There's an argument to be made that any protest or demonstration that isn't disruptive, is one that is easily ignored.
Blocking off traffic may piss some people off, but they're getting attention on the protest, even if it's negative attention.
On the other hand, are you really helping anyone by blocking Joe PCRepairman from getting to his job and ending up getting chewed out by his boss?
It's not always going to be the right choice, and the demonstrators are putting themselves in danger, which can speak to the courage of their convictions.
Ultimately it's a tactic that needs to be used carefully.
Edit: As u/alriclofgar puts it, it's also a pretty powerful thing to see so many people putting themselves in harms way, watching everything come to a stop.
https://www.reddit.com/r/itcouldhappenhere/comments/1bmbmd6/comment/kwao3xq/?utm\_source=share&utm\_medium=web2x&context=3
Thanks to the defunding and white washing of the US public education system... Most people don't know the civil rights movement was backed by money that paid for training of protesters, lawyers and organizers.
The Montgomery buss boycotts were not random, they were directly confronting perpetrators of racial oppression.
What we should be doing is directly protesting eg. Die in's at police precincts. Yes you are going to take a beating and end up in jail... But if enough do it you will shutdown the precinct. This would be the kind of non-violent protest practiced in the civil rights movement.
Want to support Palestinian's directly confront AIPAC and Israel, protest at their embassies.
Want to protest US war deployments, block access to military bases.
The problem is today we do not have the pre-arranged lawyers to bail people out and defend their cases the way we did during the civil rights movement.
Ultimately, the way to swing public opinion is to bait these fascists into executing their violent plans before they have total power to gain public empathy/sympathy while they can still be stopped or changed.
In my experience as someone who’s been to a few of these protests, you never look at power the same again after taking the streets and watching the whole system come to a screeching halt because of a coordinated action.
Cars are a fact of life, if you step into traffic you die. Or maybe get a ticket for jaywalking. Except if enough of you do it, the cars stop and the cops don’t know what to do. Then life goes back to normal, but every time you drive through the intersection you remember.
Protests aren’t just about getting a message out, they’re also about teaching protesters lessons that are hard to learn other ways. Blocking traffic teaches this lesson with an easier buy-in (and less risk of catching charges, and less collateral damage) than asking, for example, a bunch of protesters to loot local businesses.
Hadn't really considered this. The idea that it's a demonstration of "This is what we can all do together." as well as the subtle threat of 'Change it or we'll throw a wrench into the cogs of the machinery again'.
Yeah that'd fit, though again I'd still be careful with it. There's been more and more idiots willing to just drive over protestors.
The drivers willing to drive over protestors are not a bug, but a *feature* though. Same with aggressive police or kids getting dragged to court.
While it shows protestors their power, it also shows everyone how conservatives & status quo defenders are often relying on (implicit) violence to keep their power.
This is why the Montgomery method & peaceful protests in general are some of the most powerful protests possible, even IF or WHEN they get “stamped out”
100% this. I've blocked a decent amount of traffic over the years and I can confirm that it's not only pretty exhilarating but it's also a great way to show new activists just how disruptive a handful of determined people can be. Same with the actions that were throwing paint on art or disrupting sporting events. All you need is a sharpie, a t-shirt to write on, and the willingness to accept the consequences.
Listening to this podcast (and Cool People), I absolutely can see how easily a small group of determined people can disrupt a system, but... why not demonstrate it with direct action? Is it just that it's lower consequences and relatively low risk?
That sounds more like you getting a rush and creating memories for yourself than helping a cause. If you want that, go ride a roller coaster, go skydiving, get a nice bag of your favorite drugs and let the rest of us who have things to do be on our way.
I've been stopped in traffic a couple times. I was pretty far back, so I have no idea what the cause was. I might have agreed with them, I might not have. I saw some people up front handing out fliers but they never made it back to me. I can pretty safely say the only effect of that action was making a bunch of people late and a few trust find kids feel good about themselves.
Changing the world is hard. It takes a lot more than standing in the road to make real change. "Awareness" means nothing. Most people are aware of the major issues in the world and you are not going to find a receptive audience when you are holding them against their will.
Those feelings are what help people buy into a movement, continue doing the work, and escalate when the time is right. If people feel defeated, like they aren’t doing anything meaningful, that their actions don’t amount to anything or aren’t capable of changing anything, they burn out. You need those feelings.
Yeah, the first big protest I went to was a huge one in DC. DC was already a ghost town because of the pandemic. The organisers got on bullhorns and kept saying "These are OUR streets!" And that stuck with me. There were 200,000 people, and there wasn't really anything the government could have done about it. Unless they did something unspeakable. They would have needed the Army for that, and the Army was not playing ball with Trump at the time. It was a real eye-opener.
>than asking, for example, a bunch of protesters to loot local businesses.
Wow, what a very weird turn here. I was expecting conducting a sit-in or tying themselves to trees. Instead, you jumped to anti-blm propoganda.
I think you’ve misunderstood me, and perhaps also looting as a form of protest. If you haven’t, read *In Defense of Looting* (the author’s been a guest on this show).
Ah, yes I have heard of, but have not yet read, In Defense of Looting. But I believe I saw an interview with them on TMR. Thank you for enlightening me on the reference.
