Did those protests move the needle in any appreciable way?
Yes. Support for BLM and other justice movements rose exponentially. A number of cities and states have moved to make reforms of their police departments, including many of the demands being made by #defundpolice proponents.
See: Joe Biden’s platform, and his town hall last night. They did embrace more progressive visions. The key will be making sure folks like Schumer and Feinstein get the fucking memo.
Ever has it been that the people are oppressed by the government. This is not new. Remember Shay’s rebellion? Remember the union movement? Remember the sufragette movement? Remember the civil rights movement?
No change ever - and I do mean EVER - comes to us without great pain, heartache, and sacrifice. This is one such time. And it sucks, because we’d all like to believe peaceful, nonviolent protests and letter writing and phone banking will be enough.
It never is. Not until the people are in the streets, being tear gassed and beaten, does the needle move. It takes violence - and I mean violence directed at those agitating for change - to spark America. That’s why this summer’s protests were so important. That’s what’s going to move the needle. That’s why Biden’s tone on policing and justice has changed dramatically from the man who helped pass the punitive and regressive crime bill back in the 90’s.
Change is coming. Hold on. It sucks, it’s hard, we’re all right there with you. The next few years are going to be tough. But in every case, these moments have passed and ended with a wave of progress.
Another thing you can consider doing: run for local office. Change happens more at the local level than anywhere else, and we need folks fighting for equality and justice for all in our towns and counties and states as much as we do at the federal level. If I wasn’t such a goddamned introvert, I’d run myself (I’m also an atheist, which America seems to loathe electing).
No, “Law and Order” means cops murdering people in the street and politicians encouraging and protecting them. You may be thinking of democracy and the rule of law.
Exactly what happens in any developed nation: Lawless executions by cops endorsed by the nation’s leaders.
I should add that Trump endorsing is essentially endorsed in turn by every member of his party who supports and enables him including this bullshit. Which is to say that nearly the entire GOP, like Trump, is unfit for office just like he.
I know you’ve already gotten a lot of good answers about this, but I wanted to also add: work hard and have patience.
When I was in college in the south, I volunteered for an organization that was working to stop strip mining in the region. They’d been working on this one particular operation for something like 12 years when I got there. During my time with them, they finally won and got the site shut down and clean-up requirements in place. I thought, what will they do now?
They immediately started working with another group, next state over, to help them with what they were trying to get shut down and cleaned up. Like they said, there’s always more to fix. It’s a way of life, not a hobby.
And last bit of advice: When the national stuff starts to overwhelm me into a state of despair, I focus on the local. It can reenergize you to get back into the big fight.
As a factual matter you may not be wrong, and I get you’re frustrated and don’t know what else to do. I don’t think any of us really does. But keeping the protests going seems like kind of a prerequisite to anything else working, and ideally ramping them up much more.
If we really get to the point that protests can’t work… well, on the one hand, if Gandhi had been trying nonviolent protest against the Nazis instead of the British they would have just killed everyone until they stopped (like the Brits did in centuries past). On the other hand, at the end of the day, every society is a direct democracy, they just vary in how much of a supermajority you need to change the government and how the people cast their votes. The population as a whole can always burn it all to the ground, and the threat of that, even if never used, is a powerful tool. To borrow the old joke, if they’re king and we’re nothing, then they’re king over nothing.
Fortunately, I don’t think it’ll go that far. He might refuse for a while, but the man never actually fights for what he believes, he just tries to find ways of pretending he is right no matter how much he lies. But I think if push came to shove, he wouldn’t stand up to anyone.
The real concern is the loyalties of those running the military. Realistically, I would expect the military would be tasked to forcibly remove him from the White House at the direction of Congress or the Supreme Court.
Personally, I’m tired of living in interesting times, and just want to take a break!
But there are leaders such as Robert Mugabe and Bashar al-Assad who are willing to wreck the country and be king over nothing if that is the price of remaining king.
This. If you want to change things, focus on one thing that is really important to you, organize, and stick with it until you think what you achieved is good enough. Then pick the next thing.
Yes, that is the downside hidden in my “how large a supermajority” comment. If the minority includes “everyone with the weapons” that’s much harder.
My best hope right now is that communications and transportation technology has made it was easier to organize groups and find like-minded people, and harder to hide what’s going on. In Nazi Germany it was easy for even good people to convince themselves nothing was happening for a very long time. There are still lots of deluded people today of course, but videos and photos at least make it harder to hide scale atrocities.
It’s that part that scares me, though. I don’t think there’s a good chance that Trump would actually be able to actually hold on to power or overturn the results of an election he lost when all the dust is settled, BUT this is a man who simply has no interest whatsoever in the institutions of the United States government functioning if they aren’t serving his interests. We’ve never had a President who cared (or understood) so little of what the government is or how it’s supposed to work–he’s a sociopath who would rather burn it down than let someone else succeed, and he has a lot of power to set fires.
The risk of being executed or imprisoned for life for protesting and organizing in US is still not that high. That’s how the problem of murderous police squads of previous regime in Poland was solved. The regime murdered many protesters and sent to prisons even more, but in the end it failed anyway due to systematic, organized resistance. Don’t give up.
