Modern protests in the US are a cargo cult. The history of collective struggle has been comprehensively rewritten into a narrative where people gathering together to peacefully proclaim nationalism in collaboration with the bourgeois state somehow persuaded the imperial rulers to “free” slaves, or “give” women and black people the right to “vote”, or “let” queer people exist. The idea that anyone in history collectively demonstrated organized power by implicitly threatening “this is the number of people prepared to stop work, destroy property, and inflict violence against the regime if our demands are not met,” is dismissed as criminal and terrorist. Worse, it’s dismissed as actually undermining the ”real” organizing.

Their theory of action is literally “Trump, we think you’re personally cruel, evil, and an illegitimate ruler. We disapprove of your using the imperial stormtroopers to brutalize, rob, and kidnap us. We gather here today to meekly demonstrate our subservience to your regime and our reverence for the authority of your stormtroopers. We beg you to please see this gathering of supplicants who hate and despise you submitting utterly to your power and be persuaded to change your heart and take pity on us.”