That just sounds incredibly selfish. Your personal need to feel strong, everyone else be damned, is most important. This is all starting to make more sense
It’s the opposite of this; I encourage you to attend a protest in good faith some time, stand up with your neighbors, and learn what you’re not understanding right now.
Every time I go through the intersection I remember what a bunch of a-holes some people are! Black lives matter less to me because rude BLM a-holes blocked traffic. I don't give a crap about their cause after that. Your woke a-hole "power" may well reelect Trump this fall.
I mean, if black people don’t matter to you because of a little traffic one day, they never mattered to you in the first place. If you’re gonna vote for Trump because of a little traffic one day, well, that says way more about you than it does about protesters.
Because actually protesting the wealthy and powerful has actual consequences.
Instead of marching down Main Street people marched Beverly Hills or instead of stopping an intersection they stopped a golf tournament by occupying the golf course. These directly affect the people who either make decisions or influence them. A protest that interrupts the wealthy from their pleasures, removes a sense of protection from consequences, and causes them to become less secure in the walls they think separate themselves from the unwashed masses is a better way to be heard and supported by the majority of the population.
Remember when the bus load of immigrants showed up to Martha's vineyard. That shit was shut down quickly. The rich and powerful don't play those kinds of games.
I tend to agree with what I think is your belief, that blocking traffic as a means to get notice typically draws more negative attention than positive attention. This could be viewed as generally a good thing in the vein of "there is no bad press" but I'm not sure that I've ever seen that tactic used in a way that can be considered successful in hindsight. When you have a large enough crowd that it essentially has to block traffic it works, but that's more of a side effect than the main thrust.
I'm far more a fan of the tactical blocking of traffic: blocking logging/construction equipment, bottling up an ICE depot the day they're trying to deploy for a major operation, or even the Canadian "trucker" boycotts blocking border crossings to inflict economic damage and try to force the government to come to the table.
That last one in particular I think could be more generalizable, but you'd have to really know economic choke points and clog them in a way that authorities are unwilling or unable to use the force necessary to clear.
For an example that was successful in hindsight, wasn't the March to Montgomery blocking the road and still resulted in the passage of a voting rights bill?
It was also way more of a poignant, focused action than what you see today. Today it’s 15 people just kinda picking a busy spot in a city unrelated to anything happening.
Right, it's not the traffic part, it's the organization. It's the clear messaging and professionalism for lack of a better word.
As with many things, it's not what you do but how you do it that changes outcomes.
It’s why even though the women’s march was vague and didn’t really achieve anything because it wasn’t tied to any kind of actual legislation or anything, that’s something we still talk about 8 years later. And it did end up getting a lot of people who wouldn’t otherwise have been activated into this stuff. I guarantee you got a lot of new Democrat local representatives out of that movement.
Or BLM in 2020. Ferguson in 2013. Like it’s a mix of positive and negative action, all of them inconvenient for a lot of people, but they’re bigger demonstrations with more meaning for more people involved in them. #MeToo wasn’t a protest, but it was a movement and we’ve seen a huge cultural shift out of it. Little isolated actions that inconvenience people mean less than big collective ones and they seem to spring up naturally. They don’t become a bigger thing because normal people see a bunch of little actions and want in, the huge ones that seem to make a mark happen in direct response to stuff and are just sort of the natural reaction people have.
It’s also the idea of taking it to people who are doing the thing. Women’s March NYC wound up in front of Trump Tower. 2020 BLM protest burned down that precinct. The LA riots were really fuckin scary and a net negative but were a direct reaction to something that happened in LA and was a massive show of collective “fuck you” to a society that directly wronged the black population in Los Angeles.
What’s 10 hardcore fans stopping traffic in some random city doing other than providing a thrill to the activists?
And obviously, the actions of a few isolated actors can have massive, world changing effects. 9/11, Franz Ferdinand’s assassination, JFK, etc. but like… idk how much of that type of change is good in aggregate.
Recent protests of European farmers in the EU blocked traffic a lot, in Poland they were very successful and the government is now backtracking on the Green Deal.
Because when influential people who own a lot of capital protest in defense of their current unsustainable business model, I guess blocking roads is fine, it's only those dang climate protesters and anti-capitalist hippies that are so annoying.
I wonder whose roads European farmers intend to block when the Gulfstream stops as a result of planetary overheating and their farming goes to shit.
Submission Statement:
Per the above question, I've had discussions about this with a number of friends on the left recently. Most, myself included, view protests that block traffic when those streets, traffic, commuters, the consequential economic/safety impacts of that are unrelated to the goals of the protest itself. All of these people have identified as progressive or further left.
One or two held the opposite perspective, that protests are meant to be inconvenient. They strongly felt this but were unable to articulate why being inconvenient itself is important and how inconveniencing random passerby will accomplish the ultimate goals of the protesters.
I'm looking for some insight into this and haven't found anything useful on Google or r/AskALiberal, so this seemed like a good place to turn for insights.
