I was at the bar with friends last week and discussion turned to the G20, mostly because I hadn’t seen most of them in a while and I wanted to tell them all my good G20 stories (IE, “the ones I won’t publish online because they were off the record”), and subsequently it turned into a discussion about protests. First of course there was the criticism of the protest movement that mostly echoed last Wednesday’s post, but then it turned to something that I think was more interesting, which is: is protest, as we currently understand it, outdated? The arguments in favour of that hypothesis seem fairly strong.
Let’s start off with a simple definition and say that protest movements exist to do two things: change the minds of the public on an issue, and empower individuals to work together to force elite decisionmaking in favour of the “protest” side of the issue. (Okay, also they exist for social reasons and there will always be those who are just there for an adrenalin rush. Let us assume that the primary reason for protests is social change.)
The problem is that your standard protest model is, nowadays, bad at doing both of these things. Even in those situations where protests don’t dissolve into a cacophony of various messages of dissent only tenuously connected to one another, the standard protest model suffers from a problematic catch-22: in order to significantly impact the news cycle, a protest must be really big, but the larger a protest becomes, the more likely it is to be ineffective due to lessened public support due to the inconvenience of the protest and the perception that it’s a one-off stunt. And even when a protest significantly impacts the news cycle, it’s still a one-off event in a modern culture which has trouble remembering what happened in the news three months ago.
“Aha,” you say, “but what about the Tea Party? What about European labour protests?” And these are interesting discussions. The Tea Party isn’t really a good counterexample. Although they have had a number of protests and have had some impact on public debate in the United States, they also aren’t following the traditional protest model, which is “have a really big protest and then that’s it for a while in terms of public visibility.” Granted, liberal protesters might argue that they don’t get any public visibility outside of protests due to media complacency, and they have a point there. But that right there is why the Tea Party has had more impact on the media: they’re essentially sponsored by a cable news network, which has allowed them to outlive the news cycle and become a constant presence.1 Since most protests will not get that advantage, pointing to the Tea Party as a measure of protest success is erroneous. On top of that, for all the visibility the Tea Party has enjoyed, they haven’t really had that much success at shifting public opinion; there has been no groundswell of support for their pet issues and the movement has remained mostly confined to conservative Republicans despite halfhearted attempts to reach out to libertarians. Really, the Tea Party is more reflective of the current state of the Republican party base than anything else.
As for European labour protests, sure, they work – but they work because when European labour movements go out and protest, that’s not a protest fringe doing it; that’s a hefty chunk of the country. People talk about how the G20 protest was big, but it was a drop in the bucket compared to, say, the antiwar protests conducted five or six years ago – and those in turn are equivalent to a smaller European labour protest, except that the American antiwar protests were mostly one-day or very occasionally two-day affairs, whereas European labour protests can go for weeks if need be (and have). European labour protests aren’t analagous to the modern North American protest movement expressly because they aren’t interested in shifting public opinion2, but rather in representing a large portion of the public. This makes the “swaying public opinion” part of the protest model null; all these protests are designed to do is sway elite decisions.
So, if traditional protest is no longer good for swaying both the public and the elites, what can do it? This is where I come up empty; none of the existing options seem to work. In the US, phone-in campaigns to Congressional offices have had some success at pushing representatives on important votes, but quite apart from the fact that phone campaigns don’t sway public opinion at all? Even if we accept that the phone system is a solid answer – and I don’t think it’s nearly as effective as some claim – simple numbers seem to make it essentially non-duplicable outside of the United States. There are about 700,000 Americans for every representative in Congress. Most other nations have a much lower citizens-to-representative ratio, generally ranging from 100000:1 (the United Kingdom) to 150000:1 (Australia). If you want to flood their phonebanks, phone campaigns need a participation rate essentially six times as high as happens in the United States. This seems unlikely.
