Civility Won't Save Us

Liberal Protest, State Repression, and the Fantasy of Peaceful Change

Police pepper spray protestors sitting on the ground.

The Myth of Respectable Protest

For years, liberal leaders, NGOs, and progressive nonprofits have sold a fantasy: that protesting within the bounds of decorum can bring about meaningful change. If we lobby our representatives, sign a petition, boycott a corporation, or attend a sanctioned march, we are told the powers will listen. But only if we’re "peaceful." Only if we don’t inconvenience anyone. Only if we don't scare capital.

In this sanitized worldview, protests are permitted only when they resemble processions — heavily permitted, thoroughly policed, timed to end before dinner, and designed to disrupt nothing. Demonstrations that are disruptive, confrontational, or militant are denounced as illegitimate. Even when thousands pour into the streets, they’re directed away from centers of power and into vacant downtowns where their voices echo off empty buildings.

But the real test of any protest tactic is not how loudly it is praised by cable news hosts or how safely it aligns with liberal values. The real question is: does it work?

Time after time, these "respectable" tactics fail to deliver. They yield symbolic concessions at best, which are later rolled back. They change the language of power, not its structure. And crucially, they absorb public anger without threatening the institutions responsible for injustice.

Reforms Will Be Reversed

Even in those rare moments when liberal protest tactics do win reforms, those victories are shallow, unstable, and easily reversed. The history of Roe v. Wade is a cautionary tale. After decades of legal battles, the Supreme Court ruled in 1973 that abortion was protected under the Constitution. Liberals celebrated the triumph of reasoned argument and institutional progress. But almost immediately, conservatives began chipping away at those protections. And in 2022, the Supreme Court reversed itself, ending federal abortion rights in a single blow.

In many states today, abortion access is worse than it was in 1972. In some, even life-saving abortions are banned. Liberals knew fully well that the right intended to reverse the reform, had half a century to codify Roe into law, and chose instead to trust the courts. That trust was misplaced. Power granted by elite institutions can be withdrawn by those same institutions at any time.

The same pattern holds for labor rights, civil rights, environmental protections, and queer protections. What is given from above can be taken back. Voting rights are rolled back through gerrymandering and ID laws. Workplace protections are gutted by deregulation. Environmental laws are undercut by trade deals. Each victory through "respectable" means turns out to be provisional, revocable, and dependent on the goodwill of ruling elites. We are watching this in real time as the Trump administration dismantles what remains of the New Deal.

The lesson is not that change is impossible, but that real change must be imposed, not requested. The systems that grant rights on paper will also dispatch police to stop you from exercising them. Rights are not permanent gifts. They are contested terrain.

Democracy for the Dollar, Not the People

Liberal protest is built on a fundamental illusion: that elected officials are accountable to ordinary people. That if you make enough calls, send enough letters, and vote hard enough, you can steer the ship of state. But this assumes a democracy that does not exist.

In the U.S., political representation is a euphemism. Most congressional districts are gerrymandered beyond recognition. Voter suppression is rampant, particularly in Black, Indigenous, and immigrant communities. Even where people can vote freely, their influence pales in comparison to the power of capital.

A single billionaire’s Super PAC can flood a state with attack ads. A fossil fuel company can write legislation and hand it directly to lawmakers. Wall Street lobbyists don’t need petitions; they just buy outcomes. Against this machinery, a phone call from a single constituent is background noise. A tweetstorm is public relations static.

This isn’t a malfunction. It’s the design. American liberal democracy is democracy for the donor class. It produces the appearance of participation while insulating real decisions from popular input. The mechanisms of voting and lobbying offer the illusion of agency, but the outcomes are rigged in advance by wealth.

Consumerism isn't Resistance

One of liberalism’s most effective cons is convincing people that purchasing habits are a form of protest. "Vote with your wallet," they say. Choose the sustainable brand. Boycott the problematic one. Shop local. Buy organic. Drink "ethically sourced" coffee from a union-busting megachain.

This approach relies on a fiction: that everyone has equal access to choice. That working-class people — barely making rent, underinsured, food insecure — can afford to make political statements at the checkout aisle. For many, so-called ethical consumption is not even an option. And for the rich, it’s just another aesthetic.

Even when boycotts catch on, corporations adapt. They rebrand, shift blame, or make symbolic gestures while maintaining the same exploitative practices. Phillip Morris became Altria. Starbucks swapped CEOs. AT&T flew a pride flag while donating millions to anti-queer politicians. These moves do not represent defeat. They are strategies of containment, absorbing critique and selling it back as virtue.

No amount of “ethical” shopping will stop the extraction of wealth from the Global South or end imperialism. In fact, these individualized acts of “consciousness” often distract from collective action. They make protest a personal branding exercise. Consumerism will not liberate us. It is the water we drown in.

Petitions are Protest Theater

Petitions, too, are held up as tools of change. Click here to demand justice. Add your name. Share the campaign. But what do they actually accomplish?

Petitions ask the powerful to do the right thing. They assume injustice is accidental or simply the result of not enough people asking nicely. But history tells us otherwise. No system of domination — not slavery, not colonialism, not capitalism — has ever been undone by signatures.

At best, petitions result in acknowledgments. A response letter. A tweet. A non-binding resolution. The apparatus of power absorbs the protest, files it away, and returns to business as usual. Meanwhile, activists are exhausted, having poured time and energy into a mechanism that was never meant to deliver results.