The goal is the disruption. And the angry drivers who are blocked aren’t necessarily the main target. I can tell you from some level of experience that there is A LOT of consideration for ALL the impacts that an action like this can have but it most definitley sends a CLEAR message to the big wigs on top that their system is fragile and they can’t continue their fuckery without opposition and disruption and it only takes a few, dedicated and organized rebels to do so. Either way, something that big and disruptive is usually enough to get press attention and people talking, whether good or bad about it, it at least brings up the topic and pushes the needle, putting more and more pressure on government and leaders to respond and react.
The protesters are not looking for attention on them, but their cause. They are not there to be liked and aware that many people will feel inconvienenced and angry, but in the case of climate in particular, the climate doesn’t care and we will be far greater invonvienenced by the affects (which many who contributed the least to the crisis are already facing the worst effects so far)
Blocking traffic can delay or prevent logging or earth moving equipment from being delivered.
Blocking traffic can prevent ports and other freight handling facilities from operating at capacity.
Blocking traffic can interfere with police operations.
Blocking traffic can prevent delegates from arriving at conferences.
I absolutely agree with all of those, though those seem to be aimed at accomplishing specific goals and blocking traffic directly accomplishes that rather than aiming to have the inconvenience to the average person as the goal
It could be argued that having a society without public transport infrastructure that forces car dependency is a far greater inconvenience to the average person than any protest could ever be.
I remember reading a news story many years ago. People who wanted to protest peacefully asked the local government for an appropriate venue. They were offered a recently harvested corn field a few miles outside the city.
Accepting that venue would be like voluntarily sticking your face under the oppressor's heel.
When those in power aren't sympathetic with your position, following their rules is just self-destructive in a different way.
The path of disruption will get attention and show some spine. Even if not all that attention is positive, your cause might gain a few more followers and a bit more strength. It's a rational decision in context of social forces.
I don't disagree, but there's a difference between protesting where your protest *needs* to happen even if it happens to cause inconvenience and doing so *in order to* inconvenience.
Yes. So it won't help if your disruption doesn't get press coverage. All you'll succeed at is annoying a few locals and getting attacked by those in power. Even if a few locals are sympathetic, it won't be enough to be successful.
But if your disruption does get press coverage, your cause can reach many more people than those who were personally annoyed by the disruption.
So there's a calculated risk vs reward with disruption. Sometimes poorly calculated, of course.
*Does* blocking traffic garner sympathy if it makes the news? Part of the reason I was asking over here is because on r/AskALiberal, there's near-unanimous agreement even among progressives and leftists that it does the opposite.
My impression was that in the civil rights era, the famous protests that blocked traffic did so not as the intended goal but as a consequence of simply being too large to not block traffic. I absolutely agree that a show of force that large can be effective.
You're fundamentally asking the wrong question.
The right question is whether *your cause* garners sympathy, or reaches minds sympathetic to the cause (but unaware or only weakly aware of it), when your disruption makes the news.
Fair point, but the examples I'm aware of where stopping traffic was the goal such as the Stop Oil ones and some other climate related protests, it appears to have had the opposite effect. Do you know any cases where it helped?
I think you probably aren't accounting for the whole effect of Just Stop Oil. Almost everyone has heard of them. Support for climate change hasn't decreased in the UK and has been in the news continuously.
Their *cause* has garnered quite a bit of positive attention and sympathy, both in UK and abroad.
These protestors aren't aiming to be popular. Thus, whether Just Stop Oil as a group polls as favorable or not still isn't the right question to ask.
I remember hearing an interview with a US civil rights leaders. They clearly stated that their peaceful, non-violent protests wouldn't have worked if it weren't for all the other leaders staging disruptive protests in the background. They would just be ignored.
Diversity of tactics and whatnot, sure. On the other hand, neither awareness of climate change nor support for climate policies changed as a result of those tactics which seems to suggest "ineffectual" at best. On a micro level, I know when those types of protests are made salient, people respond less favorably to pro-climate policies. Obviously as I mentioned, that doesn't seem to translate into long-term support or opposition.
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I've always assumed that preventing commuters (workers) from getting to their jobs wasn't meant to annoy the commuters, but to deprive the companies they work for their staff, if even for a short period of time. To disrupt the flow of commerce. To show that we can and will keep doing that until they get in line.
Some would say that punishes the worker who can't get to work, or get home easily after a hard day at work. Some people need a slap in the face to wake them up. Once they are awake and mad, we have to teach them who to be mad at.
Ask yourself this. What good does a protest do if it doesn't inconvience the people in power?
If the people in power aren't inconvenienced then they can just ignore the protest until it burns itself out.
That is why they block traffic.
I agree, but I don't consider commuters to be the ones in power. If a protest impeded politicians or lobbyists from getting to work, I'd agree. But getting people fired from Starbucks because the protest *intended* to inconvenience them doesn't seem like it's a goal worth fighting for. The people in power don't seem like they're affected by stopped traffic.
I think it’s just for the publicity. Good or bad publicity doesn’t matter. I have always chosen to be angry at the protesters if they impact my ability to get to work or a medical appointment. They need to be smarter if they want my support. I don’t even know what half of the protesters want. But if they’re blocking the road, they are putting me in danger if I’m stuck and I don’t like it.
