Billionaires for Bush, toasting the GOP: "Four more wars!"   (Photo: Nigel Parry)

“Tell me what democracy looks like!” marchers love to shout, usually at the police. Well, this is what democracy looks like, in an orange-alert age: A “consensus” meeting; an “affinity group”; a permit; a legal observer; a bike; a direct-action salon; a tent-city; a flash mob; a Website. Twinkling.

Forget about that great gettin’-up morning when the People spontaneously rise to Power—it never happens like that, anyway. Protest has been professionalized; these are the tools. And though the Republican convention is still months away, activists have long been evaluating which tools (out of the 198 listed on the green handout, and then some) will help them steal the thunder of the most expensive political convention in history—a $91 million event, held in New York City for the first time and closer to the election than ever. A wartime spectacle produced by the same Hollywood set designer who brought you the Doha press center, and defended by 10,000 NYPD officers.

Now here’s the problem: Political conventions have been boring, predictable coronations for decades, and the protests outside have devolved into spectacles just as dull. Even this year, there aren’t any serious calls to shut down the convention, because activists understand there’s no genuine process to interrupt or influence; the Republicans are here for a glorified pep rally.

So why, then, since as early as last summer, have activists been working so hard on preparation? “Coming to New York to have a convention this late is just so in-your-face,” says Neubauer, alluding to September 11. “People take it personally.”

But as disgusted as he is at everything from Bush’s environmental policies to the war in Iraq, Neubauer, bright-eyed and smiling, doesn’t sound mad—in fact, he’s pumped. “The general vibe in America is that being out in the streets is something that happened in the sixties—that now it’s just people who have tattoos and dreadlocks and piercings,” says Neubauer, whose own dreads are pulled back neatly. “But this amazing community has been alive and serious for a long time now. Maybe that story will be told, probably ten or twenty years from now, when everyone’s legendary heroes.”

The anti-Bush nation preparing to overwhelm the convention is not of one mind (they’re leftists, after all). Most are angrily optimistic. Some worry that protests will be too obedient; others that the television cameras will focus on the freaks who will make red-state viewers sneer. And beyond the organized, there is the specter of the disorganized—those who might harbor more violent ambitions and would never deign to visit a meeting like this. Even among orderly activists, there remains the possibility that nasty exchanges with the NYPD or pro-Bush agitators could incite and divide the crowd, panicking some and endangering everyone. There is no way to predict what will happen when hundreds of thousands of riled-up protesters come face-to-face with riot cops.

But for now and in this room, the protesters share a decidedly sunny goal. They want to demonstrate to America that their liberal, diverse, urbane, never-sleeping, sometime-bohemian, Wall-Street-and-new-Times-Square-notwithstanding city is definitely not Bush country. And on these grounds, they will almost certainly succeed. Whether that symbolic victory will accomplish anything—change a voter’s mind or, dare they even say it, tip the election to the Democrats—well, that’s another matter entirely.

Like Che Guevara t-shirts, mass demonstrations—the most traditional tactic in the radical repertoire—are back in style, despite Bush’s shrugging them off as “focus groups.” Organizers of the recent abortion-rights march on Washington claim they gathered 1.15 million people for the largest march in American history. There’s still no better way for activist groups to demonstrate the depth and scope of popular objection—so there will be massive rallies and marches at the RNC.

Numbers could be huge, partly because signing up for the revolution has never been easier: Busing is planned from Washington, Chicago, and elsewhere, and Websites abound with links to day care, housing, pet-sitting, vegan restaurants, and more; every vegetarian single mother from Houston with a pet iguana will be able to shout down Bush without worries. Some RNC delegates may not be so well accommodated.

NARAL and at least nineteen other organizations, including the Central Labor Council, MoveOn.org, the Green Party, and the Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association, have filed RNC-protest-permit applications—Russell Simmons has even promised “the biggest hip-hop gathering ever” to protest the Rockefeller drug laws. But the most anticipated demonstration, scheduled the day before the convention, is being planned by United for Peace and Justice, the group that co-organized the city’s last two major antiwar protests.

“We’re not going to talk numbers, because we don’t want to overpromise,” UFPJ’s Leslie Cagan says carefully, though her permit application allows for 250,000. Dressed casually and wearing New Balance sneakers engineered specifically for marathon runners and lifelong marchers, Cagan sips a Coke in her dismal fifth-floor-walk-up office. As national coordinator of a two-year-old umbrella group formed in opposition to the Iraq war, she coordinates actions for more than 800 groups with a staff of five and a paltry budget. From the tiny Young Koreans United of Chicago to the Green Party and the Communist Party USA, all have largely set aside the crabs-in-a-barrel infighting common to the left (except for the ever-divisive and belligerent group answer, which derides all American presidents equally and supports almost any military opponent of the United States). As Cagan puts it: “We don’t have to sit around wondering, Is there some part of his tax program that we agree with?”

“It’s true,” says UFPJ’s lanky, droll spokesman, William K. Dobbs, who leans back in a beat-up office chair in front of a bush lies who dies? poster. “It’s unlike anything I’ve ever seen—everyone’s been talking tactics for nearly a year.”

UFPJ’s been organizing its march since last June. “We just want to set the tone—and make it very clear that the empire-building agenda of the Bush administration has got to be stopped,” explains Cagan, a Bronx native whose clipped hair has turned steel gray after more than 40 years of fighting the Man. “That is, if we ever get our permits.”

“Oh, the old days of just going out on the street and having a great, punchy protest are over,” Dobbs moans, playing the crusty radical—and he’s right. Today’s mass demonstration requires a back-end battalion of support that only a large group like UFPJ can coordinate: legal observers, lawyers, security personnel, free-speech experts from the NYCLU and the Center for Constitutional Rights, documentarians on the lookout for police brutality, permit-process experts—the list goes on.