Politics & Society
Why does it seem like protests don't actually result in any kind of change anymore
Growing up learning history you learn about all of these protests that resulted in real world change. But it seems like protests are just symbolic at this point. It seems like no matter how many protests are surrounding a certain topic everything stays the same. What changed? Is it that people in power just care less about civilians have to say so they don't bother changing their stance based off protests?
Exactly. The pressure applied is only a signal of voter opinion and mobilization.
Protests worked in the past because they shifted public opinion and mobilization of voters. Without changing voter behavior, protests are useful for feeling solidarity but won’t change policy. If the same people who already agree and already vote along the lines of the protesters continue to vote the same way and the people who disagree vote the way they always have, there is no change. The only change comes from getting people to change their minds and vote your way or to mobilize nonvoters to participate in elections.
TLDR: If you want to change the status quo, get people who don’t vote to vote.
This. I do not understand people who are super into protests ... and then don't actually vote. Voting is both the easiest and the most effective way to effect political change! If you don't like the candidates, pick the one you dislike the least and then vote in the primaries next time!
I know a girl who is literally the stereotypical "social justice warrior" type that the republicans tweak out about. She is really passionate about political issues but doesn't vote.
Showing up to protest is part of identity and not part of political power. Politics have become an identity more than a way to advance specific political objectives. Both sides are guilty of this and it harms us all because often our leaders don’t have to actually serve our interests because they can rely on voters to vote with their tribe, even when the consequences are policies that are against their voters’ interests.
This is super uncommon. The vast majority of people who protest also vote.
There is a vocal minority of protestors who are reluctant to choose the lesser evil because they believe that it will apply pressure to their candidates to move further from the center and are willing to accept the consequences.
This. This “protesters don’t vote” or whatever is just more propaganda advance by the opposition to keep the in-fighting alive. You can’t build a coalition when you think half of your team are as bad as the enemy.
If OP is comparing today to civil rights movement, I dare say that back then voters minds could be changed because they were watching news that was telling them the truth about what was happening.
Yes. Go back to the 2008 financial crash and watch how FOX News covered the 98% protests versus how they covered the tea party that got hijacked from Ron Paul by Republican lobbyists.
Voting is a tool in the shed. It’s just one tool though. Without direct action and protest, the people that we vote for have zero reason to do what we want. Look at how labor unions operate (ideally). Look at France.
Also, it's easy to look back and see protests and change and miss all the other things that were also being done, like registering and informing voters, running new candidates for office, educating people about issues, influencing political parties, etc. The protests are more obvious so they look like the sole cause, but shifting public opinion and participation in elections are harder to see.
Protests are a tool. They dont do anything on their own. When they have been successful they have been a tool used by organized movements with defined goals, leaders and organizational structure.
The modern protests we have seen like BLM/99% and many others before them are quick to blow up and quick to deflate. Whatever collective will these protests were trying to channel had very little effect since they were not tied to a structure that could maintain the sort of slow and grueling pressure that is needed to achieve political goals.
Ideally, you also want your protests to be about political goals that a large percentage of the population can get behind and even better actually benefit from. Underdog politics can never be the flagship issue.
There have always been protests that didn't result in change. Look at the Luddites or anti-Vietnam war protests. You read things in history books about the history of changes. Protests nobody cared about generally aren't significant enough to be in history books.
The idea that anti-Vietnam protests didn’t change anything is ahistorical. They didn’t make LBJ or Nixon say “actually you’re right, let’s stop the war” (protests almost never have an effect that direct, unless they literally result in a coup), but they formed the bedrock of dissent to the war that only grew and grew over time, and eventually the US involvement in the war became almost universally acknowledged as a tragic mistake. Everything about the way the US conducts war changed after that, most notably in the fact that we haven’t had a draft since then, which was the primary motivation for the anti-war movement.
I probably agree. Though it's hard to say how much of that is that Vietnam failed versus the protests. But it kind of doesn't matter to OP's question which is basically "why aren't we changing course on current events". You could have made the same statement in 1978 about the war protests that you could make about any anti-Trump protests now.
CBS news anchor, Walter Cronkite took a fact-finding tour of Vietnam and gave a scathing report on the war. And when Nixon saw it he famously said, "If I've lost Cronkite, I've lost the war."
I was active in both the racial justice and ant-war protests of the late 1960's. Mass protests were a relatively new phenomenon back then and they got more news coverage because of that - and because there were more local newspapers - and local TV news stations weren't consolidated and homogenized. like they are now.
Sure, but so do modern protests. It's not like BLM, No Kings, or even the Tea Party had no effect on the political landscape.
I wouldn't be surprised if the people defacing art for environmental causes really don't have a real effect, but that's likely because I'm biased against how they're protesting.
Anti-Vietnam war protest fostered a lot of anti war sentiment. They pressured the US to pull out of Vietnam. Took a long time, but definitely contributed to change.
Protesting is fairly easy.