Facebook/Twitter/other internet petitions and polls are flawed from a different end. Phone calls and letter-writing are the traditional weapons of choice for people attempting to make their voices heard to their representatives, but both of these methods require a person to really, really care about an issue.3 This is why politicians have traditionally multiple-counted people doing these things: the assumption is that since one person was angry enough about the issue to contact their representative, therefore there are X more people who feel the same way and will be less inclined to vote for the representative (at a minimum). But internet petitions have almost no disincentives attached to them: there’s a degree of anonymity involved4 and there’s next to no effort required, which means that representatives/politicians not only don’t multiple-count the people involved, they sometimes even discount them (in the “this person will never change their vote based on issue X” sense). Even when they don’t discount, the numbers taken at face value are almost never big enough to influence decisionmakers. Fair Copyright For Canada’s 87,543 members means an average of 284 members per riding, which isn’t enough to swing anything other than the absolute swingiest of swing ridings.
So what’s the solution? I’m not sure, to be honest. A combination of social media petitioning to raise public awareness of the issue above and beyond current standards combined with phone-ins coordinated to a degree as yet unexperienced seems like it could work, but it also seems like it would be extremely difficult. Something entirely new, of course, always has potential, but the problem with something entirely new is that I don’t know what that is. Better minds than mine, etc.
- The more you talk about a thing being a thing, the more likely it is that that thing will become a thing. [↩]
- I know anarchist commenters here have said they’re not interested in doing that either, but let’s just assume that the majority of left-wing protesters aren’t idiots. [↩]
- Calling is easy, but has an invasive edge to it that most people instinctively avoid; letter-writing is time-consuming and costs you a stamp. [↩]
- Or, at the very least, the perceived semi-anonymity people assume exists on the internet and almost never does. [↩]
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((The more you talk about a thing being a thing, the more likely it is that that thing will become a thing.))
That was very Sorkin-esque. Bravo.
I think the biggest reason Traditional Progressive Protest fails is that there’s no threat behind it. I don’t mean black bloc shit – that’s scary, maybe, if you own a building next to a Starbucks, but not to the rest of the world at large. But protest has proven ineffective, so it’s ineffective. In the 60’s, protest could be effective because no one had seen it before, and the notion of all of these weird individuals running in the streets was a scary repudiation of 50’s conformity. It was dangerous because it was new.
Nobody’s scared of the hippies now, even if they’re wearing black bandanas and trying to get into fights with the cops. There’s no reason to take protest seriously, because everyone knows how the story ends – people go home and go back to work.
The Tea Party, by contrast, has been more effective (though it’s obviously still limited) because we hadn’t seen that before: Conservatives, by definition, are conservative and don’t flip their shit in the streets, as a rule. The fact that they were doing it made them a possible threat – who knew what they were going to do next? It was out of character, and thus meant that they had to be taken more seriously.
If the next time there were a big lefty cause to protest, tens of thousands of people showed up in matching uniforms and marched silently through the streets, you can believe that’d make an impact. Because the implicit point of mass public protest is to signal a threat – the thousands of people marching aren’t just doing it because they have a polite disagreement, they’re letting you know that they could storm the castle. In the 60’s, a bunch of free-spirits running around signaled that; in Europe, the labor protests work because there’s a possibility they’ll shut things down; with the Tea Party, there were lots of people proudly exercising their right to open carry. Meanwhile, your average lefty protest looks like a Pepsi commercial.
–d
This is a very good step-by-step thinking of “big picture” protesting (at least as it exists in in US/Canada), but I wanted to add some perspective.
I’ve mentioned before that I work for a state government, I’ve been exposed to protests, letter writing campaigns and e-mail bombs, so here’s my rating of their relative effectiveness.
Moving from the bottom up, internet petitions are not sometimes discounted, they are ALWAYS discounted. These things are handled by staff, and despite what you may think about state or federal employees, they are not idiots. Those who survive for more than a year in a position where they are regularly exposed to the public are very good at their jobs, and they will know, without any doubt, when something is bullshit.
