this post was submitted on 18 May 2024
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It should also be pointed out that modern protest movements aren't particularly tactical. In fact, these people largely suck at it.
You all know how much this country hates homeless and homeless-adjacent people, and yet, you opt to camp out in public areas anyway.
Here's a darn good article on why your protests fail: https://www.americanpurpose.com/articles/caring-isnt-enough/
This started to inspire me to organize a protest and not a social media stunt. I'm behind the idea of a "revolution" but knowing the fundamentals of protesting is honestly eye opening. We can't just "fight back" blindly, we need to think, we need to plan, and we need to execute our demands.
Yup.
There has also been a tendency for progressive protest movements to get extremely derailed by bad-faith actors subverting the plans, messaging and outcome of the events, seeding bad messages or inciting violence.
While this isn't necessarily the fault of the protestors, the groups have been terrible about focusing on message and enforcing guidelines for how to safely protest and stay on message, so it's really hard to separate out these saboteurs and point to them as the problem-starters.
I have said for a long time that the left needs better community organization and better leaders, not just in action movements and marches, but generally on a community level, there are a lot of people committing the same sin as the right, which is attaching to the progressive cause for the performative expression and storyline narrative only, and getting lost in the conflict not the message and goal. Performative progressivism is going to be the thing that sinks movements every time because it's so easy to poke holes in the half-ass campaigns and the people involved don't really care enough to push back in an intelligent way, as long as they have their in-groups to retreat to and feel validated and comforted by their community.
Agreed. A lot of these non-violent protests get infiltrated by cops posing as demonstrators. They're called "agents provocateurs" and they work to undermine and discredit the group's goals.
They're fairly easy to spot because they're always agitating for violence and nobody in the protest seems to know who they are or can remember exactly when they joined your group.
Nailed it.
The point of protest is to upset status quo, as a demonstration for attention to grievances.
To imply that you're doing it wrong is some next generation privilege shit.
What??
I think it's more, we need to be smart about how we protest to do it most effectively. We can't afford to be sloppy about it.
Article is sort of right but also seems aimed at discouraging people. Generally seems to be the goal that site, to promote a center right agenda.
Modern protest have little cohesion because Americans have little cohesion. It has no leaders bc any leaders are swept off to jail. It's a big part of why things suck so much. That article is missing any analysis of why. It's frankly anti protest propaganda and so are you.
It's actually quite analytical, and gives you several examples as to why prior protest movements were successful. It suggests that maybe modern movements could learn a few lessons if they read their history books.
But you probably didn't read it anyway.