I think both can be true: protests can be a major force in spreading democracy and most protests achieve little or nothing.

They have some nerve putting the protests in China in the same box as the January 6 riots. But, then, it's the NY Times.

I have no idea what will happen in Iran. A government can lose legitimacy with most of its population and endure for decades. The price is what you see in Russia. So many lies stacked on top of each other, just waiting for a crisis to be revealed.

1.2: The link for "United States" goes to the protests against Roe v. Wade, not the January 6 riots. The link for Canada does go to the far right protests against Covid restrictions.

3: I got it wrong too! Protests against the repeal of Roe v. Wade!

Sorry about all the internal NYT links that I was too lazy to strip out. The most interesting bits of the article were, I thought, towards the end, so I will try to summarize them once I'm back at a computer.

Oh ha. I would not have bothered to include them then.

3: my mistake. Still not quite the thing to put a few grumpy right wing Canadians in with the China protests.

Change and causality are often really hard to measure. Did Dobbs protests impact the vote in Kansas? Did the January 2017 Women's March impact the November 2018 midterms? I think the answers in both cases are that the protests were an element in a broader movement, and had an impact, even if they couldn't be said to have brought something out of nothing. In both these cases, the protest didn't get someone with power to either exercise it differently or stop exercising it. Rather, they were a public legitimization for a faction that went on to create change through a different more established channel. A demonstration of legitimacy, if you will. Not to the powers that be, but to participants and sympathizers.

Astroturf, like the trucker protests, simulates legitimacy but doesn't demonstrate it. (Until it does -- the hope that 'fake it til you make it' will work isn't always irrational.)

So, along these lines, the question isn't so much 'what are you demonstrating?' as 'are you demonstrating and/or inspiring enough to support to prevail in a normal political contest?' It's hard, then, to be optimistic about protests in a political system -- Iran or China -- where the channels for making change are not really available in the same way.

The millions who marched against the Iraq war did, I think, demonstrate that if the thing didn't work out there'd be a political price to pay, but (a) not right away and (b) the dopes in power had deluded themselves that it was going to work, and so by the time accountability came around, they'd be fine. Bush's team was right about that as to 2004: voters were willing to give him the benefit of the doubt that the thing could still work. By 2006, though, there was hell to pay.

(I imagine that in a parliamentary system, protests have a real chance of giving a leader's intra-party rivals a chance to scheme the leader's replacement, or coalition partners could get cold feet about being stuck with a bad leader. So maybe the stars are going to align more often in a parliamentary system than in something like ours.)

Anyone with even a little rigor would try to split out protest waves by size, however hard that is to estimate. The NYT estimated 15-26 million people participated in at least one George Floyd protest, and that was clearly a difference in degree=>kind from your average affinity-group sign-wave.

To be super-charitable to the journalist, maybe they wrote "LINK TO US PROTESTS TK", and someone else did it in a rush.

My suspicion is that forcing radical changes in policy (or toppling of governments) are complicated enough phenomena and so dependent on the specific forces and histories at play that it's pretty difficult to generalize lessons across different situations, especially ones in on other sides of the world from one another.

If you actually read the article it turns out the reporter is working from an ongoing Harvard research project.

Such movements are today more likely to fail than they were at any other point since at least the 1930s, according to a data set managed by Harvard University researchers.

and

"Nonviolent campaigns are seeing their lowest success rates in more than a century," Erica Chenoweth, a political scientist who oversees the protest-tracking project, wrote in a recent paper.

The years 2020 and 2021 "have been the worst years on record for people power," Dr. Chenoweth added.

and

"For the first time since the 1940s, a decade dominated by state-backed partisan rebellions against Nazi occupations," Dr. Chenoweth has written, "nonviolent resistance does not have a statistically significant advantage over armed insurrection."

Political science recommends violence.

If only I'd finished my dissertation.

"Can nonviolent resistance survive COVID-19?" -- a click-bait title for an academic research article.

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/figure/10.1080/14754835.2022.2077085?scroll=top&needAccess=true

17: So, are vaccines considered violent resistance? And masks are nonviolent?

I just assume all NY Times stifles are boring because of the story was interesting the reporter would have saved it to put in her book next year.

I think in Iran the issue isn't going to be the protests so much as the shooting of protesters.

Okay, more quotes:

For one, polarization is increasingly prevalent worldwide, with income inequality, nationalist attitudes, fragmented news media and other forces deepening divisions across social and political lines.

Iran, whose political parties compete noisily even amid autocracy, is no exception. Some analysts see growing signs of polarization there along economic lines, urban-versus-rural divides and a moderate-versus-hard-liner split that is as much partisan as cultural.

Polarized societies, in moments of turmoil, become likelier to split over mass protests. This can bolster even despised governments, helping them to cast protesters as representing a narrow interest group rather than the citizenry as a whole.

Social media, which enables protests to organize and gather in once-unthinkable numbers, often with little or no formal leadership, may also paradoxically undermine those movements, according to a theory advanced by Zeynep Tufekci [link to 2017 NYT op-ed about the Women's March], a Columbia University sociologist.

In earlier eras, activists might spend months or years building the organizational structures and real-world ties necessary to launch a mass protest. This also made movements durable, instilling discipline and chains of command.