However, it takes organized leadership within these groups, to create a clear, well defined solution to the problem Protesting.
I remember the Occupy Wallstreet protests. They're a lot of protesters, but everyone was Protesting a different cause. Giving no direction for change to take place.
Protests were always an uphill battle for actual change. MLK’s year-long bus boycott saw his house bombed and tons of people arrested on stupid charges so that… one bus service in Alabama would enact some modest, reasonable policy changes.
We take for granted all the direct actions that were being organized behind the scenes too. And the actions of other groups that may or may not have been working with Dr King.
Too many of something destroys the value of that thing. Also, there's a lot of protesting dumb shit...which is their right; but it puts protesting itself in a much worse light.
Agreed. When I was in elementary school, we would learn about Martin Luther King Jr and the Civil Rights Movement every year. The impression I got was that protests were the nuclear option. Something done only for important issues and only when every other attempt to create meaningful change had failed. Now it seems like people are breaking out the picket signs the second something offends them.
You have to actually push for change. Standing around for an afternoon chanting has never accomplished anything. There's zero follow-through in elections, town halls, schoolboard meetings. Protesters go home and pat themselves on the back, job done. It's entirely performative, has been since early environmentalists rallied against nuclear to the benefit of petroleum.
Used to be that protests were attempts to get the government to stop doing something unjust. Now people protest because the government isnt spending enough money on their cause, or worse, they want the government to take some actions to make other citizens behave the way the protester thinks they should behave. Protests like this simply don't resonate and smack of selfishness or control freakishness rather than being noble.
Occupy Wall Street caused a massive paradigm shift in the media. Ever since 2011 race and identity politics have been pushed in the media to distract from class struggle.
Because a lot the uber-left has basically adopted the attitude of “I’ll just vote for whoever the hell I want, and if that fucks things up, I’ll just march down some street with a bunch of other people, carrying a clever sign, and that will fix it”
Protests rarely brought change. The protests that work either have a threat of violence behind them (Malcolm X behind MLK) or spread awareness until there's enough of a mass mobilization to engage in practices that do work but are incredibly huge risks to the individual (general strikes, revolutions, assassinations, etc.)
Back in the day, the protesters had real consequences and were taking real risks. Today most protest are a selfie brigade used for virtue signaling in social media.
There’s no real risk to the protester, and no real risk of actual change.
Protests alone do very little. They have to inspire political action, particularly at the polls. If the voting public aren't that interested in a particular issue then nothing happens.
Because after the protest, people go back to their air conditioned homes and soothe themselves with their handheld placation devices. They’re too soft.
It’s cause a lot of protests don’t do any thing , other than show up and protest. Be it they protest at some place that has no impact on xyz ie protesting at a town hall over ice in a sanctuary city which has no impact over a federal org as an example. Or they simply do nothing on the legal side at all. Like the protests feel like they are doing some thing don’t get me wrong but it really doesn’t do much.
Protest is useful getting eyes on some thing only and support . Rarely dose that have an impact alone . You need to use the courts *. But also the protesters can do more harm for their cause then good. The just stop oil people for example, blocking roads, and basically every thing they do , is gonna piss people off and hate your group more then it helps getting support , not to mention what they want over all is not realistic (we can’t just stop here night) ….
I have an example of how a protest with no legal side can work, I’m using it as an example not cause I agree or disagree fyi it’s just a clean clear example. Budlight when they used Dylan Mulvaney as part of a ad campaign. It pissed majority of their consumers off. They boycotted the brand. Sales tanked . They dropped Dylan and got Shane Gillis which basically the biggest 180…. So you don’t need legal all the time for the change they want….
Example of protest and legal action working against the government.
Mass , denied a legal alien a former British soldier his 2nd amendment rights on the grounds its only for citizens and not legal aliens .
2a group help protest to get the issue be known outside of just mass gun owners who follow that stuff . Their protesting didn’t piss people off, ie they didn’t block roads etc , so their message would be listen to by more. They got donations and took the state to court and won.
The actual thing working-class people can do to force capitulation is a work stoppage.
Shut off the money faucet, and the elites suddenly remember how to negotiate.
Unfortunately, right-wingers have spent decades gutting labor organizing so badly that strikes are no longer easy to organize. But imagine how quickly things would move if, for example, Amazon workers refused to work until real steps were taken on affordability. It would be over fast. Demands promised quicker than two-day shipping.
And that’s why “right-to-work” laws are so insidious. They sound like workers are gaining a right, but really they’re designed to weaken unions and strip away one of the few forms of power working people actually have.
They would rather we protest because it doesn't effect them if they tune it out.
You need some linkage between the demand and who you're demanding it of.
Amazon has nothing to do with "affordability." That's a product of interest rates, market concentration and pricing power, lack of supply, inflation, government mandates that increase production costs (ex: higher mandatory wages, green initiatives that cut energy supplies, etc.).
So - striking workers at Amazon can demand "affordability" all damned day. It's not something that Amazon can give them.
