Millennials don’t believe protesting works.
I’ve seen a lot of discussion about why millennials aren’t coming out. Yes, they work and have young children. They are taking care of their elderly parents. All of these things are true and valid.
But also millennials have gone to the Occupy Wall Street protests, which accomplished nothing. The BLM protests, which accomplished nothing. The Women’s March, which lol. I protested during all of these things only for our country to slide even further into capitalistic greed and corruption. When Bernie was running, someone we could get excited about, he was undermined by his own party.
Many millennials don’t even believe their vote matters anymore in the face of gerrymandering and the electoral college.
I still want to believe protesting can effect change. Or frankly that American citizens have any power at all anymore. I’ll be protesting on the 5th, but man is it hard to keep hope alive when our generation has been crushed under the establishment for our entire lives. Combine that with how oppressive the 40+ hour work week is and can you blame people for not protesting? Millennials barely even have the energy to do their laundry.
I’m not sure how to energize people. I’m not even sure how to energize myself. The Democratic party offers no leadership or hope whatsoever.
Please offer your local millennial (and me!) some hope. Please tell me we aren’t just screaming into a void.
Originally Posted By u/duckhunt420 At 2025-03-31 11:47:11 AM | Source
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I’m a millenial/Gen Z. I was really surprised to find out that I was one of the youngest in my protest group. A lot of people told me they were protesting for their grandkids. They also expressed regret that my generation would have to deal with the fallout of this.
Also, do we know that millennials are protesting less than other generations? My protests seem to be pretty age-diverse. They seem to match up with the generation percentages of the population at large. People might just be used to seeing mainly young people at protests.
Anecdotally for me, millennials are less present in the protests I see or attend. I think it’s less a lack of caring or believing in a cause, more, social media. People vent online which gives a kind of catharsis. I’m not talking about likes for prayers or that nonsense. I mean the lack of a third space has implications outside of our mental health.
Protests can be organized more easily online but they can also lose their real world effect and become diluted as just another online event without meaning. People need to be together for real protest. It’s like the difference between watching a concert online and being there. I think the online part, outside of organization dilutes the protest movements.
The BLM, occupy and women’s March protests all had an effect on the psyche of the world and although didn’t change the world how they wanted to, were still impactful. There is a famous study that says when 6% of people (I think) start protesting, change is inevitable. So rather than feeling downtrodden by lack of change, we need to keep pushing for it. Simple actions have an effect. If fox news is on in your doctor’s office, ask to have it changed.
Protests are effective in restraining governments from taking unpopular actions, even if the protestors don’t achieve all their goals as quickly as they would like.
See: Why protest if it doesn’t make a difference?
Protests do work
This is surprising, given that we constantly see examples where protest has made a difference. We have, already in 2024, seen blockades and protests by French farmers prompt the government to offer concessions. Likewise, in India, the renewed farmers movement marching towards Delhi has already prompted an offer from the government of improved prices for crops.
Mass street protests over a child sex abuse scandal in Budapest recently led Hungary’s prime minister, Viktor Orbán, to introduce legislation to address the scandal. Late last year, mass protests and street blockades in Panama led to the government closing one of the world’s largest copper mines.
Academic research also shows that protest can be influential. Workers’ protest and strike action was crucial in prompting Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal as part of the creation of the US welfare state. And disruptive protests have also slowed down the adoption of the austerity measures which have eroded welfare states across the high-income democracies for the past 40 years.
Colonialism was met with ongoing resistance and protest in almost every instance, including Gandhi’s campaign of non-violent civil disobedience, as well as more militant campaigns. This grew throughout the 20th century, until maintaining occupation ultimately proved unmanageable for the colonial powers.
Peaceful protests stopped really accomplishing anything once the ones protesting learned that there’s no long term consequence to just ignoring peaceful protests. Not only that protests in the past were far more strategic. You’d use Rosa Parks because she’s got the marketable image when the cameras are out. You had sit-ins. You had well organized boycotts. You had people willing to sit in a county jail for being disruptive.
I went to a protest last month. What I heard reminded me of college. Spent like 40 minutes listening to the DJ talk about how music and activism have always gone hand in hand and how later in the day please stick around to listen to music of liberation. Art is commentary. It is rarely the driver of action. Listening to music isn’t going to plan out a boycott and organize weekly/monthly meetings to plan out and continue motivating boycotts.
