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I would like to add my (unwanted) two-cents: I'm of the (soft) opinion that protests often cause more harm than good - or, will have a neutral effect - to a cause, particularly when there is anything 'uncouth' to a protest such as violence or obstruction of traffic.

As much as I hate to say it, I struggle to think of what the Women's March or Occupy Wall Street tangibly accomplished.

Can someone provide studies or articles demonstrating the effectiveness of large protests in changing the populace's views?

> Can someone provide studies or articles demonstrating the effectiveness of large protests in changing the populace's views?

Protests aren't about changing people's views as much as about normalizing active engagement by the silent whose views on the issue (even if they haven't deeply considered them prior to the protest drawing attention) already favor the protesters.

When people already opposed to position a protest takes dismiss it as unconvincing, they are missing the point. Protests are about mobilizing allies not converting enemies.

> I struggle to think of what the Women's March or Occupy Wall Street tangibly accomplished.

OWS directly produced the rapid development of anti-elite populist movements of both the Right and Left which subsequently displaced the dominant faction of the Republican Party and drastically weakened the dominant faction of the Democratic Party, it's a major reason that we have the President we have and that the pool of potential opponents for him in the next election looks like it does.

The meatspace Women's March and the online #MeToo protest movement were the central mobilizing elements in what has been one of the biggest ad most rapid social and political mobilizations of women and around women's issues—in government, workplaces, and society generally—in this country’s history, which had adverse repercussions for a number of very powerful people. It's a key element in the biggest increase in women on Congress from one Congress to the next ever.

There's a famous paper called [DO POLITICAL PROTESTS MATTER? EVIDENCE FROM THE TEA PARTY MOVEMENT](https://www.aeaweb.org/conference/2013/retrieve.php?pdfid=22...) that addresses these concerns. They use the weather as a proxy for randomized controlled trials and show that: areas where it rained during the tea party protesters had fewer protesters and the tea party movement had fewer votes in those areas. Because weather is essentially random, we can therefore conclude that the fewer votes was probably due to people choosing not to protest due to the rain, and if they had chosen to protest then there would have been more tea party votes.

I think Martin Luther King explained the rationale for civil disobedience very eloquently in his letter from the Birmingham jail.[1]

Ultimately his and other protests led to legislation in the form of the civil rights act.[2]

[1] http://okra.stanford.edu/transcription/document_images/undec...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civil_rights_movement

What you're talking about is counterfactual inference, which is a non-trivial problem even in well-controlled settings. The effect of large-scale protests would probably be very difficult to quantify with the rigour you're alluding to. I'd love to be proven wrong, though.

Occupy Wall Street directly brought the idea of there being a "1%" into everyday political and social usage, which has significantly altered the way we discuss class in this country.

The Tea party, Gandhi and his friends, Protests during Vietnam war, the storming of the Bastille.

Now, in "recent" History I tend to agree with you. My personal opinion is that protests are not violent enough to cause real change.

Edit: I would appreciate feedback from downvoters. I think the few examples I provided are valid to illustrate "protests that caused real change", but if I'm wrong I'm happy to learn.

wasn't the us involved with the vietnam conflict for the better part of 20 years? i was actually under the impression that the vietnam protests, while at times quite noticeable, weren't all that impactful in-and-of themselves.

i think that, insofar as one might be inclined to point at "successful" protests, it's often really an issue of achieving a consensus amongst a plurality of those in power.

perhaps protests can work toward that (i'm not sure); but if so, they could also work against it. i sadly doubt the protests in hong kong, despite their scope and intensity, will change much at all when the powers-that-be neither care, nor (seemingly) can ever be made to care.

Isn't it generally accepted that the US "lost" the war because of the violent anti-war protests? I didn't say one single protest changed the whole thing, but these protests changed the attitude of the population towards the war, made it vastly unpopular, and in the end the US had to give up.

Or maybe they don't agree that it's a problem worth protesting in the first place.

It's interesting that you immediately draw the conclusion that there is something "wrong" with the person or that they are "broken". Having a different opinion than you never seemed to enter the realm of possibility - unless, of course, you conclude having different opinions is being "broken".

