Lots of protests, lots of people willing to go out and disrupt cities and force the state to listen. Great! I know Americans suffer under a fascist police state, commit genocides, underfund public services, ooh - they have a shitty bourgeois democratic system, maybe they’re protesting to fix that, or maybe they’re demanding free healthcare, that’s long overdue. No, I know, it’ll be about the insane amount of school shootings, or serious police violence. I know the LA riots started against ICE, that’s cool, so maybe they’re protesting for actually fair justice! That’d be a step forward.
Whatever they’re protesting, they seem to be in huge numbers, so they’ll probably make an actual effort to disrupt things. Occupy buildings. You know, some sort of direct action, they can’t all stand around pointlessly. Anyway, enough anticipation let’s go look and find out
Oh, the protests are just “Trump bad” in another form. And they’re decrying all forms of violence. And the police are literally collaborating with some. Oh.
Americans really took all these years of mistreatment, fascism, genocide with their tax dollars, deliberately being made poorer year after year, violent suppression, being allowed to die in droves, and the mass culmination of that is… “trump bad, also be polite while saying it”??? And then the protests are used as an excuse to tighten the fascism.
I can’t wrap my head around it. Millions(?) of people coming out to protest, and the overwhelming demand is ‘replace orange man with another genocidal fascist pls’. ie. basically for nothing to change whatsoever.
At least leftists try to get the fucking goods. Lib organising is the worst.
EDIT: I’mma just be clear - protesting ICE is extremely cool and not the part I’m complaining about.
I think if you view the protests as the end goal, then yea they are pointless. Libs are mad and need a way to let out that frustration and the protests are the most effective way to absorb it. It doesnt require them to get too far out of their comfort zone or face the systemic question of how we got to this point in the first place.
As leftists i think we can view these protests as a sort of “career fair” for trying to organize people. We need to go to where the people are at and i feel like a liberal at a protest is on the path to being radicalized and forming a revolutionary consciousness, but there still needs to be some sort of nudge to get there. The nudge will have to be from another human being because social relations do dominate people’s conscious.
Theres also a sense of solidarity that builds up when you are among others who are also sharing in the disatisfaction.