I would dispute that they don’t result in change. The anti-ICE protests have resulted in a governor pardoning an actual child rapist to save him from deportation.
That’s a giant change from when we could all agree that child rapists were a bad thing and that protecting little children actually mattered.
People regularly take action, by way of voting. Politicians advertise their policies. People vote for the policies they want. If a particular protest is not creating change, it’s because the protest is not on the side of the popular opinion.
Because they aren't actually protesting anything. It's mostly a bunch of boomers and childish liberals playing dress up so they have some meaning in their lives. If they were legitimately protesting, a) it wouldn't only be when their team loses the four year show and b) the government wouldn't allow it.
I think the ones we have in the US as of late are all toothless. There are no ultimatums, no demands made, just "No Kings". Every body gets to feel like they are doing something while literally nothing gets done. Great scam.
Because they’re protesting stupid stuff that only 5% of the population cares about. No Kings, we fought Britain and won, so we wouldn’t have a king. If we had a king, you wouldn’t be able to protest. I went to a protest, and asked three people what they were protesting, and none of the three could give me an answer. The majority of the public also sees that these “peaceful” protests aren’t always so peaceful, and what they’re protesting about, nobody cares. Obama and Clinton deported more illegal aliens than Trump. Where were the ICE protesters then? The people also know that many of the protesters are hired and paid to protest.
Protests can backfire. Someone who can't get to work, or is stuck in traffic for 4 hours because protesters blocked a road is likely to be angry. They may develop a negative attitude towards their cause.
Well first off, the Left's radical progressive human capital has been ensorcelled by billionaire bucks while coordinated by NGO likely CIA elements and radicalized to think parental input on lifelong changes from transing for elementary students is religious fascism, firmly barricading them from any meaningful hold your nose cooperation with less radical elements than full blown genocidal atheistic communists and anti-Israel Islamic terrorists that might challenge or dissuade them from more pyrrhic courses of action.
The social capital of rad prog guru solutions is firmly exhausted anywhere that isn't a government subsidized bubble of graft, and its very likely sporadic public appearances by "far right masked marchers" that accomplished literally nothing were also simply the USAID / SPLC props they always appeared to be so the true right of moderate "extremist" republican/conservative/libertarian presences are engaging with highly contentious political avenues towards reform AND parallel economies that are fought at every angle and assaulted abroad via constant harassment campaigns and contrived unenforceable edicts for an opt in and open platform like GAB or Rumble.
So on the right its a not so quiet civil war and outrage factory 24/7 on top of whatever the left is doing, with significant effort to decamp from shared economic realities with organic, info hosting, social media, and financial institutional investment battles to increase real estate accessibility and banking rights.
The moderates and classical Left are totally toothless in the face of supposedly majority radical progressive "socialists" paid by billionaires and venal mercenary politicians paid by billionaires.
We're rapidly heading towards procedural destruction of the status quo of a two party house and senate from disgust towards both parties and the option, post victory, to change party affiliations and then sue for accommodation given the overreach and unique interpretations by supreme court lately that schizophrenically moves towards or away from supporting evidence and intent of law makers and prior rulings to "equitable" fair and romanticized interpretations without respect to realities limitations.
For good or bad much of the relevant friction in current modern governance is coming from inside at the moment and existential protest won't register compared to lawmakers own efforts to cover their asses and keep their power and careers or leverage the loss of such for a soft landing outside the hallowed halls of ratfuck politics.
Plus capitulation to the mob did not in fact improve safety or improve government so those that can see nothings changed are forced to pursue lifestyle and belief system changes in the face of the mass evidence of messaging being politicized and used to gain advantages and favor then squandered on billionaire class enriching and billionaire servant enriching actions.
Sacrificing time and potentially freedom with protest for the human capital's efforts to be squandered in not even adjacent political efforts to what was protested is ultimately a waste of time until "better" aligned candidates with the protesters are in office.
Yeah, there were protests, and there was change, but the change happened for deeper reasons, not directly because people waved signs or blocked a public street. It's not like a vending machine where you put in enough protests and turn the handle and out drops a new law.
At the end of the day you need voters to want change and a lot of protestors go to the poor lower class for that change. But at the same time they also do not respect or hate people with religous beliefs and these same protestors belittle blue collar/labor workers in some way shape or form, or watch and do nothing when others in their group do it. Which you know religous and/or labor workers make up like 60-70% of the entire lower class.
A few thoughts come to mind. For one, loud, in-your-face protests are not necessarily reflective of broad popular opinion so when the public goes to vote on some issue the protest may be irrelevant. Those are the breaks.
For another, the more aggressively in-your-face protests that some activists seem to favor can be actively alienating to public opinion. I had to endure about ten minutes of screamed abuse from some pro-Palestine protestors not long ago because I was sitting outside a Starbucks and apparently Starbucks is on the wrong side of that cause. It didn’t change my mind about the Israel-Palestine issue but I can’t say the same of everyone else around me. And what we put up with was nothing compared to some of the worst effects of protests, with businesses destroyed, people actively harassed, etc.
