Modern protests are fucking useless

Protests have always held a central place in American democracy. From the Boston Tea Party to the March on Washington, demonstrations have shaped history and forced leaders to confront the will of the people. Protest, at its best, is the act of collective defiance—a way for ordinary citizens to shake the halls of power, demand justice, and declare loudly that change is not just desirable, but necessary. Yet somewhere along the way, protest has lost much of its power. In today’s climate, the majority of protests feel less like catalysts for transformation and more like performative displays of outrage. They are loud, yes. They are passionate, certainly. But they rarely produce meaningful results. And when they do, the results are often minimal at best, symbolic at worst.

This is not a critique of the right to protest itself. The First Amendment guarantees the freedom of assembly for a reason. Protests matter, and in principle, they should remain one of the sharpest tools we have against injustice. But just because something is a right does not mean that exercising it automatically makes it effective. In the twenty-first century, especially in the last decade, protest has become hollow—more performance than pressure, more slogan than substance. The spectacle of outrage has overtaken the pursuit of meaningful action.

We live in an era of hashtags, slogans, and viral images. Every movement, whether progressive or conservative, quickly morphs into a brand. You can wear the right colors, share the right posts, chant the right chants, and feel like you’ve “done your part.” Entire protests are planned less around concrete goals and more around aesthetics—the signs, the catchphrases, the social media moments that can be clipped into TikToks and Instagram reels. In many cases, the protest itself becomes the goal, not what the protest is supposed to achieve. It becomes about visibility rather than victory, about self-expression rather than systemic change.

That’s the first problem: protests have become performative. The second problem is that leaders—whether political or corporate—have learned how to manage this performance. They know the script. A protest flares up, people flood the streets, hashtags trend, media coverage explodes. Then what happens? The corporation or the politician issues a vague statement of solidarity. They promise to “listen.” They change a logo for Pride Month. They paint a slogan on the street. They say the right words, but they do nothing of substance. And the movement, satisfied with its visibility, often fizzles out. The energy dissipates, and the status quo remains.

Take for example the wave of protests in 2020. Millions marched across the globe in the name of racial justice, demanding systemic change in policing. For a moment, it felt like something monumental was happening. And yet five years later, what has changed? There have been reforms here and there, incremental policy shifts, but policing as an institution remains largely the same. The deeper systemic issues—qualified immunity, the militarization of law enforcement, mass incarceration—remain untouched. The protests were historic in size and passion, but in terms of results, they delivered far less than they promised. The spectacle overshadowed the strategy.

On the other side of the political spectrum, right-wing protests suffer from the same hollowness. The infamous trucker convoys, the anti-mask demonstrations, the endless rallies crying “Stop the Steal”—these too were more performance than substance. They generated attention, yes. They stoked outrage, certainly. But what did they achieve? Did they change the systems they claimed to oppose? No. They became echo chambers of anger, performative displays of grievance that reinforced existing beliefs but did little to alter reality. Just as with leftist protests, they were heavy on theater, light on impact.

This is what I mean when I say protests today are “filler.” They are the fluff in the political diet—loud, filling, but not nourishing. People attend them to feel like they’re part of something, to vent their rage, to find community. And in that sense, they do serve an emotional purpose. But emotional release should not be confused with political strategy. Catharsis does not equal change.

So what does real change require? Protests must be part of a larger strategy, not the strategy itself. Marches and rallies can be powerful tools for visibility, but without direct follow-up—legislative pressure, organized boycotts, targeted campaigns—they fade into the background noise. Martin Luther King Jr. understood this. The March on Washington was not just a march; it was part of a broader campaign of coordinated pressure that involved lobbying, negotiation, and nonviolent disruption of the status quo. The suffragettes knew this too. Their protests were disruptive, yes, but they were also tied to concrete political goals—ratification of the 19th Amendment. Today, too many protests are untethered from strategy. They make noise, but they lack teeth.

It is not enough to march and chant if the next step is simply going home and posting about it online. If protests are to matter again, they must move beyond performance and into the realm of pressure. They must inconvenience those in power. They must create stakes. They must be tied to specific, actionable demands. Otherwise, leaders will continue to brush them off with platitudes and PR campaigns.

Consider how corporations respond to boycotts compared to protests. A march outside a headquarters can be ignored, but a sustained boycott that affects profits? That cannot be brushed aside so easily. Consider how politicians respond to pressure from lobbyists compared to street marches. Lobbyists come with specific demands and consequences if those demands aren’t met. Protests today too often lack that specificity. They are blunt instruments swung wildly, rather than precise strikes at pressure points.

This is why protests have become less effective in recent years. Not because the people don’t care, not because the issues aren’t real, but because protest has been reduced to a form of symbolic theater. It’s the illusion of resistance without the machinery of change. And the political establishment has learned how to absorb that illusion without breaking a sweat.

Does this mean protests in general are useless? No. But it means that we must rethink how we use them. A protest should be a spark, not the fire itself. It should be the beginning of a campaign, not the whole campaign. Without strategy, without follow-up, without concrete demands, a protest is just noise—and noise alone cannot dismantle systems of power.

The left must grapple with this. The right must grapple with this. Anyone who cares about change must grapple with this. Outrage is easy. Outrage is loud. But outrage without action is empty. And empty outrage does nothing but strengthen the very systems we claim to oppose.

We must demand more of ourselves and our movements. We must push beyond performative gestures and towards real strategy. Otherwise, protests will remain what they too often are today: hollow spectacles, symbolic performances that comfort the participants while leaving the structures of power untouched. If protest is to reclaim its radical potential, it must once again become more than performance. It must become pressure. It must become strategy. It must become the engine of real, tangible change.

Until then, protests will continue to fill our feeds, dominate our news cycles, and fade into memory without leaving a mark. They will remain what they have become: the politics of catharsis, not the politics of change. And if we want a better world, we must demand more than catharsis. We must demand results.