Protests are in part a rejection of traditional methods of registering opinion. Their increasing regularity indicates that people believe voting and calling their representatives are insufficient.

eople in left-leaning movements know full well that some of their own supporters are undermining message discipline and strategic imperatives.

The Black Lives Matter protests during that period were different in part because they defied the caricature of protesters as radical college students with nothing but time. According to a study led by the Johns Hopkins economist Nick Papageorge, on factors such as gender and race, the demographics of the protests were actually more representative... See more

he Floyd protests did not materialize out of nowhere. The intellectual foundation had been laid by years of previous protests that created some organizational infrastructure and steadily increased the public’s support for the BLM movement until it surged upward in June 2020.

Media attention flocks to the most radical and provocative elements and emboldens the voices on the fringes.

Another reason the BLM protests succeeded is that they were overwhelmingly peaceful

Yet seeking change through peaceful persuasion has also become less effective. Since 2010, Chenoweth wrote in a 2020 essay in the Journal of Democracy , fewer than a third of nonviolent campaigns, and just 8 percent of violent ones, have been successful—down from about two-thirds of nonviolent insurgencies and one-quarter of violent ones in the... See more

Yet in nearly every case that the researchers examined in detail—including the Women’s March and the pro–gun control March for Our Lives, which brought out more than 3 million demonstrators—they could find no evidence that protesters changed minds or affected electoral behavior.

Over the years, social movements have internalized the strategic superiority of nonviolence: More people are willing to join a peaceful march than are willing to join one that includes violent confrontations. The UC Berkeley professor Omar Wasow’s research bolsters the argument for strategic adoption of nonviolence by looking at Black-led protests... See more