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Comment by tvanantwerp | Hacker News Reader

I've spent my career working in public policy circles, and this rings true to me.

> At most, working-class voters can cast their ballots for an “unacceptable” candidate, but they can exercise no influence on policy formation or agency personnel, much less on governance areas that have been transferred to technocratic bodies.

> Unlike the working class, the professional managerial class is still capable of, and required for, wielding political power.

I've never seen actual grassroots activism accomplish much, if anything. Protests in DC are like rain; bring an umbrella, but no need to pay it much attention because it will blow over in no time. It's always insiders who make a career out of policy that ultimately shape it. Hill staff, think tank wonks, professional bureaucrats, etc--it's that professional Washingtonian class that really shapes the government's policy, because they are the ones that show up to do that work every day.

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To +1 one this: Having spent a great deal of time consulting to government, in addition to working in media, but with a deep background in tech, the managerial class of people making policy have a revolving door to the universities, which are seized by faddish ideas as often as the elected representatives. Many of these policy people actually come to hate technologists because they find their more chauvinistic plans are thwarted by the privacy and security people who are at the table because of competence that can't be ignored, and not elite credentials.

As a result, the managerialists double down on what makes them different from techs, which means being extra airy, vague, political, and what most working people interpret as untrustworthy. It's practically a shibboleth, as if to say they don't need to seem honest because they are powerful. I don't think this managerial class is as necessary as people who are a part of it think.

The class disconnect is more pronounced in recent years because of the stark differences in physical competence and the precarious status of people who imagine themselves as "elite." What they deride as populism is much more complex than they perceive. Working people expect their elites to at least be somewhat noble, and when they aren't, history is the story we tell about what happens to them.

I wonder how this would relate to the Peter principle which states that every employee rises to their level of incompetence. The conclusion might be that the managerial class is not qualified to decide on what's good for others.

If you were to look at the individual histories of most senior corporate executives, most of them were in various middle management positions at some point before they became executives...

The kinds of people who were able to move above each layer of middle management were basically those who were the most skilled at manipulating others for their own personal benefit; the simple game of taking credit whilst deflecting blame. It's not surprising that the kinds of people who are able to traverse several levels of the management hierarchy to become executives completely lack any self-awareness. Thinking about themselves would distract them from their main activity which is fooling others.

I've worked in enough companies to know that those who get promoted are not those who care about others' (or even the company's) well being. This is provably true because the contrapositive statement would create a contradiction because in such case, the manager would help others to get promoted and thus they would never get promoted themselves.

There is a capability for abstraction we overlook.

Forget for a moment about what we might think about people who succeed in business, and look critically at the ones who fail. People who fail in business are the ones who want friends, honour, fame, validation, sympathy, justice, social good, and esteem. They personalize failures against these needs and stop dealing with the higher level abstraction of the success of the venture. The ones who succeed want something else, either because they already have or self-fulfill those other things, or just don't care. We can moralize and say it's the latter, but it's more often the former.

It's easier when an institution has given you the conceit that you are not morally accountable to the uninitiated or uneducated. The thing about class is that barring crime, there is no downside to betraying someone who isn't a part of your tribe, which is usually from a school. If you believe people get what they deserve, they call that the "just world fallacy," for a reason. It's a noble lie. If it weren't, you'd see more nurses and veterans in business class seats.

Anyway, long topic, but in spite of my opinions, I think it is difficult to accurately criticize management and class without the perspective of an elite education, as (perhaps horrifically) what can instruments know of their players?

My own experience is that the Peter principle is outdated. People don’t rise vertically anymore: they rise horizontally.

Instead of working their way up within a single institution, they make lots of “lateral” transfers.

The government/lobbyist revolving doors are a good example, but not the only one. How many tech workers go back and forth between big tech companies and startups, each time rising more than if they stayed put?

It creates an administrative class that has little commitment to the institutions they “serve”, and an overly valued senior class that is able to run out the door, taking the company with it.

Meanwhile people who stick with the same company - often for reasons beyond their control - end up in “lower management” positions at best.

