Protests Don't Work Anymore

A couple weeks ago, Black Lives Matter protestors interrupted a Bill Clinton event in Philadelphia and tried to confront him about the 1994 Crime Bill. The political chattering class erupted with talk of sidelining President Clinton, predicting the political apocalypse could be coming for her, because the President dared to challenge the protestors. I said at the time that not only would the altercation not hurt her, but it would help her in Philadelphia. There isn't enough conclusive evidence that it helped her, just anecdotal evidence, but she did win Philadelphia overwhelmingly, and Pennsylvania on the whole. Voters were at best indifferent to the exchange, and perhaps responded positively to President Clinton's defense.

You can imagine what I think of the anti-Clinton protests in Los Angeles on Friday by Sanders supporters, protests that called Clinton supporters all kinds of names, not to mention what they said about Hillary. Once again, obviously the protestors feel good that they got their message out, but I think the only real winner is the person being protested against. Hillary appears reasonable, the protestors appear like a bunch of extremists. The same is true of the anti-Trump protests, which don't really move people either.

Protesting once worked in America, particularly in the Civil Rights Movement, but most movements since then that have tried to use public protest as a confrontational tool on their issue have found that it hasn't helped them. Occupy Wall Street and the Tea Party generally became less popular over time, in part because they faded into just being "white noise." Sure, people get protests for civil rights or against a war, but protesting for each and every cause becomes tedious to the public, and eventually annoying. Civil disobedience ends up being noticed more for the inconvenience to the public than the cause it's supporting, and people end up missing the point entirely. Protests end up causing people to dig in more, and ultimately miss the point of them, more often than not.

Most of America has come to correctly believe there are a "professional protestor" class in this country, and they mostly get ignored and drowned out by other things going on. Protest has become over used in this country, and it therefore doesn't work as well. Perhaps someone should tell the Bernie supporters disrupting rallies in California that they're Hillary's best allies right now.