The fight over housing reform exposed a deep divide between the elite discourse-shaping class — those aligned with YIMBYism and the new “abundance” movement — and the older, activist-driven wing of liberalism that is parochial and operating on autopilot, directed by the concerns of a previous era. This latter group primarily wants to preserve local control and community character, even if it comes at the cost of affordability and housing availability. Animated by habit and identity and disconnected from wider debates taking place, it has long stood in the way of reform.

Newsom’s success, along with other recent YIMBY efforts across the country, suggests that in key policy areas, liberalism may be slowly shedding some of its self-imposed constraints. Understanding the conflict between an intellectually engaged elite and grassroots activists stuck in outdated paradigms is key to making sense of current battles within the American Left.

At the end of June, as part of the yearly budget process, Newsom signed two bills which mark the state’s most significant shift on housing in at least a generation. CEQA was enacted in 1970 to ensure that state and local agencies assess, disclose, and mitigate the environmental impacts of development projects. Over time, it came to be used to delay or block new housing, especially in urban areas. The new reforms limit the reach of the law by, among other changes, exempting the majority of multifamily infill housing projects, limiting the grounds for lawsuits, and streamlining review processes for qualifying developments.

Showing the importance of elite discourse, in his speech announcing the signing, Gavin Newsom thanked YIMBYs for their “abundant mindset,” adding that this was a “plug to Ezra.” For those unfamiliar with internal squabbling within the liberal coalition, this is a reference to the book Abundance by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson, which was released this year and has caused a rift among left-leaning activists and intellectuals.

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At the same time, a coalition of over 100 environmental groups sent a letter calling Newsom’s changes “the worst anti-environmental bill in California in recent memory.” Organized labor also put up a fight, demanding certain carve outs as part of the reforms, at one point “fill[ing] a hearing room at the state Capitol mocking, yelling, and storming out at points while lawmakers went over the details of Newsom’s plan.”

As someone who has tried to understand the Left from outside the coalition, I’ve been fascinated watching this debate unfold. Abundance is highly readable and convincing, especially to someone with a pro-market orientation. On the housing issue in particular, we have built too little for too long, and, as Klein and Thompson point out, there’s a reason that Republican states are more affordable places to live.

Yet little that they said on this topic was surprising. Before the book came out, these arguments had been circulating for years in liberal media. Freddie deBoer expresses frustration that NIMBYs appear to be completely shut out of the discourse, estimating that pro-YIMBY perspectives are heard in mainstream media outlets by a ratio of at least 10 to 1. So what took so long? And why did so much of the organized Left still unite in opposition to California housing reforms?

The Right-wing political theorist Curtis Yarvin famously uses the term “the Cathedral” to describe what he sees as the informal but powerful ideological and institutional complex that shapes public opinion and policy in Western democracies. Under this theory, the Cathedral had a position on housing, politicians in California realized what it was, and acted accordingly. But somehow the memo had not trickled down to organized groups within the liberal coalition. While the Cathedral just notched a major victory, it was difficult and long delayed. State Senator Scott Wiener has credited Governor Newsom for putting his political capital on the line in order to enact the recent reforms.

When I recently interviewed Derek Thompson, I asked him about this divide on the Left. He responded that the key variable is age. Older Leftists grew up in a world in which ideas about overpopulation were taken seriously and development was seen as infringing on unspoiled nature. This was the time when Paul Ehrlich’s dire warnings about overpopulation and coming famines were staples of TV and radio. Younger people, in contrast, realize that housing costs have gotten out of control, and that housing is a fundamental issue facing members of their generation as they seek to build a life.

What all of this reveals is that the concept of the Cathedral, or any framework that sees the establishment in monolithic terms, needs to be unbundled. Take a look at the environmental groups that opposed housing reform. Aside from a few exceptions, most of the rest are completely obscure, even to policy wonks.

Some have names like Green Latinos and Senior & Disability Action, organized around the logic of identity politics. Many, however, are hyper local, calling themselves Alianza Coachella Valley, Los Angeles Waterkeeper, or Sierra County Land Trust. They don’t necessarily have the support of The New York Times. But they represent the priorities of liberals with money and a desire to work in the field of activism.