BTW, my own experience with executives is that most have a sales or engineering background. Very few, of any, have a background in true middle management background (HR, accounting, governmental compliance, etc.)

My impression in recent years is that the middle class has real value in almost any society we had until now. They are the glue that brings stability to any organization, they are what keeps to energetic lower layer people from gaining power from crazy ideas, and they are the first to get blamed when a crazy idea from the top management layer fails. Do you see differences between that statement and your experience?

And the real question I want to ask: Do you feel that especially the middlest of managers have to fear AI the most, because AI could theoretically replace exactly that middle layer and do it even better than a human could?

AI will not replace the middle manager any time soon. Their job is too general and not specific enough to be solved by AI. Some of the tasks they do like scheduling can be aided by AI and have been aided by scheduling software but that doesn't mean AI could do their whole job. Stuff like talking to people about how they are getting along and helping develop and grow the people on the layer below them is something a good manager should be doing and something that would be foolish to replace with a system that has no humanity. See also defusing team conflicts and keeping up morale.

The problem is your reference is some kind of broken organisation where people are basically slave labour and managers only serve to dish out the work given from above. Sure bad managers of that description could be replaced by a good AI in the future but that would be awful because a good manager brings vitality to a team, helps individual team members and helps to filter and promote ideas up and down the organisation.

> My impression in recent years is that the middle class has real value in almost any society we had until now.

The middle class really isn't any less powerful today. Near as I can tell what happened isn't that the middle class became less powerful, but that journalists in particular no longer find themselves in the upper middle class so they spread the perception that the middle class has lost its power because they themselves feel like they have lost power, especially economic power.

I suspect that society is most likely perceived as most stable when those with megaphones and that buy ink by the barrel feel most stable.

https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2016/06/th...

"journalists in particular no longer find themselves in the upper middle class"

For most of the history of journalism in the U.S., journalists were not in the "upper middle class". Journalism was a poorly paid working class job for most of the 20th century. Maybe a couple decades at the end of it different.

That low pay serves as a gatekeeping mechanism so poor people can't survive on that career. On the other hand, journalists have a disproportionate influence over public discourse, now tightly controlled by the elite class.

Or maybe it's the reverse, because the field has high prestige and impact, it attracts upper class children who don't need the salary, causing a downward pressure for journalist wages.

Eh, I don't think that's what was actually going on for most of the 20th century. Journalist was not a prestigious job, it was in fact done by working class people. I think. It's instead a new thing that journalism is dominated by "elites".

"How journalism became a middle class profession for university graduates": https://www.theguardian.com/media/greenslade/2009/jul/21/new...

"The death of the working class reporter": https://blog.usejournal.com/the-death-of-the-working-class-r...

The original claim I was challenging was "journalists in particular no longer find themselves in the upper middle class" -- I don't think they ever were, it's possible that MORE of them are now than previous -- as you say, even as salaries drop.

> "The death of the working class reporter"

This article is just standard journalistic myth-making. The journalists cited as examples of success without college degrees, Carl Bernstein and Walter Cronkite (who both went to college, just dropped out), came from privileged backgrounds just like the privileged kids who fill the industy today.

Idealistic professions done "for the greater good" typically struggle. These days, anyone with internet access can do low-paid writing through various services or publish their own thoughts via a blog or social media. There has been tremendous downward pressure on writing and many local papers have closed, among other things.

> public discourse, now tightly controlled by the elite class.

Maybe 10-15 years ago that was true, but today the control of public discourse is no longer controlled by the elite class. Blogging completely ended that control.

Lots of “journalists” are people who established themselves outside of journalism and then transferred in.

Journalists for the most prestigious outlets (NYTimes, WaPo, Newsweek, Time Magazine, etc) certainly did well for themselves. At secondary institutions it was a solid middle class job.

Now because of blogging and commodification of the news, the money is no longer in journalism but in clickbait and it's a race to the bottom.

