Historically it has been successful and many of the best changes have been the result of it. I guess my cynicism today stems from the fact I see no clear path from protesting to actual change in 2024. The SC is gone for life. The GOP is likely to crush the election and even if the Dems eek out a close win they also will block a lot of progressive legislation. In some magical world where the Dems actually do pass sweeping change the SC will just kill it anyways. So whatās the point?
Iām willing to concede you know more about this subject than me though.
Thatās about what MLKās approval rating was. Thatās about what the IWWās was in the early 20th century.
The approval rating isnāt the point. The organizing gets results. Direct action gets the goods. You canāt do mass direct action without organizing and mutual aid.
It was really difficult watching people pretend they could evaluate whether campus protests of Israel/Palestine were worth it. Were they changing opinion. What was the optics. The optics are not the fucking point. But people whose entire life revolves around reading about politics and posting about politics are completely uneducated on what politics even is, because thatās the hegemony we are up against.
Oh Iām 100% willing to admit my ignorance on this topic. Iām more just sharing my own observations/feelings rather than trying to say how it is. Iām wrong about all kinds of things all the time.
I also can admit i have very limited experience protesting unless you count picketting abortion clinics with my parents when i was 10 years old. Went to one protest for LGBTQ rights here at the capitol building and one GF protest. Outside of that I can admit I havenāt done anything in the real world to change anything.
I would absolutely take time off work and travel to protest these recent SC decisions. But I have no idea how to begin organizing what I feel should be about a couple hundred thousand people minimum
A protest imo has to be big enough and organized enough to scare those making the decisions. They need to fear us, not the other way around
None of that resistance stopped any of this from happening. Democracy was lost with Citizens United, if not earlier. Sending lawyers to airports to fight the Muslim ban was like taking aspirin to deal with a brain tumor. Iām sure it felt good, but it didnāt actually deal with the problem that a sizeable portion of our population wants fascism.
Itās hard to find the will for collective action when the political party that supposedly represents you, which has ACTUAL POWER, does jack shit. Thereās no leadership.
Thatās a stupid point. Realizing it canāt be stopped by putting on a knitted vagina hat and screaming that Donald Trump is a racist to in front of my local courthouse or screaming about how capitalism is evil and the police should be abolished at people who havenāt spent 10 minutes of their lives thinking about systemic injustice doesnāt mean you want fascism.
Even the guy on here who takes pride in talking about how people arenāt doing anything and his one time getting arrested for his activism quickly denies that heād be willing to burn down buildings to stop whatās coming.
the protests werenāt that publicized and i doubt they made any difference, most people participating would have been from places where the left (or sometimes center) won easily.
what changed in these two weeks was simply the voting round and the fact that RN were against a single left or centrist opponent. They still got a lot more votes than the other forces (again, because their opponents dropped out in many places) and not much less than in the first round (the difference probably only from places where they had already won)