Social media allows would-be protesters to skip those steps, spurring one another to action with as little as a viral post. The result is rallies that put thousands or millions of bodies in the street overnight -- but that often fizzle just as quickly. [...]

Protests were traditionally just one tool in activist campaigns to pressure governments, alongside back-room negotiations with political leaders or alliance-building with powerful actors. The use of social media, by channeling popular energy away from such organizing, means that mass protest is now often the only tool, and typically ineffective on its own.

Stifles?

I don't read the NYT, sorry.

It's certainly true that social media driven activism is transient, and what has to happen is that a more organized effort picks up the banner. I think this is what the post-Dobbs protests are about. A lot of women, especially young women, are registering to vote, and Democratic candidates nearly everywhere are actively trying to get those votes. I think people felt validated, in Kansas, to stand up for themselves, and not be dissuaded by 'it's a red state, everything is hopeless.' These things are a big deal. But no, Justice Alito didn't resign and Justice Kavanaugh hasn't admitted that he perjured himself, so if that's what one is looking for to decide whether there's a success or not (a) it's a total failure and (b) that's just dumb.

22 I understood that to be Styles, but Olivia Wilde content is just so September.

I was the discussant for one of Chenoweth's conference papers back in the day--it drew a big audience, and I think they were mostly there for her. Another panelist fainted during her own presentation on that panel, but she ended up being ok.

That was a really stressful conference. I chaired another panel during which one person showed a slide of the Muhammad cartoon, one person claimed that her data couldn't be questioned (or substantiated) because she worked for the CIA, and one person had the top of her lacy thong underwear showing whenever she turned to point out some bit of her quantitative data tables that absolutely no one cared about. That happened back when I was a grad student, and I still have nightmares about that conference.

25: Wow! I had no idea!

To be clear, I am not someone who has commented under this pseud before (at least I don't think I have).

Yeah, I have been a few but not all Abigail Adamses in the past -- it gets used by multiple people. (As dead presidents are generally supposed to be.) This one, obviously, isn't me.

I'm reminded of The Game Hunter where there's a card called student protests it has no effect.

Weren't the anti-war protests against the Iraq War the largest in history?

Oops that was the game Junta.

I don't read the NYT, sorry.

You will pry the clickbait about tiny Tokyo apartments from my cold dead hands.

Also, 25 is amazing and I would have nightmares too, although I am not sure any discipline can bring the cringe/cauchemar like comparative lit.

The protests against both Iraq wars went quite well - like Vietnam, another famous anti-war protest success story, those wars didn't last nearly as long as the war the US waged in Afghanistan. Protests must be a weakening force.

(No, I'm not going to read the link.)

Stifles should be stories.

23: Re: NY Times. 31: I saw the Tokyo thing and wanted to click but not enough to do the clear cache and refresh thing. I am kind of tempted to subscribe. WaPo has been pissing me off , because they keep pushing articles about how it's essential that healthcare workers stop wearing masks in nursingh9mes so that we can get back to normal. I'm exaggerating a bit. Leanna Wen is not my favorite person.

However, there were 2 articles I though5 were quite thorough about non profit healthcare organizations. One hired McKinsey and stopped telling patients when they were entitled to free care. The other was about a hospital that used the 340B program to subsidize expansion in more well off areas rather than investing in buildings in the low-income community. I also appreciate the NYTimes tracking all of the COVID data. Are there other papers that do good investigative journalism Inshoukd be subscribing to instead?

1: of course one way in which protests can be both is that they quite often get bought off with concessions short of regime transformation.

32 I hadn't known until I just looked, but apparently Iraqi Kurdistan is/was recently under attack by Iran, Turkey, and IS. https://iraq.liveuamap.com/

So if no one is willing to read the New York Times, do we have any options for talking about Adam Tooze's thoughts on "the most comprehensive tightening of monetary policy the world has seen" and its risks? Is Substack (and earlier) better than the NYT?

I'm not opposed to reading it. I just don't read anything much these days.

"the most comprehensive tightening of monetary policy the world has seen"

I'm not sure, exactly, how to interpret that. The figure he cites is for total number of (worldwide) interest rate increases, and I'm not sure how significant that metric is. This is interesting.

Over the entire period between 1980 and 2021 a one percent appreciation of the dollar is associated with growth in Emerging Market and Developing Economies (EMDE) that is 0.63 percent slower. Furthermore, this association has strengthened since the millennium. The impact on world trade, notably, has increased from -0.39 to -0.61.

...

It is worth emphasizing that this is surprising since the promise of the flexible exchange system adopted, in stages and by degrees, since the collapse of Bretton Woods in the early 1970s, was that it would insulate the real economy and real trade flows against the monetary shocks once transmitted by fixed exchange rate systems, or, formerly, the gold standard. But, in practice a large share of the world's economies remain attached to various kinds of dollar peg, or are so closely associated with economies that are attached to exchange rate pegs that they are de facto linked themselves.

I bet Williams Jennings Bryan could explain it better with a metaphor.

Anyway, I assume right now we're warming up for a recession because some rich people took at look at the prospect of Burger King workers making $15/hour and decided that stopping it was worth a huge boost in unemployment and an increased risk of some light fascism.