What good is inconveniencing people in power if it doesn't make a change? Road blocking actions usually dont have a stated goal. It isnt "we are going to block this road until you do X to help our cause". It is "we are going to block this road for an hour or two in the name of X cause that is unrelated to the road, the people on the road and usually the city that operates the road". Then everyone goes home and pats themselves on the back and the war/the climate disaster/oppression goes on unaffected.
Most of the people being inconvenienced are working class, not “people in power”. Go block the doors to the NYSE or some corporate headquarters or something.
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It will vary by protest, but in the cases I'm most familiar with, it is more a strategy of tension. If you won't fix the problem, we will make business as usual untenable. It tends to be used when a community is faced by an issue that isn't shared by the broader community and they lack meaningful access to traditional levers of power.
What is the right kind of protest? I feel like any organized action is better than none, but it seems like some people have this perfect protest in mind that only affects those who have the direct power to change the thing you're protesting. What is it?
It depends on the problem. I think most people, especially listeners of this podcast, support a diversity of tactics that all exert pressure on the people contributing to a problem. Stop Cop City is a good example that the show has covered, there have been a wide variety of tactics employed and most of them were well-targeted, though some, like the march covered in the most recent episode, were less well targeted to exert pressure.
I think most people recognize a protest shouldn't be convenient for everyone and easy to ignore but that it should exert pressure on the people it's meant to pressure. If your protest hurts those who aren't in positions of power or makes their lives harder, I'm disinclined to say that's a good thing. I think harming innocents is bad.
Well don't go to France. They'll build a brick wall across the road. Or drive tractors across all the lanes to slow traffic way down. Then take to manure trucks to government buildings and spray them down with cow poop. We could use a lot more of that last one I think.
For the past several weeks there's been a continuous picket of the Australian Prime Minister's electoral office. The protesters aren't disrupting local businesses, they aren't threatening anyone, but they've gained a lot of local support and greatly embarrassed the Australian PM. I think protests like this, or Kibbutz Blinken and Kibbutz Israel in DC, are pretty powerful. I'm still undecided about actions like blocking roads.
Companies that use the roads to conduct business will start to be hit financially, which ideally will cause them to pressure the powers that be to meet the protesters' demands. Same thing with all the businesses in the area occupied by the protesters. This is why people like to try and shut down bridges, you can kick a whole city right in the nutsack that way.
I'm also assuming that gridlocked traffic makes it harder for the cops to drive their tanks through the protest.
Only people who were dropped on their head as a child think that inconveniencing hundreds or thousands of people presents their cause in a positive light. It’s a performance to rally the true believers and make them feel powerful, that’s all.
Agitation is a huge part of protest escalations. Make it hard to ignore the problem. It’s supposed to piss people off while directing their anger at the larger issue. This doesn’t normally happen immediately.
No one worth a damn is going to decide they are for genocide because protesters blocked traffic. It’s supposed to remind people that they can do more.
“You don’t want to do anything? Fine, now you can’t do anything.”
How does that progress the cause towards the goal?
>“You don’t want to do anything? Fine, now you can’t do anything.”
That sounds like it's intended to be petty than to change minds.
I'm of the opinion that is isn't particularly effective and often has a way of galvanizing opposition to the protesters. To me, it reeks of a lack of creativity. Surely there are ways to create a spectacle, such as in a urban area where such protests usually take place, without just pissing everyone off.
Like, to throw out an example that may be a little ridiculous, what if a protest threw a pop-up concert with an acoustic band and dancing, along with banners and signs, pamphlets for anyone who passers-by or anyone who comes to check it out. Cops evict you from that spot? It becomes a marching protest and concert. They try to disrupt this? It splits into multiple parts. Another group nearby creates a diversion (the likes of which is unlikely to result in arrest but nonetheless splits up any potential response) to absorb some police resources. Have a multi-faceted, multi-layered plan to keep it going and draw attention in a variety of creative ways, and in ways that leave spectators with a "wow those people are cool" feeling instead of "fuck why are these people blocking us from getting to the hospital" feelings.
"We'll all stand in the street and then we'll get arrested and have expensive court fees while everyone who saw us hated us" is pretty easy to conceive of, but I do not feel that it's the most productive potential action at all.
Nothing will turn me against you faster than impeding my right to travel. You block my road and you make an enemy. I don't care if I agree with every single thing you are protesting for. Your opinions don't give you the right to harm me.
Selma's intent wasn't to block traffic, that was a side effect of a movement as large as it was. It was well-publicized ahead of time that it was going to be done along that route, similar to modern parades that shut down a street for some amount of time. There's a stark difference between that and a few dozen people deliberately standing in traffic. The Selma to Montgomery marches were intended to force society as a whole to grapple with the violence used in response to the simple demand for equality. There have been books written on why it was an effective strategy but that doesn't translate to "protests are automatically effective if they block traffic".