These people are evergreen activists, far from the intellectual currents of their own party. We may call them practitioners of Curb Your Enthusiasm liberalism. One of the recurring themes in the early seasons of the show was Cheryl Hines, Larry David’s wife, dragging him to charity events and parties with do-gooder activists. The class her friends represented were mocked for their vapidity and virtue signalling. In “The Anonymous Donor,” for example, Larry is vilified for wanting public credit for his donation, while another donor who goes by “anonymous” is celebrated, even as it turns out that he made sure his identity was whispered throughout social gatherings.

Probably not accidentally, since art is often an exaggerated portrayal of real life, the actress who played Cheryl Hines is married to RFK Jr, who spent much of his life an anti-development environmental activist before becoming better known for his views on vaccines and public health. It’s tempting to speculate that such activists might begin to feel more at home among the GOP in the future, given that RFK is now part of the Trump administration, and some of the most strident resistance to YIMBYism in blue states comes from Republican politicians.

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This demographic tends not to incorporate much new information from the wider world. They are enamored with a few narratives like the need to always be “doing more” to protect the environment, ready to also latch on to new causes like covid safety-ism and wokeness when they detect a cultural shift that is too large to ignore. And yes, they are often very old, with a lot of time on their hands.

While the NYT, Harvard, and other shapers of the discourse often get the blame for what has gone wrong with liberalism, the story of housing reform shows how problems are often caused from below. Both Curb your Enthusiasm-style Leftists and readers of Abundance can be considered liberal elites, yet while YIMBY journalists engage in high-level persuasion, those who provide money and support to most Left-wing activist groups are channeling the ideas of intellectuals and journalists of a previous generation.

In the long run, it is those who engage in the world of ideas who often triumph on the Left. But they face formidable foes among activists in the short term. The battle over Covid restrictions seems to have been another instance where these two classes were at odds. Schools remained closed to full-time, in-person learning for much longer than elite media messaging supported such an approach.

Yarvinism is right in the sense that a few prestigious media outlets and educational establishments have an outsized role in shaping discourse; but it’s too conspiratorial in its outlook. It implies internal cohesion, centrally planned messaging, and doors being closed to outsiders, when in reality, liberal institutions are often undermined by activist groups. A better model here would be Jürgen Habermas’ theory of communicative action, with democratic legitimacy coming from rational-critical deliberation among citizens.

California is finally waking up from its self-imposed crisis. The enemies of progress have often not been the liberals most prominent in public discourse who get the most attention from conservatives, but vain, superficial, and parochial interests that seek to extract rents and signal virtue to others in their social circle while imposing costs on the rest of society. Gavin Newsom took on this class and won. He’ll have a powerful story to tell in the likely event he runs for president in 2028.

These are just the latest examples of a growing trend of shock-activism that combines political protest and public nuisance. Ostensibly, they are carried out by distinct groups motivated by a particular cause, such as immigration, the environment, or Palestine. In reality, however, all are animated by the same, self-destructive ideology: neotoddlerism.

This movement has its roots in the digital revolution of 2009, when use of smartphones and social media reached a critical mass, allowing strangers to easily unite and mobilise around shared views. But protests didn’t just become bigger and more frequent; they also became more outrageous.

In infants, the chief causes of outrageous behaviour — impulsivity, attention-seeking, and a sense of entitlement — are considered normal, but in adults they’re key symptoms of the “cluster-B” personality disorders. All four such traits —  narcissistic, histrionic, antisocial and borderline — are associated with heavy social media use, most likely because such platforms offer cluster-B types a stage for their theatrics. Social media is thus the perfect meeting place for society’s most overemotional people.

Further, the ease with which theatrical behaviour goes viral online has convinced many that a better world doesn’t require years of patient work, only a sufficient quantity of theatrics. Many activists — on both the Left and Right — now hope to bring about their ideal world in the same way a spoiled brat acquires a toy they’ve been denied: by being as loud and hysterical as possible. This is neotoddlerism: the view that utopia can be achieved by acting like a three-year-old.

It’s an ideology for an age of instant gratification. Just as convenience culture has led us from hours-long films, to half-hour-long TV shows, to minutes-long YouTube videos, to seconds-long TikTok clips; so the same dumbing-down is happening to politics: the arduous process of discussion and debate is giving way to the instant hit of shocking outbursts and other viral moments.