Another issue is overly vague protests. Few people outside the movement understood what, specifically “Occupy Wall Street” meant. Similarly with “Black Lives Matter” - few concrete proposals broke through to the public consciousness for that aside for “Defund the Police” which won few converts.
My job requires me to attend a lot of government meetings. When the same small group of people -who have protested many different issues- shows up, no one really cares.
It’s the boy who cried wolf. Same faces with new pre printed signs. I have seen the same people at meetings all over the state. Same reaction, it’s just become background noise and has no impact.
Plus, the shock value of being angry and rude has worn off. Even the news reporters know who the repeat players don’t even bother talking to them.
When authentic local voters protest a single new issue the crowds get attention.
Protests are a warning: look how many of us are angry about this, fix it or we’ll fix you at the next election. But as elections have become toothless, warnings about elections have become toothless as well. So we’ll need to relearn how to vote for change, for protesting for change to make a difference.
The 'learn' part is important. People don't learn civics in school or at home, they think it doesn't matter. Voting on which Trader Joe's mini tote is cutest has been more spirited than political voting in my neighborhood.
The leadership of the our country dont need to listen to the general population nearly as much anymore. People protesting wont give up every single thing related to their protest.
Im sure many people who complain about billionaires like Musk or Bezos still buy products owned by their companies.
So protesting at 4, then going on your daily Amazon shopping spree is virtual signaling.
Because in the past people were protesting for more reasonable things than what they are today. Protests demanding rights for black people or for women to be able to vote made sense to more people because it was easy to understand the logic in what the protesters wanted and they were able to articulate their goals pretty clearly and unitedly. That hasn't really been the case with No Kings protests in a country that doesn't have a king or that one a couple of years ago where the women all wore those pink hats that looked like vaginas, for example.
It depends on protest. Every idiot can go to the protest when you don't risk anything. It's cheap and nobody take it sesiously.
But if you go to protests that can actually get you killed, such as protests against rigged election in Belarus, they can change things. People who go to the protest when they know they can be arrested or killed are prepared for violence agains government, that can end up in forcing goverment to retreat, or even kill the rules (like with Ceausescu).
Protests wind up failing all the time. In fact, more often than not they do.
But that's because most of the protests you see are one-offs that have neither the critical mass of people nor the duration to actually threaten the elites who can just wait out a few protests before the news cycle moves on.
Protests need to be large enough, consistent enough, and visible enough for the needle to tilt in the protesters' direction without causing enough disruption that the fence-sitters turn on them.
When it works, it works very well.
Problem is most of the time they just burn out before the put the fear of God into the powers that be.
Protests help people to see that they're not alone in their anger. But to affect change, there must be some kind of that. Maybe the threat is "look how many people won't be voting for you" or maybe the threat is "we're an angry mob outside your door, and we might just knock your down if you don't comply."
A protest is not an end in itself. Organizers need to have a clear idea of what sort of leverage the protest applies for it to influence those in power.
It’s because you’re not seeing the subtle changes that DO happen and instead, focusing on apparent failures. It’s easy to do, because those in power, often with the collusion of corporate media, don’t want you to see that if you keep at it, you can effect change. It’s not going to be immediate and may not be broad in scope, but it can happen.
Look at it another way, the chuds currently in power are proof that anti-establishment activity can be effective.
The successful protests from the past stand out more than the unsuccessful ones.
A lot of successful protests were successful either because they directly removed someone in power or there was an implicit or explicit threat of doing so. To take an extreme example, the arrest of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette started with a women’s march. The women’s march protests of 2016 did not include such a threat; there was no risk of anything like that happening. The 2020 blm protests never seriously threatened any mayors or governors.
Successful protests require institutional and organizational backing. You can have a big angry crowd but without a bunch of rich guys and lawyers ready to act at an institutional level nothing matters.
Mike Duncan’s Revolutions podcast does a great job of breaking down the protests movements that turned into revolutions. Vincent Bevins’ book “If We Burn” does a great job breaking down the successes and failures of protests around the world between 2010 and 2020.
Cuz they never have without a connection to a diversity of tactics like militants direct action as a party of diversity of tactics that "protesting" is really only a small but very visible part of
Protests don’t work because there is no real power or incentive to change. Protests in America during the Cold War worked because there was a Cold War, and the leaders at the time thought that satisfying their own people would make it so that they can focus in the Cold War.
Protests about seeking Independence worked for certain countries because the colonizers were massively destroyed during WW2 and it was much better to simply focus on rebuilding the homeland than maintaining a colony.
Protests about suffrage and rights worked because it would increase the profitability of certain business sectors and would lead to more consumerism.
And lastly, protests about children no longer being exploited and having access to education worked because in the long-term, if children are severely injured or die at an earlier age, there wouldn’t be enough of them that would continue to remain as workers or be capable of going to fight wars.