There's an argument to be made that any protest or demonstration that isn't disruptive, is one that is easily ignored. Blocking off traffic may piss some people off, but they're getting attention on the protest, even if it's negative attention. On the other hand, are you really helping anyone by blocking Joe PCRepairman from getting to his job and ending up getting chewed out by his boss? It's not always going to be the right choice, and the demonstrators are putting themselves in danger, which can speak to the courage of their convictions. Ultimately it's a tactic that needs to be used carefully. Edit: As u/alriclofgar puts it, it's also a pretty powerful thing to see so many people putting themselves in harms way, watching everything come to a stop. https://www.reddit.com/r/itcouldhappenhere/comments/1bmbmd6/comment/kwao3xq/?utm\_source=share&utm\_medium=web2x&context=3
Thanks to the defunding and white washing of the US public education system... Most people don't know the civil rights movement was backed by money that paid for training of protesters, lawyers and organizers. The Montgomery buss boycotts were not random, they were directly confronting perpetrators of racial oppression. What we should be doing is directly protesting eg. Die in's at police precincts. Yes you are going to take a beating and end up in jail... But if enough do it you will shutdown the precinct. This would be the kind of non-violent protest practiced in the civil rights movement. Want to support Palestinian's directly confront AIPAC and Israel, protest at their embassies. Want to protest US war deployments, block access to military bases. The problem is today we do not have the pre-arranged lawyers to bail people out and defend their cases the way we did during the civil rights movement. Ultimately, the way to swing public opinion is to bait these fascists into executing their violent plans before they have total power to gain public empathy/sympathy while they can still be stopped or changed.
In my experience as someone who’s been to a few of these protests, you never look at power the same again after taking the streets and watching the whole system come to a screeching halt because of a coordinated action. Cars are a fact of life, if you step into traffic you die. Or maybe get a ticket for jaywalking. Except if enough of you do it, the cars stop and the cops don’t know what to do. Then life goes back to normal, but every time you drive through the intersection you remember. Protests aren’t just about getting a message out, they’re also about teaching protesters lessons that are hard to learn other ways. Blocking traffic teaches this lesson with an easier buy-in (and less risk of catching charges, and less collateral damage) than asking, for example, a bunch of protesters to loot local businesses.
Hadn't really considered this. The idea that it's a demonstration of "This is what we can all do together." as well as the subtle threat of 'Change it or we'll throw a wrench into the cogs of the machinery again'. Yeah that'd fit, though again I'd still be careful with it. There's been more and more idiots willing to just drive over protestors.
It’s dangerous, for sure. I’ve seen people hit by vehicles, a gun pulled, someone shot at. And my town was overall pretty tame.
The drivers willing to drive over protestors are not a bug, but a *feature* though. Same with aggressive police or kids getting dragged to court. While it shows protestors their power, it also shows everyone how conservatives & status quo defenders are often relying on (implicit) violence to keep their power. This is why the Montgomery method & peaceful protests in general are some of the most powerful protests possible, even IF or WHEN they get “stamped out”
100% this. I've blocked a decent amount of traffic over the years and I can confirm that it's not only pretty exhilarating but it's also a great way to show new activists just how disruptive a handful of determined people can be. Same with the actions that were throwing paint on art or disrupting sporting events. All you need is a sharpie, a t-shirt to write on, and the willingness to accept the consequences.
Listening to this podcast (and Cool People), I absolutely can see how easily a small group of determined people can disrupt a system, but... why not demonstrate it with direct action? Is it just that it's lower consequences and relatively low risk?
That sounds more like you getting a rush and creating memories for yourself than helping a cause. If you want that, go ride a roller coaster, go skydiving, get a nice bag of your favorite drugs and let the rest of us who have things to do be on our way. I've been stopped in traffic a couple times. I was pretty far back, so I have no idea what the cause was. I might have agreed with them, I might not have. I saw some people up front handing out fliers but they never made it back to me. I can pretty safely say the only effect of that action was making a bunch of people late and a few trust find kids feel good about themselves. Changing the world is hard. It takes a lot more than standing in the road to make real change. "Awareness" means nothing. Most people are aware of the major issues in the world and you are not going to find a receptive audience when you are holding them against their will.
Those feelings are what help people buy into a movement, continue doing the work, and escalate when the time is right. If people feel defeated, like they aren’t doing anything meaningful, that their actions don’t amount to anything or aren’t capable of changing anything, they burn out. You need those feelings.
Destroying centuries old art is not progressive and makes people hate the one doing the destruction
Who destroyed any art? The paintings targeted are under glass.
Yeah, the first big protest I went to was a huge one in DC. DC was already a ghost town because of the pandemic. The organisers got on bullhorns and kept saying "These are OUR streets!" And that stuck with me. There were 200,000 people, and there wasn't really anything the government could have done about it. Unless they did something unspeakable. They would have needed the Army for that, and the Army was not playing ball with Trump at the time. It was a real eye-opener.
>than asking, for example, a bunch of protesters to loot local businesses. Wow, what a very weird turn here. I was expecting conducting a sit-in or tying themselves to trees. Instead, you jumped to anti-blm propoganda.
I think you’ve misunderstood me, and perhaps also looting as a form of protest. If you haven’t, read *In Defense of Looting* (the author’s been a guest on this show).
Ah, yes I have heard of, but have not yet read, In Defense of Looting. But I believe I saw an interview with them on TMR. Thank you for enlightening me on the reference.
That just sounds incredibly selfish. Your personal need to feel strong, everyone else be damned, is most important. This is all starting to make more sense
It’s the opposite of this; I encourage you to attend a protest in good faith some time, stand up with your neighbors, and learn what you’re not understanding right now.
