Speech and action: The power of protest

Passing the Frist filibuster in its second night, a friend told me he had decided that the event's critics were right. Our Senators are democratically elected, he argued. Let them vote, and if the Republicans win, they've won fairly and squarely. "Besides," he added, "why is this protest being held at Princeton? It should be happening in a red state, or at least in a purple one." In other words, who will listen? What effect can the words of a bunch of liberal, privileged college students ever hope to have?

Unfortunately, much of the debate over recent protests at Princeton has been in this vein. An oft-repeated argument against the proposal to ban ROTC from campus pointed out that a similar action by Harvard did nothing to influence national policy. Likewise, the Frist filibuster was criticized as unlikely to garner attention. It is commendable that Princeton students want to make a difference, but when this desire stifles protests deemed unable to have an impact, something is very, very wrong.

In her 1951 work "The Origins of Totalitarianism," philosopher Hannah Arendt identifies political speech as absolutely necessary for freedom; it is the silencing of this speech that leads to totalitarianism. Only democracy, according to Arendt, preserves the plurality of speech necessary to hold totalitarianism at bay. However, she criticizes the American political system for its marginalization of discourse, which should be central. When a plurality of voices is condensed into a universal majority voice, the exclusion of the differing minority voices removes those individuals' political freedom.

Protest, then, should aim first to preserve a plurality of speech. The unlikelihood of the larger aspiration — the hope to make a visible difference — cannot be allowed to stifle the more basic political action of speaking out. Even if no one is listening, those staging the mock filibuster are exercising their political rights, and to suppress these rights through apathy is to dismiss the institution of democracy.

The truth remains that the implications of an act of speech can reach much farther than the speaker imagined. Organizers of the filibuster expected the event to last a few days; instead, the protest has received national attention. Attended by Congressmen, covered in the Washington Post, The New York Times, CNN, MSN and Fox News, the filibuster took its show on the road to Washington, D.C., to protest in the nation's capital in front of political movers and shakers. The success of the Frist filibuster derives precisely from the forum it provides for ordinary people to speak their minds, enfranchising the voices of many in a way that has projected action far beyond the sphere of the Princeton University campus.

Princeton students must overcome their reluctance to protest, whether it stems from cynicism or apathy. Raising one's voice constitutes a political action whether or not the result is a change in policy. It is the citizen's political responsibility to speak out against what he deems wrong, and especially against decisions that would curtail his ability to speak out in the future. This is what the filibusterers are doing in protesting the "nuclear option." If we want our democracy to function, we must not give in to political apathy just because we cannot immediately predict how far our voices may reach. Emily Stolzenberg is a sophomore from Morgantown, W. Va. She can be reached at estolzen@princeton.edu.