The most successful protest movements in history have been the ones that have set their own agendas. Whether abolitionists, women’s suffrage advocates, or civil rights activists, progressive change movements have gained influence by disrupting politics as usual — not by slavishly aligning themselves with electoral parties. [...]
Comparisons to the Tea Party also are of limited utility. Current protesters need not mimic the goals and tactics of the Tea Party, as observers fixated on electoral dividends of activism have recommended. Initially a product of populist anger, the Tea Party evolved into a “grasstops” endeavor funded by Washington lobbyists and think tanks and aligned with the Republican Party. [...]
Current demonstrations are part of a wave of activism that stretches back to the anti-World Trade Organization protests of the 1990s and includes the battle for a $15-an-hour minimum wage, Occupy Wall Street, Black Lives Matter, and grassroots anger over big bank bailouts that gave rise to the early Tea Party movement. Like these predecessors, the current wave of activism bespeaks many Americans’ sense that electoral politics — and the political process and policies that result from it — are ineffective and, in some instances, rotten to the core. [...]
Because the protests are a byproduct of the popular disdain for politics as we know it, it is perverse to view the new waves of activism only in terms of what they mean for the two major political parties. For many of those who have turned to the streets to protest, the major parties are a part of the problem — not the solution to what ails society.
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