Are protests less effective today than they were in the 1960s?

Great Debates
1

And if so, why?

I wasn’t alive in the '60s, but it sure seems the marches and demonstrations of the Civil Rights Movement were effective in bringing about social change. The anti-war movement maybe less so?

Nowadays it seems like protests can occupy a news cycle but not much really changes… Marriage equality being a big exception, I guess?

I know it’s really hard to show causation.

I guess I’m asking are modern day protests like Occupy Wallstreet, Black Lives Matter, etc doing something fundamentally different than protestors of the past, or have the times changed in some way that makes those tactics no longer as effective?

Or maybe protest works as well (or as poorly) aa ever and there are other factors that determine which movements ultimately make a difference. (And I’m sure many people would say it’s too soon to judge whether modern day protests will ultimately be effective, but still waiting to let history be the judge seems a bit too late.)

2

The movement lasted at least eight years, but the war did not end until the Nixon/Ford Admin was good and ready to end it for its own reasons.

3

I don’t think war protesting was all that effective.

However, there was a lot more reason to protest back then as I see it - the draft was enabled.

Currently you can sign up for the army if you want or not. So we have some belief in our minds that the people in the military are willing to go. We have no real danger of being forced to go ourselves so we don’t protest. If I knew I was going to be drafted I might protest too, but when I have a job to do and rent to pay I’m not going anywhere. I can’t afford to.

4

I don’t think it is the tactics - it is what they are protesting that is different.

Occupy Wall Street had no idea what they were protesting, except that it was bad, and no suggestions on what to do about it, except that it was real bad. Black Lives Matter is protesting that the police are shooting too many black guys and glossing over the fact that the ones who get shot are either stupid, criminals, or both.

But as mentioned, the anti-Viet Nam war protests mostly died away after the draft was abolished. So it was not so much a protest of an unjust war as “as long as I don’t get my ass shot it goes to the back burner”.

Regards,
Shodan

5

As defined by the fact that they’re shot by police. As defined by those pesky things like courts and the rule of law, though, maybe not.

And Occupy Wall Street knew what they were protesting: Economic inequality. Why should it be that those who put in the most effort should get the least reward?

6

I counted myself as a supporter of OWS and its local affiliate, and I will happily agree that the 1% have too much control over the political process today.

That doesn’t change the fact that the Occupy movement was incoherent and decentralized, lacked any specific message or agenda, and more or less collapsed as soon as the heat-of-the-moment sit-in protests were forcibly dispersed.

As much as they wanted to be this generation’s Montgomery bus boycott, they ended up being this generation’s Prague Spring.

7

My thoughts on this matter were expressed better than I could have by Martin Hyde, in this post. Basically, he makes the point that problems with concrete, simple solutions that are within the power of government to achieve (for instance: stop barring black people from serving on juries, change laws defining marriage as only between a man and a woman) can be addressed via protest movements, and problems without such solutions (such as police being more likely to shoot black men, it’s not as though there’s a law authorizing this) can’t be.

8

You know the old expression (by Victor Hugo?) “nothing is more powerful than an idea whose time has come” ?
The protests of the 60’s didn’t create the civil rights movement…they just unleashed it. The time had come.
The civil rights movement would have succeeded even without the street protests, because society was ready for the changes. There was a huge base of support, but it was silent-- the protests became the key to making it vocal. But even without mass protests, the changes would have come anyway, maybe 5 or 10 years later.*
Today’s protesters don’t have a broad base of support on the brink of being unleashed.

*(here’s why: Most Americans already supported the idea of equal rights for the “colored folk”.Only 12 states had segregation laws-- the other 38 were already integrated by law. Society was changing, mostly due to the new invention called television, so that the society as a whole started to feel more unified,as everybody watched the same programes. In previous generations, the South had been viewed like a foreign country, and people were willing to let them be different, because nobody had much contact with them anyway. .By the 60’s, the country was more connected, and people didn’t like the idea of a separate , and very foreign, culture within the mainland. ).

9

And it is generally although not always confirmed by subsequent investigation that they were either criminals, stupid, or both.

You did know that Michael Brown robbed a store, beat up a cop, and tried to steal his weapon? Etc.

Regards,
Shodan

10

**Are protests less effective today than they were in the 1960s?

**Protests were effective in the 1960s ?! Now you tell me.

11

I did acknowledge the possibility that they weren’t as effective in the 60’s as I’ve been led to believe.

12

A lot of time we look back and think things were causes that were really effects. The US Army and Major League Baseball were integrated back in the 40s. Schools and buses were (beginning to be) integrated in the 50s. So the civil rights protests in the 60s were the effect of an improvement in civil rights, not necessarily a cause.

And more recently, I didn’t see any vocal support for same sex marriage until after a Massachusetts judge first legalized it in 2004.

13

They might if economic inequality gets any worse.

14

I’m pretty sure that almost all of them had pretty extensive criminal records or were caught on video committing crimes.

The bombing of a church that kills 4 little girls will ignite the conscience of a nation.