College campus students like to do silent protests on campus to people that agree with them and/or do symbolic stuff like lay on the ground and draw chalk marks around them or place duct tape on their mouths. Zero stakes, zero risk on a college campus, zero weight to these attempted symbols and of course the lack of organizing regular meetings to further operate. Protests have to evolve into professional/pseudo-professional organizations
And all the peaceful marches from MLK Jr. Elsewhere there was still Malcolm X, Black Panthers, Communist Party, Fred Hampton and his collection of people putting aside their racism and sexismm for shared labor/economic interests, and of course then there was MLK Jr being assassinated and a week of countrywide riots that sped the Civil Rights Act of 1968 through congress and the white house
The Tesla protests are good though. It needs to keep being hammered for years to come that Tesla cars are garbage and support garbage and portray an image of garbage. Continued exodus from X to BlueSky or Mastadon is good. Reddit to Lemmy is good. All things that hit rich people if enough people do make the move. If only there were good movements to get off Facebook and Instagram. Stuff like not buying Kentucky whisky/bourbon is good. Buy Canadian or overseas whiskey. Until American brands take a stand, buy foreign and make it known why you buy foreign
We need people from Instagram to exodus to Pixelfed. I don’t know how polished or appealing Pixelfed is though.
I use Flashes. Its on ATProto.
Protesting only works if it’s violent, or threatening violence. If the powers that be aren’t scared they will not care.
Are there no effective peaceful protests in the Netherlands?
That only works if your government isn’t deranged.
By this logic, South Africa should have had a violent revolution to end apartheid. It is true that sometimes, violence is the only option. For example, the abolitionist movement in the US tried to end slavery peacefully for decades until things escalated to violence. But saying violence is the only thing that works against an unjust government is unnecessarily dramatic.
Are you under the impression that apartheid ended peacefully?
*Bernie Sanders is not a democret
But he caucuses with the Democrats. He’s been a consistent voice of progressive ideas in a party of geriatric complacency. So yeah, in our current political hellscape, he’s a Democrat.
I think armed protests work.
The left is mostly disarmed 😒 so that isn’t really an option. Unless you’re talking about Luiging some billionaires
Sounds like a priority problem to be fixed then.
perhaps 🤷🏽♀️
I am boycotting instead. Also, not American.
Direct action is great but eventually we will need band together to get the thing done
Why does everyone not see anything in the Women’s March? It was a massively effective recruiting drive. Indivisible got a lot of members from the Women’s March. Indivisible has been extremely effective against Trump during his first term. They’ve been organizing for ten years.
This is why the majority of people buying and donating bus tickets for the April 5th protest are all women.
I think because the news doesn’t report on positive results, I suspect intentionally as those results are typically not positive for their owners.
Indivisible has been extremely effective against Trump during his first term.
I’m not trying to be rude, but I’ve never heard of Indivisible. What have they done and how were they effective during Trump’s first term?
Indivisible is the main organizer of the April 5th protests this weekend. In Trump 1.0 they were a big factor in protecting things like the ACA. They also work towards building progressive politics in Red and Purple states. They also work to prevent voter suppression and gerrymandering.
This isn’t even the list of their best accomplishments, but this is from their website: https://indivisible.org/impact
Their whole point is to use political pressure on politicians weak points to make them more likely to cave to their demands. They were a big factor in getting the Democrats to do the filibuster early on in Trump’s second term. They often focus on local politics. It’s a bottom-up strategy. This is also why they keep organizing those town halls.
Lots of good feedback here. Not much to offer. But I’ll help out where I can. I came from Reddit. Deleting my Reddit accounts.
To my fellow millennials…
The protests are working. Even the weekend protests at tesla showrooms. Elon is freaking the fuck out, claiming that even talking (or pointing fingers) at cybertrucks is a crime. Why? Because the stock is toppling, and that stock is the foundation of his wealth. A lot of his other schemes depend on that stock being strong.
The protests against Republicans in Congress are working. Trump is pulling nominees for his administration because they are getting absolutely wrecked and those seats are flipping. These spineless fucks won’t even show up to their own districts, let alone their own state because of the bad optics and disapproval from their constituents.
The rough part is, we have to keep this going for another few years. At least 2 IMHO. We need to flip Congress, impeach Trump and hold him and his lackeys accountable for their crimes. It’s the only way we can move forward as a country. The alternative is literally violence in the streets as trump’s SS (aka, ICE) continues to crackdown on legal and protected dissent.
i would argue that the only thing that is really affecting tesla is boycotting, not the protesting.
the only thing these people understand is their cash flow. stop it there and the tick will die. elon is freaking the fuck out because his business might be failing. not because people are causing property damage. that only emboldens him to dig his feet in.
i still believe in the power of making your opinion known, but it’s not as useful as it once was. at least when done peacefully.
Guess what directly raises awareness about boycotting? The protests.
zooms out on Tesla stock
Sure, buddy. Sure. It’s “working”
Also, Tesla stock is not the foundation of his wealth. It could go to zero and he’d still be one of the richest men in the world thanks to SpaceX.
