Comment by wsxcde | Hacker News Reader

Comment by wsxcde | Hacker News Reader

A related point made by Zeynep Tufecki is that mass protests in the past used to be show of force. If you could get half million people to travel to Washington and participate in a mass protest, that meant these people cared enough to take time off from work for a few days, spend money on travel and participate in a policitically and socially risky activity. It also meant you had several tens of thousands of organizers in diverse parts of country who managed the logistics of getting so many people to come together for the protest. The implication was clear -- give us what we want, if you don't, we definitely have the votes to take you down.

In the age of Twitter and Facebook, protests are a lot more convenient and a lot less difficult to organize. It is not clear that half a million people protesting in NYC or DC means much in terms of actual electoral consequences. Whether they can articulate it or not, politicians definitely know this and react accordingly.

I think after OWS, and before that the various "G20" etc anti-globalization protests, it became very clear that the police could effectively contain and suppress mass protest and that it would not be allowed to change anything.

And with better gerrymandering and voter targeting, the votes of protestors could be made irrelevant as well.

(There is a history that needs to be written of how "anti-globalization" moved from a left position to a right one, along the way changing from focusing on goods to focusing on immigrants)

I think we disagree on this. I interpret the failure of OWS et al. as the inability of the protestors to take their ideas mainstream. While gerrymandering, voter targeting and propaganda via mass media do dilute the protesters' votes, change is clearly possible. We saw this with the Arab Spring where the protesters were up against a much more authoritarian and anti-democratic state.

If I had to guess, I'd say the problem facing the American left is complacency. A lot of people still think things are going reasonably well and simply do not empathize with the concerns of OWS or the sunrise movement or the BLM movement. It's hard to move the needle politically if a significant minority simply do not believe that there's a crisis worth reacting to.

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