The power of a letter is two fold: There is the ‘multiplyer effect’ mentioned in the article (when you have a letter from an actual consitutent, which is not always the case,
and that there must be a response, one that is generated by staff and reviewed by someone higher in the chain if the letter is going to go out under a Representative/Senator/Governor/Mayor’s signature. This means someone high up had to consider their current position and support/opposition of the position of the letter. This is almost always a policy issue, and can result in anything from a quick review to a meeting of senior staff. This is a powerful feedback mechanism, but is infrequently used.
Emails (that are obviously not cut-and-paste jobs,) are usually a middle-ground, since they are difficult to check to see if the writer is a constitutent (I used to get emails from the polish branch of Amnesty International periodically, in Polish. I didn’t answer those), and they are by their nature more informal.
In my experience protests CAN work, but only marginally. Usually the best is when protestors can bring focused pressure and attention to an issue AND a policy maker WHEN THE POLICY DECISION IS BEING MADE. 100 people in wheelchairs showing up to the budget subcommittee meeting makes it hard for the guy in the seat to make the “yes” vote on the amendment to cut access ramps to public schools. But that type of protest takes a lot of work, effort and money to pull off.
By contrast, and I would see this every year, the FreedomWorks group (funded by Dick Army, the same guy behind a lot of Tea Party stuff) would bring 100 old white people in tshirts in to shake with rage at the final budget votes, and no one cared, (except those where were counting on those votes and made impassioned speeches and were going to vote against a budget anyway) becasue their complaint was general, not specific and it’s easy to dismiss a general complaint in favor of specific reasons to support something.
So that’s a long way of saying that I agree with MGK. “Macro” protests don’t “work” (i.e. change the policy the protest organizers may be unhappy with), becasue there’s no message aside from discontent, the fact that protests generally delegitimized by extremeists elements and/or violence. They may often be counterproductive because of the media images that, rightly or wrongly, are generated by the event (look at the claims of racism and nationalism that took center stage at both major immigration and the tea party protests of the last few years).
They may “work” in that they make the participants feel like they are contributing or part of history, or whatever, but that’s a different thing altogether (and, in my opinion, onanistic and ultimatly counterproductive).
So what’s the solution? I don’t know either. But like a lot of things that are strange about our current politics it is a legacy of the 60’s. “Protest movements” are firmly rooted in mid-20th centry thinking. I don’t know the 21st century answer is, but I expect we’ll find out sooner rather than later.
As sad as this sounds, I think the best and fastest way to sway public opinion is to get a celebrity to endorse it one or the other and then advertise the hell out of their opinion. Multiple celebrities to reach multiple market bases, a plus.
Take Oprah as an example. Her wealth and ability to reach millions of women could be a huge tool, IF you could get her to care or rally behind your cause. She knows this, which is why she is always promoting pet projects on her show, in her magazine, etc.
I don’t know about European (or Canadian) culture as much so I don’t know if this would be as effective in those regions, but Americans are generally pigs with their fat mouths in troughs, slurping up all the shit that’s fit to print. The glossier the better.
I think that Dan makes a good point, except that he limits “60s protest” to “hippies” (i.e., I assume, the anti-war protesters of the late 60s and early 70s), and fails to analyze the Civil Rights movement.
I think that analysis of the Civil Rights protests can fit into his hypothesis — let’s be honest, what was scarier to late-50s/early-60s mainstream America than organized black people? Whether the protests and the marches were intended to be scary or not, the mere fact of them was scary.
But an important component of the Civil Rights protests was “economic pressure”, which is, to the best of my knowledge, what the “hippie” protest movement lacked. (If someone is aware of evidence to the contrary, please speak up.) You can’t talk about protests in the Civil Rights era without talking about the Montgomery Bus Boycott.
I’m not sure what the lesson there for the modern era is, though. Except that the European protests MGK is talking about also represent significant economic threats. And maybe this ties into the observations above that the problem with “the protest movement” (currently) is that it happens on a day, or on a couple of days, and the main economic impact is on fellow citizens and on the city (which usually isn’t the target of the actual protest); and then the protesters go home, and everyone knows this. The violent protesters (the kind of people who smash Starbucks windows) are, in a crude way, making their protest a form of economic pressure. But we’ve already covered that it loses public support (not that they apparently care; but it’s not a model for protesters who DO care about public support), and in fact it’s not really all that *significant* a form of economic pressure.
