Demonstrators march with flags and signs during a protest against Chile's state economic model in Santiago, Chile, on Oct. 25, 2019.IVAN ALVARADO/Reuters
Niall Ferguson is the Milbank Family senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford
“Baby shark, do-do, do-do, do-do, baby shark, do-do, do-do, do-do …”
I am not sure how reassuring I would find that song if I were 15 months old and sitting in a car surrounded by a crowd of political protesters. However, credit to them for doing their best to soothe the little Lebanese lad whose mother made the mistake of driving into their demonstration last weekend.
As revolutionary anthems go, Baby Shark is unusual. The bloodthirsty Marseillaise it ain’t, nor the once stirring, now threadbare Internationale. When the late-1960s hipster radicals took to the streets, their soundtrack was classic rock’n’roll: the Beatles’ Revolution or the Rolling Stones’ Street Fighting Man. And yet Baby Shark – vacuous, repetitive, inane, infantile – is in many ways an appropriate anthem for our times.
The great revolutionary waves of the past had common objectives. Liberty, equality and fraternity in 1789; the nationalist springtime of the peoples in 1848 (and 1989); peace, land and bread in 1917; make love, not war in 1968. You will look in vain for such a uniting theme in the multiple protests that have occurred around the world this year.
In Hong Kong, the trigger was an extradition bill that threatened to subordinate the semi-autonomous region’s common-law legal system to the mainland Communist Party.
In Barcelona, by contrast, protesters took to the streets after harsh sentences were handed down to the separatist leaders responsible for 2017’s illegal referendum on Catalan independence. Beirut’s protests are said to have been triggered by a plan to tax WhatsApp. In Quito, the Ecuadorian capital, they were up in arms against austerity measures required by the International Monetary Fund. In Santiago, Chile, it was all about bus and metro fares. In Cairo, it was corruption.
Meanwhile, central London suffers intermittent traffic chaos because of a millenarian sect calling itself Extinction Rebellion, which believes that the end of the world is nigh, as well as opponents of Brexit who still haven’t got over their defeat in the 2016 referendum.
None of this is convincing. “We are not here over the WhatsApp,” a Lebanese protester told the BBC. “We are here over everything.” That seems about right. What the protests of 2019 have in common is their form, not their content.
Superficially, mass protest is one of history’s hardy perennials. Well, not quite.
For one thing, the protests of 2019 are the first to be organized through smartphone, which is fast becoming a truly universal gadget. Smartphones enable today’s protests to function with minimal leadership. Yes, there are individuals whom the media elevate in their importance to give the crowd a face and a voice. But the reality is that these movements are acephalous – leaderless – networks. They are collectively improvised, rather than conducted. They are jazz, not classical.
In Hong Kong this summer, for example, the protesters used a Reddit-like forum, LIHKG, where ideas could be upvoted. They crowd sourced supplies of umbrellas and rides to and from Central, the focal point of the protests. The organizing principle of this adaptive mode of operation was martial arts icon Bruce Lee’s phrase “Be water."
Second, acephalous networks are inherently hard to defeat, as Hong Kong’s chief executive Carrie Lam has discovered, to her cost. At the same time, the internet has made it easier than it has ever been for protest tactics to be disseminated. Now every wannabe revolutionary understands that disrupting the airport is similar to taking the urban economy hostage.
In every country where large-scale protests have been reported in the past year, higher education is at an all-time high.
Compare the World Bank’s 2016 figures for gross enrolment in tertiary education (as a percentage of the total population of the relevant five-year age group) with those for the late 1980s. In Chile, the share has risen to 90 per cent from 18 per cent. In Ecuador, it’s up to 46 per cent from 25. Egypt: 34 per cent from 15. France: 64 per from 34. Hong Kong: 72 per cent from 13. Lebanon: 38 per cent from 32. (the smallest increase). Top of the class is Turkey: 104 per cent from 12 (it must have a lot of mature students).
These, then, are the baby sharks: The excess of educated young people who are currently taking to the streets in cities around the world. It does not help that so many professors fill their students’ heads with incoherent notions of social justice. But I suspect the real issue is the mismatch between the unparalleled glut of graduates and the demand for them.
At some point, it will sink in that creating economic mayhem is the opposite of creating jobs. Until then, expect more traffic chaos. At least you now know what to sing when the baby sharks surround you.