The shooting of a guy that was caught on tape assaulting and stealing from a store-owner shortly before he is shot (and there is physical evidence that he also assaulted the police officer), is not really as compelling.

I think we can agree that the labor of a doctor or lawyer or engineer is worth more than unskilled labor. The problem isn’t the disparity in income, its the increasingly larger share of wealth that goes to the providers of capital rather than the providers of labor.

15

It wasn’t legal to lynch black people in the Jim Crow South, but the perpetrators got away with it for one of the same reason police officers (purportedly) get away with brutal treatment of black suspects: sympathetic judges and juries. We mostly dealt with the problem back then by prosecuting lynchers in federal courts instead of state ones. The jury pools were mostly the same, of course, but the judges were better equipped (and more inclined) to deal with the use of race in the selection process and similar problems. We could use the same approach today, and to some degree we do (see DOJ investigations into allegedly racially motivated police killings.)

16

I’m going to disagree with the general consensus here that there has been no decline in the effectiveness of protest marches as a tactic since their use in the 1960s.

In the early 1960s, the general population, the police, and the cohort of elected and appointed government officials as well were all unused to American citizens taking to the streets. It was startling and disruptive. It was also courageous. No one on either side knew what might happen next. It was a live confrontation that could go in any of a multitude of different directions.

By the middle 1980s it had become a pro forma ritualistic performance. You announce you’re going to do a protest (and everyone who might participate knows that that entails). You arrange the buses and make the signs, reminding everyone of the official police stance on what is an OK versus a not-OK physical formation for a protest sign, reminding everyone of what kind of ID to carry with them, asking those willing to be arrested to identify themselves in advance and reminding them of what factors (e.g., unpaid tickets, expired licenses, questionable citizenship status, bench warrants etc) should disqualify them from doing that, and what things to bring (license, paper printouts of contact info, appropriate amounts of cash for bail as need be) and leave behind (pocketknives, scissors more formidable than this, magic markers wider than that, pharmaceuticals not in original containers, illegal drugs), and so on.

Your march organizers inform you that 600,000+ people have shown up for the march. CBS estimates 300,000 and gives your march 2 mins 37 secs on the evening news including snippets with a spokesperson speaking to a reporter. That plus a brief moment of you marching folks showing a few signs and hearing you chant “What do we want? Blahh Blaah! When do we want it? Now!” which might as well be “four legs good, two legs bad”, you aren’t explaining your cause in any significant detail.

The police come up courteously: “OK, so remind me what cause are you folks marching for? Yeah Ok this is how we’ll do it, we’ll tell you to disperse. Those who want to get arrested stay, the rest of you will need to leave. We’ll tell you a second time and if no one moves we’ll assume those remaining are the ones who want to be arrested. Any questions?”

The “handcuffs” are plastic tie strips and the procedure at the jail and bail are all standard procedure.

No elected politician, average citizen, or business owner in the area is concerned about your contingent of marchers aside from delays in traffic patterns and the possibility of you littering or something.

You spend all day doing this and you go home trying to convince each other that you “DID SOMETHING”, that you stood up.

In the houses you drive past on your way home, someone says to their companion, “There was a protest march today”. Companion yawns. “Yeah? What this time?” “Blah blaah”. “Oh that. I’m sort of in favor. Oh, hey, did I tell you I got 200 points higher than ever before in Kandy Krush Saga?”

The damn things are boring to be in, boring to watch, and they aren’t educating anyone. Their time has come and gone and we need new ideas.

17

What would you suggest? Mass public defecation?

18

Protests bring public attention to issues. Public attention often leads to changes. Almost every issue, no matter how abstract, has some concrete changes that can be made at the margins, and protests often lead to those changes.

The most recent protest movement–Black Lives Matter–has been pretty successful. Many cities are now working to implement body cameras, or implement on a wider scale.
Civil groups, from police unions to the ACLU, are working on best practices for implementing them, almost entirely in response to the political movement for them. Federal legislation has been proposed to fund them. Much more research has been started on their effectiveness, and there is more attention to that research. Police unions, moved somewhat by public polling by a more informed electorate, are less and less often rejecting the idea outright.

And that’s just body cameras, one of the concrete changes sought by the protestors. There is also a growing movement questioning grand juries. This is often how change happens. Public attention gets focused on a neglected issue–often for stupid reasons–and a million slow wheels of power start to churn.

19

The protests in the 1960s were more effective because the authorities handled them poorly. They wildly overreacted, used dogs and firehoses and so forth; the authorities made the protests into spectacles of brutality by the authorities and in the process demonized themselves. Exactly as the protesters wanted.

These days the authorities know better; they handle the protestors with kid gloves and ignore them as much as possible, which robs protests of most of their effectiveness.

20

That’s the opposite of what happened in Ferguson, where mourners came out for a candlelight vigil and police showed up with full riot gear and tanks and tear gassed everyone. THEN it turned into a movement.

Though maybe that’s why Ferguson ignited a much more widespread and sympathetic base of support than, say, OWS.