"It's a tactical move. You don't get any concessions by being nice."
I'm watching a 20 year old Canadian tv drama and the person speaking is an aggressive advocate for the homeless. He's talking about moving a homeless encampment from a squat in a poor downtown area of a city into a park that's a nice (pricey?) area. He wants controversy. I immediately thought of today's No Kings protest which the libs designed from the ground up to make zero demands. And the libs would have to agree its also designed to be nice.
I took my oldest son to our local protest and yes there were libs (some Kamala signs, a “we’d be at brunch” sign), but to be honest, the vibe felt very different to the very Lib protests that happened at his first inauguration and during the first term.
I saw almost no signs about Trump and Putin being gay together or whatever and a whole bunch of signs about John Brown having done nothing wrong, Fuck ICE, deny/defend/depose, and “doing something about this”.
Yes, there were libs at these things. Well guess what, most of the people who have Saturdays off and want to go to one of these things are Libs. But I also saw a lot of solidarity with Palestine. I also saw hammer and sickle flags flying. I also saw people who looked like normies holding signs identifying themselves as anti fascist.
The politics of these marches aren’t what I wish they were, but if you’re not using them as an opportunity to build community and educate, then you’re missing what should be the point for us True Leftists and Correct Opinion Holders.
yeah, no kings if nothing else did successfully mobilize millions of first time protestors, which is nothing to scoff at imo. If even a tiny fraction of them look into local orgs or otherwise continue engaging with their community, then imo no kings at least did some good. Better than just waiting for the revolution to happen by itself.
also fwiw peaceful revolutions are said to require 3.5% of the country to mobilize, and today over 2% of the population mobilized (estimated ofc). Sure they didn't have concrete demands (nor would a one day protest achieve them anyways) but I think it mobilizing so many who oppose the current administration is still quite significant.
Pretty sure it’s only that low bc the ones that toppled governments either had immediate backing from major powers (every mid 00s color revolution) or went after governments with low legitimacy to begin with (80s Philippines and ROK)
Same study also said that revolutions without violence were twice as successful as violent ones, which I feel is attributable to most of those nonviolent revolutions being in the gorby era warsaw pact where they were both internationally encouraged and going up against governments in preexisting crises, as well as violent revolutions usually taking the forms of coups, which can be highly fragile
Community building and education is a great idea. With so many people, someone is bound to be interested in building a party.