Instead of trying to produce the best arguments, neotoddlers try to produce the most shocking video clips, which typically involve vandalism, desecration, or some other kind of public meltdown. Thus, they outrage others by embracing their own outrage and lashing out at the world. This surrender to their own impulses makes them first-order thinkers, meaning they consider immediate consequences but not consequences of consequences.

This chronological myopia was starkly illustrated after the October 7 terrorist attack by Hamas against Israel. Many neotoddlers celebrated the massacre because, in their fairy-tale worldview, Palestine is the damsel, Hamas is the knight, and Israel is the dragon. However, the cheering neotoddlers, trapped by their hatred in a perpetual present, couldn’t think far enough ahead to realise that Israel was going to retaliate, and that its wrath would be catastrophic for the Palestinians. When the inevitable retaliation came, the neotoddlers’ joy turned to horror as it dawned on them that actions have consequences.

One young pro-Palestine activist, Riddhi Patel, learned this lesson the hard way. In April, she addressed councillors at a Bakersfield City Council meeting in California, and, outraged by their refusal to pass a motion calling for a ceasefire in Gaza, proclaimed to the councillors that she’d murder them, adding: “I hope one day somebody brings the guillotine and kills all of you motherfuckers.” Later, she appeared in court on 16 felony counts, sobbing uncontrollably as she was confronted by the second-order effects that her first-order thinking had failed to foresee.

Unfortunately, it is unlikely she’ll learn much from her punishment. Not only do neotoddlers lack impulse-control, they also mistake their lack of impulse-control for morality, and mistake the impulse-control of others for callousness. “Where is the outrage?” they commonly yell, demanding everyone be as irrational as them. For the neotoddler, impatience is a virtue.

The Civil Rights movement succeeded because it was guided by leaders who had clear, specific and realistic goals, and were able to negotiate to achieve them. Since neotoddlers “organise” mostly on social media, they’re decentralised, and don’t have leaders that can guide them or negotiate for them. They therefore don’t have the means to create, only to disrupt.

And so they disrupt, with the goal of spreading awareness. Yet their attempts to do so are misguided because, for all the issues they protest about — from immigration to climate change — the problem is not a lack of awareness; it’s a lack of solutions. We don’t need to be told that war, injustice, and pollution are bad, because we learned these lessons in primary school. What we need are realistic plans of action — but the neotoddlers have none. A “ceasefire now!” would quickly be broken by Hamas. To “just stop oil!” would be to cause Western civilisation to regress technologically into an age of famine, war and superstition. On immigration, the Government can’t just “get them out”.

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Even more dysfunctionally, neotoddlers often try to disrupt attempts to meet their own demands. Many pro-Palestine activists call for peace in Gaza and yet praise Hamas, the main obstacle to peace in Gaza. And many eco-warriors oppose fossil fuels but also try to stop viable alternatives such as electric and nuclear by, for example, storming Tesla factories and atomic energy conferences. And recent Right-wing protesters in Sunderland, who claimed to represent the unheard, burned down a citizens’ advice centre, one of the few places to offer an ear to the unheard.

Unsurprisingly, nuisance-protests often end up alienating ordinary people. While the public supports climate action, it has a negative opinion of Just Stop Oil. And while the public supports a ceasefire in Gaza, it has a negative opinion of the campus protesters. The same is true of Right-wing nuisance protests: while the public generally believes immigration should be curbed, it has a negative opinion of those, like Tommy Robinson, who incited the recent riots. So, though nuisance-protests do get attention, little of that attention is converted to sympathy and a lot to spite.

But if nuisance-protests are counterproductive, why are they spreading? Because protests are usually motivated more by emotion than reason. Take the recent Southport riots. These have been driven not by any rational plan but by the frustrations of Right-wingers and ordinary working-class people about their concerns over immigration not being taken seriously by politicians. These frustrations, stoked by fake news, have led them to engage in infantile — and dangerous — actions like vandalising mosques and setting fire to police cars, which will hurt their cause more than help it. But it does make them feel good for the moment, and they live mostly for the moment.

