The Overlap Between BLM and Anti-lockdown Protesters – The Atlantic

In 2020, two major protest movements defined our political landscape: the racial-justice protests after the murder of George Floyd and the anti-lockdown protests pushing against COVID-19 restrictions.

At the time, these movements were seen by many as near-polar opposites and were often defined by their extremes. For the police-brutality protests, images of Minneapolis on fire and demands for total police abolition seemed to define the movement. For the anti-lockdown protests, militiamen with firearms in and around state capitols were among the most striking visuals. And an association with fringe right-wing groups marred the public-health protests with a sense of extremism.

But research from economist Nick Papageorge complicates these findings. Along with his co-authors, Papageorge ran surveys in the summer of 2020 that captured demographic and ideological information about the people who participated in these movements. Much to Papageorges surprise, his findings revealed significant overlap between the BLM and anti-lockdown protest movements. Andon some metricsthe paper reveals that the protesters were not out of touch with the majority of Americans. Rather, they were more representative of the country than even the 2020 electorate.

In this episode of Good on Paper, I speak with Papageorge, a professor at Johns Hopkins University who largely works at the intersection of public health and economics.

There has been this notion of, Maybe its just fun. Protesting is the new brunch was one of the things that came out, Papageorge said. And I think that was one part of the caricaturization, right? That there are these gun-toting vigilantes protesting. And then there were these privileged leftist extremists going to these BLM protests. And that just wasnt in line with what we were finding. The median protester was not an extremist.

Listen to the conversation here:

The following is a transcript of the episode:

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Jerusalem Demsas: This is Good on Paper, a policy show that questions what we really know about popular narratives.

Im your host, Jerusalem Demsas. Im a staff writer here at The Atlantic, where much of my written work begins with seeing a new working paper come out and following it down a research rabbit hole.

An exciting, new finding is always great, but the most important work is figuring out how it sits in the context of the rest of our knowledge base. What is it adding? Where does it depart from consensus?

And particularly when were talking about new findings in economicsthose often come from early versions of papers, before all the levels of review have been completed, so theres an extra, added level of scrutiny you have to have.

Theres one such paper thats been stuck in my brain since I first saw it come into my inbox more than two years agoone that upended much of my thinking around the protests in 2020.

The paper is called, Who Protests, What Do They Protest, and Why? and it focuses on the demographic and ideological characteristics of protesters in two major social movements: The BLM protests following the murder of George Floyd and the anti-lockdown protests that came in response to restrictive COVID-19 rules.

The paper finds that nearly 30 percent of protesters attended both a BLM and a lockdown protest, indicating significant overlap in the types of people attracted to both movementsand the research shows that these people are protestors, not counterprotesters. This finding really surprised me and made me question my priors about what kinds of people were attracted to these movements.

Now, its not possible to talk about protests without thinking about those that rocked college campuses this year. While this conversation doesnt touch on those protests, because we taped it in the spring, the research still has some lessons in it for those drawing large conclusions about whos protesting and why, and whether contemporaneous media reports can give us an accurate picture of chaotic events.

The stakes of misunderstanding the composition of protesters are high: Who we think is protesting drives how we respond to them. Who we think make up social movements affects whether our leaders react to them, and how. And, most importantly, for me, as a journalist, my own misunderstandings of what the 2020 protests were shaped my thinking about public-health restrictions and whether they had gone too far.

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I asked the lead author of that paper to come help me think through all of this. Nick Papageorge is an economist at Johns Hopkins University, where he mostly focuses on the intersection of public health and economics.

Lets dive in.

Demsas: All right. Nick, welcome to the show.

Nick Papageorge: Thank you. Thank you for having me.

Demsas: So I want to take us back to spring of 2020. It was a really scary time. COVID-19 was in full swing. We were seeing caseloads rising. I remember just being terrified. I didnt really know what was the way to keep yourself or the people you cared about safe.

I was lucky that I got to work from home the entire time. But at the same time, it was just like there was such different, changing informational environments. It just felt very chaotic. And the advice we were all getting was just stay away from other people, stay masked, and just limit contact as much as possible.

