The Declining Success of Civil Resistance (2024) [video](youtube.com)
youtube.com
The Declining Success of Civil Resistance (2024) [video]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iDWyOMZdiBk
13 comments
I dunno, the Tea Party had a huge effect for its numbers, unlike No Kings, which has vanished from the media in 2 days, or 2010's Occupy movements, which we've memory holed entirely.
Seven million people showed up for No Kings. And your metric is how long it grabbed media attention? Seven million people who cared enough to actually physically show up says that they're getting their message out just fine, and it's resonating with people, no matter how long the media spends on it.
Maybe I'm just getting too old for such things but every protest I have seen after the Tea Party just looks like a bunch of unstables throwing tantrums. If I were their opposition it would just bolster my position and empower me to send in more troops. I think part of the root cause has to be modern movements just not really thinking things through. It probably does not help that NGO's are leaving piles of bricks on every corner and setting protestors up for escalation and failure. I think they should also have a way to root out the agent provocateurs and Antifa Reds/Yellows especially since most protests quickly escalate into riots which undermines their movements all together.
A lot of violence is intentionally instigated by police. You do know that, right? It is an explicit propaganda move to feed you the narrative that protestors are thugs and miscreants instead of upstanding citizens exercising their right to tell the government they disapprove.
It's in an authoritarian government's best interest to quell protests and convince you that protesting is not only ineffectual, but actually an act of terrorism.
It's in an authoritarian government's best interest to quell protests and convince you that protesting is not only ineffectual, but actually an act of terrorism.
every protest I have seen after the Tea Party just looks like a bunch of unstables throwing tantrums
I'm having trouble parsing this. Do you include the Tea Partiers in the bunch of unstables?
The No Kings protests have had virtually no arrests, and minimal violence, so I don't think I can personally include them in "throwing tantrums".
I'm having trouble parsing this. Do you include the Tea Partiers in the bunch of unstables?
The No Kings protests have had virtually no arrests, and minimal violence, so I don't think I can personally include them in "throwing tantrums".
The no kings message was undone by the fact that they had no kings protestors in European monarchies protesting an elected republican (little r) president.
"after the Tea Party" means that they were one of the last legit protests in my eyes.
No Kings did not do anything to really get media attention. They were mostly well behaved but I did not take away any meaningful messages. Everyone knows that US presidents are not kings. At best they stretch the powers that were granted after 9/11 but they get replaced every few years and most of their actions can be quickly undone by the next deep state puppet.
To me it's just like bad management in a company. Bad managers/directors come and go. I can speed up their departure or just simply ignore them and wait for their replacement.
No Kings did not do anything to really get media attention. They were mostly well behaved but I did not take away any meaningful messages. Everyone knows that US presidents are not kings. At best they stretch the powers that were granted after 9/11 but they get replaced every few years and most of their actions can be quickly undone by the next deep state puppet.
To me it's just like bad management in a company. Bad managers/directors come and go. I can speed up their departure or just simply ignore them and wait for their replacement.
Thanks for the clarification. I thought it was generally understood that the Koch Brothers financed the Tea Party movement.
I'm puzzled by the "weirdos throwing a tantrum" contrast with "did not do anything to really get media attention". The No Kings rallies did everything that conservative commentors seem to want from protests. Large numbers of participants from a significant spectrum of subcultures, no violence, no property damage, consistent messaging. Still no media attention. I don't know what to think.
I'm puzzled by the "weirdos throwing a tantrum" contrast with "did not do anything to really get media attention". The No Kings rallies did everything that conservative commentors seem to want from protests. Large numbers of participants from a significant spectrum of subcultures, no violence, no property damage, consistent messaging. Still no media attention. I don't know what to think.
The US has no kings and all sides agree there should be no kings. It's like me having a protest called 'no suffocation'... We all agree on this, but I'm glad some people feel the need to state it even more obviously.
This is very clearly not the case:
https://yaledailynews.com/blog/2025/10/08/yarvin-argues-for-...
https://yaledailynews.com/blog/2025/10/08/yarvin-argues-for-...
> Everyone knows that US presidents are not kings.
That's an interesting argument. Perhaps you think the tea party movement was about making tea or a literal party?
> No Kings did not do anything to really get media attention
You're the second person here who uses media attention as a metric for the validity of political ideas. However, the media isn't groomed or fed by the people which results in a strong inverse correlation between media attention and what's good for the people.
> At best they stretch their powers... and most of their actions can be quickly undone by the next deep state puppet.
A fail to see the good news here, for one, undoing actions doesn't mean relinquishing accumulated powers, in fact it may be used as an excuse for grabbing even more powers.
More importantly, you assume that all changes are not only reversible but easily so, and the new "reverse" is always better than the original - not one of these is true.
> Bad managers/directors come and go.
And so do the companies they lead. It sounds like you are OK with letting America go, I'm not sure you understand the difference in scale and risk.
> I can speed up their departure or just simply ignore them and wait for their replacement.
There's no bright future to wait for, waiting and navel gazing surrenders the future to those who don't do it.
That's an interesting argument. Perhaps you think the tea party movement was about making tea or a literal party?
> No Kings did not do anything to really get media attention
You're the second person here who uses media attention as a metric for the validity of political ideas. However, the media isn't groomed or fed by the people which results in a strong inverse correlation between media attention and what's good for the people.
