I think Matt Taibbi has a great idea here:
In the conformist atmosphere of the late 50s and early 60s, the individual was a threat. Like communist Russia, the system then was so weak that it was actually threatened by a single person standing up and saying, “This is bullshit!”
That is not the case anymore. This current American juggernaut is the mightiest empire the world has ever seen, and it is absolutely immune to the individual. Short of violent crime, it has assimilated the individual’s every conceivable political action into mainstream commercial activity. It fears only one thing: organization.
That’s why the one thing that would have really shaken Middle America last week wasn’t “creativity.” It was something else: uniforms. Three hundred thousand people banging bongos and dressed like extras in an Oliver Stone movie scares no one in America. But 300,000 people in slacks and white button-down shirts, marching mute and angry in the direction of Your Town, would have instantly necessitated a new cabinet-level domestic security agency.
Why? Because 300,000 people who are capable of showing the unity and discipline to dress alike are also capable of doing more than just march. Which is important, because marching, as we have seen in the last few years, has been rendered basically useless. Before the war, Washington and New York saw the largest protests this country has seen since the 60s—and this not only did not stop the war, it didn’t even motivate the opposition political party to nominate an antiwar candidate.
Read the rest. Any of you who marched in the huge yet futile anti-war protests pre-Iraq invasion will identify with Taibbi’s description of the various protester MO’s and costumes and the reality of being in a crowd of hundreds of thousand people making a statement that is totally ignored. I know libertarians debated whether it was even counterproductive to march with a bunch of fruitloops and commies and people carrying banners for a variety of pet causes that had nothing to do with opposition to the war. If nothing else, protests have to be focussed to have any effect. It would be interesting to see how many people would have the discipline to turn out to protest in uniform.