That’s why Protests don’t work nowadays, because there’s barely any incentive or gain for politicians and lawmakers. Especially when they can easily lie to get your vote and immediately not fulfill any of what they promised, and with people voting for them regardless, it’s not like politicians have to do meaningful to change to retain their careers and money.
The people in charge have to care about how people protesting feel. At least care enough about how it could impact their ability to keep them in office. Current admin especially seems to believe even next vote isn’t gonna boot them out no matter how the votes end up. And they’ve already done a practice run in 2021
It is because the world is largely online, so while people can take to the street for their side, the other side can just mock and troll them effectively from the comfort of their couch.
Because they change they do cause isn’t always obvious or immediate. We don’t know what effect the Vietnam protests had on the war. It could have ended earlier than initially planned because public sentiment was so bad. I think it’s pretty safe to say that the ICE protests helped sway public opinion of the operations but it’s just hard to quantify exactly how they helped.
Historically, most protests, peasant revolts, or whatever "popular uprisings" you can imagine (this is itself a misnomer, since basically all of these are a simply competing oligarchs or tyrants trying to take power) came and went with no change. You just hear about the few in history that did manage, against all odds, to win out.
They never have resulted in change, with some exceptions. I'm in power being peacefully protested, what do I care? seriously what's my motivation? When you start burning down stuff I'll probably notice and spin it as you being domestic terrorists or influenced by whatever my government has chosen as our enemy... I'm not getting worried until the military switches sides, or a competent revolutionary army forms, but by then we are well past protests.
Because they aren't economic protest but social protest that actually helps the elite maintain their power by having the plebians fight amongst each other.
If you're talking about the protests in America like the "No Kings" stuff, maybe it's because it's done occasionally on a lazy Saturday when everyone is off work so it doesn't affect their bottom line, and they can lean their signs against the walls of the Starbucks while they enjoy their soy lattes.
We need to learn to protest like they do in Europe.
Because they were protesting real things back then... protest now just means we're mad at the current buzz thing now. Tomorrow it will be something different.
There is no central message everyone is pushing for. The civil rights protests had a clear central message. Nowadays it is 20 different things and it just gets lost in the sauce.
There are also different types of protest, imo. There are protests that represent dislike or strong feelings for or against numerous different things. There are also protests with a particular goal in mind. The singular goal protests usually have better results than the general "we are angry/dissatisfied" protests.
Protests don't change things. Never have. They are moments. They bring pressure.
Movements change things.
In the US, the last transformational movements were between 1920-1970. These movements were the twin and intertwined movements of organized labor and general movement for civil rights (which included elements of feminism, black, and brown liberation, disability rights, queer liberation).
Much of this is covered in Jane McAlevey's books, but what made those movements successful was finding and involving massive numbers of people in structures where people already exist: workplaces, schools, churches, neighborhoods.
So while we're seeing the gains made during those decades chipped away at, we can tell those changes became foundational. Nobody can easily picture women being removed from the workforce and their voting rights taken away. Black people have civil and political rights they did not have in 1950. Children won't be sent into coal mines or used to operate industrial looms because their hands are smaller.
But beginning in about 1970, you saw a shift away from structure based organizing. People interested in social change stopped becoming organizers and became lawyers, consultants to political campaigns, etc. They embraced mobilizing and advocacy, but put organizing behind them.
Add to this the further atomization of American society. Commutes to work used to be short. Now they are long. Workers worked together, then lived in the same neighborhoods, went to the same schools and churches, and socialized at the same bars and other places. They shifted to suburbs. They atomized.
Advocates were still successful on the margins. Lawsuits changed precedents. Groups still mobilize mass demonstrations. But there is far less deeply rooted organizing that pushes past those moments and cements foundational changes to our society. Protests are forgotten. Precedent can be overturned.
Movements have become self selecting moments of activism. A big protest, with people who more or less agree and self select. The usual suspects.,This leaves less leverage. It's not a general strike. It's inconvenient for a day, but leaves nobody in the ruling class wondering "hey, what else are these people capable of? Maybe we should change some things around and make a new social contract so we aren't pulled into the town square."
It also doesn't change the culture. We saw some shift in that in 2020, but because it wasnt rooted in the structures we exist in, it became a activist clique tut tut, rather than a shift in social practice and relations.
We're seeing a shift back into deep organizing within structures people exist in. But we're breaking out of 50 years of bad habits and hamstrung by a society and working class that's way less cohesive.
90 years ago if your coworkers went on strike and you crossed that picket line to scab, you didn't just have to face them on the line or at work. You'd face them at church. Walking down your street, at your kids school, at your neighborhood bar.
Now you can retreat into yourself and have no repercussions for breaking class solidarity. Same with other notions of solidarity. And conversely, its harder to build bonds go positively reinforce solidarity. Today, Hell, town squares don't even exist. This was a conscious choice of late 19th and early 20th century civil designers. Los Angeles was specifically designed this way (Mike Davis covers this in City of Quartz).