Petitions do not force power to change. Strikes, occupations, and disruptions do. It was not a petition that won the eight-hour workday, but workers shutting down industry. It was not a letter that ended apartheid — it was global boycott, armed resistance, and mass mobilization. Petitions are rituals of dissent, not engines of liberation.

50501: The Performance of Opposition

The 50501 movement, launched on February 5, 2025, quickly ballooned into a nationwide protest spectacle. Promoted heavily on social media and embraced by liberal NGOs, it offered an outlet for public frustration with authoritarian drift, economic precarity, and political stagnation. But from the beginning, it was steered toward symbolic gestures and strictly non-disruptive action. March routes were negotiated in advance, speakers were vetted, and calls for escalation were drowned out by appeals to "civility."

What could have been a mass movement quickly revealed itself as a bourgeois charade — carefully monitored, quickly pacified, and ultimately absorbed by the very institutions it claimed to challenge. Even as arrests and surveillance increase, movement leaders urge restraint, voting, and appeals to lawmakers.

In June 2025, a bulletin calling for a "Sit-Down Wave" began circulating within 50501-focused online spaces. The bulletin, titled "Protect the Peaceful Protest," lists five rules that suggest protesters very literally sit down, shut up, and obey. This is not only counter-productive; perhaps more importantly, it is dangerous. The state does not care whether its victims stand, sit, or kneel.

In form, 50501 looks like resistance; in function, it operates as controlled opposition, channeling radical energy into harmless ritual and preserving the legitimacy of a system cracking under its own weight.

When We Cross the Line

When people move beyond the boundaries of liberal respectability — when they strike, blockade, occupy, or even speak with uncompromising clarity — the smiling mask of bourgeois democracy falls away. What's revealed is not a system open to dialogue, but one built to defend profit and power at all costs. The same institutions that invite petitions and peaceful marches will unleash riot cops, surveillance, and smear campaigns the moment resistance becomes real. The illusion is that the state listens when addressed politely; the reality is that it only listens when forced to. Liberalism teaches us to color inside the lines. But the moment our actions threaten capital, property, or empire, those lines are enforced not by reasoned debate, but by batons, tear gas, and cages.

We are seeing this clearly in the response to the Palestine solidarity movement. Across the U.S., peaceful student encampments have been raided by riot police, with hundreds arrested, beaten, and suspended. At Emory University, police tackled a professor to the ground and arrested medics. At UCLA, armed pro-Israel groups were allowed to assault protestors for hours before police stepped in and then arrested the protestors instead. In the midst of ongoing anti-ICE demonstrations, the National Guard and Marines have been deployed not to stop a natural disaster or invasion, but to crush domestic resistance.

Permission Ends Where Resistance Begins

This is not a failure of the state. It is the state functioning exactly as designed: to protect power and property through violence. It’s not that liberal protest doesn’t “go far enough” — it’s that it’s allowed precisely because it doesn’t go far enough. The moment it does, the system mobilizes its repressive core: surveillance, arrests, beatings, prison, and in some cases, even death.

Repression is not the exception to liberal democracy; it is its enforcement mechanism. It’s what makes all those “rights” optional, conditional, and revocable.

And the repression doesn’t stop at the physical. The state and its adjacent institutions weaponize media narratives, moral panic, and public opinion to isolate radicals. Protests are mischaracterized as “chaos.” Demands are twisted into threats. Police violence is reframed as “restoring order.” Liberals are then invited to participate, not in resistance, but in policing their own side. They become the chorus reminding everyone not to be “too radical,” not to alienate the middle, not to break the law, as if the law were made for us.

This is how liberalism and repression work hand-in-hand: liberalism creates the boundary of “acceptable protest,” and repression enforces it.

So when liberal leaders respond to state violence with nothing but carefully worded press releases, procedural appeals, or condemnations of “both sides,” they are not failing to act — they are performing exactly as designed. Their job is to demobilize resistance, restore order, and preserve the fantasy that the system still listens.

The Liberal Machine Kills Movements

The failure of liberal protest tactics is not a mistake or a misfire. It’s a feature of the system. Petitions, symbolic marches, and “ethical” shopping exist not to challenge power, but to redirect and pacify resistance. They absorb the energy of movements and channel it into non-threatening, state-sanctioned avenues.

They ask us to believe that if we just follow the rules, protest politely, and wait patiently, things will improve. But these tactics don’t threaten empire — they protect it. They turn collective struggle into personal virtue. They transform organizing into marketing. They replace demands with branding.

Liberal protest doesn’t fail by accident. It succeeds in its true purpose: to keep resistance fragmented, non-disruptive, and ultimately harmless to the ruling class.

Toward Real Resistance: Strikes, Sabotage, and Solidarity

So what do we do? We stop playing by rules that were never meant to serve us. We stop asking for justice from institutions designed to deny it. We abandon the fantasy that our enemies can be persuaded out of power.

We turn instead to each other. We build unions. We form coalitions. We occupy campuses and block highways. We engage in mutual aid, not charity. We disrupt business as usual. We stop trying to be heard, and start making ourselves impossible to ignore. We defend ourselves.

Liberation is not granted; it is seized. And it will not be won through symbolic gestures, but through sustained, collective, organized struggle. Let the system fear us. Let capital tremble. Only then can we begin to build a world worth living in.

The people have tried playing by their rules. Now it's time to change the game.