As for Left-wing neotoddlers, their motivations tend to be more complex (but no less childish) than those of their Right-wing counterparts, because, instead of being impoverished and alienated, they tend to be privileged and popular. For instance, an analysis by the Washington Monthly revealed that the Gaza campus protests were largely confined to the most expensive and elite colleges. And Just Stop Oil members are themselves quick to admit that their movement is “privileged” and living in a white middle-class “student bubble”.

This is no accident: it’s often the affluent, not the downtrodden, who have a greater motivation to protest. As the philosopher Eric Hoffer explained in his 1951 book, The True Believer: “There is perhaps no more reliable indicator of a society’s ripeness for a mass movement than the prevalence of unrelieved boredom.” People need struggles. If their supply of problems dwindles too low, they begin to embellish the problems they already have, and invent completely new ones. As Hoffer writes: “Passionate hatred can give meaning and purpose to an empty life. Thus people haunted by the purposelessness of their lives try to find a new content not only by dedicating themselves to a holy cause but also by nursing a fanatical grievance.”

Overall, Left-wing neotoddlers and Right-wing neotoddlers tend to come from different demographics — with the former being younger, richer, more educated, and more female than the latter — and this gives them different motivations, and different modus operandi. For instance, research suggests that the cluster-B trait of narcissism, which is a feeling of self-importance, takes a different form in the two groups. In Right-wingers, it mostly manifests as a sense of entitlement, while in Left-wingers it mostly manifests as a need for exhibitionism.

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This is borne out in the different approaches Left-wingers and Right-wingers take towards their public tantrums. Right-wing nuisance-protests, such as those in Southport, are primarily attempts to relieve their frustration at not getting what they want. As such, they typically take the form of straightforward thuggery and hooliganism: starting fires, overturning cars and hurling bricks.

In contrast, nuisance-protests for Left-wing causes tend to be less about relieving frustration and more about getting attention. As such, they are usually more calculated and creative: throwing soup over paintings, releasing insect-swarms into hotels, or, most recently, painting the hands of a statue of Anne Frank red.

Generally, the Left-wing approach is more effective at getting attention. It took mass destruction by hundreds of Right-wingers in Southport to make news headlines, but it only took two Just Stop Oil activists with orange paint at Heathrow to achieve the same. Left-wing nuisance-protests are also treated more kindly by the mainstream. Right-wing protests tend to be roundly condemned by polite society, firstly because they tend to be more violent, and secondly because upholders of mainstream culture — such as liberal journalists, academics, and entertainers — are culturally programmed to dismiss concerns about Islam or immigration as “far-Right”, placing such concerns outside the bounds of polite discourse (and into the hands of actual extremists).

Left-wing protests, on the other hand, are generally viewed by Western cultural elites as well-meaning. The West’s mainstream knowledge-producing institutions, from academia to the liberal media, tend to be populated mostly by Left-leaning people who see Left-wing neotoddlers as a force for good because they’re broadly ideologically aligned with them and judge them by their perceived intentions rather than their results. For this reason, the mainstream treats Left-wing neotoddlers as its golden child, always seeing the best in them, while Right-wing neotoddlers are treated like the red-headed stepchild, worthy only of scorn.

This is particularly true at universities, where a decades-long encouragement of cluster-B infantilism reached a tipping point this summer with the campus protests. We saw the students put everything they’d been taught — exhibitionism, catastrophisation, hysteria — into practice. The protests quickly came to resemble a LARP. Whenever the protesters occupied a new part of the campus, they hung banners and declared it liberated. All this liberating eventually made them feel peckish. But when they demanded refreshments from university officials, and were denied, they claimed they were being deprived of “basic humanitarian aid” and might die of starvation.

This kind of grandiose fantasising is emblematic of people with narcissistic traits because it makes their struggles seem bigger than they actually are. As such, we commonly see similar kinds of catastrophisation among other flavours of neotoddler; every flood or forest fire is an omen of “climate catastrophe”, Israel is an “apartheid state”, biological facts about sex are “erasing trans people”, and immigration is “white genocide”. Such histrionics, whether propagated in error or with intention, serve to manipulate other hysterical people into becoming neotoddlers.

And the grim irony is that, by believing the world is worse than it actually is, neotoddlers make the world worse. Their disruptions and vandalism exert a huge economic and social cost on society, and they prevent ordinary people from getting to work, attending funerals of loved ones, and meeting vital medical appointments.