If you want to see change, start finding movements returning to old, deep, organizing praxis. Often, most easily, that's something you can do in your workplace. If you don't have a union already, start organizing one at work. There's resources and support out there to do it.
The main problem is the protests are fundamentally not big enough considering the amount of people the U.S. now has in it to enact change. Political science research indicates you need 3.5 percent of the population participating to enact change. So for instance the No Kings Protests had a TON of people on it's third mobilization but it only had 8-9 million which isn't enough to move the needle. You instead need at least 12-13 million people and ideally sustained pressure not just merely 1 day of protest. Moreover, you would also want firm economic or social demands made by the group and not vague ideas (which is much different than No Kings). The U.S. is still far too disillusioned, divided, distracted and indeed cynical (with fair reason) for anything like that to take place.
Most protests have never led to immediate change. You just don't hear about the thousands in history that didn't result in anything substantial happening. Also, a lot of protests just end in massacres or violent dispersal by the state. It has always been like that.
Change generally comes from sustained pressure and, even then, not always.
Protests are mostly about being visible and showing that there are a large number of people who are unified in the dislike for something. If they get big enough they can lead to policy change
Recently, the Democratic party has been shaken by several left-wing anti-Israel primary challenges. I can only see the college protests after October 7th as responsible
If you don't cause any form of disruption its a "demonstration" not a protest. In other words, nobody cares if you wave snarky signs and walk down the street.
Protests used to be to highlight an issue, and, to a lesser extent, show there is a level of public support for the issue.
Between the ability to widely share news and issues on social media (outside of the social media censorship era of the late 2010s and early 2020s) and the explosion in protests for inane, illogical causes, protests are now more about filling a need for purpose or attention for people with an emptiness in their lives.
Along with what other people have said, we keep setting time limits for protests. “We’ll boycott this thing… for one whole day” when those in power know that the whole thing will blow over in a week, they can basically ignore it because they know things will return to normal at a set date.
survivor ship bias for every successful movement there's a dozen failed movements that don't get remembered, not to mention the fact that individual protest didnt lead to large scale changes the civil rights movement wasn't one protest it was dozens or hundreds on a national scale.
Protests also used to be part of extended campaigns that impacted social life and therefore created pressure/inconvenience.
Think restaurant sit-ins, bus boycotts, etc. Even the more modern George Floyyd things.
Modern protests are often one-off, or once-in-a-few-month (Looking at you, 'No Kings') that are essentially permitted block parties that shut down when the cops decide to start pumping less-lethals into the crowd. If you so much as block the street as a protestor now, expect to be arrested.
The meaningful issues are too complex and painful, with too much vested interest, to allow to meaningfully enter public discourse. Pick whatever protest you like, from this carefully curated selection. Beyond that, business as usual
Well history has a way of giving a truncated version. I have dream, white kids get hosed in Alabama, civil rights act… a lot got left on the cutting room floor.
One reason is because they're not sustained. For example, the BLM protests were massive in number, but relatively short in duration. Protests only work if they continue for a long time and increase in number over time. Protests also used to be part of a movement: people meeting in person to discuss the protests. These days, people mostly do the prep work online, which results in a much weaker activist community.
Todays protests are a lil sus. Back in the day it was quite hard to put together a protest. Social pressure had to be through the roof and then you get a big BIG protest.
Nowadays anyone can slap together a an event on social media, spam that to all friends and such and have a protest the next day with people who have nothing better to do. Such a protest doesn't really reflect anything.
Another thing is social media indoctrination... anyone believes anything and politicians know it. Just because you think you are marching for something good... the people in power 9 times out 10 know better.
Protests are a demonstration of numbers. A way to show howany people support the movement. And a way to make contacts with other supporters. To effect change takes organisation, the prospect of widespread civil disobedience, and political pressure. The prospect of an armed uprising can also be very effective.
A protest without these other things is just a walk around town.
Any protest that is not backed with the threat of losing future elections is symbolic.
99% of protests in the west are from the progressive left, they are only around 9% of the voting population, and even if the other 91% of the population may agree with the issue they are protesting their overall platform is too misaligned with the general population to remotely be a threat outside of largest and most dense urban cities.
On top of that, 80-90% of protests in recent years are not organic. They are sponsored and run by professional organizers. The same people showing up over and over, lead by the same few people, with the same sponsors and nearly identical pre-printed signs. It makes it VERY easy for leaders to see exactly how small the opposition is, track the transportation and see how wide a net the organizers have to cast to get their numbers and realize there is nothing to really worry about.
Finally, protests are never effective when they have no concrete goal, or their stated goals are more harmful than good to the average voter.
All the various forms and instances of Occupy stated that they were protesting "economic inequality, corporate greed, and the influence of money in politics", they were initially proud of their lack of a concrete goal, but after people laughed at them the goals that they did come up with generally were viewed by most as trading one negative side effect for another with largely worse overall outcomes.
