Vincent Bevins: ‘The elites have discovered they can govern us without legitimacy’

In the time that elapsed between 2011 and 2015 — before Trump stormed the White House twice and Elon Musk stormed Twitter; before Putin and Erdogan amended their countries’ constitutions to give themselves unprecedented powers; before Russia and Israel gave themselves permission to invade their neighbors; before the rise of the far right, hoaxes and fake news campaigns; before the daily attacks on the media and democracy — before all these power drives became our daily dose of reality, millions of people took to the streets practically at the same time to say “enough” to the drift of the world.

Those were months that provided historic images and headlines. Hundreds of thousands of Egyptians occupied Tahrir Square in January 2011 and succeeded in ousting dictator Hosni Mubarak. In Madrid, the 15-M, also known as the Indignados movement, occupied Puerta del Sol. In Kyiv, it was Maidan Square. There was an Occupy Wall Street protest in New York, Jornadas de Junho in Brazil in 2013, and an Occupy Central protest in Hong Kong. Supposedly, more people took to the streets then than at any other time in history. “The people who count these things came to the conclusion that more people took part in protests in the 2010s than at any other point in human history. The number exceeded the previous record that had been set, the famous wave of global contention in the 1960s,” notes Vincent Bevins, 40 — who has become one of the world’s leading authorities on that period — speaking on a recent sunny afternoon in London.

Bevins, an international reporter who has worked for the Financial Times in London, The Los Angeles Times in Brazil, and The Washington Post in Indonesia, not only witnessed the Brazilian protests with his own eyes (and was tear-gassed for it): he is also the author of the new book If We Burn: The Mass Protest Decade and the Missing Revolution. In it, he travels to a dozen countries and speaks to around two hundred people to capture a moment that seemed poised to herald a profound historical change, yet now seems to have been relegated to an anecdote.

“What interested me about this phenomenon is not just that things didn’t work out: In the history of social movements, it is the most familiar story in the world that something didn’t work. A large amount of people ask for something, even for something that seems just, and nothing happens. What happened in the 2010s was much more strange. It’s not that nothing happened, it wasn’t that there was failure. You look at those euphoric moments of apparent victory, the quantity of humanity pouring into the streets or squares, at levels capable of bringing about fundamental changes, of overthrowing governments, or, in less pronounced cases, destabilizing societies… after these moments of apparent and euphoric victory, if we came back a few years later, not only did these moments of apparent triumph lead to very little, in many cases they led to a reversal. The opportunities that were generated led not only just to nothing, but in many cases to something worse than nothing.”

The people who took to Tahrir Square in 2011 and ousted Hosni Mubarak from power ended up under the rule of Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, an even more repressive and militarized dictator. The Brazilians who took to the streets against the social democratic government in 2013 watched their protests get co-opted by the far right and saw Jair Bolsonaro leave the country in a much worse state when he left power in 2023. The UN announced in 2010 that Libya had the highest human development index in the world; in 2017, it denounced the trafficking of slaves within its borders.

What the heck happened to these protests?

The resistance of the 2010s was fundamentally reactive: the rejection of a class of people that are supposed to be representing the citizens. Perhaps the most famous expression of it was in Spanish: “No nos representan” (They don’t represent us). There was a moment of apparent victory as a result of apparently spontaneous, leaderless, digitally coordinated, horizontally structured mass protests in public squares and public spaces. This recipe proved incredibly explosive. But once those opportunities were created, when the dictators fled the country, it turns out a protest of this specific type cannot fill that power vacuum, cannot form a transitional government or a revolutionary committee.

Was the problem a power vacuum?

Imagine if Che Guevara and Fidel Castro hadn’t been willing or able to form a new government after ousting Batista. More likely, the remnants of the previous regime’s military would have gotten together with the economic elites, and probably representatives from the U.S. government, and cobbled together a government that was a lot like the Batista regime but without the same last name. This is often what happened. The revolt itself didn’t take advantage of the opportunities it created in any of the cases I’ve studied. It was always some other actor. Sometimes it was someone already in power or already organized and ready to act, and other times it was an imperialist counterattack (Bahrain) or an invasion from abroad (in 2011, Libya descended into civil war, and NATO intervened). There are, however, cases of allies of the streets who eventually rise to power: Gabriel Boric in Chile, but he also failed to overthrow Pinochet’s Constitution.

