>What hasn't been discussed here is that demos like this set up the
>anti-war movement up for unfavorable comparisons with past demos. It
>doesn't take much for a jouranlist to look around and say, "Hey,
>this is a lot less than last January. This must mean that the
>movement is dying out."
Yup, that's a really important point. If a major point of demos is to affect public opinion, it really helps when they're on a trajectory of growth. That's one of the reasons the NYT declared "global public opinion" to be a superpower. Maybe I've been corrupted by following Wall Street, where the level of an actual number often matters less than how it compares to expectations, but when even organizers were stunned by turnouts for antiwar demos earlier this year, that had a real effect on how the movement was perceived by pundits and the public. With memories of those big numbers, a tiny demo in DC - whether it was 10k or 40k hardly matters - is measured against expectations formed by those big numbers from earlier this year. And it looks like the movement is dying out, just as Chuck0 says. And like I said yesterday, I don't think mass demos are appropriate when the real task is education and thinking through complicated positions. It makes a lot more sense to gather 200k people to say "No war!" To gather 10-40k to say, um, what exactly?, doesn't make so much sense.
Doug