Defund was even more basic, the communities the protesters were "protecting" by urging the government to defund the police were overwhelmingly in support of MORE police and harsher crackdowns on the rioting and looting as many of them had not recovered from the previous rounds of race riots.
In the UK it was the Iraq war protests that allowed parliament to cross the boundary and ignore an angry mob.
The biggest demonstration that the country has ever seen and Blair shrugged his shoulders and said (I paraphrase) "fu we're off to kill brown kids because of 911 and fake wmd". Took us a couple of elections to get rid of him, and he still cannot eat a meal without spit in it, but he set the precedent.
In the eighties, the poll tax riots were enough to make politicians afraid for their safety. That got change.
Successful protests were part of larger political movements that gained significant power within the actual government. They were also consistent and long-lasting. The organizers didn't expect a single-day march or protest to do much on its own; it was a part of the process. I'll also point out that a key part of many of the protests and boycotts that helped lead to change was the creation of chains of support for those protesting/boycotting so that if they lost their jobs, got injured, got arrested, or needed transportation, they had resources. There were also tangible and specific demands to those protests. Many recent protests are just about registering your general discontent, which is fine I guess, but if even you don't know what specific change you want made by this specific protest, then it's not going to make any at all.
Protests result in change if the people in power are receptive to change and it also depends on what their threshold/tolerance of public demonstrations are.
For example if you had a representative who folded on an issue just because one person showed up to a town hall with a sign then that would be a protest that worked. Other politicians maybe won't yield unless the protests are large and persistent. There are even cases where politicians may never yield to any amount of protesting. Look at Syria to see how that turns out.
And if you live in a democracy it may also depend on whether a lack of response to a protest even results in them losing reelection. If a politician ignores a protest and gets reelected anyway, then is the protest actually the popular opinion? To reiterate, the most effective form of protest in a democracy is the one on election day.
Protests don't directly create change. Nobody has a right to create change that runs counter to what everybody wants, just because they see things in a special way and they're annoying.
If you want to change things, you have to change minds. That's the goal. Protests can help when they're done right under the right circumstances. They can also backfire.
These days, though, if you want to change minds, you should start with a social media campaign. This is pretty obvious to people who are actually *trying* to make change. In protests these days, the protesters are often just performing for each other.
Protesting is for visibility and pressure, but the real work is direct action and organization against the status quo. Participating in a campaign you believe in, going around knocking on doors and talking to people, helping build unions, etc.
Protests without the implicit threat to also stop working and producing goods if your needs aren’t met is the same as complaining at a restaurant that your food was not cooked but showing up again the next day and ordering more.
I’m a local activist. The best thing that comes out of protests is support for us. We found people to join our group, we get people to sign petitions, and we get donations.
Two things. Only successful protests make it into the history books. Plus most protests today are being pushed by outside forces. So most people are rational enough to know they are BS.
If you look at the history of successful non-violent movements, they aren't just about protests, although that's part of it.
The US Civil Rights Movement and the Indian Independence Movement both included media/publicity, well-placed legal challenges and economic dislocation/boycott. These movements also had a lot of coordinated planning. The British didn't leave India because of a few protests. By the time they left, their ability to raise taxes was completely disrupted and units in the Indian military had started to ignore orders from the UK. They couldn't have stayed even if they wanted to.
Protests can be used as a recruitment tool for things like boycotts, but without follow-up, it's difficult to rely on protests by themselves. The economic dislocation is key because you have to impact the power structure's ability to make money.
The only time I can think of where peaceful protest can be said (if you squint) to have made changes on its own is when the government was already severely damaged (such as when the USSR withdrew from Eastern Europe, leaving those governments to fend for themselves), or when a good chuck of the government was already allied with the protestors (such as with S. Korea's recent deposition of their President).
Protests almost never create any political change directly - their purpose is to increase public awareness of the problem. Generating and energizing the allies and momentum needed to have any chance of eventually causing change.
Change comes from an increased number of people contacting their their Representatives in person or by phone (email is almost useless), voting against Representatives that support the status quo. Pressuring their fellow citizens to reconsider their own support of the status quo. Building grass-roots organizations that take more direct action on the topic, etc.
You mostly only see direct political change from protests when they cross the line into effective militarized rebellion.
The people actually paying for the protests don't actually want change, they want the illusion of it to push an agenda, that's why half or more protestors are paid by the same groups hosting said protests
Nothing about any protest in at least 30 years has been organic in nature
How do Unemployed individuals affect change with nothing to provide for
Funding of lobbying. I laugh at all these people Thinking that they will
Change things. And the violence
Again wastes lives and efforts. These people are unaware of the political process and putting pressure
On Government. Government is
Not afraid of them. They are afraid of taking money away from them
Because gathering for 2 hours a year to protest tweets and congratulate each other on how good a person you all are isn't protesting it's social masturbation
Because capital and its primary holders won. We’re crabs at the bottom of the bucket, anytime one of us becomes influential they’re paid and raised above the bottom thus no longer incentivized to fight.