Didn’t they really represent us?

This isn’t subjective. I’m oversimplifying various national and political contexts, but we know this is a real thing. Serious mainstream middle-of-the-road political scientists have published empirical studies showing that the state now in advanced capitalist nations is more responsive to economic power than it is to regular people. Actually, it may be entirely unresponsive to regular people unless they are somehow allied with or supported by economic elites. So the crisis of representation is real.

Has the passing of the years strengthened it?

I’m going to borrow an idea from the Brazilian philosopher Rodrigo Nunes: at the beginning of the 2010s, we found ourselves in a massive crisis of legitimacy of the state. The ruling elites of states not only in North Africa and parts of Asia and Latin America, but also in North America and Western Europe, did not have legitimacy. The people of their polities did not really grant them the right to speak in their name. And then in the second half of the 2010s, you get the ruling class learning to live with this and they can just get away with it. There’s no referee in the global system, there’s no one that will blow the whistle or throw a red card at you when you just abuse… What Trump is doing now, what Elon Musk has done [buying a social network to change the outcome of an election, announcing that he was doing it, and being rewarded with a position in the government of the world’s leading power] are things that would have been absolutely unimaginable 10 years ago.

Who’s going to tell them off anyway?

They also realized that anyone can take to the streets. Fascists and anti-democratic forces can take over a square where they all wear the same color and use Twitter. In the 1960s, the streets were leftist: in Brazil in 1964, in Chile in 1973… But look at Brazil from 2013 to 2016, or we could even say January 6, 2021, in Washington. There’s nothing ontologically progressive about any given tactic. Tactics are tools, and they either fit into a larger strategy or they don’t.

Why did we protest then and not as much now, when the average citizen has things going even less in their favor?

That decade saw exceptionally large-scale participation thanks to digital mobilization. Social media is an important part of the protests, not as much as was written in 2011, but important. You know, I’ve given a lot of talks about this book in a bunch of countries, and it’s hard for me to impress upon younger people how much everyone really believed back in 2010 that the internet was going to make the world a better place, and that social media was going to make the world more free, more democratic, more transparent and happier. Basically everybody believed it.

LOL.

That optimism has naturally faded. On the other hand, the memory left behind by these protests is often traumatic. A lot of the left of the center of Brazil’s political spectrum ended up with a fear of the streets with, “Oh my God, what if we do that again, maybe it’s going to go far-right again.” That did happen from 2013 to 2016. You get something similar in the case of Egypt.

If mass participation is a defining, and perhaps counterproductive, feature of the protests, so too is their clonal capacity. How could Tahrir Square be replicated in places with political landscapes so far removed from Egypt such as Puerta del Sol in Spain, Syntagma Square in Greece, or Wall Street in the U.S.?

In studies of revolts, protests, and revolutions from the 18th century to the 2010s, people talked about waves: the revolutionary wave of 1848 in Europe, the wave of attempts to replicate the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917. When I talk about that decade, I usually talk about copying and pasting. My book is called The Mass Protest Decade, but it could be called “The Decade of Tahrir Square.” That rebellion was essentially broadcast live. The acceleration of the reproduction of words and images had basically reached a point of near instantaneity. Spain, Greece, and New York are the most famous examples, with New York being the most explicit case: the Canadian anti-globalization magazine Adbusters said, “We need to do Tahrir Square in New York.” And that’s how Occupy Wall Street came about. In 2014, there was an Occupy Central Movement in Hong Kong, when it was already known that Egypt had suffered a counterrevolutionary military coup.

Many of the protests had their own trigger. A fruit vendor, Mohamed Bouazizi, publicly set himself on fire in the face of harassment from the authorities, sparking the Arab Spring. In Brazil, it was the rise in public transit fares.

It’s very easy to look at these incidents and say: OK, the protest was about this. But if you trace their development over one, two, three weeks, three months, you see that what motivated them could change from one day to the next, from morning to night. In Ukraine, it exploded because a small group at the very beginning protested Viktor Yanukovych’s decision not to sign an association agreement with the European Union; then, after the police crackdown, many people who were against the agreement joined in. After that, there are several versions of what happened in Maidan Square in Kyiv. In Brazil, I even saw the newer, more right-wing protesters shouting at those who had been there longer.

Was this ideological lack of definition the movement’s Achilles heel?

