Speaking for everyone around me I hear talk…
Frame it as “fuck billionaires”.
Well, yeah. Be general. If I want to sell candy I don’t market it to 11-year-old claustrophobic basketball players, I market it to kids.
Every specificity that is added to the movement’s message scares away potential supporters that can no longer identify. This is global though. Every fringe group wants to add their message to the masthead of every protest. The left has had this problem forever.
In one breath you’re saying protests have to be wide and in the next you’re complaining about groups with a specific interest joining.
No I’m complaining about groups with specific interests framing the entire campaign
So something that doesn’t actually happen in the real world. No one gets to decide the one singular issue that defines a protest. There isn’t one.
Sure, protests have organizers that do marketing/pr, logistics and the official registrations for the events. Therefore most large and significant protest movements in history are marketed with a sole purpose and can be boiled down to one topic:
Women’s March= women’s rights 1970 Earth Day= environment George Floyd/BLM= police brutality Globally it’s the same, think of Fridays for Future for example.
Sure people went to Earth Day with peace flags or believing whatever but the framing of the event was clear.
Name a single protest taken over by an outside group. It’s not something that happens. Maybe some of the white supremacy groups whose presence alone requires people to reject them or be tainted by association, but nothing on the left. That’s not an actual problem on the left, much less one “on the left forever”.
My first protest was organized against the Iraq War, but in practice also contained more broadly anti-Bush protesters as well as groups promoting third parties, communism, and veganism. None of those were a problem or threatened to take over the protest in any way.
You might be interested in !aspen_anti_billionaire_society@midwest.social
I’m not super familiar with it, but the sole mod has been quite outspoken about trying to make it a “big tent” and not allow it to be pulled by every extreme away from the singular goal of taxing the 0.01%, not even going after the 1%.
People don’t like movements with no direction.
The existing political parties phrase valid resistance as resistance that does not meaningfully impact or change anything.
People are sick of going and standing around and then going back to work, seeing that nothing has changed.
I’ve gone to every protest in my city this entire year and it hasn’t accomplished anything.
I think people support replacing our administrative branch for a lot of reasons, but nobody in a position of power is directing people to take action that makes meaningful change happen.
A fight against monarchy seemed to work well.
How so?
The “No Kings” protests we just had, brought out massive numbers all over the country.
When democracy is under threat, you better hit the street with a big sign that says TRUMP IS A C*NT. It is a moral obligation.
You’re allowed to say Cunt on the Internet
But not on TV.
So if your sign is going to make the news, you need the asterisk.
Simple, honest, fair reporting.
what might work?
Actual fights. The first time we fought the Nazis, we didn’t beat them by protesting; we beat them with bombs and bullets.
Nonviolent options only work under the threat of a violent plan-B.
…and plan-A has been completely ignored for decades.
Is this just your conjecture, or do you base this on something? Because there is research that supports nonviolent protest movements being the more effective path.
It’s based on observing current events through the lens of the education I’ve received on history. Protests by themselves today require a ridiculous scale to accomplish peanuts; contrast that to MLK Jr’s protests during the civil rights movement. His got shit done. Why? Because the Black Panthers were standing by with rifles. Today’s protests are all bark from a toothless mouth, so we’re allowed to yip away until it’s out of our system, then the status quo just keeps trucking along. There’s no modern iteration of the Black Panthers to back up all of our nonviolent protests.
The 50501 movement / ICE protests are starting to show promise, but again, scale - we’ve seen nationwide protests regularly for months, and so far all they’ve accomplished is being an inconvenience for ICE… in exchange for making themselves a target to multiple facets of the military.
We need more than noise.
It takes more than months to do anything. The civil rights movement you’re referencing took decades.
Protests against this neonazi flavor of right wing extremism have been happening for decades. They haven’t accomplished shit. To the contrary, things have gotten considerably worse. The protests are ignored. The protests will continue to be ignored so long as they’re just noise.
Please share the research, I’m genuinely interested.
Just replied on another comment. Search for Erica Chenoweth https://www.ericachenoweth.com/research/wcrw
Can you link that research?
What I’m familiar with is Erica Chenowith who authored work in this area. Here’s her summarizing it on TEDx:
https://www.nonviolent-conflict.org/resource/success-nonviolent-civil-resistance/
https://www.ericachenoweth.com/research/wcrw
One of the reasons is that nonviolent resistance attracts more supporters, and once there’s enough support for enough time, things are more likely to change.
Chenoweth’s painstaking research, unprecedented in its scope and historical breadth, has shed new light on the understanding of civil resistance, political change, and the surprising effectiveness of nonviolent action.
The key ingredients of a successful nonviolent resistance movement, the researchers found, are:
- A large and diverse population of participants that can be sustained over time.
- The ability to create loyalty shifts among key regime-supporting groups such as business elites, state media, and—most important—security elites such as the police and the military.
- A creative and imaginative variation in methods of resistance beyond mass protest.
- The organizational discipline to face direct repression without having the movement fall apart or opt for violence.
She and her coauthors speculate that framing hardships today as civil rights violations evokes comparisons with the 1960s Civil Rights Movement, which makes contemporary problems appear less significant and therefore less worthy of government action. […] Surveys were conducted in 2016 and 2019…
Six to nine years ago, it was easy to make the case that virtually everything had improved since the 1960s and that evoking that era made modern issues look relatively minor in comparison. But now we have federal agents rounding people up en masse and shipping them off to foreign prisons without a hearing—there are at least some dimensions of the current situation where a comparison with the 1960s accentuates how serious things have become.
Yeah, that one paragraph made this entire story worthless. We have gestapo kidnapping people and warfighters on the street facing down Americans. It’s no longer hyperbole to compare the times.
Rights -> Job -> Head
Head or head?