This article about the decline of Newsweek does a good job chronicling what is happening at news media companies all over the world:

https://www.cjr.org/special_report/newsweek.php

Journalists now find themselves among the precariat, especially those in the long tail of journalism working at clickbait factories like Business Insider, HuffPo, Jezebel, etc. News media is now a gig industry job.

Are you suggesting that skyrocketing education, housing, and medical care costs in proportion to stagnant wages for most people resulting in less economic security and mobility for the next generation is not real?

Pretty much what I expected. Still concerning though that these insecurities don't seem to phase that many people.

I think colloquially it is called being severely butthurt. Not a phenomenon restricted to the US.

In the context of this article's framing, well-paid tech employees are part of the same managerial/professional class of lesser elites (as distinct from the true elites in the capitalist class, our owners).

It sounds to me like you're allowing aesthetic considerations distract you from your common interests.

Have you never heard of the labor movement? The grassroots activism by working class people that forced the federal government to develop an entire arm of federal law, with its own Cabinet-level agency, to protect them from the professional managerial class?

How have you spent your career working in public policy circles and come away with so little understanding of what grassroots activism is, and the impact it has historically had?

For the same reason that Hillary Clinton got nominated in 2016. Because too many politicians are completely out of touch with the movements, conditions and perspectives of working people.

Where I live, grassroots organizers are doing all the hard work. I'm not talking about protesters. I'm talking about people who are building and connecting organically, who are facilitating workshops and popular education sessions, who are raising awareness about what's going on in local government to enable democracy to happen. Democracy doesn't function without grassroots participation. This country would be a hell hole without the hard work of local organizers everywhere.

Hillary won working class voters in the 2016 primary by a comfortable margin. +28 with non-college-educated voters and +13 with voters under $50,000 in income.

The primary is not reflective of the general.

Against Trump, but I doubt that is a reliable metric to determine real support.

Trump was not a participant in the 2016 democratic primary, where HRC won by the indicated margins.

Not just the politicians. I recently overheard a conversation at the startup where I work where people were talking about the benefits of unionizing I’m front the executive team.

It was clear they wouldn’t do it and talked about it like it was a joke. Something poor people do.

Part of it is that unions badly need reforming.

The other part is that nobody cares enough to reform them.

Most folks at my company don’t care because they get paid too much to care. Not a bad reason.

Once the economy goes to crap that might change.

> This country would be a hell hole without the hard work

This country is not a hell hole? That's a tough argument to make for a lot of people!

Volunteer in Haiti for a month.

> Have you never heard of the labor movement? The grassroots activism by working class people that forced the federal government to develop an entire arm of federal law, with its own Cabinet-level agency, to protect them from the professional managerial class?

The irony, of course, being that government bureaucracies are inherently an instrumentality of the managerial class. It's not as if the Secretary of Labor is a line worker with no college degree.

So the agency becomes subject to regulatory capture the same as any other and private sector unions declined. Meanwhile the public sector unions remained because most government workers are themselves members of the managerial class, so the public sector unions, rather than representing line workers against a corporate bureaucracy that employs them, came to represent the bureaucracy itself against the elected representatives of the people.

Is it so surprising that it doesn't come first to mind as an instance of successful activism?

I think we're reading the parent comment in very different ways. I think the key word was seen, just like the quote from the article says the managerial class is still capable of wielding power.

Basically anyone in public policy circles, even on the right, should know some labor history. But America hasn't seen a major private-sector strike victory in 20 years, and the 1997 UPS strike was a rare exception: "traditional" mass strikes haven't been a major force since the 1980s at best. It's true that pattern bargaining and labor laws have decreased the need for mass strikes since the bad old days, and people sometimes forget that OSHA and the NLRB are not a replacement for labor power but a consequence of it. But it's also true that union membership, labor bargaining power, and the union 'edge' over nonunion labor have been in decline for decades. The heyday of the UAW, the AFL-CIO, and the UFW was over by the 1980s, and even where labor has made substantial gains since they've come through courts and legislation rather than grassroots action. Even for someone who's been in public policy for 30 years, grassroots labor action has basically been a historical topic, not an active concern.

