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America Needs a Mass Movement—Now | Without one, America may sink into autocracy for decades.
(www.theatlantic.com)
this post was submitted on 14 Oct 2025
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Protests that are legal, time-limited, and non-disruptive while also having no specific demands are just angry parades. And while it can be personally cathartic to be around like minded people, this does literally nothing to affect material change. Instead, millions of people who were motivated to engage in political action have now spent a couple of hours walking around, chanting, reading signs made by others, have let off some of the built up pressure that might have otherwise motivated them to do something real. Imagine if 1% of the protestors who turned out yesterday blocked access to ICE facilities instead? Or donated time and money to feeding homeless people. Or donated time and money to helping immigrants (documented and otherwise) increase access to legal services. Imagine if instead everyone of those people decided to strike from their jobs until the shutdown was ended and healthcare funded indefinitely? My ideas are not the best ones out there, but they are all probably more impactful to real people than anything that happened yesterday.
Conversely, how many more brown people were disappeared off the streets by ICE while everyone was distracted with the no kings protest? What new, corrupt, immoral, expenditure of our tax dollars was allocated to some horrible imperialist cause or Trump ally? How many people who depend on govt services had to go without because the shutdown was in place? You get the idea.
Effective protest is disruptive, time-unbounded, and usually illegal. They always have specific demands like ending a war, passing a bill, or freeing the unjustly imprisoned, etc. I am glad that people were motivated to turn out. I am sad that they turned out for an angry parade.