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Unsurprisingly, the harm neotoddlers cause to liberal democracies has endeared them to foreign dictators. The Ayatollah developed a soft spot for the Ivy League campus protesters, cheerleading them on X, and even writing them a letter of support. It also recently transpired that Iran has been funding and directing activists across the US, and that they even masterminded an anti-Israel protest at McGill University in Canada. Closer to home, the misinformation that caused the Southport riots was amplified by a fake news website linked to the Russian government.

So, how can we end this age of neotoddlerism? The simplest way would be to cut off its main source of support. And that isn’t the Ayatollah or Putin, or even the universities. No, the neotoddlers’ main source of support is, in fact, you and I.

Neotoddlerism endures because it is much more effective at making news headlines and going viral than traditional forms of protest. As a case in point, on 22 June, celebrity environmentalists like Emma Thompson and Chris Packham led a huge march of over 60,0000 people through London, to raise awareness of habitat destruction and wildlife loss. It received little press coverage. Around the same time, a handful of Just Stop Oil protesters squirted orange paint on Stonehenge; it made the front page of every major UK newspaper, and coverage in the global press too.

Likewise, last week in London, there was a generally peaceful march against mass immigration, involving tens of thousands of people of all ethnicities, and led by figures like Tommy Robinson and Laurence Fox. It was ignored by most of the press. One week later, when Robinson embraced his inner-toddler and stoked violent riots, they made global headlines.

At a time when competition for attention is fierce, it makes business sense for the press and social media platforms to boost stories that outrage people into clicking and sharing. Such platforms naturally form a symbiosis with people who seek to outrage their way to fame: demagogues like Robinson; vandals like Just Stop Oil “poster girl”  Phoebe Plummer; and more bizarre figures still, like the “performance artist turned political activist” Crackhead Barney, who wears little but a diaper and seeks to save Gaza by being as obscene as possible.

By giving these figures platforms, we’ve not only allowed them to proselytise to huge audiences, but we’ve also turned them into idols — living testaments that you can get what you want by acting like a baby. And we can’t blame the media for this; they’re just showing us what we prefer to see. It is ordinary people who have made being a public nuisance pay. Neotoddlerism needs nothing more than attention to thrive — it is physical clickbait — and we just keep clicking.

But there is a way out. The solution to neotoddlers is the same as the one to regular spoiled brats: to ignore their outbursts and deny them attention. If someone sets fire to a car or makes a mess with orange paint, it shouldn’t make global or even national news. The media will stop reporting on these stories when we stop engaging with them. They’ll stop amplifying — and thereby incentivising — the neotoddlers when we do. So we should learn to react more slowly to news, to pay attention to what we pay attention to, and to give more of our attention to behaviours we wish to encourage rather than those we disapprove of. It’s not just the neotoddlers who need to be less impulsive, we do too.

And there are many people in this world who deserve our attention. The Dutch inventor Boyan Slat, for instance, has for the past 10 years been quietly removing plastic from the oceans through his startup, The Ocean Cleanup. His project recently hit a milestone of 15,000,000kg of trash removed from oceans and rivers worldwide, but it’s hardly been reported by the press. Meanwhile, Greta Thunberg became world famous by yelling and blocking entrances to public buildings.

We don’t yet have any start-ups to clear the oceans of rubber dinghies, but such a thing is possible, if addressing illegal immigration can be made more palatable to polite society. And that will only happen when the people who wish to “stop the boats” refrain from acting like the violent thugs they’re often stereotyped as, and start supporting practical, adult solutions.

Every child begins life throwing tantrums. And every good parent learns to ignore them, because they know that acknowledging attention-seeking behaviours validates them, and prevents their kids from outgrowing them. If we wish to stop seeing good causes ruined by bad actors, we must stop rewarding immaturity. If we wish to usher in an age of post-toddlerism, we must stop making neotoddlers famous.

