Nonviolent protests are twice as likely to succeed as armed conflicts – and those engaging a threshold of 3.5% of the population have never failed to bring about change.
Most of that I put on our ineffectual Democratic leadership who are supposed to represent the people. We had a mandate of millions and I don’t remember a single, actual dramatic effort to reshape policy by our elected leaders.
At that time, many people still believed Democrats were actually the opposition group to conservative fascism, and not the checked-out wine-mom getting alimony checks every month from the right.
Movements are not the same as protests, movements have leadership that has explicitly defined asks that the followers agree with.
iirc the organizers had challenges with this, so their default asks were awareness and they got that.
So then by any reasonable metric it was a failure. Just that the failure was at the leadership level and had zero chance at success because of that no matter what happened
George Floyd protests had more than that (closer to 8%) and they didn’t really change anything.
Most of that I put on our ineffectual Democratic leadership who are supposed to represent the people. We had a mandate of millions and I don’t remember a single, actual dramatic effort to reshape policy by our elected leaders.
At that time, many people still believed Democrats were actually the opposition group to conservative fascism, and not the checked-out wine-mom getting alimony checks every month from the right.
Movements are not the same as protests, movements have leadership that has explicitly defined asks that the followers agree with. iirc the organizers had challenges with this, so their default asks were awareness and they got that.
So then by any reasonable metric it was a failure. Just that the failure was at the leadership level and had zero chance at success because of that no matter what happened