I’m not trying to take away from the success of the hippie anti-war protests, but I’m saying that if we agree that that model is probably obsolete, the Civil Rights-style protests may not be. But they’re not easy to implement.
Boycotts are difficult to organize and implement on a scale that will actually make people notice. If you can do it, then the crowd-protests that you arrange become a promise of “look at all of these people, this is the tip of the iceberg of who we can get to boycott you”. (Or, as discussed above, “to vote against you”.) But in today’s economy, the boycott has to be so much bigger to be noticeable, and thus is even more difficult to effect. (In Montgomery, the black population’s boycott of the bus system managed to drop bus revenues by 80%; I’m not sure what percentage you would need to get a modern national or multi-national corporation to even notice.)
And in the modern era, I think boycotts and strikes are tricky because no matter how disliked the company, there’s always going to be people arguing that the boycott or the strike isn’t hurting the company as much as it is hurting the company’s workers.
So it’s something to consider, but I wouldn’t say it’s a solution.
Is there a link in the comparative lack of connected, commited organisations on the working class side of things in the Americas versus Europe and the lack of a workable protest option?
If so, is there a case to be made that the dismantling or limiting of those organisations has stunted the equity of public debate and influence? And would that be a side effect, unintended, or a desired effect of breaking said organisations and unions?
I feel like often protests aren’t so much trying to convince anyone as remind people of something the protesters care about, or remind people that a certain amount of people hold the protesters’ point of view. It’s a “don’t you forget about me” type of thing, to keep the issue alive, regardless of whether it’s gaining traction among the majority.
Granted, the protesters obviously are trying to get something changed (usually), otherwise they wouldn’t care so much. But just because they fail at this, doesn’t mean the protest is useless. Small minority views will get lost in the noise, the protests are the reminders. And if the protests get big, then the politicians get a wake up call. “Oh, so it seems a lot of people care about this…”
So ultimately, the goal of an protest organization should be to make bigger and bigger protests. It’s about showing that your view is becoming widespread and is not easy to ignore. Obviously the G20 protests were tiny, and therefore, relatively easy to ignore. But it does make everyone consider their point of view (if you can decipher it) if even for a split second. Would you have otherwise?
It would be harsh to judge protests by North American examples. There’s just not enough wrong with the US or Canada to really cause a massive protest.
But yeah, as a debating tactic… protests are subpar.
The other thing, it seems to me, is that an effective protest needs to be taken as representative of a large group of people, and the easiest way for this to happen is for the protest to BE representative of a large group of people. (Cf. FDR’s comment when told that the League of American Mothers and the Communist Party were both protesting outside the White House: The fringes are against me, the majority is with me (paraphrased).)
A protest that _isn’t_ representative of a larger swelling of opinion, or doesn’t trigger that larger swelling (which is where it’s useful to analyze the civil rights movement), is not going to be particularly effective. (This is where I think some protestors are guilty of magical thinking: “if we do the ritual right, the results will follow”, without asking the very important question of _how_ the ritual brings about the result.)
You know, I think people are missing something about the Civil Rights movement; a lot, not all, but a LOT of those protests weren’t designed to be scary uprisings (or at least, not scary to people who didn’t already regard black people as inherently scary), and those that degenerated into riots were often regarded by movers and shakers within the movement as failures.
A lot of the Civil Rights-era stuff, the marches and sit-ins and demonstrations, were specifically designed to be as non-threatening as possible. People were encouraged to wear suits, ties, hats (and going on a miles-long march in your Sunday best in the south is no treat) and to move in an orderly, quiet fashion, perhaps but some chanting or singing but without an incoherent roar of generalized rage following them.