Looks at YTD view of TSLA
Yeah, I see where they went from over 400 per share to like 270 per share in less that a year. Imagine losing 35% of your house’s value in less than a year. Now imagine that you leveraged your house to buy a fancy car, invest in your business and to get a vacation property. Now your lenders are putting pressure on you to realize that asset before it falls any further.
I get what you are saying, that Elon could burn Tesla to the ground and still get a profit from it, but it would be damn nice to take one of his biggest toys away. Add to that the fact that Tesla’s valuation has been considered inflated based on Elon’s ability to control public perception. That tumbling is a direct commentary on him as much as it is on Tesla.
Yeah tesla protests deff soured Tesla tubby attitude seeing him cry on fake news is pricesless
Seeing that stock wiped even better
Fuck that parasite
Millennials don’t believe protesting works.
For any given protest, what does the person attending believe it will do?
Astonishingly few protests in the modern world have led to immediate change regarding the issue they were held against, therefore anyone attending a protest with this in mind therefore will have violated expectations.
I have attended protests before and I see their goal as raising awareness of issues and giving a physical display of how many people are against a given subject. In this sense, as soon as a protest is seen it meets the goal.
So I ask again, if you say “protesting doesn’t work”, my question is, “How do you define work?”
Protesting is hard work that takes a long time. The young are passionate but can be impatient. Millennials in the US today have generally only lived to see an overall downward trajectory. I understand how it can be difficult for them to see a light at the end of the tunnel.
We are in America’s Dark Night of the Soul. The period of darkness before you get yourself back together and transform into something greater.
The great resignation wasn’t about work at all.
We simply don’t believe in the future anymore, because it was taken from us by greedy assholes who were born 20 years before us. After your entire youth and early adulthood filled with struggle only to get your bosses boss a new ferrari you just don’t care anymore.
Now we’re all doomers hoping for this unjust bullshit to collapse and burn even if it takes us with it. After all how much can you loose if they already took it all?
I feel this whole thread in my 40yo bones. While we’re all pretty fucking miserable, it’s reassuring to know the way I’m feeling right now is not just my mental illness getting worse. It’s also that, but still reassuring that it might not only be because of that.
My wife and I welcomed our first born into the world in late December of 2019, right before COVID really started to ramp up worldwide and lock the whole world in fear. For years now I wondered if I was a bad father because, despite my son and wife being my world, I’ve been in the grip of passive suicidality for a while now. I don’t take care of myself and my health anymore, I don’t try to better myself or my immediate surroundings, I don’t fix broken things so much as just working around the problems, and where I used to be passionate about my work, now I basically do the bare minimum to keep my job. I’m just over this rat race.
Nothing we were told was true about the world, and our place in it.
Anymore, everything feels like an immense struggle. Life feels like a second or third job. I don’t know how I’m going to survive the next several years. Thanks to MAGA and apathetic voters, we now get to relive the world of our parents and grandparents, fearing world war at the hands of fascists, – and introducing nuclear annihilation this time around, – rather than some sort of utopia brought on by technological advancement that seemed so promising in our earlier years.
I want to be here for my son and wife, but like the late, great Michael Clarke Duncan in Green Mile said, “I’m tied, boss.”
I don’t take care of myself and my health anymore, I don’t try to better myself or my immediate surroundings, I don’t fix broken things so much as just working around the problems, and where I used to be passionate about my work, now I basically do the bare minimum to keep my job. I’m just over this rat race.
Fuck your job but not your life dude. One thing is worthless and the other is everything.
I do bare minimum at work to not get fired and get whatever scraps they are willing to feed me. Then I take those and try my hardest to turn those scraps into whatever happiness I can. There is no satisfaction in our jobs anymore but it doesn’t mean that doing something for yourself or someone you care about can’t be satisfying. Even if it’s all worthless in the end somebody’s „thank you”, or even your own pride for the smallest of things that you mend are more valuable then all the money they could ever print.
I try to think that we are still the lucky ones, it’s all going to turn to real shit in a while but right now nobody is shooting at us yet, so let’s make some memories for that evening in the trench, we sure as fuck aren’t going to talk about our jobs.
I know it can be hard to look past the fog of depression sometimes, especially if the society tells you your only purpose is your work. But that’s simply not true. Your only purpose is to be happy with yourself. Im rooting for you bro. See you in the trench!
Yeah I hear ya on all counts.
Protest does work to a degree. But there is a dialectic change in that quantity begets quality when it becomes resistance.
There are huge lists of all the new policies, investigations, reforms, and more that happened after BLM. Same lists for the women’s marches during Trump’s first term. If you still don’t believe protests accomplish anything, you are being willfully ignorant and defeatist. It takes mere seconds to find these lists and start learning.