Harlan County was the cradle of the modern labor movement, but for 30 years its only political relevance has been as a symbol of the Democrats losing their labor support. I only know how things used to feel from movies and songs, not from anything that's happened in my lifetime. Maybe that'll change, the miners struck just months ago, but they haven't won yet. I've never seen grassroots labor wield power either, but that's not the same question as asking whether I know what it used to be like, or whether I want it to come back.

Was the GM strike last month not a victory for the UAW? From what I've read they got most of what they demanded when they started out over the company's initial offer.

Wow, yes it is. You're right, I just hadn't seen the final outcome of that.

It's not a knockout victory, it looks like only 57% of members ratified the new contract, but it's an impressive show of solidarity given how tiered employment has weakened unions. Salaried workers got less overtime, hourly workers got better rates, and temp workers got PTO and full-time opportunities. Plus, post-08 hires will be brought up to pre-08 wages, which has been a concern ever since the bailout.

Even if it's not an overwhelming win, that's impressive news for UAW keeping its influence across a growing range of workers statuses.

M&P are workers also and any one who works in tech is by definition are in "the professional managerial class"

I think you are confusing stunts with long term sustained lobbying.

For example I got several k people a substantial improvement to their pensions, passed a motion at a union conference got it put on bargaining agenda and successfully changed the companies mind.

Do tell us more.

Not sarcasm, to be clear. I'd be very interested in this unionizing story.

> The grassroots activism by working class people that forced the federal government to develop an entire arm of federal law, with its own Cabinet-level agency, to protect them from the professional managerial class?

But didn't all that happen almost a century ago?

The working class has been satiated since the times of such strikes and accomplishments with tax breaks, easy access to credit and a booming economic growth rate that was long-term unsustainable. Keeping in mind both parties are at fault in that trade: the politicians for being willing to ply the electorate with unsustainable economic policies to ensure votes, and the voters for being so shortsighted and naive to think infinite growth was possible. Now those chickens are coming home to roost and most of those people most responsible will probably be dead and dust before the debts are paid.

I'm not one of those people who thinks the planet is actually going to kill us off. We're a clever bunch, we'll survive. That said our world in 100 years or so will look significantly different, and I don't think in any of the ways people wanted.

Do tell, how will the world look different without infinite growth? What is your vision?

Sustainable business practices. Recognition that YoY growth, every year in every business, is unreasonable. That in a world of limited resources, limited audience, limited funds and limited attention, expecting infinite growth is childishly naive.

Gay people can get married in America, which was completely unthinkable a generation ago. 100% due to activists, many who risked their lives to make it happen.

The gilettes jaunes are on the streets, nobody cares to make them cultural icons. Gays had very visible and generally disproportionate (compared to population) media coverage of their rights. Was it really 100% due to activists on the street, or very influential but high profile gay people who helped build one of the few successful rights movements of our times?

high profile gay people

When I read this the first person I thought of was Alan Turing [1]. His was the fate of high profile gay people until the grassroots movement sprang from the Stonewall riots [1]. It was these activists who took the first steps to even make it possible for a high profile gay person to come out in public.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alan_Turing

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

Do you seriously believe that upper class gays/lesbians and lower class gays/lesbians was the same?

In order for Alan Turing to be charged with “gross indecency”, he had to go the police himself, inform them he was gay (without being asked or prompted), and affirm it in a statement signed under penalty of perjury.

The only reason he did that was because he was so accustomed to people not caring, he didn’t think he was in any danger.

Being privileged has its privileges.

I just had to look up that claim, and it seems that Turing admitted a homosexual relationship during a police investigation about his house being burgled, seeing as that relationship was with the accused burglar. That's slightly different to the implication that he walked into a police station of his own free will and promptly signed his own castration order.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alan_Turing#Conviction_for_i...

(I'm aware of wikipedia fallibility but I'm on mobile and will generally trust in the citations for this particular individual)

My description of his conviction was incomplete. I wasn’t trying to give a comprehensive account. I was simply trying to explain the level of protection his privilege afforded him.

