this post was submitted on 14 Oct 2025
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I participated in the first. I wish a single person cared or a single thing changed.
Protesting and marches are no longer an effective tool. Times change, tactics need to catch up.
Protesting and marches are still an incredibly effective tool. I think what you're rightly pointing out is that communicative protests are not having many concrete effects in their own right, but that's already a known factor.
Communicative protests bring people together, they give people a sense of hope, and they strengthen existing community organizers and groups by allowing people to be recruited into local efforts that do produce concrete actions.
For example, I went to the recent Workers Over Billionaires rally near me. I knew damn well that it wasn't going to physically do anything to stop Trump, to harm billionaires, or reduce the power of the administration in its own right.
But y'know what I did see happening there? Hundreds of people signing up with a local group that helps immigrants safely make it to, and stay in, local public schools, and hundreds more getting advice on how to unionize their workplace, along with many people getting socialism-related literature, signing up to canvass for a local progressive candidate, and being given tons of stickers and pamphlets that will likely help promote a ton of other local progressive groups that all in their own way either concretely harm the administration's efforts, or help people in the community with all sorts of socioeconomic problems.
And at the end of the day, I, along with many others, felt much less despair. And if you want a strong movement, you want people that have hope, and not hopelessness.
Sure, there's a ton of very liberal people there wearing their "if the 3.5% rise up, dictators FALL" shirts thinking that communicative protests like that one will magically depose Trump if more than 3.5% of the population participates, but in the end, these protests have time and time again massively increased participation and funding going to groups that strengthen working class people's power, and harm the administration's efforts to harm all sorts of people, and that's better than nothing.
You're not going to get a 60 year old wine mom to go and break the windows of an ICE building, but you can get her to donate money to organizations that consistently file legal challenges, or encourage some friends to vote for a candidate that could eventually put much stronger legislative protections in place.
If you feel much less despair, you are fooling yourself. Belief that we are on the precipice of things getting better is a delusion. All of those politicians want you happily walking the street keeping yourselves busy. Thinking you’re doing something to help. Anything to keep the pitchforks in the barn while they bleed you dry.
Did I say that?
Hope is not optimism. There is a significant distinction if you care to look up their definitions. It gives me more confidence that resistance is still possible, and gives others the courage to both do and desire the same, but it certainly does not make me pre-emptively expect the best outcome to simply happen as a result.
I do not believe that we are on the precipice of things getting better, make no mistake.
But simply being angry and hopeless does not produce change. And believe me, there is nothing more soul crushing than finally realizing the reason you've felt the way you have your whole life is because you're nonbinary, after you've already surrounded yourself with tons of trans friends, then see an administration call them all terrorists, revoke their medical care they need to survive, and signal to neo-nazis and far-right thugs that they will do nothing to stop politically motivated violence against you and the people you love, while friends and people you work with are being threatened with violent black-bagging and deportation.
I do not "happily walk in the street", I angrily organize with people in my community to get as many people as fucking possible dedicated to making ICE agents uncomfortable any time they appear, to get candidates in power with a goddamn spine, to stop the people I meet from ending their lives over this administration's actions, and to give people who are minimally politically active a reason to start doing more.
We've already had people in my community transition from these hyper-liberal No Kings style protests into simply walking to ICE buildings and protesting there until late into the night, because they realize that people have their back. Blocking exits for deportation vans and making these thugs feel unsafe is something they would not have done otherwise.
I've already lost someone to suicide because of this administration's actions. I've helped comfort many others. Even a communicative protest that had ZERO community organizing, charity involvement, or other forms of collective action like we've seen over and over again with these rallies would do good in my community, because it shows so many fucking people that there are people that will stand with them no matter how hard this world gets.
Any action matters. Anything to give people more hope is worth it. Anything that organizes people and gets them to take more concrete actions down the line is worth it.
I won't lose another friend.
Thoughts and prayers…
Does the term "self-defeating" mean anything to you?
Yes but it’s not applicable in this case.