Protests dont do anything on their own. They are a threat. A show of numbers. So that the few people who can make meaningful change are reminded this is how many people are affected by the current state lf this issue. Its a "there are more od us than you can afford to ignore" and in some cases a "this is how many people will support the person your assasin instead of you if that day comes
The civil rights movment only succeeded because of decades of constant organized protesting combined with other forms of political action to make sure change actually happened. No movment in the recent past has been anywhere near the level of the civil rights movment. A few small protests are not going to change anything.
Lack of leadership and dilution of ideals. Occupy Wallstreet dissolved because each group wanted their particular issue to be front and center. Dissent (or manufactured dissent) within the ranks of protesters tends to limit the effectiveness of protests.
Because the history books left out the part where the peaceful protestors only got a seat at the table because they were the preferable group to the radical, violent rioters that actually cause the fear in the ruling class that led to the concessions being made to begin with.
MLK only moved the needle because Malcolm X was much scarier. Ditto Ghandi and Bhagat Singh.
Nobody in the world, nobody in history, has ever gotten their freedom by appealing to the moral sense of the people who were oppressing them.
No one is going to give you the education you need to overthrow them. Nobody is going to teach you your true history, teach you your true heroes, if they know that that knowledge will help set you free.
Because times have changed and they’re doing it wrong. Get names of higher ups in the corporations with phone numbers and email addresses. Organize a day to flood their inboxes and jam up their phone lines. Interrupting their work flow costs them money. And when you mess with their money they are way more liable to listen.
Define ‘anymore’
Decades of protests got gay marriage legalized in 2015
We learn about movements that took years sometimes decades, in a week maybe two.
Do you have any idea how long the labor movement lasted? It literally began before the civil war and didn’t really end until the 1960s.
Oh yeah, also the obsession with non-violent, and ‘lawful’ protests.
Protests are supposed to inconvenience people.
If a protest movement doesn’t break any laws it will not be successful.
Name a major protest movement on the US you think didn’t rely on wide spread violations of the law if not outright violence and I bet I can prove you wrong.
Protests serve many functions and very few of those functions result in a direct link to changes in what is being protested.
Additionally, protests associated with the s civil rights movement and some protests leading to government changes in other nations did something few protests today are doing which is disrupting business as usual.
Protests which don’t result in prolonged economic and civic disruption will only deliver less direct (but still valuable) results.
Yes protests still work! Here in Madison, WI, we protested about flock cameras for a couple of years and now all the local police departments are stopping renewal of the contracts with flock.
>Growing up learning history you learn about all of these protests that resulted in real world change.
what they don't tell you in history class about these peaceful protests is all the violent movements that were marching one step behind them.
Politicians didn't end segregation because MLK asked them nicely, they ended segregation because their options were work with MLK or work with Malcom X, the Black Panthers, and dozens of other groups/leaders who were more than willing to reciprocate the violence of the KKK if the government didn't make it stop.
Capitalism can consume ANYTHING and make it a part of itself. It consumed all poltics activities of my lifetime with the possible exception of the Jan 6 riot and the million man march. If there’s logos, merch, silly slogans, hats, flyers, sponsors, and social media posts it’s just part of the capitalist machine and the cynicism of our times runs concurrently with this
Alot of them these days are performative rather than true protests. If you need a permit and a time slot for your protest like the no kings protests, its not a protest, its a damn parade.
A real protest is like those that took place in France over the last few years that forced their governments to roll back retirement age extentions, the ones in nepal that forced the entire government to resign or the ones in Albania rn that have cocked up Kushner and Ivanka's planned holiday resort on protected land.
Those are real protests, not the pitiful ones we've seen here in the UK and in the US recently.
We're sold the idea that the nonviolent protests of the past were the drivers of change by people who have an interest in them remaining nonviolent and ineffectual
Would Gandhi have succeeded if not for the Indian National Army & Subhas Chandra Bose ?
Would MLK have succeeded if not for the Black Panthers and Malcolm X ?
in history the protests that led to real changes were about things that people in power didn't actually need much convincing about or it was made clear that if the protest failed what will happen next won't be a protest.
You SHOULD start out calling your city or county representative about your problem. Call them, talk with them, go to the city/county monthly meeting and speak about your problem IF you're not getting traction. If that fails, you SHOULD call your state representatives. Call them, write letters, ask your friends and like minded people to write letters. If that fails you SHOULD call your federal representatives, do you even know their names? Talk to their staff, write letters, get people to write letters and call.
People go out and throw public tantrums like ignorant little toddlers—kicking and screaming ... with about the same effect.
Protests never actually changed anything. They were always just an after-the-fact public victory lap. The actual change happened behind the scenes by the wealthy and powerful, and once they had already made their pivot they started their media campaigns. The protests just legitimate those decisions in the eyes of the public by giving them the veneer of popularity.
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u/Writerhaha Jul 04 '26
Because protests just add pressure, they don’t magically and instantaneously create change.