He was comfortable reporting one of his lovers to the police because he was used to people looking the other way.

Obviously, one of the many downsides to criminalizing harmless behavior is that it places people outside the protection of the law.

Was it really 100% due to activists on the street, or [high-profile insiders]

Okay, 90 percent activists on the street, 10 percent insiders (who generally only stepped in after the 90 percent had already laid their bodies on the tracks, and accomplished the hard part).

Was it really 90%?

Reason i m asking is thay certain countries had 0% activism and it all changed thanks to culture and osmosis. The fact that audiences were prepared for the changes was huge

Since we're all spouting bare assertions, I assert that it was 90% Frasier and Ellen DeGeneres and 10% activists.

I assert that it was 90% Frasier and Ellen DeGeneres

Who got into a Tardis and went back and organized the Stonewall riots, ACT UP and the Mattachine Society. Yeah, OK.

Gay people are distributed throughout the various ranks of American society. No one really gives a care at a broad level about the rights of a poor gay person.

What actually brought about the change was that due entirely to the fact that people in power had relatives that were gay, or were gay themselves. And these people turned the wheels of society toward making it accepted.

>What actually brought about the change was that due entirely to the fact that people in power had relatives that were gay, or were gay themselves.

The people in power had gay relatives or were gay themselves a century ago and yet nothing changed without activism.

A century ago those people were in the closet so nobody knew and those that did didn't say anything.

People had to come out in order for their acceptance to be possible. It's really easy to justify not caring when the group you don't care about seems other. When they're people you know it's much harder to justify not caring.

Activists, yes - but not really through marching. Money, judicial challenges and coordinated political action to promote marriage equality as a goal were the key. The debate was reframed, messaging was crafted carefully and the groups organizing and paying for it all were extremely organized and cohesive. The Proteus fund and specifically the CMC did a heck of a lot here.

Marching is the first necessary step to get people organized. It is the lowest bar for starting to organize and to participate. It is where people can drum up support, awareness and donations.

Is this demonstrably, empirically true, or is it something you are just telling yourself because you desperately want it to be true?

I listened to an hour-long podcast in which Chris Hayes interviewed Alicia Garza, who co-founded Black Lives Matter (BLM). They talked specifically about this question and since you're interested, perhaps it would be one place to go to hear informed organizers/activists discussing it. It aired on June 4.

Besides BLM, one other recent place in which this question of "are demonstrations enough" comes up is, of course, Occupy. (In that case: no, demonstrations were not enough.)

One thing I remember Garza saying is that the ability to organize a large, nationwide march on Washington showcases the scope and depth (down to the grassroots level) of a movement. If your movement isn't broad and organized, your nationwide march will not succeed.

But that's a necessary condition for political action, not a sufficient condition. A movement can't let marches be the endpoint, and in the interview, Garza emphasized this.

Clearly the organizers of the 1993 "March on Washington for Lesbian, Gay and Bi Equal Rights and Liberation" (which I attended) did not view the march as an endpoint. Many of the roughly 600K (+/- 300K) people present had a lot at stake, including their jobs, at that time. The march was more of a focal point, a coming of age. A constituency made visible. But not an endpoint.

For more: https://www.dissentmagazine.org/online_articles/how-black-li...

Other notable protests in the past 20-30 years, in the US and elsewhere:

- Anti Iraq War movement (2003-4), mostly US.

- Anti WTO movement (1999-2010) global (US, Canada, Japan, Europe). Eventually blended into / surpassed by the Occupy movement.

- ACT UP: Gay rights / HIV/AIDS awareness. (1987 - 2000)

Those are the major causes of which I'm aware.

Of the set, ACT UP was arguably the most successful, and probably deserves much of the credit for mainstreaming gay / nonbinary gender culture.

The WTO protests are more mixed, but put a damper on the Washington Concensus / Neoconservative Agenda movement. Global trade meetings are no longer casually-hosted affairs, and now tend to be in remote / secluded locations.

The Iraq War protests were arguably the least effective, though massive in many cities. They simply disappeared off news coverage though. Clearly they didn't stop the war or lessen the catastrophic impacts of it, though they did help cement a strong political divide over it in the US.