I lost count of the number of times that, say, some engineer 3 years out of college couldn't afford a 5 bedroom house

That engineer can probably afford a 5 bedroom house on their salary if they moved to a different city like Pittsburgh or Austin. So it isn't some abstract issue, it's just a concrete question of whether they would like to stay where they are, or move to a city where they could afford a 5 bedroom house.

Protest clearly is useful and virtuous.

But protest that is crafted to cause disruption to the populace at large (blocking traffic) needs to be used very carefully.

It can create backlash against and undermine your cause.

Further, the precedent that any group with a grievance can undermine common goods like transportation infrastructure is a dangerous one-- irrespective of the validity and the severity of the grievances..

> clearly

Please prove it then. I must be a little slow because it is not clear to me at all.

You don't view the Selma to Montgomery marches, the Orange Revolution, the Vietnam protests, the UK miners' strike, the spontaneous assembly of Germans demanding the Berlin Wall be opened, etc, as having significantly spurred social change?

Just because not every protest is virtuous or successful doesn't mean that protest doesn't have value.

It's not clear that protests were actually the driving force in causing those changes, particularly in the case of the Vietnam protests. The Berlin wall was doomed to fail from the beginning. It was only a matter of time combined with the lucky mistake of a government official.

At the end of the day a modern protest accomplishes nothing. Let's not pretend that government officials don't know what the populace wants. They chose to ignore it for their own benefit and a protest won't change that. The only thing a protest does is give confidence to other powerful people who want to overthrow the current leaders, again for their own benefit. All the big "revolutions" have simply exchanged one abuser for another. The french revolution exchanged the monarchy for Napoleon's dictatorship. Russia went from a monarchy to a communist dictatorship and then to an authoritarian capitalist state. And in the case of east Germany it was the western capitalists who swooped in and bought out the entire country for western-dictated dumping prices, leaving the eastern populace disenfranchised and economically barely better off than before (and sometimes worse, now giving rise to a new nationalist party).

If you actually want to change anything you need to hit the powers that be where it hurts. They couldn't give a shit how many people are unhappy and protesting but what they do care about is money. The strike is the most effective and only effective tool the populace has, short of extreme violence which will just lead to another despot taking power.

>This person and many like them are just completely self-centered.

I would agree if this were a unique experience, but this is a mentality held by a large section of the population. It is systemic.

It is systemic, and the promotion of identity activism at the expense of economic activism has done a lot to cause it.

Realistically, "corporate diversity" usually means "we have diverse kinds of privileged middle class people in our offices."

E.g. a female CEO is considered a necessary diversity win, but generally no one cares if the food servers and cleaners - most of whom usually happen to be female too - are treated with respect and decency.

Does Google - or any other FANG - actively and practically support anti-poverty activism and awareness to anything like the same extent they support a relatively safe form of activism like LGBT pride?

Is there a society in the world where self-centeredness is not common? What do you mean by systemic?

Yes, you don't see people with this attitude towards the HK protest. There is a completely different standard when it comes to issues of race in the US.

> I lost count of the number of times that, say, some engineer 3 years out of college couldn't afford a 5 bedroom house in Palo Alto for them, their partner and their dog and how they were underpaid and this was unfair and a problem

Is it not a problem that someone with one of the best jobs in the world can't afford a decent house near work? It might be related to why the contingent workers have 2.5 hour commutes.

Since when do 2 people and a dog need a 5 bedroom house? And does that really only qualify as “decent”? Especially 3 years out of school...

In any case OP was just trying to point out the entitlement that gets instilled, and how it can be particularly blinding when you’re wrapped up in your own decadent lifestyle. It’s a very common trait among people in the valley, in my experience.

5 bedroom house is an exaggeration. People just want a reasonable (say, 3 bedroom for older folks, 2 bedroom for folks 3 years out of college) house near work, which they can’t afford.

That doesn’t make the fact that ordinary workers have to travel multiple hours each way to afford housing any better. It is just a canary in the coal mine that even very highly paid workers struggle to afford housing in the area.

No one needs a 5-bedroom house. In most of the rest of the world, that's something that only very wealthy people can afford.

And if you don't like the housing options in the Bay Area, don't move there. It's very simple. The only reason housing is so bad in the Bay Area is because people keep moving there and complaining about it, but still putting up with it.

> decent house

He described something more than decent.