And spring of 2020 is also when George Floyd is murdered. And in response, a nationwide movement erupted. Protests were happening in most American cities and even around the world. And all of a sudden, I have a vivid memory of seeing this open letter thats signed by over 1,200 peoplepublic-health professionals, infectious-disease professionalsand its a weird document from the time because you have them criticizing the heavily armed and predominantly white protesters for protesting stay-at-home orders, but then they say that, actually, the anti-racism protests were completely justifiable under public-health grounds.

Readingquoting directly from it nowthey say, Do not disband protests under the guise of maintaining public health for COVID-19 restrictions. And it just felt very weird to me. It felt very weird that you had public-health professionals who, ostensibly, were giving us advice about how to stay healthy now telling us that, Well, for certain things it was okay to break some of these guidelines. So what was your reaction to that letter?

Papageorge: I think if I could start at a high level, one of the critiques coming from economistsand people have an idea of what economists do, and it has to do with banks and finance and interest rates. And it turns out that what we do is a lot closer to what maybe comes into your mind when youre thinking about what a sociologist does: We study people and behavior and factors that affect behavior, sources of inequality, and so on.

And so one of the things that really frustrated economists was there seemed to be this implied hierarchy about what was important in these public-health debates. And, of course, we dont want people to die from a disease. At the same time, kids not going to school is really, really harmful. And I dont know where different people are going to land in that debate, because I could certainly see somebody saying, Look, preventing any death is just the most paramount thing. I could also hear somebody saying, We need kids to go to school. Thats just the most important thing.

I cant tell you which one of those two is the right one. What I dont think we did was recognize this really nasty trade-offthis really brutal trade-offand have that conversation. And then there was this implied view about whats a worthy thing to do, and I guess it wasnt opening schools.

Demsas: Like, whats worth risking COVID-19?

Papageorge: Right, exactly. Whats worth risking COVID-19? And we decidedor it was decidedthat, Well, okay, but going to a BLM protest is okay. And I think that undermined some credibility of some of these decisions that were made on our behalf. And I think that maybe I agreed, in a way, with that trade-off. I decided to leave the house and join a big group to go to a BLM protest. But I could see why people might have thought, Hey, wait. Youre telling me I cant take my kid to school but that Im allowed to go to this protest? That doesnt seem right. Who decided that?

Demsas: I was rocked back to this. I remember vividly a couple years ago whenand Im going to out myself as a weirdo for this, butthe National Bureau of Economic Research puts out this weekly rundown of studies, and Ill click through them. And I remember seeing your study in 2022, when it first came out, and seeing the findings that people who attended anti-public-health protests and people who attended BLM protests, that there was a lot of overlap over those people. Can you tell us about that? How did you find that? Like, what was the process of even doing that survey?

Papageorge: It was a strange study for me. We were playing with data, and we found a pattern that didnt make sense. And so we had to come back and figure out: Whats the question this is answering?

Demsas: Yeah. Why were you doing the survey in the first place?

Papageorge: The survey started pretty soon after the emergence of COVID-19. And Washington University got some outside funding to run a high-quality survey. I was asked to contribute some thoughts on what we might want to look at. That is because Ive looked at infectious disease before in the economic context, in particular HIV, risky behavior, how it interacts with medication usage, and employment, and these kinds of thingsthese health-economic interactions.

So we started asking questions, and then the data setwe were going to go back for several rounds. And so by the time of the second round of questions, when they were asking whether we wanted to add more questions, the BLM protests had started. And so we thought, Well, we should probably collect data on whether or not people are attending them. And thenI dont know who in the group (it might have been me; I dont think it was)somebody said, Well, there are these other protests going on for reopening. I dont want to quite call them anti-public health. I think that they were maybe pro-reopening. And so

Demsas: No, fair. Thats probably a biased way of me talking about it.

Papageorge: So there were these protests and, in my mind, there was still this caricature that these were, like, gun-toting vigilantes, and that we, Okay, sure, we should probably collect that data as well, because were trying to be scientists here. And I thought, Why dont we see whats predicting protest attendance? Obviously, you know, going to a BLM protest probably predicts not going to a reopening protest, just because that would make sense according to my bias, my priors.