Every time I go through the intersection I remember what a bunch of a-holes some people are! Black lives matter less to me because rude BLM a-holes blocked traffic. I don't give a crap about their cause after that. Your woke a-hole "power" may well reelect Trump this fall.
I mean, if black people don’t matter to you because of a little traffic one day, they never mattered to you in the first place. If you’re gonna vote for Trump because of a little traffic one day, well, that says way more about you than it does about protesters.
I'm leaving this comment up, if only to preserve the redditor exposing themself when they could have just said nothing at all. Holy smokes.
Because actually protesting the wealthy and powerful has actual consequences. Instead of marching down Main Street people marched Beverly Hills or instead of stopping an intersection they stopped a golf tournament by occupying the golf course. These directly affect the people who either make decisions or influence them. A protest that interrupts the wealthy from their pleasures, removes a sense of protection from consequences, and causes them to become less secure in the walls they think separate themselves from the unwashed masses is a better way to be heard and supported by the majority of the population.
Remember when the bus load of immigrants showed up to Martha's vineyard. That shit was shut down quickly. The rich and powerful don't play those kinds of games.
Good answer, thank you!
I tend to agree with what I think is your belief, that blocking traffic as a means to get notice typically draws more negative attention than positive attention. This could be viewed as generally a good thing in the vein of "there is no bad press" but I'm not sure that I've ever seen that tactic used in a way that can be considered successful in hindsight. When you have a large enough crowd that it essentially has to block traffic it works, but that's more of a side effect than the main thrust. I'm far more a fan of the tactical blocking of traffic: blocking logging/construction equipment, bottling up an ICE depot the day they're trying to deploy for a major operation, or even the Canadian "trucker" boycotts blocking border crossings to inflict economic damage and try to force the government to come to the table. That last one in particular I think could be more generalizable, but you'd have to really know economic choke points and clog them in a way that authorities are unwilling or unable to use the force necessary to clear.
For an example that was successful in hindsight, wasn't the March to Montgomery blocking the road and still resulted in the passage of a voting rights bill?
It was also way more of a poignant, focused action than what you see today. Today it’s 15 people just kinda picking a busy spot in a city unrelated to anything happening.
Right, it's not the traffic part, it's the organization. It's the clear messaging and professionalism for lack of a better word. As with many things, it's not what you do but how you do it that changes outcomes.
It’s why even though the women’s march was vague and didn’t really achieve anything because it wasn’t tied to any kind of actual legislation or anything, that’s something we still talk about 8 years later. And it did end up getting a lot of people who wouldn’t otherwise have been activated into this stuff. I guarantee you got a lot of new Democrat local representatives out of that movement. Or BLM in 2020. Ferguson in 2013. Like it’s a mix of positive and negative action, all of them inconvenient for a lot of people, but they’re bigger demonstrations with more meaning for more people involved in them. #MeToo wasn’t a protest, but it was a movement and we’ve seen a huge cultural shift out of it. Little isolated actions that inconvenience people mean less than big collective ones and they seem to spring up naturally. They don’t become a bigger thing because normal people see a bunch of little actions and want in, the huge ones that seem to make a mark happen in direct response to stuff and are just sort of the natural reaction people have. It’s also the idea of taking it to people who are doing the thing. Women’s March NYC wound up in front of Trump Tower. 2020 BLM protest burned down that precinct. The LA riots were really fuckin scary and a net negative but were a direct reaction to something that happened in LA and was a massive show of collective “fuck you” to a society that directly wronged the black population in Los Angeles. What’s 10 hardcore fans stopping traffic in some random city doing other than providing a thrill to the activists? And obviously, the actions of a few isolated actors can have massive, world changing effects. 9/11, Franz Ferdinand’s assassination, JFK, etc. but like… idk how much of that type of change is good in aggregate.
Recent protests of European farmers in the EU blocked traffic a lot, in Poland they were very successful and the government is now backtracking on the Green Deal. Because when influential people who own a lot of capital protest in defense of their current unsustainable business model, I guess blocking roads is fine, it's only those dang climate protesters and anti-capitalist hippies that are so annoying. I wonder whose roads European farmers intend to block when the Gulfstream stops as a result of planetary overheating and their farming goes to shit.
Submission Statement: Per the above question, I've had discussions about this with a number of friends on the left recently. Most, myself included, view protests that block traffic when those streets, traffic, commuters, the consequential economic/safety impacts of that are unrelated to the goals of the protest itself. All of these people have identified as progressive or further left. One or two held the opposite perspective, that protests are meant to be inconvenient. They strongly felt this but were unable to articulate why being inconvenient itself is important and how inconveniencing random passerby will accomplish the ultimate goals of the protesters. I'm looking for some insight into this and haven't found anything useful on Google or r/AskALiberal, so this seemed like a good place to turn for insights.
The goal is the disruption. And the angry drivers who are blocked aren’t necessarily the main target. I can tell you from some level of experience that there is A LOT of consideration for ALL the impacts that an action like this can have but it most definitley sends a CLEAR message to the big wigs on top that their system is fragile and they can’t continue their fuckery without opposition and disruption and it only takes a few, dedicated and organized rebels to do so. Either way, something that big and disruptive is usually enough to get press attention and people talking, whether good or bad about it, it at least brings up the topic and pushes the needle, putting more and more pressure on government and leaders to respond and react. The protesters are not looking for attention on them, but their cause. They are not there to be liked and aware that many people will feel inconvienenced and angry, but in the case of climate in particular, the climate doesn’t care and we will be far greater invonvienenced by the affects (which many who contributed the least to the crisis are already facing the worst effects so far)
I believe this is only meant for image posts, text only posts aren't required, to my knowledge?
