The Curious Leaderlessness of Modern Movements

In the summer of 2020, at the height of the Covid pandemic, America was raging at the death of George Floyd and violent protests took place in multiple cities. In Seattle, this movement reached its peak with the establishment of the leaderless Capitol Hill Occupied Protest (CHOP). The protestors occupied several blocks of the city, declared the area autonomous from Seattle, demanded police reform, raised awareness of issues affecting black trans lives, painted murals and played music. But less than a month later, CHOP dissolved after multiple shootings and at least 30 arrests within the community. Most of their demands were never met. A number of other early twenty-first political movements, including the Arab Spring and Occupy Wall Street have, like CHOP, produced mixed results and are remembered chiefly for having raised awareness.

Throughout history, protest movements have had a tough time making headway against entrenched powers, corrupt legislators, internal pressures and societies that are intent on maintaining order above all else. But when a movement begins online, it faces special difficulties. Movements that begin online tend to be fast-growing, vociferous and hard to repress at first—but also chaotic and unfocused. Without clear leaders to provide discipline, online movements can burn bright and fizzle fast. They can help people tear down existing structures. But they often fail to establish fairer alternatives or reinstate peace.

When Tunisian street vendor Mohamed Bouazizi set himself on fire on 17 December 2010, he sparked protests that spread across the Arab world, becoming an icon for angry young men disillusioned with broken and unresponsive governments in Tunisia, Libya, Egypt, Yemen, Syria, Bahrain and other Arab states. Social media—particularly Facebook—played a significant role in disseminating the ideas of the Arab Spring, providing these young men with an arena in which to organise protests, riots and civil wars. Their rage brought down governments and deposed many leaders.

But today, the Arab Spring is usually seen as a failure because it met with effective counterrevolutions or complete state failure in every country apart from Tunisia, which is democratically governed. Even there, the economic situation has only worsened since 2010 and 85% of its unemployed are young people. Far from lionising him, some people now curse the name of Mohamed Bouazizi. The lessons of the Arab Spring are perhaps best encapsulated by Paul Salem’s remark that “revolution is not transition.” Without leaders, mass online movements can become chaotic and fail to transmute anger and malaise into plans and policies.

The most effective movements of the twentieth century—both good and bad—were driven by leaders who galvanised their followers with specific messages despite—or perhaps because—of the fact that they lacked tools like Twitter. Martin Luther King Jr., for example, harnessed widespread black disaffection into peaceful protest and focused it into demands for voting and labour rights, desegregation and other basic rights. Occupy Wall Street was also founded on legitimate grievances like income inequality and student debt, but its agenda was too broad and vague and it lacked specific policy proposals and a recognisable single leader. Thus, the protestors’ anger never crystallised into enforceable legislative demands. Occupy Wall Street formed extremely quickly on Twitter and Facebook, spread all over the world—but fell apart under the weight of government crackdowns and sexual assault allegations that frittered away its public credibility. 

While it has had some long-term positive effects, such as bringing the issue of wealth inequality to the forefront of public consciousness, the inequality itself has either remained unchanged or has worsened, especially since Covid. Committed leaders who served as the movement’s representatives could have become the face of the movement on public media, reduced the noise into a few signal demands, leveraged their notoriety into opportunities to lobby lawmakers and roundly denounced any acts of sexual harassment. 

But enforcing this kind of discipline is a tall order today. Even at the best of times, it’s hard for a visible leader to emerge who is charismatic enough to express the dissatisfaction of a large group. The way in which decentralised protests are organised on social media makes it even harder to establish any kind of leadership. Raised on the extreme democracy of Twitter, everyone feels entitled to an equal voice. As a result, there aren’t many undisputed leaders today, only influencers steering the conversation but never assuming full control or  accountability. 

In CHOP, this lack of solid leadership led to murder, when people were killed by one of the occupation’s enforcers, who had brought firearms into the compound. Many people involved in CHOP expressed their frustration at the lack of leadership. There was disagreement as to who should speak for the group. Some people felt everyone should be able to speak up. Some felt that only black people should be allowed to represent the group or only black women. As a result, no real leaders or coherent narratives emerged. According to one protestor: 

CHOP is like if Twitter were an actual place. It’s full of different ideologies, perspectives, and pains, and everyone thinks they are right and no one wants to be a follower … I would hear the term “Black leadership” 15 times a day, and no one knew who they were. There wasn’t a group with shared ideas and leadership.

Of the 30 demands made by the CHOP protestors, the most important was the demand that Seattle Police Department’s $409 million budget be slashed by 50%. The city council did vote to cut the budget in 2021, but by just 9.5%. And in the following mayoral election, the winning candidate ran on a platform that included a proposal to increase the police budget.

While paranoia about unsavoury infiltrators is common to all mass movements, it’s especially common in leaderless modern movements. The free-for-all of social media makes it very difficult to vet a movement’s members or decide who is integral to the movement’s main aims. Anyone can declare oneself a member of the group, thus potentially diluting its message and damaging its credibility. “A lack of organisation means that they can’t say ‘This is not us,’” political scientist Yascha Mounk has commented. “The same is true of issues.”

The 2020 Black Lives Matter protests were accompanied by significant violence and destruction of property. Since these protests were decentralised and organised online, they had no clear leaders and the media spent a significant amount of time disentangling who exactly was responsible for the violence: BLM itself, Antifa, right-wing interlopers like the Proud Boys or other white nationalist groups. Local officials generally ascribed the violence to “outside agitators.” 

But the damage was done. Between April 2021 and May 2022, support for BLM fell across the board, especially among black Americans, because of the movement’s perceived strategies and tactics. BLM successfully placed itself at the centre of the country’s discussion of race and policing. But violence and vandalism by fringe or external elements chipped away at its credibility and it had no single leader who would have been able to condemn those actions or urge countermeasures. 

To achieve real social change, a movement needs charismatic leaders who can crystallise and express people’s needs. Though social media is an excellent tool for democratic expression and amplification of messages, it often prevents movements from coalescing around a few central ideas and hampers disciplined campaigning.

Perhaps the best recent example of modern leadership is that of the comedian Jon Stewart. Theoretically, he should have no authority on matters like the treatment of the 9/11 first responders. But his advocacy for them on The Daily Show was highly effective. His criticisms of the US Senate’s failure to fund a bill that would mandate healthcare and benefits for first responders led to a decade-long campaign to ensure they delivered on those demands. In 2019, he represented the first responders in Congress, speaking in opposition to a $7.375 billion cap on their compensation. In 2020, he delivered an emotional testimony to an embarrassed panel of legislators and eventually helped to secure the 9/11 Victim Compensation Fund, which will continue until the end of 2092. 

Stewart later used the methods he had learned in campaigning for first responders to help veterans exposed to toxic burn pits in Iraq, Afghanistan and other active military fields of operation. Through a combination of disciplined campaigning, direct call-outs and specific demands, he successfully pressured the Senate to pass the PACT Act, which funds medical treatment for veterans. In these campaigns, social media was used to amplify the voices of the aggrieved, not as the main means of organising the protests themselves. 

Future protest movements can learn from this model. Protestors need to take more deliberate steps to find the right leaders.