Whether or not more recent movements, particularly on the right, could be considered mass / popular uprisings is a fair question. I'd be inclined to say "no", but a case might be made for the Tea Party and alt-right movements.

I'll be the first one to sound the 'correlation is not causation' alarm over and over. After all, maybe the social issue is getting enough people to protest because society is already on the verge of change, rather than society changing because of the protests. Protesters may be getting the causation backwards. However, there's some evidence that protests are helpful in causing change.

My favorite study to establish a directional causal link looks at policies enacted after protests, accounting for the effect weather has on protests. The weather is presumably random enough to not be related to where society is, and it affects protest turnout, which lets you connect protest turnout to policy change causally. It's not definitive, but yeah, there's decent evidence.

I disagree with the other poster who is suggesting that marching is a necessary step for change, but it does seem to be a useful instrument for it.

Yep it is a solid way to meet people who might also have an inside track to influencing the institutions of a given government. It also gets eyes on your cause when it's not right in the front of society at large. A lot of it is just to get otherwise ignorant people becoming aware and seeing the activists are just people like them trying to make a fair go of it.

Perhaps it's necessary but not sufficient: if you have zero lawyers, press, or government officials on your side, marching is a great way to get thrown in jail for "rioting" and have your reputation destroyed.

The quilt spread across the National Mall was little but a march on Washington.

Which quilt? I agree, but I'm not certain what your point is.

The NAMES Project Quilt.

Gay marriage was also prevented in America for hundreds of years 100% due to activists. There is no money for or against gay marriage, it was always only activists on both sides so it isn't a good example of a class war.

I'm not so sure, gay rights intersects with the class war in at least a couple of ways:

- Dividing the working class on the issue of gay rights is an effective way for the elites to get the working class to ignore the class war.

- Control of reproduction offers some control over labor.

Can you elaborate on the second point? I don’t understand how banning gay marriage controls reproduction.

It's interesting (and sad to me) how popular this article is on here when it exclusively describes our current political climate in terms of economics.

It seems like social issues are front and center more than ever at the moment. I think economics can largely explain the divide, but it's interesting for the author to talk at length about the top 10% and leave this out -- as if the top 10% is filled with Econs who vote solely on what they think is best for them economically, and not based on how they feel about social issues.

I think the reason the current climate feels so "divided" is because it's more of a social divide than before.

I think it's easier when it's just a class war. But this is a human rights war. When your basic rights feel threatened, it gives you a little more skin in the game.

100% isn't quite right. I think the parent comment applies to gay marriage as well.

Federal recognition of gay marriage eventually occurred in America due to a gay widow who took the government to court over a $300k inheritance tax bill on her wife's estate [1]. Of course the changing cultural attitudes towards LGBT people is overwhelmingly due to grassroots activism, but this shouldn't be overlooked.

For LGBT rights, money has played a factor. If wealthy, upper-class Americans did not also suffer from anti-LGBT laws, I'm not sure we would have made the same progress. There are also financial incentives for LGBT acceptance [2]. A more cynical view might be that acceptance of gay marriage was accelerated due to increasing anti-capitalist sentiments within the LGBT community in the 20th century [3]. The continued oppression of gay people might have led to uprisings far worse than Stonewall. Legislative acceptance of LGBT rights has weakened the link between LGBT activism and anti-capitalist ideologies, to the point that nowadays gay pride parades are turning into a parade of adverts for corporations.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Windsor

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

[3] https://aeon.co/essays/the-radical-roots-of-gay-liberation-a...

Federal judges, not activists.

Federal judges care little about mass opinion, but a great deal about elite opinion.

Roe v. Wade had nothing to do with feminism, and everything to do with the positions of the American Medical Association, the Mayo Clinic (formerly represented by Blackmun), and academic researchers at elite universities.

Not a terribly important distinction if you’re pro-gay rights or pro-choice.

But give credit where credit is due.