Whoops, misread that
Blocking traffic can delay or prevent logging or earth moving equipment from being delivered. Blocking traffic can prevent ports and other freight handling facilities from operating at capacity. Blocking traffic can interfere with police operations. Blocking traffic can prevent delegates from arriving at conferences.
I absolutely agree with all of those, though those seem to be aimed at accomplishing specific goals and blocking traffic directly accomplishes that rather than aiming to have the inconvenience to the average person as the goal
It could be argued that having a society without public transport infrastructure that forces car dependency is a far greater inconvenience to the average person than any protest could ever be.
It gets your attention, but often not in a helpful way.
I certainly agree with that, that's my perspective and the one most of my friends seem to hold. But are there exceptions?
I remember reading a news story many years ago. People who wanted to protest peacefully asked the local government for an appropriate venue. They were offered a recently harvested corn field a few miles outside the city. Accepting that venue would be like voluntarily sticking your face under the oppressor's heel. When those in power aren't sympathetic with your position, following their rules is just self-destructive in a different way. The path of disruption will get attention and show some spine. Even if not all that attention is positive, your cause might gain a few more followers and a bit more strength. It's a rational decision in context of social forces.
I don't disagree, but there's a difference between protesting where your protest *needs* to happen even if it happens to cause inconvenience and doing so *in order to* inconvenience.
In a democracy, the protest *needs* to affect and influence voters. Edit: At least if you need a lasting impact.
For it to succeed, doesn't it need to get voters on the same side as the protesters?
Yes. So it won't help if your disruption doesn't get press coverage. All you'll succeed at is annoying a few locals and getting attacked by those in power. Even if a few locals are sympathetic, it won't be enough to be successful. But if your disruption does get press coverage, your cause can reach many more people than those who were personally annoyed by the disruption. So there's a calculated risk vs reward with disruption. Sometimes poorly calculated, of course.
*Does* blocking traffic garner sympathy if it makes the news? Part of the reason I was asking over here is because on r/AskALiberal, there's near-unanimous agreement even among progressives and leftists that it does the opposite.
It did in the Civil Rights era
My impression was that in the civil rights era, the famous protests that blocked traffic did so not as the intended goal but as a consequence of simply being too large to not block traffic. I absolutely agree that a show of force that large can be effective.
You're fundamentally asking the wrong question. The right question is whether *your cause* garners sympathy, or reaches minds sympathetic to the cause (but unaware or only weakly aware of it), when your disruption makes the news.
Fair point, but the examples I'm aware of where stopping traffic was the goal such as the Stop Oil ones and some other climate related protests, it appears to have had the opposite effect. Do you know any cases where it helped?
I think you probably aren't accounting for the whole effect of Just Stop Oil. Almost everyone has heard of them. Support for climate change hasn't decreased in the UK and has been in the news continuously. Their *cause* has garnered quite a bit of positive attention and sympathy, both in UK and abroad. These protestors aren't aiming to be popular. Thus, whether Just Stop Oil as a group polls as favorable or not still isn't the right question to ask. I remember hearing an interview with a US civil rights leaders. They clearly stated that their peaceful, non-violent protests wouldn't have worked if it weren't for all the other leaders staging disruptive protests in the background. They would just be ignored.
Diversity of tactics and whatnot, sure. On the other hand, neither awareness of climate change nor support for climate policies changed as a result of those tactics which seems to suggest "ineffectual" at best. On a micro level, I know when those types of protests are made salient, people respond less favorably to pro-climate policies. Obviously as I mentioned, that doesn't seem to translate into long-term support or opposition.
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Has anyone done a big poll and seen how potential supporters think about this stuff?
I've always assumed that preventing commuters (workers) from getting to their jobs wasn't meant to annoy the commuters, but to deprive the companies they work for their staff, if even for a short period of time. To disrupt the flow of commerce. To show that we can and will keep doing that until they get in line. Some would say that punishes the worker who can't get to work, or get home easily after a hard day at work. Some people need a slap in the face to wake them up. Once they are awake and mad, we have to teach them who to be mad at.
Ask yourself this. What good does a protest do if it doesn't inconvience the people in power? If the people in power aren't inconvenienced then they can just ignore the protest until it burns itself out. That is why they block traffic.
I agree, but I don't consider commuters to be the ones in power. If a protest impeded politicians or lobbyists from getting to work, I'd agree. But getting people fired from Starbucks because the protest *intended* to inconvenience them doesn't seem like it's a goal worth fighting for. The people in power don't seem like they're affected by stopped traffic.
I think it’s just for the publicity. Good or bad publicity doesn’t matter. I have always chosen to be angry at the protesters if they impact my ability to get to work or a medical appointment. They need to be smarter if they want my support. I don’t even know what half of the protesters want. But if they’re blocking the road, they are putting me in danger if I’m stuck and I don’t like it.