And we found the opposite. And then we checked it again, and we found the opposite again, and then we really started to kick the tires. But the result didnt go away, and so then we entered this period of thinking, Okay, maybe this is novel, and maybe we need to start to figure out why this might make sense. Economics, as a field, tries to be a little bit apolitical. I would say that one out of every five of my findings, Im like, Oh man.

Demsas: (Laughs.) Didnt want to find that out.

Papageorge: Didnt want to find that. But you shouldnt be able to tell my politics by reading my papers. But one thing I did think to myself was, I am getting frustrated by some of the public-health mandates that seem to me to be a little bit excessive.

Demsas: More than just the closing schools or other stuff?

Papageorge: Just the decisions that didnt make, to me, a whole lot of sense, like, Okay, were gonna let some bars open, but were gonna keep the schools closed.

Demsas: Yeah, yeah.

Papageorge: And I just was like, Okay, well, what are we waiting for here? Whats the evidence, and wheres the cost-benefit analysis here?

Demsas: Yeah.

Papageorge: Like, at what point

Demsas: And whose values are being followed?

Papageorge: Whose values are being used in that cost-benefit [analysis], right?

And so I was getting more and more concerned that, throughout this entire period, you could still get stuff off of Amazon. Theres all these people that had to still work. And they dont have the kind of job that I have, where I can telework. And I started thinking about just the mental-health burden. I started thinking about my own kid, who, you knowhe has two parents who still have jobs, but I know that hes missing out on socialization at this critical period. These costs are starting to build up. And so I was getting frustrated, and I remember my husband saying to me, If its shut down again in Baltimore city, Im going to go to join a reopening protest.

Demsas: Wow.

Papageorge: And it was kind of joking, I think, or maybe he wasnt. I think he was serious. And wed gone to BLM protests, and I thought that we were just really isolated in having that mixture of views. And so when I looked at the data, I thought, Oh, maybe we werent.

Demsas: But its really interesting to me that you were surprised by these findings, even though they represented your own views.

Papageorge: Thats totally true. But thats one of the things also, I thinkand maybe Im just conditioned to be like this with science, to really remove myself from my science. And so I dont necessarily assume that folksI think thats one of the biggest dangers in sciences, especially in the social sciences, is thinking that your views are representative, that your opinions are shared by others. I think a lot of good social science comes when you step back and listen to other people and make sure youre not speaking for them, but maybe elevating their voices.

Demsas: Well, lets dig in a little bit into some of the findings here on the numbers. So, 33 percent of BLM protesters identified as Republicans, and 36 percent of reopening protesters as Democrats. I mean, just generally stepping back, if I think about how these were characterized, we think about BLM protests as a left-wing movement and the reopening protest as a right-wing movement. So when you actually look at who is involved in these protests, what are you actually seeing? Who are these people? And where is the overlap?

Papageorge: Right. So, if you go to a BLM protest, or if you report having gone to a BLM protest, they tended to be a little more Democratic. And then the reopening protests tended to be a little bit more Republican. But then there was this mixture, right? There were plenty of Republicans at BLM protests, and there were plenty of Democrats at these reopening protests, which again, I thought was a little bit strange.

But I do remember in the early days of the BLM protests, it wasnt the same movement that it is today, which I think its become much more politicized. You know, you remember Mitt Romney was joining in these protests. There was this outrage from a lot of different places that was collective. The other thing that we found interesting is that people who protested tended to be working in person and have children, which you would think, These are things that are going to make me not want to protest. We also found that people and different measures of well-being were higher.

Demsas: Like higher well-being meant you were more likely to go to a protest?

Papageorge: Yes.

Demsas: Yeah, okay.

Papageorge: Which again, you wonder, Isnt it frustration and anger that drives you to protest? But then there is precedent in earlier research saying that people might go to protests and then feel good. Maybe they feel like they have some say, they have some agency here. Maybe it was cathartic to go to the protest. Or we could just be thinking that people who are energetic and feeling good about themselves are the kinds of people who will go to a protest, as well.

Demsas: Yeah.