The point was to provoke a response from the existing power structures that forced people upon whom those power structures depended for functional legitimacy to sit up and take notice. When you see cops beating the shit out of a bunch of soberly dressed people who just want to buy a sammich or walk down the street or whatever, it forces you to consider exactly what’s being done in your name, and whether you want to endorse that.
When you see the cops whomping the shit out of a punk-ass college student who just bricked the window of a coffee shop, surrounded by a bunch of people cheering him on, in the service of an abstract cause half a world away that you personally have only the most tenuous grasp on, you’re way more likely to conclude that the lot of them have it coming. The weakest, least effective (though flashiest) protests of the CW era were always campus ones, in which a bunch of freakily-dressed (or completely undressed) people screamed epithets and took over buildings and burned shit. That kind of sort of turns people off, and it allows disproportionate response to be taken against them without a lot of people really giving a damn.
(Why yes, I do read Ta-Nehisi Coates’ blog. Why do you ask?)
So in order to influence policy, you need to do one of two things. You can influence the politicians making the decisions. Or you can influence the voters electing the politician.
If you want to influence a politician in the United States, the best way to do that is to cut someone a check. Not necessarily the politician himself, but someone who fund raises for your cause that is courting that politician or his opponents. But better still than giving money is collecting it. If you can collect and distribute money from people, you can influence anyone you want.
If you want to influence voters, you need to advertise amd propagandize. A protest is a very cheap way of advertising your message, but it isn’t easy to controll or very slick to look at. Better methods of influence involve TV or newspaper apperances, billboards, celebrity endorsements, blogging, and throwing a really good party. You want to know why we have churches and company picnics and state fairs? Because someone wants to get you all together to shape your opinions by throwing a party.
Another factor in the marginalization of protest is the fact that as long as a majority of people in the country have have what they feel is a pretty good life, they will be far less inclined to “rock the boat” and risk what they have.
I see this in the union I belong to, there are major issues affecting the union and it’s members, but getting anyone to do anything beyond half hearted hand waving is impossible. We have a regular yearly event where the all the unions send members to the state capital to speak to the legislature about issues the concern the union. It’s pretty much a joke, because the politicians who support the union just mouth platitudes, and the ones who are against the unions just leave for the day and ignore us.
The suggestion that we get a bunch of people together and show up on a different day in order to catch the politicians off guard was quite literally seen as a joke. When the union heads realized that it was a serious suggestion they were shocked and quickly said no, it was impossible and bad and impossibly bad to not play by the preset rules.
One of the things that I think works is combining protesting with lobbying. Case in point: here in the U.S. there is a group called Protect (protect.org) dedicated to (suprise, suprise) child protection. When they wanted to change a specific policy (in New York, California, and some other states, the law stated that if you raped a neighbor’s kid, automatic jailtime, if you raped your own, possible probation. The message to predators? “Grow your own victim.”) They would annouce the campaign on their webpage, ask all of their members to deluge their reps with snail-mails (best) phonecalls and emails dedicated towards this change. (And sometimes to start sending letters to the editor.) Sometimes they’d lose a round or two, but eventually they got the law changed in these states (not all, I believe.)
That’s why I agree with most of what John 2.0 posted above; aim towards a specific goal, combine it with reps of your group meeting state reps (the local protesters here in San Jose do the same thing and make it clear that you’ll back up your action with votes (and unfortunately dollars to political organizations when necessary.)
Some online petitions require you to put in your name and address. Does that make them more effective than an anonymous petition?
@stavner: I don’t know, I’ve never seen one of those. But my guess is, probably not. The internet is great at connecting people, but it’s usually best for organization.
It’s important to remember the different perspectives at play. From the singer’s perspective it may be “I’m part of a group that’s 50,000 strong making my voice heard on this issue” from the ultimate recipient (who is going to be a staff person) it’s more like “that’s 50,000 people who only care enough about this issue to spend spend 30 seconds on the internet. Oh, and lets see if “Mickey Mouse” signed on for this one.” Who knows if the names and addresses are real?
