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Comment by dv_dt | Hacker News Reader

Protests come when people are pushed into a corner with little other choice. Participation is more prevalent when people have free time in their lives. Our economics has systematically squeezed free time out in favor of more work to most of our workforce, and particularly hard for young people.

One reason so many local city policies favor the old, is that they're retired and have the time to participate

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This. I fought against a zoning exception (ironic comment) that would allow an asphalt plant near my children's school. When we showed up at meetings, they were canceled and rescheduled at different times for 'reasons'. I managed to get people there every time, but it was tough for parents to get there, and it seemed like the process had been weaponized against our participation.

When in American history have we had more free time for civic participation?

Probably never, except maybe during the period when only white male landowners could vote and so the "we" was a much smaller and wealthier group. Voter turnout is pretty high these days though.

https://www.electproject.org/national-1789-present

I think the problem is more like:

When in American history have we had more things that are more engaging¹ competing with civic participation for our free time?

¹: and I think the terrifying answer might be:

    LOL, never, so? Hurry up and die.

July 2020.

around May, 1886

and a lot more after

In the latter half of the 20th century, while many things were much worse than they are today, it was genuinely possible to support a family on a single minimum-wage job in many parts of the country.

Now, that doesn't mean that everyone used the extra time for civic participation, but when you compare that to today, when far too many people have to work two or three jobs per adult just to keep the lights on, I think it's fair to say that there was more free time.

Young people seem to have plenty of free time to march around the streets protesting, chanting and banging drums (which has pretty much zero effect on policy), but they aren't able to find the time to attend a city council meeting, or even vote, for that matter.

Pretty sure the young people protesting are the ones also voting. But that’s only a small fraction of the total young people.the rest are too busy on TikTok :/

I don't think economics have squeezed out free time -- phones squeeze out all our free time.

Having two or three jobs is not really conductive to free time.

In the US per official data ~5% have more than one job (and that includes lawyers doing consultancy for example) https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNS12026620

So that would mean 1 in 10 families that are affected on average. Seems like a lot.

concerning

Hmm… 1 in 20 individuals are affected… I get the idea being 2 adults per family, one of them affected, hence 1 in 10 families, but I think its incorrect/misleading (potentially in either direction) to say 1 in 10 families. I haven't looked at the data about how many families are single parent (which could increase the impact per family) OR how many of those 5% identified as working multiple jobs are married (I wouldn't be surprised if more of them are unmarried, since a two parent family with both working one job might be expected to not need the additional jobs).

That is a self reported survey of households that doesn't lend itself to capturing all of the people. One, participants need to respond, which a busy and tired person isn't likely to do. Two, it doesn't define job, so if you don't think of your side hustle/gig work as a job, then you won't say it is. In the survey, if you did answer, and you do have 2 jobs, but you didn't work both in the exact week that you were surveyed, then you also aren't counted. IRS data, ADP private payroll estimates are much higher, but have their own issues.

Being on your phone doesn't stop you from waiting in line at the polling booth. A job does.

If the economy continues in it's current vector, there will be a lot more unemployed people with idle hands available to do interesting things.

Protests are also largely useless.

This is status quo propaganda.

Note that I'm not saying you, yourself, are a proponent of the status quo, deliberately spreading propaganda.

But protests are absolutely not useless.

"waaaah they don't change Trump's mind after a single protest waaaaah" of course not. That's not what they're there to do. That's the win condition, not the only move in the game.*

Protests have a variety of important effects, but let's just focus on two of the big ones, which are closely linked:

1) They tell the other people who disagree with what is going on that they are not alone. That there are others like them out there, and that if they do try to do something (whether that's go to a protest themselves, call their congresspeople, or whatever), it won't be just shouting into the void.

2) They tell the people who agree with what is going on that this is not over. They can't just expect to be greeted as liberators; there are people in their own hometown who think that this is not OK, it shouldn't be allowed to continue, and anyone who supports it can expect at least a side-eye at the supermarket, if not much more serious social shunning.

And no: neither of these lead directly to a change in the policies that are being protested. But that doesn't mean that they're useless, any more than it's useless to, say, release wolves into Yellowstone, if what you care about are some of the myriad downstream effects of a trophic cascade.

* Not, I would note very firmly, that it's a game. This is merely a convenient metaphor.

Not when they’re accompanied with large scale strikes as Europeans have found.

You mean French.

Protesting is basically "doing nothing, loudly." It looks virtuous but has almost zero actual affect on policy. Does any politician actually look at a protest and say "Oh, my, look at that, people don't like what I'm doing! Looks like I have to change my mind."

They never change their minds, that's because the police are willing to beat the protesters for them. The Civil Rights movement is an example of (mostly, but not always peaceful) protest that changed things within living memory. Gay rights advances in recent decades definitely owe a lot to demonstrations and public organizing that put the issues into public conversation. Women's suffrage movements also featured many protests. Policy effects are everywhere.

What has no effect pretty much ever is protesting foreign policy, because the majority of people in any country neither care nor know what happens anywhere else.

Politicians are like ROM. You can't change them once they are programmed. If you want a different function, you need to swap them out. Yelling in the street is not going to get you anywhere.

The reason Civil Rights, Gay Rights and so on got traction was not through protestors changing politicians' minds. It was through the masses changing their minds and actually going to the ballot boxes to replace their (essentially robot) politicians.

That's demonstrably false. Politicians like Strom Thurmond and Joe Biden enjoyed long careers in the Senate after opposing the Civil Rights movement. Lindsey Graham opposes gay marriage today.

It was also through the violent actions of terrorist groups that police couldn't keep under control. For every time the politicians agreed with a Rosa Parks, it was because they were afraid of a Black Panthers.

While the police and politicians were afraid, it's not because there was a real terrorist threat from the Black Panthers or other militant black movements of the time. While the Panthers had some issues with violence, almost all of that was dedicated to infighting, and the few incidents that weren't were almost all revealed to be incited and planned by agent provacateurs. They were just afraid of blacks, and of giving the "lower" classes any kind of idea that they could effect change.

Civil disobedience and other exertions of citizen power are only a subset of "protest". I've been to a lot of protests and most of them accomplished jack shit.

It's very rare for anything to change as a direct result of protests, but the act of protesting brings issues into the public consciousness that weren't necessarily there before. That is the real driver of change. Changing public opinion directly transforms the Overton Window and limits the acceptable range of opinions and actions politicians can take. Just because no laws were directly changed doesn't mean your protest did nothing.

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