THIS MONTH, simultaneous outbursts of public political expression -- street protests -- occurred in France and the United States. The French protests were in defense of France's traditional social contract preventing arbitrary job termination; the US protests attacked plans to implement oppressive anti-immigration laws.

Much about the protests was different, save one thing. In France, labor unions, students, and the unemployed constituted the population of protesters. In the US, although unions and students were involved, most of the protesters were from the unorganized working class: immigrants or the descendants of immigrants, now US citizens. In France, protests became violent (though of course, never as violent as the media portray anti-establishment protests); in the US, they were completely peaceful. The French protests spotlighted France's ongoing class warfare between the employer class and its compliant government, and the employee class and its supporters among a left-learning populace. The US protests were intended to cloak the differences between (mostly Latin) immigrants, legal and illegal, and other citizens.

The French protesters challenged the state structures that threatened their well-being, especially parliamentary law wielded by those they saw as their class enemies. Perhaps if the Congress had actually gone through with its threat to return the US to pre-globalization Dark Ages, the American protests too would have turned ugly and anti-state. We won't know on this go-round, because the US protests were successful.

But so were the French protests, though they were so different from the US protests in conception, organization, promotion, and execution. Does this validate the sneaking suspicion of every status-quo, law-and-order type, that “the street” has ultimate power in a political system, whatever its constitution?

In a way, yes, it does. Activists learn how to construct their protests so that they produce the desired outcome and not its opposite due to public misinterpretation and backlash. In fact, skillful street protest organizers take into account the information environment in which they operate.

Todd Gitlin, once an activist against the Vietnam War, now a university professor, has written extensively on the ways that the TV networks (dominant at the time) and other media manipulated protests in the 60s and 70s.

Those days have passed, as the US protesters know. They coopted the TV networks, cable programs, and newspapers by wrapping themselves in the flag, Mexican as well as American. But also, the media is fractured. The protesters relied on alternative channels (Spanish-language talk radio, cellphones, and the Internet) to support their movement's internal communications. The French did it a little differently, as befits a more literate culture in which the written word still commands the attention of intellectuals, politicians, and other opinion leaders. They certainly didn't attempt to put a good face on their protests; the violence was apparent. But they shifted the center of political gravity from the spokespersons of rightwing "reform" to the public arena, thereby thwarting the politicians who have, to put it lightly, a problem communicating with people (including each other). The strategy worked. The new employment bill was withdrawn.

The one thing that the two street protests shared in common, and with Islamic protests earlier this year against Danish cartoons and Western values (including world domination, a value shared by many of the Islamic activists), is passion. It's impossible to particpate or even just witness a real street protest and not palpably feel the energy of the assembled crowd (and occasionally, the counter-crowd formed by their opponents). Children of the 60s may remember, but no one since then has -- until America's soon-to-be-a-majority Latino population spread its political wings this month.

Much has been written about “mob behavior” and crowds by conservative social theorists, but the fact is, they work. In the US, it's not so much the street as public functions and parades where the forces of the status quo hold forth. The intended effect is the same. Emotional force translated into political power.

What leads me to these observations is the realization that it's difficult to discover much passion in in public places, whether they're government buildings, commercial offices, shoppingmalls, or destination resorts (including theme parks) -- and not only in the US, but everywhere. How is it that the deployment of some of the best, brightest, and well-paid professionals -- planners, designers, marketers, ethnographers, PR people, real-estate developers, and the like -- are unable to project, even just once in awhile, the same power inherent to the street protest? With the exception of sports events, where the excitement is highly synthetic, thin gruel, we seem incapable of tapping into the power of the marching crowd even infrequently, let alone on a sustained basis. Maybe it's because the protests really are about something, and not totally synthetic and soulless vanities.

Fortunately for the politically dispossessed, street protests work. But for most citizens, day to day, there is only blandness, civility, and too often, marginalization and irrelevance.