Four Dalmatian Puppy

Contributor

other

People visit the site of the Nova festival, in Reim

Fake Electors Indictment Arizona

The Washington Post

For The Washington Post

Israel Palestinians Campus Protests

US-PALESTINIAN-ISRAEL-EDUCATION-CONFLICT

**ONE TIME USE ONLY FOR OP-SMITH-HIGHER-ED

Former U.S. President Trump's criminal trial on charges of falsifying business records continues in New York

POOL

Westminster Dog Show

ONE TIME USE ILLUSTRATION FOR OP-RIEVES-HUBRIS

(Chloe Cushman for The Washington Post)

US-POLLUTION-PLASTIC-CHEMICAL-RECYCLING

(Getty Images)

Follow section front redirects in Spectrum

Enable NLP source in PCS for load testing

Switch off the News Alerts Survey Widget when we have enough responses

Poll to determine if new LUF updates are available

Allows the winning A/B test variant to be turned on without Spectrum deployment

Show infinite scrolling sections in Assembler MultiView

Show option for NLP article summaries in Action Bar

A general feature flag for Recipe Features that aren't yet released

Feature flag for media team features that aren't yet released

Use new Orca video player for preroll plugin in Spectrum

Show the snow tracker (instead of the heat tracker) on Spectrum

How to confront antisemitism, deal with protests — and respect free speech

Is student loan debt an emergency? Take our quiz.

Humans might need to re-engineer the climate

Mike Johnson works to boost House GOP funding as ouster threat looms

Election 2024 latest news: Biden heading to Delaware for campaign event; Trump trial resumes

Bill Barr doesn’t mind a little autocracy if your politics are right

Nationals sweep away the Marlins to get back to .500

Blinken calls proposed Israeli cease-fire deal ‘extraordinarily generous’

Jayden Daniels is latest in Washington’s checkered history of first-round QBs

Brave Little Hunter is free: Baby orca escapes lagoon for open seas

I learned to heal my sadness by cradling dying chickens 

Soldiers reunite with their pets from overseas: ‘It meant everything to me’

King Charles is back at work after cancer diagnosis. He looks good.

In a ‘meat grinder’ of a war, Russian and Ukrainian casualties rise

Middle East conflict live updates: Netanyahu vows to invade Rafah regardless of cease-fire deal; Blinken in region

Apple banned this app for years. It’s now America’s No. 1 iPhone app. 

A TikTok ban could also end short-form video as we’ve come to know it

An AI blood test purports to diagnose postpartum depression

Trump and allies say Biden pays rent for ‘illegals’ in Michigan. Not true.

Eighty percent of Ukraine-Israel bill will be spent in U.S. or by U.S. military

Facts in the Trump courtroom v. ‘facts’ in the court of public opinion

Carolyn Hax: Her family left all the kitchen work to her, so she went on strike

Miss Manners: Some audience members ask rambling questions post-lecture

Ask Amy: Why did my friend lie about seeing my ex-girlfriend?

In photos: Flash floods kill over 100 people in Kenya

Americans are sleeping more than ever. See how you compare.

Parenting in Gaza today is so much more than keeping your children alive

The Rick Steves guide to life

The sad, stale state of in-flight vegetarian meals

How to train for a marathon on vacation

Trump trial live updates: Witness testimony continues with Keith Davidson

Trump Hush Money

Jose Carlos Fajardo

Sen. Tom Cotton is developing a habit of saying controversial things about protesters. During the summer of George Floyd, he <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/03/opinion/tom-cotton-protests-military.html" target=_blank>published an op-ed</a> in the New York Times calling for the federal government to deploy the military to quell rioting, touching off a firestorm that ended with the resignation of one of the newspaper staffers involved and the reassignment of another.

More recently, on Monday night, after pro-Palestinian protesters <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2024/04/15/gaza-israel-war-protests-bridges/" target=_blank>closed roads across the country</a>, including two groups that tied up traffic for hours on an Oakland highway and the Golden Gate Bridge, Cotton (R-Ark.) <a href="https://twitter.com/TomCottonAR/status/1780039918737121502" target=_blank>tweeted</a>, “I encourage people who get stuck behind the pro-Hamas mobs blocking traffic: take matters into your own hands to get them out of the way.”

It’s not clear exactly what he wanted drivers to do, but a few things are clear.

First, let’s be honest: Cotton was voicing a fantasy that was probably harbored by many of the motorists stuck behind protests (and some following along at home).

Second, he was wrong to give it voice. It’s not cute when one of America’s highest elected officials suggests a little vigilante action; it is, rather, a dereliction of his duty. Any citizen who took the senator’s suggestion seriously would be in the wrong and, soon, in jail.

Third, Cotton’s trolling is nevertheless politically effective because it addresses justified frustration with the government’s failure to stop ultra-disruptive protests, which seem to be on the rise. This, too, is a dereliction of duty, one that tempts citizens to take matters into their own hands.