I think a good litmus test for a political issue to gain brownie points on is this: Does it affect the politician, themselves?

If a politician is straight, what does two gay persons marrying have to do with him? It’s thus a brownie point issue, same goes with pot.

Once it start affecting their bottom line, i.e. there’s money involved, watch them and the media skirt around the issue carefully.

That’s ignorant. There was and still is for Republicans a very high cost for supporting romantic equality.

The elites have always tolerated homosexuality while the masses have always been creeped out by it. This particular change just looks like another case of the elites getting their way at the expense of the masses.

I used to diss protests that accomplish nothing but then I realized what their real use was: to connect people into doing actual stuff. To open a place for discussion on a specific issue, sometimes in the media, but at least in the street, for few hours, with like-minded people.

If you are rich serious people concerned over an issue, you create a forum or gather a summit. If you are poor, or rather, let's be realistic, middle-class, then you do a protest. It's rent-free, it filters out people who can't be bothered to move from the couch and the nay-sayers, it shows a wide range of groups with varied interests.

Protests are the first step in making policy change, but it takes several bounces before it affects people in DC.

Are there many examples of that happening?

The biggest counter example I can think of was Occupy Wall Street. AFAIK nothing ever came out of it, not even a small organised group.

Most protests I've seen have actually been the other way around. They were organised by pressure groups or unions and the protesters were already members of those groups. They existed primarily as a chest-beating exercise to show politicians their power. A few protests are more spontaneous especially the sort when democracies get overthrown or established. But in the west protests don't ever seem to create new organised movements.

That's how it worked for me (privacy advocacy protests in France). But now that I think about it, it makes sense that big protests are actually more of a recruiting tool for already established organization than a way to know each others. My example may be marginal in that it was on a small subject that did not bring a lot of big names.

You're missing the forest for the trees on Occupy. Loads of people and groups active today found each other through that or got their start there.

I want to believe it. Have any examples?

I've never seen actual grassroots activism accomplish much, if anything.... It's always insiders who make a career out of policy that ultimately shape it.

Did the Vietnam War end because the Washington insiders (who were, if you'll recall, the ones who started it) had a change of heart, got together one day and decided to stop it? Or because the country threatened to become ungovernable if they didn't?

Really, the blithe dismissal of the impact of public protest expressed in your statment is astounding.

I'm 50, and it'd be a stretch to say I "saw" that happen.

I was in high school before I realized that the Vietnam war had happened while I was alive.

I think the point is that grassroots activism has been effective once upon a time, but has not been effective for decades.

> because they are the ones that show up to do that work every day

Because someone is motivated enough to pay them every day to do that work

Look harder.

My friends have worked on marriage, marijuana, human trafficking, consumer protection, etc, etc.

(My own efforts weren't as potent. At the time. Though I'd like to think my cohort moved the needle on election integrity issues. All the "radical" stuff we pushed 10 years ago is now received wisdom.)

In fact, I'd argue that most progress is bottom up, happening locally.

I highly recommend Camp Wellstone training for activists. Of course there's many others. On the left.

The political right has no shortage of resources for their activists.

> because they are the ones that show up to do that work every day

As I used to say back when I was a programmer, often in the context of fads like "quality is free," nothing gets done unless you do that thing on purpose.

Hard to say this when the entire immigration and trade policy of the US veered into an extremely unlikely configuration on the back of a candidate universally loathed by the establishment on both the left and the right.

> I've never seen actual grassroots activism accomplish much

Eh... Martin Luther King Jr?

What are some good theories on how to break up these over-empowered groups?

If you want a policy proposal to be burned to the ground; organize grassroots support for it. The following PR disaster angry mob will set it on fire for you without you getting your hands dirty.

> I've never seen actual grassroots activism accomplish much, if anything.

> it's that professional ... class that really shapes the government's policy, because they are the ones that show up to do that work every day.

Yup.

"Activism is a way for useless people to feel important, even if the consequences of their activism are counterproductive for those they claim to be helping and damaging to the fabric of society as a whole." – Thomas Sowell

How about the end of apartheid in South Africa?

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