This one lasted barely 21 minutes. A group of 50 centipeded past Nelson’s Column, some in Berghaus fleeces, some in moth-eaten donkey jackets, and all in hi-viz orange vests. Fewer than half of them, the “arrestables”, took to the road at the speed of a hearse; the rest remained on the pavement shouting support. And the moment they hit Whitehall, the police began to pick them off. The entire column was kettled onto the pavement, each orange beset by four or five yellows: wrestled, handcuffed and scooped into the waiting vans. The police worked from back-to-front, leaving the dwindling vanguard of the column to pace resolutely on, like captured admirals walking the plank. One woman on the pavement was crying, cursing the police, cursing the burning planet. But those under arrest were placid, serene, unblinking. They lay there quietly as the police took their details and unbuckled their watches into evidence bags. 

Eventually, the only person left was a tiny old woman, still clutching her banner, and shuffling down the street. “Is there anything we can do to make you leave the road?” the police asked. She didn’t reply. “Gentle,” someone shouted as they swarmed her too. “She’s 80 years old!” “There’s plenty more people to be arrested,” one of the organisers called from the touchline. “This is not going to stop.” The combination of farce, dauntlessness and misallocated courage was unmistakable. After months of background hibernation — occasional snooker stunt aside — Just Stop Oil are back. Today, tomorrow, and the day after, they are repeating the above process, churning phalanx after phalanx into the rough embrace of the Metropolitan Police.

This is the radical fringe of the climate movement, which will come to define the coming decade of politics, if not the century. It’s aiming at a political revolution. But for now, it still sits somewhere in a Venn diagram of risible-meets-despised in the collective mind. First there was Extinction Rebellion (XR), which briefly captured the public mood before squandering it in a symbolic clash between working-class commuters and middle-class activists at Canning Town Tube. Then Insulate Britain emerged as an extreme splinter, dissatisfied with the slow progress of XR. Finally, defeated on the motorways of Britain, it morphed again. Just Stop Oil is the latest phase of evolution: its nimblest, most creative and worthiest form yet. 

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There is overlap between the groups — one woman in Trafalgar Square confides that she’s there in breach of contempt of court charges dating from the Insulate Britain protests two years ago. But each name-change has been accompanied by a detectable lurch in timbre. XR’s 2019 protests were comparably joyful, colourful, carnivalesque. Their successors strike a more militant mood. You can read the difference in the logos. XR’s: a jagged hourglass; a stop sign. “Time is running out.” Just Stop Oil’s: a weeping, staring, chop-fallen skull. “This is humanity’s deathly future.” 

Between them these groups have made the threat of interrupted football fixtures, Heinz-splattered artwork and choked highways a new part of daily life. But they remain outside of politics, at best a parasitical feature of public debate. And, like any other radical movement of our time, they are an eccentric receptacle for wayward political anger.

This round of marches has been in the works for months, and JSO recruited hard in anticipation. On a dark and blustery October night, I went along to a welcome meeting, held in a cinderblock discussion space just off Brick Lane called Newspeak House. There were about 100 perched on secondary-school chairs, ready, or at the very least willing, to join JSO’s merry men. 

Here such climate fears are mobilised; here they are put in uniform. The star speaker was Roger Hallam, Extinction Rebellion co-founder and Just Stop Oil’s in-house eschatalogue. He was there to tell us how bad it all is — in fact how it’s much worse than we can possibly believe — all delivered in his distinctive rambling, potty-mouthed, and wilfully apocalyptic rhetorical style. “It’s not gonna be a choice between it being ok and it being shit; it’s a choice between it being shit and it being so fucking shit you can’t possibly imagine!” The scroll of doom he unfurls is essential to understanding this movement. In 1968, radicals were told to take their desires for reality. Now, they take their nightmares for prophecy. 

Hallam leans heavily on the 20th-century horror imaginary for his figurative conjurings. The Holocaust, the Cambodian genocide, atrocities in the Congo — they’re as nothing compared with the moral crime and mass slaughter our political elites are carrying out right now. This religious imagery — Hallam’s mother was a Methodist preacher — is now the lingua franca of the movement. They too talk of “genocide”, even of “reckoning”. We have sinned against our planet, and now we must be punished. Perhaps, as the Christian climate scholar Catherine Keller has written, only “theology… articulates what unconditionally matters”.

Hallam’s showstopper claim is that if we breach two degrees of warming above pre-industrial averages this century, “one thousand million” people will die. This is the end for everyone, everywhere, and animals too. The “sixth extinction” is already underway. 