Papageorge: I think that if one reflects a little bit on it, it makes sense that folks who mightve been really frustrated with the state of things were folks who were working and who were worried about losing their job. These are also parents who have lost their childcare arrangements, which was incredibly frustrating. But I can also imagine those same parents saying, I dont want my kid to grow up in a world where this kind of violence happens. And so that was another set of findings.

One thing that we found strange was that people who saw themselves at greater risk of COVID-19 were more likely to go to protests.

Demsas: I found this super interesting. So first of all, youre just asking the question: How scared are you of dying, of getting sick? Or how are you determining that?

Papageorge: So you can do different things. One is kind of more objective, where you can just look at the county caseloads or county reports. And, if I remember correctly, we have a positive correlation with it, but a lot of that can just be, Hey, there were more protests available in places where there were higher rates, right? Maybe bigger cities or whatever.

You can also ask people about their beliefs. Now, doing that is always wacky, so we got sort of wacky answers there.

Demsas: You got high numbers, right? Like, 30 percent chance of death?

Papageorge: Exactly. But in our defense, anybody who looks to get beliefs data, its really tricky to do that. And people answer in a very wacky way.

Demsas: But also if you asked me in June 2020, what I thought the risk of death from COVID wasI remember my dad, who always, every year around June gets really bad allergies. My dad has really bad ones. I remember him calling me like, Hey, I feel kind of sick. And I just freaked out. I went to his apartment, and I just dropped offId just been on Twitter, looking up random virologists and being like, Are they using Motrin? Are they using Tylenol? Are they usingyou know what I mean? So theres a level where I think I would have said, Oh my gosh, Im acting like I think my fathers going to die, you know? And so I dont know how I would have evaluated that.

Papageorge: Yeah, I think thats right. There is a whole lot of research on how to collect these kinds of data. And if you want to do it well, you have to do it really carefully, kind of anchoring people. For example, people are really bad at small probabilities. So maybe something thats, like, 0.1-percent chance, theyll think its 10. And to them, its the same number.

Demsas: It just means small. Yeah.

Papageorge: But I mean, these are massively different numbers. I think if I remember, on average, people thought there was a 30-percent chance that they would get COVID-19, which maybe thats not so bad. But then they think if you get COVID-19, theres a 30 percent chance of dying. And youre thinking, Okay.

Demsas: And thats if they go to the protest?

Papageorge: No, no. This is just in general. So youre thinking, Okay, this is really high. But we did find that people who saw themselves at greater risk of COVID-19 were more likely to go to the protests, which that in itself doesnt surprise me, because that could just be a recognition that, you know, I do risky things. And so, that actually checks out.

Demsas: So, you find that 28 percent of protesters attended both a reopening protest and a BLM protest. One hypothesis raised when I first read this paper was: Maybe there are just certain kinds of people who like to protest, or not like it as an activity but have a high propensity to just protest if its something thats available in their area.

And I was looking into the literature on this, and theres a study by a sociologist at the University of South Carolina at Aiken. Her name is Michelle Petrie, and she looks at the determinants of protest participation. And one thing she brings up is this concept called biographical availability, which is basically whether someone has the time, particularly unstructured time, where they feel like theyre less at risk of being surveilled or facing consequences for engaging in protest.

And she cites Doug McAdam, who has this paper about the 1964 Mississippi Freedom Summer Project, and he finds that then the people who participated largely came from affluent families, where they were in their early 20s. Its summer, so they didnt have jobs. They were unemployed, unlikely to be married.

I mean, in your sense, is it whats going on here? It feels like theres two potential hypothesesand maybe theyre both true. One is that theres a large overlap on these ideologies between people who were concerned about anti-police brutality and people who were worried about reopening and public-health restrictions. But its also possible that a lot of people are just like, Maybe Ill just protest. You know what I mean? And so how do you tease that out?

Papageorge: I think its hard to tease out, is the first thing. And I think that there is this notion of biographical availability. Certain people are just going to be more likely to protest. And thats something that we spend a lot of time doing. Thats why we look at these predictors. What are the factors that seem to predict protest attendance?