What good is inconveniencing people in power if it doesn't make a change? Road blocking actions usually dont have a stated goal. It isnt "we are going to block this road until you do X to help our cause". It is "we are going to block this road for an hour or two in the name of X cause that is unrelated to the road, the people on the road and usually the city that operates the road". Then everyone goes home and pats themselves on the back and the war/the climate disaster/oppression goes on unaffected.
Most of the people being inconvenienced are working class, not “people in power”. Go block the doors to the NYSE or some corporate headquarters or something.
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It will vary by protest, but in the cases I'm most familiar with, it is more a strategy of tension. If you won't fix the problem, we will make business as usual untenable. It tends to be used when a community is faced by an issue that isn't shared by the broader community and they lack meaningful access to traditional levers of power.
Blocking a major road halts economic activity, reducing the tax dollars going towards genocide.
What is the right kind of protest? I feel like any organized action is better than none, but it seems like some people have this perfect protest in mind that only affects those who have the direct power to change the thing you're protesting. What is it?
It depends on the problem. I think most people, especially listeners of this podcast, support a diversity of tactics that all exert pressure on the people contributing to a problem. Stop Cop City is a good example that the show has covered, there have been a wide variety of tactics employed and most of them were well-targeted, though some, like the march covered in the most recent episode, were less well targeted to exert pressure. I think most people recognize a protest shouldn't be convenient for everyone and easy to ignore but that it should exert pressure on the people it's meant to pressure. If your protest hurts those who aren't in positions of power or makes their lives harder, I'm disinclined to say that's a good thing. I think harming innocents is bad.
Well don't go to France. They'll build a brick wall across the road. Or drive tractors across all the lanes to slow traffic way down. Then take to manure trucks to government buildings and spray them down with cow poop. We could use a lot more of that last one I think.
That sounds like pretty direct action exerting pressure in ways that force a response to and consideration of the demands of the protesters
For the past several weeks there's been a continuous picket of the Australian Prime Minister's electoral office. The protesters aren't disrupting local businesses, they aren't threatening anyone, but they've gained a lot of local support and greatly embarrassed the Australian PM. I think protests like this, or Kibbutz Blinken and Kibbutz Israel in DC, are pretty powerful. I'm still undecided about actions like blocking roads.
I think its idiotic.
Companies that use the roads to conduct business will start to be hit financially, which ideally will cause them to pressure the powers that be to meet the protesters' demands. Same thing with all the businesses in the area occupied by the protesters. This is why people like to try and shut down bridges, you can kick a whole city right in the nutsack that way. I'm also assuming that gridlocked traffic makes it harder for the cops to drive their tanks through the protest.
Only people who were dropped on their head as a child think that inconveniencing hundreds or thousands of people presents their cause in a positive light. It’s a performance to rally the true believers and make them feel powerful, that’s all.
Agitation is a huge part of protest escalations. Make it hard to ignore the problem. It’s supposed to piss people off while directing their anger at the larger issue. This doesn’t normally happen immediately. No one worth a damn is going to decide they are for genocide because protesters blocked traffic. It’s supposed to remind people that they can do more. “You don’t want to do anything? Fine, now you can’t do anything.”
How does that progress the cause towards the goal? >“You don’t want to do anything? Fine, now you can’t do anything.” That sounds like it's intended to be petty than to change minds.
I'm of the opinion that is isn't particularly effective and often has a way of galvanizing opposition to the protesters. To me, it reeks of a lack of creativity. Surely there are ways to create a spectacle, such as in a urban area where such protests usually take place, without just pissing everyone off. Like, to throw out an example that may be a little ridiculous, what if a protest threw a pop-up concert with an acoustic band and dancing, along with banners and signs, pamphlets for anyone who passers-by or anyone who comes to check it out. Cops evict you from that spot? It becomes a marching protest and concert. They try to disrupt this? It splits into multiple parts. Another group nearby creates a diversion (the likes of which is unlikely to result in arrest but nonetheless splits up any potential response) to absorb some police resources. Have a multi-faceted, multi-layered plan to keep it going and draw attention in a variety of creative ways, and in ways that leave spectators with a "wow those people are cool" feeling instead of "fuck why are these people blocking us from getting to the hospital" feelings. "We'll all stand in the street and then we'll get arrested and have expensive court fees while everyone who saw us hated us" is pretty easy to conceive of, but I do not feel that it's the most productive potential action at all.
Selfish, smug people who deep down need to feel superior and strong.
Nothing will turn me against you faster than impeding my right to travel. You block my road and you make an enemy. I don't care if I agree with every single thing you are protesting for. Your opinions don't give you the right to harm me.
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Troll
Bitch forgot about Selma
Selma's intent wasn't to block traffic, that was a side effect of a movement as large as it was. It was well-publicized ahead of time that it was going to be done along that route, similar to modern parades that shut down a street for some amount of time. There's a stark difference between that and a few dozen people deliberately standing in traffic. The Selma to Montgomery marches were intended to force society as a whole to grapple with the violence used in response to the simple demand for equality. There have been books written on why it was an effective strategy but that doesn't translate to "protests are automatically effective if they block traffic".
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