@divya ACT UP caused very narrow and targeted disorder on the streets, and famously paired it with an inside strategy. i’m not saying all protest is bad. i’m saying effective protest is orderly, intentionally and clearly contained, carefully controlled because when it devolves into anything that resembles street violence you lose. the 1980s were a propitious time for these protests, bc there was a right wing govt but no fascist outside movement contesting. 1/

@divya the civil rights movement has to be scored a win for outside protest, but it was a close run thing, under unusual circumstances, in which people were so committed they not only began nonviolent but remained so under baton and fist. even so, it likely would not have succeeded if the disorder had not been confined to a fraction of the country the rest was embarrassed about, and extraordinary efforts by LBJ. i think we’ve overlearned from a very close-run N=1. 2/

@divya 60s protest in general cannot be scored a success, except that it was its middle aged protagonists who got to do most of the scoring when we learned about it in school. we traded LBJ for Nixon, and have been in decline ever since. Democrats retook power in 1992 only by catastrophically rebranding themselves and betraying our values, a spiral Biden is the first (ironically) to meaningfully recover from. /fin