The calculation isn’t as much about raw numbers as it is about the level of committment of the people involved. 500 individual letters that aren’t the same letter signed by 500 different people or 1000 calls from people who are knowledgable and rational will probably have more impact. The big benefit of an internet petition is that it’s quick and easy, right? That’s also the big drawback.
It’s also important to remember that usually a high level executive or legislative offical is in a generation that didn’t grow up with the internet (The average age of the Senate is 61) and is just going to be more likely to shrug an internet petition off.
It’s no fun to call a local legislator or city councilman and make an appointment, then put on a suit and go sit in a broom-closet sized office and talk about concerns you have over specific issues that you’ve taken the time to learn and understand. But that’s how that offical knows that you’re serious. No internet petition does that.
The success behind the Tea Party comes from a much simpler source: massive amounts of 1-2 pension-wielding retirees and “well-kept”/financially stable housewives in the ranks allows for maximum protest presence. If the Tea Partiers had to make due with people who couldn’t *afford* to leave their jobs or apartments behind for days-weeks at a time, it would have fallen apart long before 2008. This, sad to say, is neither a joke nor an exaggeration.
Personal observance: I’ve attended two Tea Party meetings and been in the same area (and was thus bombarded by media reports) for another. The two Tea Parties that I was a direct witness for were held in Minneapolis and Fargo. When I say that the people in my age/sex demographic were literally 1:20, I’m not joking at all. I was surrounded by military retirees/pensioners in the North Dakota party and aggrieved housewives/pensioners in the Minneapolis party (two sets of people who “know” that they’ll still be able to feed themselves if they decide to wander around a few states for a month and one set of people who *know* that the government is going to give them their money no matter what *and* have the means/prior lifestyle to travel the country via trailers to maintain that message). They’re able to have some measure of success because their rosters are plump with affluent/”comfortable” people. It’s analogous to the European protesters (who can also afford to march and protest for weeks because their housing and food are taken care of beforehand.) The average American (read: the American who’s either living hand to mouth as is, or who can’t afford to travel around the country to protest because he knows that he’d get fired or replaced if he takes off more than one week of vacation at a time) doesn’t have the financial or social flexibility of the average Tea Partier.
Believe me, it was fun having to stay at a run-down crap-sack hotel in Wichita Falls because visiting Tea Partiers took all of the available rooms on the local AFB so that they could rest in comfort before the next day’s events. I mean, why should someone who’s AD *and* returning from Afghanistan have a hotel room with air conditioning and hole-free walls? It’s not like I deserve it or anything, right? And it was loads of fun to wait for food behind visiting retirees who bragged about how they’re collecting upwards of $2000 a month from a military pension and upwards of $4,000 a month from a civilian government pension but couldn’t stand the idea of “government waste/misuse of funds” (while they’re eating food designated for active duty personnel because “it’s cheaper to get it from the base”.) These motherfuckers bragged about all of their benefits and pensions while I have to count every penny and live on the bad side of town, but they didn’t want to eat at the Sonic because cheeseburgers are $.50 cheaper if they get them from the military. Fuck that, and fuck the road-rambling members/lifeblood of the Tea Party. Winnebago-driving SOBs who haven’t had a hard day in their lives since Nixon abandoned Vietnam the day they were supposed to deploy…
I think its dangerous to start saying things like “protests don’t work”, protests are something by which we keep the goverment in check. Living in these times we need to fight to protect our freedom more than ever. Here in the UK they passed the Serious Organised Crime and Police Act which effectively prevents protesting outside paliment, which to me seems a very authoritarian act on behalf of our government. I guess I’m rabbling a bit but protesting is necessary to continue to live in a free soceity.
One question is whether protests *ever* worked.
Can we name on one hand the number of protests that specifically changed things in the United States?
OK, the Civil Rights Movement. But that was as much because the protests made the opposition look like dickheads as anything else. When you go up against people protesting to be treated like human beings with firehoses, dogs, church bombings, and lynchings, you tend to cede the moral high ground pretty quick. If the South had just tolerated them and played it cool, the North and everyone else would have said, “whatever, who cares, we totally understand” because most Whites didn’t actually give a shit about Blacks anyhow, and if they didn’t have to think about it, they were happy not to. Sad but true.