In too many jurisdictions, the costs of these protests are inflicted mainly on the people stuck in traffic and not the ones blocking the roads. In November, a similar protest <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/16/world/asia/san-francisco-bay-bridge-protest.html" target=_blank>shut down San Francisco’s Bay Bridge</a> for more than four hours and resulted in the arrest of 80 people. According to the <a href="https://sfstandard.com/2023/12/01/how-bay-bridge-protest-blocked-traffic-hours/" target=_blank>San Francisco Standard</a>, the bridge had carried more than 22,000 people between 5 and 9 a.m. that morning. From 10 to 11 a.m., only 11 vehicles made it across.

Back-of-the-envelope math suggests that those 80 people consumed thousands of hours of other people’s time, and perhaps tens of thousands. Moreover, the protesters, unlike the drivers, got to schedule important things around their disruption, such as medical treatment, day-care dropoffs and job interviews. When such havoc can be wreaked at such minimal personal inconvenience — some time on the road, a little more at the police station and later, for most of them, <a href="https://sfstandard.com/2024/03/14/san-francisco-bay-bridge-protesters-criminal-charges-dismissed/" target=_blank>five hours of community service</a> and a modest fine — it’s hardly surprising that, only months later, San Francisco experienced another disruptive protest. These will continue in cities that don’t impose stiffer penalties for blocking the roads.

This is the opposite of my usual prescription for dealing with crime. I typically argue for better policing to increase the likelihood that criminals will be caught, but for relatively light punishment — a policy both more effective and more humane than draconian mass incarceration strategies. Unfortunately, this won’t prevent road closings because the protesters are already almost certain to be arrested. The only remaining option is to make the punishment hurt.

Progressive jurisdictions have been reluctant to do this because so many in the political class view the protesters’ actions as benign — a justified expression of outrage, youthful exuberance, a victimless crime. They are none of these things.

They are unjustified because, no matter how righteous the cause, the tactics won’t advance it. Most Americans view road-blocking protests as <a href="https://today.yougov.com/politics/articles/47565-american-opinion-portest-tactics-acceptability" target=_blank>illegitimate</a> — as I’d bet most progressives did when Canadian truckers used similar tactics to protest vaccine mandates. There is no First Amendment right to halt the movement of other people, any more than there is a First Amendment right to burn down the White House, even if you sincerely believe that’s the only way to fully express your views on U.S. foreign policy.

These forms of expression are forbidden for good reason; both fires and road closures are dangerous and potentially deadly. A 2017 <a href="https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMsa1614073" target=_blank>paper</a> in the New England Journal of Medicine examining road closures for marathons found a small but significant increase in mortality among people with heart trouble on marathon days, apparently caused in part by ambulance delays. November’s protest on the Bay Bridge <a href="https://www.sfchronicle.com/health/article/ucsf-transplant-organs-delayed-bay-bridge-18496699.php" target=_blank>delayed a transplant organ</a> en route to the University of California at San Francisco, while Monday’s protests risked making at least two drivers late for major medical treatment. One of them told a local news reporter that he was on his way to colon surgery, and the other was worried about <a href="https://abc7news.com/pro-palestinian-protesters-shut-down-golden-gate-bridge-and-i-880-in-oakland/14668534/" target=_blank>missing a stem cell infusion</a>.

Now consider the lesser suffering of all the other people stuck in those man-made jams — the ones trying to visit sick relatives, get to an appointment with their parole officer, make it to class, open their shop, catch a flight, have coffee with an old friend or just work through a list of errands. Think about how little the protesters considered them when they decided to block the road. Then ask whether they might not have reconsidered if they’d known that courts would impose jail sentences long enough to make <i>them</i> miss important events.

This<i> </i>is how a civilized society solves such problems, not through vigilante violence — or benign neglect.

The Up Side of Down: Why Failing Well Is the Key to Success

Megan McArdle is a Washington Post columnist and the author of "<a href="https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0143126369/ref=as_li_qf_asin_il_tl?ie=UTF8&tag=thewaspos09-20&creative=9325&linkCode=as2&creativeASIN=0143126369&linkId=81f062af99d4715d7ed5ca96b18dc573">The Up Side of Down: Why Failing Well Is the Key to Success</a>."

Megan McArdle

washpost

A better way to end road-closing protests

the-washington-post

US Mideast Tensions California

Editorials

Columns

Guest opinions

Cartoons

Submit a guest opinion

Today's Opinions newsletter

Opinions

Opinion Columns

Opinion Columnists

Sign up for the Prompt 2024 newsletter for opinions on the biggest questions in politics

Washington Post Opinions

The Washington Post Opinions section features opinion articles, op-eds, editorials by the Editorial Board, global opinions and letters to the editor on the issues of the day. Offerings include columns by Washington Post opinion writers, political cartoons by editorial cartoonists Ann Telnaes and Michael de Adder and podcasts by Jonathan Capehart.