This is a crude analogy, but imagine that factory workers in 20th-century Italy go on strike and convince the factory owner to give them something. The owner doesn’t have to agree with them to understand that it’s in his best interest to get them to go back to work. But in order for him to believe that, there has to be a clear list of demands with the implicit promise that if that happens, things will get back up and running. Otherwise, the factory owner would respond either by suppressing the revolt or by letting it drag on until the workers ran out of food and the revolt would dissolve. That’s more or less the two kinds of outcomes you have in the 2010s.

For journalists, it was a tough change: you had to be knowledgeable about Egypt, Libya and Spain at the same time (and very few of them were), stay up-to-date on social media, and absorb events that sometimes only became more distorted the more you were out on the street... None of our old reporting tools worked. And what we thought were global experts turned out to be filling in their gaps with ideology.

It was an absolute failure of our class, the international journalists at the major news outlets. Everyone who took to the streets of São Paulo in 2013 came back with their personal explanation of what was happening. And, since I personally knew the journalists — “that guy’s a little more left-wing and that guy really thinks corruption’s the big thing” — I could see that reflected in their coverage. Were they choosing to lie? No. I think they were given a tiny window of time to go to streets occupied by millions of people with millions of reasons to be there. Each one came back with their own interpretations based on their deep assumptions.

Was it especially confusing for news consumers?

Journalists looked at the protests and thought: Does it look good? In two ways. First, is the image good? And second, is this country’s government one of the good guys or the bad guys? Because if it’s one of the bad guys, China’s or Putin’s, there’s no need to know any more; the protests are good. But if the government is a good guy, we have to ask some hard questions. “Oh, what’s going on in France? Well, be careful about maximizing this movement, because I’m pretty sure they have a democracy in France.”

And for the protesters, did seeing coverage so divorced from what they felt was happening also have consequences?

The people who organized the January 25 protests in Egypt had built the capacity through a decade or more of organizing in support of Palestine, and in opposition to the U.S. invasion of Iraq. They assumed everybody knew, as they understood it, that a movement for democracy in Egypt would necessarily challenge the U.S. and its allies in the region. It was traumatic for them to see the likes of CNN arrive and say: “This is a movement of young Egyptians that want to join the U.S.-led system as junior partners, they want to be like junior America.” Yes, obviously, if you go around Tahrir far enough, you’ll eventually find four people who think that and can tell you so on camera in good English. The journalists didn’t know what was happening, but they knew it would make for good TV.

You were a journalist for The Washington Post. How do you see the masthead in its Bezos era?

I don’t think anyone becomes as rich as Jeff Bezos without worrying about the image they project with their money and power. Bezos paid a very small amount — not for us, but for himself — for the Post, but the purchase never seemed to me unrelated to his main objective, which is to increase his wealth and power. For him, it was probably just another step in that direction: it gave him a certain amount of influence, perhaps made it harder for a certain journalistic class to criticize him for a while. But it seemed to me that as soon as it was no longer compatible with his main interest — building a business empire rather than supporting centrist journalism in the United States — that it would fall apart. And I think that’s what happened. What surprises me is that he wanted everyone to know that it had fallen apart. He went on social media and said, essentially, I have directed the opinion pages to follow an ideological line that I made up myself. And if they don’t follow my line, the line of the billionaire owner, they should leave the paper. The classic way to do this if you’re an oligarch (and I believe Bezos is one) and you want to strangle a newspaper, or at least nudge it to the right, is to move slowly behind the scenes, promote people that you like, fail to promote people that you don’t like. He didn’t just want to change the Post, he wanted us all to know he was using his power to change it, which I thought was really striking.

It almost makes you miss the newspaper owners of centuries past.

In what we now call the golden age of journalism, seen as a time when you could have a real career and a stable job, there were critiques of the way newspaper owners and their advertisers forced the reproduction of certain points of view. Chomsky captured several of these criticisms in Manufacturing Consent. They were right. But things have gotten so, so, so much worse now that we would die to have the problems of for-profit ownership and steady advertising streams.

In the 2010s, the most repeated question was: Who is going to pay for my work? Now, the big question is: Who is going to read my work? Who is going to care?

Now, our problem is that we face the extinction of journalism as a practice, as a human activity. The era of journalism could come to an end, it could last only a few hundred years total. So looking back at how just how imperfect everything was in the 1970s or even how things were in 2011, in 2025 things are much, much worse.

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