Vietnam? Give me a break. The damned war ended long after the protests had stopped, and all the protests did for most “Middle Americans” was convince them that the hippies and yippies were draft-dodging assholes. The public opinion about the war had nothing to do with protests, it had to do with the way shit dragged on, endlessly, purposelessly, and with high casualty rates. It had to do with the fact that it came out (in ’72, Pentagon Papers) that the whole damn thing had been started on a shuck anyway. Protesters had jack shit to do with that.
Other than those two potential things, protests have been basically a failure. *Boycotts* have been successful, because there is actually an economic price there, and there’s only so much of that a business can take. But protests cost the US government nothing. They know they’ll be gone tomorrow. They know they have no teeth.
US protests have always been weak sauce. The reason is pretty simple: even in bad times, most Americans are pretty content to mind their own business and to express themselves through the ballot if anywhere. In the US, only the really fringe go out with sandwich boards. The politicians know this. The protests never shut down much of anything for any amount of time. Protesters against the war machine are like ants against a bear — distracting, but tasty.
Protesting has nothing to do with why our society is free. The free press (with all of its own problems) is more responsible for that than any protest ever was. The press actually has power. The voters have (some) power. The protesters… zero. It’s a way that people from the 1960s like to feel like they “did something,” but unless they were out getting beat up for the cameras in Selma, they probably didn’t do all that much except get a little high, get a little tear-gassed, and feel a little less responsible for the activities of their elected government.
Bacon, how exactly does protesting keep government in check? How is protesting necessary for living in a free society? How does it protect your freedom?
I’m a big believer in voting, and representation, and communication to officials, elected and appointed. I do not understand how standing in a mass, waiving signs outside a building does any of those things. And I do not think standing around in a mass outside of a building has any effect on any given governmental policy, so if changing a governmental policy is a goal then I do not think protests work to achieve those aims.
However, protests are very good at generating media attention, either positive or negative. So if that’s the goal of the protest, spot on. If you just want to gather and release a lot of undirected energy at “the government” by yelling and waiving signs, then I suppose protests “work” (and I’m not knocking that, as sort of a street-level political Bacchanalia), but that shouldn’t be confused with actually achieving a discrete political goal.
I dated a gal who was heavily involved with the innocence project while she was in a law school (I live in a state with the death penalty). It was a lot of time and work and that, combined with the work of hundreds of other people who contributed hundreds or thousands of man hours they got several men off death row, two who were released under pardons of innocence. That’s something a candlelight vigil never accomplished, but those guys always got their picture in the paper.
The problem with relying on institutions (elected or otherwise) is that you are putting power in the hands of the very people who seek to take away your freedoms, the very institutions that cause the problems that people protest against(either in public demonstrations or just privately). Michel Foucault would argue that institutions that exert power and define justice, no matter how benign they appear to be, must be criticised and resisted, or else we become subjugated. The problem with being subjects to people in positions of power is that there is little we, the subjugated, can do to improve our situation, our lives resolve around the decisions of others. Mass protests are a method of resistance to these autocratic intuitions so I think it is foolish to dismiss them as worthless
As for effecting change within an institution or society in general, I would agree that protests are not effective for bringing immediate change. What protests are effective at is raising discussion, highlighting problems that people find unpleasant and hard to stomach, that is a step towards improving the situations the oppressed find themselves. Maybe Martin Luther King’s organised marches in the Deep South didn’t bring about an immediate change in the conditions of black people who lived there but it certainly helped lay the foundations of a more tolerant society for future generations. Hence why it saddens me when MGK, who seems like an otherwise well meaning “right on” man, seems so keen as to dismiss the act of protesting
But Bacon, you’re missing the point: protests have become extremely ineffective at raising discussion or highlighting problems. If they don’t do that, then they don’t do much of anything.