And I think the storys a bit nuanced because, Okay, sure. Younger? That makes sense. That checks out. But having kids and also working in person? That does not. And then there was also and has been this notion of, you know, Maybe its just fun. Protesting is the new brunch was one of the things that came out.

And I think that was one part of the caricaturization, right? That there are these gun-toting vigilantes protesting. And then there were these privileged, leftist extremists going to these BLM protests. And that just wasnt in line with what we were finding. The median protester was not an extremist. The median protester was not somebody who had plenty of time on their hands or plenty of affluence, and so they dont even need to worry about working. People seem to be overcoming obstacles to get there. And so thats got to be at least part of the story.

We also were able to look at police shootings in the area where these folks were, and that seemed to be also predictive.

Demsas: So if there were more police shootings, theyre more likely

Papageorge: If there were more police shootings, you were more likely to go to BLM, exactly. And so that seems to suggest that this isnt just a leisure activity, but something that people are taking seriously.

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Demsas: Okay, were going to take a quick break, but more with Nick when we get back.

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Demsas: This is something I find with economists a lot when Im talking to them, that theres a lot of frustration that, in many ways, our official apparatuses dont take into account costs like fun

Papageorge: (Laughs.)

Demsas: Things that you like to do that make your life happy. The trade-off, of course: We wanted people to stop dying and, especially at the very beginning, when we had no information, it makes a lot of sense to shut down a lot of things.

But its interesting to think back again to that letter we talked about at the beginning because, in many ways, that letter was actually the way you would want public-health officials to engage with trade-offs. Because they go into it, and they say, Yes, of course, there are concerns with catching COVID-19 in public spaces. But also, people have a legitimate concern about protesting and about anti-racism. Our goal, as public-health professionals, is to provide them the tools to do mitigation of that kind of damage. And it was like, Where is that trade-off thinking in any other space?

Papageorge: Right. No, thats what I think was soand to be fair to people in public health, and I work now with some epidemiologists, there is now this call, in general for, Okay, we need to figure out a way to think about these trade-offs more carefully.

Obviously, there are some folks who still think any one death is worth just infinity and therefore anything else is just secondary. Fine. Thats what they think. I just dont. One reason: We know poverty is deadly, so youre not comparing apples to oranges.

And so what it really comes down to is its kind of, Whose life matters more? And I think thats really hard when youre comparing, say, my somewhere-in-her-70s mom and a low-income kid in the city. And, you know, whose life matters? Well, both. But youre going to put a policy together thats going to probably harm one person less than the other. And I think its really hard to think about that.

Demsas: Yeah. And, to me, there were so many times during the pandemic where I felt the way that public-health professionalsthe value system in placewas sort of what I later learned is called the precautionary principle. It is this ideado no harm is the very simple way of doing it, of just saying, Okay, whatever you actually are going to do, make sure99.999 percent sure, even 100 percent surethat anything you do is not going to cause harm. And that means lets not approve tests if were not 100 percent sure that theyre going to be perfectly accurate or at a really high level of accuracy, even though the status quo is that we have no tests. People have no way of figuring out whether or not they might be infected.

And I wonder, do you think that the finding that youre having in this paper, and also the research youve done in other spaces, is that pushing the public-health field to think differently? Or are you seeing any kind of changes at all in the public-health field in response to how many people felt that trade-offs werent really adequately considered during 2020?

Papageorge: So I absolutely think that this paper and other work Ive done pushes against this idea that, in public-health contexts, health is the only thing to think about. Ive made a whole career off of thinking about the way that health interacts with other factors that are important to us. Were not health maximizers. We might have been. I mean, you can imagine some creatures living in some other planet that the only thing they care about is their health.

Demsas: Theyre living on Soylent.

Papageorge: Longevity is the only thing you care about. I mean, just any decision we make on any given day shows that thats not true. We leave our house. We eat fried foods. We drink. We get into cars. We get on planes. We do all sorts of things that show that we are not health maximizers. Were lots-of-things maximizers. Health is one of them. We would rather be healthy than not healthy if it were for free. The thing is, its not for free.

Link:

The Overlap Between BLM and Anti-lockdown Protesters - The Atlantic