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But, Hallam told us with a wild grin, “once you find yourself in that police cell, you know you’re doing the right thing”. I looked around Newspeak House and saw nodding heads, and flashing, inspired eyes. A young activist then outlined the strategy. The plan was to “slow march” on roads until the government caved to our demands. The target for each of us was to get arrested five times. And, he yelped excitedly at the end, “When you’re in court, say ‘fuck you’ to the judge!”

How do you turn a muddled mob into a militia? With “nonviolence training”, held in a cosy Quakers’ reading-room in central London. Not since I crept the boards of youth theatre have I faced such a punishing gauntlet of breathing exercises, “chairs to one side”, and choreographed morality tales. But this is how the campaigns that have immobilised our cities for the last year and a half are war-gamed and strategised. Arranged in a circle of chairs was a medley of Just Stop Oil regulars. Veteran Greenpeace-niks, lifelong RSPB-donor twitcher-types, dyed-haired student-radicals, school-leavers stranded on a domestic gap year. And — still overwhelmingly the spine of this movement it seems — the white middle-class middle-aged. Well: who else is free for this sort of thing on a Wednesday afternoon?

This crowd was very much the newly converted. They explain how they’ve learned to feel climate guilt at having had their children, or, discussing road accidents caused by JSO marches, exclaim that such incidents are the fault of those who continue to choose to drive. These feelings are here to be diverted into the studied dispassion of “nonviolence”. The protest philosophy attempts to plot a third way between violent action and apathy, resisting and disrupting in such a way that avoids causing harm. Blocking roads is thought to be a method of causing disruption without utterly alienating Just Stop Oil from the wider population. 

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On our feet, we marshalled for the battles we’d face on the road. What do you do if a driver agitates that they’re losing work because of the protest? Calmly apologise and explain that you’re here to protest the climate crisis. And if someone claims they’re driving someone to hospital with an injury? Groups must use their discretion. The level of anticipated confrontation was uncomfortable for most of the people there. And this is where that eerie stupor of detachment that seems to possess JSO activists on marches comes from. It’s a form of withdrawal from chaotic surroundings, submerged beneath the moral demands of the movement.

“I don’t understand why we’re marching on the roads at all,” one women said. Why don’t we challenge the supply-side of the fossil-fuel industry instead? The trainer explained that in April last year, JSO activists blocked the 10 largest oil terminals in Britain with hundreds of activists and forced ExxonMobil to suspend operations at the sites. The demonstration generated little media coverage, and was quickly forgotten. It was deemed a failure.

Just Stop Oil claims that its arrest tactics are meant to place pressure on the judiciary and police, compelling the state to concede its demands. But the new powers given to the police in the Public Order Act have made arrest a formality, as it was this week on Whitehall. It’s clear that the strategy really is to convey a form of scandal-symbolism — which is also why artworks and now church services have become fair game. And this places the group in an uneasily dependent relationship with the motorists it disrupts and the “Right-wing” media it so resents. It needs the rage and the coverage to make its protests worthwhile. Shock can only carry you so far though. This round of arrests has been reported, but generated nothing like the commotion of XR’s 2019 campaign, let alone JSO’s earlier efforts.

But they’re not after everyone. Just Stop Oil has inherited XR’s aim of converting 3.5% of the population to the cause, a numinous figure drawn from a study of protest movements that showed inexorable social change flowing after that point. But many of the social movements they take their cue from (including JSO’s own hall of fame: Gandhi, Martin Luther King Jr. and Nelson Mandela) took place in pre-democratic or semi-democratic societies. Resorting to civil disobedience is a more obviously moral option when the ballot box is sealed. But to stage an occupation of something as quotidian as a B-road, justified or not, comes across as a statement of political superiority, arrogance even.

The climate writer Richard Seymour has argued that Extinction Rebellion represented one variation of “technopopulist” politics — a genuinely grassroots campaign which nonetheless advocates for solutions located above and beyond usual party politics. Just Stop Oil is another example of this scrappy phenomenon, which emerged as a symptom of the very social failures it seeks to redress. Speaking to tearful activists on pavements of Whitehall, they gnash and rage: “We’ve tried protests, we’ve tried petitions, we’ve tried everything…” But as the road is quickly cleared and the cars start moving again, you have to ask the obvious question: is this changing anyone’s minds either?