moral high ground that both draws in new participants and succeeds at winning

...