> At best they stretch their powers... and most of their actions can be quickly undone by the next deep state puppet.
A fail to see the good news here, for one, undoing actions doesn't mean relinquishing accumulated powers, in fact it may be used as an excuse for grabbing even more powers.
More importantly, you assume that all changes are not only reversible but easily so, and the new "reverse" is always better than the original - not one of these is true.
> Bad managers/directors come and go.
And so do the companies they lead. It sounds like you are OK with letting America go, I'm not sure you understand the difference in scale and risk.
> I can speed up their departure or just simply ignore them and wait for their replacement.
There's no bright future to wait for, waiting and navel gazing surrenders the future to those who don't do it.
Just to address parts of this where we may have some small slice of agreement:
No kings might be cringe in that way, but then again can you really say that the tea party wasn't? Are Sarah Palin and the like effective avatars for intelligent government reform? It seems to me evoking 1776 and literal revolution because idk the government might subsidize healthcare is about as silly as calling an opposing president a king. To be clear, I'm also going out of my way to be extremely charitable to your position despite my personal beliefs. And assuming you will also in good faith attempt a willingness to assess protests movements along lines that go beyond your individual sympathies.
I would contend the reason the tea party was "successful" is because mainstream Republicans co-opted it and thought they could control it to temper an extremely charismatic incumbent Democrat who they wanted to weaken as they feared the extent of his mandate. Cue mitch mcconnell saying he will make Obama a "one-term president". Fox News and others became incessant boosters of it. Of course, this turned against them in 2016 when their plans to nominate another Bush collided with Trump riding the grassroots insurgency, which now somewhat controls them (we'll see what happens in the coming post-Trump era).
Democrats have simply not had such an insurgency, although it seems obvious given the failures of both sides of the mainstream that such a thing is coming. In some cases vis a vis "the deep state" (as vacuous as I find that term) those farther from the center agree, even if from opposite sides of the spectrum. If nothing more one can say a move to populism on either side is self evidently a move to some shared common representation of "populism", even if both left and right strenuously disagree on implementation and so on.
So anyway, I wouldn't pat the tea party on the back too hard. Their success has more to do with institutional Republican hubris than their own effectiveness. It's not like the current administration is actually implementing limited government, if you haven't noticed. But I suspect any hope we have of a good faith discussion will quickly evaporate if I stray any closer to that topic. Fwiw I think the collapse of successful civil movements has far more to do with trends we see causing other declines in our society, that is the collective elevation of self-interest, greed, bombast and mob makes right. In that way, perhaps the lack of success of some movements - given the environment in which they operate - is actually in a weird way a credit to them. If you are successful in an increasingly inane society, what does that say about you? What benchmark would you even articulate to define a successful protest movement in the modern United States?
No kings might be cringe in that way, but then again can you really say that the tea party wasn't? Are Sarah Palin and the like effective avatars for intelligent government reform? It seems to me evoking 1776 and literal revolution because idk the government might subsidize healthcare is about as silly as calling an opposing president a king. To be clear, I'm also going out of my way to be extremely charitable to your position despite my personal beliefs. And assuming you will also in good faith attempt a willingness to assess protests movements along lines that go beyond your individual sympathies.
I would contend the reason the tea party was "successful" is because mainstream Republicans co-opted it and thought they could control it to temper an extremely charismatic incumbent Democrat who they wanted to weaken as they feared the extent of his mandate. Cue mitch mcconnell saying he will make Obama a "one-term president". Fox News and others became incessant boosters of it. Of course, this turned against them in 2016 when their plans to nominate another Bush collided with Trump riding the grassroots insurgency, which now somewhat controls them (we'll see what happens in the coming post-Trump era).
Democrats have simply not had such an insurgency, although it seems obvious given the failures of both sides of the mainstream that such a thing is coming. In some cases vis a vis "the deep state" (as vacuous as I find that term) those farther from the center agree, even if from opposite sides of the spectrum. If nothing more one can say a move to populism on either side is self evidently a move to some shared common representation of "populism", even if both left and right strenuously disagree on implementation and so on.
So anyway, I wouldn't pat the tea party on the back too hard. Their success has more to do with institutional Republican hubris than their own effectiveness. It's not like the current administration is actually implementing limited government, if you haven't noticed. But I suspect any hope we have of a good faith discussion will quickly evaporate if I stray any closer to that topic. Fwiw I think the collapse of successful civil movements has far more to do with trends we see causing other declines in our society, that is the collective elevation of self-interest, greed, bombast and mob makes right. In that way, perhaps the lack of success of some movements - given the environment in which they operate - is actually in a weird way a credit to them. If you are successful in an increasingly inane society, what does that say about you? What benchmark would you even articulate to define a successful protest movement in the modern United States?
Maybe no kings vanishing from the media is a feature, not a bug. I wouldn’t want a left wing movements that depended on media promotion, in fact I’d assume any left wing movement that was still in the media would be the failure. Media attention destroys left wing movements.
I also just generally think all movements work best locally. So yeah, throw a protest to build community, but I wouldn’t expect further efforts to be so visible.
I also just generally think all movements work best locally. So yeah, throw a protest to build community, but I wouldn’t expect further efforts to be so visible.